The agreement we hold—human to human, citizen to citizen—is that we are telling one another the truth. So obvious is this that even those who know they are not speaking the facts are telling their lies on the presumption that they are true, because no one believes what a liar says is a lie. Truth …
Category Archives: Thoughts About Writing
Mind’s Eye, Body’s Eye
Most of us have, I think it’s safe to generalize, little to do with poetry. Between a paragraph of prose and the stanza of a poem, we are likelier to prefer the indicative sentence to the symbolic verse. Poetry is ponderous in a way even the poorly written paragraph is not; it slows us down, …
Making Things
Lacing, sewing, weaving—all of these are arts which produce a structured fabric of some sort, a textile which stands as a context for both use and significance and the pleasure that attends both. Interestingly, the words textile and context are linguistic twins; both, along with the word text as well (note the –xt combination in …
Some and All, Any and None
Every art has its procedure, its way of doing business. The art of writing—or call it the art of composition or of thinking—lays out grammar as its way forward, with signposts and guardrails to keep the force of one’s thinking (the old word for it was mentation) accumulating forward. One such critical guide stipulates whether …
Thinking Things
To think about language is to think about what it means to think. That cumbersome sentence makes defensible sense, in fact, because language is the means by which we think. We take up language to say something about our experience in the world. We form subjects and predicates, sentences and paragraphs, and in doing so …