Equanimity is a perfect, unshakable balance of mind.
–Nyanponika Thera
Welcome back! Here's hoping you had a peaceful and productive week, and enjoyed yourself.
What will the day bring? It is a question I ask myself each morning, and whether I am feeling dreadful or pretty darn good, I can never fully anticipate the answer. Life is never truly routine, never without a multitude of things to wonder and marvel at. As John O'Donohue writes, "If you could imagine the most incredible story ever, it would be less incredible than the story of being here. And the ironic thing is, that story is not a story; it is true." It is exciting to watch the world unfold, to witness the grand parade of things that pass before the eye of consciousness, to note the details, large and small, as one image, one thought, one feeling quickly passes on to the next! We ride the waves, sometimes on a crest, sometimes in a trough, but always we are in the realm of consciousness. . . . For me, meaning is found in the striving to become more aware of the life within and around us. If we can avoid getting caught up in our thoughts, the weight of which can at times be enormous, then we can connect with ourselves and others in that other space out of which all things flow and to which all return, and perhaps there find a goodness otherwise hidden. Behind the mask of appearances, there is a source, a cosmic sea of sorts; and instead of thrashing about in the waves as if at any moment we might drown, we might perchance learn to swim in harmony with that sea. Whether you paint, draw, play an instrument, sing, dance . . . you know the freedom and spontaneity that one taps into at times. For me, painting and dancing are forms of play that take me away from the everyday, for I see things in the paint, feel drama in movement. Likewise, in writing we become, I believe, more conscious of what we feel, think, see, hear, and so on, for in our mind we look at things, turn them over, bring them close, take a step back, listen more intently . . . in short we find connections between thoughts and feelings and images that might have escaped us had we not stopped to contemplate the show.
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Writing is for many people a very satisfying way of exploring where they have been and where they may be going, and the connections between. In Why I Write, Joan Didion says: "We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and screamed, forget who we were."
Autobiographical narratives are structured as stories about the writer himself or herself, what some have called "core stories," and they are related to our core beliefs. Fiction writers often repeat such stories using different characters and situations with telltale resemblances. They show an individual caught in some way or facing something troublesome, which has to be dealt with or overcome in some measure. The story or stories show the author both recounting and reflecting on personal experience, making sense of it, putting it in some meaningful frame to be understood and thus communicated to a reader. Such essays may have an historical, social, and/or psychological frame, delving into the events, the changes, the lessons, and particularly the themes that have shaped the author's life. Who one has been, and is, is the central focus and the story elements–character, setting, action–serve to dramatize the life. Description is used to convey the physical characteristics of person, places, and things, to bring them vividly to life in the reader's imagination, in specific forms, colors, shapes, sounds, scents–whatever the key sensations.
Narration pulls together the basic elements of story: character, with whatever history and personality and motivation allow for insight into the action at the heart of the story; plot, the arranged action/events/scenes that show how a certain conflict arises and develops ; setting, which brings a clear sense of time and place and the force they exert; narrative point of view, the perspective of the storyteller or narrator; and theme, the idea(s) put into play by all the elements together, whether of innocence, experience, youth, age, promise, loss, death . . . .
Freewrites and Triggers for Digging:
* Find an old photograph of yourself. Describe in detail what you see and what you remember of the circumstances surrounding that moment. What has happened to the child, adolescent or person you were then and the one you are today? What lessons have been inscribed in those happenings? What do you know now that you didn't then?
* Draw a cartoon of your family. Make each member a character. Write a list of moments central to the life and circumstances that came with being one of this family. Freewrite on any that promise an interesting story and that show how you and your family got on, for better or for worse.
* Think back to your first day of school. What was it like? What lessons have stayed with you? Who is memorable, and why? Drop yourself into a scene and explore the ideas or themes that arise. How important are they today? Can you trace the influence of a certain individual or event on the thoughts, feelings or attitudes you have today?
Graded Writing Assignment #3: Construct a multi-paragraph essay (no less than three paragraphs) that narrates an experience or event that reveals something about the world we live in. It may be descriptive of a place, a time, a person, an object, or an idea. You may use first-person voice, the familiar "I" that we use in conversations about ourselves, or you may third-person narration, referring to others using nouns and third-person pronouns. We may get time to work on it in class; nonetheless, you will revise and bring it to class week 3. Make sure to double space the lines, to use 11 point type in Times font, and to indent the first paragraph (and all paragraph beginnings). Try for 350-500 words. Underline in text the explicit thesis idea or write at the bottom of the page the implicit thesis idea. Bring this essay to class week 3.
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Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogroves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
–Lewis Carroll's opening lines in "The Jabberwocky"
Before we go on to our next assignment, we'll practice the sentence, specifically, describing the structure, and then on to the additive or cumulative structure, if we have time. Last week we reviewed saw that English syntax consists fundamentally of a grammatical subject, verb, and object. The subject is typically a noun or noun phrase or a verbal functioning as a noun. The verb is the base of the predicate and operates as a linking mechanism (no action: I am a teacher) or designates the action put in play by the subject, which we can think of as an actor or agent. The direct object is usually a noun or noun phrase following the verb and that receives or takes the action of the verb. We do well to keep subjects and verbs at the head of a sentence, and together, with the subordinate elements following after (naturally, they are exceptions).
Bill struck the match. I lit the cigarette. We shared a smoke, one warm summer night.
Here is a poem that expresses the relationship (sort of) between syntax elements:
One day the Nouns were clustered in the street.
An adjective walked by, with her dark beauty
The nouns were struck, moved, changed.
The next day a Verb drove up, and created the Sentence.
– Kenneth Koch, "Permanently" (referenced in Stanley Fish's How to Write a Sentence)
Words exist in logical relationships with each other, and discovering those relationships will help you understand syntax better, and the sentences you create.
Not all verbs take an object, but for now we will play with the basic structure and build ever more layered sentences by adding predicate elements, modifying words, phrases, and clauses to the first simple sentence (independent clause), as in the following examples, in which the main clause is italicized:
A customer shot me a dirty look, long and low, as if I had in some way offended her deeply, though I could not but think myself innocent, and unjustly vilified.
In the following example, the main clause and the subordinate elements are laid out in outline:
1.The women whispered late into the night,
2. their voices rising and falling softly,
3. while I,
4. a mere six years old,
5. dreamed of a time when I, too, would have a world as rich as theirs seemed to me then.
We punctuate for two reasons: one, to order the pace of reading; two, to separate words, phrases, and clause into groups for the sake of clarity and readability and emphasis.
The period has been described as a stop sign; the comma a speed bump; the semi-colon a "rolling stop"; the parenthetical a detour; the colon a flashing yellow light indicating something's up ahead; and the dash as "a tree branch in the road"(Writing Tools, Roy Peters Clark). Punctuation rules have been standardized, but options and play remain. We'll review today beginning with the comma, a mark that indicates where one reading aloud would likely pause, and which sets off modifying words and phrases and clauses by asking to slow down and see the constituent units. For practice, I have a set of sentences to illustrate. The semi-colon works well to set off large blocks of text, particularly where commas are already at work; and to show the contrast between cause elements on either side in balanced and parallel sentence constructions.
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