David O. Ives, narrating

The styles of writing used by lawyers range wide.  But they center on spare passages that go from point A to B in a straight line.  Point B is usually first in conception.  It is where we want to go.  As advocates, the required outcome is often a given, or relatively so. 

Point A, then, is the variable and the focus of effort; it determines both the first impression and the path traveled to the destination, Point B.

Whole briefs may be well written without deviation from this linear style.  This implies nothing rigid or mechanical: there are as many straight paths to even one given point as there are radii to a circle's center.  And points lead in chain from one to another, the preceding supporting those that follow, A and B, then B to C, and, finally, Z.

Most briefs must employ a second type of treatment, however: a sweeping look from a point arrived at to survey the surrounding ground.  Defensive passages are most often of this kind.  We are often saying, first, that from those grounds this follows: Point A to Point B.  But then we often must then say, to guard the ground newly won, that nothing prevents what followed from being so, and in particular, none of several prominent apparent troubles are actual: Point B becomes a perch or vantage point from which we survey the surrounding ground and discuss the prominent features.

Defense is a special interest of the advocate, but the sweeping survey can support the linear progression in another way, since the surrounding features may be positive as well as negative: describing positive surrounding features show the reader that the outcome urged is desirable.  This is, if you like, offense - secondary to the primary offense, which is linear.  Commonly this secondary offense is a policy argument, or direct recognition that the outcome urged is not only correct or permitted, but in fact right and just - even, occasionally, beautiful.

These patterns, of course, scale from small to large: the sentences making littler point, the paragraphs their own, and the larger passages carrying the great points.  In each, the style yields linear advances followed by panoptic sweeps.

This style is not exclusively legal, though when it is not, it risks being high-brow.  It need not be; some uses of the style are delightful.

For a short example of this style that is at once high-brow, popular, workaday and delightful, see an old station identification sign-on from WGBH public television.  It is a hybrid of legal notice and mission statement; it hits all the bases required by FCC regulation, media and charity law, but speaks to its public in a popular mode.  Being television, the panoptics can occur in the visual, and do, freeing the narrative to be almost entirely linear, though there are a couple of panoptic sentences.  There is no need for defense, this being a station identification and not an adversarial argument, so the panoptics are of the second kind and devoted to invoking delight and a feeling of rightness.

A couple of smaller observations on this WGBH ident, which delights me:

First, it begins with a "This is..." sentence: a humble rhetorical workhorse and a favorite of mine for beginnings, here perfectly deployed.  Pointing and identifying - either "this is..." or simply the gesture of pointing - is one of the earliest acts of communication by any child, as it probably was for the human race.  This is powerful because it is fundamental. 

Second, there is the dated but beautiful use of the verb to cope, a good example of the use of certain simple words possessed of uncommon depth.  The depth of the to cope is that it bears both the more contemporary connotation of struggling to dealing with, as one copes with an adversity, as well as the deeper, older connotation of ably dealing with, as a mason copes with stone.  The WGBH use is a rich balancing of these implication, though unfortunately the worse for wear, since the years of intervening usage have pushed these connotations out of balance and so far towards struggles and sufferings and away from valient effort that we hear "to help to cope" and visualize a good person comforting an aging friend in a hospital rather than a strong person helping another cut stone.  When writen, I think to cope would have richly conveyed both struggles and successes: a possibility lost to the shifting sands of usage.

The Castro

San Francisco is an old dame of the stage.  She looks less well in the sunlight, but is sapphire in shadows, shrouds of mist, clouds that roil and roll as if time-lapsed.  Her drag is sincere, but her glitter is beaten leaf-thin by long habits of irony.  Had Wilde grown old and become a city, San Francisco would be his glorious, tawdry dotage.

dreamscapes

In my dreams, the locations of my life - Astoria apartment, childhood home, the law office I work in, even the commute - have their counterparts.  Recognizable, but warped.  Larger and more beautiful, but often threatening.  This seems to be common.

I work in a midtown Manhattan skyscraper, the upper twenty floors of which belong to my firm.  In my dreams, it is the same, except that there is a coffered, high-ceilinged, dim and creepy food court and conference area at the top.  One floor down from that, four small corner balconies, reached from the 46th floor landing of the fire stairs.  (The top floor of our offices is, in fact, the 47th.) 

When in my dreams I step out onto these balconies, they are windswept and ominous: grey clouds roll above and below, obscuring the street.  Sometimes I just go out there myself to be outside and feel the heavy wind try to pull me over the edge.  Other times I go with whoever in my dream I'm talking to.  They dislike my pressuring them to do so.  I don't know why I do pressure them.  Other times I'm chased onto these balconies, or take refuge, hiding there, from whatever greater danger roams within.

to others

A lack of ambition and love results simply in a lack of existence outside one's head.  Unless one has both the talent and luck of Emily Dickinson.

Great ones

This is the first year I've seen dragonflies right in Manhattan. Big, jungly ones. The first I saw this summer was novel enough that a high-power lawyer I was walking with stopped to snap a picture of it with her blackberry to send to her husband. The third made a trend. And this one is the first for which I've realized that I've lost count. This one is brown rather than sapphire. But it gets the blog post. Fly with pride, brownie!

cocktail party

T.S. Eliot urges in his last play that we remember that we are not just persons, or even bodies, but also, simply, objects.  That our quality as mere objects is part of our being.  As when we fall out of bed, or get smacked by an unseen tree limb in the dark, or plow heedless through a spider's web the next morning.

Hacienda Temozon

A gentle grandeur, born long ago by now-slumbering industry. A fabric, wove of sisal and wealth, worried into softness by the hands that work it.

sightings

Back in the mid-eighties, in upstate South Carolina public schools - and I'm sure elsewhere - you could see boys with long, wide rattails, waved or permed, dropping from the back of an otherwise buzzcut scalp of blond-brown hair. 

And there he was, in my subway car this morning.  Not just the crimp-waved rattail, but the bored, slouchy attitude, the braces, the striped tshirt with the elasticity at the neck all given out, just hanging.  He pushes past the woman to exit first, his small rudeness not aggressive or hurried, just careless and selfish, shoulders plunging and rising with his loping gait.

Common 1980s middle school white trash.  Released back into the wild, after a thirty year hibernation.

up

Ambition and possession are foundational.  The possessions need not be material and it is best the ambition not be.

preacher

There are forms of thinking that build, and that break down.  Ecclesiastes, or a mindset in Qohelet's vein, can pour acid that will dissolve anything.  The value of love itself?  Thought of that kind pours on, sizzles, and it is seen as conditional, the faulty, then treacherous, then futile and then - pop - nil.

out of the corner

Imagine a race of alien explorers who pass our planet, who simply drive by: as anyone might pass the local library, without even taking the foot off the gas or turning to glance; as a New Yorker crosses Times Square, heedless; as a political staffer might pass the monumental core of Washington, seeing nothing and concentrating on his groceries; as a museum goer passes a masterwork, having already seen too many paintings.

bump

"My yoke is easy and my burden light."  More generally, the work of entertaining one's self beyond a simple degree is a burden, spurs ennui, a grind.  We are, alas, made for the plow and not the surf.