SUMMER 2004: Punctuation

By the time you read this I’ll be winging my way across land and sea for la bella Italia. I’ll be sojourning near Praiano, the village on the Amalfi Coast where my book, I LOVE YOU LIKE A TOMATO, originates, in the seaside town of Positano. Everything here is built on the side of the mountain and so climbing steps has become my favorite form of exercise, and sure beats the stair stepper and treadmill at the gym for vigorous aerobic workouts. The villa I stay in has a 260 step descent to the beach.

I could put a comma on every step. I could climb the stairs and read my book of poems, SLOW DANCE ON STILTS, aloud to the gulls and leave out all the punctuation. I could drop my commas on the steps and toss my semicolons, dashes, periods and line breaks to the wind as I pontificate aloud.

Where did punctuation begin? Early writers spoke out loud as they wrote their tales, and until we were deep into the Middle Ages, writers figured readers would naturally prefer hearing the words they wrote rather than seeing them. Comparatively few people could read, so public readings were the mode of communication. Medieval texts called upon the audience to "lend an ear" to a tale or story. They said nothing about lending an eye.

Because books were read out loud to an audience, the writer didn’t separate the words into phonetic sections, but strung them together in continuous sentences. The direction of the eye followed the string of letters, which varied from place to place, from age to age, left to right, top to bottom - or as in Hebrew and Arabic, from right to left, or in columns top to bottom as in Chinese and Japanese, or in pairs of vertical columns such as in Mayan texts. Some wrote in alternate lines in opposite directions, back and forth, a method called boustrophedon in ancient Greek.

These ancient writings on scrolls did not separate words, made no distinction between lower case and upper case letters, and used no punctuation. I think some of my students would love to go back to this form, but the words were written to be read aloud, and because it was not easy to read words strung together this way, huge mistakes in reading were common and troublesome.

Punctuation traditionally is ascribed to Aristophanes of Byzantium (circa 200 B.C.) and was at best erratic. The apostle Paul’s epistles as read by Augustine were not scrolls but a codex, a bound papyrus manuscript in continuous writing. The early Christians adopted the codex because they could easily carry the forbidden texts hidden away in their clothes. The pages were numbered and bound in a single package, convenient to transport as well as hide.

Egyptian hieroglyphs, Sumerian cuneiform and Sanskrit had no use for separating and dividing letters into words. A primitive form of punctuation divided words into lines of sense indicating a raise in the voice at the end of a block of thought. This device served the idea of silent reading, which could not rely on oratorical skills or memory.

After the seventh century, a combination of points and dashes indicated a full stop, a raised or high point was equivalent to the comma, and a semicolon was used as we still use it today. Punctuation became necessary, not to read aloud, but to read in silence. By the ninth century, silent reading was more common and scribes began separating words and using punctuation liberally. Irish scribes began isolating not only parts of speech but also the grammatical constituents within a sentence, and many of these punctuation marks are still used today.

With silent reading the reader could establish an unrestricted relationship with the book and the words. And there were critics. The critics of punctuation held that public reading was the only correct form of reading, and they warned that silent reading only encouraged day dreaming and the "terrible sin of idleness."

I recommend my students have at their elbows Diana Hacker’s small, inexpensive pocket handbook, "A Pocket Style Manual" to engage in the lovely sin of idleness prompted by reading and writing.

Back to my 260 steps back up from the beach. By the time I return to the States I’ll feel almost as Herculean as the 85 year-old nonna next door who hops up and down those same steps morning and night without a problem or a complaint.

I’d rather be out under the bright blue Italian sky than writing in a room with a fan and the door closed. But wait a second, is there a comma in that last sentence?

Have a great summer. I’ll write you from Italy.
Con affetto,
Marie

Why write? Here are the four motives George Orwell claims inspires the writer. It was first published in a 1946 essay. The first motive to write, he says, is sheer egoism. The desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get back at the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. Orwell says writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen -- in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. Serious writers, says Orwell, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists.

The second motive Orwell gives is aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. (My observation is that most poets fall into this category.) Orwell says above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations.

Orwell’s third motive is historical impulse. The desire to find out true facts and store them up for posterity.

The fourth motive Orwell gives us is political purpose -- using the word "political" in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples' idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. No book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

Orwell writes, "All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and yet writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness, and one would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. This could be the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention."

Then he adds, and this I think is the most important statement of his musings: "... it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality."

Do you agree with Orwell? What motivates you? Below is my definition of a writer’s motive. It’s Lu Chi’s poem from Wen Fu, the first ars poetica of China, written in the third century A.D., translated by Sam Hamill:

The Terror:

I worry that my ink well
may run dry,

that right words
cannot be found.

I want to respond to each
moment’s inspiration.

Work with what is given;
that which passes cannot be detained.

Things move into shadows and vanish;
memory returns in an echo.

When Spring arrives,
we understand why Nature has reasons.

Thoughts rise from the heart on breezes
and language finds its speaker.

Yesterday’s buds are this morning’s blossoms
we draw with a brush on silk.