When a Poem Becomes an Essay

Happy Monday, friends!

I’ve been reflecting on the many poets who are also fine essayists and thinking of the psychic terrain these two forms share. Here’s some useful background information on the essay, which intimates, I think, why writers find it easy to transition between the two forms:

The term essay comes from the French for "trial" or "attempt." French author Michel de Montaigne coined the term when he assigned the title Essais to his first publication in 1580. In "Montaigne: A Biography" (1984), Donald Frame notes that Montaigne "often used the verb essayer (in modern French, normally to try) in ways close to his project, related to experience, with the sense of trying out or testing." (Richard Nordquist)

In 2021, I learned about the Scottish physiologist John Scott Haldane, who was responsible for finding a treatment for decompression sickness, otherwise known as the bends. The experiments leading up to the discovery were astonishing (they involved goats). I knew immediately I wanted to write a poem about this…

“The Bends” opens Wound is the Origin of Wonder:

Much of what had struck me about this scientific discovery, and about Haldane himself, was left out of the poem. Indeed, much of what I couldn’t shake about this story was prosaic—it could not easily be distilled into poetic language, but meandered through (as I would discover while writing) my own adolescence.

Soon after, I had the opportunity to write for Diagram’s March music-themed essay “competition,” a play on March Madness. One of the songs available for explication was “Zombie” by The Cranberries.

Suddenly, everything clicked.

Not really. But something did, suddenly and slowly, come into view about Haldane’s story, O’Riordan’s haunting voice, and my brief grunge phase.

Sometimes, when an idea is too wide and meandering for a poem, it shifts into prose that allows for storytelling while still capturing the affinities of poetry.

Here’s my essay on adolescence, Haldane, the bends, and “Zombie.”

***

At thirteen, the irrefutably coolest member of my friend group went grunge, and it became necessary for all of life to be inflected through the fact; slowly at first, courtesy of a spiralbound notebook scribbled in Sharpie, and culminating in the purchase of a pair of UFO pants donned in high summer on the beaches of Montauk while eating lemon ice cream served out of a frozen lemon.

As my parents smiled good-naturedly over their matching gazpachos, quietly swallowing their disappointment that their only offspring had the looks of Samara Morgan and the personality of a nursery schoolteacher, I clutched my grenade of porous yellow and relayed the events of that afternoon. I’d been introduced to a new song, the song, a vintage song released a decade prior—maybe my parents had heard of it when they weren’t busy being criminally dull. I plugged a first-generation iPod into primitive portable speakers and played “Zombie” on loop until the battery gave out. It was the sort of song, I reasoned, even they, normal pant-wearing types, could appreciate. So universal was its suffering, and it mentioned 1916, which was more or less their childhoods.

“Zombie” is a protest song by the Irish alternative rock band The Cranberries written during a period of Irish national conflict called, rather literally, The Troubles. Few calamaties carry the sting of civil war which The Troubles, a 30-year low-grade fever of ethno-nationalist struggle and dissent, very narrowly avoided. “Zombie” is a song about violence that, in the way of all good mimetic fallacy, is relentlessly circuitous on its journey back to chorus. It succeeds heartily at that compressed, claustrophobic effect, and is therefore wildly irritating unless you’ve expressly ordered it, like that one time a year you crave the dish you loathed in childhood but would pay $34 for a chef to reimagine in a seasonal reduction. It is full of pathos and unapologetically anthemic, made even more so by its message—1916 says it all…sort of. My friends and I spent the eighth grade convinced it was a song about World War I, not the 1916 Irish insurrection known as the Easter Rising which killed thousands over the course of a week, and led to the founding of the Republic of Ireland. We cut Dolores slack on the dates, which according to the principles of eyeliner, could be smudged. And we sustained this conviction without hint of self-scrutiny, which was another delightful part of being young.  

On the subject of things we took for granted—metabolisms that could withstand spectacular quantities of sugar, boys and their comically elaborate advances, the very idea of sleeping in—what strikes me now is how cruel and petty we often were towards one another. How could we be the little shits we were? is more or less the question as we delivered our mercurial, half-baked truths to each other’s faces, mascara running from a string of unnecessary confessions.

Nothing felt quite in balance those years, though nothing felt expressly perilous either. Now, days organized around modalities of health and wellness founder, despite our best efforts, on an undercurrent of demise. If this won’t kill you, that will. And that, perhaps, is the greatest distinction between what runs in the blood at 13 versus at 32; that early, misplaced nihilism before you’ve learned the term for it is the purest form of verve and faith in the world.

“Zombie” draws its devastating charm from the chorus in which O’Riordan—a very fine musician—bleats, for there is no other verb, the word “zombie,” the ending vowel elided so as to sound like “bay” or “baah,” the approximate sound of goat speech. A bold choice, and one that time has rendered apocryphal: no one begins singing “Zombie” for any other reason than that a sudden noise, mechanical or otherwise, has brought the chorus to mind. Suddenly, you’re back in a friend’s basement dyeing your hair Cream of Raven and looking up GIFs of the anarchist symbol to draw on your wrist.

There is, of course, a goat edition of the song in which the music video has been superimposed with footage of actual goats bleating, because: the internet:

But I would now like to tell you a story about goats.

In 1905, a Scottish physiologist named John Scott Haldane was commissioned by the British Royal Navy to solve a curious problem. English divers were resurfacing with a fatal illness. Autopsies performed revealed bubbles in major organs, as though their very blood had turned effervescent.

And so Haldane, a character to be certain, and one whose family motto was “suffer,” was called to work out a set of principles for safe, staged decompression. The ailment never struck divers who stayed above 33 feet, so it was merely a matter of determining at what rate to acclimate divers to changes of air pressure. Haldane had a penchant for practical experimentation; he once entombed himself in order to record the physiological effects of asphyxiation.

For this particular experiment, however, he used goats.

85 goats were gathered in London. In groups of eight, they were placed inside chambers whose air was compressed then normalized at different rates. They were subsequently released into the yard and observed.

Now, I admit the image of a herd of goats stumbling about on a makeshift pasture while a line of humorless scientists document their symptoms—stiff legs, crossed eyes, weakness on one side of the haunch—is rather droll. A part of me is even tempted by the obvious “zombie goats” joke. It’s there, and a different writer could stick the landing.

Instead, I see white lab coats flapping in the wind. I hear the shallow breaths of young men in decompression chambers, nicknamed “diver’s ovens,” as they await a cure for what usually killed. I think of how the illness is colloquially called the bends because its afflicted bend over as nitrogen wrecks havoc on joints and muscles, leaving the heart frothing.

I think of how only one out of the 85 goats survived to the end of the experiment.
I will never go scuba diving because I would have to tell the young captain how the mechanism of decompression was devised, and he would smile tolerantly, shielded by the vigor of his youth. Or else, he might ask a follow-up question, and I would have to face yet again how pathetic and soft I am, how difficult it is for me to bear even what is meant to be a happy tale of progress when I am still not over mourning the 84 goats sacrificed to this twisted art.

“It’s the same old theme since 1916,” O’Riordan sings, landing a perfect rhyme. It’s the same old theme since the cave paintings, Homer, the Old Testament. What is less obvious is the violence synonymous with progress, the discomfiting reality that those same advancements that allowed a navy to maintain its edge on the brink of catastrophic world wars makes it possible for vacationers to misidentify tropical fish—the scientific violence inseparable from human progress. Is there a distorted electric guitar riff that captures the ways we hurt each other in the name of the future?

Are there any anthems for that?

xM