Consequently, I cannot avoid a glance at what she has left me. And she knows my tastes well enough to expect that I will drop any wasteful pastime because we both know I badly need a slam upside my head.This time it's Pico Iyer's January 8 apologia for The Point of the Long and Winding Sentence.
Iyer advocates and practices the art of linking dependent and independent clauses together, and sparing terminal punctuation as a way to protests against the urgency of the new media:
I'm using longer and longer sentences as a small protest against - and attempt to rescue any readers I might have from - the bombardment of the moment.Yes! Yes! This liberates and emboldens me. Gush without terminal punctuation. What is it that they say?
Yet nowadays the planet is moving too fast for even a Rushdie or DeLillo to keep up, and many of us in the privileged world have access to more information than we know what to do with. What we crave is something that will free us from the overcrowded moment and allow us to see it in a larger light. No writer can compete, for speed and urgency, with texts or CNN news flashes or RSS feeds, but any writer can try to give us the depth, the nuances - the "gaps," as Annie Dillard calls them - that don't show up on many screens. Not everyone wants to be reduced to a sound bite or a bumper sticker.
Enter (I hope) the long sentence: the collection of clauses that is so many-chambered and lavish and abundant in tones and suggestions, that has so much room for near-contradiction and ambiguity and those places in memory or imagination that can't be simplified, or put into easy words, that it allows the reader to keep many things in her head and heart at the same time, and to descend, as by a spiral staircase, deeper into herself and those things that won't be squeezed into an either/or. With each clause, we're taken further and further from trite conclusions - or that at least is the hope - and away from reductionism, as if the writer were a dentist, saying "Open wider" so that he can probe the tender, neglected spaces in the reader (though in this case it's not the mouth that he's attending to but the mind).
.....
too often nowadays our writing is telegraphic as a way of keeping our thinking simplistic, our feeling slogan-crude. The short sentence is the domain of uninflected talk-radio rants and shouting heads on TV who feel that qualification or subtlety is an assault on their integrity (and not, as it truly is, integrity's greatest adornment).
To pick up a book is, ideally, to enter a world of intimacy and continuity; the best volumes usher us into a larger universe, a more spacious state of mind ....impeccable sentences take me, with each clause, further from the normal and the predictable, and deeper into dimensions I hadn't dared to contemplate ..... because the energy and the complication of his sentences, at his best, pull me into a furious debate in which I see a mind alive, self-questioning, wildly controlled in its engagement with the world. His is a prose that banishes all simplicities while never letting go of passion ..... the promise of the long sentence is that it will take you beyond the known, far from shore, into depths and mysteries you can't get your mind, or most of your words, around.
.....
When I read the great exemplar of this, Herman Melville - and when I feel the building tension as Martin Luther King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail" swells with clause after biblical clause of all the things people of his skin color cannot do - I feel as if I'm stepping out of the crowded, overlighted fluorescent culture of my local convenience store and being taken up to a very high place from which I can see across time and space, in myself and in the world. It's as if I've been rescued, for a moment, from the jostle and rush of the 405 Freeway and led back to something inside me that has room for certainty and doubt at once.
....
The long sentence is how we begin to free ourselves from the machine-like world of bullet points and the inhumanity of ballot-box yeas or nays .... we've got shortness and speed up the wazoo these days; what I long for is something that will sustain me and stretch me till something snaps, take me so far beyond a simple clause or a single formulation that suddenly, unexpectedly, I find myself in a place that feels as spacious and strange as life itself.
The long sentence opens the very doors that a short sentence simply slams shut.
God never used a period, just a lot of commas.
Why then should I? I am liberated. But is that what TW intended?
News Item: An inscription on the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial that has faced criticism will be changed, an Interior Department official tells CNN. The memorial in Washington was unveiled in August and has many of King's quotes on it. Poet and author Maya Angelou was among those who said one paraphrased inscription wrongly made King seem arrogant.
ReplyDeleteThe inscription currently reads:
"I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness."
King's original words were from a 1968 sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta:
"If you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice; say that I was a drum major for peace; I was a drum major for righteousness; and all of the other shallow things will not matter."
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar told the Washington Post he has given the National Park Service 30 days to change the quote.
First I love the above comment and how it illustrates this so perfectly, as well. Then, I want to say, you're a god-send. I was playing with this very notion recently without actually articulating it. I just found myself moving away from my usual short clipped sentences because I wanted to go deeper without interruption, but just pause, and then keep moving forward with the idea. I really like how the article TW left for you points this out, without pointing it out, but by illustrating it so beautifully.
DeleteI don't know what TW intended, but I do know I needed to read this, so thank her and thank You.
Great post!:) Hee Hee Hee
ReplyDeleteIt is not without some joy that I read this post, buoyed, as it were, by its affirmation of elaborate but well-constructed prose and by the freedom such prose allows to delicately describe the intricate tendrils of thought that the human mind is capable of positing, developing, and carrying to logical denouement, but it is with scepticism that I read your justification of TW's penchant for saving "weeks of papers" - that she is "so much an advocate of Old (print) Media" - for I find it much more likely her reason, and indeed yours, for carefully collecting and storing the mounting piles of newsprint that must, of consequence, accrue over the course of several weeks to be not that you or she are advocates of traditional media and whatever qualities of the writing craft might still survive in those media, but that, more concerned with the preservation of carpeting than with the curating of cultural nuance, you own a dog.
ReplyDeleteUh...huh!!!!!
ReplyDelete