Smudge (excerpt)
As I said, I am a good student.
Therefore I stopped writing about lynching. In fact, I stopped writing all together.
Standing in front of Leiter’s photo of a bus idling next to a birch tree spindling from a pearly sidewalk, I thought I could start again here. I could start just by describing what I see.
I began using Leiter’s work to focus on what he called single and unimportant things, that are elevated by the force of his seeing and his rigorous commitment to beauty.
Beauty turns a jar into a saint, an umbrella into a cathedral, a window jamb into an altar.
The way the beauty of a foreign word replaces our need for its meaning.
A word such as fouchi d’artificio.
I learned that word from two Italian men at a roof party as we watched the sky burst with color.
It was one of those parties where you don’t know anyone except your date and you keep losing him.
So you end up tottering up a spiral staircase and onto the roof deck. It’s late summer, and you are freezing in your strapless silver dress. Unaccustomed to heels, you stay on the roof because you are afraid to make your way back down the staircase.
You notice the one with longer hair first. He’s wearing a blazer, jeans, and a scarf the same color as his auburn ringlets. He tells you he is studying conducting, and you say very clever things about the role of the conductor. You agree that it is outrageous that some people think he isn’t really a musician.
The other man is shorter, balding to about mid-way up his skull. He keeps asking aren’t you cold, aren’t you freezing? and rubbing your arm. He tells you he is from Sicily and hunts octopus off the coast there, diving naked and jamming a trident under rocks where the shy creature hides, surfacing slicked with salt, ink, and blood.
And when your mouth gets wide with horror he laughs.
You are drunk and exhausted from a summer of failure. Their accents are musical and funny. They think your garbling of their native tongue is charming. It lets them touch your lips, pretending to show you how to shape syllables.
Look at you, laughing in your pretty silver dress.
I have something I’d like to tell you, but I don’t think you’d understand.
You still believe something about your life—your rigor, your intellect—you believe something about beauty.
You believe it makes you too precious to harm.
You’ve not yet begged through blood sounding like an animal
or been a mouth of pain gumming against the floor.
Never watched another act upon you and that action shear you off in great slabs so all that remains is a kind of blurred smudge.
No, in that moment, you still believe in beauty and why not? You have it. You pronounce the word perfectly, not knowing it’s the last word he will hear you say.
As I said, I am a good student.
Therefore I stopped writing about lynching. In fact, I stopped writing all together.
Standing in front of Leiter’s photo of a bus idling next to a birch tree spindling from a pearly sidewalk, I thought I could start again here. I could start just by describing what I see.
I began using Leiter’s work to focus on what he called single and unimportant things, that are elevated by the force of his seeing and his rigorous commitment to beauty.
Beauty turns a jar into a saint, an umbrella into a cathedral, a window jamb into an altar.
The way the beauty of a foreign word replaces our need for its meaning.
A word such as fouchi d’artificio.
I learned that word from two Italian men at a roof party as we watched the sky burst with color.
It was one of those parties where you don’t know anyone except your date and you keep losing him.
So you end up tottering up a spiral staircase and onto the roof deck. It’s late summer, and you are freezing in your strapless silver dress. Unaccustomed to heels, you stay on the roof because you are afraid to make your way back down the staircase.
You notice the one with longer hair first. He’s wearing a blazer, jeans, and a scarf the same color as his auburn ringlets. He tells you he is studying conducting, and you say very clever things about the role of the conductor. You agree that it is outrageous that some people think he isn’t really a musician.
The other man is shorter, balding to about mid-way up his skull. He keeps asking aren’t you cold, aren’t you freezing? and rubbing your arm. He tells you he is from Sicily and hunts octopus off the coast there, diving naked and jamming a trident under rocks where the shy creature hides, surfacing slicked with salt, ink, and blood.
And when your mouth gets wide with horror he laughs.
You are drunk and exhausted from a summer of failure. Their accents are musical and funny. They think your garbling of their native tongue is charming. It lets them touch your lips, pretending to show you how to shape syllables.
Look at you, laughing in your pretty silver dress.
I have something I’d like to tell you, but I don’t think you’d understand.
You still believe something about your life—your rigor, your intellect—you believe something about beauty.
You believe it makes you too precious to harm.
You’ve not yet begged through blood sounding like an animal
or been a mouth of pain gumming against the floor.
Never watched another act upon you and that action shear you off in great slabs so all that remains is a kind of blurred smudge.
No, in that moment, you still believe in beauty and why not? You have it. You pronounce the word perfectly, not knowing it’s the last word he will hear you say.
