Of dashes (the motions of mind)

A spider once whispered a secret of gossamer line in the ear of a child that read with his mind—it rustled like rhyme—like a crushing of leaves by the darkening wind in the mint of a night—and he closed his eyes—and he opened his mind to the motions abound in the quiet of sound—in the twilight of mind—where the hollows of time begin to mime—where the hand reclines—where the spirit blithe sings in notes so high the Cherubims sigh—and the light takes flight!—for a moment he lies in obscure delight—in a daze of fantastic respite—and a lapis lazuli consumes a cerulean height—in the mind of an eye—where a vision of telescopic delight reigns a supreme right—bending the ridges of time—ebbing the wisps of a wonder back to a slender root—of a mystical kind—where clarity shines like the winks of a light caught in the glaucous ooze of primordial slime—but alas—the sound of a spoon as it clinks on a dish—from a distant smoky ravine—shakes open his lids in violent whisks—and the child sighs—forgetting his might he ebbs into vigilance—arises in time—the spider reclines. 

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.

Punctuation is shorthand for ideas.

What little grammar we learn in the classroom approaches punctuation as a mere compass through which our gliding eyes can sail the winds of language, a means only of disembarkation upon the sturdy ground of our writer’s point. Rather than a dimension of rhetoric, punctles are (to the common reader) little more than synchronized pause. It’s no wonder that the average student cannot differentiate between the functionality of a comma and that of a semi-colon; only in poetry and elevated prose do we encounter the ever elusive, heart-tittering dash in all its glory—and last I heard, Emily Dickinson didn’t make the final cut of the SAT’s Verbal portion.

So, what can be said of punctuation?

Very little (though I may prove otherwise) because English education today fails to address the variations of pause—it doesn’t address the momentum of a dash, the ambiguity of ellipses, the exclusivity of parentheses, or the boldness of a colon. Professors and teachers alike complain that their students can’t write; they stress vocabulary, organization, and the necessity of a thesis statement, but fail to explain the nature of a comma.