Because It's Transient

"You never want to hear one of his kind sing, Mog."

"Why not?"

"Because it will be the sweetest sound you'll ever hear," he said. "It will trigger something in your brain that will bring you a perfect and unbroken peace, the best you could ever hope to feel. It will remind you that you are an entirely whole human being, flawless and complete, and that you already have all you will ever want or need. Loneliness and sadness will be a distant memory. You heart will fill up, and you'll feel the world could never disappoint you again."

"Sounds dreadful," Morrigan said in a flat voice.

"It is dreadful," Jupiter insisted, his face somber, "because it's transient. Because Israfel can't keep singing forever. And when he stops, eventually that feeling of perfect happiness will fade away. And you'll be left here in the real world, with all its hardness and imperfection and muck. It will be so unbearable, and you will be so empty, it'll feel as if your life has stopped. As if you are trapped in a bubble, while the rest of the world carries on living imperfectly around you. You see those people out there?" He drew the curtain back very slightly, and they looked again into the audience.

The sea of faces, lit by the glow of the empty orchestra pit, all shared the same expression--eager but somehow vacant. Wanting. Wanting. "They're not patrons of the fine arts," Jupiter continued. "They're not here because they appreciate a masterful performance." He looked down at Morrigan and whispered, "Junkies, Mog. Every last one of them. Here for their next hit."

From Wundersmith: The Calling of Morrigan Crow by Jessica Townsend.

One of my Facebook "Friends," an old classmate I haven't spoken to in decades, has been doing something wonderful with her son, a photo series titled Leaf of the Day. Each day they find a fall leaf and share the picture. I'm wondering if they do more with each besides that. It's been a little spot of joy in my feed each day. I want to imitate it next year with my boys. Here's a sample.

I love particularly the way it works as a series. No piece of beauty is ever all there is; each is perfect as its own little entity, but there is always another just as lovely. The variety of having a selection adds to the wonder and depth of the whole enterprise.

Since I had to work on my birthday, my wife and the boys decorated our driveway and sidewalk with messages for me to return home to. A couple days later someone (we don't know who) added a happy sun to their work.

Last post I shared a poem from Ross Gay's book Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. Here are parts of another one, Weeping.

 . . . which means the precise sound of a flower bud

unwrapping, and the tiny racket a seed makes

cracking open in the dark, which has evolved

in a handful of Latinate languages to mean the sound

of lovers exiting each other, implying as well the space

between them . . . 

 . . . and of course the sweet bead of sugar

imperceptibly moseying from the fig's tiny eye precisely

unlike sorrow which the assembly of insects sipping there

will tell you . . . 

Wonderful imagery. The poem gets better from there.

And it reminds me of similar imagery from a Rebecca Solnit book I shared in A Galaxy of Worlds; a Galaxy of Events.

Moths drink the tears of sleeping birds. The birds sleep on, inadvertent givers. The moths fly on, enriched. We feed on sorrows, on stories, on the spaciousness they open up when they let us travel in our imagination beyond our own limits, when they dissolve the boundaries that confine us and urge us to extend the potentialities of our imperfect, broken, incomplete selves. Those apricots my brother brought me in three big cardboard boxes long ago, were they tears too? And this book, is it tears? Who drinks your tears, who has your wings, who hears your stories?

The other day I was browsing the quotes from books I've collected at Goodreads and these two appeared next to each other in a way that seems meant to be.

"Honey girl, I don't care what you do, as long as you're kind to everyone you meet."

"That's it?"

"That is the hardest part of being alive."

 -- Brian K. Vaugan, Saga, Vol. 9

The moment we forget that even the evil among us are still human is the moment we forget that even the most human among us are still evil.

 -- Shaun David Hutchinson, The Apocalypse of Elena Mendoza

They are perfectly complementary.

Speaking of perfectly, this random bit of "inspiration" captures my parenting experience perfectly.

If you are not believing in the chaos, you must try harder to enjoy the chaos.

I'm trying. I often fail, but I'm trying.

(I love the image behind those words.)

From over the weekend:

On the way to the park:

"I really like my new shoes."

"Good, I'm glad you like them. Let's do a better job taking care of these so they last longer. You have boots for getting muddy, wet, or snowy. Keep these nice."

"Okay."

At the park:

"Oh, look, a big pile of dirt!"

"Don't get your new shoes muddy!"

"Don't worry, it's not--oops!"

Less than 24 hours since purchase . . .

Those have been some recent enjoyments and diversions. I started this post as a place to capture my review of Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark by Cecelia Watson. Here it is.

Though many hate them for these same reasons,* semicolons have always been my favorite punctuation mark because they are all about nuance and complexity; they're soft and mushy, hard to figure out how to use properly, and allow for--if not create--elasticity and ambiguity. In this book, Watson turns her "biography of the semicolon" into a meditation on these characteristics and turns them into a philosophy of writing, language, and art.

She starts from the invention of the mark and moves through the development of the rules of grammar to current style guides, showing how usage has always been debated, open to interpretation, and dependent on style. She detours through some prominent legal cases where major issues and even literal lives depended on arguments about how semicolons should be interpreted in laws. From there she delves into famous writers who demonstrate masterful use of the semicolon in their varying styles to great effect. She finishes with exhortations to not get caught up in hard rules and inflexible interpretations--knocking down snobbery along the way--and to focus on effective and affective communication in analyzing and crafting words.

One of the blurbs on the back of the copy I have calls it a book about language rules that's really a book about the love of language, in all its unruliness. Another says it's a slyly profound proof of the value of creative freedom itself. Both are true. Far from a dry treatise on an obscure bit of punctuation, this is an entertaining consideration of why we bother writing and how best to approach it.

A quick tour through Watson's thoughts in her own words:

Complaints about the mind-numbing uselessness of grammar surfaced as early as 1827, came to a boil by 1850, and simmered through the rest of the nineteenth century. If grammarians wanted to stay relevant and sell those lucrative grammar books to schools and their pupils, they needed to answer to carping parents and officials. The grammarians' solution was rather ingenious: grammar, they proposed, was a method of teaching students the art of scientific observation without requiring expensive or complex scientific apparatus. In the service of this goal of teaching scientific skills, grammarians resolved to employ careful observation of English as a way to use the methods of science to refine grammar; and they imported into the grammars some of the conventions of science textbooks, like diagrams.

-----

Faced with the shift towards an inductive method modeled on science, midcentury grammarians waffled on the proper place of punctuation in their guidebooks. Was punctuation part of orthography, the study of how a language should be written? Was it part of prosody, how language should sound? Or did punctuation fall under the heading of syntax, the study of how language should be structured? The problem sparked vigorous debate. If punctuation were to be part of prosody, how could it be taught with the properly scientific inductive method? A student could hardly be expected to inductively derive rules from the rich, subtle, and infinitely varied rhythms that punctuation created in texts!

----------

By "good," I don't mean what rule books mean by "good punctuation." I mean punctuation that is effective, punctuation that is actively making a text better, punctuation that is fit to the tone and style of the text and its purpose. These criteria don't mean that good punctuation won't ever appear to play by The Rules--they just mean it's coincidental if it happens to do so. Punctuation has to be judged by how it shapes the text in which it's situated. The problem, for writers and readers, is how to go about figuring out whether punctuation is any good or not without the security of a book of rules. It's a tough thing to do, to learn to let go of getting answers from stylebooks and to replace that practice with asking exploratory questions about our texts.

-----

The [language] Masters are the people who usually don't really need to refer to the rules in order to use them, and in fact they never needed to memorize the rules in the first place in order to deploy "proper English." But they're very certain, nonetheless, that rules are a good thing. These rule lovers possess an innate understanding of the proscriptions provided by rules; they like rules because the rules give words to, and validate, an instinctive understanding of usage that the rule lover already has. Perhaps this rule lover has had to memorize a few of the more obscure precepts to possess the complete set in his or her head, but the basics have been there from childhood.

-----

I have yet to meet a rule lover who's been able to tell me that he or she actually learned good English usage by memorizing or consulting rules. And even if memorizing rules were a good way to learn English successfully, where would knowing and using all the rules with precision actually get you? You could write perfectly "correct" English all day and still not have what most of us really want, which is style. We want our words to have impact. We want our boss to implement that great new idea, we want our texts to inspire love and our tweets to get laughs, we want the eulogy to do justice, we want to sound breezy and cool in that social media profile, we want the A on the paper, we want to persuade and to be understood. Following the rules will not be sufficient to accomplish these things; some of these abilities elude even the people who consider themselves Masters. Maybe the Masters can speak "standard English" and maybe they can write well enough in obscure jargon and byzantine syntax to be published in some niche academic field, but that might be the only English they can speak--and that is a limitation and liability. So what if you know the password to get into the Ivory Tower if you can't get back out of it when you need some fresh air and open sky?

-----

If rules are not natural features of language, then they depend upon their being shared knowledge in order to bestow on our writing the clarity and precision they promise. Rules have never in human history--and are not now--freeing us from the pitfalls and challenges of interpreting other people's words and the anxieties of writing down our own.

-----

A lot of people find an imprecise thought uncomfortable: to these types, it looks like a leak to plug rather than an opportunity to let thoughts flow.

-----

Art that allows the imagination to participate in it is a beautiful testament to the value that can lie in ambiguity. Uncertainty, after all, is very human, and can call forth our best human virtues.

I was one of those people who came to my knowledge of grammar instinctively, through lots of exposure to writing and language. I remain to this day vague about many of the specifics of the rules, but I can almost always identify when something doesn't follow them. I understand the temptation to be a snob and mock those who get it wrong, so I appreciate this corrective to that instinct.

This is not the kind of book that shouts to be noticed and excites with appeal. I know it wasn't in demand because I kept it from the library for a very long time and used the maximum ten renewals before I managed to read it. Since I shared that review with my Goodreads friends and in my library's catalog, five other people have requested it. I have done my duty as a story pusher.

That *

Sex and the Semicolon

The punctuation mark that makes men tremble

Trevor Butterworth [in 2005] wrote a 2,700-word essay on the semicolon in the Financial Times. Butterworth, who had worked in the States, wondered why so many Americans shared Donald Barthelme's sense that the mark was "ugly as a tick on a dog's belly." His answer: As a culture, we Yanks distrust nuance and complexity.

Ben McIntyre, writing in the Times of London a couple of months later, added to the collection of semicolon snubbers: Kurt Vonnegut called the marks "transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing." Hemingway and Chandler and Stephen King, said McIntyre, "wouldn't be seen dead in a ditch with a semi-colon (though Truman Capote might). Real men, goes the unwritten rule of American punctuation, don't use semi-colons."

And Kilpatrick, in a 2006 column, restated those sentiments at a higher pitch, calling the semicolon "girly," "odious," and "the most pusillanimous, sissified, utterly useless mark of punctuation ever invented."

Roy Peter Clark, who blogs about grammar and usage at Poynter Online, was more restrained, but still suspicious. The semicolon, he wrote last month, looks "like an ink smudge on a new white carpet." And he's unnerved by its "arbitrariness, as if the semicolon were a mark of choice rather than rule." (Which it is - there's that nuance and complexity again!)

One more thing. This isn't relevant to conveying the sense of her book, but I love it as a metaphor for seeing racism:

So many discrete racist or otherwise malignantly biased acts can be excused as meaningless matters of happenstance, just as a puzzle piece looks like an abstract blob of nothing until hundreds of them are assembled all together and then suddenly--we see.

Suddenly--we see.

Since I've been using this blog to share some of this pandemic experience and life in 2020, a couple of topical items.

Most of the world is moving on as though the presidential election is decided and won. The incumbent and his diehard supporters are still living in his alternate reality where he won. I'm assuming that will have to eventually come to an end and am not stressing about it like some are. I hope I'm right.

The following has been in my mind a fun little way to capture events. I haven't shared it anywhere because I'm worried some will see it as disrespectful to Elizabeth Warren and the movement it's a play on, but it works for me without mocking that.

They told him he lost the election.

Nevertheless, he persisted.

It's just a bit of silliness.

And some updates on the virus. Its spread is worsening, in my area and the country. Check out the progression of these numbers. Sent to county employees from our health department. Plus a final update from my church.

Sept. 17

696 new cases

12 new deaths

Sept. 25

959 new cases

6 new deaths

12.7% rate

Oct. 1

544 new cases

8 new deaths

11.9% rate

Oct. 8

632 new cases

7 new deaths

6.2% rate

Oct. 15

736 new cases

10 new deaths

6.1% rate

Oct. 22

1428 new cases

24 new deaths

6.9% rate

Oct. 29

1006 new cases

16 new deaths

Nov. 5

1651 new cases

15 new deaths

11.0% rate

Nov. 12

2447 new cases

13 new deaths

14.7% rate

Nov. 13

These last two weeks have seen a very rapid increase in Covid-19 cases in our local area, state, and nationally. Just this morning our test positivity rate for Johnson County for new cases is reported to be over 25%. That means 1 out of every 4 people testing for COVID are coming back positive. We have what is called “uncontrolled community spread.”

Nov. 19

2404 new cases

34 new deaths

16.4% rate

Middle and high schools in our district are going back to all virtual school after Thanksgiving. Not elementary yet since schools have remained relatively safe compared to the rest of the community. Other districts are taking similar measures. More mask mandates, curfews, and limitations are once again being imposed everywhere. More would already be in place, I suspect, if there wasn't so much outcry and resistance from some segments of the population.

I'll end with this meme that perfectly hits my funny bone.

Things you can say in response to literally anything when you have nothing else to say:

• As the prophecy foretold.
• But at what cost?
• So let it be written; so let it be done.
• So . . . it has come to this.
• That's just what he/she/they would've said.
• Is this why fate brought us together?
• And thus, I die.
•  . . . just like in my dream . . . 
• Be that as it may, still may it be as it may be.
• There is no escape from destiny.
• Wise words by wise men write wise deeds in wise pen.
• In this economy?
•  . . . and then the wolves came.