Fleeting Moments

Mark Doty is an award-winning poet and memoirist. He is the author of many books, including Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, about a painting in The Met collection.

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Audio Transcript

Mark Doty: My name is Mark Doty. I am a poet and memoirist. I have no traditional training in art or in art history, but as a writer, I respond so immediately to visual images. And it’s partly because you can do so swiftly in paint what would take you forever to try to do in words.

Poets and painters—painters of still life—use objects as a kind of language, placing one thing beside the other, allowing them to generate meaning through contrast, through scale, through their relation to one another. This is the way the poetic image works.

Jan Davidsz de Heem (Dutch, 1606–1683/84). Still Life with a Glass and Oysters, ca. 1640. Oil on wood, 9 7/8 x 7 1/2 in. (25.1 x 19.1 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, 1871 (71.78)

Narrator: Doty was so entranced by Jan Davidsz de Heem’s painting Still Life with a Glass and Oysters that he wrote an entire book about it.

Doty: When I was younger, I looked at art and I liked drama. So human figures, moments of transcendence and spectacle, those things really riveted my attention. Still lifes seemed so quiet. Still life comes to life because it is in some way incomplete. That things are being consumed and used. That they’re not perfect.

But the objects that surround us in the everyday world are things that are changed by our touch, altered by our use. The oysters here have been shucked. The lemon has been cut in two different ways. Those grapes look like they might be just browning a little bit around the outer edges on the right. Someone has begun a meal here or has set one in place. The wall behind it—if that is a wall—having also been mottled and marked by time.

Still life is concerned with presence and absence. No person is in this picture, yet we feel the presence of the person who has tasted these things, arranged them in this way: that person now is gone forever. This painter is gone forever. The person who looked with such devout attention at these objects is no longer here, but something of his inner life is here in the warmth and magnetism of imperfect things. Nothing is more boring than perfection.

Narrator: Doty finds many commonalities between painters and poets, how they see and create.

Doty: As a writer one is always trying to fix things in time or hold a moment up to the light so it can be seen, really as long as anybody cares to read it. This painting does exactly that: it holds up a moment lost, a moment suffused with feeling. I don’t know that we can say what the feeling was. Is this longing? Is there a sadness about this picture? Is it a moment of complete pleasure? It seems a little ambiguous to me. A moment of real emotion, in other words. 

Pieter Claesz (Dutch, 1596/97–1660). Still Life with a Skull and a Writing Quill, 1628. Oil on wood, 9 1/2 x 14 1/8 in. (24.1 x 35.9 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, Rogers Fund, 1949 (49.107)

Narrator: Human beings gravitate towards images—just think of Instagram. Are we so different from those who painted still lifes like this or hung them on their walls?

Doty: The average Dutch home in this era owned around sixty paintings, sixty-five perhaps. Now, why does anybody need sixty-five paintings? There were painters like Adriaen Coorte, who did a painting of just three gooseberries, you know, or a seashell. Or a stalk of asparagus. Who needs an image of one stalk of asparagus? Why do we want images of the world around us, as if those images validate us? That they frame our perception in some way?

Now, for the people who enjoyed these paintings, many of these things did carry symbolic meaning. The bread and wine, of course, have religious overtones. The sense that the moment is being seized now and enjoyed because life is passing. Vanitas—all is vanity. And so there are Dutch still lifes with skulls, with blown-out candles, with watches: things that are intended to remind us of the brevity of experience.

Now, you could say that this Jan de Heem painting also reminds us of the brevity of these foodstuffs. These oysters aren’t going to last very long. You need to eat them at this moment, enjoy them now, because they will be gone before you know it. All things will be gone. The objects in this painting stand on the brink of an abyss, which is disappearance.

And you might say that that elusive, vague background is, in fact, mortality. It’s where things go as they vanish and as they perish. But they’re here now, here for us to embrace and to enjoy. So you could take this as a warning or you could take it as a celebration. Or perhaps some of both. 

Willem Claesz Heda (Dutch, 1594–1680). Still Life with Oysters, a Silver Tazza, and Glassware, 1635. Oil on wood, 19 5/8 x 31 3/4 in. (49.8 x 80.6 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, From the Collection of Rita and Frits Markus, Bequest of Rita Markus, 2005 (2005.331.4)

Narrator: Seen through Doty’s eyes, these paintings reveal truths about something much larger, reaching beyond just the objects on display.

Doty: You could feel that these things have been looked at with such attention that we can feel something of what they meant to someone once—meant to the painter or the person for whom the painting was made. Irrecoverable, but the feeling is still there. This is one of the best arguments I can think of for the idea of the soul: that we can’t know this, but we can feel a kind of phantom humanity present in these. It’s very moving to me that, four hundred years later, this should have so much life to it.

So our vanishing happens rapidly—the vanishing of these painters and the persons who use these things. But in this permanent form, the painter has captured something of what it is to be an individual involved with things, touching the world, taking pleasure in it, finding sorrow and regret in it, finding one’s own intimate life imbued in the things that we touch.

I think that’s one of the reasons that people respond to these paintings. They’re ordinary things: food, some ham, a knife, a piece of candy. And yet there’s something tremblingly alive about the painted image of it, hmm? Full of human feeling, the feeling of someone who we’ll never be able to know.