ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
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Zoë Stark
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In “Joyas Voladoras,” a six-paragraph essay by Brian Doyle as delicate as a hummingbird’s heart, the beginnings of each paragraph have a similar rhythm, purpose and substance. They establish the structure of the essay, its factual basis, and narrative. Endings of each paragraph explore metaphor and the writer’s contemplations. Beginnings share brevity, pacing, and tone. Ending sentences are longer, spanning lines with multiple clauses, often speeding up like a bike on a downward slope.
"Joyas Voladoras” begins with a simple command, “Consider the hummingbird for a long moment.” Those seven words last as long as a glimpse of a nearby hummingbird. A seven-word sentence is an easy, bite-sized beginning. In the next paragraph, the opening sentence informs, “Each one visits a thousand flowers a day.” Another small bite, easy to chew. In the third paragraph, the beginning sentence is the longest of the group: “Hummingbirds, like all flying birds but more so, have incredible enormous immense ferocious metabolisms.” “[I]ncredible enormous immense ferocious” is written without commas, a staccato with the last three words leaving similar sounds in the mouth. There is a playful quality to the start of the third paragraph that signals a turning towards the essay’s purpose, the author’s thoughts on the beauty, fragility, and brevity of life. In the fourth paragraph, another short beginning sentence compares the enormous heart of the blue whale to that of the hummingbird. In the fifth, the opening sentence is again, brief, “Mammals and birds have hearts with four chambers.” And finally, the start of the sixth paragraph the essay turns in nine words to what humans hold in their hearts, “So much held in a heart in a lifetime.” Like a prose poem, the first sentences of Doyle’s essay fit precisely together as the backbone of the essay, but they can be read in succession, leaving out the rest, maintaining the meaning:
The structure works alone; it also works as outline, as guide. In each opening sentence, a set of facts are put simply forward. And the opening of the final paragraph, which begins with a contemplative interpretation, is also brief. This is just a piece about a tiny bird (and a huge water mammal), the brevity suggests. No problem, you can read this, the tone invites. The last sentences of each of the six paragraphs of “Joyas Voladoras” are the inverse. Each one is complex, in length and intent. The final sentence of the first paragraph begins with the essay’s title, “ “Joyas Voladoras” and is seventy-seven words long, comprising seven full lines on the page. It is a zipping hummingbird of a sentence, eight comma clauses, including this one: “more than three hundred species of them whirring and zooming and nectaring in hummer time zones nine times removed from ours.” Whirring and zooming are familiar verbs, but “nectaring” is Doyle’s creation. The three work together to precisely describe the speed, motion, action of the hummingbird. “Nectaring” also gives the reader a sense of Doyle’s voice the way that “incredible enormous immense ferocious” does. It has a roguish quality that invites discussion. If “[c]onsider the hummingbird” feels serious, calling for deep, maybe academic contemplation, “nectaring” gives a sense of delight, curiosity. And while the first sentences of the essay’s paragraphs go down easy, the final sentences are the heart of the matter, quite literally, because each final sentence also describes heart. That first paragraph ends with the clause, “their hearts hammering faster than we could clearly hear if we pressed our elephantine ears to their infinitesimal chests.” The ending of the second paragraph considers hummingbirds’ deaths in a ten-line sentence that includes the names of seventeen kinds of hummingbirds. The listing of their names is another frenzied beating, darting, dancing set of words that ask to be read aloud while at the same time any reader would need to sneak a breath long before the period. This second paragraph also ends with the heart (and the end of the heart), “each mad heart silent, a brilliant music stilled.” At the end of the third paragraph, the turning paragraph, the pacing slows down as reflection becomes more introspective. Doyle writes that every living animal gets two million heartbeats. “You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise, and live to be two hundred years old,” he says, “or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old.” This third paragraph’s shorter final sentence leaves more room for breathing, for thinking: What kind of use do I want to make of my two million? The end of the fourth paragraph introduces a sense of the unknown. Unlike hummingbirds, facts about blue whales are scarce. “But we know this,” it concludes, turning again toward the heart, “animals with the largest hearts in the world generally travel in pairs, and their penetrating moaning cries, their piercing yearning tongue, can be heard underwater for miles and miles.” At the end of the fifth, almost final paragraph, the sentence is the most succinct of the endings. “We all churn inside.” And when the essay concludes, it is with a cascading eight-line sentence, wave upon wave of the ways we are unable to protect our human hearts from feeling: “a woman’s second glance, a child’s apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother’s paper ancient hand in the thicket of your hair, the memory of your father’s voice early in the morning…” These may be just seven of the ways your heart could be decked, but it seems like a thousand, because of the pouring feel of the list, each clause getting longer and longer until the essay ends with the sound of the writer’s father making pancakes. “Joyas Voladoras” is a song of an essay. Patterns of brief, factual opening sentences and long, accelerating, concluding sentences are its refrain. “Joyas Voladoras” seems simple at first, a little, catchy tune, tiny as a hummingbird, Doyle considering those minute birds, their impossible speed, fragile mortality. “When they rest they come close to death…” Doyle writes, and “if they are not soon warmed, if they do not soon find that which is sweet, their hearts grow cold, and they cease to be.” Hummingbirds, Doyle explains, leave it all on the field. But in the end, “Joyas Voladoras” is complex, enormous as a blue whale, gigantic as the question of how to live one’s life. We too, are close to death, Doyle’s essay points out. In our lifetimes, we are heartbeats away. We are a “day, an hour, a moment” away. We can’t escape death any more than we can keep our hearts unscathed while living. We try to “live alone,” Doyle writes, “in the house of the heart.” But we love anyway, and because of this, our hearts are also broken. The rhythm of “Joyas Voladoras” is the pulse that underscores this same point. Beginnings of paragraphs are tight, focused, factual, under control. But in the endings, emotion overflows: a beloved’s gaze, a child’s breath, accident, illness, mother’s hand in your hair, father’s voice. One way to spend our two billion heartbeats, “Joyas Voladoras” suggests, is to live like hummingbirds with nothing held back, hearts cracked open, joy and sorrow spilling over. |
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Zoë Stark is an essay writer, teacher, and an MFA candidate at the Vermont School of Fine Arts. This is her first publication. Zoë lives in Somerville, Massachusetts with her wife and son.
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