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