"Entirely Ordinary"

What I want to say about this week’s reading has to do with the way we make meaning, the ways we find significance and relevance in our activities, how we decide what is important and what is not, and how we do this in writing. What I love about this piece is that July was writing—or rather trying to finish—a screenplay, and it wasn’t there—there was nothing there for her, the words and characters and ideas were not coming, so she followed what was there, what did have her attention, what seemed like procrastination to begin with—calling people from the Pennysaver. The result is fascinating and seems not like an offshoot of her “real” work—but rather the writing she was meant to do all along. So there are several things that I could say about this—at times something seems like a distraction or a tangent to what we are trying to do, but if that is where our energy is, it might just be best to surrender to the pull and follow, or at least get curious about why it has our attention.

I’m also interested in the line on the last page, the beginning of the story about Andrew and the bullfrog tadpoles where she says “And because I was refused by the majority of the people I called, the ones I met with did not feel random—we chose each other.” So I’m interested in the concept of randomness in relation to the subjects we choose to write about. After they are written, just like these stories by July, they do not feel random, but almost “meant to be.” And so often I hear people say that about life, that something was meant to be—always after the fact. When a thing or event comes together in a way that is pleasing we can look back and say it was meant to be, as if it were fated, even if when we began it seemed random or like a distraction or maybe even a mistake. I think this also has some relevance to our discussion about the past and how it functions in the present, how the past is restructured as we access it in the present—past events take on new meaning and relevance in relation to the way things unfold in the present. July’s first phone call to Michael takes on a kind of significance when she meets him and he agrees to share his story. The leather jacket gives her a head-rush and leaves her a little star-struck even though it is “entirely ordinary.” The people and events and objects take on even more relevance as she crafts it them into story.

A third thing this got me thinking about is how our writing, particularly creative non-fiction dove-tails with our lives. I was talking to a friend the other night who is writing a book. She’s in the final editing stages and talked about how the writing impacted her daily experience and her daily experience impacted her writing. We can see this in July’s Pennysaver stories—the writing guided and shaped her experience and her experience guided and shaped her writing.

I’m curious about the ways we weave living and language, the way we make meaning retrospectively, the way a good story can give ordinary things a kind of power and make events seem fated. 

"A license for vagueness,,,"

To read the opening of Purpura's "Autopsy Report" is to be audience to a jazz performance.  Listen to the improvisations:  "I shall begin...I shall stand...I shall touch...I shall note," all opening riffs of strangely archaic, willful language.  And then we hit a segment in which the verbs suddenly disappear for a few sentences:  "The twenty-eight year alcoholic before us, a businessman.  All the prescriptions for his hypertension, bagged and unused near his black-socked, gold-toed foot."   Next more conventional scene leading to a new segment, a report from inside her head:  "What I thought before seeing it all: never again will I know the body as I do know.  And how exactly is that?"  With that question, the narrator signals her intention in the essay, and off she goes.

"Autopsy Report" is an example of a so-called "lyric essay," a species of the essay genre with a slippery definition. It is a form that might invoke lyric language, one in which ambiguities remain so that "the meaning must be completed by the reader," and one that often experiments with form. Phillip Lopate, whose collection The Art of the Personal Essay is required reading for any fan of the genre, is impatient with the lyric essay, complaining that it is a "license for vagueness."

I suppose we might lodge that complaint against Purpura in this essay, particularly on p. 174 in the passages that begins "If looking, though, is a practice..." and ending on the next page with "a gesture of ease."  Here she tacks away from dead bodies to examine how, as a child growing up in a household with two parents who were artists, the "forms spoke" and that this was "the silent part of my life as a child."  Then there is a reference to God, which might provide some explanation for the ineffability of what she saw in paintings, but seemed, finally, too "pushy."  Purpura ends that paragraph this way:  "A call to jettison the issue, the only issue as I understood it: the unknowable certainty of being alive, of being a body untethered from origin, untethered from end, but also so terribly here."  What does this mean?  I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.

Then there is the matter of structure, which Root addresses in "What do the Spaces Say."  Purpura's use of segments, the creation of a mosaic, seems exactly what Root was writing about.  Does he provide a useful explanation for why it works (if it does)?  What do the spaces say in "Autopsy Report?"

Form and Style

I’ve read Jamison’s “Empathy Exams” before, and I really really loved it (and her). This time, I read to examine form and her central question. It’s hard for me to look at this essay critically, for I love her writing style, her unwavering honesty and vulnerability, and the universality of the message, so I got a bit lost in her writing. Enjoying it instead of analyzing it. Oh well. This time around this essay seemed especially meaningful to me.

My initial response to what her central question is would’ve been to say that she is exploring empathy: its definition, use, and so forth. But I think now that it’s more than just defining and/or categorizing of empathy. She seems to me to be exploring her own conception of empathy, and to be really critiquing her own uses of it. This distinction is important. She is bravely admitting her own flaws in her emotional responses and the responses she demands from others. In this way, we as readers can even look at our own responses and expectations in emotions beyond empathy. We can, along with Jamison, question why we empathize and what we get out of being empathetic. I think her ability to be ruthlessly honest helps us to do that.

In terms of form/style, I found myself especially interested in the shifts to second person in the “Encounter Dynamics” on pages 13 and 24. These segments seem to be another way to be self-critical and to examine herself in a different light. It feels more vulnerable to me. I feel like those shifts – and the imagined tape recording on 18 – are even more honest and naked. I decided I really like what she is doing in those places.

I have been working on a lyric essay for a while now that shifts back and forth between first and third person. In the third person segment, I am still speaking about myself, but I think I decided to use that point of view as a way to separate myself (as writer) from a super vulnerable and naked self (as character). I used this form as a shell, but I have convinced myself that it works for the essay – probably because I’m too chicken to just use a regular first person narrative to explore the stuff I do in those segments. So I think that shifting point of view or maybe even tenses is a way to play with style and form, but it also gives us a new way to keep asking the central question – if we do it *right*, that is (what is right? I have no idea).

I’m curious to know what the rest of you think about those sorts of shifts within essays. Do they strike you as more or less authentic or honest? Do you think they usually work? Or are they more for the writer – a way to write about something tough and use form to make it a little easier?