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eveningsout
An extraordinary fascination with ordinary things
Still Life with Oysters
and Lemons
On Objects and Intimacy by Mark Doty
Beacon Press, $20
Reviewed by Yvonne Zipter
The starting point for this long essay by Mark Doty is a seventeenth-century still life by Dutch artist Jan Davidsz de Heem. Doty's Still Life with Oysters and Lemons-which takes its name from de Heem's painting-is somewhere between a love letter and a meditation and differs noticeably in focus from his other two recent prose works, Heaven's Coast and Firebird, which deal with, respectively, coping with his lover's death from AIDS and growing up gay.
In Still Life, Doty begins with the mundane items that are the subject of still lifes-
MARK "D"U"T'7""
from foodstuffs to utensils-and ranges over objects as diverse as peppermints, a chipped platter, and an oak table as he strives to understand how such ordinary things can have such resonance in our lives.
Though Doty probes for answers to questions about why artists paint still lifes and what causes a still life's viewers to be moved, there is not a true narrative thread to Still Life. What draws in the reader, in part, is the tenderness and passion that Doty brings to his descriptions. In addition, there is the allure of watching this brilliant, compassionate mind at work.
Still Life, in many ways, is a classic ex-
ample of the type of personal essay known as an analytic meditation, in which an author examines a topic through close examination, personal experience, and examination of her feelings as she struggles to understand a particular subject and strives to come to a conclusion about it.
Doty takes us with him as he attempts to circle in on the appeal of things, each pass filled with wonderfully contextualizing detail. For instance, while exploring his first experience with the significance of an ordinary item-a peppermint candy-he digresses into an exquisite description of his grandmother, Mamaw, the source of the candies:
Mark Doty
"Mamaw wears a thin flowered dress of rayon or some other slippery stuff, and a white crocheted cardigan sweater, also thin, that keeps riding up her skinny, intricately mottled wrists... Those wrists are a wonder: veins and splotches, just at the back of the hand, rhyme with her liver-colored ‘age spots'." Detail surfaces, too, from his relationship with his current lover as well as his past lover, and Doty's queer sensibilities are pervasive throughout.
Part of what we learn from this book is that Doty's many digressions aren't off the subject at all, that the substance of these seeming asides, in fact, is exactly what gets packed into our feeling for a specific thing. In other words, it's not the thing in and of itself that captivates us but all of the memories wrapped up in it. In the end, however, Doty is not entirely satisfied with such conclusions as these:
"All I can say of still life must finally fall short; I may inventory, weigh, suggest, but I cannot circumscribe; some element of mystery will always be left out."
Whether the reader endeavors to grasp every nuance of Doty's inquiry or simply wallows in the beauty of the language and the lushness of the descriptions, I doubt that anyone who has ever been enchanted by a pitcher or a seashell or a painting will be disappointed in the journey.
Yvonne Zipter is a freelance writer living in Chicago.
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