Jo Ann Beard's "The Fourth State of Matter" // PLUS 20% Off All Memberships!
Jo Ann Beard's "The Fourth State of Matter" // PLUS 20% Off All Memberships!
THE INTERIOR GAZE: WEEK TWO. Plus: Join us tomorrow for a writing salon and reading discussion!
Apologies that this is coming a day late! This is Week Two of The Interior Gaze, a space where we read, write, and discuss essays.
For the rest of October I’m offering 20% off all yearly and monthly memberships.
The discount lasts for an entire year! Please consider becoming a member and supporting this work. With this discount, the yearly membership is about $3.50 a month!
Jo Ann Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter” may be one of the best essays I’ve ever read.
It’s a master class in trusting one’s reader— Beard weaves several threads of tension throughout the text, starting with the very first opening paragraph.
Bascomb (who wrote the essay “Picturing the Personal Essay: A Visual Guide,” which was included in the Tuesday PDFs), categorizes Beard’s essay “narrative with a lift,” because of the ways in which she builds tension. “The tension,” he writes, “begs for a resolution.”
We begin with a collie, and a “we” that gestures outside of the essay’s present moment:
“The collie wakes me up about three times a night, summoning me from a
great distance as I row my boat through a dim, complicated dream. She’s
on the shoreline, barking. Wake up. She’s staring at me with her head slightly
tipped to the side, long nose, gazing eyes, toenails clenched to get a purchase
on the wood floor. We used to call her the face of love.”
Did you notice that “we” and the “used to” in the last sentence? If so, how do you think it affected your reading? I didn’t fully experience the traction of that sentence until my second read— didn’t notice that she had given me something to sink my teeth into.
This is partially because Beard doesn’t linger on these moments. She doesn’t draw them out for the reader; instead she trusts that her reader will be affected, either consciously or subconsciously.
Some (of the many) questions we can ask ourselves as writers and readers is:
what does Beard leave out?
What does she decline to explain to her reader? And how does this create a deeper and more personal relationship with the text?
When writers linger— when they include everything, and explain everything for the reader (either because they’re not sure the reader will understand without some help, or because the writer is compelled to justify their own actions)— this inevitably leads to a more superficial investment in the text. That’s not to say one cannot linger. One can. It’s a matter of why one is lingering.
To resist explaining our motives is to let ourselves be ugly in the reader’s eyes, sometimes for only a moment, and sometimes for the entire time (here I think of
’s incredible essay, “The Love of My Life,” which can elicit strong and sometimes judgmental responses in readers, especially those who have not experienced a life-shattering loss).Letting the reader do some intellectual (and psychic) work allows their assumptions and experiences to occupy the text. This can have a big emotional payoff (also called an epiphany)— the reader’s expectations will either be fulfilled or contradicted. It’s a risk, though. The writer must keep their reader oriented, so they don’t give up on the essay altogether.
Sometimes I like to think of essays as universes.
The cosmology of a successful essay is entirely intentional and deftly controlled. The writer maps out a universe for both themself and the readers. I imagine Beard thinking about how to write “The Fourth State of Matter,” which, at its core, is about a violent school shooting that she did not witness in person. She could have started in the climax itself, but instead she cast herself as witness from the opening paragraph, slowly earning the reader’s trust.
Witness.
This is a slippery concept. The Oxford dictionary definition defines a “witness” as “a person who sees an event, typically a crime or accident, take place.” But do we have to be present to “see” the event?
This is an open question that Beard willingly explores, never giving us a definitive answer. She did not witness the violent death of her colleagues in the traditional sense, but she experienced the loss nonetheless.
Her telescopic point of view sees only what it wants to see, but the narrative veers outside of the frame by including characters who, through their interactions with her, defy her own beliefs.
Beard’s point of view zooms in close and then widens, pulsing rhythmically like a dying star.
“There are squirrels living in the spare bedroom upstairs. Three dogs also live in this house, but they were invited. I keep the door of the spare bedroom shut at all times, because of the squirrels and because that’s where the vanished husband’s belongings are stored.”
Then, in the following paragraph:
“I can take almost anything at this point. For instance, that my vanished husband is neither here nor there; he’s reduced himself to a troubled voice on the telephone three or four times a day.”
In the first sentence there is presence (the squirrels), but this presence is clearly demarcated (the invited and the not-invited).
There is absence (the vanished husband) but the absence is incomplete (a troubled voice on the telephone).
The word “vanished” is doing a lot of work here, especially because it is not quite the right word (for to vanish means to “disappear suddenly and completely,” and the husband is not wholly disappeared). But vanished, in mathematical terms, also means “to become zero.”
The reader senses into the space of zero— that empty room, occupied by uninvited guests and the detritus her husband has left behind, the boxes “filled with thirteen years of his pack-ratness.” Her husband has not let go, and she is lingering in that not empty space, that space which is also, at the same time, empty.
Yet the essay is not empty.
Beard’s world wavers between a solitude that is not quite alone and the deep relationships with her co-workers, whose characters she takes time to develop over many pages. Chris, in particular, is another center in this essay, one of the bright, flickering stars who is also dying— by the time Beard wrote this essay, of course, Chris was no longer alive, and she is recalling the past, but their interactions are not framed as if they occur in the past. He is still alive here.
Beard breathes life into everything.
“I spend more time with Chris that I ever did with my husband. The morning I told him I was being dumped he was genuinely perplexed. ‘He’s leaving you?’ he asked.”
Consider which moments are the present moments of this essay. Consider the present-tense of “spend” and the past tense of “told.” How easily Beard directs her readers eye to past and present, when both are, in fact, past.
But what is past in an essay? What is present? The writer decides this for the reader. The writer resurrects what is no longer here.
Then we come upon the fourth state of matter: plasma. Blood.
Here is the “ex-beauty queen” who vanquishes the squirrels.
The “ex” also a zero; an absence of what once was true. The vanished husband. The former face of love. In this essay, absence is its own presence. Chris asks, “Why are you letting this go on?” He is referring to her husband and his obsessive phone calls. She replies, “I am not letting…It just is, is all.” The ex-beauty queen says, “You’ll do it when you do it.” Not referring to the husband but to the former face of love; the dog who is ready to leave this earth, but who Beard is not ready to let go.
At the office there’s Bob. “He and I don’t get along; each of us thinks the other needs to be taken down a peg.” Bob is opposite Chris’s position in the essay’s constellation. Gang Lu appears, standing stiffly, talking to Chris. In this moment we are granted a premonition; a glance into the future that we may not yet know how to decipher.
Then:
“Gang Lu looks around the room with expressionless eyes. He’s sick of physics and sick of the buffoons who practice it. The tall glacial German, Chris, who tells him what to do; the crass idiot Bob, who talks to him as if he is a dog; the student Shane, whose ideas about plasma physics are treated with reverence and praised at every meeting. The woman who puts her feet on the desk and dismisses him with her eyes. Gang Lu no longer spends his evenings in the computer lab down the hall, running simulations and thinking about magnetic forces and invisible particles; he now spends them at the firing range, learning to hit a moving target with the gun he purchased last spring. He pictures himself holding the gun with both hands, arms straight out and steady; Clint Eastwood, only smarter.”
In this moment Beard exits her own point of view and, in cinematic fashion, becomes Gang Lu. This is a liberty she has taken. Some could argue that this liberty turns the essay into fiction. But Beard proves later that she has evidence to justify this entrance.
The telescopic lens of her point of view expands.
This foreshadows her future role as witness but not-witness. An author who narrates an event she did not witness in person.
The beginning of the next section begins with: “The collie fell down the basement stairs.”
The tone of the essay has not, thus far, been jovial, but with Gang Lu’s point of view, in tandem with the collie’s fall, it descends into its own kind of basement— the stars flicker dangerously; threatening to shed their light completely.
Tension rises.
The following section is the climax of the essay.
The essay first appears to be about an elderly dog; a vanished husband. Now it has become something else entirely. In the paragraph preceding this section, Beard, on her way out of the office, passes Gang Lu and says hello. He doesn’t respond. He is holding a letter. As they pass, she leaves her body for his.
In the shortest section, Gang Lu shoots all of the characters Beard has taken the time to introduce. Dwight, Chris. Linhua Shan. Bob.
Beard’s narration flits from eyes to eyes. Through Bob’s eyes she sees Chris, “still sitting upright in his chair, head thrown back at an unnatural angle. Everything is broken and red.”
Red, the color of plasma; the fourth state of matter.
“The first call comes at four o’clock.”
We, the readers, know what the call is about, but the author, in the essay’s universe, does not. “Some kind of disturbance in the building.”
Although we have witnessed the essay’s supposed climax, the tension has not slackened. It rises. The essay is less about the material circumstances than it is about the author’s emotional relationship to the ones who are now gone. She does not want to see it, or accept it, just as she did not want to let go of her dog, or husband.
Beard draws out the shooting’s aftermath with more detail than its events, because the essay is not only about the shooting.
Plasma is not liquid nor is it gas. It is a liminal substance. She draws us into this liminal space.A space of knowing and not-knowing. The writer knows, and the readers knows, but the writer who lives in the essay’s universe does not yet know.
“I tell the white face in the mirror that Gang Lu did this, wrecked everything and murdered all these people. It seems as ludicrous as everything else. I can’t get my mind to work right, I’m still operating on yesterday’s fact; today hasn’t gelled yet. ‘It’s a good thing none of this has happened,’ I say to my face. A knock at the door and I open it.”
She opens the door to the former face of love.
I will leave you with the last few sentences of the essay:
“Around my neck is the thing he brought me from Poland. I hold it out. Like this? I ask. Shards of fly wings, suspended in amber.”
The “like this,” we know, is addressed to Chris, although this moment was not narrated in the essay. We know, or can assume, that she is referring the the fourth state of matter; to the amber; once plasma, now solid, suspending shattered fly wings in place over thousands of years.
“‘Exactly,’ he says.
What can we learn from this essay?
An essay can be and do almost anything.
Emotional truth is not always absolute truth.
A traumatic event does not have to be the center of an essay, but part of a larger and more complex constellation forming the essay’s universe.
Everything surrounding us matters, and can be brought into the essay’s world.
We can trust the reader to come with us as we explore a moment, or moments, as long as we give them something to hold onto.
Leaving certain things unsaid (for instance, the depth of Beard’s relationship with Chris) is not only an option, but is sometimes vital to the life of an essay.
Bascomb wrote that Beard’s essay fits the category of “narrative with a lift,” but I think it inhabits many forms. It’s also braided. It explores what he calls “the formal limits of focus.” And it does, in fact, come full circle, though not in a neat and tidy way. Better put, it comes full circles, like rippling circles radiating out in water after a stone has sunk to its bottom.
Wow, Beard's and Bascomb's essays, and your reflections here, helped me complete a draft I have been working on for months. I initially struggled to relate Beard's craft to mine, because her story telling is so phenomenal, I was really just along for the ride, barely conscious of reading; whereas I don't consider myself much of a story teller, in conversation or in writing. I'm a reflective essayist--spiral and descent are the way I maneuver. But I have been struggling for months on a piece that is mostly poetry, playing with a metaphor that is profoundly meaningful to me, and I want to invite readers into its meaning. But for the final section I needed to pivot back to essay form, and I could not find a way through it without becoming blandly philosophical or spiritually aloof--hardly an invitation! There is just so much meaning attached to what I'm trying to write, every time I approached it I felt like was trying to funnel an ocean onto the page.
But after reading these pieces and your reflections, I knew what to look for: look for the mounting tension. I found it in the sentence: "I have tried and tried to write the end of this poem, and I cannot." and I stayed with that tension. The next paragraph began, "for months I have demanded a poem my body cannot deliver." Staying with that tension, anchored me so I could write sentence after sentence until I finally made my way to the essay's/poem's end.
I wish I could say more about Beard's essay, because it was so phenomenal, the way it carried me. But i didn't do the second read you recommended, so I'm more in a "what just happened?" state. But your reflections here are so beautiful, and I'm finding so much value from this course, even though I'm only able to participate in a very limited way.