The Paragraph

For eleven years I’ve been writing paragraphs; most of these paragraphs fail. Is it the misery of failure that drives this repetition? Am I a masochist? Usually it’s a problem of voice: the compression warps the tone. Sometimes the paragraph reads next day as if written by a zonked hierophant shouting from a mountain; I swoon: “did a french horn write this!?” I remain particularly susceptible to footnotes but no real paragraph needs any. Worst of all is when one paragraph becomes five paragraphs; five paragraphs are four paragraphs too many. I die of cringe; I’m hemorrhaging paragraphs! And yet I keep on having this strange dream of an unthought, empty paragraph hovering over the rain-slashed garbage-strewn estuarial archipelago where I live ::: A short paragraph is the best, no longer than 200 words, serpentine, amusing, punchy, drawing a limit by stepping past it and yet obviously this is nearly impossible to achieve. Bloviation and bloat are the principle dangers; well actually. Funnily enough the paragraph is, for me, a sculptural object. As we all know, content follows form; I don’t really care what it says—lorem ipsum1—it just has to look good from a distance, attract a reader or two; hand printed in lead type on heavy paper and with strange punctuation and perhaps even some italics just to break up all the straight lines; short, readable, and with space for an immanent conflict in the reader. Cliche is the question; catastrophe is the answer. Are you there little para-graph? Is it time?