Starting again
I'm someone else now, but I was wondering if this space would invite me to return. Who I am now is someone who thinks a lot about words, relations, changes. I project the grammar onto situations to understand understanding. I keep quiet, thinking that I will have a career telling the secrets of my thoughts, but I'm beginning to understand that this game of secret sharing is selfish. Everyone has a secret, but no one cares when you reveal it. Are these secrets then? Tell me what it means to have a secret. When do words hide themselves in people? And when do we misunderstand? Do we say that we are hiding when, exhausted, we go home for the day, sleep in our beds, and wake up to walk outside, to be seen, to have conversations? When I walk outside, am I revealing myself as a secret? Should I keep quiet? Should I stay inside? Maybe the secret is that I never come out.
***
There was more to this post, but I deleted it. I reread a few lines of the post and thought, Ugh, how awkward. And then I read the part I left intact above, and still, I think to myself, What is it about the wording, the kind of rolling clausal structure, the carefully orchestrated pseudo-stream of consciousness, the free indirect discourse in the style above that implies lethargy and evokes sympathy? I could go through this line by line, but I want to just look at the first:
1. I'm someone else now, but I was wondering if this space would invite me to return.
-In this sentence, "I," "someone else," and "now" seem to be playing on deixis to establish a kind of empty representation of me. Presumably, you have a category of me already and can experience the prototype effect when I use the first person singular pronoun "I," but I ask you to question that prototype effect with the subjective predicative complement "someone else," which recasts the subject, and the adjunct of time "now," which plants this recasting in a mental space of immediacy.
A worthy question: What are the major differences between "I'm someone else now" and "I was someone else then"? Well, for one, the plain present copula allows for the subject to take a verbal inflection (I'm), but the preterite copula (was) does not (*I's, *I'as, etc.). I feel like, in the second example, this inability puts a lot of focus on the base verb. "I'm someone else" can focus on "someone else" but "I was someone else" focuses on being.
In any case, the sentence, in full, is coordinated at the level of the main clause, and coordination structures most certainly have a kind of psychological effect on readers. clause(X, but Y). Let's move on to the extended coordination structure "but I was wondering if this space would invite me to return." I notice, immediately, a shift in tense (was/ preterite) and the introduction of aspect (was wondering/ progressive). And if we go by the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, "if" is a preposition marking an adjunct of condition. It takes a clausal complement, obviously (this space would invite me to return). Within the embedded clause, which is acting as complement to the preposition, we have a kind of condition that comes about as the result of a verb of mental state (wonder) and the conditional preposition (if). And it makes me wonder what are the conditions unto which I could not be invited to return? I run this space. This is my space. And notice, also, the personification of space: the space invites and is the subject of the subordinate clause. I wonder, then, by personifying a space. What is really going on here is my attempt to get you to identify with the space, a space that I have already put my wondering on and that is implicitly my space (no, not Myspace...). Maybe it's a gesture: "Hey, you, the reader. Invite me back. This is your space. You are the space." But the power is really in the hands of the one who is able to make the commands, the true owner of the space. (This is tricky, though. Ownership is an epistemological thing. I know very well that I don't own a space on the internet, a space hosted by an online journal company, yet nevertheless... this is the fetish of ownership, maybe.)
I'll stop here for a second to propose what still needs to be looked at: continuity of tense in the extended coordinate represents a separate mental space, and the "but" maybe asks the reader to blend the two to find a relationship and reason within the coordination structure. The use of the deictic determiner "this" to determine "space" in the NP "this space." The modal "would" and its relationship to the conditional "if." The plain form verb and head of the non-finite clause, "invite." The other non-finite clause "to return," which is itself embedded in a non-finite clause in a complex catenative construction (to return has a subject in the accusative pronoun "me").
***
There was more to this post, but I deleted it. I reread a few lines of the post and thought, Ugh, how awkward. And then I read the part I left intact above, and still, I think to myself, What is it about the wording, the kind of rolling clausal structure, the carefully orchestrated pseudo-stream of consciousness, the free indirect discourse in the style above that implies lethargy and evokes sympathy? I could go through this line by line, but I want to just look at the first:
1. I'm someone else now, but I was wondering if this space would invite me to return.
-In this sentence, "I," "someone else," and "now" seem to be playing on deixis to establish a kind of empty representation of me. Presumably, you have a category of me already and can experience the prototype effect when I use the first person singular pronoun "I," but I ask you to question that prototype effect with the subjective predicative complement "someone else," which recasts the subject, and the adjunct of time "now," which plants this recasting in a mental space of immediacy.
A worthy question: What are the major differences between "I'm someone else now" and "I was someone else then"? Well, for one, the plain present copula allows for the subject to take a verbal inflection (I'm), but the preterite copula (was) does not (*I's, *I'as, etc.). I feel like, in the second example, this inability puts a lot of focus on the base verb. "I'm someone else" can focus on "someone else" but "I was someone else" focuses on being.
In any case, the sentence, in full, is coordinated at the level of the main clause, and coordination structures most certainly have a kind of psychological effect on readers. clause(X, but Y). Let's move on to the extended coordination structure "but I was wondering if this space would invite me to return." I notice, immediately, a shift in tense (was/ preterite) and the introduction of aspect (was wondering/ progressive). And if we go by the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, "if" is a preposition marking an adjunct of condition. It takes a clausal complement, obviously (this space would invite me to return). Within the embedded clause, which is acting as complement to the preposition, we have a kind of condition that comes about as the result of a verb of mental state (wonder) and the conditional preposition (if). And it makes me wonder what are the conditions unto which I could not be invited to return? I run this space. This is my space. And notice, also, the personification of space: the space invites and is the subject of the subordinate clause. I wonder, then, by personifying a space. What is really going on here is my attempt to get you to identify with the space, a space that I have already put my wondering on and that is implicitly my space (no, not Myspace...). Maybe it's a gesture: "Hey, you, the reader. Invite me back. This is your space. You are the space." But the power is really in the hands of the one who is able to make the commands, the true owner of the space. (This is tricky, though. Ownership is an epistemological thing. I know very well that I don't own a space on the internet, a space hosted by an online journal company, yet nevertheless... this is the fetish of ownership, maybe.)
I'll stop here for a second to propose what still needs to be looked at: continuity of tense in the extended coordinate represents a separate mental space, and the "but" maybe asks the reader to blend the two to find a relationship and reason within the coordination structure. The use of the deictic determiner "this" to determine "space" in the NP "this space." The modal "would" and its relationship to the conditional "if." The plain form verb and head of the non-finite clause, "invite." The other non-finite clause "to return," which is itself embedded in a non-finite clause in a complex catenative construction (to return has a subject in the accusative pronoun "me").