“A funny thing about a chair; You hardly ever think it’s there.”
-Theodore Roethke
Lately, going batty at the thought of stillness, I can’t help but wonder how sitting by a window feels like being in asylum. The world outside, cycling through its seasons, is complicit in our human associations. When it rains or snows, we remember: birthdays, anniversaries, memorials. When the leaves change and fall, we recollect: an early lesson in death, the night I first believed in love. It is harder, perhaps, to ground our perceptions in the consistency of common things: a bed, a desk, a chair.
• • •
I stood among the boys, who had clustered in a huddle of Oxfords and low-slung jeans, in a second-story room at a campus house party. Each with a whiskey glass and a streaming cigarette, they stood in staged rapture. Ben had waved me into the room as I passed in search of a free bathroom. “Come,” he said. “We could use a feminine eye.” So I joined them, gazing at a painting on the wall.
The canvas hung askew. Thickly coated in acrylic, the painting bore the abstract depiction of a chair, singular and empty, in a room of three distorted walls. I didn’t recognize the painting, nor did I particularly care for it, but I appreciated the expressionist approach. The brush strokes echoed de Kooning; the bold primary colors resembled Barnett New-man—rich yellows, reds, an underpainting of blue. And it reminded me of the city that I had recently abandoned for the Colorado mountains. “The question is,” Ben began, gripping his drink. “What is the nature of a chair?” He glanced at me from beneath the rim of his newsboy hat and scratched at the thin beard skirting his chin.
• • •
I’ve been trying to find order in the disorder of memory. I wonder what it means that I can’t recall all of their names. Or have I have tried to forget them? Most days their faces blend in a half-rendered backdrop, except for two, ingrained and juxtaposed in the foreground of one night. The night we lost Ben; the night I found Joe. Sitting here, I can feel the seat of my chair hard beneath my body. The legs creak like dry branches or a slab of driftwood in the wind. I am alone with just an image becoming more and more singular, begging to be objectified like the myriad common things praised by Neruda’s odes—one chair, alone in the jungle.
• • •
Chair: a seat, with support for the back, designed to accommodate one person. The word originates from the Greek cathedra, a compound of kata(“down”) and hedra (“seat”).
• • •
Early evidence of chairs dates to 2680 bc in ancient Egypt, where cave paintings, carvings, and hieroglyphics depicted seated figures. Across the Euphrates, stone funerary carvings on monuments revealed the existence of chairs in Mesopotamia. The most famous ancient chair was in fact a throne (from Indo-Euro-pean origin, meaning “to hold or support”). Tutankhamen’s throne, circa 1333-1323 BC, built of wood and encased in gold, was excavated from the pharaoh’s tomb in 1923.
• • •
“Consider,” Ben continued. “Did someone just get up, or is someone about to sit down?” His grin widened. A friend of mine in the sophomore class whom I knew from back home had insisted I attend the party that night; there were people to meet. Ben was one of them. Hard beats and laughter rose from downstairs as the boys carried on their charade, assuming theatrical gestures and affected accents of Bohemian art junkies.
One noted the use of color while inhaling a cigarette. Another—long, lanky—leaned in until his nose nearly touched the canvas. Foreground brush strokes filled the surface with the color of saffron and cornmeal. Red sliced through the frame like rouge to form the angles of a chair, and a pool of blue added depth to the composition. Even now I’m not sure why the painting inspired such parody. But the image has ingrained itself in the card catalogue of visual history—one I can’t help but pull from, looking for reference while sitting by a window.
• • •
In 1888, Vincent Van Gogh painted two of his well-known works while in the company of Paul Gauguin at Arles. Vincent’s Chair, housed in London’s National Gallery, vibrates with Van Gogh’s signature golds and blues and depicts a simple straw chair positioned on a wood slab floor. A crumpled handkerchief with tobacco and the artist’s pipe rests in the seat. Conversely, Gauguin’s Armchair, exhibited in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, is darkly ornate—a “somber reddish-brown wood,” as Van Gogh described it in a letter to critic G. –Albert Aurier, “the seat of greenish straw,” with a lighted torch and two strewn novels.
• • •
Plato’s Theory of Forms uses the example of a chair to suggest a material object is merely an imitation of its ideal form. The ideal form, in turn, constitutes the object’s true reality. The essence of a chair is its “chair-ness.”
• • •
Maybe it was a riddle after all. “A trick question,” Ben said, his mouth curling at the taste of whiskey. I couldn’t help but indulge him. “So—what is the nature of a chair?” He linked his arm in mine. “Wouldn’t you agree that both are truth? Someone stands, someone else sits down. Someone comes, someone goes.” His voice carried the scent of bourbon; its cadence seesawed between playful and profound. The other boy, distracted by his own amusement, rubbed his eyeglasses against his shirt and placed them back on the bridge of his nose, then offered: “like a glass half empty or half full.” I felt the wine I nursed in slow sips begin to flush and color my cheeks, and chose not to prolong the discussion by noting that the perspective of a chair and the nature of a chair are, in fact, two different things. By then it hardly mattered. The boys broke character and began roughhousing over a bummed cigarette. The sight of them morphed into a tangle of limbs and choke holds.
• • •
The American painter Andrew Wyeth all but immortalized the Windsor writing chair when he placed the lone object in the center of his composition. Realistically rendered against the dark beige walls of a Pennsylvania bedroom, Wyeth’s Writing Chair, c 1961, is empty except for a dark captain’s jacket draped over one arm.
• • •
In Latin, the phrase ex cathedra, meaning “from the chair,” was once commonly applied to the Pope’s declarations on faith or morals as contained in divine revelation or, at least, intimately connected to something greater.
• • •
Why do we remember certain details? What is it about them that holds us? Before the window I assume the restive pace of a captive. Sitting again—in a throne of unkempt velvet ...the plush of an overstuffed chair—perhaps I’ll find the calm sensibility and decorum of a lady. Either way, I will stay here long enough to call upon the archival instinct to reconstruct and conserve the mundane pieces of a moment: The way I wrapped a cardigan close around my chest as I waited outside the house that night. How earlier that day the campus grounds flaunted a palette of autumn, where rusty hues mingled with blond cottonwoods and golden beeches. Or the fact that, just before I saw Joe coming toward me, as I gripped the porch railing, trying to seem at ease, I noticed the toe of my tennis shoe dotted with a fresh stain of red wine.
I first saw Joe on his bicycle weeks before while sitting one morning by the library. With one hand gripping his handlebars and a book clamped under his arm, he pedaled effortlessly. And, because attraction really does defy dimension and morph everything it knows, as he passed, his cool glance spanned the length of the quad. And then, like every morning since, his eyes (brown, docile, animal) reached across the lawn to mine (green, dewy, smitten). So when he stood beside me with his hands in his pockets, toeing at a stone in the grass, it seemed an inevitable moment. We fumbled through introductions. I tried not to blush when I noticed the gap between his front teeth. My arms clasped my body in a straightjacket hold because it felt impossible to stand still. He asked if I was cold. Even now I remember the ache in the back of my legs and wonder how odd it is that we say “weak” in the knees, when it’s so clearly the strength of the pulse running through the body.
• • •
In One and Three Chairs, 1965, Joseph Kosuth places a chair against a wall. To its left hangs a life-size photograph of that same chair. To its right, an enlarged Photostat of the definition of the word chair. The installation, on view at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, asks viewers to consider how these three representations communicate the common fact of the object. We see a chair. We see the visual image of a chair. We see the etymological definition of a chair. How do they differ? Which representation constitutes the true nature of the form?
• • •
On Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau furnished his ten-by-fifteen-foot cabin with a bed, a table, a writing desk, and three chairs: “one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.”
• • •
Given the chance, the more sober-minded would probably have known better, or foreseen the danger that night. But autumn was around us. The fall had fallen in leaves of gold, and in its death we were alive and young in that back-to-school-special sort of way, all promise and adventure. When Ben reappeared, bounding from the house, he slung an arm around Joe and, glancing between the two of us, seemed to slow down for a moment—to come back to earth again, just long enough to say, “So you found him.”
The two of them jabbed elbows and laughed like schoolboys before Ben spun away, singing a scat-style tune, waving and yelling alongside another guy that they’d meet us at the dorm. Their bodies held in shadow against the campus lights, the brim of Ben’s newsboy hat outlined in a sharp yellow glow.
• • •
Years ago, riding the subway in Manhattan, I watched a man offer his seat to an elderly woman. She nodded politely. Once seated, she turned and recognized the woman next to her was a childhood friend. The two women reunited, tearing with disbelief. Then the woman stopped short and looked around. “Where’s that sweet young man?” she kept saying. “Where’d he run off to?” I looked, too, but he was gone.
• • •
Details are as relentless as they are invaluable. Memory is maddening. I want to stand and spin my chair like a prop in a musical. Sitting backward now, my thighs stretch wide to straddle the seat, my chest hugs the carved wooden rods of the straight back. Its curves and mine embrace, just for an instant. Then I am up again, swinging one leg over the side, like Liza Minelli in Cabaret, because I cannot bear to sit still.
• • •
Later that night, as Joe and I walked east, away from the mountains, he explained the tradition of exploring the catacombs of cam-pus—a grid of utility tunnels nestled below school grounds. I asked if it was dangerous. We bit our lips and laughed, and his laughter, somehow familiar, warmed the air around my cheeks. We continued across campus to meet the others, beneath the soaring contour of Pike’s Peak stenciled against the indigo sky, above the underworld carved in the earth below, amidst the dry leaves still whispering at our feet. In a way, I think part of us is buried in those whispers, the risk, the romance, the way we relished in uncertainty and believed it could never harm us.
• • •
Presenting the chair as portrait, Van Gogh may have intended his two paintings to evoke the artists’ contrasting temperaments. In art books or on the occasion they are exhibited to-gether, Vincent’s Chair and Gauguin’s Armchair often appear side by side facing away from each other, as if to suggest a volatile relationship be-tween the two men. But much depends on how you look at it. Facing each other, the paintings may speak to a mutual, although grudging, respect.
• • •
In the fifth grade, a boy in my class kept rocking back and forth in his chair. After berating him repeatedly, our teacher dragged him to his feet. “If you can’t sit still, then you’ll have to stand,” she said, determined to make an example of him. He stood, fidgety and shamed. I looked across the room and exchanged a conspiring glance with my friends. And as if by instinct—some act of fair-dealing bravado—we stood, wailing: “If he has to stand, then we won’t sit.” In minutes our loyal classmates followed suit. The scrape of wooden chairs on linoleum echoed through the room. In our small-scale triumph, it seemed as if the world had opened before us.
• • •
When we reached the dorm, it was nearly midnight. People filtered in and out of the confines of someone’s dorm room. I sat on the edge of a crowded couch and watched a couple dancing nearby: the boy’s rutted brow, the girl’s puckered lips, hips swaying in abstract circles, arms slicing through the air. I caught Joe’s stare across the room. The crowd around us began to thin, and I could see the faint movement in his shoulders. My hands grew clammy; my cheeks reddened, as if I had stumbled upon the throne of lust and longing, and was given a moment to sit—in a chair that embraces everything, the sound ground and supreme dignity of repose—before time continued, and I smiled. I remember the precise moment I smiled, too, as if it marked the moment of my concession, the surge of instinct when something inside me decided I would like this one above the rest.
• • •
In the second grade, I suffered a crush on a boy from my class who, one day, pulled a chair out from under me just as I bent to sit down. My bony ass, and then my hard stubborn head, slammed against the floor. The room erupted in laughter. I nursed bruises for weeks. The next day he told me that I had pretty hair, and then he said, “Sometimes it hurts when we like things so much.”
• • •
Now I am standing again. Nose to window-pane, breath whiting out the leaves outside, I’m thinking about how easily things grow hazy and obscured. Death carries its own dimension. Shock inevitably fogs the view. If I stood on this chair, circling the seat on tiptoes, and tried to peer into meaning or tried to unearth the epicenter of narrative, I would find little but a balancing act, wobbly legs and all.
• • •
I still wonder how we knew where to look that night, how we determined that something was wrong. I remember a shift in the nearby voices, which dislodged me from my reverie in the possibility of Joe, to recognize that most everyone had been ushered out of the room until just a few of us remained. Someone was pacing, saying, “They should have been here by now. It’s been hours.” We stood clustered in the center of the room, silently, drunkenly courting worse-case scenarios, until someone broke trance and volunteered to stay behind, “in case they show,” while the rest of us pivoted toward the door.
• • •
Beginning in 1963, Andy Warhol revealed his darkest work to date with a series of screen prints called Electric Chairs. The series, housed in several museums, including the Tate and the Walker Art Center, is part of Warhol’s larger Death and Disaster period, and offers a rare glimpse into an execution chamber. In one purple-tinged print, and another bathed in red, the word Silence appears in the top right corner of the room. The image evokes those that have sat there before, and those who may follow. Yet it is neither condemnation nor celebration. Warhol, who often refused to discuss his work beyond elusive statements such as “There’s nothing behind it,” or “I like boring things,” simply provides a representation. Interpretation lies at the mercy of the viewer.
• • •
It is difficult in language to find a worthy match for the euphoria of being young and high and falling in love. So much depends on the quickening pace of everything: breath, the air, everything propelling forward so there is little choice but to follow in oblivion. I remember how fast our feet moved as we looked for our friend that night. I could hear one boy’s breath heaving as, two paces ahead, he led us across the lawn and through the vacant parking lot that lay bathed in the vermillion glow of the campus security posts. Another boy trailed after him, trying to reason while keeping stride—“They must have lost track of time. What could have possibly gone wrong?” We continued, an anonymous mob of boys and girls parading toward a darkness we sensed but didn’t know. I heard Joe’s footsteps behind me. As we hurried faster, he took my hand and linked his arm in mine. I can still recall how his forearm pulsed against my own—so much life surging beneath our skin—and the sick happiness I felt amid the strangeness of running, as we did, toward red flashes wavering across campus.
As our breath shortened, the air felt peculiar. I could hear our feet heavy on the ground, the wind whistling around us. As we neared the library, the crimson lights of an ambulance churned through the dark, like a flaming car-ousel but quiet—no doors slamming shut, no engine idling at the ready to rush toward help. Just stillness. Red light. Silence.
• • •
Odd to think that a chair, an invention of such simplicity, is an artifact that we have come to take for granted. We see and touch chairs not with our eyes and hands alone but with our entire bodies. When we are tired, we sit. When we dine, we sit. When we read, when we write, when we confess our sins and ask forgiveness. The simple presence of a chair, like the unbridled promise of life when we are young, is a common assumption: we trust that the structure will hold us. But what if a chair is pulled aside, what if it breaks suddenly beneath you?
• • •
Picking myself up, the sound of my chair against the floor must have startled the starlings outside. Back in my seat, I am trying to remain here, one leg curled beneath me like a girl, so I’m not so tempted to tip forward again to catch a better view. The breath on the windowpane has cleared, and the details glow anew. I can see the lines of the leaves again, the composition of the branches, just before the sky turns—Bring me a chair in the midst of thunder.
• • •
Death by electrocution can be, but is not always, instantaneous. But I wonder, when Ben removed a manhole cover just north of the library and descended, not into the tunnels as intended, but into an unmarked electrical vault, if he knew he had stepped into an accident. His feet were firmly grounded when his hand touched a live wire, and I wonder if he felt the 8,000-volt current that shot through his body? If he thought of his parents, his first love, of sex or lightbulbs, of leaves and lightning, of the Rosenbergs, of Warhol, or if there was anything at all but the surge and the Silence?
• • •
Even the most common artifacts support multiple representations. Thoreau’s three chairs each served a different purpose. Warhol’s chair mainly served one. Kosuth’s three chairs, seemingly different, are one and the same; they question the notion of representation itself. According to Roethke, “to know a chair is really it, You sometimes have to go and sit.” Ben’s definition of the chair in the painting that night was aptly ephemeral, embodying a transient duality of arrival and departure, past and future. Someone comes, someone goes. Death, yet life.
• • •
Am I trying with this recollection to compose a scene or paint a picture? One seems dependent on movement, the other on stillness. The racing adrenaline of tragic accident. The numbness of loss. The view from a window arouses and fragments the narrative of memory into images that resurface like a dream: The morning after the sky carried the faint residue of siren light; Joe laying beside me, his breath steaming and cooling the back of my neck. I inhaled the smell of his hands: the balmy trace of soap and cigarettes, the steely salt he had wiped from my eyes. I felt for the small beating just inside his wrist—here, still.
• • •
During the 8th International Istanbul Biennial in 2003, Columbian sculptor Doris Salcedo filled a gap between two buildings in the city’s ironmonger district with 1,600 wooden chairs. Communicating both chaos and absence, what surreal moment might one discover—what twist of fate to stumble across a once-familiar alley filled with a four-story mass grave of chairs? How do they balance, caught in a still cascade? How do we make sense of such incongruous logic?
• • •
Sometimes I think the world is a crowded waiting room, which we fill, sitting and standing, pacing and leaning, waiting for our name to be called, afraid of the crisp white coats and of the cool touch of a stethoscope against our skin, which will tell us just how alive we really are. In just two days we would attempt to celebrate Joe’s birthday—a week later, my own. When the arrangements were complete for a memorial on campus, we would plant a tree in Ben’s memory because that is what people often do. Each year its leaves change from pale to deep green to yellow and gold, and when the light shifts, as it shifts now, the saw-toothed leaves would shimmy on their branches like gilded chandeliers, before dropping to the ground to spin beneath the feet of lovers and dreamers and freshman and seniors, just trying to learn something, to outlive the years we all deserve.
• • •
And what if I were in some ballroom lit with gold chandeliers—or for that matter, an old gymnasium full of streamers and strobe lights, and walls lined with bleachers and color-schemed balloons—waiting for a boy to sweep me onto the floor? Forget about the electric chair, all that energy surging through a body, and raise a chair to dance the Hora, or swing one overhead, tap its narrow legs against the concrete courts like the hip hop girls back home practicing for the homecoming show. Or a wrestler, flailing a chair into the ring, challenging the world to a brawl.
• • •
Hans Hofmann, the abstract expressionist painter, once said: “The whole world, as we experience it visually, comes to us through the mystic realm of color.” That night Ben and I and the other boys talked about the abstract image of a chair, analyzing the brush strokes, mocking the philosophical nature of it all. I woke the next morning to an aching realization. I wished I could have shared then what I know now—that the nature of a chair exists in how we view it. And that if I had three chairs I would paint them the three primary colors from which all others can be formed: red for death, yellow for life, blue for love. I would have told Ben this before he dashed off through the fallen leaves, leaving the rest of us strolling in a bath of moonlight.
• • •
Maybe I don’t have to assume the lens of a patient or prisoner, but there is a certain confinement to sitting by a window, a sense of internment reserved for the elderly, the housebound, or melodramatic children pining away for snow, something laced with longing, nostalgia, even a little boredom—just a chair by the window: straight back, timber legs, and the body. How could I not move restlessly, spinning and squatting like a burlesque dancer contorting over a chair? Its inanimate thing-ness, its quotidian inertia, instills an endless signaling to the brain—a single chair is the first sign of peace: remember, believe, grow unabashedly nostalgic, see in color, feel in motion, dance a little more.
Jericho Parms is the author of Lost Wax (University of Georgia Press). Her essays have appeared in The Normal School, Hotel Amerika, American Literary Review, Brevity, Passages North and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, noted in Best American Essays, and anthologized in Brief Encounters: A Collection of Contemporary Nonfiction, and Waveform: Twenty-First-Century Essays By Women. She holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is a contributing editor at Fourth Genre.
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