By Roy Atadgy –
I’m known to hide in sentences. Living between punctuation, Rubix-cubing words, interrogating
them, inspecting them obsessively––this is my ultimate comfort. When it comes to sentences, to
the battleground of sentences (in which words are disordered soldiers), deciphering its perfect
architecture, ordering the disorder, is not only where I find comfort, but a chaotic kind of
meaning. It’s vexing, it’s difficult, and, if done right, the revisions are endless. If you could
compare the making of sentences to any other medium, it is most like sculpture; you’ve got a big
block of nothing, a big fat blank. Terrifying. But as you chip away it, as you bring texture and
movement to this inanimate thing, it becomes animate. It becomes as singular as Dama Velata’s
veil or as immortalizing as Qin Shi’s terracotta army accompanying him to the afterlife. God
breathes life into Adam––is this not sculpture, too? What is there beneath the block of marble or
the manless dust has always been there, and likewise the page begs to reveal the sentence trapped
in the cursor.
Mostly I like my sentences long and meandering, challenging the reader to follow a labyrinthine
syntax addictively organized. Here is one I must have restructured about fifty times (and have
endeavored even now to edit):
Helping her up the stairs with the cancer in her bones was to her not only a physical cruelty but
a cruelty of memory: surely recalling winters when blizzards still throttled Philly, rubbing me
awake to hear the school closures crackle over the radio, waiting, still dream-bound, in my
flannels for mine to be announced––for a kid akin to winning the lottery––and, after breakfast
mapled my breath, her joy at leading my tiny limbs slowly, carefully, down the carpeted steps of
our duplex in my snowsuit and out into the whitened world.
So much of the job of sentence-making is to make sense of the senseless, to secure and inoculate
myself from what I fear most or don’t understand. By beautifying the moment, by merging the
aesthetic with the painful, I can neutralize its power over me. I regain control. I make the grand
claim of the author that the story is now safely under my thumb. Like a well-stocked shelter, like
a miklat packed to the roof with dried goods, words are where I can go to hide from the sirens
and the disorder metastasizing around me and wait for the quiet again.
Waking up on the morning of October 7 th , rising comfortably in the miklat that is America, I was
animated by two severe things: fear and anger. These are not great distancing emotions for the
writer to accomplish what he wants to accomplish. I abandoned all fiction. I stopped and started
essays about everything from the college protests to the response of American Jewry. In some
ways, the totalizing force of that day makes writing about it impossible even today. Someday, it
will reveal itself to me.
What I do know is that with enough time, with enough setting and resetting of words––I can
make it. No matter which war, no matter how high the stakes, I can nestle myself into a
sentence’s protective poetry. There, no one can touch me.
Roy Atadgy is a novelist, living in Westchester, Pennsylvania
