A Sentence Space: a Manifesto
A sentence is a settlement of parts, a happy arrangement — I write to settle myself — although my subject matter may disturb or challenge. I hope so. This blog is my play space. I also write to play: to make shapes, to produce images, make unexpected arrangements. I write to replenish my voice but also to pay attention: to focus, to adjust my lens. I write to find my subject and that takes a while. I have to play through several drafts and versions. Play is also work until I find that surprising alignments between words. This is also a space for whimsy, for dreaming, for opening up space — extra-territorial, moon-lit, sunlit, whatever she stumbles upon — a cracked door, an open room, a space full of toys. She beckons me in. Happenstance. Whimsy. Mood. A trail of thoughts. Writing is also thinking. It is speaking out loud: a form of address, an argument, rhetoric, a good arrangement with words.
Good syntax is elastic — it pings — I remember that game we used to play as children, cat’s cradle. Sometimes we played with thread and sometimes with elastic. I write to create shape and texture, to hear that ping, the release of energy. Writing is a way of recharging. Syntax is also a form of wiring and the wiring needs a lot of work, so I write and rewrite. I shape shift. Nothing stays still for long. A writer is a restless creature, pacing and pacing around the room, sleepless, her eyes closed, groping her way into other worlds. That famous sentence from Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse describing the death of Mrs. Ramsay:
Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty.
Syntax squirming into life even in the face of Death, perhaps because of Death, and so she must squirm through a series of interrupted subordinate clauses which somehow reflects life interrupted — those arms outstretched, stretched out, his arms.
‘The poet, Stevie Smith at her typewriter’ by Suzie Hanna (from ‘The Blue from Heaven’ film)