The reading this week brought me back to the beginning of the semester where we were starting to define what constitutes an essay. According to Cynthia Ozick, ” A genuine essay has no educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use: it is the movement of the free mind at play”. In other words the essay is not trying to serve some greater purpose. The purpose of the essay is the essay itself, the free thinking of the authors mind. In a sense the topic for an essay can be anything has meaning to the author, “however trivial ( the smell of sweat) or crushing ( the thought that we must die)”. The “essay” does not seek an answer, but rather seeks exploration. The essayist, according to Ozick is “free to leap out in any direction, to hop from thought to thought”. In her lyrical essay “The Body”, Jenny Boully displays this type of free thought.

In her essay Boully weaves together characteristics of different essay genes in order to craft what she describes a sort of “hybrid version of the form”. Boully’s essay works with facts, imagination, human faith and human perception (436). In her essay Boully brings in biblical quotations, Personal experience, postcards, ect.  The passage of this essay that draw me in the post is one that I assume is personal to the author: “It is not the story I know or the story that you tell me that matters: it is what I already know, what I don’t want to hear you say”. The lines to me read like a poem. My initial thought was that I could create an entire essay about this line and the one that follows, “Let it exist this way concealed; let me always be embarrassed, knowing that you know that I know but pretend not to know”. I expected the essay to deal with this topic, however I realized after reading the essay that the author used this section to drive forward the essay in a variety of different directions.

Boully goes on to bring in bible verses that talk about growing up and having to let go of childhood thing. Boully then jumps to talk about going to the circus, and about a terrifying fear of clowns. The first time that I read this essay I had no idea how these things were connecting. It seemed to me as it I was reading the authors free flowing thoughts that jumped all over the place. However, after reading the essay again I now see how each thought drives the next. Wanting to go back to a lover you know you shouldn’t leads to, they both pretend that we don’t know what will eventually happen, to a bible verse that talks of letting go of childhood assumptions, while it may seem at fist glance to be all over the place on closer examination I can see the logical flow the authors ideas.

I must say that I am intrigued by this lyrical form. I wonder what my essay would look like written In this way. Letting one idea drive me to another is something that I struggle with, so forcing myself to craft something like this would be a challenge. Maybe that is why I am so intrigued by it. Could I actually make create something like this or am I too logical?