I sing the song of the sentence, a grammar song of universality and understanding, composed of phrases and clauses the likes of which have not been heard for lo these many generations; a song of subjects and predicates, participles and gerunds; the song of the sentence.
I sing not in self-reflection, and attempt not the songs of singers long since passed us by, generations-old songs sung into mirrors by mouths as wide the sky; I sing, instead, a song of simplicity and offer it to anyone with a mind in the mood to dance.
The sentence then (as I take your hand; skip with me now through a mist of green tea), and all it contains, the logic and sense, the sound we heard from the cradle commenced, (and the stutter step, and the rhyme time swing, and back again like) the firelight between chaos and certainty, a divine line dividing the arbitrary mind-rhyme from its meaningful expression: the sentence, and all its possibilities: such is our subject this night.
This is not a song of contents, of theories and definitions expounded upon through paragraphs of argumentation, nor is it a song of the word, of the in-the-beginning-was-the and the at-the-end-of-will-be, the word as hard as a diamond, as cold to the touch as the moon–no!, I am much too happy to sing its cold blue song, a song of abstractions in blue light, of whiskey cups and waitress caps and cigarette ash from philosophers and their tears (detritus of hot air); I much prefer the sentence, to sing the song of the sentence and dance beneath its swirling colored lights as they trace patterns in the randomness and give rise to expectations and surprises, shocking and comfortable in their newness: words and contents cannot compete…how on Earth could they compete!?, for this is the sentence, its spirit swifter, its timescale grander, its very essence larger than words can possibly imagine, a galaxy of meaning orbiting an empty sun whose presence is detected not through direct observation but through the rhythm of the dance: meaning traced in the invisible lines of metaphor.
But what does it take to start a sentence, to brave unknown landscapes between first words and final punctation marks, to embark into the dark forest of your mind guided only by a legion of incoherent ill-formed thoughts, each clutching at your ears and begging to be heard; to know that every step forward will only have to be retread again and again, revisited and revised until that single step is so solid as to take the weight of the literary force that precedes it, the paragraphs upon paragraphs that precede it, and to venture out anyway, willing to imagine and conceive and develop themes on a whim, trusting in the momentum of the metaphorical pen, determined to make each sentence its own success?
Writers brave enough to begin a sentence deserve themselves a song, for they are the heroes, the heroines, the myths and legends who freed humanity from the monochromatic scale of the single grunted word, the ancestors of art who yearned to dance the dance of tongues, and who deserve more praise than I have time to sing, for I cannot forget the others, the ones who, though following the trail of their elders, retained their youthful exuberance and skipped where their elders had walked, twirled where they had rested–the wild children who laughed in the face of the dark wood and never hesitated to expand the range: they may not have been the ones to discover, but they were the ones to engage, building gardens of wondrous beauty by putting sentences on the page, begging us to enter the spectacle of the new age with adjectives that always sparkle and rhythms that never end; they taught us what it meant to dance, and they deserve their song.
So dance with me now in celebration of their dreams, and spin with me now to trace a pattern of our own, the song bringing a smile to both our faces, and with our hands entwined, spin now once more, and off you go, alone, to sing your own song; but know this: after I bow graciously to your withdrawing back, I close my eyes to dance surprised, forever and again, twirling along, spinning my song of the sentence.