Fault lines and parables
Dear reader,
Here’s a sentence:
For mothers, some mothers, my mother, daughters are division and sons are multiplication; the former reduce them, fracture them, take from them, the latter augment and enhance.
This sentence comes from the wonderful Rebecca Solnit in her book The Faraway Nearby, who I’ve written about before.
The context, which you can already sense from the sentence, is about Solnit’s troubled relationship with her own mother, made more fractured by Alzheimer’s, but already built on a fault line of jealousy.
The punctuation here is almost breathtaking—the most obvious mirroring between the ‘division’ of daughters and the even repetition of those first three phrases and their increasing specification, giving it a sense of inevitability, even horror, especially as mirrored in the repetition of “them” in the second half.
There’s more we can notice, the hard sounds given to the daughter language: “division”, “reduce”, “fracture”, “take”, compared to the more open vowel sounds of the sons: “augment and enhance”. There’s also the play on “division”, used in both a mathematical sense as opposed to the multiplication of the sons, but also “division” with the implication of disagreement (just by virtue of existing).
But implicit in those first three phrases are a kind of grappling with the generalisation, as if we are seeing her thoughts in real time—does this apply to all mothers? No, but does it apply to some? Yes. And does it apply to “mine” (Solnit’s)? Well.
All writing, of course, is forging between generalisation and specificity. But by understanding Solnit’s specific relationship, perhaps our own is illumined a little.
And, for writers, some writers, this writer, maybe that can be enough.
Drip feed of writerly news:
Each newsletter, a spot of self-promo of things I’ve written recently. At the start of this year, I wrote a piece of microfiction (ie less than 100 words) that won Highly Commended in the Welkin Writing Prize, and has since been nominated for Best of the Net.
You can read it here: it’s called A Parable of Slow Songs. I promise you have time.
As always, thanks for reading - if you have any feedback, or just want to tell me what you’ve been reading, hit the button!
With apologies for mentioning maths,
Guan