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How will you keep your kids busy this summer vacation?

 Swimming lessons

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If it is true, as Matisse and now Patricia Hampl in her nonfiction novella Blue Arabesque have urged, that we are made of all that we have seen, then it matters greatly what it is we look at, and also how we do the looking. In her search for the sublime, Hampl argues against the “glimpse” as way of seeing, a manner of sight she sees gaining indomitable momentum in the present culture of social media that caters to and creates twittering attention spans. Hampl espouses, instead, the long “gaze.” It takes time to do this, she repeats like a prayer. And then, in literary arabesque, she takes the time to detail what she means by “gaze,” allowing thoughts to unfurl, figures of speech to bud and blossom, articulation to drift like spent petals onto dark tables, into pages and pages of what seems to me to be Hampl’s own blue backdrop, her own gaze of “divine nonchalance.”

Though I highly favored the many splintered and fractured “glimpses” of motifs from a particular Matisse odalisque painting scattered throughout the chapters: the fishbowl, the gold filament, the glory of ease, the yellow beaded necklace, the dark, dreamy fish eyes of the odalisque, Hampl demostrates the “gaze” in her use of extended metaphor. In the opening chapter of Blue Arabesque, time is a golden filamentous thread. Though it borders on being overdone, she likens minutes to wool, nanoseconds to spun-silk, days to yards of fabric, which get stitched together into weeks and months. With time as fabric, like the blue embroidered North African screen behind the odalisque, as something with volume and surface area, as something other than the straight line it is often digitally represented to be, Hampl sets up her extended metaphor, her gaze, and lingers there in wonder, if time is fabric, what happens to time over time? It frays. It becomes “warped and woofed.” It is consigned to linen closets, where it rests stifled and unused. A closet, which, Hampl riffs, is the “closet of the ages where the first tensile thread of our story on the planet emerged from the bobbin of history” (and this is where I begin to roll my eyes and wonder if the metaphor is now overreaching—why not the spindle of history? The sheared-sheep of history? Why not the evolving follicles of the pre-evolutionary sheep? Perhaps too long a gaze becomes in this manner, cross-eyed.)

Hampl’s extended metaphor does not create a fixed way to interpret the golden filament in the remainder of the book, however. The golden filament emerges afresh in chapters that come after, towing with it Hampl’s earlier imagery. For example, when in chapter three Hampl describes herself flung upon a low-padded bench where she languished, ill, in a corridor “that swam with ominous gold light,” Hampl’s meticulous use of “gold” carries with it the facet of “gold-ness” she previously used to describe time. Hampl swoons, and wonders if “her time had come.” The unsympathetic guide taps on his “gold wristwatch” to hurry her back to health, and again, the “gold” of the watch is able to do more work because it carries with it the weight of the extended metaphor. Time here really is golden.

In chapter four, the gold filament becomes something new. Hampl uses the same imagery to describe the south of France as “a narrow band of possibility laid out like a gold filament, a precious necklace cast on the smooth flesh of beaches ancient even to the Romans.” Here again are the motifs of the painting used to accentuate new facets of Hampl’s argument. Time, as gold filament, can be connected through the extended metaphor to both place and possibility. It is as if Hampl has taken a complex shape and rotated it in her hands to examine yet another new side.

Motif connects the chapters in a manner evocative of basting fabric together when one is quilting. Hampl uses the golden filament as though it were literally a thread that brings together pieces that may be sewn together more permanently later, but may also hang together loosely for now, like putative hypotheses looping through the text. Her mention of the Golden Age is loosely stuck together with the layers of other “golden” associations, time, place, possibility, fabric, swooning, ominous light, wristwatches and rush, Hampl’s phrasing of life as “covered with a gilded template of rights and wrong turns.” The images are able to lift and hover above the context of their passage and there they comingle with the other contexts, just as our days, and the memories of our days, if they are patches on a fabric, are able to lift and come alongside one another depending on how the cloth folds and wrinkles.

I will admit, as Hampl pressures, that the fragment is my totem. I know that in my writing I rely on the power of an image to indirectly answer questions and handle tough issues. I defer to metaphor when my writing seems to only get tangential to the heart of a matter. I am not entirely sure how to achieve the “fullness” that is quite arguably superior to the facet other than basting together seemingly transient details in a piece, like a gold filament, so that the entire piece requires the countenance of a gaze rather than the gall of a glance to be understood. Writing with this quality allows itself to be seen and seen again and again, in new contexts, new chapters, unfolding new meaning and significance. Images used in extended metaphors such as artfully drawn as Hampl’s have the power to transfect themselves into the life of the reader. Suddenly, you will see gold somewhere around you, perhaps in a wedding band, and your gaze of the world will lengthen slantwise, like a ray of sun through opening clouds, and the thought will come: this gold is time.