Patrick James-Hep Response

[Sondra Perl]

#577

What is most striking to me about Mary Pinard’s essay is the form that she utilizes. A segmented essay, there is a wonderful, recursive quality to her writing as she explores images of flight and freedom. Whether it’s the anecdote regarding the woman on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” or her own adventures on the trapeze, Pinard’s striking images connect important themes of creativity, loss, and freedom through ideas of flight. Moreover, each segment of the essay raises the stakes of her subject matter, especially as she explores the profound sense of loss she felt after her mother’s death. “Over time I got good at filling in that huge space that was her absence,” she writes, “explanations, stories full of sad, sad endings, and occasionally a scrap of a small story of hope: there was still that flying going on in my head, that leap into freedom” (31).

Interspersed within these sharp, lyrical expressions of grief are informative descriptions of trapeze artistry, the history of the circus, and a brief explanation of the word hep, “which in trapeze parlance signals a change and means ‘Go!'” (35). I find that Pinard’s shift in tone here creates a compelling tension, pulling back on the essay’s inherent emotionality, if only to return to it at a later, more effective moment. This ability to shift emotional registers allows Pinard to be both meditative and discursive, and her writing develops a fugal momentum as the affective resonances of flying become more clear.

My favorite sentences in the essay: “From that day, I was practicing my own art of flying, both those endless flight patterns in my mind as well as my other mode of flying, which is writing. I’ve also understood that my initial attraction to the woman on the flying trapeze was no doubt psychologically connected to the loss, just months prior, of my own mother in that violent car accident. It seems to me entirely possible that the black-haired, jeweled flyer, literally swinging into my mind’s eye at almost the same moment in time when my mother flew forever out of my view, was a form shaped by my own grief and love and need for repair” (36). With these sentences, Pinard is able to make clear the connections between the beautiful “jeweled flyer,” the violent flight of her mother from the car, and the reparative aspects of flights of fancy (i.e. writing). Through a conflation of grace, violence, and creativity, Pinard articulates her emotional attachment to flight, either through the trapeze or her own work in poetry. These modes of flying provide a means of escape and healing for Pinard, especially within the painful context of loss and grief.

[Website Services Admin]

#589

Patrick, ‘the conflation of grace, violence, and creativity’ is a great way to articulate not only the tone of the story, but the structure. After reading your response, it seems that her tone seem to mimic the cyclical structure of the piece, where she’s creative when she is talking about the more journalistic/informative aspects of her story, graceful when describing her experiences with trapeze and – not necessarily violent – but sort of mournful/pained when discussing her family history.

I wonder how the story changes if it is read through a different lens – grief, for example – than one of flight and freedom.

[Author]

Posts