Pathos in marvel; marble in rhyme

The sentimental speaker slips into pathos (from logos to pathos) as she muses in rhyme, and can you (really) blame her literal lapse?—After all, is poetry not the ultimate pathos; the thought in feeling; the rapturous heart? And does it not befit she who it reads to dazzle in awe; to marvel at maniacal frenzy? Indeed, marvel is marked by an astonished wonder roused by the pangs of a passion, devoid of reason’s hegemony. Echoing the words of a great poet about a certain greatest of poets, she says: let the rhythms of rhyme marvel us to the point of petrification; let the marvel “make us marble with too much conceiving”—the marvel (n): the poetry; the marvel (v): the garnished effect of the reading—the emotion that binds found only in rhyme; the glittering rhetoric; the truth in mirage; let it remind that:

“Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.”

And so, can we blame the ecstatic Speaker; the hapless romantic; for a truant reason, a pathetic incline?

Whitman's Spider-like Space

What a happy coincidence!—She leafs through a “chronological” labyrinth of rhyme, and encounters a true anachronism: Whitman’s rhythmic measure; and our curious Speaker meanders impulsively into the coils of his silvery thread; suspending suspense as the gauze slithers in thin slivers of verse; a patient spider is he, not pouncing but pensively musing in feathers of fine resplendent line that he shan’t recant.

Oh DubyaDubya, your soul is a spider and the resplendent lines, the filaments, filaments, filaments, a verse that still seizes a moth-of-a-reader in inescapable awe—caught in your words, your filaments raw, she steps a weak foot on the bridge of your gossamer flings and flings down into measureless space, into the vast ocean of wordless pace, and pushing her down is your anchor that pulls as it holds and makes intimate folds in pearly threads of fine diaphanous verse. Your words commence play, and a happy incident indeed the feeling they breed. 

(illumination)

The power of the parenthesis (subject, writing) exists in its ability to create parallels—to house within the hooks of two sweeping loops a substance of infinitude, says the bashful Speaker. She wonders: how does the content (within these affectionate half-moons) interact with the lacerated space around? 

(Amidst the onslaught of pointed diction and punctured space exists a sentimental sweep; a pause of thought; a clarification of sorts that means to bring a peace in abridged piece to an arena of inkshed) 

The parenthesis demands a shift in thought, a necessary cognitive movement that illuminates what most readers regard as the main event—but what is “the main event”? (Is it fair to say that the contents of a parenthetical clause are subject to the discrimination of a biased reader, one who (understandably) assumes that what exists within merely informs what exists outside?) 

The twinned horseshoe leaves in its wake a mystique often unaddressed because it is sealed in closure; the reader is comforted by confined content and experiences it as a parallel text, alien though necessarily (and at least) tangential to its context. The parenthesis is almost a whisper; it is a change in tone; in voice;  (and the soothing effect of the bulging pair cannot be thoroughly endured till the reader finds himself frantically searching for that second curl of cessation that will give him leave to settle back into the comfort of the original phrase; he fidgets in loss, forsaken by his writer; an errant reader lost in the literal whims of fancy.

(story)

Nabokov writes, “My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy has set . . .”

The power of the parenthesis (Parenthetically Mine:

A (very) Short Story

You are my subject; I want to poach this moment (pen the inflections of your flesh—as they undulate on your face—within the slabs of punctured space) and dress myself in its impossible fur (the curve of a cheek dances with the visceral lip as it curls in heat). You say,

"Listen, just listen—",

and your waxen fingers come down like knives on crystal, piercing the hum of the night and it is you that chimes. My hand still resides, a paperweight smidged in dye, on the leaf, still green, lightly peppered in azure tint. This hand is a shade, carefully penning the fantastic blend of ghostly bends that becomes your face; tired and yellow, feeding off of a tense that never remains. Is it in vain? Is it vain?

Come, continue to play . . . let my hand indulge in the supple demands of your arms as they flex and beckon pale spiders like magnets to pounce on a canvas of sound; let me play, let me bounce. Is it fine that my mind reclines into the depths of your sound?

(your eye flutters its lid, plunging serene like a wave slapping a curtain of pain onto soft grains; lapping its honey glaze on the empty space, creating rhythm and rhyme and an endless design that persists in time). You say,

“Can I read what you write?”

My subject, my object—perpetual verb: give me sound; give me rhyme; let your fingers climb up the scale and down the vine. Am I stealing your pride? Let me drink with my mind! Ignore the blue streaks that transverse my specter fin; forget my hands—shift your gaze from my literal veins and continue to play, for you simply shan’t exist a self-referent midge. Don’t pry: you are my subject, my object; you'll wither the vine. You are mine.

(you begrudgingly shift)

I am dry.

The moment has passed.

The period last) exists in its ability to create parallels.

Rilke and the “space”

On the plight of the punctured space, Rilke scrawls: “Dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away, you write, and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast.”

Undoubtedly, the concern of the conscientious writer for the haunting space that slinks in blanks of prose and poetry alike can invariably be traced to the nooks and crannies of correspondence. It is in the paragraph preceding this one, the quoted contents of which were happily encountered in Mr. Maria’s Letters to a Young Poet, that the Speaker encounters an authoritative voice amidst the cacophonous clashing cymbals of modern Punctal Theory. And while our sentimental poet’s moving portrayal of heartfelt empathy illuminates the barely absent punctle’s slighted state, it hardly renders its true shape: Rilke’s insight dwells in deliberate word choice, and further, in a certain white male’s inability to resist the temptation to inflect gender upon the space, prefacing what is an otherwise perfectly poignant lament for the loneliness of a certain specter with a deceptively innocent and undoubtedly biting “Dear Sir”. Indeed, the space around the space is geometrically expanding in lonesome leaps; its quest for identity ruthlessly undermined; masculinity thrust upon it as the echoes of the female voice are lost in inscription. Here we have our most neglected punctle, in it’s self-referent glory, mistook for a masculine silhouette: and is it not, this mis-gendered shade, the punctle that pervades?

e.e. Cummings & the space

The poetry lover cannot delve into a pointed exploration of punctative potential without first immersing herself in the plethora of the .punctuated. g!oo!dness that is e.e. Cummings’ canon. It is in Cummings’ typographical imagery that one encounters a valid counterpart to Eliot and Pound’s experiments in content obscurity. Rather than employ form as that which informs the contents of diction, Cummings forces the reader to regard form the main event. His reversal is truly avant-garde in that it redefines the lyric experience. The profound simplicity of his content is infused with electricity generated through the brilliance of creative punctuation:

Despite the space’s status as the most slighted of our weeping punctles, here (or rather, above) she is the main event: no longer merely skulking unseen through pompous diction, she is given room to be. The grasshopper, becoming as he leaps through space, is the space as she dashes unfettered and finally free from punctual decree. And is she not really the most punctual of our beloved punctles—always on time, coming to be only briefly despite her geometric potential? Truly, the space is the saddest of the bunch: exhausted from use; veiled in an invisibility cloak (why?); and truly oppressed, living in the shadow of (un)sightly words.