Essays and Assays

Essays and Assays

I.
At age 62, I am enjoying the essay form immensely. Although we learn how to write essays in adolescence, this is yet another example of the maxim, “youth is wasted on the young.”

I think that once you’ve experienced the death of a parent or a friend, gone through a divorce, bankruptcy or prolonged unemployment, the essay has the secure grasp to match the gravitas. The essay is terrific for capturing life.

The essay is a kind of prose poem, or said a different way, a poem is an essay with intentional line breaks, internal rhyme and word compression.

II.
As in a poem, there is no limit to subject matter in an essay, under the infinitely malleable rules of creative non-fiction. If you want to write an essay about an avocado, or guacamole, or the recent foodie trend of avocado toast, then have at it.

Author John McPhee wrote an entire book about oranges, Oranges (1967). McPhee’s book The Founding Fish (2002), is a history of the shad, going back to the days of George Washington and Henry David Thoreau.

Lately, I’ve been enjoying the essays of Barry Lopez, notably About This Life (1998), with insightful and poignant deep dives into the domains of air cargo, Anagama pottery kilns, and “Orchids on Volcanoes,” an essay about the Galapagos Islands. With the well-traveled Barry Lopez, whose alter ego is a hermit living remotely on the McKenzie River in the Oregon Cascades, you always come away with extra stamps in your passport.

III.
I might also describe the essay as a journal entry gone wild, or a blog fueled by literary adrenaline, the fight-or-flight mechanism fully engaged; the essay as a form of survival. The writer will not rest until she subdues the beast of the unknown.

Which leads me to the essay as a form of knowing. Thus the title of this essay, and the similar sounding noun, assay, meaning “trial, test of quality,” from the Latin exagium “a weighing.” In the 14th Century, the word took on a meaning of “trial of purity of a metal.”

To my scientist friends, an assay has the modern meaning of “an investigative (analytic) procedure in laboratory medicine, mining, pharmacology, environmental biology and molecular biology for qualitatively assessing or quantitatively measuring the presence, amount, or functional activity of a target entity.” Thank you, Wikipedia.

Is this also not a terrific definition for an essay? The essayist (pharmacologist) perches at her desk (bench) in her office (the laboratory), attired in a smart cardigan (lab coat), and with unlimited analysis, conducts an extensive, underfunded, investigation into her subject, with the end result a qualitative assessment of her subject’s essence.

IV.
What I really like about the assay association is the word “purity.”

When you noodle around in the etymology of the word “pure,” you’re going to bump into words like “simple,” “clean” and “absolute.” Dive deeper into the Proto-Indo-European roots of pure, and you’re going to find 7,500 years of usage based on a cleansing ritual, which surfaces in Middle Irish as “fresh” and “new.”

With this derivation, the essayist assumes a priestly role, leading a purification ceremony for her subject. For this we shall need an altar, fire, and alchemy.

V.
I find that the adult writers I coach benefit when I can give them prompts.
For essayists, it’s helpful when some outside entity provides the match for the kindling, the faded map to the territory, or the combination to the safe.

“Dig here,” or, “start with that coffee mug next to the pen.”

What about that red squirrel in the hillside oak outside the window?

Why do people rock climb? What is the history of the carabiner?

Why is there a dormant volcano named Sibley between Oakland and Orinda?

What is the salinity of San Pablo Bay, and why?

What happened to the divorce rate during the Covid-19 pandemic?

Here, our assays begin.

Jon Obermeyer is a poet and author based in Berkeley, CA. He holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from UNC Greensboro, where he studied under Robert Watson, Lee Zacharias and Fred Chappell. Jon published his first collection of essays, The Low Wire: Meditations on Loss and Creativity, in 2016. The essay above will appear in Laying Low later this year.

Photograph by author: “Mt Tamalpais, As Seen from Highway 37 near Vallejo”