Diagramming Sentences
 

 

As a child, from time to time, you had to stay late in the classroom, after school. The task of detention was this: you'd be obliged to write, in cursive handwriting, on the chalkboard, in straight sets, slanting to the right, a message on repeat. The message would be something like, "I will not talk in class." You watched your hand, writing, big forms in gray on black, line by unequal line-- subversive pleasures. Draw out the given text. Repeat, love its curves, vary its dots and dashes, let it distract you. Keep going. Another recipe for writing, this time non-punitive, was designed to help you read. You watched as your teacher was diagramming sentences. She hoped you could see how subject-object-verb sequences could sport off-shoots. Verbs dripped adverbs like little runners. How the prepositional phrase could slant right or left, up or down,  into the main line of subject-verb-object: and then escape like paper airplanes in a sputter of low lying wings. Drawing sentences generates a virtual ground or place from the shapes of text, the text of shapes. Scatter zones map to star charts. Mathematical formulae drop into miasmatic fields. Reading, and listening to voices reading, opens to empathy, variation, and a feeling of infinity. Being read aloud to, a child listens through her hands...Drawing is moving outside the doors of the library. She wants in. She might be sorrowful, she may be laughing, she may be the queen of Mars. How will drawing have already given us a way through the thicket of memes and screens? Mysteries of form: handwriting is free, can I score these texts? A found question: "If you know that most people are afraid right now, how would you message a thing?"