"for life's not a paragraph..."

“since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things…
for life's not a paragraph…”
-e.e. cummings, since feeling is first

Life is not a paragraph. It is not governed by the tyrannical grammarians armed with their red ink pens brimming to wreak havoc on our expression. Nothing in life is as neat as Strunk and White would have you believe. Life, while it can demand rigor, cannot demand arbitrary adherence. When you need to breathe, well, just throw down a comma. Whether the clause really begins there, it is your Life, it is your clause, and you can make it your own. And if it is more than a breath, might one suggest simply taking a rest. Put down a period. You’ll be able to pick up where you left off. It is your life—you’re doing the writing. And just expect, my friends, for those occasional epiphanies which come in the strangest of times, in the oddest of ways. Be armed with an onomonopiac and an exclamation point. Forget prudence or so-called “good manners;” if you want to shout, I say shout. It is just as Bradbury reminds us, “If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.” Regulations cannot be systematized. Expectations are one thing, but the details cannot be micro-managed. We must simply have faith in the humanity of Humanity, else why do we even care to protect it with our regulations. We devise systems to ensure optimal opportunity for humanity to express itself. Over time, these systems take on a life of their own—we forget that they began at an arbitrary point of history—they begin as a means to an end, and not an end in themselves. Systems would help us reach God; at least that was the claim. But even if you bought into that tenuous claim, the systems didn’t become gods. Yet that is where we are, in the midst of the Callistratus Idolatry.

You simply must refuse to live according to the pattern of Introduction—Corpus—Conclusion. You cannot let each day be tied to a single topic sentence with three supporting points and a summation. Reason is really only useful to Man if it permits Man to be. Rules must support life, not become a cancer. The heart cannot be abandoned or worse yet, quashed by rubrics. The syntax of things is vaster than the rules can anticipate. We are not dealing merely with words in this world. Nor are we dealing with simple ideas. But we also are dealing with hearts and souls—depositories of infinitude and life from whence fateful courses emerge. We cannot harness that. We cannot rein it in. No system is so comprehensive as to contain the ability to detain infinity.

Embrace life simply. Sometimes we must conclude before we begin. This is what Life calls resolve. Sometimes we must stumble around before we find the point, the thesis. That is what Life calls discernment. Sometimes we must begin with a particular notion only to discover that somewhere through the course of justifying it that we actually conclude otherwise. That is what Life calls living. Life is not in the structure of the sentences, but in the movements, in the spaces not only between words, but between letters. Life is in the contact of the pencil point to the paper being pulled along loopily and lifted purposefully. It is all over the paper—in the doodles, in the smudges, in the coffee stains, in the crinkles, in the indentations in the margins made by the desperate struggle to revive a dying pen. But it is even beyond all of this. For Life is beyond the very margins. Nothing contains life. There is no universal acid that can pierce its dignity. Frankly, this is because Life is the universal acid itself—it is the force whose dignity cuts through all. Its preservation, its growth, its sustenance takes precedence in all of history. It is the enduring and prevailing supersession of any theory of containment—whether it be grammar, political, or religious. Life dictates and will not be dictated to. It is not a paragraph because it is the source of paragraphs. There is more in an ounce of love than in a warehouse of dissertations—“The best gesture of my brain is less than / your eyelid’s flutter which says / we are for each other:”—because it is from Love that Life springs. Thus, if it is Life you are interested in, then Love you must find. The longer you wait, the more Death has already prevailed upon you—for loneliness and isolation are but the foyer to the grave. The hardened heart of a rule-zealous Stoic will be the very rock from which his tombstone is chiseled.

“Wholly to be a fool…” Life is in the foolishness prolonged by the ellipsis. I fancy that the three periods are tokens given to the wayfarer to tote alongside to sprinkle intermittently along his course. For it is here he will find the stuff of Life, the experience of Love, the opportunity to be lost, to be found, to take wrong turns, to know the hot and cold, to think about being wise and to share enduring kisses. Yes, there will be a story. Its order, however, will not be determined by the rules of grammar, but simply by the path and steps of our traveler. It is he who will put the periods where they belong…