LOOK AWAY! LOOK AWAY! LOOK AWAY!

“Chalice” by Pranav Prakash

I always admired the sheer volume of poetry she could recite from memory. I remember our final trip together, to Dublin, with particular affection. There we visited the National Library, which at the time showcased a lapis lazuli carving gifted to Yeats by a young poet named Harry Clifton, who had procured it during a trip to China. Christine knew not only this arcane trivia, but she recalled Yeats’s description of the carving, in his poem named for the material from which it was carved:

Every discoloration of the stone,
Every accidental crack or dent,
Seems a water-course or an avalanche,
Or lofty slope where it still snows…
        (W.B. Yeats, “Lapis Lazuli”, stanza 5)

We were amazed that the carved lapis lazuli, detail-rich but not exceptional in its evocative force, could inspire such a lively companion poem, one propelled by sociopolitical avoirdupois rather than pure aestheticism. But more than that, Christine’s reciting of Yeats brought the carving’s materiality into sharper relief; it enriched our experience of the carving to such an extent that, acting almost against our will, we remained for several minutes longer, in silent observance, until another piece finally called out to us.

***

Nine days later, Christine was gone.

The images from that day — the visual, olfactory, aural images — will always exist with uncompromised clarity: the burning antimony rampant in the air; the remnants of two cars, the distinction between them blurred by an exhaustion of white foam; the sign that had not been heeded and the heedless youngster, who bawled and bawled behind an older woman’s clement conceal; the slow-strolling gurney across grating asphalt; the news bearer tasked with conveying the unspeakable; the perfunctory but sincere-seeming condolence; the emptiness then, and thereafter.

On one hand, I hesitate to acknowledge that my most enduring memories of our time together are filtered through our relationship to art and language, but on the other, I’m aware that she’d have preferred it that way.

***

Some time after the accident, during my first solo trip after Christine’s passing, I saw a piece even more peculiar than the carved lapis lazuli we had seen in Dublin. I scanned over it, taking a beat to parse the thing's striking visual character — “striking,” according to the sediments of my time-tainted, grief-warped recollection of it, at least — but almost immediately, a strict admonishment printed below it captured my attention.

THIS IS NOT TO BE LOOKED AT.

(a) So I hastily averted my eyes.
(b) So I averted my eyes hastily.

***

Despite having good reason to not indulge the ever-present temptation to discuss language, I include both sentences to motivate the following brief point about rhetoric and text. The linearity of text entails both its segmentation and hierarchization, and these properties have a bearing on how readers perceive a text. The lexical ordering of a sentence determines which elements are perceived as more salient than others. According to the principle of end-focus, we say that, all else being equal, the most salient lexical item in a sentence appears at its end.

Let me propose one class of exceptions generalizable under a separate principle. Granting that the linearity of text implies its temporality, and that there is a class of adverbs — adverbs of manner — that affect the temporality of a sentence, then it follows that there exist cases where considerations concerning lexical salience depend at least as much on the semantics of certain adverbs as on lexical ordering.

Consequently, for my sentence’s rhetorical thrust to be fully felt, it is neither necessary nor sufficient for the word “hastily” to be perceived as the sentence’s most salient word. What takes precedence in this case is the promptness with which “hastily” achieves its salience; the reader ought to conceive of an “abstracted hastiness” even before it is instantiated in the sentence’s context, precisely due to the meaning of the word.

Here is an example of the opposite case, where an adverb of manner does not demand expedited salience:

So I slowly averted my eyes.

Of course this is not preferable. How absurd it is for the pushy writer to rush their reader into imagining a sprinting snail! It is clear that “So I averted my eyes slowly” is the necessary revision. The general principle, then, is that some — but certainly not all — adverbs of manner establish an exception to the principle of end-focus. It is of course true that there are other exceptions, some perhaps even more relevant to the study of rhetoric, but these lie beyond the scope of this discussion.

*** 

That experience reminded me of an art exhibit in the mid-90s, in Chicago — it might have been at the Museum of Contemporary Art, or perhaps the Smart Museum, on the South Side. The artist titled her exhibit “LOOK AWAY! LOOK AWAY! LOOK AWAY!”, but to this day I couldn’t tell you anything more about it.

But I remember what Christine jotted in her notebook, the azure Leuchtturm beauty she always kept on her nightstand:

I am a nobody in this world, just a writer, maybe a rhetorician, but I warn my fellow artists: the title you decide to give your work may take the form of an imperative, but you then run the risk of your audience interpreting it as such; you risk their obedience. As a matter of fact, I am disposed to level vicious moral judgment against those who do otherwise!

That passage inspired one of the poems that featured in the last collection she published. Nobody loved language — to revel in it, flirt with it, to poke and prod around its supposed limits, to constantly troll all of us — more than my wife. She was no nobody, not in this world or any other. She was a brilliant person, and I miss her more than any expression of magnitude or time could ever do justice.

About the author

Samir de Leon is a writer based in Chicago.

about the artist

Pranav Prakash is a multidisciplinary artist and humanities scholar. He is a Junior Research Fellow and Director of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Christ Church, University of Oxford. After receiving foundational training in papermaking, bookbinding, and Western calligraphy at the Center for the Book, University of Iowa, Pranav learned watermedia monotype printing at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Colorado, and letterpress printing at Schola Musicae, Bodleian Old Library, University of Oxford. He was trained in Perso-Arabic calligraphic styles at the National Association of Iranian Calligraphers in Tehran, Iran, and the Qasid Arabic Institute in Amman, Jordan. Although he works with a variety of media, most notably watercolour, gouache, pastel, chalk, oil and acrylic, he is most fond of ink and reed pens. Through his artwork, he grapples with a range of political and social issues that have historically affected underprivileged communities in India, Iran and Central Asia.