December 5: A-bun-dant Clever-ness
“Pulled through by lack, the unbent light/ angles a mathematical rain, minuses saturate
what they cannot coat.”
It’s a lost art, breaking words across lines. The plentifulness of paper and the ease of electronic word processing’s automatic returns make fitting pieces of words just before the margin something we just don’t do anymore.
But when I write longhand, my pages are justified—margin to margin. Akimbo on the page. I fill the whole line even if what I am writing won’t actually fit where I am writing it. Sometimes, I take the medieval monk route and abbreviate the word to the point of undecipherability, but more often I cut it into two semi-arbitrary pieces. Usually between syllables and most probably about in half, but sometimes the split is not fair at all.
The word never complains. Even when its second half is missing or its fancy capital gets left behind, it finds a way to make sense of itself. Not obvious sense like nowhere actually being now-here or pedantic sense like parts of words have meaning on their own and when we take words apart and then put them back together, their portmanteau becomes evident, e.g., to-get-her. Don’t go, it’s a trap.
No, I’m thinking about the cut, the slash, the strikethrough that takes away half the word and gives it to another line.
I was writing about abundance the other morning and broke (interesting) the word across two lines in my notebook:
abun-
dance.
At first, I felt disappointed in myself for destroying such a powerful word, for turning overflowing bounty into nothing: abun. But then I realized that fractured abun-dance is really the soul of abundance: to stand broken and meaningless at the end of a line and know, really believe, that your fullness is just in front of you. To feel abundance is to look at that minus sign, that lack, that hyphen that symbolizes loss as a gesture that is pulling you toward completion.
Abundance is not in the bun or the dance but in the belief that even when you are looking out over the edge of nothing, something is there, waiting.
