Paradigm 1: one sentence, two commas
Honolulu Star-Advertiser 7 August 2010: A3
Click to enlarge.
In the sentence I've marked in red, the paired commas set off the relative clause "which were administered . . . " and turn it into a parenthetical digression: "The so-called black sites and enhanced interrogation methods (which, by the way, were administered on the basis of guidance from the Department of Justice) are a thing of the past." The sentence's entire meaning depends on those commas, plus the not always enforced distinction between restrictive modifiers beginning with "that" and non-restrictive modifiers beginning with "which." But if a court chooses to read in a less pedantic way than I've been writing, it might just as easily understand the clause to be whispering, "The so-called black sites and enhanced interrogation methods which were administered on the basis of guidance from the Department of Justice [sotto voce] (as opposed to those which weren't) [normal voice] are a thing of the past."
I'm sounding not only pedantic but also cynical and paranoid. Still, the August 6 New York Times, page A1, carries excerpts from a 911 call in which a man notifies the police that he has just murdered eight people with a brace of pistols which he calls "two of my favorites." In a state where language is well regulated, perhaps guns would be too. But one reason those eight people are dead now is that America's legislatures and courts play the eighteenth-century commas of the Second Amendment as if they were the rules of a game. My bridge-playing colleagues in the break room at Eli Lilly & Co. used to explain, "When I said, 'Three no trump,' that meant I had the seven of diamonds, shithead!" With exactly the same passion, attorneys for the owners of America's shooting irons rise from their seats to claim under oath that they have located the essential unambiguity at the core of a sentence that reads:
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
Paradigm 2: one page, no commas
Gertrude Stein: Writings and Lectures 1909-1945,
ed. Patricia Meyerowitz. Baltimore: Penguin, 1971
Paradigm 3: by way of trying to explain
the difference
Beauty is truth, truth beauty.
We can't know what Gertrude Stein would have written about the torture contractors of the black sites. Personally, she thought Hitler was just great. But these commaless sentences of hers, all rigorous unambiguity, do tell some truth by contrast about (for instance) the torture memos of John C. Yoo. Textual history reveals that Yoo shopped through his black library of dictionaries for one definitional language to enable the torturers in one dungeon, and another and perhaps contradictory definitional language to enable the torturers in another. But Stein's sentences, stripped of punctuation and reduced to nothing but words, chastened themselves to a single voice.
A choir of one, that voice now sings to us from the history of its page, helping us learn from its still living sound that sentences never become things of the past. Their truths or their lies live on as grammar: grammar, rigorous judge, sentencing speech from within to life.
