Macinstruct

Many years ago—so many that the card catalogue was physically a card catalogue—I was trolling through it idly and came upon the intriguing title—Gravity and Levity—of a book by a psychiatrist named Alan McGlashan. It is an interesting little collection of essays that roam the borderland between medicine and mysticism.

Most writing taught in schools is fairly conservative. Some leeway might be allowed depending on the crowd (sorry about the rhyme...or maybe not, as we’ll see), but the usual requirements include spelling correctly, eschewing sentence fragments and the dreaded comma splice, and so forth: all the things that your equally dreaded freshman composition teacher enforces with an iron fist and a red pen. But there is a subversive tradition in the history of writing in English. It’s rare, but it’s there. Some have called this Grammar B (as opposed, of course, to Grammar A, the mainstream).

I have a old friend who lives in Liberal, Kansas, a brave little outpost at a crossroads just north of the Oklahoma panhandle. Being an Albuquerque sophisticate, I like to tease Bill for living out in the boondocks. And so it was that, lying awake in the small hours last week, I remembered some lines from a poem:

Of the babies born at midnight
In the sod huts of lost hope,
With no physician there,
Except a Kansas prayer,
And the Indian raid a-howling through the air.

A few nights ago—early morning, actually—a friend of mine had a good-sized ceramic pot stolen from his front stoop, one of a matched pair. Neighbors coming home in the small hours surprised the thief before he could get the other one onto his truck. The slamming of the tailgate woke Charles up, but by the time he had got his bathrobe on and got out the front door, the guy was gone. The small bush that had been in the pot was, says Charles, “lying like a crime victim in the yard.”