Lia Purpura - On Looking: Essays

Interview

How did this collection take shape? Did you begin with the intention of “looking,” or did the essays emerge more subconsciously to be collected later?



I had no intention of writing a book of essays on “looking”—at difficult things, hidden, sub-acute things, things in their solitude, or even about the act of looking at and being seen. I was moving from moment to moment in each essay, and then I was moving from essay to essay. An insistent image or scene, or a nagging moment from one essay would reseed itself and another essay would grow up around that particular spark or irritant or sense of incompletion. In this way I ended up with a pile of essays that spoke back and forth to each other. So when Sarabande asked to see my work, I was pretty startled; I was aware of swimming around in certain regional waters, and suddenly I was offered the chance to come ashore, to publish them together as a book.



Similarly, does this practice of always paying attention, of always “recording, recording, recording,” ever present any difficulty in your life? How do you fortify yourself against the human inclination toward ease and the easy slippage into allowing things to become ordinary and unremarkable?



I wish I had more of an inclination toward ease! My intrinsic tendencies run toward a steady (ok, obsessive) form of paying attention, of seeing, of probing, of being curious, and having to look (and by extension, having to jot, because I have a terrible memory). But I also deeply enjoy days that fall into ritual—taking out winter clothes and airing them, washing summer clothes and storing them away—that sort of thing. These moments are calming, meditative, and move with a force of their own. The urgent need to see and note is subsumed, for that time, in the larger form of the task. During these respites, not everything then leaps, surprises, and startles. Attention, though, is a big issue culturally. I read an interview recently with a behavioral researcher who was talking about the difficulties of continual, partial attention and how scanning and the mindset that accompanies that form of scattered attention, the constant fear of missing something better, has become terribly, spiritually depleting. I think of these two angels often: Goethe, saying “every object, well contemplated, creates an organ for its perception,” and from Eliot’s “Burnt Norton,” the lines, “. . . the roses/Had the look of flowers that are looked at.” Paying attention changes both the perceiver and the perceived. If attention is fractured, then actual, human relationships and solitude fray.



How did the logistics of this research come about? You mention that before seeing it all, you thought, “Never again will I know the body as I do now.” Is this still the case?



I had no idea what to expect from the autopsies. I was in the middle of writing “On Not Hurting a Fly: A Memorial” and I couldn't go on without understanding the internal body I was trying to describe. I did try looking at pictures, but they were too static and I needed the essay to see in a very present way. After much official letter writing and much cajoling and arranging, I went to see, on a rainy Sunday morning in March, these autopsies. Seeing into the body was like lifting a shroud; what had been vaguely located suddenly had tint and hue and texture and weight and, yes, scent. It was like being born, that particular kind of seeing. Of course it was complicated by sadness and a terrible anger about so many stupid, violent deaths. And today, still, the experience exerts its after-waves and shocks. People transpose or go sheer for me. At times I see the spleen below a belt, heart near a pocket. I hear heavy breathing or coughing and can see the filled and charred lungs of smokers. There’s a brain, I’ll think at the grocery store, behind that cashier’s sweaty brow. Or I’ll look at a shadow at a certain time of day, or a couch, and think, that’s kidney-colored. Or sounds come back; biting into a taut, ripe cherry makes the exact sound of the pituitary gland being lifted out. And bodies, even the strongest versions, seem terribly fragile, and health in general contingent on such incremental forces, and on luck.



“Sugar Eggs: A Reverie,” like others, is an essay clearly informed by poetry and behaves unpredictably, weaving together odes to sugar eggs with View-Masters, snow globes, and a rifle's scope. Could you talk about how this essay came to you?



I've been aware of gathering up the pieces for “Sugar Eggs: A Reverie” all my life. The essay contains manifestations of spaces I've known, hoarded, cared for, been drawn toward, or recognized in constant variations all my life. In moving from description to description in the essay, I assumed each space would share itself with the next, reflect back the previous one, call across time to other spaces I was writing about since they had lived in me for so long. I almost didn't want to write this essay; I just wanted to go on harvesting these spaces forever. As for its being informed by poetry, yes, in many ways I think it works like a large poem might work. But it isn't a poem. I hope that the form of a piece always responds to necessity, a drive that works the writing into its own very particular shape.



You speak of a tendency to live “preemptively with loss, memorializing instances” as they happen. What do you think this says about the way we think about ourselves and the way memory is created?



I grew up, as a second-generation American, in a family for whom the last bit of old Europe was still making itself known—in our attitude toward food, manners, clothing, privacy—so much. From a very early age, I felt the sense of a world teetering, and we all, in our own ways, embrace as well as resist that. Now, of course, I want it all back and it lives only in old wooden spoons, dresses I've saved, my grandmothers’ kitchen stuff, my own weird gestures toward order and structure. I was thinking about paper straws the other day, one of the rare and strangely, inexplicably loved objects of my childhood. No more paper straws! My things are beginning to antiquate me. And yet, how necessary to recall them, those straws, the tender-waxy resistance against the teeth, the sheer, few pastel colors.

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