Introducing The Form

Ever notice how much information people can convey in just a single sentence?

Like,  Alice, that cousin of Alexi's with the codfish license up in Port Hardy, got her foot caught in the hatch cover, wearin'  them new orange gumboots that Fisheries says you gotta wear, and now she's off work for they don't know how long, only she ain't got enough hours in, or days or something, so she can't get any compensation, so she's gonna have to pay for the new pin her own self. 

So you continue, and string a whole bunch of them sentences together, and it is kind of amazing what you can end up with inside the confines of just a finite number of sentences, manipulating all those syllables, that arrangement of vowels and consonants - the forceful shaping of thought into language, of urgent intentions into vocalization. 

Whatever there is to say can be said directly in a surprisingly small amount of space. Often it is not the literal message of the words that is as important as the direct link to mind: the shared consciousness, the ability to hear the little voice in your head that pronounces the words as you read them. 

I am not immediately concerned with writing about earth-shaking events, about politics or the environment or issues of liberation; not that the issues are not important, for of course they are, but a deeper pre-occupation for me is 'The Origin of Voice,' because the strange fact is that we are all trying to say the same thing: we all share the dilemma of consciousness, we are all constantly required to distill and compress and shape our intentions and impressions and intuitions into some manageable form so that they can be comprehended by others.

Anything you write - a grocery list, a haiku, an essay, a sonnet, a story - MUST have a form, and since the constraints and restraints of Form are inherent in any human communication,  I offer this one as being as good as any; whatever you have to say, if you can't say it in ten sentences, there's no use in going on to twenty. 

I thought of this form after long and thoughtful counting of my toes, and since they are my toes, this is My Form; however,  I am not going to patent it, or try to restrict access to it, but offer it freely to the world, because I am a noble sort of fellow.

If everybody in the world was required by law to reduce everything they had to say down to ten sentences, they would take a lot more care for their words, and  we would have a lot less background babble. 

I think of this writing as poetry, where the cues for voice, instead of coming from rhyme or line-length or meter, come from the natural flow of words, often emphasized with line length, following the structural components of the sentence as indicated with punctuation.