letter

Chelsea,

Your reverie is a compelling examination of the process of entering in and out of sleep, especially the dream state, and what this process means for your waking life. The epigraph by Borges that introduces your paper suggests that the falling into and emerging from sleep is also a metaphor for your writing, and this, of course, gives another dimension to your paper. You are very adept at recording and interrogating your sensations (almost Poe-like) and using different expressive (e.g. interior monologue/dialogue) modes within your poetic structure and tone of your essay. Your question, “Don’t you see yourself watching you?" in many ways points to precisely what you do in this piece.

Your metaphor of “the eye pierced by sight” is uncannily like Roland Barthes’ identification of an element which interests him in photographs (We are reading his work for class next week). He calls it the “punctum”—“sting, speck, cut.” He says: “A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).” You have also meditated on time and space in the context of moving between different levels of consciousness.

I have questioned a few of the words you’ve chosen. For example, does the eye experience the nerves that surface from fear? What are you conveying by referring to the “internalized city of dreams” as a “sewer”?

We can discuss this further in conference.