DANGLING PARTICIPLES

I don’t do flower arrangements, a word here and a comma there, a male noun dangling here and a female verb down under just waiting to swoop up to the rescue in an elaborate choreography of stoic feminism and poetic justice. If these are the nuts and the bolts of the trade, the arts and farts of culture, then maybe I’ll just have to content myself with the rhythms of natives, the beats of the past, and the music of the dispossessed, in order to maintain some integrity of purpose. Maybe art is a plaything of the rich and I’ll admit that I never wanted to be a starving artist. But language is at a disadvantage, because people use it for mundane purposes also. The average bloke doesn’t paint landscapes. Everybody writes. To rise above, pretense demands elaborate editorial gymnastics to maintain the inherited class system. Life itself is an art form, of course, and the essence of art is combination, bringing diverse elements into unique juxtaposition. Nothing is truly original. Balance is the hard part, as always, carefully crafting the finished product so that it is ‘just so’. ‘Stuff’ cannot be defined; you’ve either got it or you don’t. In other words, “Don’t call us; we’ll call you.”

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