Life Sentences (45 page)

These spaces and the relations established within them are nothing like the physical relations of things and properties in the world of reference. The weariness of the salesman inhabits his veins, his nerves, his bones; defeat and despair darken his consciousness; and his skin is as tired as his clothing. But the word
weariness
is not weary; nor is the little verb
was
even a bit bored because of the two spaces it has had to occupy (as
was
—as
wasn’t
) in the salesman’s last sentence. In addition, there are maybe a billion more instances of
was
and
wasn’t
in use, and an inexhaustible number waiting their chance; another billion that were forgotten as soon as spoken, a billion more written, only to be erased or stricken or consumed by accidents, cruel indifference, or the elements.

My grammarian was using a prescribed notation to develop in
the blackboard’s representational space a picture of relationships that cannot be normally observed. Yet I doubt if she realized the creative importance of such figurations (they were essential to the development of mathematics and symbolic logic; they revolutionized music) or appreciated the human mind’s desire to spacialize whatever it wishes to understand. Time is not without a strong presence, although it, too, is always given a linear presentation. For instance, if a real man were standing there at the door, shabby and weary; his eyes, his nose, his turned-down mouth would be in simultaneous alignment, and given together to the world; but the sentence can give these characteristics to us only one item at a time, like keys and lipstick taken from a purse, and the salesman’s self would be parceled out in pieces that might be supposed to fit together finally in a coherent form and face, like a jigsaw one might buy at the five-and-dime. For another instance, that initial
The
must wait until
at the door
has had a chance to fold up into
man
before it does its work, because it is being definite about “man-at-the-door” not
man
by itself, just as
at
must apply itself to “the-door” not
door
alone. Of course, conceptually, these relations are in instantaneous play, but the reader’s eye and mind do not move quite that fast. Meanwhile, notationally,
the
is spoken, typed, or written in a sea of space between it and its noun.
Fainthearted
, for example, might pop in between them, or
weary
, or both, or more than both: “The weary fainthearted fat man at the door was, if I had read his look aright, a damned encyclopedia salesman.” In this sentence we are forced to deal with epistemological disclaimers and heated evaluations in addition to descriptions that fly from one realm of being to another: in and out of the public world and then in and out of the salesman’s consciousness like purple martins to and from their house.

By the way, the period that puts an end to any sentence—that says a sentence is a sentence—and was at one time used to name a sentence instead of saying
sentence
—is not an arbitrary mark, yet its presence must be justified, for any sentence whatever can be longer than it happens to be, running on like a kitchen tap. “The man at
the door was an encyclopedia salesman / who stood there nervously shifting his weight from one foot to the other as if he needed to pee.” A new addition, like a breezeway or a screened porch, will provide fresh entertainments. Arnold Schoenberg once advised John Cage to go back over what he was doing and see if it still worked if you added something. “See how it continues,” he suggested, “how it flows.” We know these things about sentences, as obvious as most noses on most faces, but we often choose not to remember them, or the noses either.

The similarity of logical form to grammatical form is generally acknowledged. However, these regulatory systems are not the same, nor do they have the same aims. Grammatical structures are superficial. They want and need to be as evident as gravy spills, because countless superficial people must use them, and because common speech loves vagueness and ambiguity. In an essay on the ontology of the sentence, I once gave up after listing thirteen uses for the preposition
of
, although, as a result,
of
became my favorite among my favorites, because it is, like
on
and
and
and
in
, so many different words. Grammar offers no clue to which
at
I have in “at the door.” Is it the
at
of “at an impasse” or the
at
of “not at all”? My favorite syllogism, however, celebrates
in
, a real mischief maker. There is a pain in my foot. My foot is in my shoe. There is a pain in my shoe. The man with the pain in his shoe is not
at
an impasse, no, not
at
all, but simply
at
the front door.

The hypothetical nature of Aristotle’s seemingly categorical, “All S is P,” has now been unmasked by logicians and written, “If x is an S then x is a P,” not something obvious on first consideration. When Aristotle forced verbs to act as nouns (turning
slew
into “the slayer of”), he did so on behalf of
ousia
and the simplification of the copula, which he understood in spatial terms as if he were using contemporary eyes: namely as connecting species to genus. Nouns (and adjectives after they had been made into nouns) were like classes that contained other classes that contained yet others until classes were reached that were so small and specific they had no differentiations (the
infima
species). These were the conceptually thick terms,
since they told you so much more about themselves than nouns of greater scope and less density. What is common to all things may be profound but it can’t be much.

Plato’s Form of the Good, on the other hand, is the analytic embrace and dense compounding of every other Form, because, as the sun of the spiritual world, it not only makes each Form intelligible the way light makes material things visible, but it does so by granting them logical consequence—they flow like a fountain from it. Aristotle’s Being is like Saturn who ate his children, but with such sluggish digestion they could be coughed up later, reborn just as they once were except they are now angry as hell; whereas Plato’s Good (like the idea of One and the idea of One More that were once supposed to generate the whole of arithmetic) is never separate from its components but utterly made of them. For Plato the Idea of the Good is the ultimate subject. We should expect that from an Idealist. For Aristotle, however, Being is the predicate of predicates and true of every significant thing. For Aristotle, the man at the front door is no one much until he becomes shabby-suited and weary, while for Plato … can we see past those scuffed shoes and that overzealous tie? Do we understand? He is Man in all his calamitous glory.

Traditionally, then, the subject of a sentence has been viewed in three quite different ways: first, as an outlined object in a coloring book which the predicate obliges by crayoning in, making the apple green or red or yellow or spotty brown and rotten if the teacher is to be displeased (color the man weary); second, as a sorting box into which the predicate tosses the subject like a button, coin, or nail (where does Man go? One place the concept belongs is in the carton called Mortal along with forest ferns and hummingbirds); and third, as a stew to which predicates are added like ingredients asked for by a recipe, or as you might rub a goose with garlic (to the stock,
Man
, add a cup of salesmanship). Sometimes, whether the subject is regarded as a coloring book or a sorting box depends on whether the predicate is an adjective or a noun. Only in the third case is any semantic change to either term permitted to occur.

Plato thought of his Forms as blending much the way, if I read
him aright, colors are blended, and then splayed forth again, prismatically, as if white were indeed the fountain of all and not just the froth. Some prefer to look at language chemically. For them, sentences are like compounds composed of elements whose connections create different emergent qualities while allowing the original elements to retain their identities the way letters or even phonemes do. Hydrogen does not resemble a gas when performing the magic of water, though when it makes its escape from oxygen’s grasp, it is vaporous and volatile enough. The ultimate model for the sort of mixing we mean may be music. There each note retains its identity within the chord while sounding, with others, as one, and composing the onward rush of its narrative structure from recombinations, repetitions, and all the elements of pitch placement and dynamics.

But words are too duplicitous for such comparisons to run their course. Ford Madox Ford and Joseph Conrad agreed that writing in English, as contrasted with writing in French, was like throwing mud at a wall, but I think that most words are closets crammed with suits, shirts, socks, and dresses, panties, hats, and gloves, and I see words dressing themselves in the wardrobes of others, first of all picking out this or that sense and then asking: will this skirt go with that blouse? Does this tie match my shirt? Consider the little unassuming functionary,
at
, that pinpoints times and places. The sentence does not say what door our man is
at
, but the location need not be spoken: any man at a side, closet, kitchen, or cellar door would not be an encyclopedia salesman. The content of the sentence establishes an unspoken occult context in which
front
has a necessary though ghostly presence. This context is crowded. We know that this sentence belongs to the Great Depression; that the door in question is the front one; that someone outside or in the house (whose existence is also presumed) has seen the man and then identified him, probably for someone else, even a third man.

“The man at the door was an encyclopedia salesman” and “The dog at the door was a Doberman pinscher” have the same grammatical form as “The flea on the dog was a nervous Nellie.” Grammarians have found these shoes too loose to be comfortable, and have tried
to tighten their forms by including other elements, such as insisting on an equivalent Depression-era placement and proper door selection for any other sentence said to have “the same form.”

The syntactical spot filled by
man
might better have employed the word
fellow
, because then we could profitably alliterate: “The fellow at the front door was an encyclopedia salesman.” Unfortunately,
fellow
is a bit demeaning, and we should have to decide whether we wanted to retain the initial anonymity of
man
or sacrifice him to euphony and its unifications. Of course, if we have determined on
shabby-suited
and dissed the poor wretch before he has even reached our door, then
fellow
he must be. “The shabby-suited fellow at the front door was a Fuller Brush salesman” would be only a step from perfection.

The philosophical rule we are invoking for the careful writer here is Leibniz’s Principle of Sufficient Reason. In fact, the universe has insufficient reason; it is but an accident determined to happen, and human beings, who possess a little reason, rarely use it; however, works of art are governed by the question, “Why this, rather than that?” Why
fellow
rather than
man
, why put
shabby-suited
up front with
man
rather than right before
encyclopedia salesman
, why
weary
when
worn-out
will do? One odd result of the application of this principle, first employed, to my knowledge, by Plato in the
Timaeus
, is that it flies in the face of form. Form makes possible reproduction; form insists upon substitutions, multiplication: there are many heroic couplets, many valid arguments of the type called Barbara, lots of recordings of
Swan Lake
, oodles of Van Gogh’s sunflowers; but only one such painting, one such Taj Mahal, one such text called
Tom Jones
. Form cares only about loyalty to its regulations. Banal sonnets can be as perfect as Milton’s, and great ones as imperfect as Hopkins’s. For philosophers, paradoxes like this are paradise.

Such equivalence is essential to the understanding of the fourth formal element of the sentence: its sound, and therefore the meters and rhythms of its words, the effect of assonance, consonance, gutturals, glottals, sibilants, fricatives, dentals, inflections, and other ties of the tongue that are often studied under the heading of
prosody
,
including rhyme schemes and verse forms. Any sentence claiming a literary status should not be simply read or said but sung. Apart from genre rules and regulations, little is usually done to connect these patterns to other organizing principles or to assess either how—or how much—they affect the meaning of their host. Unfortunately, no two people are likely to scan a line or a sentence in the same way, except by mischance. Moreover, there is always present the desire to squeeze the meter of a poetic passage into obedient feet, as though they were those of Cinderella, and in the case of prose to ignore its rhythms altogether, as if it were improper for it to seem musical, feminine, and weak, when it is expected to be masculine, vigorous, and visual instead of auditory, seductive, and sensual. I made the immediately preceding sentence awkward to sharpen a point. The three properties (musical, feminine, and weak) set up the expectation of three others that would balance it (masculine, vigorous, and visual), but then I added another trio (auditory, seductive, and sensual) and hung it rather firmly on the line by repeating the alliteration pattern and near-rhyming
sensual
with
visual
; but now another group is called for in order to restore the equilibrium of the whole, since, hanging there in public view like undies taken from the wash, it threatens to bring the entire wardrobe into disrepute.

Sentences, especially extended ones, contain an unruly clutch of repetitive patterns and structural orders, some made for the concepts in advance of their choice the way syntax lies in wait for its vocabulary; some composed on the spot with the materialities of language; and these interact continuously with one another. Every repetition (a rhyme, for instance) pulls the knot of its joint significance tighter, drawing meanings that are often many words apart into conjunction, modification, closure, or, as Hardy puts it, chime.