Few writers work as hard as Lia Purpura to interrogate the language of our world, to try to shift our perceptions away from the metaphors we habitually apply to what we see. This act is almost a kind of denial of writing — metaphor, simile, and even cliche are the tools we habitually use to make our observations comprehensible. But Purpura distrusts such simplification, such habits. “A word is a way to speak about something that really, in truth, no word can touch,” she wrote in her 2011 essay collection, Rough Likeness. Her essays live in the frisson created between the something and the word we’ve resignedly decided accurately represents it.
All the Fierce Tethers, Purpura’s fourth essay collection, is as wide-ranging as her previous books, which found raw material in buzzards and jellyfish, motherhood and the word gunmetal. But a darker tone defines this particular set of lyric essays, which circle around themes of death, fear, and loss, and how we use words to elide or erase our anxiety and mortality. She notices it in the way an image of despair like Edvard Munch’s famous painting The Scream has become fodder for postcards and parodies. “A trinket,” she writes. “A T-shirt. A necklace. A thing you stop seeing that stands in for. It’s a joke. A tactic. A way to connect at the office, in meetings (which make everyone want to scream). Why tame that moment? Why encourage skipping so quickly past?”
Fear of death, sure. But Purpura also suggests that our distancing runs deeper, stemming from a fear of our own individuality. In tamping down the impact of Munch’s image, we’re denying our capacity to experience our particularlized despair. We fear, she writes, finding “that spot where the world leaks in, wherever it happens — diner, store, street — there, in the moment a scream originates.”
Purpura’s essays are designed to reveal that we do a lot of this kind of covering up. The process for acquiring an eagle feather for an indigenous religious ceremony is so bureaucratic that the spiritual is all but sapped from it. We’ve blinkered ourselves to the layers of meaning in calling someone a loon — an odd bird in a crazed and damaged ecosystem. Laughing off these things — over even just ignoring them — is a form of denial. So is easy irony, “the outward sign of a feeling one’s trying not to have. The adult version of yanking your crush’s braid on the playground.”
Shattering rhetoric to better understand it can make her writing a bit abstruse, as when she muses about her feeling of anticipating seeing a moose in the woods, or considers the amount of metaphorical weight we put on eagles. “To see an eagle, and not a symbol, you’d have to stop wanting the bird to mean,” she writes. If Purpura’s work resides on a spectrum, lines like that are in a blurry space between Annie Dillard and Ram Dass. Think of it as the dust that gets coughed up when you’re doing a gut rehab to English’s metaphorical infrastructure. She’s trying to reorient our relationship to word and object: She writes of places being unpoemed and unspecialized, things becoming rekinned, her own self becoming illiterated.
And this work can be powerful, particularly in a set of essays called “Bloodspots” about a murder in her Baltimore neighborhood. She reads and questions every detail she gathers about the incident: the path of the blood trail, the rain that washes it away, the denial of the neighbors, the rhetoric of police robocalls, a line by Gerard Manley Hopkins’ etched on a building, memories of protests of Freddie Gray’s death in police custody. The intersection of all of these things, she suggests, make us inextricable parts of an environment of death and loss, despite our efforts to separate, redline, cordon off. “Nothing is still or unto itself,” she writes. She is chasing an “all-dimensions-at-once sensation. To listen in archeologically. To navigate constellationally.”
The words we have for this kind of writing — or at least the ones that came most readily to me reading the book — have a religious bent. Meditative, contemplative. Prayer is meaningful to Purpura, she explained in a recent interview, less because it connects to the spiritual than because it escapes the concrete: “Prayer, at least in my practice, does not require language and often refuses it, works to thwart it, asks that I become an altered perceiver and communicator.” Fittingly, the essay called “Of Prayer” is not about prayer as such. After news of a man’s murder-suicide of his wife and daughters hits the campus of the school were Purpura teaches, she asks for a moment of silence for one of the dead daughters, a student, and notices her students praying. “I feared that I, alone, had no prayer,” she writes.
But in her students she recognizes that prayer surfaces the same struggle to engage with and distance oneself from fear and grief that she noticed in Munch’s Scream, or in that trail of bloodspots. A year later, the whole neighborhood reminds her of the loss: “Stories lay themselves over the land. Leaves-losing-color, then trees-losing leaves … Any land looks like death when the blooming is done and nothing’s green for months on end.” The loss is in the very atmosphere; a few repeated words, our heads hung low as we say them, can pull it close to us, or keep it at bay, useful for what the moment demands.
[Published April 9, 2019 by Sarabande Books, 200 pages, $16.95 paperback]