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5. A Craving for Shape and Motion
It is useful to remember, at the present juncture of our argument, that a craving for shape and motion has always lurked beneath the frozen surface of Western alphabetic notation. Its fossils are the rhetorical patterns which in the classic rhetorical terminology are called “Figures of Arrangement.” Look for example at the always popular ABBA pattern called Chiasmus. It is called that because it wants to be shaped like an “X” and the Greek word for “X” is “Chi.” Here’s an example I noticed recently:
You will have come across other examples of this figure in your daily reading. Here is a sample from mine. Henry Royce told his employees in 1905, while creating the first Rolls Royce automobiles: “Small things make perfection, but perfection is no small thing.” Earlier, Abraham Lincoln used the same pattern, with an added climax, when he maintained that “You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” More recently, the banker Walter Wriston warned us: "Good judgment is the result of experience and experience is the result of bad judgment." And the relative ranking of the two great auction houses, Sotheby’s and Christie’s, has been satirized in this way: “Sotheby’s is a place where auctioneers try to be gentlemen; Christie’s is a place where gentlemen try to be auctioneers.
See how, in all these examples, the suppressed “X” design wants to break free from the linear bounds of print? The second, “BA” half wants to spring back upon the “AB” first half like a mouse trap, intensifying the ironic and comic reversals inherent in the pattern. Look at how it works with our original example:
Printed text is full of such suppressed energy, patterns that want to move but can’t. We want words to move for the same reason we want everything else to move, because movement means life, and the space and time in which life exists.