Lyrical Essay
A lyrical essay is a kind of essay that combines poetry, essay, and memoir. A lyrical essay combines the biographical parts of a personal essay and the lyrical parts of poetry to create a more free and fluid kind of autobiography. I wrote my lyrical essay The Ant Crawls On my Hand about my relationship with sleep deprivation.
The Ant Crawls on my Hand
The smell of ants, the scent of chemical, like nail polish remover, formic acid
an ant so far from her trail,
lost girl, far from the pathway.
How did you get here?
Ant on my book, let me flip the page.
The ant is sleeping and won’t move. I can’t flip the page, she wiggles her antennae a little, doesn’t move, cute how she just sits there.
Did you know an ant only takes short naps? She can work 24/7, She can get the work done.
Did you know, Symptoms of sleep deprivation in humans start as the inability to concentrate and impaired memory; soon it progresses to hallucinations, severe mood swings, and increased chances of death. But I swear I felt that ant on my hand and I swear I saw that man in the clouds.
The ant on my hand is such a hard worker, but the paint on the paper looks like garbage. A piece of paper with paint is sometimes just a piece of paper with paint and empty thoughts. I sacrifice sleep for the hope and the feeling that I can make good art, something meaningful and beautiful. I’ll hold my breath so my heart doesn’t beat too fast as the caffeine in my vessels makes my ankles jitter, the ants on my hand accumulate until my wrist goes numb.
I just can’t open this jar
Sweet citron tea spills on the table attracting flies
And all the luminous dead little things pile onto the viscid sticky surface.
The degradation of the tendons in my wrist make it creak when I ball my fist up,
The cathartic feeling of watching the sun rise works as an adamantine engine of a brain realizes it’s done all it can, the ants scatter back into my ears leaving behind a
trail of pheromones and
toxic smelling
formic acid
Intention Statement
The Ant Crawls on my Hand is a lyrical essay about how I have a really bad and unhealthy way of working on projects. I don’t perceive myself to be working hard enough if I don’t push myself past my limits, in my mind, how can I have tried my best if I didn’t deprive myself of sleep and work until the deadline. However many of these all-nighters don’t usually make quality work, or I just never think anything I’ve made is good enough. I’ve also overworked my drawing hand to the point of carpal tunnel syndrome.
The research I included about the effects of sleep deprivation are to validate what I feel when I stay up too late, I get moody and my thoughts will start to blur. It definitely affects my judgement and usually leads me to keep myself from sleeping even more.
I included a comic I did a few years ago about a moth and a person because it was based on an experience I had while pulling an all nighter to get more art projects done for an art competition. I impulsively took a break from the art I was doing and scribbled this comic about a moth in my room. The only things awake with me at four in the morning are usually bugs and moths that orbited the light of my desk lamp. I submitted this comic along with my more finished art pieces and ironically, this impulsive and what I thought was meaningless comic, won a national award.
The research about ants is included for the same reason I wrote a comic about moths, I get insects crawling around my desk when it’s late at night or morning and ants usually release a gross chemical smell wherever they walk, I researched it and found that the ants that live in my house leave a trail of pheromones and release formic acid when they bite into things. I also wish I could only have to take minute long naps like an ant, I find them admirable for how hard they work; however, I am not an ant and I can’t work all day and night, so setting ants as the ideal worker is unhealthy and unrealistic.
I tried to break from this habit and write a lyrical essay more freely.
Lyrical Essay Production
Here is my comic muse, I cut it to represent a sleep deprived artist’s art coming to life.
Here is a screenshot of my photoshop production stage:
I masked out the different areas so I could color scans of the drawings I did.
I think I accomplished my goal with my production, initially, I wanted to make a 360 painting of my Lyrical Essay, however I ended up pivoting to make a comic. I think the comic gets my idea across and I like how I executed it.