Pure Act: The Uncommon Life of Robert Lax (Catholic Practice in North America)

by Michael N. McGregor

You can take a word like “night” that’s been used so often and in so many combinations that you think it’s no longer usable and try to find a way of using it, in spite of that, so that its meaning becomes “night” again. One of the things you hope happens when you repeat a word rhythmically—and in a pattern that can be listened to pleasantly—is that all of its meanings will begin to reappear or re-present themselves in the mind—all the dimensions of its meanings. (This is essentially an auditory thing; the disposition of words on a page has the same relation to the sound of a poem as notes on a page of music have to the music.) The vertical arrangement of the words has two functions: to show the reader how to read it aloud—including where pauses should be—and to present the images one at a time. We are so accustomed to skimming and skipping in the traditional horizontal word arrangement that we no longer see many of the words as words; we start picking up whole phrases. The vertical arrangement restores the original value of each word and establishes the order in which the words are to be read.