It is unsurprising that Lia Purpura, an accomplished and subtle poet, chooses looking as the guiding force of her new book of essays, On Looking. The act of looking, after all, is above all else an aesthetic one. The ability to see, to look closely and attentively at all manner of details and figures, in many ways defines both what the artist is and what she does. We call Saul Bellow an exquisite prose writer because he can see a faucet's stream of hot water as "green with a white inner shape and a thread of vapor"; we call Picasso a brilliant, challenging artist because he can look at a three-dimensional reality and understand how it can be portrayed on a two-dimensional canvas. Looking defines both ends of the aesthetic spectrum: both the beautiful and the ugly attract our gaze, call for our visual attention, demand our looking.

Less clearly but just as crucially, however, looking is an ethical act. When we choose to look at something, we acknowledge its claim on our existence and give into its demand for our attention. This is why socially conscious photojournalism and video documentary can be so powerful: they force us to look at injustice, to directly confront what we so often squeamishly turn away from. When Winfred Owen describes a Word War I soldier dying from gas as "the blood / C[a]me gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, / Obscene as cancer," he is making a conscious decision to bear witness, to not turn away from the horrors technology has put at our disposal. It is no surprise that the fathers of French realism, Balzac and Zola, did not couch a defense of their art in aesthetic so much as ethical terms.

It is this dual nature of looking, its aesthetic components as well as its ethical compulsions, that Purpura so expertly traces in On Looking. The book's opening essay, "Autopsy Report," a recording of Purpura's extended, attentive viewing of a series of cadavers, brilliantly if rather jarringly weds these twin aspects. Her journey is a brave one, a testament to her unwillingness to turn away from decay simply because of the unease it provokes, an insistence on witnessing the body in all its fragility and mortality in all its finality. But it also, oddly enough, is an encounter with beauty. When viewing the bodies of a series of drowned men, Purpura unsparingly describes how they had "ears sludge-filled. Their legs mud-smeared." Yet, in the same instance, she is able to delicately, even poetically, describe their "lashes white with river silt." The decay is painfully rendered, yet the beauty is also acutely delineated. Purpura's judicious gaze accommodates both the unsparing ethical dimension of looking as well as its aesthetic value: she describes a shooting victim's jacket as "soaked black with blood," yet also finds his shirt's holes "like ragged stars, or a child's cut-out snowflake"; she mercilessly sees the "intercoastal blood vessel pulled out like a basted hem," but also sees the body's "yellow layers of fat, yellow as a cartoon sun, as sweet cream butter."

As evidenced by this opening chapter, Purpura's boldest move is to take on topics and objects that we normally don't look at: cadavers, the warts and moles of a human face, the "organized cilia and bell muscles" of the jellyfish. In one particularly memorable essay, she describes taking her son to see the self-proclaimed smallest woman in the world at the Maryland State Fair. The sight elicits all sorts of questions from the young boy about the woman and her manager: "Does that man make her sit there, my son asks and asks. Is he mean? Is she happy? Does she want to be there? Mom, why am I sad? Is it because I looked at her like she was a sculpture?" Here we see one of the most powerful properties of looking: its ability to provoke sympathy. Only after we truly look at someone or something, only once we allow another to inhabit our consciousness fully and completely, can we move beyond the shell of our selves and begin to ask such questions. As Purpura elsewhere writes, "By seeing I called to things, and in turn, things called me, applied me to their sight and we became each as treasure, startling to one another, and rare." To look at someone, she intimates, is to begin "clearing a space, preparing a ground for meetings to occur."

Such sentiments, however, are quickly deflated. Despite the fact that Purpura's son intuitively learns "how easily one form can inhabit another," despite the fact that he experiences a sympathy that bridges previously unfathomable gaps, such an identification is transitory. Purpura ends the essay by reminding us that her son "very much did not want to be small, and displayed at a fair in the heat of August." In the end, Purpura's son is just another child drawn by a luridly thrilling sight, just another person experiencing "that weird package of love and revulsion, that 'glad it's not me' layered over with real tenderness. Some forward sway. Some retraction." What a brilliant formulation for the enticing yet disturbing experience of the grotesque, the genuinely powerful but ultimately transient experience of sympathy that looking at suffering calls forth.

Purpura claims that she did not set out to write a book on looking. It just so happened that, given her finely attuned eye for detail and her insatiable need to observe, these essays congealed around such a topic. This apparent lack of a governing principle, however, does not cause the book to suffer. Purpura's collection gains structure through thematic linkages, through verbal echoes, through the working and reworking of certain tropes and figures. The collection reads more of poetry than of theoretical treatise: Purpura's individual essays move by jumps and starts, by subtle connections that mirror the workings of the mind and the eclectic sights a keen eye takes in. Seeing the flourishes of a frosted windowpane recalls other images — "cracked riverbeds and leaf-veins in sun"; "common seaweed, washed up on any Long Island beach." As Purpura writes, "The form reaches out, draws its heirs close." This layering of vision, this constant ability and necessity of form to morph and echo other forms, is a theme throughout the collection, particularly in the essay "Recurrences/Concurrences." Just as the act of looking enables a boy to project himself into a carnival sideshow, so too does looking enable our imaginations and our memories room to roam free. When we see a frosted windowpane, we come to realize this essential truth: "What it is— is what else it is."

While Purpura constantly probes the multifaceted, complex ethics of seeing—what does it mean for a young woman to shrink from a stranger's gaze? When are we entitled to look away from horror? How can we justify looking at but not acting upon injustice?—she is at her most comfortable and most discerning when viewing the beauty of the everyday and the grotesque. She has a particular gift for bringing the minute, overlooked detail into vibrant life: she sees the tadpole as "those clear-little globes of life, each with a pause and breath at its center, a comma thrashing, growing its thought"; she observes an emerald dragonfly, its "jittery sheen articulated as she moved and made her smaller by that trick, partial, and barely seen"; on the subway, in a Bellovian onrush of expertly realized physical details, she describes "a woman's earlobe, deeply notched; the close back of a man's neck, oily and creased; a girl's cracked lip; a freckle; a boil; a split thumbnail with its crescent of dirt, next to which your own nail rests on the cool, aluminum pole." Ever kinetic and never settled, Purpura's lyric prose is certainly her best defense of looking.

 

Anthony Domestico '07 is an English and American Literature and Languages concentrator in Pforzheimer House.