Rhythm, Rhythm, Rhythm

As a long-lapsed percussionist and classically-trained composer, rhythm – and its symbolic, written, representation – is everything to me: I hear it in my footsteps, in the tires of traffic passing over uneven roads, the clicking of the dog-childrens’ toenails against linoleum — and, in this iteration of my life, I hear it and see it in the way that words flow or fragment across the page, the screen.

The rhythm currently dominant in The Work at hand is that of my head hitting the wooden sheen of KaijuDesk as I search for the right punctuation to symbolize the rhythmic content of The Passage at hand; I am Goldilocks, and punctuation my (poisoned) porridge.

I’ve been turning over and again to this passage in Ursula K. Le Guin’s STEERING THE CRAFT (an essential in any writer’s library):

“… punctuation tells the reader how to hear your writing. That’s what it’s for. Commas and periods bring out the grammatical structure of a sentence; they make it clear to the understanding, and the emotions, by showing what it sounds like – where the breaks come, where to pause.

If you read music, you know that rests are signs for silence. Punctuation marks serve very much the same purpose.”

– Ursula K. Le Guin, STEERING THE CRAFT, pp.11-12

And so it is – though now that I’ve typed out Le Guin’s wisdom, something is starting to, might be, click(ing). Excuse me.