An Analysis of Julia Alvarez’s Poem, “Touching Bottom” Essay

In the poems first stanza, Alvargonz says, sometimes the best advice comes randomlybut without intent, how can it be advice? Perhaps full advice consists simply of sensations accept ideas, rendered into words by other and know by the self as something true. If we go by this definition, and so the random pieces of advice are, indeed, unafraid advice. She is thus saying that some of the best advice is recognized by the self and in the self, and not merely received from others. such(prenominal) advice is possibly worth more than any intentional directive, because the meaning of the advice is something that one makes for oneself.Alvarez implies that good advice is abundant, but requires some recognizingwhich is what she does. To be able to give good advice, a person must think like the liquidator of the advice, and who demote to think like the recipient than the recipient herself?Alvarez creates remarkable associations in her sagacity between randomly heard directives and the t roubles of her life she is actually both the donor and the receiver of the random advice, and whoever (or whatever) gave her the advice only has an intermediary role. These random pieces of advice are vigour like what we usually conceive advice to be, but are simply re judicial decisioners of things that she already knew. Thus these random pieces of advice that she recognizes are essentially advice that she gives to herself.In the second stanza, Alvarez talks of the power of these random bits of wisdom. She realizes that a minotaur of your own makingthat is, self-imposed limitationsputs the mind into a certain degree of paralysis, and that randomly received advice, in their simplicity, defy the power to awaken an awareness of truisms deeply buried in the subconscious. Alvarez in essence, is talking about the shock of recognition that she experiences when she hears these random bits of meaning. It takes these to remind her of her own good ideas that she may have unintentionally d iscarded into the dark tangle of her mind.Additionally, Alvarez implicitly contrasts her random bits of advice with true advice intentionally given by others withal often, such advice is derived from the experiences of the giver and not the receiver. The poem, because of its focus on accidental advice, reminds us of the tendency of people to ignore intentionally given advice, no result how good, because advice is usually given based on the perceived needs of the recipient although these needs are often misidentified. This contrasts with her accidental bits of advice, which by their very record are good and well received.The random advice that Alvarez hears makes her capable of mournful bottom. Although touching bottom in general usage has the negative meaning of gain the lowest point of something (such as when a company goes bankrupt), what she means by having touched bottom in my life is that she realized and recognized the staple and most important aspects of her life. The ex amples that she gives of these bits of advice, such as Please hold by the silence (which she is able to connect to her problem of writers block) are of secondary importance, serving only to illustrate and strengthen the poems main point, which is that one needs only to look into the self to attain wisdom.