Brinson Leigh Kresge, "Repetition Development in the Lyric Essay" (Assay 9.2)

ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
9.2

Brinson Leigh Kresge

Repetition Development in the Lyric Essay

Repetition in the Lyric Essay: Studying the Contours

I am at the computer once more, wearing my knit hat and my furry booties, basking in the warmth created by my space heater, which I drag behind me like a child’s string and wheel toy. I do these things in the colder months, along with dipping tea bags and sighing dramatically drawn-out sighs; I have done them for years—as far back as I can remember. Repetition threads itself through life, providing a rhythm of constancy at the feet of change. That baseline is more pronounced in the late-fall period, in which I am writing this now, where the early darkness consumes the hope of late-afternoon-light productivity. And while my desire to start new projects diminishes, my focus loops back to the utilization of repetition in my recent essay “‘What Kind of Times are These’: A Deconstruction of Tendencies.” In that work, repetition served as a keyhole that allowed me to peer more fearlessly into intimate personal material and a means to stay grounded in a loosely constructed lyric form. Repetition enabled me to both hone in on specificity and expand perceived significance.

At the table again, my children make faces at each other and try to recognize and call out the moods portrayed. The scene evokes the face charts in Eula Biss’s “The Pain Scale” and makes me aware of my own face and how with age, my face has come to reflect mood even in the absence of intense emotion. In the bathroom mirror, each day, as I brush my teeth in the morning and brush my teeth in the early dark, I can see these etched moods: the smiles, the squints, the frowns, and furrows as they have unfolded through the years—on repeat. They are lines of narrative with meaning in the gaps; they are not the life I have lived but also the closest the physical can imitate fleeting experience. Faces, in that way, are a type of lyric essay.

Like faces, lyric essays are difficult to detail, as Deborah Tall and John D’Agata present: “They forsake narrative line, discursive logic, and the art of persuasion in favor of idiosyncratic meditation” (Tall and D’Agata). In attempts to construct even breathing definitions, we must identify elements that occur within the lyric essay and examine how devices, such as repetition, are used and the subsequent effects they provoke. Doing such furthers the lyric essay’s cause and success, promotes more comprehensive analyses, and consciously sharpens repetition as a tool for writers to employ for definitive effect. I underscore the uniqueness and value of repetition as a tool for writers by fleshing out and categorizing its characteristics.

To that end, I am interested in the meaning that occurs in the divide between repetition’s definition and literary usage. Repetition, by definition, means the action of restating something that has already been said or written; this function implies replacement, where one can read significance into the necessity of the action. As an employed rhetorical strategy, repetition produces emphasis, clarity, amplification, or emotional impact; this stylistic perspective implies an amalgamated result. The divide between primary definition and strategy suggests two meaning-making opportunities, which, when in involute conjunction, demonstrate that repetition is never exclusively repetitive.

Anecdotally: a mom yells her child’s name over and over. The volume and pronunciation may not change, still the need for this repetition summons stories and the inherent amplification of emphasis accrues meaning. Together, provoked action and amplification, evoke emotional impact. Why is this mother trying to connect with this child in this way? Why is the repetition of their name so necessary? Maybe the child has a habit of not responding when people interact with them. Or, the mom is saying the name repeatedly because she is distracted and cannot follow up by finding her child; she just wants to get their attention and have them respond without tracking them down. New questions arise from those implicit stories. How does this mom feel having to repeat herself? Unheard? Ignored? What are those feelings based on? Her own childhood? The temperament of the child? What follows this instance of repetition is influenced by all these factors—whether brought to light or as they work behind the scenes. From this simple repetition of one name, possibility emerges, and the gravity of meaning magnifies.

Like a mother calling her child or the deepening creases on my face, each incident of repetition in a written composition is not an event taking place in isolation. Each reiteration compounds the iteration before and, in this way, furthers the impact, meaning, and momentum—facilitating the development of the effective lyric essay. This evolution through repetition occurs in two directions: honing perspective and expanding view. I explore three aspects of each.

It is essential to acknowledge that repetition as a lyric device has a long history of utilization and analysis in prose and poetry. Those usages and examinations, and more prominently those in poetry, undoubtedly influence and correspond to the techniques and impacts of repetition within the lyric essay. As such, craft analysis of each genre individually works to illuminate nuanced differences and buttresses areas of mutuality. Often drawing on the craft of poetry, I utilize previously delineated definitions for my purposes and employ self-created categories and descriptions to label occurrences I have not encountered a name for or point towards something slightly different from common usage. I will echo the more extensive conversation on the parameters of the nebulous lyric essay in saying that these categorizations and definitions help pinpoint which techniques, when utilized effectively, allow the lyric form to reflect life’s complexity by transcending the sum of its parts.

Honing Repetition

Essay development occurs through honing perspective, when words, phrases, and fragments repeat through concept and structure to emphasize the original context of their usage further, draw attention to the complexity of meaning, and/or build significance. Honing occurs conceptually and structurally: exergasia, antistasis, and excavating essence. While exergasia and antistasis accrete significance, excavating essence defines through reduction; both evolve the essay through specificity.

Exergasia

Brigham Young University’s “Figures of Repetition” defines exergasia as “augmentation by repeating the same thought in many figures” (Rhetoricae). “The Stars,” a lyric essay by Eliot Weinberger, provides examples of exergasia structurally through word choice and overall format, which work to sustain momentum and drive at purpose. Exergasia also appears conceptually, deepening impact, and exhibits a complexity that the word “stars” cannot capture.

Weinberger’s intention to convey the mystery of stars is made apparent in the opening: “The stars: what are they? They are…” (171). The essay continues as one extended sentence broken into semi-colon punctuated perspectives of stars from different angles, mirroring the endless expanse of space as viewed from vantage points on Earth in different ages.

As the essay continues, so does the repetition of phrases that begin: “they are…,” “they sit...,” “they run…,” “the sky is…,” “up there…,” and “Look…” which—while evolving from existence to action, to location, to a demand for our involvement—are repetitions with the shared goal of finding an adequate expression for stars. In addition to this overall structure, Weinberger’s repetition of word choices begins to reveal a motif arising from theme and variation:

...they are the souls of dead babies turned into flowers in the sky;
they are birds whose feathers are on fire;
they impregnate the mothers of great men;
they are shining concentrations of spirit-breath, made from the residues left over from the creation of the sun and moon;
they portend war, death, famine, plague, good and bad harvests, the birth of kings;

they regulate the prices of salt and fish;
     they are the seeds of all the creatures on earth…. (171)

In the repetition of word choices that point to death (war, famine, plague), creation (seeds and birth), and duality (good and bad), there is an unfolding of the pivotal and essential role stars have played in humankind’s quest to find meaning, not only in stars but also in our existence. Through conceptual repetition, this signification of the struggles and marvels of the human experience reveals larger systems we have created for existential understanding: religion, science, and mythology. Just as the human journey has taken us from the microcosmic personal wonder to the macrocosmic systems which seek understanding, so too does Weinberger’s essay as it meanders and plunges into the realms of each—science: “they are, like all matter, made of four kinds of matter: protons, neutrons, electrons, neutrinos…”; religion/mythology: “footprints of Vishnu,” “Tree of Immortality,” “the Lord created them for other creatures,” “they are portents of Thor,” “the motionless Dhruva” and so on.

In “The Stars,” Weinberger utilizes repetition like the lens of a telescope: to hone focus; he does not tell the reader about stars but instead provides a visceral experience of their significance through exergasia. The spectacle of different celestial bodies emerges through specificity and leaves the reader with a heart-expanding realization of space’s splendor.

Antistasis

“Antistasis is a rhetorical term for the repetition of a word or phrase in a different or contrary sense” (Rhetoricae). No other repetitional device suits my inner two-year-old like antistasis, where everything and nothing are true all at once. And while the juxtaposition created through repetition would seemingly cancel out all meaning, this honed-in “yes and yes” and “no and no” framing provides inclusive/exclusive discovery, which furthers the lyric essay’s development.

Weinberger employs antistasis via “phrase flipping” in “The Stars.” In this application, he illustrates the multiplicity of meaning and significance of stars: “...they are fixed and we are moving; we are fixed and they are moving;” “They are different sizes… they are all the same size but some are closer to us....;” “they never change... they are in a state of constant flux…” (172).

Both sides of the repeated phrase within each example are true when examining the stars through often-oppositional personal experience and science-based knowledge. Focusing on both these perspectives is necessary for charting how we relate to stars through the mind’s factualization, the heart’s fascination, and the overlap therewithin.

Similarly, in Eula Biss’s essay “The Pain Scale,” a complex knot of antistasis appears through the juxtaposition of mind and bodily experience while Biss wrestles with understanding pain: “Although I cannot ask my body to remember feeling pain it does not feel, and I cannot ask it to remember not feeling pain it does not feel, I have found that I can ask my body to imagine the pain it feels as something else” (18). How does a writer get at the intangible through the material words? Moreover, how do they aptly describe a sensation that defies concrete experience, one that is subjective with no fixed frame of reference? In this example, Biss attempts to establish authority through a conversation with her body from the counterpoint of her mind; she outlines what she can and cannot ask in remembering versus imagining what it does or does not feel. Here the repetition of “pain” expresses contrary viewpoints in a way that targets ambiguous truths.

In her essay “On a Sale from 1 to 10: Life Writing and Lyrical Pain,” Susannah B. Mintz points to the lyric essay’s ability to materialize that which a linear, monistic perspective cannot achieve: “Given the notorious resistance of physical pain to textual representation, how does an author write the story of pain?” She continues, “[a] lyric essay, it is argued, can perform the kind of conceptual shift that many theorists of pain have called for, situating pain along the pathways not just of the nerves but of subjectivity, of relationships between the self and other, imagination and words” (243). Mintz suggests that “The Pain Scale” is a lyric essay that demonstrates this effect. One way in which Biss achieves this conceptual shift is through repetition, narrowing in on a truth held within the complexity of antistasis.

Excavating Essence

“Excavating essence” is a repetitional device by which a writer establishes reference points through a progressive process of elimination to reify an emotional truth. Within the context of this device, the essayist is like a paleontologist who visits and revisits an excavation site, scene or theme. There they brush away that which obscures to unearth a discovery that is only theorized to exist based on a handful of clues and a desire to know.

Along the way, the paleontologist/writer may come across ostensible fossils/ideas that appear crucial to their investigation. “Dirt” is distinguished from relevant material and vice versa. In this way, through affirmation and negation, reference points are created. Those points are not in and of themselves the quest of the excavator. However, collectively they suggest something more significant than their particulars. The “paleontological writer” may never unearth the entirety of the beast they are searching to uncover, but they come closer to understanding its shape by recognizing what it is not.

As this repetitional technique returns to “sites,” themes or scenes, it often, although not exclusively, coincides with the braided lyric essay. Not to conflate the two, the braided essay is a container that seeks emotional truth through the intersection(s) of various thematic throughlines; in contrast, excavating essence is a repetitional method that works through elimination to expose the lyric essay’s emotional truth. Excavating essence is used to materialize that which is vaporous, often as an essayist grapples with ephemeral subjects such as love, death, loss, and pain.

In “Circus Train,” Judith Kitchen essays to understand what she is relinquishing when she dies. She uses excavating essence to give form to that which she seeks. Her progressing illness, the unreliability of the mind, Samuel Becket’s Company, the search for self through shifting perspectives, and the strawberry patch of her childhood serve as excavation sites. She returns to each repeatedly to uncover fixed points she uses to locate meaning that will transcend her death. She writes: “Of course you could go on replaying scene after scene. But to what end? Don’t these moments disappear with you, drop off into the void? You suspect that they do – and so you write them furiously, as though you could hang on to a lifetime when, in fact, you know you can’t” (Kitchen 252).

The unreliability of the mind is one of the most prominent excavation sites in “Circus Train.” Kitchen strives to find a tether amid the unknowns of her declining physical and mental state. Near the essay’s opening, Kitchen asserts: “There’s something I have to say about the good properties of metastasis. It’s certain. There is no backing out, so you are forced to accept.” (246). Like metastasis, and relatedly, life and death are certainties, yet Kitchen is not content with their insubstantial verbal forms. She cannot locate meaning in representation. Therefore, Kitchen turns to mental framings to establish vantage points from which she can delimit her life and its meaning. To do so, she investigates: memory (seeing in retrospect/remembering), thinking/knowing, dreaming, wishing, and wondering. These words frequently appear throughout the essay:

So start there. This is the beginning (Kitchen 246), memory persists (246), I could go back... instead I see (246), I do not remember what I was thinking, but that I was thinking (246), I am awake from a dream (246), I remember too much (247), I wish it different (247), I wonder, will that be the last thing to go (247), So will thought be my solace or my curse? (247)

Consequently, Kitchen recognizes the unreliability of the mind. In the strawberry patch:

I looked up, and there it was – the little circus train winding through the valley. But was there a valley? I don’t remember that there was. There were cornfields, and beyond them the woods. And the river on the other side of the road. But I remember the train far away, while I was sitting in the strawberry patch. It must have been another time, another place... I see it so clearly, almost seventy years later, and still there is doubt because I see the house, the apricot tree, the strawberry patch, and there is no room in that scene for the little valley with its tiny chugging circus.... So where....” (248)

In and of themselves, memory and thought cannot substantiate the particulars of her life. They cannot help Kitchen locate the what that is lost when she dies. They provide reference points, but like a paleontologist with a handful of vertebrae, an iliac bone, and some phalanges, the sought-after entirety does not exist in these indicators of something larger.

Kitchen digs deeper; she returns to the strawberry patch site a few paragraphs later:

Was the train in a book – a picture book, so that its colors persist as though they were trailing each other across the page? It could be. Books were that real. But I was sitting in the strawberry patch, with only my eyes to take in my red-and-white-striped overalls, my bare feet, the white confetti of the blossoms. Picture perfect. Except for the valley that didn’t exist. But it did exist, because we lived there. Nowhere to look but out. And up.

So where... (248)

So where is the truth of what was lived? So where is the aggregate of us that the workings of the mind cannot capture? Kitchen’s “so where...” eliminates thought and memory as reliable means to answer the depth of these questions. This discovery via negation mirrors a quote from Thich Nhat Hanh about teaching:

Teaching is merely a vehicle to describe the truth. Don’t mistake it for the truth itself. A finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. The finger is needed to know where to look for the moon, but if you mistake the finger for the moon itself, you will never know the real moon. (Hanh 568)

Kitchen’s reference points are fingers-pointing. These fingers indicate the existence of something larger and give clues to where to find it, but they are not the something. Once she establishes that thoughts and memories do not contain answers in and of themselves, they signal a profound thing—emotional truth starts to take form.

Another key site in which Kitchen excavates is the orientation of self. She does so through a loosely systematic exploration of perspective as seen through numerous point-of-view shifts. The essay begins unattached from her as an experiencer: “Start at the toes. Eternally cold” (246), but quickly shifts to establishing the reader as an experient-cohort with the inclusion of “your”: “Ever since the chemo leaked, your toes have no feeling” (246). Kitchen makes clear from the onset that this plight to locate the lasting substance of a life is not hers alone.

Kitchen’s repetitive perspective shifts establish reference points for understanding self through unfolding negation. “From then on, it’s all first person. Or sort of” (246) -- is there truly a lasting first person? “With the dirt and the breeze and my own sense of self that did not disappear with my mother’s call” (246) -- our sense of self does not depend on others. “All these are before, but all these happened to me” (247) -- we are not what happens to us. And in a convergence of strawberry patch and personal identity, she continues: “In the strawberry patch, I was the one making things happen. Especially in my head, my thinking, my careful tune of a thought” (247) -- my “self” is not simply created; I also create self.

In a notable shift, following her first “so where...” Kitchen pulls back from self-identification, describing herself as she/her: “Memory serves her well. And yet here, caught on the brink of its own oblivion, it deserts her at a crucial moment. That train has lived in the folds of her brain for well over half a century, and only now, when she wanted to write it down, did it disappear into ripples of doubt” (248). Is the “her,” owner of these memories, her-self? Is her-self the “she” that experienced being in the strawberry patch, or the “she” that writes and doubts?

After the move to Hamilton Street, Kitchen reorients the perspective of self again, placing the reader directly in her shoes:

And you skated past them on roller skates or rode past your fat-wheeled bike... and you know nothing of their lives... And you turned right on Water Street... you dropped your bike in the grass... and your voices carried and you were caught in the freedom of being where you were not allowed to go. The body high in the maple tree. Looking out through new eyes. (249)

Not only does the reader experience what Kitchen experienced, the individual us becomes a collective us with “your voices carried,” and the reader is caught in a freedom of being where one is not allowed to go—into someone else’s life and experience. The reader looks out through new eyes.

In the essay’s concluding paragraph, Kitchen merges the “she” and “I,” both of which she has previously conjoined with us-- the “you,” the reader(s):

She sees her reflection in the store window. She looks at herself and I stare back. Or I look at myself and she stares back. It’s hard to tell which. I am older and she is young. Or vice versa. She seems to have startled herself. Who are we, now that we have to rely on new ways of calculating the integers of time? (251-252)

Kitchen has established that her previously held ways of calculating the integers of time: thought, memory, and identification of self are unsuccessful at depicting a whole that exists beyond them. The sum of it all, of who a person is, “the some thing – you can hand over, relieve yourself of, bequeath” (250), is what exists between an “I” and “she,” between and outside of a “you” and “me.” Kitchen and the reader may not be able to hold this thing she is pointing to or even describe it, but through her process of excavating the essence, the reader feels it and knows it more clearly than before. In The Little Prince, the fox says, “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye” (de Saint-Exupéry). Excavating essence removes that which is inessential to allow one to see with the heart.

Expanding Repetition

Essay development also occurs through expanding perspective when limiting associations are reduced and, conversely, when familiarity provides reassurance. In both instances, repetition creates a space for heightened perceptivity. This expansion occurs conceptually and structurally through familiarity diminishment, layering referents, and return and diverge.

Diminished Familiarity

Diminished familiarity is an example of repetition that disrupts the reader or writer’s patterned association with words or structure and allows space for something new to emerge. In his essay “Prose Reversing….” Teicher exposes one aspect of diminished familiarity: “In the six-page piece, the word’ future,’ or variant thereof, appears eight times. This is a poet’s gesture, like that game where you repeat a word aloud until it is meaningless. Only here, it is repeated so that its meaning changes a bit each time” (Teicher).

Teicher is pointing to an adaptive framing of semantic satiation, which Tian and Huber’s research presents as “[a] process [that] can serve as a unique approach to test for discounting through loss of association since it allows the separation of the ‘lexical level from semantic level effects in a meaning-based task that involves repetition of words’” (269).

This clever appropriation of semantic satiation into a context of expanding understanding through the loss of previous associations pervades Brian Doyle’s essay “Kaddish,” a title that refers to an ancient Jewish prayer sequence recited for the dead. Notably, this essay’s litany-esq attributes echo Allen Ginsberg’s poem of the same title. In the penultimate section of Ginsberg’s poem, he employs diminished familiarity to move past the stories of his mother and reckon with the whole of who his mother was. Doyle’s “Kaddish” is too an attempt to fathom, in this case, to make sense of the impact of 9/11. Like the referenced section in Ginsberg’s poem, Boyles’s twelve-page essay is composed of phrases that read rhythmically like a prayer. Each phrase, like a reverent bow—a smooth mala, or rosary bead, counted with attention and slid down the string.

The repetition of the phrases beginning “The man who...,” and later, “The woman who...,” is relentless. Though prayer-like, the essay is an onslaught armed with the sheer number of people that died in the 9/11 attacks. Simultaneous to illuminating the gravity of this loss, through repetition the reader’s identification of each man and woman as individual subjects diminishes and allows for a felt realization that these deaths could have been any person. It could (or may) have been the reader’s loved ones that died; it could have been the writer’s death; it could have been the reader’s. The recognition one's mortality proves hard to provoke; this diminished familiarity through Doyle’s use of semantic satiation bypasses the reader’s mental safeguards and allows a glimpse at one’s perishable existence.

Doyle’s concluding section, much smaller than the others, switches subjects more rapidly, and the reader’s mind is open and primed for effect:

Kaddish L’yiladim v’yiladot: Prayers for Dead Boys and Girls
The boy who wanted to be an ambulance driver.
The girl, age four, flying with her mother.
The boy, age three, flying with his parents.
The child inside the woman who was seven months pregnant
The children inside mothers who didn’t know of them yet,
The children who would have been conceived in years to come,
Their children, and their children’s children,
May they swim in the sea of Light forever. (Doyle)

While the prayer-like repetition in this essay dissolves a separate subject, it concurrently lulls the reader into a sense of comfort. There is a predictable rhythm. The reader goes on autopilot and is along for the ride. In this concluding section, the sudden shift of focus to children who died in 9-11, the unborn victims, and the unborn’s unborn victims, is jarring. The reader comes crashing out of the sky, having forgotten where they were headed all along, and for that reason, the impact is immense.

Diminished familiarity manifests similarly in John Scalzi’s lyric essay, “Being Poor.” Throughout Scalzi particularizes the experience of poverty through sentences that all begin with: “Being poor is....” This repetition creates a rhythm of semantic satiation by which the reader softens to previously held associations regarding being poor. For many, hearing about poverty is accompanied by a level of desensitization—news, tent cities, and campaign platforms bombard the public with generalized poverty. And large-scale generalizations can be overwhelming to attack or even approach; this results in emotional detachment. Being poor is tokenized and one comes to merely “know” of poverty; there is no sustained awareness of what poverty looks like and what it ordains for those suffering at its hands.

This level of desensitization within people of privilege also isolates those who have been, or are currently, poor. Waking people up through experience as opposed to conceptualization creates understanding. Experiential learning is possible when “knowing” is bypassed. Moreover, isolation can be reduced when someone suffering from poverty feels seen. Scalzi's use of diminished familiarity does both; it provides experiential learning and sufferers are seen through the amplitude of relatable specifics of being poor:

Being poor is hoping the toothache goes away...Being poor is hoping your kids don’t have a growth spurt...Being poor is goodwill underwear...Being poor is feeling the glued soles tear off your supermarket shoes when you run around the playground...Being poor is people angry at you just for walking around in the mall...Being poor is never buying anything someone else hasn’t bought first...Being poor is getting tired of people wanting you to be grateful...Being poor is knowing how hard it is to stop being poor (Scalzi).

More generally, the lyric essay’s inclusion of experimental form gives rise to diminished familiarity. Deborah Tall notes, “We turn to the lyric essay -- with its malleability, ingenuity, immediacy, complexity, and use of poetic language -- to give us a fresh way to make music of the world. But we must be willing to go out on an artistic limb with these writers, keep our balance on their sometimes vertiginous byways’” (Tall). Through braided, hybrid, collage, hermit crab, segmented, and other forms, the lyric essay often demands that both writer and reader take leaps of faith. The (literal) diminished familiarity of linear narrative forces the reader to hold all the pieces more loosely and allows meaning to arise in the spaces where other forms offer more explicit narrative, connections, and explanations. Just as the lyric essay’s writer finds value in a writing process that demands diminished familiarity through repetitional return, “If the reader is willing to walk those margins, there are new worlds to be found” (Tall).

Layering Referents

In his essay, “Identity and Digression: Notes on Apposition in Lyric Poetry,” Hoks uses the term “layering referents” in regard to apposition. Here, I am expanding his term beyond the confines of apposition and applying it to the larger structure of an essay in which a word, phrase, or concept appears fixed. In this rhetorical device, multiple references placed near one another accrete a meaning through opposition or comparison; still, as the context changes, the purpose builds. In this framing, apposition and repetition work similarly to acknowledge complexity, expand perspective, and develop the essay.

In “Kaddish,” repeated words appear throughout like touchstones; the changing scene around them evolves them:

The man who was building a dollhouse for his daughter…
The man who built tiny ceramic railroad towns for his daughters.
The man who built forty crossbows. (1)

The man who was rebuilding a 1967 Mustang.
The man who had rebuilt a 1967 Mustang.
The man who was rebuilding a 1948 Studebaker.
The man who was rebuilding an MG convertible...
The man who built harpsichords. (3)

Doyle uses many of these layering referents: surfing, playing (sports and instruments), destinations, and things that were loved. With each repetitious reference, the meaning compounds; he expands the scope of the number of people affected by the 9/11 attacks and subsequent deaths but also demonstrates the breadth of hobbies, activities, desires, and hopes—both wild and mundane. This layering results in an impactful composition showing the enormity of lost potential when a person’s life ends, when people’s lives end.

In my essay “‘What Kind of Times are These’: A Deconstruction of Tendencies,” a list of unrelated words appears along with the definition of apophenia, the tendency to attribute meaning to perceived connections or patterns between unrelated things. As the essay progresses, these exact, unrelated words appear [interjected] in the text, denoted by hard brackets, and begin interacting in different settings to accrue meaning. A [garden hose] develops from an association with dance tights to dominating male presence, to heterosexual expectation and the lasting harm created by such:

… tangled [garden hose] tights with holes cut in the feet—the edges singed with a lighter to prevent runs … (6). [garden hose] … The dedicated, straight-backed ballerinas, decked in ornaments and light, played smiling roles, fawning over their clearly queer male counterparts … Their boasted parts were scary, something to avoid in pas de deux … (8). When I was older than school buses and younger than junior high, I held a [garden hose] above my face and peered in—earwigs came spewing out. I remember hundreds of pinchers puncturing what I would now label my prepubescent skin. Luckily, the internet tells me, “In most cases, the discomfort is mild and passes quickly.” I’m still waiting. (21)

This referent interacts in different contexts, whereby its symbolism becomes layered. Consequently, the [garden hose] tights come to implicate dance as a source of heteronormative conditioning.

Other words similarly accrue significance through repetition and contextualization. [Ladder rungs] come to represent the interaction between seen and unseen. [Stained glass], the method of piecing together and understanding identity. [Juicy fruit] and [honey sticks] reveal themselves to be symbols of the ever-moving target of female expectations relating to desirability and sexual attraction:

Her golden [honey stick] legs crossed tight [shuttered blinds] tapering to a [pencil point] … (1). My now ex- [Corrugated, / postcard] / girlfriend has fingers/ that are [juicy fruit]/ exquisite … She is a [stained glass], / composition of [honey stick], / small bones … (4). The terms homosexual attractions, i.e., a proclivity for [synonyms], may emerge during [juicy fruit] adolescence … (6). I can no longer imagine melting like candle wax in his arms or him consuming me like [juicy fruit] …. (7)

As a result of layering referents, the reader is left questioning the margins of apophenia. Impacts are seen rippling out from seemingly random words contextualized disparately from purportedly benign occurrences. In this way, repetition and the lyric essay form reflect the investigated material. Through layering referents, the reader experiences the ways in which repetition imprints the mind and affects perspective, which mirrors how social programming shapes views and behavior.

Return and diverge

Brenda Miller describes this type of essay container in “The Fine Art of Containment in Creative Nonfiction,” referencing Virginia Woolf’s essay “Street Haunting”: “The piece meanders full circle, ending nearly exactly where it began: with the image of that lead pencil. But this image does not so much repeat as transform, taking on a new dimension through the passage we have undertaken” (Miller 3). This device is an example of structural repetition, which develops the essay conceptually through an expanded perspective.

Weinberger awes us with our newly acquired panoramic view when he utilizes this return and diverge technique in “The Stars.” The essay begins, “The stars: what are they?” (171) and goes on to superimpose layers of imagery, mythology, science, and perspective on our understanding of the stars. As outlined in the section on exergasia, Weinberger hones in on meaning while evolving conceptual understanding as he moves from “they are…,” “they sit...,” “they run…,” “the sky is…,” “up there…,” to “Look….” In doing so, he not only returns to the question at the essay’s start, he provides the reader with an astronomical map of their journey and leaves them with the magnificence of space: “...look: the winnowing Fan; there the Growing Small; there the court of God; there the Quail’s Fire; there St. Peter’s Ship and the Star of the Sea; there: look: up there: the stars” (176). Through exergasia and via return and divergence, repetition provides a time-lapsed, multidimensional experience of the stars, bringing us back to the initial image. Still, upon our return, instead of waiting to be told about the stars, we are all looking up in felt wonder.
“The Pain Scale” also demonstrates return and diverge in that the essay's resolution harkens back to its opening--the examination of the concept of “Zero”:

0 →
No Pain

The concept of Christ is considerably older than the concept of zero. Both are problematic -- both have their fallacies and their immaculate conceptions. But the problem of zero troubles me significantly more than the problem of Christ. (65)

While Biss opens with her concerns over the concept of zero; zero on the section header appears to equal – no pain. It is a baseline on which to build understanding: “I’m sitting in a hospital trying to measure my pain on a scale from zero to ten, I need a zero. A scale of any sort needs fixed points” (66). Pain is the ground floor, a place from which to grow understanding. And in the subsequent crafted meditation on pain, Biss and the reader develop understanding through her examinations of pain as a subjective non-entity. The essay concludes:

A better scale, my father thinks, might rate what patients would be willing to do to relieve their pain…. “Would you accept a shorter life span?” I might. We are laughing, having fun with this game. But later, reading statements collected by the American Pain Foundation, I am alarmed by the number of references to suicide.

The description of hurricane-force winds on the Beaufort scale is simply, “devastation occurs.”

Bringing us, of course, back to zero. (25)

Here we are; we have returned. We are back at zero, except now we know zero not as a neutral or a baseline but as a perpetuation of destruction and all that came before that. The frequency of pain, exhaustion, and desperation to understand the intangibility of both sensation and the human condition rises in frequency until there is no longer an option for sustaining it. Biss’s reference to suicide demonstrates just how high the stakes get as we approach ten, as we approach that which cannot be weathered, as we approach destruction.

Regardless of the cause, everything ends. Within the return and diverge format, the reader sees that endings that circle back to the beginning never return to the same place; the essay has developed, and the home we grew up in does not exist when we return, not because it has changed, but because we have. Through return and diverge, we behold our change.

Contoured: Repetition in Form

I grew up in the house I live in now. I went out into the world, and then circumstances drew me back. Regardless of location, I have been in myself the entire time—well, iterations of myself; nothing stays precisely as it was, just as nothing will remain as it is. The structure of this house persists, but I drag around a different space heater and drink from a different moon and mountain mug. The floor still squeaks as I enter or exit the kitchen, and the radiators still knock in the night. At least, I think they did that before, but I may be superimposing my acquired experiences from now onto the fewer repetitions of then.

Sometimes when my kids run up the stairs to bed, I see them as a visual echo. Deep within, I catch glimpses of a little me fleeing the perceived darkness that grabbed at my heels—me squealing and feeling the smooth warped-wood banister under my then smoother hands. It feels odd that I observe all this from the perspective of the then-perceived encroaching darkness.

So many times, up and down these stairs. How many repetitions of hand glides did it take to wear meaning into this rail? How many glides, splinters, and blisters did it take to wear meaning into my hands?

At the bathroom mirror of my childhood once more, I search my reflection for Biss’ zero, a core self beyond my own visual echo. Like everyone, my current face supersedes all my faces that came before, the ones that ended so this face can exist. Various depressions and wrinkles erode youthfulness; recorded contrasting moods manifest new meaning simultaneously; significance is layered. Through the diminishing familiarity with what my face was before, I excavate my essence. With time, we learn to let go of those faces that were not us to begin with; there is not a choice. If we are alert to the brilliance of that process—repetition within nature’s well-crafted essay—when we get to our end, those we love are left expanded. They see us in the specificity of a black and cream tea mug and will look up and recognize us in the grandeur of the stars.

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Brinson Leigh Kresge is an MFA candidate in fiction and a teaching assistant at UNC Wilmington, where she serves as a reader and fact checker for Ecotone. Her nonfiction was recently published in the New York Times, and her poetry has appeared in 805 Lit + Art and mixed-media art presentations in the United States and Osaka, Japan. Through the Kaleidoscope, Kresge’s current project, is a full-length, genre-bending manuscript that reflects the complexity of identity, sexuality, interconnectedness, and impermanence through a dismantling of formalities and a shifting interplay of form.