Craft Notes
Thinking about Intervals and Nature
As the new year and decade begin, I’m thinking about intervals. Most instantly, a year seems to be a more natural interval than a decade. Roughly the same things happen each year. There will be a shortest and a longest day and the air will grow warm and then cool again. The arbitrary part of a year is in its stopping/starting point. Nothing is magical so far as I can see about where we choose to end one year and begin the next. If anything, I’d prefer to wait until mid-February or so to conclude all of last year’s business and begin anew.
A decade in the natural world seems to mean not much. But what about in a lifetime? Age 0-10, age 10-20, age 20-30, and so–these seem a bit more adequate as era-markers. Even in the 1800s decades were given sobriquets. There were the Hungry Forties (think potato famine) and the Gay Nineties (aka the Naughty Nineties; aka the Mauve Decade). But not before that; what about modernity made the decade seem like a definable, describable, identifiable interval?
Day is perhaps the truest time-interval. The sun will rise and set. While a year is a real thing, a felt thing, it is usually too drawn out and diffuse to pinpoint or summarize in a word. If you say that 2003 was a good year, I will know that it took the space of time for you to make that judgment. Mid-year, there is no telling. But a day has a character and a shape detectable even as it passes. It is defined by its largest moment. It can be remade no more than once, and the next day may be something else entirely. “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning” (Ps. 30:5).
These are time intervals. Modern space intervals mean very little (inch, mile, pint) and exist only for the purpose of standardization, ratio.
Then there are language intervals.
I teach my comp students that a paragraph develops one idea. Unity of purpose. How long is an idea? Of how much does an idea consist, and how many words ought be expended to develop it? Paragraphing, the gerund, is a kind of lie I must tell them. The same goes for the sentence, otherwise known as a complete thought. So a paragraph is one idea, a sentence is a complete thought. “It was” being a grammatically complete thought; “The chocolate Labrador retriever who took showers with my grandmother after her husband died and who in old age gnawed off my fingertip” being incomplete (but true).
So paragraphs and sentences can be different lengths, can have more or less content or even almost none. And then words. These strings of phonemes (single sound units) and morphemes (single meaning units). English is analytic compared to German, but still we smoosh several morphemes together. Notwithstanding. Unbreakable. I like the way E.E. Cummings rejiggers morphemes, splices them and splits them. I don’t like the way academics do it, as in (Re)vision and Herstory.
Still words seem not too artificial as intervals; they can contain a lot or a little, but so can days. In fact this is nicer, perhaps, truer to the subjectivity of time and passage, wholeness and cycle.
If you look at sheet music, you see marked units–measures, lines–but more pertinently there are phrases; these you can really hear. A measure has a certain number of beats, but a phrase has a shape.
I wouldn’t know what lies to tell students about the interval of the poetic line.
You can count lines or words or pages. I remember an old version of Microsoft Word would tell you at what grade level you wrote based on syllables per word and words per sentence, because of course the higher the ratio the smarter the writer. I don’t think MSWord does that anymore but it is still hard to disabuse my students of the notion that twistier, chewier prose sounds smarter. The syllable, this is based on sound, but it is also a lie. What about breath.
It occurs to me that I’m using the word interval rather diffusely. In language, interval refers more to the spaces between words/lines/paragraphs, whereas an interval of time has substance, is not just a pause. But if a day is an interval, it seems that really a sentence is an interval. They are both blanks to fill. The line, the word is a unit of measurement. I’m thinking about how to measure language, how to schematize its dimensions. How not to, how to resist demarcating language, this fragile, this skewed architecture, this fun-house mirror that both invites and defies boundary-making.
Tags: paragraphs, sentences, words
Wow, Amy. What a great post. There should be books and books out there on the space and time of the sentence.
What about breath?
Wow, Amy. What a great post. There should be books and books out there on the space and time of the sentence.
What about breath?
This post reminded me of a passage from Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead:
“This morning a splendid dawn passed over our house on its way to Kansas. This morning Kansas rolled out of its sleep into a sunlight grandly announced, proclaimed throughout heaven–one more of the very finite number of days that this old prairie has been called Kansas, or Iowa. But it has all been one day, that first day. Light is constant, we just turn over in it. So every day is in fact the selfsame evening and morning.”
Nice to think of in the context of intervals in language.
This post reminded me of a passage from Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead:
“This morning a splendid dawn passed over our house on its way to Kansas. This morning Kansas rolled out of its sleep into a sunlight grandly announced, proclaimed throughout heaven–one more of the very finite number of days that this old prairie has been called Kansas, or Iowa. But it has all been one day, that first day. Light is constant, we just turn over in it. So every day is in fact the selfsame evening and morning.”
Nice to think of in the context of intervals in language.
It seems worth noting here (in this box I am now thinking of as an interval) (which will disappear once I’ve clicked “submit comment”) (the way that months and sometimes words do as well) that poet and translator Emily Toder is responsible for giving glorious names to the useful interval of weeks, and that one of last year’s calendar of weeks is here: http://www.slope.org/slope26/1/files/Toder.jpg and that this year will work the same way.
According to Emily, “the only rules are 1) pronunciation is up to you and 2) weeks start on *Mondays* 12:01 am, or maybe even 12 on the nose… prob. on the nose is best.”
Hope everyone is having a happy Ubie.
It seems worth noting here (in this box I am now thinking of as an interval) (which will disappear once I’ve clicked “submit comment”) (the way that months and sometimes words do as well) that poet and translator Emily Toder is responsible for giving glorious names to the useful interval of weeks, and that one of last year’s calendar of weeks is here: http://www.slope.org/slope26/1/files/Toder.jpg and that this year will work the same way.
According to Emily, “the only rules are 1) pronunciation is up to you and 2) weeks start on *Mondays* 12:01 am, or maybe even 12 on the nose… prob. on the nose is best.”
Hope everyone is having a happy Ubie.
I really love this:
Paragraphing, the gerund, is a kind of lie I must tell them. The same goes for the sentence, otherwise known as a complete thought. So a paragraph is one idea, a sentence is a complete thought. “It was” being a grammatically complete thought; “The chocolate Labrador retriever who took showers with my grandmother after her husband died and who in old age gnawed off my fingertip” being incomplete (but true).
Why should the period border statements/thoughts? How do we write a sentences that is truly an open system–a sentence linked to all that has come before it, and all that will come after? This is why I love sentences that are grammatically complete, that use clear diction, but that are untrue, impossible, or otherwise make no sense. Some of Dennis Cooper’s sentences are like that. Some of Diane Williams’s.
I really love this:
Paragraphing, the gerund, is a kind of lie I must tell them. The same goes for the sentence, otherwise known as a complete thought. So a paragraph is one idea, a sentence is a complete thought. “It was” being a grammatically complete thought; “The chocolate Labrador retriever who took showers with my grandmother after her husband died and who in old age gnawed off my fingertip” being incomplete (but true).
Why should the period border statements/thoughts? How do we write a sentences that is truly an open system–a sentence linked to all that has come before it, and all that will come after? This is why I love sentences that are grammatically complete, that use clear diction, but that are untrue, impossible, or otherwise make no sense. Some of Dennis Cooper’s sentences are like that. Some of Diane Williams’s.
i will never forget the day i realized that one can half an interval infinitely
from the wikipedia entry for ‘0 (number)’:
Early History
By the middle of the 2nd millennium BCE, the Babylonian mathematics had a sophisticated sexagesimal positional numeral system. The lack of a positional value (or zero) was indicated by a space between sexagesimal numerals. By 300 BCE, a punctuation symbol (two slanted wedges) was co-opted as a placeholder in the same Babylonian system. In a tablet unearthed at Kish (dating from about 700 BCE), the scribe Bêl-bân-aplu wrote his zeros with three hooks, rather than two slanted wedges.[8]
The Babylonian placeholder was not a true zero because it was not used alone. Nor was it used at the end of a number. Thus numbers like 2 and 120 (2×60), 3 and 180 (3×60), 4 and 240 (4×60), looked the same because the larger numbers lacked a final sexagesimal placeholder. Only context could differentiate them.
Records show that the ancient Greeks seemed unsure about the status of zero as a number. They asked themselves, “How can nothing be something?”, leading to philosophical and, by the Medieval period, religious arguments about the nature and existence of zero and the vacuum. The paradoxes of Zeno of Elea depend in large part on the uncertain interpretation of zero.
i will never forget the day i realized that one can half an interval infinitely
from the wikipedia entry for ‘0 (number)’:
Early History
By the middle of the 2nd millennium BCE, the Babylonian mathematics had a sophisticated sexagesimal positional numeral system. The lack of a positional value (or zero) was indicated by a space between sexagesimal numerals. By 300 BCE, a punctuation symbol (two slanted wedges) was co-opted as a placeholder in the same Babylonian system. In a tablet unearthed at Kish (dating from about 700 BCE), the scribe Bêl-bân-aplu wrote his zeros with three hooks, rather than two slanted wedges.[8]
The Babylonian placeholder was not a true zero because it was not used alone. Nor was it used at the end of a number. Thus numbers like 2 and 120 (2×60), 3 and 180 (3×60), 4 and 240 (4×60), looked the same because the larger numbers lacked a final sexagesimal placeholder. Only context could differentiate them.
Records show that the ancient Greeks seemed unsure about the status of zero as a number. They asked themselves, “How can nothing be something?”, leading to philosophical and, by the Medieval period, religious arguments about the nature and existence of zero and the vacuum. The paradoxes of Zeno of Elea depend in large part on the uncertain interpretation of zero.
Really fine post, Amy…your discussion of the day as a natural yardstick made me think of Peter Handke’s essay “The Successful Day” in The Jukebox and Other Essays on Storytelling. Handke writes of a successful day as having almost mystical powers, a sort of “fragrance that will never evaporate”; he writes of a particular Van Morrison song which he believes ought to be called “the Successful Day” but isn’t; he writes of how a potentially successful day needs to begin before it begins, in the dream, and that objects on waking will assert a certain harmony, he will feel water “in the hollow of his hand” that recalls great rivers. It’s a splendid essay and filled with questions that wrap around and around.
I appreciate that you brought up music. In taking piano lessons a couple of years ago I was struck anew at how little correlation the horizontal space on the page or number of notes reflects the actual time passing. And this seems somehow related to language, and how, as in how in Calvino light years can go by within a single sentence while in Nicholson Baker a quarter mile of words can capture a minute (or “Bullet in the Brain”–a lifetime traced in cortical tissue traced in an instant traced in several pages).
I like thinking about the intervals in stories where the author jump cuts in time and place. Too many stories I read (and write) take place in a single scene, temporal and spatial. Not to say that it isn’t done well (it is, all the time), but I don’t see enough of a story that’s unafraid to use intervals to dimension itself outward in various ways, almost thinking that it’s a novel in the way that a small dog or cat can fully believe it is large and ferocious.
Really fine post, Amy…your discussion of the day as a natural yardstick made me think of Peter Handke’s essay “The Successful Day” in The Jukebox and Other Essays on Storytelling. Handke writes of a successful day as having almost mystical powers, a sort of “fragrance that will never evaporate”; he writes of a particular Van Morrison song which he believes ought to be called “the Successful Day” but isn’t; he writes of how a potentially successful day needs to begin before it begins, in the dream, and that objects on waking will assert a certain harmony, he will feel water “in the hollow of his hand” that recalls great rivers. It’s a splendid essay and filled with questions that wrap around and around.
I appreciate that you brought up music. In taking piano lessons a couple of years ago I was struck anew at how little correlation the horizontal space on the page or number of notes reflects the actual time passing. And this seems somehow related to language, and how, as in how in Calvino light years can go by within a single sentence while in Nicholson Baker a quarter mile of words can capture a minute (or “Bullet in the Brain”–a lifetime traced in cortical tissue traced in an instant traced in several pages).
I like thinking about the intervals in stories where the author jump cuts in time and place. Too many stories I read (and write) take place in a single scene, temporal and spatial. Not to say that it isn’t done well (it is, all the time), but I don’t see enough of a story that’s unafraid to use intervals to dimension itself outward in various ways, almost thinking that it’s a novel in the way that a small dog or cat can fully believe it is large and ferocious.
Oops, sorry about the italics. Damn you, HTML.
Oops, sorry about the italics. Damn you, HTML.
So Alec, what do you think of a sentence that stutters or is aphasic and yet is rich or laden with meaning? Are you not as interested?
So Alec, what do you think of a sentence that stutters or is aphasic and yet is rich or laden with meaning? Are you not as interested?
Oh, of course I am. It’s not I’m principally interested in the specific kind of sentences I described above. I just think those sentences are powerful. To me, they are sentences that are crystalline to whatever narrator, but are so deeply subjective that they can’t be made sense of by any reader.
Oh, of course I am. It’s not I’m principally interested in the specific kind of sentences I described above. I just think those sentences are powerful. To me, they are sentences that are crystalline to whatever narrator, but are so deeply subjective that they can’t be made sense of by any reader.
Is it lame to be talking about what “kind” of sentences I prefer? Like there are all of these species of sentences.
Is it lame to be talking about what “kind” of sentences I prefer? Like there are all of these species of sentences.
Zero is deserving of Blake Butler-esque superlatives. As in “Zero sears my aching brain with a red hot fiery brand”.
And how do we know that time is unidirectional? Because you can open a bottle of perfume in a room and minutes later smell the scent, but you can not put an open bottle into a scented room, passively capture all the fragrance in the bottle and seal it shut.
Gilead is a great book.
Zero is deserving of Blake Butler-esque superlatives. As in “Zero sears my aching brain with a red hot fiery brand”.
And how do we know that time is unidirectional? Because you can open a bottle of perfume in a room and minutes later smell the scent, but you can not put an open bottle into a scented room, passively capture all the fragrance in the bottle and seal it shut.
Gilead is a great book.
i ♥ you mimi
i ♥ you mimi
nice, thanks for that
this is so lovely. more names for intervals!
nice, thanks for that
this is so lovely. more names for intervals!
i learned you can halve an interval indefinitely from the movie IQ starring Walter Mathau as Einstein
i learned you can halve an interval indefinitely from the movie IQ starring Walter Mathau as Einstein
yes! this is good…i was hoping this thinking about intervals would turn on aesthetics, like you’re saying with a stories unfolding outward, and alec’s notes about sentences.
i’m going to find that essay by handke. is the whole book delightful?
yes! this is good…i was hoping this thinking about intervals would turn on aesthetics, like you’re saying with a stories unfolding outward, and alec’s notes about sentences.
i’m going to find that essay by handke. is the whole book delightful?
hi alec, thanks for the nice things you have said. i think this question of species is so tied into this–another way to classify, to taxonomize. i think it has a use. we can talk about different kind of sentences operationally, while realizing that the labels are totally insufficient though instructive to a point. i like the idea of trying to make the sentence an open system.
hi alec, thanks for the nice things you have said. i think this question of species is so tied into this–another way to classify, to taxonomize. i think it has a use. we can talk about different kind of sentences operationally, while realizing that the labels are totally insufficient though instructive to a point. i like the idea of trying to make the sentence an open system.
i love that the greeks were unsure about zero. they were smart. i wanted to incorporate into this post but couldn’t benedict anderson’s idea of empty homogenous time, which is how we moderns and postmoderns think about time–each minute is an empty vessel exactly like the last–whereas in the middle ages past/present/future were much more fluid. so exactly–how can time be nothing yet nothing–empty yet a vessel? is a page a space or the content that fills the space and can we even make that distinction
i love that the greeks were unsure about zero. they were smart. i wanted to incorporate into this post but couldn’t benedict anderson’s idea of empty homogenous time, which is how we moderns and postmoderns think about time–each minute is an empty vessel exactly like the last–whereas in the middle ages past/present/future were much more fluid. so exactly–how can time be nothing yet nothing–empty yet a vessel? is a page a space or the content that fills the space and can we even make that distinction
Your interval essay was very timely for me. I was thinking about and questioning intervals of time just a day or two ago. Now I have language intervals to dwell on.
I agree that “Gilead” is a good book.
Your interval essay was very timely for me. I was thinking about and questioning intervals of time just a day or two ago. Now I have language intervals to dwell on.
I agree that “Gilead” is a good book.
i always forget to use ‘halve’ for some reason.
my personal feeling is that one role literature can play in the future is changing language to more accurately reflect the nature of things, or changing our perception of things to more accurately reflect the way they are, or something.
i feel like your idea of the space between words and sentences mirrors the conundrum they had with numbers. maybe what we need is a zero of sorts, rather than our crude, babylonian punctuation marks.
do you feel that way, amy? do you think our system is inadequate or do you think that our usage can improve? i mean, i know you said you want to resist demarcating language, but something like what i’m talking about would be more descriptive rather than restrictive, right? right? i don’t know.
i always forget to use ‘halve’ for some reason.
my personal feeling is that one role literature can play in the future is changing language to more accurately reflect the nature of things, or changing our perception of things to more accurately reflect the way they are, or something.
i feel like your idea of the space between words and sentences mirrors the conundrum they had with numbers. maybe what we need is a zero of sorts, rather than our crude, babylonian punctuation marks.
do you feel that way, amy? do you think our system is inadequate or do you think that our usage can improve? i mean, i know you said you want to resist demarcating language, but something like what i’m talking about would be more descriptive rather than restrictive, right? right? i don’t know.
Hi Amy,
glad to see you are into the interval. i am always trying to internalize time passing, or externalize it. not sure.
i don’t really see a distinction between intervals (as blanks to fill) and units of measurement. don’t units of measurement have meaning? moving through space, space becomes distance, distance becomes time. that happens in writing as well.
in poetry, the line acts as an interval as much as the sentence may in other forms. sentence may be there in poetry too. the line can have words or be blank. a word can be there or be gone.
as for the feeling of a year, i love trying to feel the year, yet the academic year and the calendar year don’t align. we’re feeling two year intervals unfold all the time.
Claire
Hi Amy,
glad to see you are into the interval. i am always trying to internalize time passing, or externalize it. not sure.
i don’t really see a distinction between intervals (as blanks to fill) and units of measurement. don’t units of measurement have meaning? moving through space, space becomes distance, distance becomes time. that happens in writing as well.
in poetry, the line acts as an interval as much as the sentence may in other forms. sentence may be there in poetry too. the line can have words or be blank. a word can be there or be gone.
as for the feeling of a year, i love trying to feel the year, yet the academic year and the calendar year don’t align. we’re feeling two year intervals unfold all the time.
Claire