Back in southwest France. The heat is still there, but the day is being negotiated by a breeze from somewhere higher up. A violent catabatic gust has just catapulted a beautifully crafted set of twelve-spot dominoes across my parlour floor, a timely reminder that landscapes are conversations, not pictures.
Earlier I found myself thinking about punctuation. About cadence. About music. About the strange tendency to mistake notation for performance. A score is not music. A sentence is not a thought. A landscape is not a view. The marks on the page matter. The notes matter. The contours of the mountain matter. But none of them contain the thing itself.
The thing itself happens in motion.
Perhaps this is why cadence interests me. Punctuation, at a minimum, is guidance on cadence. At its best, it traces a path through which a reader may recreate the movement of a thought.
The dominoes are back in their broken box now. The breeze has carried on northward. Yet something remains: the sense that the world is less a collection of objects than a series of performances, each leaving behind only enough evidence to be imagined again.
David Marshall
Montory