The Essayist's Notebook

I am engaged in writing an essay. It is in pursuit of my own sense of wonder. At this point I do not know if it will be published. If I am honest, the driver to finish it may be the need for material for a proposed book of essays. Otherwise I am content to leave it becoming. In a sense it has always been becoming; since the first days as a child that I looked at pictures of the sky in a book. That in-itself I now see as revealing; for the curiosity of what lay beyond, came not from simply standing during the day or at night and looking into the eastern void, but sitting with a book on my lap looking at a photograph; naming the stars I had just been observing. Perhaps the essay I am striving to write was born in that moment, in a boy of eleven years of age.

I seem always to have favoured a view of the east, this perhaps is a declaration of both my choice of stance, and an honesty in respect of my attention. As a young long-distance runner, I always delighted in running in the pre-dawn of day amid my rotating friends and family on the eastern horizon; and tracked the passing of my time with the appearance of Venus sometimes towards the north, sometimes, the south, but always on that eastern horizon. Until of course she was not, preferring to spend some time in the west. Most especially on those occasions when she hung low in the south-western sky and claimed our attention with her brightness. She was impossible to ignore. I almost lived by her oscillation upon the ecliptic.

And now a sudden illumination arrives about my home in the province of La Soule (Xiberoa in Basque) south-west France. A 16th century stone house on a east-west alignment. The balcony of my bedroom facing due east, a raised terrace facing south-east and the curiously functional eskeratz with its grand double doors facing full west. A geometry unique to this valley in the Pyrenees. Perhaps this is what drew me here. When shopping for a house in the south-west I knew instantly that this is where I wanted to be.

My home in Ireland offers the same disposition; front door, windows and patio, all looking directly east across the Irish sea offering the blessing of darkness. An ink-stained backcloth on which to find our way, navigating in red and green against a cosmos in black and revealing shades of white; cold white, warm white, the light of the wanderers we call the planets. We are blessed even with our local navigation light on Rockabill; it is a sectored light, which means that when shone towards us, on the coast, the light is red, and offers no disturbance to us as we scan the night sky with our binoculars. That view has sponsored more than a few magazine features, about the night sky or the re-telling of the stories of King Caphaeus, his wife Cassiopeia, their daughter Andromeda and suitor Perseus. One can imagine them today, King Caphaeus resigned to live with the consequences of his desire for a trophy wife. And she, Cassiopeia obsessed with her own beauty, posing for her Instagram account and arguing incessantly with her daughter Andromeda in their reality TV series; and perhaps flirting with Perseus her daughter's suitor. The stars were gods, but as flawed as humans whose power only magnified the impact and intensity of their frailties. Even so, oftimes, lying with my back on the deck of the boat, just observing their nightly celestial play, I would glance at them, not for another episode in their story, but to ask them, Is this the right way?.

So years later, it is a winter night. I am seated on my balcony once again, gazing at the constellations; re-imagining their stories; their adventurous arrival here through time. And with the habit of the eleven year old boy I return to my parlour, take a Surface tablet in my hands and navigate what we know of the view. A world of knowledge at my fingertips I scan and scroll my way through fields of notion and anti-notion, of conjecture and refutation. How old is the universe, how big is the universe, and the curious contradictions between our models of physics and astronomy. If two electrons must agree about the sending and receiving of a photon, then how can the James Webb telescope be taking a picture of the begining of the universe, at the far reaches of what scientists think is existence; 13.5 billion light years across. It makes no sense to the reflecting elder or the eleven year old boy still engaged with his wonder.

And then the question arrives: What if extension were a function of sentience? Immediately I realize this is a black hole. And I grip hard upon the outer rim. I cannot allow it to draw me in uncontrollably. Another immediacy. I rely now entirely upon the practice of essay. Open a OneNote page on the tablet and begin to explore the black hole.

David Marshall Montory

A Note: This note began as an attempt to understand where an essay came from. In looking backwards, however, it revealed something unexpected. The essay did not begin with a decision to write, nor with a topic, nor even with a question. It emerged from a pattern of attention extending across a lifetime: a child naming stars from a book, a runner watching Venus on the horizon, a sailor trusting the night sky, and an older man returning once again to wonder. The question that ultimately arrived was simply the point at which that long attention became visible.

In this sense, the note became the thing it set out to describe. What began as a recollection developed into an act of essaying. Rather than explaining the birth of an essay, it records one.

For a deeper exploration of the concepts behind this pattern of attention, see them explored at essayism.org. And for a deeper understanding of the methodology visit The Essayist.