Expository Writing: Shaping Information Diane Ackerman

A few years after that, I wanted silence. My daydreams ­were full of places I longed to be, shelters and solitudes. I wanted a room apart from others, a hidden cabin to rest in. I wanted to be in a redwood forest with trees so tall the owls called out in the daytime. I daydreamed of living in a vapor cave a few hours away from ­here. Underground, warm, and moist, I thought it would be the perfect world for staying out of cold winter, for escaping the noise of living.

And how often I’ve wanted to escape to a wilderness where a human hand has not been in everything. But those ­were only dreams of peace, of comfort, of a nest inside stone or woods, a sanctuary where a dream or life wouldn’t be invaded.

Years ago, in the next canyon west of ­here, there was a man who followed one of those dreams and moved into a cave that could only be reached by climbing down a rope. For years he lived there in comfort, like a troglodite. The inner weather was stable, never too hot, too cold, too wet, or too dry. But then he felt lonely. His utopia needed a woman. He went to town until he found a wife. For a while after the marriage, his wife climbed down the rope along with him, but before long she didn’t want the mice scurrying about in the cave, or the untidy bats that wanted to hang from the stones of the ceiling. So they built a door. Because of the closed entryway, the temperature changed. They had to put in heat. Then the inner moisture of earth warped the door, so they had to have ­air-­conditioning, and after that the earth wanted to go about life in its own way and it didn’t give in to the people.

In other days and places, people paid more attention to the ­strong-­headed will of earth. Once homes ­were built of wood that had been felled from a single region in a forest. That way, it was thought, the ­house would hold together more harmoniously, and the family of walls would not fall or lend themselves to the unhappiness or arguments of the inhabitants.

An Italian immigrant to Chicago, Aldo Piacenzi, built bird­houses that ­were dwellings of harmony and peace. They ­were the incredible spired shapes of cathedrals in Italy. They ­housed not only the birds, but also his memories, his own past. He painted them the watery blue of his Mediterranean, the wild ­rose of flowers in a summer field. Inside them was straw and the droppings of lives that layed eggs, fledglings who grew there. What places to inhabit, the bright and sunny bird­houses in dreary alleyways of the city.

One beautiful afternoon, cool and moist, with the kind of yellow light that falls on earth in these arid regions, I waited for barn swallows to return from their daily work of food gathering. Inside the tunnel where they live, hundreds of swallows had mixed their saliva with mud and clay, much like the solitary bees, and formed nests that ­were perfect as a potter’s bowl. At five in the eve­ning, they returned all at once, a dark, flying shadow. Despite their enormous numbers and the crowding together of nests, they didn’t pause for even a moment before entering the nests, nor did they crowd one another. Instantly they vanished into the nests. The tunnel went silent. It held no outward signs of life.

But I knew they ­were there, filled with the fire of living. And what a marriage of elements was in those nests. Not only mud’s earth and water, the fire of sun and dry air, but even the elements contained one another. The bodies of prophets and crazy men ­were broken down in that soil.

I’ve noticed often how when a ­house is abandoned, it begins to sag. Without a tenant, it has no need to go on. If it ­were a person, we’d say it is depressed or lonely. The roof settles in, the paint cracks, the walls and floorboards warp and slope downward in their own natural ways, telling us that life must stay in everything as the world whirls and tilts and moves through boundless space.

One summer day, cleaning up after ­long-­eared owls where I work at a rehabilitation facility for birds of prey, I was raking the gravel floor of a flight cage. Down on the ground, something looked like it was moving. I bent over to look into the pile of bones and pellets I’d just raked together. There, close to the ground, ­were two fetal mice. They ­were new to the planet, pink and hairless. They ­were so tenderly young. Their faces had swollen ­blue-­veined eyes. They ­were nestled in a mound of feathers, soft as velvet, each one curled up smaller than an infant’s ear, listening to the first sounds of earth. But the ants ­were biting them. They turned in agony, unable to pull away, not yet having the arms or legs to move, but feeling, twisting away from, the pain of the bites. I was horrified to see them bitten out of life that way. I dipped them in water, as if to take away the sting, and let the ants fall in the bucket. Then I held the tiny mice in the palm of my hand. Some of the ants ­were drowning in the water. I was trading one life for another, exchanging the lives of the ants for those of mice, but I hated their suffering, and hated even more that they had not yet grown to a life, and already they inhabited the miserable world of pain. Death and life feed each other. I know that.

Inside these rooms where birds are healed, there are other lives besides those of mice. There are fine gray globes the wasps have woven together, the white cocoons of spiders in a corner, the downward tunneling anthills. All these dwellings are inside one small walled space, but I think most about the mice. Sometimes the downy nests fall out of the walls where their mothers have placed them out of the way of their enemies. When one of the nests falls, they are so well made and soft, woven mostly from the chest feathers of birds. Sometimes the leg of a small quail holds the nest together like a slender cornerstone with dry, bent claws. The mice have adapted to life in the presence of their enemies, adapted to living in the thin wall between beak and beak, claw and claw. They move their nests often, as if a new rafter or wall will protect them from the inevitable fate of all our returns home to the deeper, wider nests of earth that ­houses us all.

One August at Zia Pueblo during the corn dance I noticed tourists picking up shards of all the old pottery that had been made and broken there. The residents of Zia know not to take the bowls and pots left behind by the older ones. They know that the fragments of those earlier lives need to be smoothed back to earth, but younger nations, travelers from continents across the world who have come to inhabit this land, have little of their own to grow on. The pieces of earth that ­were formed into bowls, even on their way home to dust, provide the new people a lifeline to an unknown land, help them remember that they live in the old nest of earth.

It was in early February, during the mating season of the great horned owl. It was dusk, and I hiked up the back of a mountain to where I’d heard the owls a year before. I wanted to hear them again, the voices so tender, so deep, like a memory of comfort. I was halfway up the trail when I found a soft, round nest. It had fallen from one of the ­bare-­branched trees. It was a delicate nest, woven together of feathers, sage, and strands of wild grass. Holding it in my hand in the rosy twilight, I noticed that a blue thread was entwined with the other gatherings there. I pulled at the thread a little, and then I recognized it. It was a thread from one of my skirts. It was blue cotton. It was the unmistakable color and shape of a pattern I knew. I liked it, that a thread of my life was in an abandoned nest, one that had held eggs and new life. I took the nest home. At home, I held it to the light and looked more closely. There, to my surprise, nestled into the ­gray-­green sage, was a gnarl of black hair. It was also unmistakable. It was my daughter’s hair, cleaned from a brush and picked up out in the sun beneath the maple tree, or the pit cherry where the birds eat from the overladen, fertile branches until only the seeds remain on the trees.

I didn’t know what kind of nest it was, or who had lived there. It didn’t matter. I thought of the remnants of our lives carried up the hill that way and turned into shelter. That night, resting inside the walls of our home, the world outside weighed so heavily against the thin wood of the ­house. The sloped roof was the only thing between us and the universe. Everything ­outside of our wooden boundaries seemed so large. Filled with the night’s citizens, it all came alive. The world opened in the thickets of the dark. The wild grapes would soon ripen on the vines. The burrowing ones ­were emerging. Horned owls sat in treetops. Mice scurried ­here and there. Skunks, fox, the slow and holy porcupine, all ­were passing by this way. The young of the solitary bees ­were feeding on the pollen in the dark. The ­whole world was a nest on its humble tilt, in the maze of the universe, holding us.

The Reader’s Presence

1. ‑In each of the vignettes that make up this essay, Hogan contemplates the meaning of various dwellings. What are the specific characteristics of a dwelling place for Hogan? Who lives there? How does each dwelling suit and serve its inhabitants? Why does Hogan describe dwellings for animals as well as dwellings for humans? With what effect(s)? To what extent and in what ways do the two overlap? What are the advantages — and the disadvantages — of Hogan’s having chosen to contemplate death as well as life in this essay about where we live? How would you characterize the vision of life, death, and the universe that emerges from this essay?

2. ‑Reread carefully the story about the cave dweller and his wife told in paragraph 7. To what extent does Hogan encourage her readers to take the story literally? At what point does it begin to take on the qualities of myth or fable? Compare and contrast this story with the biblical story of Adam and Eve, and their fall from the Garden of Eden. To whom, or to what impulse(s), can each fall be attributed? How are women characterized in the respective stories? How are the endings similar, and where do they diverge? Based on your comparative analysis of these stories, what inferences might you draw about the Native American and ­Judeo-­Christian worldviews?

3. ‑Identify and discuss the various analogies Hogan draws throughout the essay. Where does she compare dwellings made by animals to ­human-­made artifacts? ­human-­made dwellings to natural phenomena? the animate to the inanimate? What are the effects of this interweaving of pro­cesses, objects, and species? In the following essay, John Hollander writes that “such repre­sen­ta­tions of disorder as lists, paintings, photos, ­etc., all compromise the purity of true messiness by the verbal or visual order they impose on the confusion” (“Mess,” see following selection). What form of order does Hogan’s essay “impose” on the natural places in phenomena she discovers? Is “impose” the right word? If not, what verb would you substitute to describe Hogan’s writing?

1bed-sitter: A combined bedroom and sitting room. — Eds.

John Hollander

Mess

John Hollander (b. 1929) is one of the leading poets and literary scholars in the United States. Since his first book, Crackling of Thorns (1958), he has published more than twenty collections of his poetry, including his more recent works, The Poetry of Everyday Life (1999), Figurehead and Other Poems (1999), and Picture Window (2003). He has also edited numerous anthologies, including War Poems (1999), Sonnets: From Dante to the Present (2001), American Wits (2003), and his latest, Poetry for Young People: Animal Poems (2004). His 1997 collection of literary criticism, The Work of Poetry, won the Robert Penn Warren–Cleanth Brooks award. After a ­de­cades-­long teaching career, Hollander is now the Sterling Professor Emeritus En­glish at Yale University. His poems and prose continue to appear regularly in the New Yorker, the Partisan Review, Esquire, and other magazines and journals. The essay “Mess” appeared in the Yale Review in 1995.

Mess is a state of mind. Or rather, messiness is a par­tic­u­lar relation between the state of arrangement of a collection of things and a state of mind that contemplates it in its containing space. For example, X’s mess may be Y’s delight — sheer profusion, uncompromised by any ap­parent structure even in the repre­sen­ta­tion of it. Or there may be some inner order or logic to A’s mess that B cannot possibly perceive. Consider: someone — Alpha — rearranges all the books on Beta’s library shelf, which have been piled or stacked, sometimes properly, sometimes not, but all in relevant sequence (by author and, within that, by date of publication), and rearranges them neatly, by size and color. Beta surveys the result, and can only feel, if not blurt out, “what a mess!” This situation often occurs with respect to messes of the workplace generally.

For there are many kinds of mess, both within walls and outside them: neglected gardens and the aftermath of tropical storms, and the indoor kinds of disorder peculiar to specific areas of our life with, and in and among, things. There are messes of one’s own making, messes not even of one’s own person, places, or things. There are personal states of mind about common areas of messiness — those of the kitchen, the bedroom, the bathroom, the salon (of what­ever sort, from half a ­bed-­sitter¹ to some grand public parlor), or those of personal appearance (clothes, hair, ­etc.). Then, for all those who are in any way ­self-­employed or whose avocations are practiced in some private space — a workshop, a ­dark-­room, a study or a studio — there is a mess of the workplace. It’s not the most common kind of mess, but it’s exemplary: the eye surveying it is sickened by the rollercoaster of scanning the scene. And, alas, it’s the one I’m most afflicted with.

I know that things are really in a mess when — as about ninety seconds ago — I reach for the mouse on my Macintosh and find instead a thick layer of old envelopes, manuscript notes consulted three weeks ago, favorite pens and inoperative ones, folders used hastily and not replaced, and so forth. In order to start working, I brush these accumulated impedimenta aside, thus creating a new mess. But this is, worse yet, absorbed by the general condition of my study: piles of thin books and thick books, green volumes of the Loeb Classical Library and slimy paperbacks of ephemeral ­spy-­thrillers, mostly used notebooks, bills paid and unpaid, immortal letters from beloved friends, unopened and untrashed folders stuffed with things that should be in various other folders, ­book-­mailing envelopes, unanswered mail whose cries for help and attention are muffled by three months’ worth of bank statements enshrouding them in the gloom of continued neglect. Even this fairly orderly inventory seems to simplify the confusion: in actuality, searching for a letter or a page of manuscript in this state of things involves crouching down with my head on one side and searching vertically along the outside of a teetering pile for what may be a thin, hidden layer of it.

Displacement, and lack of design, are obscured in the origins of our very word mess. The famous biblical “mess of red pottage” (lentil mush or dal) for which Esau sold his birthright wasn’t “messy” in our sense (unless, of course, in the not very interesting case of Esau having dribbled it on his clothing). The word meant a serving of food, or a course in a meal: something placed in front of you (from the Latin missis, put or placed), hence “messmates” (dining companions) and ultimately “officers’ mess” and the like. It also came to mean a dish of prepared mixed food — like an olla podrida or a minestrone — then by extension (but only from the early nineteenth century on) any ­hodge-­podge: inedible, and outside the neat confines of a bowl or pot, and thus unpleasant, confusing, and agitating or depressing to contemplate. But for us, the association with food perhaps remains only in how much the state of mind of being messy is like that of being fat: for example, X says, “God, I’m getting gross! I’ll have to diet!” Y, really fat, cringes on hearing this, and feels that for the slender X to talk that way is an obscenity. Similarly, X: “God, this place is a pigsty!” Y: (ditto). For a person prone to messiness, Cyril Connolly’s celebrated observation about fat people is projected onto the world itself: inside every neat arrangement is a mess struggling to break out, like some kind of statue of chaos lying implicit in the marble of apparent or­gan­iz­ation.

₅

In Paradise, there was no such thing as messiness. This was partly because unfallen, ideal life needed no supplemental things — objects of use and artifice, elements of any sort of technology. Thus there was nothing to leave lying around, messily or even neatly, by Adam and Eve — according to Milton — “at their savory dinner set / Of herbs and other country messes.” But it was also because order, hence orderliness, was itself so natural that what­ever bit of nature Adam and Eve might have been occupied with, or even using in a momentary ­tool-­like way, flew or leapt or crept into place in some sort of reasonable arrangement, even as in our unparadised state things fall under the joyless tug of gravity. But messiness may seem to be an inevitable state of the condition of having so many things, precious or disposable, in one’s life.

As I observed before, even to describe a mess is to impose order on it. The ancient Greek vision of primal chaos, even, was not messy in that it was ­pre-­messy: there weren’t any categories by which to define order, so that there could be no disorder — no nextness or betweenness, no above, below, ­here, there, and so forth. “Let there be light” meant “Let there be perception of something,” and it was then that order became possible, and mess possibly implied. Now, a list or inventory is in itself an orderly literary form, and even incoherent assemblages of items fall too easily into some other kind of order: in Through the ­Looking-­Glass, the Walrus’s “Of shoes and ships, and sealing wax, / Of cabbages, and kings,” is given a harmonious structure by the pairs of alliterating words, and even by the ­half-­punning association of “ships, [sailing] sealing wax.” The wonderful cata­logue in Tom Sawyer of the elements of what must have been, pocketed or piled on the ground, a mess of splendid proportions, is a poem of its own. The objects of barter for a stint of fence whitewashing (Tom, it will be remembered, turns having to do a chore into getting to do it by sheer ­con-­man’s insouciance) comprise

twelve marbles, part of a jewsharp, a piece of blue ­bottle-­glass to look through, a spool cannon, a key that wouldn’t unlock anything, a fragment of chalk, a glass stopper of a decanter, a tin soldier, a couple of tadpoles, six ­fire-­crackers, a kitten with only one eye, a brass ­door-­knob, a dog collar — but no dog — the handle of a knife, four pieces of orange peel, and a dilapidated old window sash.

Thus such repre­sen­ta­tions of disorder as lists, paintings, photos, ­etc., all compromise the purity of true messiness by the verbal or visual order they impose on the confusion. To get at the mess in my study, for example, a movie might serve best, alternately mixing ­mid-­shot and zoom on a par­tic­u­lar portion of the disaster, which would, in an almost fractal way, seem to be a ­mini-­disaster of its own. There are even neatly conventionalized emblems of messiness that are, after all, all too neat: thus, whenever a movie wants to show an apartment or office that has been ransacked by Baddies (cop Baddies or baddy Baddies or what­ever) in search of the Thing They Want, the designer is always careful to show at least one picture on the wall hanging carefully askew. All this could possibly tell us about a degree of messiness is that the searchers ­were so messy (at another level of application of the term) in their technique that they violated their search agenda to run over to the wall and tilt the picture (very messy procedure indeed), or that, hastily leaving the scene to avoid detection, they nonetheless took a final revenge against the Occupant for not having the Thing on his or her premises, and tilted the picture in a fit of pique. And yet a tilted picture gives good cueing mileage: it can present a good bit of disorder at the expense of a minimum of misalignment, after all.

A meditation on mess could be endless. As I struggle to conclude this one, one of my cats regards me from her nest in and among one of the disaster areas that all surfaces in my study soon become. Cats disdain messes in several ways. First, they are proverbially neat about their shit and the condition of their fur. Second, they pick their way so elegantly among my piles of books, papers, and ancillary objects (dishes of paper clips, scissors, functional and ­dried-­out pens, crumpled envelopes, outmoded postage stamps, boxes of slides and disks, staplers, glue bottles, tape dispensers — you know) that they cannot even be said to acknowledge the mess’s existence. The gray familiar creature currently making her own order out of a region of mess on my desk — carefully disposing herself around and over and among piles and bunches and stacks and crazily oblique layers and thereby reinterpreting it as natural landscape — makes me further despair until I realize that what she does with her body, I must do with my perception of this inevitable disorder — shaping its forms to the disorder and thereby shaping the disorder to its forms. She has taught me resignation.

The Reader’s Presence

1. ‑In the second sentence of his essay, Hollander defines “mess” as “a par­tic­u­lar relation between the state of arrangement of a collection of things and a state of mind that contemplates it in its containing space.” How would you paraphrase Hollander’s definition? To what extent does his definition echo proverbs and traditional sayings such as “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”? What does Hollander’s definition add to this kind of general insight about the observer? What role do “things” play in messiness, and what role is played by the person who contemplates them? Examine carefully the many observers mentioned in this essay, from the hypothetical X and Y in the first paragraph to the real cat in the final paragraph. What are their various reactions to the seeming disorder around them?

2. ‑Hollander traces the origins of the word mess in paragraph 4. What is the connection between its original meaning and the meaning it took on “by extension” in the nineteenth century? According to Hollander, how does the state of mind of being messy correspond to the state of mind of being fat? He follows this association with yet another: the sculpture lying latent within the marble. Examine carefully — and then comment on — the way each analogy leads by association into the next and the effect of this series of associations.

3. ‑Hollander’s project is complicated by the fact that he has chosen to define a word that is enmeshed in his own writing pro­cess and product. How does the act of describing the “mess” on his desk (paragraph 3) alter the nature of the scene he describes? Is it, according to the author, even possible to do justice to a mess in written terms?

4. ‑Consider the fluctuation between control and lack of control manifested not only in the subject of the essay but in the essay itself. Based on your analysis, how would you compare and contrast the degree of order in Hollander’s study and in his writing? Is Hollander’s essay a mess? Where are its messy passages? Why does Hollander find himself struggling to end the essay (paragraph 8)? Reread Jamaica Kincaid’s essay, “Biography of a Dress” (page 175), in the light of Hollander’s remarks. How does Kincaid contain or fail to contain the messiness of her memories? Are you bothered by or ­attracted to writing that is “tilted” or “misaligned”? Why?