In All The Right Places

I agree to use punctuation whenever the staircase glitters. Punctuation is galactic in its applications, broadly universal, most carbon-based organisms will recognize a colon when they see one. There is something natural in the formation of a thought, if we think of thought as words, hard to think of it otherwise, but I’m sure it exists, a cat leaps up to a cluttered table without spilling anything, no books toppling, no glass of water tipped over. The fluidity inherent in language is helped by a gentle, momentary restraint, a sudden burgeoning of ideas is saved from exploding into bedlam, a contagion of words are given a retreat from the catastrophe of their own making, a mastodon may pause in its ruminant abstraction to study a hummingbird, the wedding builds in energy as a comma’s insertion saves the tumult of a dress from total disaster, stem-loops and quadruplexes stabilize DNA, all this theology and juice of existence in our chaotic lives unpacked in an instant, a burst of emotion, often calling for a comma, sometimes a semicolon, to make a point, to emphasize a belief, to clarify a meaning. It’s a form of musical direction. The words are flowing along, perhaps too fast, they could use a pause, here it is, a drop of rain on a leaf of mint. It’s often the small seemingly inconsequential things that promote balance in all the right places, traffic lights preventing death and collision. This makes punctuation magnetic, a hypnotic osmosis, a blessing, a penetration. From Latin punctus, past participle of pungere, to “prick, pierce.” We might think of it as a pollen, a tattoo, an added value, a neuroscientific tool, magnetic resonance imaging or positron emission tomography in the pursuit of an elusive symptom, or perhaps just an afterthought, jute wrapped around a bale of cotton to keep it clean; it’s wedged between words or inserted between phrases in order to pause, break, suspend, pull the seminal beginnings of rock into the fullness of cypress surrounding it at the edge of a cliff, which I have just now imagined, calling it forth from a memory, a road trip to Big Sur. Punctuation arrives by stream, twigs and branches from a storm, the litter of a windy day on a surface of flowing water, we’ve all seen something similar, a sentence flowing along until it greets a period, and the ideas come to a rest, a still pool reflecting the Taj Mahal.