Question 3: What do you know about the sentence?

Sara Veglahn

Sentences disappear.

I read and they disappear into something other than language—but what? Images? Emotion? Action? At the same time, though, they also come into sharp relief. I can’t not focus on the materiality of a sentence. I am propelled into the structure of phrases and clauses (I always find it pleasing that every clause is its own little sentence), subjects and predicates, modifiers, coordinating conjunctions, conjunctive adverbs, and subordinating conjunctions. I receive the same kind of pleasure from the music and rhythm of a sentence as I do from identifying all of the parts and naming them. I’ve heard that the practice of diagramming sentences (my favorite grade school activity) doesn’t happen anymore and wonder what my relationship to language would have been if I hadn’t been given that very precise method and practice of moving words and drawing lines to connect them.

I write and I don’t know exactly what I am going to render or reveal to my reader. I read and I don’t know what the writer is going to render or reveal to me—or at least it seems that way in the works I love the most. Certainly, the use of periodic sentences (where the main point comes at the end) can heighten the effect of suspense, but I think there’s more to it than structure. Sometimes I think I know what kind of sentence I want to make, but the language won’t work in the way I want it to, or the sentences become confused with language—or the language becomes confused. I suppose this is because we also use sentences to survive in the world.

I have a dream in which I say two sentences very loudly so that I will remember them later. I have recorded this dream but it is only the action that has been recorded—the sentences were lost despite my awareness in the dream-state to try to remember them. Almost every morning I wake up thinking, “I must remember this. I must write it down.”

Does remembering depend on what one can make into a sentence? I woke up with this in my head this morning: “every day a bride—a dead tomb.” Because I wrote it down, I have remembered it. It has been recorded in case it will be useful later. It may have information to reveal.

The shortest, most simple sentence often is the most expansive. The most famous example is perhaps “Jesus wept.” There are multitudes contained in those two words. But then there is the particularity and musicality of the long, sweeping, many-paged sentence. These are perhaps the most passage-like (if passage is a journey). The movement in a long sentence reveals its machine. The sentence diagram of a long sentence becomes a decoder ring.

Each sentence provides room for the next one, and I believe there is always a particular place that is destined for each sentence. A teacher of mine compared building a paragraph to building a stone wall—a successful wall will only stand if the stones are different sizes, different weights. The wall builder knows instinctively when the wall is solid and in balance.

I like to think of a sentence as a way of thinking, a passage, a journey. Of course, there is the other meaning—to be condemned, punished. Sentenced to a life in prison, for example. Sentenced to the sentence.

Joanna Howard

A mutiny, a division of ranks, a brazen escape on a prison ship bound for the penal colony on the island. His launch abandoned him, awash in the shallows of the distant isle. He was fished out, resorted and returned to the base where he issued the following statement: that from out the sea there emerged a creature who appeared, if not part fish and part man, then a fish in a man¹s costume; a hybrid creature, seeming at once truncated and sinuous, appearing at first partly submerged, then surging up, undulating, its tentacles outstretched, sweeping in anything around it. And while it had not precisely demolished their ship in its clutches, what was clear was that their course must shift. It as from this point that his thinking, and his captain¹s thinking began to branch apart.

And now, resituated on the base, he was held in interim. His career thus far had been punctuated by such indeterminate pauses. Consecutive probations. Mitigating factors. And it was not unusual for him to find himself subject to an imperative action. He had been insubordinate, on multiple counts.

The tribunal consulted. He was thus adjudged: a split sentence. Part to be served on the prison island, and part to be suspended or prolonged, accordingly. He considered the facts of it; It was imposed, and it was mandatory. It was in part a set duration, in full, an unfixed stint, and its ultimate severity would be determined by his actions. But it was not death. It was not complete condemnation. It was another beginning point, or so it would seem, a return, to the island which had nearly consumed him, on a boat he had only ever commanded in part. A return to an island, to walk its shores, however briefly, before consignment.




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