My good friend Steven Watson, who’s charted social networks for such historical scenes as Warhol’s Factory, knows me so well that when he returned to the city from a summer in Minnesota, he brought back the perfect book of diagrams for my collection:

New York: Maynard, Merrill, & Co, 1894

A Key Containing Diagrams of the Sentences Given for Analysis in Reed and Kellogg’s Graded Lessons in English, and Higher Lessons in English.

Leafing through the pages I was repeatedly struck by the beauty of sentence diagrams like these — which you’d do best to take a moment to work out for yourself before reading on:

Diagramming a sentence is like putting it up on blocks to examine its engine from below — or: like dangling its counterbalanced parts like a mobile; — or: like dissecting its anatomy on the surgeon’s table.

Not only does the schoolboy’s exercise of sentence diagramming act to slow down the rapid consumption of the sentence, which usually goes down much too smoothly, but it also puts it at a nice remove from the throat — that is, from the voice — pushing it back towards the mind. You start regarding the sentence not as an utterance but rather as a mechanism whose workings you can pick apart. You see it spatially rather than temporally.

The whole procedure invites you to tinker with the sentence, to revise how it balances its parts. You start seeing other ways in which the thought might express itself — and also how it might be shifted (by choice or by stylistic pressure) into divergent variants or even oppositions.

 

Moral instruction

The following example typifies the schoolmasterish tone of the 1894 book, which issues many opinionated enjoinders to proper conduct and thought:

The underlying theme of mental hygiene speaks to the old notion that right thinking comes from expressing yourself in the right language, the truth always underpinned by correct grammar — a belief I wish I could share.

But in addition to all the muddled verbiage of bureaucrats and academics, the world also bulges with perfectly well-written cant — which incoherent truth (often curses or screams) rarely manages to puncture.

 

Cape Town

All this takes me back to 1969 — to a dark study hall in Cape Town, where I first had to try my hand at diagramming sentences (I can still almost feel my fountain pen scratching blue ink on white foolscap).

Having been plunked down for a year at St George’s Grammar School, I had to adjust to a system that did all it could to ape the bygone world of English boarding schools. Thus a uniform of jacket, tie, and straw boater; chapel services three times a day; and a strict code of conduct that when violated led to canings by the housemaster.

It was this same master who instructed us in English. He sermonized as forcefully to us in the classroom as did the minister in chapel, decrying Communists, hippies, and other drags on the venerable traditions of the west — a social order that he invoked as broadly as he could to clothe the diseased apartheid body of his particular time and place.

Curiously, sentence diagramming proved to be an odd solace to me there, I’m not sure why.

I’d lose myself in penciling apart the sentences not only of my homework, but also of the colonialist adventure books I found on the school’s bookshelves (Lord Jim and King Solmon’s Mines).

 

Degenerate English

These thoughts had me pull out an old storage box from which I retrieved a memoir I once tried writing about my boarding school experiences. At this point I could write a memoir about the memoir-writing, I suppose, for it was written when I was about 24 or 25 — in 1981 or 2, that is.

In any case, opening the small looseleaf notebook now, I see Degenerate English proclaimed on the title page, and then this promising start:

The writing went downhill after that, for I was trying to make something I’m still incapable of doing (fashioning a long continuous passage of prose), and I should have stopped while I was ahead.

What still interests me on this particular page is, among other things, the underlying struggle in tone and diction between American and South African English, a battle I fought ferociously within myself at the time, though not with complete success — on returning to the States, everyone remarked on my “English accent.”

 

Back to the voice

After that failure of writing for the page, I returned to writing for the voice.

I’d first started tape recording my words in college when I painstakingly composed a piece about a summer I’d spent living with an extended Navajo family in Arizona. I titled the tape Talking my way about theirs, and it began like this:

What drew me to this form is that by recording those sentences rather than printing them, I could slow down your path through my text considerably — especially compared to how I imagine you just took it in. Screens repel close reading in favor of fast skimming, and we only pretend that our browser is giving us “pages.”

But to return to my slightly meandering thread: after Degenerate English died about seventy pages in, I wrote a peculiar text for the tape recorder entitled Thoughts on erasing blank tape, a piece I partly circled back to twenty or so years later in Trace.

In none of these recorded works was I entirely satisfied, for like most people I disliked the sound of my own voice, and aside from that personal objection I found fault with the insistent stamp of personality that any voice carries with it.

 

Intonation

But by then I’d become highly sensitive to the nuances of the spoken word, which no written sentence could fully capture. Certainly I thought punctuation marks were far too few in number, and even the line-breaks of poetry, while useful, were at best a small step in the right direction.

These days, emoticons are a new form of punctuation; they try flagging what’s ordinarily conveyed far more intricately by tone of voice and facial expression.

Back then I started wondering whether a system of written notation could convey the meaningful stresses of intonation. I turned to books on phonetics to see how linguists transcribed these subtleties, and I remember being struck by a textbook example in which the same sentence has an opposite meaning depending on which word is stressed:

I thought it was going to rain. [it did]
I thought it was going to r a i n. [it didn't]

Then I came upon a marvelous example of notation, which in this case rings five different changes on the simple declaration I love you:

from Phonetics by JD O’Connor (Pelican: 1973)

How much is conveyed in tone of voice, and how much is lost without it!

Eventually, however, after experimenting a bit with some decidedly eccentric notation systems of my own, I reluctantly abandoned the attempt as being too unwieldy.

 

Trails

Many years later I returned with Marc Downie to explore ideas of intonation and meaning in the sound score for Loops, but that’s a different story.

As for sentence diagramming, that obsession resurfaced in Breath — and is a main impetus behind Other Bodies.