Pickled Heads: St. Petersburg, and: Peripheral: Emerson, 1847

Abstract

Pickled Heads: St. Petersburg, and: Peripheral: Emerson, 1847 Susan Blackwell Ramsey (bio) Pickled Heads: St. Petersburg For years they floated in adjacent jars, two heads on a dusty storage shelf,abandoned in a back room of the palace: Mary Hamilton and Charles Mons. [End Page 136] We want to make things last. Salt, sugar, sun will work, and tannin from chestnut bark, and brainsspread on the skins that toted them, and sometimes words. But new two hundred years ago- these "spirits of wine." (Fermenting's nature, but distilling's art.) Not all steam is water,just as not all passion's love. Boil wine, catch what evaporates, trap that alcohol and it preserves whatever you drop in, the head of your wife's lover, for example-Peter ordered his queen to display it on her mantle- or your mistress, killed for infanticide. They say Great Peter kissed the dead head's lips. The bodies sinned, the heads were saved. Don't bedistracted by stories of Joaquin Murrieta glaring in a jar in California. Though he was gunned down by someone named Love, his problems were political, not erotic.He really should remind you of Evita, beautifully embalmed, better than Lenin, then passed around, hot political potato, hidden in attics, propped like a doll behinda movie screen for weeks, deaths unfurling behind her like a red scarf from Isadora's car. And even if Jeremy Bentham's head was found once in a luggage locker in Aberdeen,once in the front quadrangle being used as a football by medical students, he died [End Page 137] a natural death and landed in that cabinet, stuffed, propped, dressed, through his own will,wax head on his shoulders, catastrophe in the drawer, still convinced Utility was his goal. The uses the dead are put to by the living. Peter saved one for hatred, one for love,and they outlasted hatred, love, and Peter to become flip sides of Death's two-headed coin. Heads win. Maybe the story isn't the heads but Peter, unstoppablemonster consuming youth, a Minotaur trapped in the labyrinth he built himself. Finally Catherine freed them. After decades she found them, observed how well their youth and beautywere preserved, and had them buried, though no one says whether bottled or free to stop being beautiful. Peripheral: Emerson, 1847 His life seemed full of isolated details, some interesting enough,but without connections one to another or to a larger coherence. -Robert Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire Bill says I'm right, he learned it in the service- night vision is different. You have to train your eyes to one side of what you want to see. It works for faint stars, too. Orion's testicles [End Page 138] blink on, blink off, like the neon martini over some rundown bar. Let focus go, and the secrets moving through the long blades of grass change from point to wave, to pattern, plot. To draw a chair, draw the spaces between the legs. Paint only shadows-your brain supplies the face. The bodies were gone by the time they found Pompeii, but ash shaped casts around what once was there, as peripheral people may define the shape of someone otherwise too big to see. (Andrew Wyeth painted his father as a hill.)So don't focus on this house where turnpike meets Great Country Road. Try glancing east where gawkers watch Alcott hammer that summerhouseEmerson's kindness commissioned-nine posts, not from need but for the Muses, and nearly more nails than lumber,or focus on this coach delivering Aunt Mary Moody Emerson, four foot two,traveling with her coffin, wearing her shroud, whose letters shaped his brain. Or come out back and climb up on this branch with me. Right now apples are Emerson's passion. We'll peer between leaves the way pinhole and paper let you watch eclipse and not go blind. His boy's been buried these five years. In March he pruned every tree to let in light-the rule [End Page 139] is to trim everything that grows up or in and a third of everything that's left. Lace...