A Formation of Self

Before even touching the camera, I made a list of some of the photographs I would
take: web covered with water, grimace reflected in the calculator screen, hand
holding a tiny round mirror where just my eye is visible, cat’s striped underbelly as he jumps toward the lens, manhole covers, hand holding a translucent section of orange, pinkies partaking of a pinkie swear, midsection with jeans, hair held out sideways at arm’s length, bottom of foot, soap on face. This, I think is akin to a formation of self. Perhaps I have had the revelations even if the photos are never
taken.
I already know the dual strains the biographers will talk about, strains twisting through a life. The combination is embodied here: I write joyfully, in the margin of my lab book, beside a diagram of a beaker, “Isolated it today, Beautiful wispy strands, spider webs suspended below the surface, delicate tendrils, cloudy white, lyrical, elegant DNA! This is DNA! So beautiful!”
I should have been a Renaissance man. It kills me to choose a field (to choose between the sciences and the humanities!). My mind roams, I wide-eyed, into infinite caverns and loops. I should fly! Let me devour the air, dissolve everything into my bloodstream, learn! The elements are boundless, but, if asked to isolate them, I can see tangles around
medicine and writing. The trick will be to integrate them into a whole, and then maybe I can take the photograph. Aahh, is it already there, no? Can’t you see it? I invoke the Daedalus in me, everything that has gone into making me, hoping it will
be my liberation.
Music is one such element. The experience of plying in an orchestra from the inside
is an investigation into subjectivity. It is reminiscent of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle: the more one knows the speed of a particle, the less one knows its
position. Namely the position of the observer matters and affects the substance of
the observation; even science is embracing embodiment. I see splashes of bright
rain in violin arpeggios fading away in singed circles, a clarinet solo fades blue to
black, and a flute harmony leaves us moving sideways, a pregnant silence, the
trumpets interrupt with the smell of lightning. Perhaps in the audience you would
sense something else.
I think of rowing as meditation. Pshoow, huh, aaah; pshoow, huh, aaah. I can close
my eyes and still hear it. We glide over reflected sky… and lean. And defy the request
for “leadership positions,” laugh at it, because it misses the entire point, that we are
integral, one organism. I hear the oars cut the water, shunk shunk; there are no leaders.
Once I heard an echo from all quarters. “Do not rush,” said the conductor, “follow the
baton.” “Do not rush,” said the coach, “watch the body in front of you.” Do not rush.
I write about characters’ words: how they use words, how they manipulate them, how they create their own realities; words used dangerously, flippantly, talking at
cross purposes, deliberately being vague; the nature of talking, of words and
realities. Perhaps mine has been a flight of fancy too. But, come on, it’s in the words, a person, a locus, somewhere in the words. It’s all words. I love the words.
I should be a writer, but I will be a doctor, and out of the philosophical tension I will create a self.


ANALYSIS
This essay is a good example of an essay that shows rather than tells the reader who
the author is. Through excited language and illustrative anecdotes, she offers a
complex picture of her multifaceted nature.
The writing is as fluid as its subject matter. One paragraph runs into the next with little break for transition or explicit connection. It has the feel of an ecstatic
stream-of-consciousness, moving rapidly toward a climactic end.
The author is as immediate as she is mysterious. She creates and intimate
relationship with her reader, while continuously keeping him/her “in the dark” as she
jumps from one mental twist to another.
She openly exposes her charged thoughts, yet leaves the ties between them uncemented. This creates an unpredictability that is risky but effective. Still, one ought to be wary in presenting as essay of this sort. The potential for
obliqueness is high, and, even here, the reader is at times left in confusion regarding the coherence of the whole. Granted the essay is about confluence of
seeming opposites, but poetic license should not obscure important content. This
particular essay could have been made stronger with a more explicit recurring theme to help keep the reader focused.
In general, though, this essay stands out as a bold, impassioned presentation of self.
It lingers in the memory as an entangled web of an intricate mind.