Timothy Connors

I’m not sure how to proceed with my video essay. My audio essay was wholly grounded in my personal experience. Thus far, my video essay is on the opposite end of the spectrum: it is distantly universal. The video essay tries to explore speech not simply as a verbal tool, but as a physical and cellular mechanism as well. I used sparse narrative in an effort to limit the verbal, but again, that risks distancing viewers from the essay’s exploration. Even if I don’t include my brother and include instead my own shyness and difficulties with speech, how do I ground the viewer and make this piece more personal?

In most of the video essays we’ve watched, narration is key for the personal. In Sans Soleil, Chris Marker uses a woman’s voice who is presumably reading letters from the person filming the scenes. The letters are intimate in that the writer reveals his complex thoughts to this woman. Through the letters, Marker creates a highly meditative atmosphere: the audience ponders the letters and attempts to discover their meaning with the woman who reads them.

In The Voyagers by Penny Lane, the narration moves to a strictly personal narrative about 5:15 minutes in: “I remember when Carl Sagan died. I was in high school. I guess…you were in college?” Lane uses her own thoughts about the video’s more universal themes to move into her personal narrative that clearly alternates between the personal and the universal.

In these two videos, the personal emerges through the context of the narrative (Marker’s reading of letters) or through an explicit alternating between universal narrative and personal narrative (Lane’s movements from knowledge/hope to love). Both videos are effective, but I guess the question is: what do I want my essay to convey?

I want to go for meditative. Social anxiety or shyness seems distant from a pure meditation on speech in its many forms. I’m afraid that alternating to a personal narrative about my own social anxiety will necessitate new images and themes that will disrupt the desired flow of the universal in my essay.

What if the narration consisted of two people having a conversation about social anxiety? That way, the more universal images could remain undisrupted while the audience ponders the relationship between the two speakers. The conversation would be intimately detailed, yet the exploration would still proceed in visuals, suggesting that two conversations are occurring: one between the speakers, and another subliminally through body language and image.

The essays that I’ve composed so far are concerned with the meaning, importance, and act of speech. As I prepare to compose a video essay, I’ve stumbled on an interesting question: is it possible to create a visual essay that is devoid of speech? Can an essay retain its reflective and exploratory qualities without a narrator to guide its movements?

In Nick Twemlow’s contributor’s note to “Wolfvision,” Twemlow suggests “that images are a lot like words…”  in that using videos and images uploaded on the internet should be available to everyone. He then describes a photography graduate student who marked not books, but television shows as his greatest influences because “the image for him, superseded the written word.” Twemlow uses this example to wonder “why we can’t ask that images become building blocks of our cinematic grammar, much like words work for writers.” Twemlow avoids an absolute assertion that images are synonymous with words, but he appears to wish that images would become another language.

This desire reminded me of “Autopsy Report” and Lia Purpura’s act of looking when she was a child: “by seeing I called to things, and in turn, things called to me, applied me to their sight and we became each as treasure, startling to one another and rare” (7). Purpura’s “seeing” was treasured and startling because language, as she knows it now, was unattached. Seeing and encountering these objects was “ineffable” (7). Looking was sacred because language was unassociated, looking transcended language. This, I think, is what Twemlow desires for images in cinema. He wants the image to be sacred and shared. But therein lies the problem. In order for an image, according to Purpura, to be sacred, it must be ineffable; it cannot be shared. As soon as the image is named anything, the image’s meaning is constrained; it is no longer sacred.

This is not to say that Twemlow believes that images are sufficient in a video essay; he uses narration in “Wolfvision” to frame the viewer’s experience. But, I think that his desire for images to become like a language doesn’t grapple with reality: by making anything a language, it must be made common and effable; it must be defined using either textual or verbal language.

And so I think narration is necessary in a video essay. Images are evocative and affecting in an infinite number of ways. For the essayist who wants to explore a single topic—and not the infinite paths different minds may take when interpreting images without words—narration must contextualize the images used in a video essay.  This means abandoning an image’s sacredness and beautiful ineffability and choosing to re-contexualize an image’s meaning for the viewer so that although the image loses its sacredness, it avoids becoming common and effable.

Narration, in a traditional documentary or non-fiction film, is straightforward: the words spoken are illustrated by images on the screen and the narrative itself progresses seamlessly; a story is told. In the video essay, however, narration can take advantage of the “liminal space between sound and image.” That is, narration no longer needs to illustrate the images on screen. Narration, in the video essay, can contradict the imagery of the video. These contradictions force interpretation when sound and image don’t coincide. In this way, the video essay “disrupts the smooth, impenetrable surface of standard cinema.”

The conflict between sound and image in the video essay not only forces a deeper interpretation, but also allows the essayist to say many things simultaneously. The video essay is layered; it expresses itself differently through two separate senses and captures the contradictory nature of the essay. As in all essay forms, the viewer (or reader or listener) either determines a way to accord the inherent contradictions of a contemplating mind, or accepts a détente. The difference, in the video essay, is that contradictions can happen immediately, in one moment.

One such example is evident in the first two minutes of “Ode to Every Thing”. The narration begins with Eula Bliss listing the items in her son’s books. The visual images do not correspond to the listed items (apple, cup, car, dog, doll, car, glove), instead, we see airplanes slowly swinging by, attached to a mobile. As Bliss continues to list items, the planes become fuzzy and distant, as if the camera is the baby’s perspective, and the plane has moved out of his/her near-sighted eyes. This juxtaposition allows the viewer to inhabit two perspectives: we listen to Bliss’s thoughts about objects; and we experience the objects as her baby does. It seems odd, then, when Bliss says, around 1:47, “part of me suspected it was not the boy that made the Velveteen rabbit real, but the rabbit that made the boy real.” The viewer sees images that correspond to a baby’s experience (as soon as Bliss says this, the scene goes fuzzy and black, and focuses poorly on candle-lit toys), and yet, through the narration, we hear Bliss question the experience. “Ode to Every Thing”, through sound and image, expresses a contradiction: The baby makes objects real; the objects make the baby real.

I wonder how far a video essayist could go with this layering. How many contradictory (or at least conflicting) layers could there be? Can sound effects and music further complicate the essay? I really want to say yes, but then again, at what point does the essay become confusing and the interpretation tedious? The essayist doesn’t want to “pander to a passive audience,” but neither, I think, does the essayist want to alienate them.

We’ve talked in class about the difficulty of depicting abstract ideas in audio. The story told in “The Theory and Practice of Postmodernism: A Manifesto” by David Antin is definitely not abstract. It’s a mundane story about the search for the “perfect” mattress. The story turns out to be an allegory for decision making in the postmodern era: “this is the situation that I think best describes our postmodern condition    with respect to which I believe in taking descartes advice    if youre lost in a forest and you have no idea which way to go     go for it straight ahead     because its not likely to be worse than any anything else” (122). Antin’s essay, as John D’Agata’s introduction to the essay states, is crafted from Antin’s spoken word performance (111). This is evident not only in Antin’s uncomplicated colloquial language, but also in the mundanity of the story and the (to my mind) maddeningly reductive ending.

By reductive, I mean Antin reduces this mattress to a simple moral that sounds like something my grandfather would pose as a solution to a problem he refused to listen to. It also reminds me of the saying, “he who hesitates is lost,” which is not true in all situations and doesn’t mean anything without any context.

However, I’m afraid that an ending like this one is hard to avoid in an audio essay. When its difficult to convey something non-concrete, reductive endings are a possible result. It’s a way for the audio essay to “‘Put the argument into a concrete shape, into an image, some hard phrase, round and solid as a ball, which [listeners] can see and handle and carry home with them’” (Emerson qtd. in Orleans 176).

I’m a little worried about the ending to my audio essay in light of this observation. Thus far, my essay could easily end with a reductive “talk is cheap,” or “silence is golden”. And while that’s hyperbole, the meaning is similar. But, I think I am forgetting the voice. The expressive voice adds a new dimension to the essay that makes it less reductive. Voices contain the diction, tone, and accent of the people speaking. Depth in the audio essay doesn’t lie in verbiage, it lies in the individual(s) who lend(s) the essay voice. Even with a reductive ending, the voice that says it is, in a way, abstract and difficult to define—because it is as unique as any complex sentence construction.

So, I guess, after consideration of the three voices in my audio essay, I’m less worried.

My immediate concern when thinking about the audio essay is the use of voice…my voice. The physical voice is not usually a concern in writing classes. Jeff Porter sums this up nicely, writing that “we do not usually think of our voices in the literal sense when writing. We have been effectively schooled in sophisticated ways to reduce the idea of voice to its message…” (Essayists, 193). This worries me mainly because I’m afraid that I have a monotonous voice. How can my voice engage my listeners instead of putting them to sleep?

Jeff Porter, in the same essay, discusses NPR’s innovative success from the early eighties to the nineties. NPR used a variety of imperfect, human voices radically different from the disembodied, authoritative anchor voices of early radio days. (Essayists, 190-191). Sarah Vowell, whose voice Porter describes as sounding like “a disaffected teenager scheming revenge from the basement of a library” (190), is a good example. Vowell’s voice, though young and nasally seems to fit perfectly with her diction. During “NRA vs. NEA” on This American Life, Vowell comments on her father’s cannon exploding by saying, “I wish there were a more articulate way to say this, but I’m telling you there isn’t. It’s just really really cool” (11:21). Vowell chooses a diminutive form of expression that accords with the voice of “a disaffected teenager scheming revenge from the library basement”.

Yet, voice and the words spoken make up only a portion of Vowell’s essay. She incorporates other voices throughout: her Dad’s, the hikers’, her sister (the loneliest twin in history), and her mother. Then there is the music—interludes that give a sense of travel to the essay, and, of course sound effects, mostly guns going off (and a cannon!). Vowell’s voice does not stand alone. It sounds genuine, not only because she speaks honestly, but because her voice does not dominate the essay—it is in conversation with other voices, other sounds, and music.

In my audio essay, then, how do I use my voice as a player in an orchestra? Our voices are not meant (unless it sounds like silk dripping with honey) to be heard alone. We have to figure out how our voice works in concert with other sounds and voices. How can the voice (even a monotone voice) supplement other sounds? How can sounds work together to form a musical totality? That question must be reflected on. I suspect that the answer is different for everyone.

Inspired by Sara Levine’s “The Self on a Shelf”, I thought I’d take a closer look at John McPhee’s persona in “The Search for Marvin Gardens”. Upon closer inspection, McPhee’s persona does not “create the illusion of an intelligent, complex, dynamic self, one who can look inward and outward” (Levine, 161). I notice some rhetorical questions, excessive descriptions, and scenes created from the third-person, but nothing in McPhee’s style cultivates a persona. Nothing leaps like the variance in Elkin’s style (colloquial, hyphenated-whole-phrase-adjectives, cliché play, etc.). What leaps in McPhee’s essay, though, was his selective use of “I”. The pronoun submerges and emerges throughout.

While Levine believes that the essayist should create a complex persona, she emphasizes, also, that the essayist displays a “style-as-deviance” (Levine, 162). The essayist says something differently than the “status quo” prose writers. “Style-as-deviance” may help to better understand the “persona” crafted by McPhee—not as a lack of persona (as it sometimes seems)–but a persona that submerges to differentiate.

“Where is Marvin Gardens” is, on the surface, a series of Monopoly games played by McPhee and his opponent—“a tall shadowy figure…[who will] always go for the quick kill” (McPhee, 9). The “I” is prevalent in these surface level game sequences: “I roll the dice”; “I buy Vermont Avenue”; “I buy Illinois for $240” (McPhee, 9-10). The competition is egoistic. It dehumanizes the opponent (his opponent is “a shadowy figure” with a history, but no name). The essay is interspersed with descriptions of dilapidated streets, scenes narrated in the third person, and historical facts that submerge McPhee’s “I”. That “I” only asks: “‘Do you know where Marvin Gardens is?’” (McPhee, 14).

McPhee, like every Monopoly player, is not interested in the reality of property buying; he’s interested in “winning”. He wants to be an Anthony J. Drexel Biddle, he wants to win “chess at Wall Street level” (McPhee, 16). Despite the overwhelming socioeconomic disparities that McPhee’s “I” witnesses, the “I” is submerged to avoid any serious contemplation of Atlantic City’s physical realities. A financial winner can’t think about losers.

Rather than writing a journalistic essay exposing Atlantic City’s retail realities, McPhee’s submersion of the “I” places the reader in a familiar position. The deviance from a woeful socioeconomic tale creates an “I” that lacks style, but is relatable. It forces the reader to ask: what makes me or any Monopoly player different from a Biddle? No answer is provided.

We’ve seen this phenomenon already in Didion’s piece, this resistance of definition where the essay zooms in on its subject/question/object (the topic of the essay, let’s say), but pulls back before declaring anything.

This week, we see the phenomenon again in three separate essays. In “Notes Towards a History of Scaffolding”, Susan Mitchell shifts from a personal observation to a dictionary definition of “scaffolding” to a conceptual inquiry of the artistic process. Goldbarth seems to take this shifting of perspectives literally as he shifts from the microscopic world discovered by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek to a personal narrative to a macroscopic historical narrative. Griffin moves, quite candidly, from “fiction to essay. From private to public” (The Next American Essay, 314).

In all three, these shifts are demarcated by space between text, number, or location, creating the appearance of separate thoughts or entities cut and pasted together to form not a “final product”, but a chimera that grows, changes, and, like us, never finds the precise answers, but contains every instrument of thought with which to wonder about questions of life and death; empathy and experience; love and tragedy; art and creation—the essay breaths, tries, fails, lives, and tries again.

Like this, but less scary.

Huxley starts from a more concrete conception of the essay. He attempts to define the essay by declaring that there are three poles of reference in which the essay exists: the personal/autobiographical; the factual/concrete particular; and the abstract universal (Essayists on the Essay, 88). He says, indeed, that the best essays are those that shift between the three poles (Essayists on the Essay, 90). Huxley is citing in a way, this phenomenon of the essay’s shifting perspective.

I disagree, however, with his attempt to define these perspective shifts. By doing so, Huxley limits the possibilities of the essay. Some of the passages from our readings are not as easily placed within these poles. What do we make, for instance, of Mitchell’s final passage in “Notes Toward a History of Scaffolding” in which she imagines herself as a bat experiencing the sights and sounds of an old cathedral? (The Next American Essay, 250) True, it is from her “journal of excess” and so you could say that it is in the pole of the personal…but the actions, the sights, the smells she imagines are distant from her…it’s more poetry, less definable. Perhaps then you could place it in the abstract pole, but even then you’d have to admit an overlap of the personal.

This is the problem: there is always an overlap.

I prefer Adorno’s conception, it keeps us firmly distant from defining this shift and addresses overlap:

“The delusion that the ordo idearum (order of things) should be the ordo rerum is based on the insinuation that the mediated is               unmediated. Just as little as a simple fact can be thought without concept, because to think it always already means to conceptualize it, it is equally impossible to think the purest concept without reference to the factual” (Essayists on the Essay, 83).

Adorno points to the impossibility of definition itself without acknowledging the context in which the definition is created and vis versa. Thus the shifting perspectives of the essay and its resistance from either end of the conceptual—factual spectrum. It’s ironic that Huxley would attempt to define a craft that resists absolute definition, but, maybe Huxley just falls further on the side of the factual than Adorno, Mitchell, Goldbarth, or Griffin.

His attempt to concretize the essay does make essays easier to talk about.