Sentence

A sentence cannot exist without previous sentences, but sometimes there is no initial statement. The left branch, the right, grammatically speaking, are footmarks painted on a ballroom floor. Rereading Poetics of Space. The sentence is a dwelling, a breath, to which I open my mouth. In which chargeless vacuum can we exist more: of the impulsive knee, of shapes manoeuvring in the sky. The sentence I just said wavers and becomes sentenceless. It shakes out its hair, it has a new dress. Syntax is shape, it shapes the reader. In my final class I said the sentence doesn’t exist in nature, only the utterance does, and one of my students challenged me, so I tried to explain how written language is a construct with rules which are arbitrary, while speaking is natural—we utter all the time without agreed rules—but this does not satisfy him, and I say I’ve got to do more reading on this subject, and the class laughs, but I’m left feeling uneasy. My student also.

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