1. Peak Bloom

Sometime around 4am in the basement of my cousin’s yellow, flower-encircled house, I googled: “Is the structure of vision sadistic?” The first entry returned a link to the Facebook page of Sadistic Vision, a metal band. I’d been writing about my incapacity to commit suicide, and the sometimes positively destablizing realms of pain, especially perceptual. Goethe has a notion: to see is to theorize. The eye doubles light.

My cousin is a dance professor. She and I had never spent time together, but she invited me to stay for the summer. Her intelligence and capacity for sympathy made me feel repugnant—this shame, I think, hid a more honest feeling of jealous curiosity. Later that day, she took me to a garden full of withering roses. We walked the alleys between hedges, overbright with fallen petals. I selfishly returned us to a conversation about uses of physical violence and body damage in art—I wanted to know her threshold. I asked her what kinds of violative expressions can cure, forestall further violence, provide alternatives to it.

The roses were just beyond peak bloom. My cousin worried they’d disappoint us. "I think I like them better this way,” she said. I said, what do you think it is that makes them more attractive—something about excess? She said she didn’t know.

2. The Cattle in the Shade

The next day, we drove to an island to find a lake she wanted to see. Again we discussed violence. She said my ideas reminded her of a performance in which dancers sprinted erratically for over an hour while others dropped bricks from random positions down toward their heads. What can be gained from this display? What bodies get to represent what kinds of violence? Why should we contribute to the endless discussion about the inscribability of the body? These were her questions. Goethe says if only we could look closely enough at our nerves, we’d find the impressions of light—the ways it inscribes us. My cousin and I walked and walked but never reached the lake’s shore. When we were too tired to go on, we turned around.

Scattered along the path were golden potatoes. I was distracted by them and the diaphanous hues of the grasses. I moved my hands in swivels, trying to learn the pattern of how the grass fell. I’d seen this pattern earlier in the splay of silvery orbs across the dark weave of my shirt as I washed my hands by the window. These currents of energy made me think of Mona Hatoum’s photograph “Van Gogh’s Back,” in which a person’s sudsy back hair is gathered in bursts of counterspirals, remarkably like the titular artist’s brushstrokes—as if she, too, were noticing energy’s replications. How can a mark contain the rupture of the visible? Andrew Wyeth paints the rupture of the visible in his grass. His fields are excoriated—the strands of grass traces of wiped pigment, removed with his rag or a sharp instrument. 

The potatoes in the grass were molding in shades of yellow, green, and gray—together creating an intensity akin to that color on a glass palette when the pigment is forcibly scraped from the pressed edge of the palette knife. When the blade is drawn down, the discarded pigment compresses in a shining arc, the edges of which are like scattered rainbow hues immobilized in a solution. Each shred of grass I saw was shining like that.

I kept at it with my hands and the grass rhythm. My cousin’s husband said, some minutes later, that the grass was flattened because the cows had lain on it. “See?” He pointed to a group of cows a short distance from us that were resting beneath a cluster of vermilion sycamores. I looked at the swaths of flattened grass. The impression of the body, I said, I can’t get away from it.

3. Suicidal Symmetry

Leo Bersani, in Receptive Bodies, writes that our bodies transform or modulate the world’s destructive energies into survivable filaments of pleasure—but worries that if our barest gesture of survival is taking interest, and pleasure, in pain—we produce a kind of “suicidal symmetry” to the world’s violence, recirculating it. The world, like “an imaginary windmill,” he writes, “coerces us to enjoy and endure” its “solipsistic orgies.” If it’s even possible to ethically consent to existence—I worry life isn’t worth consenting to.

While living in New York, often when I wasn’t sure I’d make it through the day without taking a train to Coney Island to kill myself, I’d go to The Met and sit in front of my favorite Rembrandt self-portrait. Just before I’d flown to my cousin’s I’d gone to the museum’s “Dutch Masters” exhibit, where they’d moved the portrait. I found it in its new room and sat, trying to apologize to Rembrandt. I tried with the absorptive power of my heart to cast an admirational wave toward his brilliant red earlobe, hoping to take some with me as I left. I read the new placard beside the painting, which said that technologies had revealed Rembrandt used a scoring method to capture “the rough curls spilling out of his cap.” His glorious curls were in fact cuts, scrapes, like Wyeth’s fields. Later I searched google again, this time for something about the connection between palette knife work and the mysteriousness of color. I found an amazing sentence: At its optimum, the palette knife can create a visual expression of constant change and continuous movement similar to that which is found in the harmonic rhythm of ocean breaks or making mud pies.

4. In Lovely Blue

The last chapter of Receptive Bodies is about a particular kind of detached staring, a passive mode of visual reception through which we can experience a non-mimetic abandon to the world’s massive violence, and at the same time confirm that pleasure at the level of perception is salvific. I admit when I catch on again to the oceanic patterns of mud pies, I have the desire to stand on a friend’s feet, dancing their steps. It’s my longing to become the same as—the same as the grass, the same as the splattered orbs (as if you weren’t already the same as them, Bersani might say). He ends Receptive Bodies on the color blue. Although the fact of our complicity in violence is incontrovertible, “we can,” he writes, “allow our attention to be briefly arrested by lovely patches of blue.”

Is staring an imitation of blue? In that “empty, monotonous, yet intense staring at the world,” Bersani writes, “the very possibility of meaning is absorbed” and “erased.” What about the monotony of detached staring erases meaning’s possibility? Further—is the mode of attention implicit in this monotonous stare the same as being temporarily transfixed by blue?

Emily Dickinson often uses the words “blue” and “monotony” in her writing—but only in a single draft of a poem across her known corpus does she put them together. The poem begins: “The Heart has narrow Banks / It measures like the Sea / In mighty — unremitting Bass / And Blue Monotony.” On her handwritten folio, she’s marked an x just above measures—noting her variant at the bottom: paces. In the context of her poem, the heart both measures and it paces. By what measures of desire do the heartbeat, the sea, or blue, become wearisome?

The poem ends: “Till Hurricane bisect / And as itself discerns / It's insufficient Area / The Heart convulsive learns // That Calm is but a Wall / Of unattempted Gauze / An instant's Push demolishes / A Questioning — dissolves.” For Bersani, temporal repetition, meaninglessness, and visual transfixion exist in a charged relation—what tinge might Emily’s words cast upon or elicit from his terms? Her pairing of blue and monotony has always frightened me—what if the words are interchangeable? The curative loveliness of a particular patch of blue is, for Bersani, an extraordinary store of hope against the world’s overwhelming destructiveness—as is the potential of a monotonous stare to dissolve the painful distance produced by the self’s effort to understand world. Perhaps Emily only warns us that blue becomes an insufficient Area when the heart determines to measure it.

Still, I turn on the question—the fear—that a certain combination of words will confirm there is no lovely elsewhere—blue, or otherwise—no respite from cruelty for any of us.

On my last day at my cousin’s, before returning home, I hung out on the campus where she works while she taught her seminar. I allowed myself to wander past houses, into a patch of woods, getting lost. I found a generously low-branching tree, silver, its sprawling roots wide and smooth. I lay down. I tried to pay attention to the world. Later I told my cousin about it. I said, I was so overwhelmed by the luscious sounds and small movements, I tried not to close my eyes. “But that seems to me,” she said, “like the moment to close your eyes.” Is there a difference in the grace implied by these small gestures, I wonder—the willingness to open, the willingness to close— 

End Note

Works cited in this essay include Emily Dickinson’s manuscript image of “The Heart has narrow Banks,” from edickinson.org, Leo Bersani’s Receptive Bodies, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Theory of Colours. Due credit is offered in gratitude to the band Sadistic Vision and the unknown author whose inspiring writings on the palette knife I can no longer locate online. Grateful thanks to those who permitted use of images of Mona Hatoum, Andrew Newell Wyeth, and Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn’s works. Both the title of this essay and the section title “In Lovely Blue” are taken from and in reference to Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hymns and Fragments. And last, as regards the choice of title, I thank Jeff Shapiro, without whom this essay would never have been written, who noted, in Sophocles’ Antigone, that to those who criticized her for lamenting “too much,” Antigone replies: “What, then, shall be the natural measure of my sorrow?”