“Freely, effortlessly, thought and feeling move in these consummate works of art, hither and thither between the essay’s three poles- from the personal to the universal, from the abstract back to the concrete, from the objective datum to the inner experience.” -Huxley
The objects in the three essays we read this week were used as cornerstones tying a strand of meaning throughout the essays. They also piled on more meaning as the object (now symbol) journeyed through each essay and transformed by being placed in different contexts and associated with different features of the essay (personal, objective, and universal features). The objects were given different definitions, and sparked various memories and emotions of the essayists. My favorite essay was Susan Mitchell’s work about the scaffolding and the creative process, but I’ll talk about “Delft” because I had the most trouble sorting through everything in this essay.
In “Delft” the tiny insect fleas are a HUGE point of intersection that move the writer’s thoughts from personal to abstract to objective to universal. The flea first makes it’s appearance in Goldbarth’s description of Leeuwenhoek’s observations of the levels and levels of the microscopic and in seeing something in a new way that “altered everything thereafter.” The flea is “a door to a new world,” “a looming leviathan,” which is ironic considering these descriptions point to something momentous and meaningful, not typically associated with a tiny trivial flea. From the beginning of the essay, the audience already understands that the flea is more than a small insect, but the starting point for looking at a larger concept. The beginning of looking at something in a different way, just like looking at a flea under a microscope; it becomes larger.
The flea, the scaffold, and the red shoes are repurposed over and over again throughout each essay, and it is the objects’ relationship to different situations, images and feelings that create a whole picture. Goldbarth describes Leeuwenhoek’s objective, factual analysis of the birth of fleas from larvae and then switches to a personal description of picking fleas off of a former lover. The flea is the objective insect flying around, a memory of intimacy, and a theme of the minuscule as important. It is a moment of entry into all of these. In this essay, the flea is a unit of measurement, a carrier of illness, associated with female hormones, associated with sexual desire (“a muse of Physical Passion”) while also having its own mating described in disgusting, gross detail. The flea becomes a bunch of different things!
The flea is also shown throughout time in this essay, as a common itchy feature plaguing (puns, puns!) all of human and animal existence. It’s this tiny creature that seems inescapable from human life whether rich or poor, Queen or King; it’s these little carriers of illness, tragedy and death. Goldbarth reminds that “this story’s this simple: the tiniest units that introduce love, conduct huge suffering.” However, he says this while discussing his personal fight and relationship with his lover Cynthia. This phrase is fitting for many moments in his story, and certainly with his description of the flea as both Cupid’s seducer and disease bringer.
The flea represents the tiny things that can have a ton of meaning packed into them. It also becomes a point of transition throughout the essay in changing discussion from Leeuwenhoek and Vermeer, to the narrator’s personal story, to universal musings on how small things can have enormous effects, because the flea is placed in all of these situations. The flea becomes a turning point because we are comparing its relationship in each situation with all the other relationships with the flea. How does the personal story of the writer’s lover relate to the story of Vermeer and Leeuwenhoek? Or to Vermeer and his wife tickled by a flea? Or to the plagues of Europe? Is it just that small things matter? Even small moments and memories and relationships that seem to grow ever smaller the more in the past they become?
Goldbarth calls for his readers to be attentive, and we certainly have to with his intricate language, quick pacing and hilarious slang. But also attentive to the small moments, “the slimmest syllable love or politics utters” because there needs to be a “counterbalancing force” to the tremendous grief that can “strike with the strength of a huge blunt instrument.” The flea is certainly an object that keeps his essay moving from topic to topic (i.e. Leeuwenhoek to personal stories etc.) but it also takes on meaning by representing microscopic even amorphous things that can end up being very important.
And briefly on the structure of the essay: it is interesting that it is broken into sections demarcated with breaks between switching views or centuries, but that the associations continue seamlessly from looking out Vermeer’s View of Delft, to Leeuwenhoek writing down information of fleas, to a series of flea “facts” to an account of the plague, to an imagined account of Vermeer and Leeuwnhoek in a bar. It all flows together so effortlessly, while having a flea fly in and out all of these passages.
