6 June 2024
Kate C, after reading my latest essay, directed me to this essay.
It is a lovely piece for writing, and on I can learn from. Looking more closely, I see this essay won the Pushcart Prize. You can find it here: https://agnionline.bu.edu/essay/glaciology And there is more by her — at least in the same place this was published — that you can find at https://agnionline.bu.edu/about/our-people/authors/lia-purpura/
It was as if after the big event of snowfall we’d forgotten there was more, still, to be said. A cache of loose details below to attend. A trove poised. A stealth gathering.
Deposition below the singular-seeming white cover.
—Lia Purpura, Glaciology
The essay is divided into sections: The first is Plan, and then six sections titled “Deposition on Thaw,” “Deposition on the Shapes of Tasks,” and so on, each being a deposition. She beings, in plan, with an accurate description of how glaciers work, how they pick up material, entrain it in the ice, mix it around, and then drop it, depositing it as poorly sorted till.
Poor sorting: I like that: that it all gets dropped, the big stuff enmeshed with the grainy soft stuff. The indiscriminate mess. That it forms a long train, so that seeing it all, one can trail events back. Guess at them. View time. And by way of the whole scattered and shifting pattern, by the gathering eye, make something of these loose details, collecting.
—Lia Purpura, Glaciology
The second section, Deposition on Thaw, talks about melting, and “the way snow melted into vertebrae, whole bodies of bone inclined toward one another. Bones stacked and bent in the attitude of prayer, the edges honed and precarious.” Nice and apt imagery. Later: “There were thicknesses, white places layered in smears that others were trained to read. Densities amid the rivulets of veins. Occlusions. Artifacts.” Next is a passing mention of an X-ray, and an artifact, that melds into listing objects revealed by the snow melt.
So far:
- I like the use of the dynamics of a glacier and the resultant deposition as a metaphor
- The imagery is very nicely done, the allusion to the shapes of the melting snow as vertebrae and bone, and later a mention of the elbows of things poking up, and year again the rivulets of veins of the snow melt.
- This use of bodily imagery taken from the shapes of the snow melt is nice, and I suspect, with the allusion of the x-ray, we may be getting a hint at the subject of the essay.
The next section “Deposition on the Shapes of Tasks,” gives us more of a clue as to what is going on: “a little shard, small bit taken out of my body and sent off for further study.” And later…
Waiting all that long week—for test results, the snow to stop, dough to rise, nightfall—small tasks turned into days. Days unfolded into tasks. The inside-out arms of clothes pulled right, made whole and unwrinkled, took lovely hours. Tasks filled like balloons and rounded with breath; they floated and bumped around the day: some popcorn, some dishes, some mending.
—Lia Purpura, Glaciology
“Test results” lends weight to the idea that we have a thread of medical and health content. The image of tasks floating and bumping like balloons is nice. And more
Everything coming down—snow, sleet, threat, delicacy—twined through like a rivulet (the cut water makes in its persistence, its pressure carving) so the bank grows a dangerous, fragile lip.
—Lia Purpura, Glaciology
Again an allusion to threat, and a reinvocation of the image of a rivulet, this time not just a product of melting, but a process that it shaping other things, carving a miniature canyon with a ‘dangerous, fragile lip. And a return to the dynamics of glacial melt.
As the depositions continue, they remain image-laiden. The imagery focuses on home and cooking and family and personal objects. Every now and then there is a hint of what is going on, ending with “The snow receded, the warmth returned, and I was fine. I was negative. Negative, negative, I was thinking, buoyant. The hard winter lifted all at once, the sun came, dewy and beading, the air was sweet and I was fine…”
A nice essay. A skillful use of imagery. A bit overpowering, perhaps – more than I think I would be inclined to use, but not wrong, just not my style. I will see if I can capture a selection of phrases/images I like… though perhaps there will be too many to list:
the elbows of everything poked through.
There were thicknesses, white places layered in smears that others were trained to read. Densities amid the rivulets of veins.
Tasks filled like balloons and rounded with breath; they floated and bumped around the day
Everything coming down—snow, sleet, threat, delicacy—twined through like a rivulet (the cut water makes in its persistence, its pressure carving) so the bank grows a dangerous, fragile lip.
That week time was ample, broad as a boulevard, a stroll, a meander.
Scents fully unfolded: coffee, chocolate, and milk marbling together on the stove, thinnest skin across to touch and lift and eat.
One rough, gritty chip in the rim of a favorite cup.
the yellow dust that rose and stuck to my hands as I folded in the unbeaten eggs, cold suns to poke and dim with flour
that week passed with a fever’s disheveled clarity
There were intimacies akin to falling back to a pillow after water, soup, and tea were brought, gratitude unspoken; the night table’s terrain, the book, the book’s binding, glue at the binding and the word for each sewn section, folio, surfacing from far off.
Always one lemon pared in a spiral of undress, its inner skin gone a flushed, sweet-cream rose.
Time should seize, should haul us back, then let go, wind-sheared into now, breathlessly into the moment’s hard strata.
the perfect scrolls of carrot peel I lowered like a proclamation into the hamsters’ cage
I am tied to the sight of the world, to things burnished and scoured by use, and by their diminution loved
One idly picks up pinecones, rocks, shells to mark a moment, to commemorate time. One picks them up because they shine out from their mud, or water lapping brightens their veins and shorn faces, or there they are, wedged inexplicably whole in a jetty, and a spiral tip beckons, though the center be partial and broken.
The tender crack in a baking loaf, its creamy rift rough at the edges and going gold.
—Lia Purpura, Glaciology
What all do I like in this long list? To much to say, but let me at least call out some of the (differing) features that engage me:
- Some of the visual images grab me: the elbows of things poking through the snow; the perfect scroll of carrot peals; unbeaten eggs, two cold suns; the lemon pared in a spiral of undress.
- Among the visual images, a subset are geomorphological: rivulets; they shine out from their mud; the bank grows a dangerous fragile lip; burnished and scoured; the tender rift in a baking loaf.
- I also like the images that are multi sensory, or that include or imply action.
- the two egg-suns which are to be poked and beaten
- tasks like balloons that float and bump about all day
- the night tables terrain, which makes me think of groping for things in the dark
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