Gretel Ehrlich

Read about Gretel Ehrlich’s essay “Spring” – BR (37) – so that you can decode her seemingly scattered exploration of love, the past, and time itself. One approach is to explore her essay as a conversation among images.

Advice about the reading work:

Note that Ehrlich’s modes of seeing include images evoked from memory, dreams, hallucination, and reflections. And many of her reflections are about an invisible concept: time. In the real world, she sees from below and she sees from above. In dreams and hallucinations, she is freed from the restraints of time and place; the laws of physics are suspended. Her exploration of all this imagery is a rich journey.

You might even approach “Spring” as if you were interpreting a dream or trying to make sense of a hallucination. In fact, she does this herself, reflecting at length on these states of meta-consciousness, or perhaps sur-reality. Deal with her dreams and hallucinations like texts that pose both problems and solutions. This approach will help you figure out just what she is telling you and showing you about “seeing,” conceived in a broad sense. Seeing, of course, is not her subject; spring is her subject – or at least her contemplation of spring opens the door to knowing what she can and cannot know.

More advice about the reading work:

Before you make the move from reading to writing, take these two preliminary steps:

• Locate the end of the beginning, and the beginning of the end of Ehrlich’s essay. Draw lines between paragraphs at those junctures.
• Read the essay again, re-seeing the entire essay. Near the end, test your hypothesis about where the end of the essay begins by looking for where she begins a recursive journey, thinking her way back through the whole essay. These paragraphs will feel like a gathering toward a resolution of the ideas, images, scenes, dreams, hallucinations and reflections that preceded it. You can decode the essay by watching Ehrlich decode it in her ending.

The writing assignment:

In one thoughtful page, explain the necessity of Ehrlich’s ending. Why happens in those final paragraphs?

Advice:

• Resist the temptation to leap into answering the question. Take care of the reader’s needs first by contextualizing you claims about the text with some brief representation.
• Better yet, don’t make representation a separate task; integrate representation with claim-making and reflection. Choose key terms and concepts to quote, not full sentences, and this kind of integration will be much easier.
• As always, include MLA-style, in-text citations and a Works Cited entry for this essay at the end of your paragraph.