Punctuation on the Couch

A fountain pen is not a cigar.

November 25, 2010

Grammar Sigmundamentals 

I am looking at the photograph of Freud on the cover of Alfred Tauber’s account of The Reluctant Philosopher. There is a sadness behind his eyes as he looks through the pages he has written. In the next moment, he will put this page down with a sigh. Inwardly, he will chuckle at his sighing; he will get up to go looking for a cigar, which he will put in his coat pocket. He’ll take his hat from its place by the door and go out to walk, not to look around him; no, he’ll peer only so far in front of his feet, head down, that he doesn’t stumble.

          He won’t be rehearsing the argument he's been outlining; he’ll be thinking of how it must go wrong. “The punctuation I have at hand,” he’ll be thinking, “without inventing more – the periods, colons, semicolons, and commas, the dashes and parentheses, question and exclamation marks – is not enough. There are not enough marks to capture the fits-and-starts of how thinking wanders; the punctuation shuttles only side to side, and the thought moves also up and down. Moreover, the marks miss how this interruption is more important than that; they can’t see the way the stream of thought changes depth as it meanders, as it widens and narrows, as it slips underground then reappears in a place one did not expect it.

          “They don’t understand water, or children’s games. Hopscotch: pitching the stone into the third box, then leaping on one leg – right, right, and up-over, both feet down, right, both and turn, quickly, gaily, but without smearing the lines etched into the dirt; now back: right, both, bend, hand the stone; one, one, one, and home, where someone will charge a line has been touched, and all will run around the edges to see.

          “They are clarity; they can’t show how the words fall in and out of focus, how unsteady on their feet they are.”

He takes out his cigar, nips off the end, but does not light it. He’ll have trouble sleeping tonight because it will come, the shimmer separating, like a cascade of commas, his eyelids from his eyes.

SF

Let go thyself.

Know thyself, heh-heh-heh.

November 24, 2010
TMI

My friend, the philosopher Tom Nashe, wrote not too long ago:          

     “In truth none of us knows himself very well, even those of us obsessed with self-knowledge, the ones that have spent a decade in analysis, that write down every other thought and feeling, that plunge their fingers into every orifice to examine the viscosity of every fluid, watery, creamy, slippery, coarse, that put under a metaphorical microscope the soft but well-formed turds of full stomachs, the wax they candle from their ears, the hard buggers of the dry days of summer, that record dreams in notebooks and reactions in the margins of novels and plays, that make – and save – long lists, and write “Notes to Self.” There is the unexamined life not worth living. Then, there are the lacy lies, the webs of willful misunderstanding that hold the examined life together, so it can appear to make sense.” 

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Home from Paradise

Michel bundled up in Paradise

November 23, 2014

Home from the Ice and the Fire

So where have I been? – my two readers want to know. I'm just back from Paradise. Why else would I be misappropriating quotes from a 16th-century Frenchman.  Here is Montaigne on education – though he might as well be talking about politicians as about teachers.  According to the TRV:

• When . . . parents and teachers are permitted to lash out at and punish their children out of passion, it is no longer correction but revenge.
• Enter one of our schools; what will you hear? – the voices of teachers drunk with wrath. 
• They are forever thundering in our ears as though pouring into a funnel . . . .
• Virtue has its excesses, which stand in need of moderation, no less than vice.  Therefore, lest I wither and dry up with prudence, I shall step softly aside and, turning my eyes from the gray sky always ahead look toward the sun behind . Because –
• I hate these carping and morose fellows who dodge all the joys of life but glue themselves to its evils – like leeches that suck nothing but bad blood.

Speaking of Armageddon. Those that know me, know that I am not particularly political, but I have spent this past week at Uncle Albert’s, listening to CNN and Fox. If you want to hear what I heard – whatever was said, this is what I heard – if you want to hear what I heard, click here.

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