12. The Hanged Man

Troubled as I was by such assaults on the salients of my prose, I took myself on a long lonely walk, as I often do, in a writerly way, to the old and decrepit park near my venerable home. There, as my custom, I parked my walking stick by the side of the old well that the Chilsom twins perished in (one suddenly provoked to push the other in, the latter somehow goading the former to jump in after) and pulled out my moleskin to prepare myself to work, as I was wont to do, by charging my intellect and sensibilities by marveling critically and intensely at the natural wonder of my own prose and by exciting my animal spirits with a perusal of a copy of a familiar Egyptian pornographic scroll. My meditations complete, I began to introduce the third part of my article. I had gotten no more than a few scratches in when I began to be distracted by the resonant and liquid murmurs of the well, whose various ploppings and splashes had started up into a low demurring eruption, like an enormous cold throat being cleared. Vexed, I asked “What?” more or less aloud. In response, a sleeping whisper seemed to answer

...Are ...you

And here, I horripilated slightly, for I knew the well was very cold and deep, and the root of its spring had never been identified. I stared in the face of the well and listened:

...Are ...you ...sure

My teeth ground nervously as I strained to make out the words that faded in and out uncomfortably like water trapped in one’s ears.

...Are ...you ... sure ....that ....is

....one sentence ...and not ...two

I replied with a catechism: “The function of a sentence is to express a clear and unified idea composed of one or more related thoughts.”

Something moved upon the face of the unseen surface of the waters.


Are thoughts ...the objects ...for which ...the words ...stand?


“Spirit,” I commanded “this sentence is my topic sentence for my paragraph. There is only one. All other sentences are subordinate to it, to serve to reinforce or elaborate it. To honor it. It provides the unity for all the other sentences in the paragraph.”

And here I heard a deep and pocketed chuckle, that was indeed far away deep in the well, and yet closer than before:

There are five ways known to man to develop a paragraph ...There are twenty-two known to us ...Listen to me, and I will teach them to you ...They are: a priori, from cause to effect, a posteriori, or from effect to cause, a contendo, or compare and contrast...

I fled that place, for I knew that the rhetoric of hell consisted entirely of antitheses and proved all propositions equally false.