My work filming the stories of retired individuals and my numerous and intimate relationships with dozens of senior citizens inspired the ideas in these essays. As we’ve seen in this class (even all the way back to the beginning with Montaigne), the essay is shaped by personal observations or subjective experiences that are “evoked by our passage through the world” and allow for the growth of abstract musings and reflective thought (Benson 42). While writing my essays, I tried to see the “simple stuff” of my occasionally mundane everyday work grind and “discern the infinite suggestiveness of common things”(Smith 27). Now I probably need a “journal of excess” to log all the various every day observations that could spawn essays and encourage the reflective and meditative.

            Through this entire process of essay writing and adaptation, I’ve arrived at the conclusion that one of the most important characteristics (and the one I struggle writing the most) in a personal essay is the use of the “concrete and particular” to highlight the subjective and ground reflective musing, so that an essay does not simply become a convoluted log of abstract thoughts (Sanders 130). As Huxley notes, an effective essay moves between “three poles- from the personal to the universal, from the abstract back to the concrete, from the objective datum to the inner experience”(88). All these poles add some meaning, function or structure to the essay, but I’ve found that the “concrete or objective datum” is often vital to hold together the flowing river of thoughts in motion and also often needed to push this river smoothly onward. One example we’ve seen in class of grounding an essay in this kind of specificity was through the use of objects (i.e. the fly, scaffold, spacecraft, or red shoes) that spawned multiple ideas able to organically flow.

            Although Montaigne mentioned that his essays “go along befuddled and staggering with a natural drunkenness,”(3) I think it is more apt to say that he guided the drunken fool though unexpected places, but along a methodical path. We’ve discussed in class that the essay is free association artistically controlled, and that the essayist must be “attuned both to giving the mind free reign and in reining it in” (Klaus xxii). I have definitely learned a lot through my essays about coherence and that one way of reigning in multiple thoughts and universal ideas is by finding a solid particular to pin them to.

My textual essay began with my thoughts surrounding memory and age. I wanted to explore what it means to be old, how the process of aging not only affects your mind and body, but also affects how people interact and view you. When I started, I was overwhelmed by all the possible directions. In my original text, I framed multiple ideas through the notion of a never-ending and fluid timeline because readers could hopefully mark their own experiences and memories along the timeline. This structure allowed me to jump between different moments, but became a rather complex patchwork of stories, descriptions, abstractions, and reflections, each trying to exert so many big ideas, including memory, time, and age. I seemed to be lacking the “center of the spiral: the narrative anchor that is strong enough to hang all the wandering and meandering and pondering on to”(On Space, Love, and Carl Sagan’s Cosmic Mix Tape)

To introduce these same ideas with more concreteness and coherence, I choose to begin in the present tense in my audio essay within a particular scene. By using the present tense and the scene of a live studio show, I oriented my audience to Brooksby Village Television while also grounding ideas about aging, memory, and time. Instead of relying on abstract ideas and observations about aging to pull me through my essay, the particular scenes (as well as concrete examples through the voices of residents) pushed my essay forward and allowed me to express and ground my thoughts.

The medium of audio also allowed me to further express other important characteristics of the essay: the essayist’s persona and authenticity. We’ve discussed in class that the essayist’s voice (whether written or spoken) is created and performed, yet authentic. Murdoch describes that an essay is a “the best substitute that literature has to offer us for a good talk” and that the essayist should not be pontifical, pompous, or too earnest (66). While putting together my audio essay, I was more conscious of my own persona in the piece, perhaps because of the nature of listening to your own voice. As Porter points out the actual sound of a voice in audio essays and on the radio holds “the promise of authenticity” (188). I was concerned about sounding too performed, but was able to add authenticity to my voice and performance by utilizing actual audio recordings of myself at work.

While working on my audio essay I was inspired by the line “They are not characters, they are humans” and this idea of looking at the residents began to shape my next essay. I struggled again to find a way to ground my ideas in the “concrete and particular,” and tried to think of an object or metaphor that could shape these thoughts. Cameras and mirrors became my objects as tools of perception and trickery. I decided to present the idea of trickery first, so that the audience could think about perception and how they were looking at things throughout the entire piece. The medium also allowed me to juxtapose pictures of youthful woman with descriptions of age and allowed me to rely on images (like pill bottles, walkers, and wedding gowns) to express associations of age and youth.

In my final revision, my goals were to continue utilizing the concrete and particular to ground ideas, and to express the personal more in my essay. Although my essays have been about personal observations and thoughts, I felt that they were focused more on the residents than on my relationship with residents, so I decided to expand the idea of perception to include how residents view me. I struggled terribly to find anchors for this essay without having premade images and videos to rely on as grounding examples. I had to work backwards from my universal ideas and “take notice of the particular facts, from which these generalizations were originally drawn”(Huxley 89). Through feedback on my previous iterations, I tried to begin in a particular scene to orient my audience. I wanted to think of a personal observation or moment at my work that I could draw from without just transcribing a scene from one of the shows I had already used and ended up reminiscing with my coworkers about various moments and people.

I hope what improved from my original essay to my revision is the grounding and coherence of my ideas. The work in video and audio certainly inspired new large ideas, but also required me to use more descriptive, concrete language to replace the lack of tangible images and sounds. Through this whole process, I have learned that an essay is not “as transparent as a pane of glass” (Klaus xi). I always thought of an essay in a very academic sense and knew very little about the personal essay. I’ve learned that essays are creative and dynamic, and can take innumerable shapes and forms. Although the style, structure, and medium of essay can be vastly different, it is always a vessel for the essayist’s meditative and questioning thoughts.