Commas are breaths. Commas breathe. They let you off. They let you breathe. But it is a sort of false breath, one hooked up to a respiration machine which calculates the rhythm for you. If I gave you commas I would be giving you my breath. I would be both the machine and the patient. Either way, I am deadened.
If I give you my breath, can I continue to breathe myself? And yet, if commas breathe breath into words, in writing without them I am choosing instead to deaden each letter, which will lay scattered around amongst scoured skin flakes. Because I like to exfoliate. I like to brush off the past. It is an ultimatum of sorts, you may have my body or my words.
Another machine-false separation, as if punctured veins could spill anything other than red ink. (The sort used by teachers
to correct bad grammar). Though this is less about punctuation than it is about punctures, which must then really be about containment. Full stops. Which are frontiers. Which are breath breaks.
Breaking is the moment of change. I feel uneasy around change, it asks for choices to be set down and adhered to.
It is a commitment. Once broken, even the best repair work cannot return to the constant. The constant being the repetition, which is the comfort (for as long as it is a blanket to warm yourself in and not one that inadvertently suffocates).
It is no coincidence then that a movement across borders is referred to as a break. It is a desire for safety and a resistance against the frustration of adjustment. The period where you must suffer a shortage of breath whilst learning to breathe in new air. Breaking of course, suggests there was a superiority to that that was before, as if something could be perfect in itself, enough in itself, to remain unchanged. Yet, it does not need a direct break for cracks to nonetheless appear on the surface. They emerge of their own accord, and so it becomes easier to make clean quick breaks, like the plaster pulled off swiftly and with purpose. Break and
break and break offers a surface that is too unpredictable for cracks to develop. Cracks which are the slow plaster removal pain. Break and break and break which allows for you to create, to remould, to adjust on your own terms, to turn shortage of breathes into staccatos and to not consider this a lack but just another rhythm. Maybe this is exfoliation, a brushing of the past in a controlled practice, an enforced confrontation with change. A strengthening exercise. A test. An attempt.
Punctuation marks scar a text. Tiny reminders of the barrier between inside and outside expression. Between the what to say and how to say.
Inside our body we make sense, but crossing to the outside and encountering others, communicating with others requires mediation. This is the journey of the word, and this is the journey of the breaking, the breaking of self understanding to a place of communication. Between the words I have inside and the words I place on a page, there is the moment of their translation into something tangible, letterible, spellable, grammared.
I’ll walk you across and through it now. It is a bracken-covered no man’s land between the inside and the out. Even the lightest step treading through will leave a broken trail. And your skin covers quickly with scrapes and scratches. In the silence all that can be heard is the sound of snapping, and sentence length inhalations. Sentence length inhalations. This is not the breath that you know inside, the one that flows un-punctured. On the outside you must breathe shallow
so all can take a share, other breaths need space, need air, their own air, to read you.
So you write with full stops, and you let yourself slowly deflate as each one pierces new layers of surface as it tries to heal from those scratches. And you are a bracken bonsai tree, stunted. Growth cornered and comma’d off with scissors. A skin that contains at the expense of its contents. The evaporated insides leaving an empty, shrunken shell. Would I rather deaden than puncture? Taking breath from my words is only the breath of a certain air. One that is for sharing. The one we take for granted. The outside. It does not mean they are not still breathing from their own source, the one permeating skin from the inside. My blood is filled with froth. I am ventilated.
My deadened words, the ones without commas and full stops, are deadened, not dead. The difference is one of motion and one of emotion. Without sensation they are a numb. They are the lain down aftermath of the journey. They are the ringing in the ears after cries have ceased. They are the knitting of scars from the scrapes and scratches. They are deadened and they need this. They need this moment void. They need to be still and suspended. They are rag dolls. They are in pretence for a while, they are resting.
Numbness and restful stillness are purposeful. They are not dead, involuntarily without motion or emotion. They are still and they are not breathing, but air permeates them nonetheless. It seeps in through the skin as calmly as it leaks out again. It is an all encompassing, decentralised breath, one that is different, less obvious, less owned. It is continual, it does not tire. It is open, it does not need the throat to relax, the windpipes to release, the nostrils to flare and close. It is as open as becoming shapeless, it is borderless.
This is how my words live. And this is how they feel and move. It is a sort of sleep travel. One that soars over skies. It is without gravity. Without regulation. It is shapeless.
It is clear and clean, free of scars.
Yet there is space in this shapelessness. It is shapeless space, but space all the same. I would like my unpunctuated words to give the feeling of this decentralised breath. The feeling of continuity. A continuity which is not the same as the density found in a nonstop breath whereby a sentence spoken that does not provide the chance to breathe leaves one gasping and breathless, grasping at words that never fully form.
This is a different sort of breathing. It is a different sort of nonstop breath, somewhere between active and passive. It may be not articulated but this is not the same as not expressed.
Yes, the space is vast and, without markings to guide, it cannot be navigated and so must remain in a certain silence. The silence of a scar, which is a sound but of a different quality, a skin but of a different texture.
To be free of scars it becomes completely scar, it is a defence, scar cannot scar on scar. From my unpunctuated place I cannot capitalise. I do not favour. I do not have to decide. And with this I can curl into myself and listen to the whispering of other’s breaths, my spine a row of full stops continuing into ellipses that fall over each other as I curve. It is the stop that can continue. It both makes the break, and makes the bridge to cross it.
If I give you my breath, can I continue to breathe myself? And yet, if commas breathe breath into words, in writing without them I am choosing instead to deaden each letter, which will lay scattered around amongst scoured skin flakes. Because I like to exfoliate. I like to brush off the past. It is an ultimatum of sorts, you may have my body or my words.
Another machine-false separation, as if punctured veins could spill anything other than red ink. (The sort used by teachers
to correct bad grammar). Though this is less about punctuation than it is about punctures, which must then really be about containment. Full stops. Which are frontiers. Which are breath breaks.
Breaking is the moment of change. I feel uneasy around change, it asks for choices to be set down and adhered to.
It is a commitment. Once broken, even the best repair work cannot return to the constant. The constant being the repetition, which is the comfort (for as long as it is a blanket to warm yourself in and not one that inadvertently suffocates).
It is no coincidence then that a movement across borders is referred to as a break. It is a desire for safety and a resistance against the frustration of adjustment. The period where you must suffer a shortage of breath whilst learning to breathe in new air. Breaking of course, suggests there was a superiority to that that was before, as if something could be perfect in itself, enough in itself, to remain unchanged. Yet, it does not need a direct break for cracks to nonetheless appear on the surface. They emerge of their own accord, and so it becomes easier to make clean quick breaks, like the plaster pulled off swiftly and with purpose. Break and
break and break offers a surface that is too unpredictable for cracks to develop. Cracks which are the slow plaster removal pain. Break and break and break which allows for you to create, to remould, to adjust on your own terms, to turn shortage of breathes into staccatos and to not consider this a lack but just another rhythm. Maybe this is exfoliation, a brushing of the past in a controlled practice, an enforced confrontation with change. A strengthening exercise. A test. An attempt.
Punctuation marks scar a text. Tiny reminders of the barrier between inside and outside expression. Between the what to say and how to say.
Inside our body we make sense, but crossing to the outside and encountering others, communicating with others requires mediation. This is the journey of the word, and this is the journey of the breaking, the breaking of self understanding to a place of communication. Between the words I have inside and the words I place on a page, there is the moment of their translation into something tangible, letterible, spellable, grammared.
I’ll walk you across and through it now. It is a bracken-covered no man’s land between the inside and the out. Even the lightest step treading through will leave a broken trail. And your skin covers quickly with scrapes and scratches. In the silence all that can be heard is the sound of snapping, and sentence length inhalations. Sentence length inhalations. This is not the breath that you know inside, the one that flows un-punctured. On the outside you must breathe shallow
so all can take a share, other breaths need space, need air, their own air, to read you.
So you write with full stops, and you let yourself slowly deflate as each one pierces new layers of surface as it tries to heal from those scratches. And you are a bracken bonsai tree, stunted. Growth cornered and comma’d off with scissors. A skin that contains at the expense of its contents. The evaporated insides leaving an empty, shrunken shell. Would I rather deaden than puncture? Taking breath from my words is only the breath of a certain air. One that is for sharing. The one we take for granted. The outside. It does not mean they are not still breathing from their own source, the one permeating skin from the inside. My blood is filled with froth. I am ventilated.
My deadened words, the ones without commas and full stops, are deadened, not dead. The difference is one of motion and one of emotion. Without sensation they are a numb. They are the lain down aftermath of the journey. They are the ringing in the ears after cries have ceased. They are the knitting of scars from the scrapes and scratches. They are deadened and they need this. They need this moment void. They need to be still and suspended. They are rag dolls. They are in pretence for a while, they are resting.
Numbness and restful stillness are purposeful. They are not dead, involuntarily without motion or emotion. They are still and they are not breathing, but air permeates them nonetheless. It seeps in through the skin as calmly as it leaks out again. It is an all encompassing, decentralised breath, one that is different, less obvious, less owned. It is continual, it does not tire. It is open, it does not need the throat to relax, the windpipes to release, the nostrils to flare and close. It is as open as becoming shapeless, it is borderless.
This is how my words live. And this is how they feel and move. It is a sort of sleep travel. One that soars over skies. It is without gravity. Without regulation. It is shapeless.
It is clear and clean, free of scars.
Yet there is space in this shapelessness. It is shapeless space, but space all the same. I would like my unpunctuated words to give the feeling of this decentralised breath. The feeling of continuity. A continuity which is not the same as the density found in a nonstop breath whereby a sentence spoken that does not provide the chance to breathe leaves one gasping and breathless, grasping at words that never fully form.
This is a different sort of breathing. It is a different sort of nonstop breath, somewhere between active and passive. It may be not articulated but this is not the same as not expressed.
Yes, the space is vast and, without markings to guide, it cannot be navigated and so must remain in a certain silence. The silence of a scar, which is a sound but of a different quality, a skin but of a different texture.
To be free of scars it becomes completely scar, it is a defence, scar cannot scar on scar. From my unpunctuated place I cannot capitalise. I do not favour. I do not have to decide. And with this I can curl into myself and listen to the whispering of other’s breaths, my spine a row of full stops continuing into ellipses that fall over each other as I curve. It is the stop that can continue. It both makes the break, and makes the bridge to cross it.
