The Fourth State of Matter

Content Warning: This analysis discusses gun violence and suicide.

Jo Ann Beard’s essay “The Fourth State of Matter” uses a braided structure to recount a personal history of her own sideline autobiographical experiences. By pursuing the strands of her braided essay, which consist of her aging collie, chaotic squirrels living in her house, her impending divorce from her husband, and her workplace relationships, Beard delays the central action and tension of the essay artfully.

The essay is written from the perspective of a first-person narrator and primarily in the present tense. There are small departures from this structure, which foreshadow and move the essay’s action forward. One such move involves the moments where Beard slips into Gang Lu’s consciousness, in which readers get insight into the brewing anger he holds for his colleagues and later experience the horrific play-by-play of the shooting from his perspective. Another involves the moment where Beard leaps forward in time to the aftermath of the shooting as she brings a friend of Robert Smith’s into the room where, readers will later learn, he died. Beard’s narration, or her perceived consciousness, moves in time around the tragic events that plagued her life.

The first three strands of the braided essay all represent stressors in Beard’s life, and the final thread, her workplace experiences, culminates in the terrible event that overshadows all other issues. These interruptions and stressors occupying Beard become a comparably benign brew compared to what is to come.

The essay’s braided structure is clear in the way that Beard consistently alternates between every major thread, as though each impending issue is building in tension. The story moves home with either the collie, the squirrels, or both, and then back to her work life, then back to her home life, and so the rhythm continues. One of the themes central to this essay is Grief, Loss, and the Illusion of Control. The imagery of her ailing dog coupled with squirrels invading Beard’s spare bedroom reveal Beard’s passiveness in response to these disruptive problems. Her passivity is potentially a result of an overload of personal problems and her subsequent inability to think clearly and decisively about any particular one. These anxieties feel inescapable in their perpetual rotation, suggesting Beard feels extreme overwhelm.

Another result of the delay fostered by the braided structure is that in each of these paragraphs, there are small hints at the violence to come. She foreshadows the graduate student Gang Lu’s terrible, premeditated mass shooting in the tension in her life and in the off-kilter interactions with Lu. In this structure, Beard is able to also carefully construct moments of relief in the humorous squirrel anecdotes and in a conversation with her friend, which make the dramatic tonal shift in Beard’s rendering of the terrible act that much more unexpected and stirring. The introduction of the mass shooting and her loss of her colleagues occurs in the last third of the essay.

Celestial images, such as of the Milky Way, planets, moons, and, particularly, the vastness of the sky, including its indifference to humanity, reinforce the theme of Grief, Loss, and the Illusion of Control, and serve as a spiritual space late in the essay for Beard to process her grief and loss. Ultimately Beard’s shifting relationship to the celestial after her immense loss embodies the theme’s overarching impact on the essay as she wrestles with grief in response to an act of senseless violence that she had no control over.

This imagery also establishes the theme of The Tension Between the Scientific/Rational and the Emotion/Spiritual. Beard establishes that she is not part of the space-physics department in terms of discipline but is there in her editorial capacity managing the space-physics monthly, which puts her outside of the scientific/rational. Beard’s lack of alignment with the sciences and the rational is affirmed throughout the essay, especially as she discusses the decision of whether to euthanize her collie with her colleague Christopher Goertz. Beard’s response to Goertz’s suggestion, a suggestion stemming from someone aligned with the sciences, that she put the collie down to alleviate the animal’s suffering—an arguably rational and practical one—is strongly emotionally driven: “This makes my heart pound. Absolutely not, I cannot do it. And then I weaken and say what I really want: for her to go to sleep and not wake up, just slip out of her skin and into the other world” (Paragraph 39). Her emotional stagnancy in the face of this extreme difficulty affects her inability to emotionally cope with the squirrels or her impending divorce, making her more or less frozen in time as life comes at her, unable to change her circumstances. This sensitivity to the death of her collie also foreshadows the intensity of emotions in response to the tragedy of the mass shooting and also deeply contrasts with the deaths devoid of peace awaiting her colleagues.

In the aftermath of the shooting, the sky, once a point of academic study for Beard, becomes a symbol of emotional and spiritual solace as she seems to commune with the dead, particularly Christopher Goertz, through the celestial: “I’ve propped myself so I’ll be able to see when dawn starts to arrive. For now there are still planets and stars. Above the black branches of a maple is the Dog Star, Sirius, my personal favorite. The dusty rings of Saturn. Io, Jupiter’s moon” (Paragraph 130). This image echoes the essay’s opening scene, when Beard takes her dog out to pee in the middle of the night (one of many trips), only now, grief-stricken, Beard lies down on the blue vinyl sofa dedicated to the dogs and looks up at the sky.

Where once this stargazing was a relief from the care involved with her collie, it is now a complex point of pain and reflection: “When I think I can’t bear it for one more minute I reach down and nudge her gently with my dog arm” (Paragraph 131). The night, which Beard describes as “a pocket of silence,” is still also somewhat a place of solace: Beard writes, “We’re in the plasmapause, a place of equilibrium, where the forces of the earth meet the forces of the sun. I imagine it as a place of stillness, where the particles of dust stop spinning and hang motionless in deep space” (Paragraph 131). As much as the sky is now a place of pain for Beard, it is also where she can get closest to those she’s lost, particularly to Christopher Goertz; the essay closes with this interaction between Beard and a celestial Goertz.