THE DASH and the MARK

THE DASH AND THE MARK

It’s like saying nature or nurture, up or down, East or West, Poncho & Lefty. But they’re also regulators, turnstiles, in the phenomenon of “fast or slow.” The two grammatical glyphs symbolize more than just punctuation marks. They seem to be benchmarks of technological change, and with that shifts in exactly how we think. It’s amazing how these otherwise insignificant small marks on a page hold such power over us.

I personally am a devotee of the dash. Anyone who has read anything here knows that. It’s easy, but it also facilitates swiftness in thought transition and flow from one idea to the next. Sometimes I just refuse to let punctuation interfere if it holds up an idea. I want to move forward, and to hell with the rules of how to say it. It was said that Henry James agreed with this – disgusted with how “dogmatizing” kills the “felicity” of thought. That made me feel better.

But the dash is also a mark which is so popular now that it’s virtually eliminates commas, colons, semicolons, and even periods. So it does have its dark side. There’s no time for grammar in the age of computers. Sentences “run on” like lower-case vers libre falling off an e e cummings typewriter. Texting and digital chat combine with acronyms and cyber-signs that make the The Chicago Manuel of Style a museum relic.

There’s always a downside, right? Technology takes just as it gives. The inability to slow down and contextualize, to shore up specific thoughts before getting lost in others, leads to a sense of helplessness in a sea of white noise. And without a doubt, “noise” along with psychobabble, doublespeak, and chatty semaphore has us all existentially lost. Nothing makes much sense. Hence the need to slow things down again, at least long enough to allow our minds to get around what’s being said.

Hello, once again, to the simple period, first cousin to the comma which is second cousin to the semicolon (distant cousin to the colon). The period stops everything. It demands a complete break between sounds, audible rests between notes. Thoughts need to be gathered and processed before moving forward. There used to be a good argument for preserving the cousins of punctuation, like the colon and semicolon, but now it’s down to even defending the period.

I used to be a great defender of the semicolon – not an absolute stop in transmitting thoughts, but just enough to ready ourselves for another round of the same thought. It says there’s “more to this” before stopping.

The semicolon is relaxed, bottom-heavy, asymmetrically negotiable. The “crescent moon” part says there’s more to this thought, but we can pause before moving on. It separates and unites. Multiple semicolons in tandem is a family divided between parents and children, where each has something to say. To leave one out is to silence the whole family. It’s an e pluribus unum writ small.

Many today attack the colon and semicolon, and even the comma, calling them pretentious, unnecessary, highbrow, too slow, obstructive, old school, and ironically as “empty of meaning” as the dash. And yet the dash is used precisely because it is empty of meaning. Meaninglessness is the trend. It reminds me of the prophet suddenly landing in the midst of chaos, telling everyone to slow down and regroup, only to discover that chaos is what they want. Regrouping is not. The prophet is yesterday’s comma, period and colon.

Not to totally condemn speed. Computers have given us lots. Instant communications, access to information never before available, human connectivity, etc. The dash facilitates this. In that sense the dash is almost like a horizontal line allowing uninterrupted flow with what’s in front, like passing a baton in a relay race. The “rational and logical” may get blurred, but it (hopefully) spills over into the poetic and allegorical, if not the lyrical. The muse is always hovering at the edge of that precipice, between form and formless, like a hummingbird.

Buckminster Fuller said, “I seem to be a verb.” In that spirit I almost find myself using the dash as an escutcheon — my way of plowing through reams of bullshit. But the comma and semicolon are also faithful allies. They slow me down and make me re-collect and sort out. It’s a mesalliance that becomes an “odd couple” in the new world of sharing. “Sharing” becomes the new subject of scrutiny. What exactly is it?

One needs to keep up with the computer age while also knowing where to pause, when to take a breath. Every speedway needs a speedbump with which to measure distance. The “bump” is all that’s left in the parsing of thoughts and ideas, in the contextualizing of things. It triggers ideas and emotions. It concentrates and distills and allows thoughts to be expressed (orally and written).

This is the modern narrative and the modern dilemma. But the comma and semicolon also have a hidden history of their own. Many of us aren’t aware that many punctuation marks like them did not survive. The velocity of earlier times even then made them prohibitive. Responding to many such marks, scholars actually said “there’s no time for this!” But the three compadres here did survive. Why? Fortuitously, each allowed just enough stylistic “flow” to turn confusion into refreshing clarity. And that opened the door, opportunistically speaking, to grammatical eloquence. It coincided with the “art of expression” as it needed to be in 15^th century Italy. It also lent elbowroom for annotation to be more or less left up to the writer’s personal taste and style and less on prescribed rules. In other words, there was just enough play between rules and artful flexibility for the comma, semicolon, and colon to live on.

Through the centuries many efforts have been made to force the written word to follow strict guidelines, meticulously hammered out by scholars. But once a very good (or great) writer came along, it became apparent that creative innovation was due mostly to liberties taken without rules, setting them aside which then sent academics into a tailspin. Grammatical rules, more than any other kinds of rules, were always meant to be broken. They’re just a backdrop for lines to be overstepped, risks to be taken, envelopes pushed. Defenders of the Manuel of Style to this day cringe at the thought.

Today, we might say that the purpose of any punctuation mark is the reverse of “risk-taking” – again, to slow things down (the academics get the last laugh). The “syntactical offenders” of yesterday who used the “wrong” punctuation are those who now use no punctuation. Even the “half semicolon” (comma), the final stopgap against free-floating stream of consciousness, the quarter-guard against unharnessed babble, is anathema to the “noise” of digital chat. The comma is an annoyance, just as taking a breath is almost an annoyance, a valuable waste of time. – So why not just do away with the “human” element altogether?! – asks the computer.

Again, just a few years ago I was defending the semicolon. Now it’s the comma — that sickled/crescent moon that keeps me from being swept into an abyss of white noise without end or beginning – 24/7 cacophonous distortion. Even the apostrophe, that silent sibling hovering above like a quarter-moon, is in danger of the same currents of ungoverned, unrestrained free agency.

What stuns me most, as my last fingernail holds on to the crescent’s edge, is that the world now spins with its own tech-no-logic. It lives on without hooks and dots. Human beings continue on pretending to communicate – again, the question of what “sharing” actually means. Their only common denominator seems to be through the medium of data. Even feelings and emotions don’t make sense unless sifted through the filters of numbers, averages, polls, deviations, and probabilities. When someone cries or laughs, he or she subconsciously measures it against “curves,” “norms,” and “averages.” Am I normal? Am I okay?” The superego takes over. Computer data (especially numbers) doesn’t need punctuation or a literary “style.”

And so, survival (for me) is a matter of negotiating velocity and flow with points of restraint, disruption, pressure and reticence. It becomes a battle between making an imprint along the steady current of undisturbed and undisciplined primal release. The flow is so strong that an occasional “hook” (by way of an apostrophe or comma) is like a paddle trying to slow up a river. The straight line (dash) goes with the current; the hook attempts to divert the water and make a splash just for a moment.

Points are made everyday. But fewer and fewer are actually heard. There are simply too many drowning in that river of noise. Every person is an individual, which means there are no individuals. Everyone seeks to stand out, which means no one stands out. The difference is that some of us know this, while many do not. Their “noise” is unconscious and random, and they treat any silence between sounds as something to fear and loathe. Vacuums invite pauses which invite unwanted thoughts. Best to stay submerged and deaf.

And so, again, when I see a punctuation mark anymore, I see a relic, a dinosaur, a memento from a lost time submerging and drowning. I see myself holding on to a branch along the river’s edge hoping not to be swept away. My fingers hold on but are are already weakening, and I see my fate downstream. But at least I know other branches live on ahead. I will always stop myself somehow, somewhere, as the current takes me along, if only to make sense of certain things along the way.

© 2022 Richard Hiatt