Many years ago I devoted myself to watching great films and to figuring out how to make one or two small ones of my own. With so many hours spent in darkened screening rooms, the basic filmic rhythm in which one shot succeeded the previous one at the moment of the anticipated cut began to bother me — not for intellectual reasons, but in my gut.

I found the same oppressive rhythm in the films of even the greatest filmmakers, who seemed to share no other formal property — Brakhage and Hawks, Rossellini and Preminger. Nothing was more certain than that the shot I was looking at would soon end in a cut, and the next one too, and the one after that.

This felt like an endless compound sentence: A and B and C and D and …

There were films that dispensed with cutting entirely (Warhol, Snow, Gehr), but this was not what I was after. I dreamed of a film syntax that more closely resembled that of a complex sentence, in which each shot had a sharply different grammatical function. There were stabs at that in Kubelka and Eisenstein, though even their best films relapsed into the same familiar structure of one-shot-after-another.

I soon realized that the ideal form I had in mind could result only in very short films, consumed very quickly by the demands of differentiation. Very brief lives! Or, as it turned out for me, no life at all.

It also struck me that you could object in the same way to language. For after all most of our reading is not of one sentence alone but of many in succession. So it came down to the same thing: one sentence after another, all falling within fairly predictable lengths, and all ending with a period.

These long-forgotten thoughts came back to me recently when I was pondering a passage by William James in which he considers the stream of consciousness:

Like a bird’s life, it seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings. The rhythm of language expresses this, where every thought is expressed in a sentence, and every sentence closed by a period.

Later he remarks that we can’t sustain our attention for more than a few seconds at a time, that when we concentrate on a topic, ours is a “repetition of successive efforts” to bring it back to mind. Each time our mind comes to a tiny rest, we’re soon dislodged again and must flutter off to another branch (hopefully of the same tree!)

When I try to sit and think without distraction, I steady myself by considering the rise and fall of my breathing. The length and quality of each breath varies, but not the fact that one succeeds another.

When the day comes that it doesn’t, I won’t know it.