Joe Moran: First You Write a Sentence
“I may give more time to them than most people do, but we are all of us, of school age and older, in the sentences game. Sentences are our writing commons, the shared ground where every writer walks. A poet works with them, but so does the unsung author who came up with Items trapped in doors cause delays or Store in a cool, dry place. Every kind of writer writes in sentences. Even the most clueless or careless strew their writing with capital letters and full stops, in the hope that they will turn what lies between them into this universal currency. By learning to make sentences, we learn not just about writing but about everything. The sentence is where we make the briefest of senses out of this mad, beautiful, befuddling mess: life.”
Kauniisti kirjoitettu kirja kirjoittamisesta. Tai oikeastaan tätä voisi kutsua rakkauskirjeeksi lauseelle. Muistutus kirjoittajalle siitä, että lause vaatii ajattelua, työtä, hiomista, katselua, editointia, muotoa, rytmin, oikeat sanat oikeassa järjestyksessä ja oikeat välimerkit ollakseen vaikuttava, toteuttaakseen tehtävänsä. Ehkä jopa elämäntehtävän:
“If our lives have any point, which I doubt, it might be this: to notice the world with our own eyes and to wrap that noticing in words. For this we have made the perfect receptable – a sentence.”
Joe Moran käsittelee myös tekoälyä (kirja on ilmestynyt vuonna 2018).
“Writing has to be humanly messy, non-algorithmically flawed, to be truly readable. Something in us balks at he idea of applying algebra to words, because words, unlike numbers, can move, hurt, anger, enchant and cajole, and build credible worlds of thought and feeling out of nothing. That ‘little bit of creativity’ is all. A sentence need a glint of human intelligence behind it to give it the elusive thing, sentience, that makes it a sentence.”
Onko ihminen uniikki? Se jää nähtäväksi.
