Experiment 2
Proposal
For my second experiment, I plan to transform my one sentence journal entry (you are good to climb on—sustained trauma) into a lyric essay. I am interested in themes brought up by the line such as memory, loss of memory, and trauma. To this end, I believe that the genre of a lyric essay would be a very effective way of exploring those themes, especially considering the genre’s segmentation and use of white space.
I plan on having the focal point of this essay be my first concussion, when I fell off a horse twice in five minutes. As a result, I was out of school for over two weeks and it took me about seven months to recover fully from the event. I think that this physical trauma would be an effective narrative in exploring the ways that memory and lack of memory affects who we are and what we do.
Genre Analysis
The lyric essay was first defined in the Fall 1997 Special Edition of Seneca Review by John D’Agata and Deborah Toll. They said that the lyric essay “gives primacy to artfulness over the conveying of information, forsaking narrative line, discursive logic, and the art of persuasion in favor of idiosyncratic meditation.” It is a form that is a sub-genre of creative nonfiction, and it seeks to juxtapose images to convey emotion or theme rather than tell a narrative. This might mean that the author is writing in a stream-of-consciousness, for example. Additionally, the lyric essay is not married to a particular form or order—it does not have to be chronological, transitional in anyway, or narrative based. Using fragments and white space, incorporating other genres such as poetry, and employing tools such as metaphor and inference are also key to this genre, as well as juxtaposition of image and language.
Examples:
The Pain Scale by Eula Biss
http://www.snreview.org/biss.pdf
Someone’s Knocking at My Door by LASZLO KRASZNAHORKAI
https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/12/someones-knocking-at-my-door/
Both of these samples have concepts and ideas I hope to replicate and explore, such as:
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Both these examples have a stream of consciousness type voice
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They explore each topic by its peripheries, surroundings, and extremes
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There are a lot of different sections, and each section is divided into mini sections, usually separated by white space
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Pacing is quite fast, and moves the piece along well
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Exploration of a theme or idea, narratives act as anecdotes and not as the main plot.
Sketch Draft
Section 1:
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Learning how to ride: exploring what it meant in a big picture kind of way to learn how to ride a horse
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Start with the literal: how to catch a horse from paddock, which brush to use when grooming, how to put a saddle on, etc.
Section 2:
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Being fearless when horseback riding. Explore themes of trust and relationship.
Section 3:
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Concussion/the event of my becoming concussed.
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Using black lines to represent what I don’t remember/what people tell me what happened
Section 4:
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Describing Lola, the horse I fell off of and how her mood affects how we ride
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How horses are like people and horseback riding is a partner sport, not an individual one
Section 5:
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Exploring physical sustained trauma versus mental sustained trauma and the different kinds of pain they produce
Section 6:
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Exploring what it means to have as little mental stimulation as possible for weeks
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Exploring what it means to remember a time when your brain was healing and you were sleeping
Section 7:
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Getting back on the horse
Continuing with life after a trauma
Sample
Learning to ride was learning to be fearless. With every other sport I tried, the only things I had to control were myself and a ball. But riding required trusting another living, breathing animal with a mind of its own. A mind that I couldn’t fully understand or communicate with. Learning to ride was coming to terms with the fact that I would never know all of the information, never know what all the possible outcomes were, never know exactly everything that I might want or need to know. I didn’t know how to fearlessly trust in someone until I started riding. I didn’t know I needed an excuse to trust someone that deeply until I absolutely had to.
Horseback riding is exactly that: riding. An equestrian lives a life never fully in control. That’s the beauty of the sport. We’re along for the ride. There’s skill in giving up control, again and again, despite fear and failure. That’s beautiful. That’s living.
***
The first fall felt like a dream in three parts. The stop, the suspension, the smash. I remember it like a flip book: she stopped and I kept going. The dust on my polo, the numb shock down my spine: the smash. Me against the hard, brown earth, hard and brown in my memory because that’s the way it’s always been.
I remember it because of the reverb. Shock waves of numb pain, burning hardest in the center of my back and fizzling out at the ends of my pinky fingers and toes. Lola and I had been ready, I had counted the strides and then aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa because the dirt was underneath my fingernails.
There’s a saying in the riding world that you’re not a true horseback rider until you’ve fallen off at least five times. This was just another tally mark, one that I marked down with pride. More than that, there’s an understanding that each time a rider takes a lesson, the lesson is not just training for the rider, but the horse. Each time a horse refuses a jump without consequence, it teaches them that refusing is an acceptable action. So, I had no choice.
I got back on, Something here about falling but it’ll be blacked out anyway and Something here about falling but it’ll be blacked out anyway and Something here about falling but it’ll be blacked out anyway and Something here about falling but it’ll be blacked out anyway and.
Reflection
I am very glad that I decided to explore this genre! I’m not sure that this will be the experiment that I end up completing for my final project, but I am open to continuing to develop it. I think that’s there more work to be done in terms of exploring the physical look of the piece in terms of white space and blacked out lines and what those two things represent and how they relate to each other. Additionally, I think that the jumping off point of the narrative of how I was concussed might be a gateway into exploring larger themes such as change of identity and loss of self. These are ideas that I think might come into better focus if I continued to explore the essay itself.