I had added the following to the preceding. I decided to take it back. Not because I don’t mean it, but because I think I rather prefer the original as it was. Even in the blogging, I think I could do with a little less editing . . . or at least with a little more segmentation. And it’s all good. No one’s reading anyway . . .
It occurs to me that since this is the only thing I’ve posted here so far, I shouldn’t leave it uncommented. Someone might get the wrong impression. But what is the right impression? Do I, of all people, have any friggin’ idea what that might be? That, I would say, is partly the point (and much of the point of Jesus’ interactions with his friends on the boat–both the time that He walked and the time that He slept): I don’t know. Oh, how I don’t know. Volumes could be written about the depths of my unknowing. I suppose that’s what I’ll do.
Joel 
2 comments
Comments feed for this article
Thu - 2007/10/25 at 12:08
Christine
I enjoy elipses, parantheses, dashes, etc…
I also think that your speaking would be somewhat easier to follow if I could see all of the little parenthtical devices to help me keep track of all of the parenthetical statements within your extraordinarily complicated sentences. You tell stories like that, too. Bunny trails. Sometimes you remember to come back to the original thought. Sometimes you don’t.
Perhaps that is why I so enjoy telling Richard that his sentences are too complicated and getting to make him simplify them.
Not that I am saying it’s bad. I kind of enjoy your pretzel-like sentences.
Fri - 2007/11/30 at 15:41
joelmw
Among the cool technology in “Minority Report” are the various computer interfaces. I love the one he uses in his “office” at work and this is a little like what I sometimes see in my head and wish I could express when I talk. The thing about words and about thought (and by this I want to be clear that I mean the words and thoughts as entities themselves and not merely as symbols of something else; not that they cease to exist as such or even that they necessarily transcend that symbolic existence, but their substance itself, let alone the substance of that to which they refer, is more than we typically allow for) is that they exist in a relational network that would be better represented in a 4-D (space with time) interactive environment. I think I may have to blog this, ’cause it’s feeling important and bigger than I want to throw into a comment . . .
Briefly (and related), about bunny trails: what one might be trying to do with the whole process is describe a landscape. What one is expected to do is traverse that landscape efficiently, taking a listener from A to B as directly as possible. One thing about me is that I’m usually not even sure I want to get to B or, for that matter, I’m not altogether sure what B is that I should want to get there. In any case, I’m less interested in B as a destination than in the nature of B and, likewise, of the ontology in which it exists. Which is not necessarily to justify the bunny trail. And I should add that much of this is deeply instinctual and somewhat un- or subconscious even when I’m aware that it’s happening.