Rough Likeness: Essays Read Online Free Page A

also wounded; stomach easily nauseated; bring him some oranges, also a little tart jelly... I go around from one case to another. I do not see that I do much good to these wounded and dying; but I cannot leave them.
     
    And though he does record degenerate scene upon scene (“One of the officers had his feet pinn’d firmly to the ground by bayonets stuck through them . . .”), of the “real war,” he says, “Its interior history will not only never be written—its practicality, minutiae of deeds and passions, will never even be suggested.”
    For pages and pages—and indeed the war takes up most of his unruly autobiography—Whitman offers objects touched and seen, the actual stamps, books, pens, coins, and sweets presented at the bedsides of the young soldiers he nursed and wrote letters for, and loved. He culls from his “blood-smutch’d little note-books” everything—wounds, letters, recipes, gestures, scents, finals words—to piece together “the most wayward, spontaneous, fragmentary book ever printed.” He writes of the entire precise and compulsive endeavor, “I wish I could convey to the reader the associations that attach to these soil’d and creas’d livraisons, each composed of a sheet or two of paper, folded small to carry in the pocket, and fastened with a pin.”
    He means, I think, that he does what he can.

    One night, at college (rural Ohio, attic room, wobbly desk, warm circle of light from a yellow tin lamp), Wordsworth cast forth into the unsayable in a way wholly recognizable to me. There, on a cataract , he might have called it, or promontory of recognition, I circled his definitions of those glowing lozenges of memory, those palpating areas (gone hazy at times with Romantic abstraction—virtue! imagination!) and next to his surprisingly plain phrase, “spots of time,” wrote my very own simple “yes”:
    There are in our existence spots of time
Which with distinct preeminence retain
A fructifying virtue, whence, depressed
By trivial occupations and the round
Of ordinary intercourse, our minds—
Especially the imaginative power—
Are nourished and invisibly repaired;
Such moments chiefly seem to have their date
In our first childhood.
     
    Spots of time: how the words for it cleared a space for future field notes on the subject: Italy. Outskirts of Rome, en route to Minturno. I’m twenty. Friends and I are driving fast in a sports car and stop along a strip of beach to stretch, and so I can take my shoes off and touch the Mediterranean for the first time. I’d been, just moments ago, tasting a column of salty wind blowing in from the front window; opening and closing my eyes in the force of it, turning my head to catch the whistle first in one ear, then the other, pausing the sound by turning away, licking my lips to gather the salt. It is out of this private quietude that I step onto the sand and remove my shoes and walk until the big rock I see, no, the five rocks clustered, then eight come into focus, and closer, closer, they’re rounding and shading until they become—is this to be expected in Italy?—drowned and bloated pigs. Bleached and swelling in the sun, stink complicating the sweet, feathery heat of October. Pigs. The sky is blue and cloudless and the car seats hot when we return. We’re full of the scene and can’t stop talking. Our pockets are lined with it, filled with sun-edged coins to keep and trade and spend for years. “Remember the pigs?” we still say when we meet, now more than two decades later.
    To mark an occasion with the available props—the word spot, the word scraps. And moments —how meager!
    But it’s this, or no marking at all takes place. With no words, the occasion is gone.
    Yes, words are brief, partial, unlikely, stark.
    Styptic. Wanting.
    Vienna. Japan. Sublime. Bower. Pigs .
    Reader, forgive them all.

“Poetry Is a Satisfying of the Desire for Resemblance” (Theme & Variations)
     
    There was the eye socket, cranium, jaw, and