Brian Doyle
Irreconcilable Dissonance
From Oregon Humanities
*Note: I can’t help but thinking that starting off with a 400+ page
anthology (The Lost Origins of the Essay) of historical essays for
this project, has been the physical equivalent of someone running a
10K marathon after having sat on the couch after work for two weeks.
Luckily, this particular assignment, or goal (an essay a day) gives me
the chance to focus on smaller pieces of work. The dilemma, often
times, of the undergrad student writing academic essays, is figuring
out what to write about, when it comes to writing about an extensive
piece of work. The essay is often times brief: a fleeting thought, a
fragmented idea, a breath of air; Exhalation. This assignment, labeled
as such, aims to answer a body of questions, that will be outlined
below, in order to, not necessarily arrive at any formulaic conclusion
as to what an essay is, but come to a better interpretation, as to how
and why people decide to write essays, and what, if anything,
separates essay writing from other forms of creative nonfiction,
memoir, and even fiction.
Essays are picked at random from a cache of anthologies, online
publications, break room coffee tables, and anywhere else.
This essay is from The Best American Essay Series 2010, which any
normal person doing research would find that the title is a bit self
congratulatory. Oh well, we’ll make the decision here as to what is
the best and what is not. Christopher Hitchens was the editor for this
year (R.I.P.).
What are some of the first things that we notice about this essay
without turning too much of an analytical eye one it? (meaning if we
stare at something too long with this particular eye we may see it as
pieces that come together to make something, and we may lose the joy
of reading something without over intellectualizing it and picking it
apart.)
First, Brian Doyle’s essay is short. Not more than a thousand words,
spoken in plain, conversational language, with refreshing run on
sentences. As if you were talking to someone with whom you feel you
can be unabashedly honest with, without fear of being judged, or maybe
Doyle feels this way about his readers. This is the kind of language
reserved for close friends, lovers, family members. Language that is
lose. The antithesis of resume writing or academic writing.
The Essay is about divorce. Doyle, explains that he has been married
once, “to the woman to whom I am still married, so far, and one thing
I have noticed about being married is that it makes you a lot more
attentive to divorce, which used to seem like something that happened
to other people, but doesn’t anymore, because of course every marriage
is pregnant with divorce, and also now I know a lot of people who are
divorced, or are about to be, or are somewhere in between those poles,
for which shadowy status there should be words like “mivorced” or
“darried” or “sleeperated” or “schleperated” but there aren’t, so
far.”
The sentence above, runs on beautifully, without any breath. It is
unapologetic. Naked and honest and proposes the dilemma that the
writer is struggling with, as to why people get divorced? And why are
the reasons so odd, inane? Not ever what you would expect, as in the
excerpt below, and is the writer, married himself, immune from
divorce:
I read about another woman who divorced her husband because one time
they were walking down the street, the husband on the curb side in
accordance with the ancient courteous male custom of being on that
side so as to receive the splatter from the pristine acreage of his
beloved, and as they approached a fire hydrant he lifted his leg,
puppylike, as a joke, and she marched right to their lawyer’s office
and instituted divorce proceedings. That particular woman refused to
speak to reporters about the reasons for divorce, but you wonder what
the iceberg was under that surface, you know?
The essay is intentionally humorous is it not? But it is the last two
paragraphs, that contain something beautiful and unexplainable -the
reason why I decided to do a whole contract about essay writing-
because I knew that finding these little gems or moments of self
discovery and life inquiry, are the reasons why I love essays.
Doyle uses the expression “marriage is pregnant with divorce” twice in
his short piece. What feelings does the verb pregnant evoke? Do you
think about problems that are constantly growing and exploding? Or
some unsteady force always threatening to capsize the union of two
people? Is it intentional that he uses the expression twice, or is the
thought just something resonating in his head like an echo or a voice,
mimicked on paper?
Much like the introductory sentence, which feels like a paragraph, the
conclusion is a run on, but done so very poetically. Doyle makes great
use of metaphor and simile and he is good at what he does:
The saddest word I’ve heard wrapped around divorce like a tattered
blanket is “tired,” as in “We were both just tired,” because being
tired seems so utterly normal to me, so much the rug always bunching
in that one spot no matter what you do, the slightly worn dish rack,
the belt with extra holes punched with an ice pick that you borrowed
from your cousin for exactly this purpose, the flashlight in the
pantry that has never had batteries and never will, that the thought
of “tired” being both your daily bread and also grounds for divorce
gives me the willies. The shagginess of things, the way they never
quite work out as planned and break down every Tuesday, necessitating
wine and foul language and duct tape the wrong-size screw quietly
hammered into place with the bottom of the garden gnome, seems to me
the very essence of marriage; so if what makes a marriage work (the
constant shifting of expectations and eternal parade of small
surprises) is also what cause marriage to dissolve, where is it safe
to stand?
What does a bunched rug, or a slightly worn dish rack, or the belt
with extra holes punched with an ice pick say about American life?
What does an ice pick symbolize here? What do these inane objects say
about domesticity or desperation or the pursuit of happiness or the
struggle to maintain equilibrium among the seemingly inconsequential
things that threaten our most valued relationships? And how painfully
mundane they are? The essay evokes these questions. Begs inquiry.
Thought. Investigation. Therefore to me, it is an effective piece of
art. And lastly, with a thread of naked humility, the writer asks a
question, as if he is honestly is seeking the advice of some friends,
who know where he’s been and where he is going, and have cut belt
holes with a knife, if not an ice pick.
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