In English we completed Listener Lyrics. A lyrical essay is when you take another persons story and describe in in a non-linear and unconventional way. Try to guess the person I interviewed and what aspect about their personal lives I was trying to highlight!
In order to create my final piece, I had to interview someone whose experience I wanted to share. Here is the transcript from that interview (which also reveals what I was trying to emphasis in my essay.)
Lyrical Essayist Study
I stepped out of my comfort zone when reading “The Book of Beginnings and Endings,” by Jenny Boully, as it is full of lyrical essays. A lyrical essay is an unconventional contemporary writing form that combines aspects of poetry and essay writing.
Here is my initial analysis of the chapters white reading: Lyrical Essay Analysis
I decided to mimic Boully’s lyrical writing style in my own essay. Make sure to read the reflection at the end where I explain which aspects of her writing I tried to imitate.
The Feeling of Fulfilment by Kirsten Andrews
The average lifetime is around 80 years. That is when infancy to adolescence to mid-adult life all happens. Flowers bloom in those 80 years. Deer graze in those 80 years. And you achieve in those 80 years. What is the feeling of fulfillment? Is it spending those 80 years doing your hobbies or spending your time with the flowers?
Sunflowers turn to face the sun. When they cannot face the sun, they face each other. When they are facing each other, what are they saying? Will never know, as we cannot speak the language of the flowers? When humans no longer face the sun, and turn to each other, what are we saying?
Kind words can hurt. Harsh words can heal. Sometimes opposites attract. Sometimes you need to be with someone who is the same as you. Where does the line get drawn? When do you stop focusing on someone else, and begin to understand yourself? The sugar that is drizzled on your life is for you to choose. The human mind decides how much glucose one can handle.
Some live simple. Just them, a few flowers, maybe a mut. A simple house, simple connections, and a boring job. So boring. The hours are drawn out as the social clock ticks away. The social clock telling you that between the ages of 40 and 60 you should have decided whether to want to pursue parenthood or work. The social clock telling you how to live your life. You are arriving close to your 80 years.
It is all an equation.
If you ignore the social clock, do you reach a different level of fulfilment? Maybe. Fulfillment can not be defined by what Psychology is determining. It is instead defined by who you are and what you choose to do. The flower you become, the other sunflowers you talk to.
The equation makes sense.
Fulfilment is a feeling, an expression, a form of a human. You are fulfilment. You are your own fulfilment. Confusion stings fulfilment. One of Erik Erikson’s Psychosocial stages is Initiative vs. Guilt. This is when toddlers begin to understand their environment and control the difference between good and bad. This is when they begin to feel fulfilment. Baby sunflowers at the beginning of life, learning something that grayer sunflowers still don’t understand.
So do we ever fully understand fulfillment? That is for you to decide. Do we ever fully feel fulfillment? You can, if your equation makes sense. 80 years. You being understanding your environment around ages 2 or 3. That gives you ample amounts of time to determine what your definition of fulfillment is. It is a conscious effort.
The effort of the deer to figure out where he wants to graze. The effort of the sunflower to figure out who it will turn to.
Expository Essay
While reading Jenny Boully’s lyrical essay collection, The Book of Beginnings and Endings, I admired her approach to writing which included taking a concept from the world and thinking about it abstractly. Throughout her writing she used literary devices, such as metaphors and comparisons, to enhance her abstract way of thinking. Boully’s lyrical writing is unique because she often refers to flower metaphors, she jumps between many topics in one essay, and she actively considers many different perspectives of one idea.
In my piece, The Feeling of Fulfilment, I relate the concept of Psychology in an abstract way. When I refer to the “social clock” and “Erik Erikson’s stages of development,” I am taking true scientific information and incorporating it into the contemporary and innovative essay format. This is similar to Boully’s essay titled Strange Mechanism for a Dream where she uses the idea of star death to explain a romantic relationship, while mixing in metaphors about a doctor. In the passage, “the star still exists; some stars; such as quasars and pulsars, will continue to give off signals, such colossal amplitudes of last life, a life-line showing up on no screen, continuously beeping for a celestial doctor who does not come,” (51) we see Boully take an analytical approach to her writing. She discusses the concept of stars and relates it in an abstract way by using a doctor metaphor to express the way in which it is dying, similar to how I relate Psychology to fulfilment.
Another common Boully technique is the use of flowers as metaphors. Flowers are a consistent theme throughout many of her lyrical essays. In her essay titled I. she writes, “given the dread and the sorrow of everyday life, of the mundane and the platitudes, we see how Aboullie offers the flowers as a sign of moving out of the quotidian and into the miraculous. By introducing forsythia, hyacinths, laurel, and lilacs, Aboullie not only evokes all the various poems and literary moments involving such flowers, but also the suggestion that even within the darkness, among the dust and decrepitude, whatever blooms” (Boully 46). In order to mimic her appreciation and use of flowers, I included the theme of the sunflower throughout my piece. I used sunflowers to describe people and used it to depict situations such as, “baby sunflowers at the beginning of life, learning something that grayer sunflowers still don’t understand,” showing how understanding of fulfilment changes as you age.
In her writing, Boully jumps between topics in order to create abstract connections. In her essay titled On Probability she discusses both statistics and the concept of miracles, “Children live in miracles, but for the adult a miracle becomes something unbelievable: I can’t believe it: it’s a miracle, people will say upon the resurrection of the dead or the ability of some people to walk away from scenes of disasters unscathed. In adulthood, only those events which seem to live in the 0.00000001 percent margins of probability and which seem to have no rational basis for occurring can be attributed to a miracle” (19.) Boully’s ability to connect two topics that aren’t often considered together demonstrates her thinking in the abstract. I connected the topic of fulfillment with the idea that your life is only 80 years. Even though the topics I chose are frequently related, I connected them in a way that still requires the readers to contemplate in the abstract. By tying in the idea of a social clock, “The social clock telling you that between the ages of 40 and 60 you should have decided whether to want to pursue parenthood or work. The social clock telling you how to live your life. You are arriving close to your 80 years,” I imply that you have to decide how to achieve fulfillment before your 80 years are up, similar to the way Boully uses statistics to back up her theory of miracles.
Another classic Boully writing tactic is examining different perspectives. In her essay On the Care & Repair of Books, Boully explains the lost poetry she notices when people don’t take the time to fully read and appreciate old works. Boully uses the vocabulary, “twice-dead poet,” to describe the under-appreciated poets in the passage, “The scholars made notes to reread the works of the twice-dead poet, but of course, never came around to actually doing so. No one would ever understand the appearance of all the animals at the end of the famous poem or why the field butterflies behaved as they did, yet everyone would all say that they understood, that they understood completely and with textual references and secondary sources even.” (40) This shows contrasting perspectives. Boully explains how everyone claims that they understand the writing, which is the scholars perspective, when she believes that they really don’t, which is her perspective. In my writing, I mimic this tactic in the section, “some live simple. Just them, a few flowers, maybe a mut. A simple house, simple connections, and a boring job. So boring. The hours are drawn out as the social clock ticks away.” Here I explore one person’s lifestyle and compare it to what I have been referring to in the entire essay as the other perspective of continuing to reach for fulfilment.
In both The Book of Beginnings and Endings and The Feeling of Fulfilment flower metaphors, multiple topics, and contrasting viewpoints are used. This is Boully’s way of combining concepts with abstract thinking, and something I used to combine Psychology with fulfilment in my own writing.