Peter Witte
1. THE DISPATCHStorytime?
There are so many details in this print that one could get lost staring at it. And I have. But I want to help you avoid getting taken in and distracted by the picture’s surface level dramas. Allow me to point out where the real drama exists. The picture is of a parlor room in an English home that is filled with the busyness of several generations of family. The family members in the picture are mostly women and girls, but there is a young boy, too. He is kneeling on the rug, alone and playing with a train (the boy is in his own world, probably choo-choo-choo’ing across the countryside). When you look upon this picture, your attention is quickly drawn to the center of the room, where a woman is curling the hair of a young lady, but it is not going well: the curler has burned the hair and smoke is rising. Once, though, you move past that very real, but manageable drama, you will find your way to the place within the picture that contains the drama that we all enjoy and come to look for in pictures, the real drama that I have spoken about. That is, on the left in the picture, in the background, there is a young girl who, with a book in her outstretched hands, is approaching, tentatively, cautiously, her grandmother, who is sitting by the fire, eyes downcast, enjoying a moment to herself (the view of the grandmother’s lap is blocked by the younger women who are standing about the parlor, so you might believe that she is reading or knitting or occupying herself with this or that activity, but I know that she has nothing in her lap; the grandmother is sitting by the fire, enjoying solitude, that is all). And should she not? Do not we all deserve a little solitude? But also, when you get lonesome in the apartment that you have all to yourself, when that lonesomeness is about to break you, do you not deserve interaction from others? It is the opposite of but no different than when you are in the middle of a flurry of activity at your family gathering, when the noise is such that you find yourself noticing a slight pain in the head due to noise, during such times, you deserve solitude. In this picture, grandmother deserves the moment of solitude she has found. But, just the same, granddaughter deserves to have the story she has her little heart set on. Both are deserving, but someone is not going to get their just desert. So, you can see that, despite the mundanity of the moment, this scene is a dramatic moment, one the granddaughter is going to remember well. She is going to recall it regularly and across time so that years from now, the weight of the moment will have grown heavier in her mind, heavier and yet, you might argue, disproportionate to its deserving weight. The granddaughter is going to remember how it felt when her grandmother said, “Not right now, love, I am having some peace.” And she is going to remember it as something other than what it was. To the granddaughter, it will be deep rejection, a meaningful dismissal of her, a put down. She will remember how she felt when she heard her grandmother’s words, and it will have felt a lot worse to her than it should have felt. This is the drama, the central drama of the picture.
2. BUREAU INVENTORYA cardboard box filled with things I have found in nature, including bird feathers, seashells, rocks, sticks, bark, and metal pieces.
My father's mug, which has a picture of Saint Francis on one side and his prayer on the other (the mug fell, was broken, and I glued it back together and now it holds writing pens, scissors, bookmarks, and two spoons).
A DVD box set of Werner Herzog films (all of the features he made with Klaus Kinski).
A photo of my wife and me standing at the Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C. (taken before we had children).
A miniature bust of Mao Zedong I bought at a flea market in Beijing.
A miniature bust of Abraham Lincoln I bought at a thrift shop near Washington, D.C.
A pile of books (on top is Kafka's The Complete Stories).
A decorated, hexagonal, wooden box with a picture of a deer hunt, made (I believe) in the Middle East (maybe Iran?) (given to me by my in-laws); it is empty.
An old pocket watch that has needed a battery change for about seven years now.
My best set of watercolor brushes.
3. BIOGRAPHYPeter Witte's writing has been published by The Threepenny Review, The Sun, and Tin House Online, and is forthcoming in West Branch. His comics have appeared in The Rumpus and Hobart. He is a reader for the New England Review and an instructor at the University of Maryland. He lives in University Park, Maryland with his wife, two children, and beloved dog.