Freedom & Structure

"twenty eight days gone,

my last essay drawing nigh:

a challenge complete."

Though my haiku writing remains regrettably stunted, I spent the last two Februarys cultivating the craft of the essay. I may be so bold to say that my essays have improved greatly since day one, hopefully not only in grammar & style but also in substance. God willing, this time next Spring I hope to be in my first semester of graduate school. Part of the impetus for this challenge arose from a desire to sharpen my reading & writing skills in preparation for graduate study. Because I may be knee-deep in other readings & writings next Spring, I believe this may be my last essay-a-day challenge for a few years. However, I would be remiss not to reflect on the joys & lessons I encountered in the essay-a-day challenge. Here is one such lesson.

The Slavery of Free Verse

Alas, where to begin but with the master himself? And in a fitting inversion, Chesterton argues in The Slavery of Free Verse that modern man often reads at the end rather than the beginning. We fill our time with essays, articles, videos, & media from the present long before we consult the words of the past. This trend is most apparent to Chesterton in the modern poetry of his time.

"But the whole general tendency, regarded as an emancipation, seems to me more or less of an enslavement. It seems founded on one subconscious idea; that talk is freer than verse; and that verse, therefore, should claim the freedom of talk. But talk, especially in our time, is not free at all. It is tripped up by trivialities, tamed by conventions, loaded with dead words, thwarted by a thousand meaningless things. It does not liberate the soul so much, when a man can say, "You always look so nice," as when he can say, "But your eternal summer shall not fade."

Chesterton sees the apparent, though mistaken, logic of our modern minds. Why not embrace the liberty of words freely & clearly flowing from your mouth, rather than force them into a structure of meter & rhyme? Or, to quote Kevin from The Office, "Why use many word when few word do trick?" Yet our own lived experience testifies against this intuition, even if some may not appreciate the differences.

At heart in poetry is a paradox: in structure there exists a particular beacon of freedom. Beyond the mere psychological effects which meter & rhyme produce in our brains, the truths expressed in a rigorously structured sonnet are in fact liberated from the conventions which form, twist, & limit the expression of our ordinary language. We venerate those whose wit seamlessly manipulates a rhythm as they extemporaneously pontificate flowing speech. We call them rappers. The freedom of hip-hop comes from the beautiful structure of meter & rhyme, a beat & a sample track. Though I first read The Slavery of Free Verse years ago, I rediscovered the paradox of freedom in structure not through poetry, but in the essay-a-day challenge.

The Gift of Structure

My wife is brilliant & thoughtful; I want to be more like her when I grow up. In her undergrad, she researched Ancient Near Eastern wisdom literature & discovered a common theme: freedom in structure. The odes & proverbs of our distant past arose in a time of supreme disorder, a time when man approached civilization with an eye towards an untamable world. Yet, across these times & places poets described the wise man & the fool, those who follow Wisdom & those in bed with Folly. A common feature distinguishing the two is appearance of freedom & the reality of freedom. The fool follows the desires of his heart wherever they lead, unable to consider the due consequences of his freedom. The wise man weighs the path ahead & finds a freedom in desire submitted to Wisdom. Thus to the mind of our ancient humanity, wisdom concerns the structures which gift desire that which it really wants, not what it merely likes or prefers. Again, we find the paradox of the gift of freedom in structure.

Freedom in an Essay-A-Day

I began this challenge to cultivate & prepare for future writing. I considered the end & judged a particular path to arrive there. Along the way, as my wife may attest, writing an essay every day, even in the shortest month of the year, rarely bore the appearance of freedom. Some days contained fully-developed prompts, a strong thesis, rigid structure, & a definite landing. Others saw a struggling man attempting to coherently say anything worth saying. I'd like to think my writing improved. But even if it did not and my intentions failed to actualize what I desired, I still discovered a particular kind of freedom in the bounds of a challenge.

Where my mind tends to connect dot after dot, idea after idea, thought after thought, reference after reference, I bound myself to a thesis. I glued myself to an essay. I submitted my inquiry to those who were brave & kind enough to read. Though an essay may not express the same honey-richness as a poem, I am discovering the freedom to think thoughts through, to concisely connect, & to augment arguments. Yes, the present participle fits as I continue to discover the various freedoms in writing words worth writing. In the end, I recommend the writing of essays & commend those who do so. For the freedom to think well is not a sufficient condition to live well, but it is a necessary condition to do so.

Thank you to you all who have been kind & brave enough to read.