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. 

A ghoul in relics

Following this ardent apology succeeds an argumentation vested in logic’s design:

Whitman’s use of the dash generates a quick movement of breath that mirrors in form the “speeding . . . unreeling” spider’s silken thread. The dash makes the poem, looming thrice at pivotal moments of movement—carrying the momentum of the creative mind in hasty pause. The Speaker imagines Whitman a diligent spider, endlessly weaving his Leaves of Grass in some cottage cranny, eight arms at full length, “ceaselessly musing”—birthing fine linen in ringlets of elegant line; forging and shaping an impulse of soul: a means of design meant to build “till the bridge you will need be formed, Till the ductile anchor hold”. Indeed, Whitman did mark where on a bluff a delicate spider perused its surroundings through lurches of silk, but arguably he did more than this:

“A noiseless patient spider,
I marked where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding”

To mark; to etch on paper: to write—who is this spindling spider? Is it perhaps a vision of our pouncing poet, himself settled neatly in a seat off of a certain wooden (oak) desk—indeed a kind of little bluff? Our spidery poet—your silk has found crevice in the nooks of my moods: the threads of your “O my soul”, silver in substance, still fling in the winds of this gossamer ghoul.

(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.

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.