This Essay

an essay by Nathaniel Page

When I set out to write this essay, my first thought was “How shall I begin?” I knew I needed something to hook the reader in. I could begin with a shocking statement, like “In 1875, my father was eaten by a snake,” but to find a similar statement that was actually true, I feared, would be difficult. It seemed more reasonable to be honest, and start the essay where the action really started, at the beginning, when I was wondering how to start this essay.

But genre writers often begin their scenes in the middle of the action, so that the reader immediately has a stake in what is going on, before the authors flash back and fill in the back story. And with that statement, which provides a good transition for me to talk about the reason I chose to write this essay (which is, incidentally, the reason why I placed that statement there), I shall transition to a discussion of my reasons for this essay. Yes-- there is a story behind my wondering how to start this essay. That is, there was a motive for me to write this essay in the first place.

I’ll just be upfront about it. I wanted to see if I could lead a reader strait through an essay based entirely on itself. That is the thesis statement of this essay. I would build each sentence upon the previous sentences. It would be a giant pyramid scheme of an essay. That metaphor is meant to illustrate the more strait forward characterization before it; this is a common writer’s technique. In the previous few sentences I’ve created an effect by making a statement, itself based on previous statements, and then reflected on it; this pattern will end now. Do you think that the sentence before the last is a parenthetical, and that the sentence following it is a parenthetical to that? Has the last clause of the sentence before the last sentence been proven false by the sentence following it? Onto a foundation of nothing this essay would clump more and more suspense. The reader would be kept thinking “Where can he possibly go from here?” (The suspense of such a technique, though, would be severely undercut by my stating upfront my intentions, as I have done here. Was it the right thing to do? And if it wasn’t, would it be the right thing to do to erase this sentence? You are looking at the answer to those questions.)

All of which raises another question, of course. Why did I want to write such an essay? But I cannot answer that question, I’m afraid. If I told you about my deeper motive, it would call into question the honesty of the last sentence in the first paragraph of this essay, the one in which I said it would be “reasonable” and “honest” to just start the story where it started. And then, if I went back and changed that sentence, as I am doing to some of the sentences here and there in the piece as I write it, going back and moving them around (not this sentence, of course-- this sentence is exactly where it was when I first wrote it) to make it more coherent, then that would change how my transition went, and there would be a whole cascading series of changes I’d have to make through the length of the piece, possibly effecting its structure. That would not do.

For lack of alternatives, though, I’d like to continue this discussion. My reputation for honesty has been lessened somewhat already, anyway. Maybe, somewhere deep in my subconscious, I wanted the essay to be a commentary on postmodernism, insofar as it would spring from nothingness and be relentlessly self-referential. It might remind a reader who had studied philosophy of the ceaseless and seemingly pointless cogitations of that craft, the way that thought experiments, casting doubt on everything we have never thought twice about, amble further and further from tangible reality, circling back around eventually to devour their own roots, leaving everything dead.

Such an essay would illustrate the dramatic irony of such cogitations. It would draw a comparison between its own pointlessness and the pointlessness of mulling a semantic trick like “This sentence is false.” Like philosophy, it would earn a meager living off the connotations of the words it used to describe itself, on self-reflection, and on logic. I would find it humorous, and at bottom that would be the real reason for its existence, which bears the question, from what ineffable source springs humor? What causes the human face to twist up involuntarily and the human to emit animal sounds and to convulse? At the same time the essay would be attempting to be philosophical. It would be trying to “work on several levels.” The essay would have long sentences self-consciously followed by shorter ones. It would even point out that it was aware that the sort of irony it peddled was transparent and had been used to the point of cliche. The lens could always zoom further and further out, but it could probably never look at itself. Paragraphs would end with strong, short statements.

This essay is the essay of a Facebook user-- (Google Docs still calls “Facebook” a misspelled word. Passive aggressive? (Okay, I confess, I found that joke on Twitter))-- of an author living in the era of reality television, that pinnacle of post-modernity. By creating, from nothing, simply one comment, and then eliciting further comment on that one comment, and another comment on that comment, eventually opening the doors to comment from all possible personae in my imagination, I could create an almost infinite well of content. The first comment of course, is a comment on itself, a singularity of sorts, onto which all else can be built. My essay would be an incestuous orgy of comment and reflection. It would be autosarcophagous, but it would go beyond self-cannibalism by building itself on nothing first. It would be an Ouroboros of an essay! Such an essay would become the final antidote to writer’s block. Just as each of my stati, updated, contribute a fraction of a cent to Mark Zuckerberg each month, subsequent reflections of my essay could far eclipse the essay itself. This essay, if it attracted attention, would inspire whole other essays about it, and about what it meant, much improving my reputation and talked-aboutness. I can see follow up essays coming out, years later-- “‘This Essay’ 25 Years Later” for instance.

This essay suffers (suffers!) from the problem, pointed out above in reference to the lens, of the lens itself never being visible to itself, the object changing under observation, the light particle experiencing the standstill of time. The meditator who attempts to watch his own mind will become aware of this lens situation, just like it is becoming more apparent in this essay with each next sentence. It is a paradox. This essay is breaking down a bit here, so I’ll insert a margin note to break up the rhythm. This idea of the transparent process is also important, though. I ought to comment on it here. Why don’t newspapers publish the banter of their editors in regards to their stories, unless a story seems to especially merit it? Margin notes are relevant. They are a meta-narrative on the writer’s process that in itself contributes to an understanding of written work, and might even reveal a writer’s blind spots.

Then again, the Psychologist Fritz Perls suggested to patients afraid of public speaking to “take back their eyes.” The patient was to stop looking at himself as the audience saw him, which tended to make him think of himself as an object, paralysing him. Nietzsche warned against the rot of a too-inward-looking soul, a soul that might one day look at itself and realize it looked like this essay.

How to add another layer irony to his essay, how to reach the exalted state of meta-irony, a perspective of irony like the light particle’s perspective of time, like social commentator Lewis Hyde did in his book The Gift, when he claimed that criticism and commentary were “imitations of creativity.” (The Gift was criticism). The irony, unmentioned, unreflected upon, was brilliant, probably the most literary and creative moment of the book. It was an event horizon of irony. The essay changes back into the present tense. The cogitations continue, but how to make them compelling for perhaps one more paragraph?

I ask because at this point in an essay about itself, the writer will begin to come up against a growing itch in the reader to encounter some meat (or some cheese, for vegetarians, or some soy protein, for vegans) in this sandwich. This has all been building towards some kind of epiphany; the author must deliver. The reader’s interest is flagging by now. The initial conceit of an essay about itself was worth a chuckle, but can he be expected to actually follow it through another inane paragraph? That remains to be seen.

My triumph, if you are reading this sentence, is apparent. We can now say that this essay is a successful essay. How will it look on a second read? The problem, of course, is only that it is so silly and I fear, so self-indulgent, that I probably won’t show it to anyone.