Plans for Sentences (Gladman III)

 

 

In Calamities (2016) Renee Gladman used writing itself to reflect on the ways in which line-making in writing and drawing can be said to mirror one another. In Prose Architectures (2017) she turned to drawing as a means of continuing her investigation of line-making as a mode of thought. In Plans for Sentences (2022), she has circled back around to explore the relationship between visual and verbal lines. She highlights the circular nature of this investigation in her epigraph on the first page of the book:

These sentences—they—will begin having already been sentences somewhere else, and this will mark their afterlife, and this will be their debut.

So how might this work? In what sense might sentences be said to have existed previously, and to be currently experiencing an afterlife, and also making their first appearance? I can't be sure that what I am about to say is anything like what Gladman intended, or what someone else looking at the same materials might come up with, or what I may wind up thinking myself at some later date. But it does seem to me that there is a logic to these seemingly paradoxical assertions.

The text of Plans for Sentences has an architecture of its own. Open the book anywhere and you will see on the left-hand page a line drawing similar in nature to those in Prose Architectures. (There are sixty such drawings. Roughly midway through the book Gladman begins experimenting with the effects of the addition of color in parts of the drawing.) On each facing page are prose sentences which seem to echo or develop notions suggested by the drawings across from them. It's as if Gladman were looking at the drawings and then "translating" the drawing in a somewhat intuitive and experimental way, or unpacking the thinking that the drawing generates in her mind as she looks at it.

But there's another dynamic at work as well. In almost every case there are three or four sentences on each facing right-hand page, and as you read those sentences in sequence you are made aware of echoes and redundancies and divergences not just among the sentences on that page, but among all of the sentences on all of the other pages of the book as well. There's a sense in which the entire book, the collection of drawings and sentences taken as a whole, consists of a set of vibratory interactions. It's almost symphonic in that regard.

Let's take, for example, Fig. 9

(© 2022 Renee Gladman. Used with permission of author)

 

This drawing is illustrative of many of the ideas about the relationship between the architecture of the sentence and the architecture of the drawing that Gladman has been exploring in recent years. On the one hand, it is clearly a constructed object, a linear sculpture of sorts which balances many different visual elements—horizontal lines, vertical lines, positive and negative spaces, lights and darks, circular and rectangular shapes—in a manner which comes across as artful, almost lyrical. Squint at it just right, and it might be landscape of sorts; squint at it another way, it might suggest a building.

On the other hand, many of the sequences, and most of the horizontal movements, look sort of like handwriting, and the drawing as a whole looks as if it might be a second cousin once removed to the kind of prewriting outline that I for one often create when I'm trying to organize some ideas for an essay. A thinking map.

With those preliminary thoughts in mind, let's consider the sentences that appear on the facing page:

These sentences will constellate the gears that alter your movements on weather; they will foment tiny gears of speech, clicking, turning, moating, and will be like wind blowing thought back onto itself, behind itself so that thought moves by leaning forward

These sentences will have performed the dreams of sentences upon arrival

These moats will separate objects from subjects and preserve silence

They will set the world of text in motion, diverting at the escapement, turning to void, and will make small bodies of sayings that will click and moat

First of all, I notice that there is a kind of instability or lateral drift in the way these sentences unfold that echoes or mirrors in my mind what happens when I look at the drawing. This drawing does not work the way I am used to seeing drawings work. It's not a picture of something, nor is it a pure abstraction. I can sense or intuit a logic to the drawing, but it is not a logic I could easily articulate. There are elements in the drawing that are unique and idiosyncratic, but there are also echoes, lots of echoes, in which one part of the drawing seems to be reflecting or re-presenting another part.

Likewise, these sentences do not work in the ways I am used to seeing sentences work. The word "moat" for example, is deployed here three times, once as a noun and twice, surprisingly, as a verb. All four sentences are syntactically correct, but they are nevertheless enigmatic and resistant to paraphrase. And there are, as in the drawing, lots of echoes here: words and phrases repeated in different contexts and generative of different effects.

So to return to the original question of how sentence might be said to exist simultaneously in different times, I think it has to do with the ways in which these sentences—and drawings—reverberate and cross-pollinate with one another. They are "like wind blowing back on thought itself," in all of its instability and recursiveness. As a writer I am always acutely aware of how trying to capture a line of thought in words is necessarily reductive. As Stephen Dobyns remarks:

The main problem with turning the world into language is that it's, well, impossible. The word is always less than the thing that it wants to represent. No matter how complicated, exact, true, and beautiful the language may become, it is always a diminishment of the reality described.

 

Which is why we have to keep coming back to it again and again, and why, in Gladman's writing, things that have been said before, that have been seen from a particular angle of vision, are revisited and seen again, as if for the first time. The past is the present is the future. The "real," whatever that might be, can only be visited (and re-visited) in our minds obliquely, imaginatively, intuitively.

I am primarily aware, as I look at Plans for Sentences, of a very active and innovative intelligence engaged in a purposeful and structured exploration of alternative modes of thinking. Reading Gladman is for me not unlike watching a very self-assured artist at her easel as she goes about bringing an entire world to life on the blank canvas. I find the time that I spend attending to her work to be both interesting and inspirational.