Letters on Sight

Two Writers Reflect on Landscape, Neighbors, and Artistic Vision

Toward the end of 2020, I asked my friend Cat if she wanted to write a series of epistolary essays, passed back and forth with no real agenda. Because we live in opposite corners of the country—she’s on the East Coast, I’m on the West—Cat thought our respective landscapes might be a generative place to start. (As usual when it comes to writing instincts, she was right.) We wrote to each other through winter’s shortest days and continued as the light imperceptibly lengthened, as one year stepped aside for the next. For me, the rhythm of sending off a missive and waiting to hear back lent a glow to that pandemic winter, like a candle seen through a window. What began as a correspondence about geography opened into meditations on vision, fear, and wonder. These letters ask different incarnations of the same question: “How do we behold and bear the world for all that it is, and all it is not?”

To learn more about this collaborative project, watch our behind-the-scenes Instagram Live conversation.

If you’d like to listen to the piece, we recorded an audio version for you:

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December 3, 2020

Dear Cat,

Today I read one of those sentences that rings inside you and keeps on ringing even after you’ve swept over the words. Actually it was half a sentence, this one: “...the feeling that you have finally located a geography that mirrors exactly the topography of your soul.” The sentiment is, okay, a bit dramatic—but I also recognize it. I’ve felt this before, the sense that a physical landscape is humming in tune with my internal one. Have you?

There’s a word for this: topophilia. Literally translated, it means the love of place. Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan popularized the term in the 70s, giving us a descriptor for that diffuse longing we feel for particular environments. Tuan pinned language to what many people intuited: that places can take hold of our imaginations and not let go.

Sometimes I think about how rare it is to have been born into the landscape I love most. The coastal desert of Southern California isn’t for everyone, but it’s for me. When I lived in New England I fantasized about my hometown’s foliage and its foothills that catch fire like clockwork with the same intensity I did carne asada tacos spritzed with lime. This stretch of coast—let’s call it from Santa Barbara, where I was born, down the coast to San Diego, where I live now, and even, while we’re here, across the border into Baja California—will always feel like home. 

This is not to say I don’t cringe at much of Southern California’s features—the highways, the faux-adobe McDonald’s, the outlet malls and congestion and concrete. It’s just to say that I love the place in equal measure. In Lydia Kiesling’s novel The Golden State, the protagonist says of her husband: “If Engin and I can be said to have anything in common, anything that forms the basis of a solid lifelong marital foundation that is, it’s a shared aesthetic, so that the landscape of California moves and offends us in equal parts.” I think we are moved and offended by the places we know best. Our intimacy with certain landscapes gives us the perspective to critique them, even as we belong to them.

Years ago our friends were married in an adobe chapel in Redlands, a city composed of strip malls and citrus groves laid out like a carpet at the foot of the San Bernardino mountains. I drove the two hours north from San Diego, following freeways lined with Starbucks and divorce attorney billboards before turning off on a back road that curved along an orange grove. Outside my window I watched the wall of trees slide by: branch and fruit and leaf. Shades of green and orange blurred and melted into dusk, the air warm with the scent of blossoms. When I think of California’s colors, what comes to mind is this palette of citrus: dense, waxy leaves and the globes of fruit set against a wash of sky. I’m thinking about these colors because it’s nearing winter, and that’s when everything here turns crystalline. Summers in Southern California are hazy and muted, but everything sharpens as it cools. And so, citrus; oranges especially.

I read a (maybe apocryphal) story about essayist John McPhee’s early days at The New Yorker. In the story, McPhee brings his editor a list of pitches. I picture McPhee shuffling through them like a deck of cards as one by one the editor swats down ideas. Discard. Discard. The stack thins. Finally McPhee says simply, “Oranges.” The editor pauses, then replies: “Oh, yes.” This single word grows into two sprawling feature stories, and eventually McPhee’s forty-thousand-word volume titled (somewhat blandly) Oranges.

I like the idea of oranges evoking that level of admiration and verbosity. I like the idea of an editor assigning a story based on their name alone—a secondary color—and of a writer having tens of thousands of words to say about them. After all, I feel admiration for oranges every time I run past a tree in my neighborhood with leaves the exact color a leaf should be and little scoops of sherbet tucked among them. (In English, the fruit is named after the fact of its own color. But oranges aren’t always orange; the rind only turns something other than green when cold temperatures cause the chlorophyll pigment to flee the fruit. So in Vietnam, say, or the Gambia, you might eat a just-ripe orange wrapped in green.)

I associate oranges with attention, with being awake enough to the world to admire fiery orbs hidden among leaves on the side of the road. Anyway, today I’m noticing them again because citrus is a winter fruit, and today they beam like poppies in the December sun. Nothing’s quite as bright as California in the winter. 

I’m enthusiastic, obviously. Tell me what you see?

Annie 

——

December 13, 2020

Annie,

Your awe for oranges calls to my mind Ross Gay’s “To the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian,” a poem about wonder and abundance. The speaker is walking through the city, preoccupied with some navel-gazing, some circular thinking (“the city they / say is a lonely / place until…”) when suddenly he is standing under the canopy of a fig tree, and a woman tending the tree is saying to him, “take / as much as / you can.” He loads his mouth and his pockets with figs, and before long a small crowd of strangers has gathered, and they’re all picking figs for themselves and for one another, their limbs touching, “sugar stoned” and “gleeful eating out of each other’s hands.” The poem is set in Philadelphia, and I suppose this is the landscape to which I most belong. It’s also the landscape I recently abandoned, in a move to the suburbs about which I feel a certain degree of ambivalence. But let’s start in the city:  

I lived in Philly for the better part of the past fifteen years, since I was eighteen. Gay’s poem contains everything I came to love about the landscape of this city, which is really a peoplescape, dense with buildings made by human hands, dense with strangers who sometimes come to feel like neighbors. 

Here’s a glimpse of the city that most mirrors the topography of my soul: March, April and May, on a narrow residential street lined with brownstone and brick and flowering trees. Against the odds of a lingering winter, the lenten roses are coming up in the flower beds, and so are the daffodils. The trees are bare of leaves, but they begin to flower. First, cherry blossoms, white and pink. Yellow forsythia petals soften twiggy bushes. Then the towering magnolias bloom, and for three weeks their meaty petals open every morning and close every evening. Then they fall. They fall so quickly, over five days maybe, and they brown on the sidewalk, stepped on and smudged into concrete, and this feels like a little death because I know it’ll be a year before I see those fat blossoms again. But then the tulips push through, the most radiant colors yet, and all the trees begin to leaf. At the end of April, cherry blossom petals are falling as dense as a snow squall, and the sidewalks and cars are covered pink, and I laugh with strangers who, like me, are out for a walk just because. The chill has finally ceded to sun and we’re all outside again. In Philly, everyone knows someone who’s been mugged or shot, or whose car window’s been shattered, or whose home has been robbed while they sleep. The possibility of harm hovers like a shadow. But in springtime, the specter seems to dissipate, and the fear I feel on winter’s empty sidewalks gives way to an overwhelming sense of levity. 

This past spring, during quarantine, Austin was working overtime from home and I needed to get our one-year-old out of our one-bedroom apartment for hours everyday. We passed time in the Azalea Garden, a little grove surrounded by sycamores where people come to picnic or do tai chi or let their children play. On the way, if it was late afternoon, I’d stop at the walk-up window at the corner bar and get a beer to sip as I strolled. Other parents of young children would nod in understanding. These are some of the things I love most about the city—the feeling of being seen; moments when an individual emerges from the public, and, with only a look, comes to feel like a friend. 

Once I set Torrance free from his stroller, he would crawl through the park. Not yet walking, he was no less determined to cover a lot of ground, and he’d bolt on all fours through the grass to the garden to examine bits of mulch and fallen petals while I swiftly plucked trash from his path. I wondered how sanitary it was to let my kid crawl through the park, but what other option did I have for this little mover, cooped up as we were in 900 square feet? Plus, I loved the company here—the strangers who’d raise a glass or a smile, delighted as I was by my child. 

Beginning in late May, we went for fewer walks. Protests had erupted all over the city. Cars were burning. Crowds were marching down Spring Garden Street, two blocks from the apartment, and five blocks away police were deploying canisters of tear gas. The city’s energy was tense and exciting. I liked being near the action, close to what felt like the start of needed change. But I was scared, too. I worried I’d end up out with the baby in the wrong place at the wrong time. Not only was I too afraid to march; for weeks, we stayed inside. 

By July, when the tension had dissipated, the neighborhood greenspace had filled with tents: a housing encampment was erected, a protest to pressure the mayor to create affordable housing for those experiencing homelessness because of the pandemic. At its peak, there were around 150 tents sprawled through the parks between the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Rodin Garden, and the Barnes. In the spaces where Philadelphians look for beauty, the encampment residents asked to be seen. 

For those camped out, the tent village was a place of camaraderie, a family, and ultimately, a victory—by October, the city promised 50 houses and two tiny-house villages for encampment tenants. But it was also a place of violence. In and around the parks, two people were stabbed; others were accosted. I heard an encampment resident took a knife to a passerby’s dog, though I don’t know if this is true. But this is the tenor in which we decided it was time to leave the neighborhood. 

Philadelphia can feel like a place of abundance, but it’s also a place of scarcity. It lacks resources to protect its most vulnerable. Then vulnerability erodes into violence. It is, as Gay writes, “a city like most / which has murdered its own / people.” To live in this landscape, one must live with both the abundance and the scarcity—the joy of the crowd, and the fear and fatigue of it. We left because we wanted space. We left because we couldn’t afford two bedrooms in our neighborhood. We left anxiety and the excitement of progress, the falling petals and the fear of strangers. By now the brownstones are trimmed with Christmas lights and evergreen. In another version of my life I’d be walking home after dark, lit from within by the neighborhood’s beauty, and, always, looking over my shoulder.

I said Philadelphia is the landscape to which I most belong, but, though its logic is more instinctive to me than that of any other place, I don’t think I fully belong to it. I don’t have enough courage or compassion. The struggle between love and fear of this city is too strong in me to stay. I don’t know, then, if I’ve finally located a geography that mirrors the topography of my soul. I’ve landed in a suburban grid in New Jersey. This morning, I see ranch houses with carports and oversized Christmas inflatables wilted on front lawns. They’ll perk up when the sun goes down, and this will give my toddler immense joy, so I’ll remember that this landscape is a fine place for now. But being here, I’m nagged with the thought that what I see matters to my soul. This place neither inspires nor scares me, and I’m beginning to wonder whether both are spiritually vital. 

What does it do to your soul to live among the oranges, and leaves the exact color a leaf should be? And what is the moral value of fixing our gaze upon things that aren’t as they should be, of staying in landscapes that scare us?

Cat

——

December 30, 2020

Cat, 

We talked recently on the phone about the concept of seeing, and how this crops up in our own writing. It’s such a resonant word, seeing, evoking a dozen rabbit trails of meaning. But what I thought about first when I read your question—What is the moral value of fixing our gaze upon things that aren’t as they should be?—was selective sight.

I’ll tell you more about my neighborhood, this pocket of San Diego nudged up against the coast. It’s called Ocean Beach—O.B. for short. The aesthetic is grungy while still managing a certain quaintness, like Venice Beach’s younger sibling who lives at home. People walk around barefoot and bike to the beach in wetsuits with surfboards tucked under their arms. In late summer the African tulip trees pump out flowers immoderately, each branch holding fistfuls of flame. The nearby Jack in the Box wears rooftop letters like a tiara spelling out Oh Bee. (It took me months to notice this nod to the neighborhood.) Across the street a man with a yellowing beard sells hand-lettered signs. His signs advise smoking joints and chilling out, and assert that living anywhere besides here would be a great sadness.

Every spring, migratory parrots make their way to the neighborhood. No one is quite sure how they first arrived—they’re florid green and should be winging through the cloud forests of southern Mexico—but here they are, nibbling each other on telephone wires and shrieking through the sky before sunrise. You can tell who’s lived here longer by the level of irritation these parrots evoke. Newer residents say, happily, the parrots are back! Established locals are less enchanted and make jokes about BB guns.

I like giving attention to my neighborhood’s quirks, which make me glad to live here. I like the sensation of being attuned to the world, of being pulled taut like a violin’s string. All of the details I just shared with you are true. But if I stopped here, the story would be only partially true.

I said the neighborhood is grungy. (One of the bearded painter’s signs: “The most rundown little beach town in the West—and we like it that way!”) The houses are mostly small, often squeezed two to a lot. This detail belies the area’s affluence. Lots are divided because rent and housing prices are exorbitant and most homeowners need to subsidize their mortgage. But those who rent out back units still live in one of California’s most expensive corners. This is also one of the least ethnically-diverse neighborhoods in San Diego, a city I love for its Mexican-American border culture. The neighborhood’s ethnic and class uniformity is representative of who can afford to live near the coast.

There’s also a sizable population of people without stable housing who gather in the Jack in the Box parking lot and use the public restrooms at the beach. As with all neighbors, our proximity binds us together, sometimes in surprising ways. On a run recently, I prepared to sidestep a man walking ahead of me. He moved slowly up the sidewalk. As I drew level with him, he stopped abruptly and then tipped backward like an axed tree. His head hit the concrete. Without the option of preamble or introduction I found myself kneeling over a stranger, taking in his faded bandana, his hair woven in a braid, glasses scattered next to him on the concrete. His eyes fixed unseeingly upward, two mirrors of sky. 

He was unresponsive as I spoke to him while someone else called for help. A store owner recognized the man as someone who usually slept on a nearby street. After several long seconds he regained consciousness and tried to sit up. I drew back, feeling embarrassed by the intimacy of looking into his face at such close range, almost as though I had crossed an invisible fence that separates us from one another in our moments of vulnerability. I remembered the times that I have been sick or scared in public, and that fearful sense of exposure. He must have felt similarly, because he flapped his hands at the small crowd that had gathered and tried to shoo us away.

A nurse who happened to be walking by asked him intake questions. It seemed he had passed out from dehydration, alcohol, low blood sugar, or a mix of all three. He refused medical care and repeated offers of water or food. Finally we walked away and left him leaning against a shaded wall, still breathing heavily. I still think about that interaction, whether I should have done more, and of the responsibility we have toward those we live closest to.

I’m glad you mentioned Ross Gay, who other than being a totally ebullient writer I adore is also able to hold delight and lament in the same hand. He mines for goodness with full awareness that the world often buries it under griefs ranging from racism to leukemia to our daily refusals to extend tenderness to one another. This is something I am trying to do better, in my writing and in my life: to see and speak of both truths at once.

For years I have held onto some words by E.B. White as a sort of writing manifesto: “All I hoped to say in books, all I ever hoped to say, is that I love the world.” As far as reasons for writing go, I think it’s a good one: saying you love the world. But to love the world as it is means you have to see it for all that it is. Selective attention produces a thin and manufactured kind of art. If I hold E.B. White’s quote as a lamp to guide my writing, then I have to also hold James Baldwin’s, when he said, “The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.” Meaning, I think, to make another conscious of that which is difficult to behold. There’s love in this inclusive way of seeing. There’s love in not looking away. 

I’m not sure how to answer your question, about the value of staying in landscapes that scare us. I do think there’s a need to fix our gaze upon that which is not as it should be. What we see, as you said, matters to our soul. What we choose not to see does too.

In truth, I only have more questions, the ones I am asking myself. They are less about fear and more about sight—or more accurately selective sight, and selective attention. I think about the comfort I’m swaddled in, the way it both attracts and repels me, the way I seek it and push it away. These are the questions Davis and I ask each other as we consider where to root ourselves when we eventually leave our current rental: How does comfort induce blindness, and blindness induce comfort? How do I see and attend to that which grieves me? And then, related: how do I move towards it?

I’m starting here, I guess. I’m trying to see and attend to it all, the way you see both Philadelphia’s abundance and its scarcity, the wilted lawn ornaments and Torrance’s delight in them.

Annie

——

January 6, 2021

Annie,

I’m writing to you on Epiphany, this gloaming of Christmastide, a celebration of mystery illumined: in a creche in the poor town of Bethlehem, the hidden nature of God becomes visible in, of all things, the soft and ruddy flesh of baby cheeks. (What could be better?) The name of this festival means to reveal, for in an infant visage, we see the face of God. In light of our correspondence, I’m struck that this is a feast day dedicated to seeing. 

I recently read, tucked in a newsletter, this insight from Catherine Elgin, a philosopher of aesthetics: “Our only hope of understanding and coping with the chaos that confronts us is to ignore most of what is there to be seen.” Of course I thought of your meditation on selective sight. Elgin’s assertion focuses on the negative, on what we ignore. But it implies that we must sift out some of what’s there to be seen, and pay attention to it. 

I’m moved by your encounter with the fainted man. What strikes me is the surprise of intimacy–the way you got so close that you saw the texture of his braid and the tenor of his eyes. This proximity led you to take responsibility for a person you’d otherwise, literally, have sidestepped. Up close, you saw him, and did what you could to see to his need.

Another instance of seeing: the California fires, a fixture in your topography. You’ve written such captivating accounts of them, about how when you were a teenager, you and your family would set up camping chairs on the bluffs and watch the fire blaze and sway on the face of the mountain. You got yourself to a safe enough place, but rather than flee, you fixed your gaze, as the terrible light shone over your faces. 

Both of these episodes seem instructive in our wondering about the moral implications of vision. I often ask myself, as I’ve asked you here, about the virtue of looking on the things that scare me, and my question is, “Where should I look?” Perhaps an equally important question is, “From where should I look?” This requires situational discernment. Sometimes, we have to get out of the fire. A gaze that leads to love won’t get us anywhere if we’re engulfed in the object of our witness. If we have enough distance, if we’re safe in body and spirit, then our vision might prove useful. 

You stared at the fires. You’ve stayed in California, in spite of the danger. I wonder how your annual witness to the effects of climate change has shaped you: maybe you shun single-use plastic, drive fewer miles, think of fire when you go to the polls. Your vulnerability, and your vision, leads to action born of awe.

If we’re not at all vulnerable to the thing that scares us, we’re likely to look elsewhere, complacent. As an urban person, I developed reverence for strangers, especially those different from me, that I might not have had I spent my life in a homogenous community. I think of how my politics differ from those who live far from the city’s diversity. Living in a place as populous as Philadelphia, you have an unshakable sense of interdependence with others. Your life brushes against strangers’ lives all day, sometimes literally, if your arm’s pressed against another’s arm on the bus, and sometimes just with a nod to the dozens of people you pass on your morning commute. It’s hard not to feel a generalized sense of responsibility toward the collective, and to vote this way, happy to give your tax dollars to meet the needs of some of those strangers. At the same time, this generalized sense of responsibility can paralyze me. Too often, a worn body with a cardboard sign becomes synecdochic for the whole problem of human need, and I look away, overwhelmed. I may vote for government services, but I don’t offer my own.

Sometimes, then, we have to get up close. By getting near to an individual, the way you did that day, you saw not a failing society but one fragile person. I can do that. I can attend to one person. I can call an old neighbor and coworker, a single mother of teenagers who lost her job this year. I can check on my new neighbor, offer to walk her dog when she throws out her back. If I’m really looking, I know I’ll see God flickering on her face.  

I find it compelling that in the Christian tradition, human life culminates in a mystical experience of seeing. I’m referring here to the notion of the beatific vision. This is the moment when, in death, a person sees God as God is, absolute divine beauty. The fog of mortality is lifted, and one’s vision is clarified and sensitized to the sublime. Death, then, is the aperture through which holy beauty comes into focus.

Most human fear is, at heart, fear of what might kill us. We swaddle ourselves in comfort and try to keep grief at arm’s length because it makes us feel far from death. But maybe we should let death come closer. You recommended Edwidge Danticat to me, and I just finished her book The Art of Death. In it, she writes that those who have come close to death “live with the heightened awareness that they could die at any time, and out of this awareness comes a kind of clarity of focus and an attentiveness, albeit temporary, to every single hour and every single day.” When my dad and brother died, I lived with this awareness, and my vision of the world expanded. The oranges, you could say, were more orange. To sit with our grief, to sit with the dying, to get close to the poor and the ill, to call our friends who are down or anxious, to behold nature’s decay–these are all ways to let death come closer. Perhaps proximity to death while we live is the beginning of the beatific vision, the window through which we see God as God is, and the world as the world is. 

Cat

——

January 15, 2021

Cat,

Midway through Genesis, that opening chapter into the wild landscape of scripture, we meet Hagar. She’s an Egyptian slave owned by Abraham and Sarah (both, in my opinion, rendered fairly unlikeable in this story). Neither of them use Hagar’s name, referring to her only as “slave-girl.” When Sarah goes decades without conceiving, Abraham takes Hagar as a concubine. She becomes pregnant, and Sarah mistreats her. And so Hagar runs away. As she retreats into the wilderness, God sees her. But more surprisingly, Hagar sees God. God appears to her and calls her by name. Then, Hagar names God in return: El Roi. It’s the only time this name is used throughout scripture. El Roi means the God Who Sees.

On the morning of Epiphany, I sat working on my laptop in a square of sun next to the kitchen window. I imagine you finishing your letter to me a few hours earlier, well ahead of my West Coast schedule. I picture a white brick fireplace, your books, and Torrance still asleep because you have been blessed with a toddler who sleeps long and hard like a teenager. Work was slow, so late in the morning I walked to my neighborhood grocery store. I got home and baked muffins with canned pumpkin leftover from the holidays. When I finally sat down at my laptop, the sun having continued on its path, I saw the news of the Capitol attack. My text messages and social media feeds lit up with disbelief and alarm and rage.

In the following hours and days, many Christians noted the significance of the failed coup taking place on Epiphany, a day—as you wrote—given to the revelation of God in human form. A day that remembers wise men who stooped low before an infant. The terrorism at the Capitol was its own form of epiphany in the way it revealed (again) the white supremacy and the violent grasping for power that is a sickness at the heart of our common life. As our friend Amy Peterson writes, apocalypse and epiphany are related words, both indicating an unveiling. What felt apocalyptic in the dystopian sense of the word was also a revelation. 

Of the images that flooded our screens that day, the one I can’t get out of my head is the banner reading “Jesus Saves” that floated above the heads of insurrectionists. I am angry about many things in the wake of this attack and I am angry, in particular, that those who stormed the Capitol carried God’s name. They carried it falsely—as I learned to say in Sunday school, taking it in vain—but they carried it all the same. When the world watched the news, we saw the name of Jesus linked to destruction.

I wonder what Jesus those who carried the banner had in mind. Was it the bleary newborn before whom the Magi bowed? The man who mixed a salve of dirt and spit and rubbed it on a blind man’s eyes? The man who saw a blind beggar in the first place, when so many rushed by on their busy, important lives? This Jesus I have in mind is a God who sees others in their vulnerability, and inhabits the same vulnerability. (As poet Mary Karr imagines him: “Your mask was an infant’s head on a limp stalk / sticky eyes smeared blind / limbs rendered useless in swaddle.”) With a human body, God chose to be near us in excruciating weakness.

This month I started reading Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. The book is a map for artists who want to rededicate themselves to their work, or to uncover their creative impulse for the first time. Cameron reminds her reader that a first step on this path is to pay attention. “Art is born in attention. Its midwife is detail,” she writes. “Art may seem to spring from pain, but perhaps that is because pain serves to focus our attention onto details.” I wonder about this link between suffering and attention, and the way pain concentrates our attention on the immediate, insistent present. You’ve experienced this. In the years following your dad’s death, and then your brother’s, you wrote a book. Grief comingles with beauty in your work. You record the quality of light in the room where your dad stopped breathing and the Camparis raised around the table in Rome where you last saw your brother alive. 

If suffering concentrates our attention, or expands our vision, I wonder what we are now called to attend to in this new year. In the wake of broadcasted violence, in this pandemic season, in a year of extraordinary public suffering, what are we called to see? One answer, I think, is to notice the things that Christ noticed—a blind beggar, a bleeding woman, mud-colored sparrows. A girl wandering in the wilderness, carrying a child she never asked to conceive. What I’m getting at is that God both sees and moves close to our suffering. My hope is that the God Who Sees might also train us to do the same.

Reading back over these letters, I am amused but also glad to see the movement from oranges and magnolia blossoms to voting for one’s neighbor, Epiphany, insurrection. What we’re talking about when we talk about landscapes and climate and neighborhoods is actually something else: vision. The willingness to look again and see more clearly. In doing so, we might find love for the earth in California’s parched foothills, communion with a stranger, Christ in an infant’s face. (What could be better?)

Annie

——

January 19, 2021

Annie,

I’m reading your letter this morning while eating a grapefruit. It’s the kind of grapefruit that makes you wonder if it’s been genetically modified or if nature is just this lavish–its slivers so fat, its juice so pink, filling each bead and popping gratuitously between my teeth. I’m thinking again of your oranges. I do love and wonder how our letters evolved from the glory of those little scoops of sherbet to the amber of wildfire to the yellow “Jesus Saves” sign of the Capitol insurrection. I’m curious about the connection between simple beauty and the flashes of vision that grieve us. Is the former a sentimental escape, the latter the stuff of real life that we need to shore ourselves to face? 

Remember our friend Michael Dechane’s staggering poem, “Three Times She Peels A Grapefruit”? His description of this woman’s tearing of the fruit is beautiful, both in the sensual images he conjures and in the sound of the words he gives: She pulls at “the dimpled peel.” “She turns the pith down like a sheet.” Each crescent inside is “a red moon.” By my reading, it’s a poem about loss: about the way we turn our attention from our beloved and tear the whole endeavor of love to pieces. It’s about intimacy turned distant. Finally, the woman feeds the speaker a bit of the fruit, an act of familiarity we sense may be one of the last: “I watch her hand find my mouth / to offer the glad collapse of a hundred fullnesses.” 

How are beauty and sorrow working together in this poem? The same way they work together in all of life. The loss is more painful because of the loveliness of the thing being lost. The woman’s elegant, powerful hands that “can pull apart a sun,” her “unselfconscious grace”—these quotidien gifts, which for years may have simply delighted the speaker, now grieve him. The beauty hurts. But in the same glance, it comforts. Beauty tosses up some consolation for the loss. 

I find this in my own life. I remember moments when love was torn, and my mind’s eye narrows on the things that visually compelled me. Fuschia azaleas picked by my first love and wrapped in tin-foil. The crystal clarity of my late brother’s blue eyes. The flaky pink salmon my cousins brought to feed me while my dad lay in the hospice bed. It was a casual dinner but we lit the candles anyway. In these little marvels remembered, I’m consoled.

And when I think about the insurrection at the Capitol on the day of Epiphany, and when I wonder in prayer what tomorrow, Inauguration Day, will bring—a festive ritual of democracy, or cowardly, violent grasping at power?—I fight despair by fixing my gaze more closely. The sweater I’m wearing is poppy red, a color so saturated that it seems to burst with a sort of visual nectar. The pothos on my mantle is spilling verdant hearts down the white brick hearth. Last night, Torrance helped me to make biscuits (he busied himself ten minutes smoothing butter onto a sheet pan with his miniature hands) and I taught him to notice their risen faces, gilded, as I slid them from the oven. These mundane delights remind me that life is not all fearsome, that even when love is torn, or a landscape is torn, or a city, or a nation, there will still, somehow, be small joys to help us bear it. And by bear it, of course, I mean both endure and behold. Oranges and insurrections are not opposites. They are intimately linked, the one giving me the courage and energy to see the other.

Cat

Learn more about Catherine Ricketts’ writing at @bycatherinericketts and catherinedanaricketts.com.