There was this zoologist cum novelist at the conference last year who spoke about language and thought and how the former shaped the latter plus her astonishment that one of her books was criticized as being avant-garde on account of it having sections without full-stops meaning no periods no nothing and the passages just went on and on though I don't think it was the book with that wicked title The Sin of Colour but for another with a no less unconventional name Memories of Rain anyway it was something about the heart eschewing punctuation and being true to one's self yet if needs be whole paragraphs or even pages can be used as linguistic pauses to fully capture the moment and whilst my colleague dozed off my attention was captured by this natural and emotional scientist Sunetra Gupta and the meticulous way she presented her paper in a very British very detailed very serious ladylike manner.

No periods? I confess my fascination at the thought and was reminded of the central passage in Rushdie's Midnight's Children (p.342 and 343, to be exact) running from, "And at last I turned my Lambretta homewards, so that I was at the Guru Mandir roundabout with the roar of aircraft overhead..." to, "...I have shaken off five-hundred-year-old whores and confessions of love at dead of night, free now, beyond caring, crashing on to tarmc, restored to innocence and purity by a tumbling piece of the moon, wiped clean as a wooden writing-chest, brained (just as prophesied) by my mother's silver spittoon," past dozens of commas and semi-colons but no stops. It's a bomb, you see.

I haven't thought about Gupta since August 2005. Until yesterday evening when the memory surfaced. I put a reminder in my handphone, forgot about it until it rang this morning and so I checked my conference booklet, googled her name and hey that paper she presented is published online, Language & Thinking. I then quickly hurried to the relevant paragraph and here it is:

My reaction to punctuation is truly visceral. I physically abhor the repeated use of the full-stop. Interestingly called the 'period' by some, the full-stop to me is simply not the satisfactory musical interval between the statements or ideas that I wish to put forward. There is something too final about the full-stop – I am happy to use it judiciously, but mostly I rely on commas to separate interlinked ideas. Conversely, sometimes, the finality of a full-stop is not enough, and I need to employ paragraphs or even blank lines or a row of asterisks to create the correct pause between sections of prose. It is natural that a writer's relationship with punctuation should be emotional.

And the half-para just preceding the above:

Many of my favourite authors write in perfectly grammatical sentences, using other devices such as narrative or imagery to create meaning. Indeed, I have a very high regard for prose whose complexity lies outside the structure of its sentences, but there is a certain tyranny in the expectation that we all write that way. It grieves me that the battles fought by so many writers to free us from such an expectation have not led to any sustained victory, for we all write from the heart, and if the heart eschews punctuation at that given moment, that is the only way to be true to oneself.

I think likewise about those hearts who eschew logic, coherency, structure, systematisation, absolutism, rationalism, dogma. Are they given a chance to be true to themselves barring any suggestion that they have deviated somewhat? Can God be true to them? Maybe the acceptance of a person's weirdness, not unlike a writer's unconventionality, can be the start of a self's (whether ours or another's) new journey. An untouched period in the making.