37 pages • 1 hour read
Jo Ann BeardThe Fourth State of Matter
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1996A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Finding Stability in Chaos
Content Warning: This discussion of themes references mass shootings, school shootings, gun violence, and suicide.
Beard’s story provides multiple narrative threads that work together to build a greater picture of Beard’s life around the time of the fateful shooting. These different moving pieces are all difficult stressors for Beard, and the combination of all of them and Beard’s lack of action suggest a sense of overwhelm toward her problems. This anxious stagnancy that Beard experiences in the narrative creates building tension surrounding the mundane, which is then turned on its head after the shooting. No longer are Beard’s everyday stressors such an extreme concern, and even the squirrels in the upstairs room are missed.
There are three major threads in the story that represent mundane things out of Beard’s control. Beard establishes one of her primary stressors in the opening sentence: “The collie wakes me up about three times a night, summoning me from a great distance as I row my boat through a dim, complicated dream” (Paragraph 1). The collie, never named in the essay, is aging, tottering around “on her broomstick legs” throughout the essay (Paragraph 2), needing to be carried upstairs by Beard, having accidents in the house, falling over outside onto the grass and even down stairs. Unable to climb the stairs to where Beard’s bedroom is, Beard sleeps on a blue vinyl sofa dedicated to her dogs in her living room. The collie, while presenting a strain, is blameless in her interference in Beard’s life. In her frailty, she serves as a kind of harbinger of death in the essay, one that is helpless and awaiting death’s quiet arrival, even though the collie doesn’t pass in the course of the essay. Beard yearns for a natural, peaceful death and to avoid causing anything that would directly lead to the dog’s death. Despite the difficulty of her position of power over the collie, Beard finds comfort and stability in the daily routine that the collie provides.
Squirrels emerge quickly and serve as a second thread representing Beard’s building anxiety. During Beard’s nightly trip outside for the collie to go potty, Beard notes, “In the porch light the trees shiver, the squirrels turn over in their sleep” (Paragraph 3). Here, the squirrels seem angelic in their peaceful, natural place, but soon Beard reveals that the squirrels are “living in the spare bedroom upstairs” (Paragraph 3). In addition to the collie, the squirrels contribute to Beard sleeping in her living room, as they “come alive at night, throwing terrific parties in the spare bedroom, making thumps and crashes” (Paragraph 10). As much as the squirrels torment Beard, they serve as a source of humorous levity throughout the essay and even reveal another source of the good in humanity in the form of Beard’s friend Caroline, who comes to extract the squirrels from the house. In describing her friend, Beard writes, “I’ve seen her wrestle goats, scare off a giant snake, and express a dog’s anal glands, all in one afternoon” (Paragraph 41). She continues to describe a time when Caroline “was nursing a dead cat that was still breathing” (Paragraph 45). Caroline spoon-fed the cat baby food but later had to take it to the vet “to be euthanized” (Paragraph 45). In Caroline, like Beard, we see another expression of humanity’s gentleness, and much like the collie’s purity in her frailty, the squirrels are motiveless in the chaos they wreak in Beard’s home and life. Even in their absence at the end of the narrative, they are missed as a source of consistency.
Finally, Beard’s husband has left her without much clarity or sense of respectful communication. The cruelty of the husband lies passively in boxes in the spare bedroom he has yet to move to his new apartment—“The boxes are filled with thirteen years of his pack-ratness: [including a] collection of ancient Rolling Stones T-shirts. You know he’s turning over a new leaf when he leaves the Rolling Stones behind” (Paragraph 9)—and more aggressively in his bombarding phone calls and voicemails at home and at work: “The second and third blinks are from my husband, the across-town apartment dweller” (Paragraph 18). Caroline comments on the toxic nature of Beard’s relationship with her “vanished husband,” but Beard remains neutral in their interactions, suggesting a reliance on her husband for a sense of normalcy, despite the pain he causes her.
Grief, Loss, and the Illusion of Control
Stability is one aspect of Beard’s relationship with the individual threads, but another prevalent conversation in the text is Beard’s relationship with grief and her desire for control. The collie, established in the essay’s opening lines, is the reader’s first introduction to this theme. Throughout the essay Beard is struggling with the reality of her deteriorating collie and the impending decision she must make: when to put her down. In the course of the collie’s ailment, the sense of control and, more specifically, training shifts between Beard and the collie: “I stand her up, dry her off, put fresh blankets underneath her, carry the peed-on blankets down to the basement, stuff them into the washer and then into the dryer. By the time I bring them back upstairs they are needed again” (Paragraph 8). This is now the ritual the collie has trained Beard into, signaled by the thump of the collie’s tail against the floor. Beard describes the recalibration of control and training in the course of the essay: “In retraining her I’ve somehow retrained myself, bustling cheerfully down to the basement, arms drenched in urine, the task of doing load after load of laundry strangely satisfying. She is Pavlov and I am her dog” (Paragraph 8). While this devastating reality concludes with the final punchline “She is Pavlov and I am her dog,” it doesn’t detract from the difficult decision Beard is faced with throughout the essay, a mark of the control she arguably refuses to exert, and the impending grief she continues to stave off by not putting the collie down. Her relationship with the situation is to exert as much control as she emotionally can muster.
Caroline’s visit to help remove the squirrels invading the spare bedroom complicates this tension between grief, loss, and the illusion of control. The collie and the squirrels work almost collaboratively to disrupt Beard’s life and sleep, which Beard appears to passively accept outside of coordinating with her friend Caroline to help her. Caroline, upon her arrival at the house, takes charge in humanely extracting the squirrels, but also in chastising Beard for taking the abuse from her “vanished husband” (Paragraph 6), which Beard similarly doesn’t act against. Beard continues to take the barrage of phone calls and voicemails from the husband who has left her, without protest or much clarity as to why.
Beard’s passivity is ultimately most cruelly contrasted with the unexpected but premeditated deaths of her colleagues at the hands of graduate student Gang Lu. Lu, savagely, controls the lives of Beard’s colleagues, Christopher Goertz, Robert Smith, Linhua Shan, T. Anne Cleary, and Dwight Nicholson, and the quality of life of Miya Rodolfo-Sioson. Beard describes Lu’s premeditation in the course of the essay:
Gang Lu no longer spends his evenings in the computer lab down the hall, running simulations and thinking about magnetic forces and invisible particles; he now spends them at the firing range, learning to hit a moving target with the gun he purchased last spring (Paragraph 80).
The purchase of the gun in the spring and the regular trips to the gun range until November 1, the date of the shooting, indicate at least six to eight months of planning—an intensive sense of control to dominate all other emotions, which starkly contrasts with Beard’s passivity.
Even in carrying out the mass shooting and thus mass murder, Lu exerts a methodical sense of control, writing a letter to his sister in China on a university computer before committing the crime. He enters the seminar room and kills his colleagues execution style one by one, descends the stairs and heads to the department’s office, and continues his planned, calculated extermination of the department. Lu returns to the seminar room to ensure his dark deed is complete and fires more extraneous bullets into his colleagues. Lu heads to his final destination, “cross[ing] two streets and the green, into the second building and up the stairs” (Paragraph 100), where the office receptionist, Miya Rodolfo-Sioson, summons Anne Cleary, the administrator, from her office just in time for Lu to shoot both of them. Lu “expels the spent cartridges in the stairwell, loads new ones” (Paragraph 100); to the sound of police chasing him, he enters a vacant conference room, “takes off his coat, folds it carefully, and puts it over the back of a chair. Checks his watch: twelve minutes since it began. Places the barrel against his right temple. Fires” (Paragraph 101). Lu asserts the ultimate sense of control in evading the prosecution and the consequences of his actions by taking his own life. The loss that Beard feels at the hands of this malicious control is much more significant than her previous struggles. In the night with the collie, she must recreate a sense of control to manage her feelings. Instead of the opposite, she wakes the collie for late-night bathroom breaks, searching the stars for meaning and resolution. The relationship between control and loss in the essay is a constant push and pull.
The Tension Between the Scientific/Rational and the Emotion/Spiritual
Another recurring theme throughout this essay is the tension between the scientific and rational versus the emotional and spiritual. By nature of Beard working in the space-physics department, this element of the theme establishes itself organically: Beard, in her capacity as the managing editor of the department’s monthly publication, works with a group of space physicists. The fact that their work is particularly to do with the stars, moons, space, and thus the celestial also invites the spiritual into this tension, since the sky is a site of spirituality for many religious. While this muddies the dichotomy, it productively muddies it for the essay. Beard is consistently surrounded by scientific explanations for cosmic phenomena yet seeks to find spiritual reasoning simultaneously. For her, these elements both compete and work together.
Early on in the essay, this distinction is fairly stark; the skies are deeply associated with Beard’s work, which she distances herself from, as when she says, “They’re speaking in physics, so I’m left out of the conversation” (Paragraph 70). This gulf persists as Beard discusses how to handle her ailing collie, to which her colleague Christopher Goertz very directly asserts she should euthanize the animal to put her out of her suffering. Beard quickly rejects such a solution: “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). This notion of death, of “the other world,” evokes a quiet sense of spirituality, which recurs at the end of the essay in the aftermath of the shooting as Beard uses the sky to process her grief.
After learning about and processing the deaths of her colleagues through the news broadcast and after all her friends and her husband have gone home, Beard is left alone in her house, still sleeping on her “blue vinyl dog couch” despite her now squirrel-free upstairs (Paragraph 10). She props herself up to “be able to see when dawn starts to arrive” (Paragraph 130), but what she sees now are “planets and stars. Above the black branches of a maple is the Dog Star, Sirius…The dusty rings of Saturn. Io, Jupiter’s moon” (Paragraph 130). This echoes the opening sequence of the essay, as she gazes at these same celestial specimens, but this stargazing shifts to hold a certain pain: “When I think I can’t bear it for one more minute I reach down and nudge [the collie] gently with my dog arm” (Paragraph 131). Bearing pain is a recurring action Beard struggles with throughout the essay, but in relation to gazing at the sky, it is a new pain for Beard in the aftermath of the shooting.
Ultimately, Beard combines the elements of the scientific and emotional in her relationship with the skies after the shooting: “In a few hours the world will resume itself, but for now we’re in a pocket of silence. We’re in the plasmapause, a place of equilibrium, where the forces of the earth meet the forces of the sun” (Paragraph 131). Here Beard casts the night as a collapsing of earth and the celestial. Beard continues, “I imagine it as a place of stillness, where the particles of dust stop spinning and hang motionless in deep space” (Paragraph 131). In this portion of this passage, the scientific and spiritual have collapsed into one, confirmed as Beard talks directly to Goertz as she holds out the amber pendant he brought her from Poland. “Like this?” she asks, presumably inquiring about how his death aligned with that of the fly encased in amber. “Exactly,” her imagined Goertz replies (Paragraph 132-33). The night and the collapsing of the scientific and the spiritual allows Beard to seek solace in clarifying the deaths of her colleagues, including her particularly close friend and colleague Christopher Goertz
