The Three Poles of Description

The Three Poles of Description

Aldous Huxley
Essays belong to a literary species whose extreme variability can be studied most effectively within a three-poled frame of reference. There is the pole of the 1) personal and the autobiographical; there is the pole of the 2) objective, the factual, the concreteparticular; and there is the pole of the 3) abstract-universal.

The Three Poles of Description

1) Personal, autobiographical
I like that butterfly

2) Objective, factual, concrete-particular

Its actually a moth, Lucerne Moth, Nomophila nearctica

3) Abstract, universal
Does knowledge increase appreciation? To name a thing is to know it, to value it as distinct from others in its order and class. But is the moth, wrongly called, less seen? Does a person without language see less. I remember learning the names of trees [comes back to autobiographical]
The Three Poles of Description

Pole 1: Personal & Autobiographical

a. The physical dimensionsthe seen, heard, smelled, tasted, and touched. I guess I remembered clearest of all the early mornings, when the lake was cool and motionless, remembered how the bedroom smelled of the lumber it was made of and of the wet woods whose scent entered through the screen.
From Once More to the Lake

The Three Poles of Description

On afternoons when he came home from work sober, we flung ourselves at him for hugs, and felt against our ribs the telltale lump in his coat. In the barn we tumbled on the hay and heard beneath our sneakers the crunch of buried glass. We tugged open a drawer in his workbench, looking for screwdrivers or crescent wrenches, and spied a gleaming six-pack among the tools. Playing tag, we darted around the house just in time to see him sway on the rear stoop and heave a finished bottle into the woods. In his good night kiss we smelled the cloying sweetness of Clorets, the mints he chewed to camouflage his dragon's breath.
From Under the Influence.
The Three Poles of Description

Personal & Autobiographical (cont.)

b. The psychological/emotional dimensions the regretted, feared, doubted, hoped for, longed for, ashamed of, questioned
Such waltzing was hard, terribly hard for with a boy's scrawny arms I was trying to hold my tipsy father upright. From Under the Influence.
Note: this quote alludes to the poem My Fathers Waltz.

The Three Poles of Description

States of mind and emotional intensities are often described through metaphor.
Crouching in the dark corner of the basement [.] Wailing, screaming, the saddest melody youve ever heard, the animal cries until the flood of tears until the crashing waves mate and divide, growing into a wall that crashes down, pulling the animal down to the deepest depths. There is no air down there. Only the suffocating waters that pour into the lungs making it blissfully hard to fight for life. The dark of midnight, the silence of nothing envelopes it like a warm and welcoming blanket.
--From a past student writer

The Three Poles of Description

Mother watched him go with arms crossed over her chest, her face closed like the lid on a box of snakes.
After a scene in Under the Influence when the father leaves home (again)

The Three Poles of Description

Another metaphor
The secret bores under the skin, gets in the blood, into the bone, and stays there. Long after you have supposedly been cured of malaria, the fever can flare up, the tremors can shake you. So it is with the fevers of shame. You swallow the bitter quinine of knowledge, and you learn to feel pity and compassion toward the drinker. Yet the shame lingers in your marrow, and, because of the shame, anger.
From Under the Influence.

The Three Poles of Description

Pole 2: Objective & Factual

The expository dimensionsdefinitions, facts history, background, myths, descriptions of processes and phenomena (natural cycles, forces of nature, how machinery works.)
Read Whites paragraph that begins Peace and goodness and jollity page 4. Here is part:

The Three Poles of Description

My boy loved our rented outboard, and his great desire was to achieve single-handed mastery over it, and authority, and he soon learned the trick of choking it a little (but not too much), and the adjustment of the needle valve. Watching him I would remember the things you could do with the old one-cylinder engine with the heavy flywheel, how you could have it eating out of your hand if you got really close to it spiritually. Motor boats in those days didn't have clutches, and you would make a landing by shutting off the motor at the proper time and coasting in with a dead rudder. But there was a way of reversing them, if you learned the trick, by cutting the switch and putting it on again exactly on the final dying revolution of the flywheel so that it would kick back against compression and begin reversing. Approaching a dock in a strong following breeze, it was difficult to slow up sufficiently by the ordinary coasting method, and if a boy felt he had complete mastery over his motor, he was tempted to keep it running beyond its time and then reverse it a few feet from the dock. It took a cool nerve, because if you threw the switch a twentieth of a second too soon you would catch the flywheel when it still had speed enough to go up past center, and the boat would leap ahead, charging bull-fashion at the dock.

An amazingly detailed description of how to dock a boat that has an old one-cylinder engine. Can you add a description of a process to your piece?
The Three Poles of Description

Examples from Under the Influence

The Biblical story of the lunatic and the swine is retold (page 738). Followed by this reflection on it:

Hearing the story in Sunday school, my friends thought mainly of the pigs. (How big a splash did they make? Who paid for the lost pork?) But I thought of the redeemed lunatic, who bathed himself and put on clothes and calmly sat at the feet of Jesus, restored-so the Bible said-to "his right mind. When drunk, our father was clearly in his wrong mind. [returns here to his own life, the autobiographical pole]
From Under the Influence.

The Three Poles of Description

Pole 3: Abstract & Universal

The abstract, non-physical dimensionthe reflected upon, the wondered about, the questioned. Deep thinking. Reaching out with the mind for new connections. Includes
Epiphanies Discussions of values, morals, ethics Realizations that were connected to a group of people, to all humanity, to natural cycles, to mystery.

May be blended with

Emotions in reaction to above, and so pole 1-b, the psychological/emotional Stories and myths (pole 2)

The Three Poles of Description

I saw the dragonfly alight on the tip of my rod as it hovered a few inches from the surface of the water. It was the arrival of the fly that convinced me beyond any doubt that everything was as it always had been, that the years were a mirage and that there had been no years.
an insight that reaches beyond the particular to affirm a universal truth (Charles Phillips).
The Three Poles of Description

Blending of all poles

(especially 1 and 3)

A stillness settles in my heart and is carried to my hand [pole 1 someone doing something]. It is the quietude of resolve layered over fear [pole 3, abstract]. And it is this resolve that lowers us, my knife and me, deeper and deeper into the person beneath. It is an entry into the body that is nothing like a caress; still, it is among the gentlest of acts. [Pole 3, what IS surgery] Then stroke and stroke again, and we are joined by other instruments, hemostats and forceps, until the wound blooms with strange flowers whose looped handles fall to the sides in steely array. [pole 2, slightly: describes the process of surgery] You turn aside to wash your gloves. [pole 1, person doing something] It is a ritual cleansing. One enters this temple doubly washed. Here is man as microcosm, representing in all his parts the earth, perhaps the universe. [Pole 3 big time: the body represents the whole universe]
From surgeon Richard Selzers essay The Knife
The Three Poles of Description

Bonus point question

up to 50 points

Even though it is rich in descriptions of the personal and factual (poles 1 & 2), Once More to the Lake is known for reaching for the 3rd polethe abstract & universal. The author realizes that, in a sense, nothing has changed; the lake is the same, time really has not passed at all. In your opinion, does Under the Influence ever reach beyond the personal & factual and try to describe what is abstract and universal? Explain how and where, with quotes.
The Three Poles of Description