A Benign Assembly of Phantoms

For this week’s blog, I’ve been thinking about several things, one of which is my essay, the other of which is the passing of time. When did it become the middle of the semester? How often do we say, “soon, I’ll really get down to working on my assignments once the school year settles in.” But, like John Lennon said, “life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.” Often, we can’t wait until we’re in the mood for something, or when we feel the time is right because there is no off button for reality.

This is partly what I was thinking about in regards to my personal academic essay. As Marius writes, “like a story, an essay imposes order on reality by establishing connections…[even though] words cannot convey all there is to reality” (82-83). I took this to mean that basically an essay is a lasso on reality, albeit a small one, that encapsulates some small part of experience. But how do you convey the passage of time? What I’ve been thinking about with my essay is playing with the structure of it to indicate the passing of time. I don’t know how I’m going to do this yet, but a big portion of my essay will be about how we as academics spend a good deal of time within our brains while the outside world soldiers on, oblivious to our theses and books. The struggle will be how you marry those two things. How do you live a full life, or at least a non-crappy one, and still work in this field? It’ll be about other things too, but the overarching theme may be that life goes on.

I’m also having another problem, and I wonder if any of you are having it too, with my voice in the essay. How do I write this thing without sounding pretentious? I really do want to write it in the most natural voice possible, as if I was talking to the reader. No fluff, no bullcrap, just a conversation with the reader. But then again, I do want to make it structurally complex, so I might have to have several different voices in there. Bloom’s chapter on the Six Degrees of Separation talks about all these voices, and as natural and authoritative as her voice is, I’m inclined to believe her. She even discusses this notion of time moving forward in the chapter: “Nevertheless the life that is being scripted for us, not necessarily the one we write about, is running forward” (125). She continues that “although our writing may provide the voice-over…there is no pause button in the flow of time, in the stream of events and phenomena to which we have no choice but to respond” (125).

Why do we write stories then? As a “temporary stay against confusion” as Robert Frost wrote? Do they make sense of our own senseless lives? I think the answer is even simpler than that: so we don’t forget them. The “pentimento image” of us will bleed through, but like songs written for a long-gone relationship, stories will cease to be about just one person or situation, especially stories that are made for reading or listening, and instead become opportunities for readers to use their own memories and experiences to make “connections between parts of reality explored by the writer” (Marius 83). Or, to put it more poetically, they are “like an incantation” that calls up “the ghosts of summer evenings long departed…a benign assembly of phantoms, gathering shadowless in the circle of afternoon sunlight falling in our front yard” (80).