Syntax in the Soil

Chaos Garden: Installment II: What blooms when grammar refuses containment (2/5)

This is the second installment in my five-part essay arc threaded across each of my Substack sectors. If you’ve missed the first essay, you can start here.

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There’s a difference between writing and performing coherence. Writing breaks down contradiction. Performing coherence rewards polish. In most institutional settings (policy, publishing, even protest) language is expected to behave. Grammar is conscripted as a domination tool. Clarity gets flattened into cleanliness. Emotional realism is edited out in favor of ornamental syntax.

But in chaos gardens, language doesn’t behave. It ferments. It decomposes. It refuses containment. Syntax becomes compost: layered, bruised, metabolically alive. A sentence ceases to be a tidy unit of meaning; it becomes a perimeter of grief, a scaffold for memory, a refusal to resolve.

This isn’t a rejection of clarity. It’s a rejection of clarity as performance. Plato’s Gorgias warned us: rhetoric, when severed from philosophical grounding, becomes flattery. It simulates knowledge. It rewards charisma. It goes for spectacle. Socrates didn’t critique persuasion itself; he critiqued persuasion without epistemic rigor. He exposed the substructure beneath rhetorical performance and asked whether language, untethered from justice, becomes seduction rather than truth.

That’s the crack. And it’s not theoretical. In editorial rooms, “clarity” is often weaponized. Make it cleaner. Trim the excess. Simplify the syntax. What gets trimmed is often trauma. What gets cleaned is often contradiction. What gets lost is the emotional perimeter that made the sentence necessary in the first place.

Octavio Paz knew this. His essays didn’t explain; they ruptured. In The Labyrinth of Solitude, he mapped identity through linguistic evasion, showing how silence and euphemism carry cultural trauma. In Los hijos del limo, he treated poetry as compost, where memory rots into rhythm. In Translation: Literature and Letters, he refused replication, insisting that translation is redesign; not a copy, but an equivalent. Paz didn’t sanitize language. He fermented it. He let it rot. He let it bloom.

Pablo Neruda pushed further. In La palabra, he didn’t describe words, he touched them, tasted them, hunted them like relics in the soil. “Todo está en la palabra,” he wrote. Everything is in the word. Not because it’s clean, but because it carries residue, gold left behind. In Las palabras, he refused neutrality. Words weren’t tools; they were bruised fruit, sweet and acidic, overripe with memory. And in El deber del poeta, he made his position clear: the poet’s duty isn’t to polish. It’s to breach. It’s breaking injustice into rhythm without ornamental apology.

Both Paz and Neruda treated language as emotional infrastructure. Not performance. Not clarity. Survival logic.

Miguel de Unamuno refused polish altogether. His verses were short, personal, deliberately unrefined; delivered with the urgency of someone who knew revision could dilute conviction. His prose wasn’t crafted for elegance; it was built for separation. At the University of Salamanca, he delivered the line that outlived the fascist regime: “Venceréis, pero no convenceréis.” You will win, but you will not convince. Not rhetoric, reckoning.

Unamuno drew a line between domination and conviction. Violence and military intimidation can silence, but it cannot persuade. It can occupy space but not inhabit truth. Language, for him, was not a weapon but a refusal. He called the university a “temple of intelligence” and named himself its “high priest,” not out of vanity, but fidelity to reason. The Nationalist slogan ¡Viva la muerte! (Long live death!) wasn’t language; it was noise. Terror without argument. A hollow victory unable to process belief.

Fran Lebowitz offers a different perimeter: less tragic, more surgical. Her defense of grammar isn’t nostalgic. It’s anatomical. Grammar, for her, is infrastructure under siege. She draws a sharp line between writing and speaking: one confronts, the other flows. She hasn’t published a book since 1981, not because she lacks ideas, but because writing demands self-interrogation she finds intolerable. She writes with a Bic pen, not as affectation, but because machines move too fast. They bypass the friction she believes thought requires.

Her fidelity to reading is configurational. “Think before you speak. Read before you think.” Not a slogan. A governance model. Reading, for Lebowitz, is the only reliable bulwark against intellectual laziness. It forces context. It interrupts the fantasy that one’s own thoughts are sufficient. She doesn’t advocate grammar as ornament, but as perimeter logic: rules that, when known deeply, can be broken with precision. Not for flair. For clarity.

Gabriel García Márquez didn’t treat language as a museum artifact. He treated it as living system: unfinished, mutable, politically charged. His Colombian roots, journalistic upbringing, and narrative architecture in magical realism weren’t aesthetic choices; they were structural refusals. He didn’t write to preserve Spanish. He wrote to push it forward.

“The duty of the writer is not to preserve the language but to open the way for it in history.” Not a metaphor. A predominance model. Márquez believed writers should challenge linguistic convention, not conform to it. Language wasn’t tradition; it was the breach engine, rewriting history from the margins. His Nobel Prize speech diagnosed the failure of official language to process Latin America’s “boundless, frenzied reality.” Bureaucratic syntax couldn’t render ordinary lives believable. So he rewrote the casing. His fiction didn’t escape reality. It redesigned it, from the inside, with rhythm, precision, and emotional perimeter.

F.A. Hayek approached language another way: systemic, not poetic. His “fatal conceit” wasn’t just economic. It was linguistic. Political language, he argued, creates the illusion of design where none exists. Terms like “social planning” or “redesigning human association” imply society is a machine with a blueprint. Hayek rejected that premise. He saw society as an emergent order, shaped by countless individual actions, not centralized intent. Political discourse anthropomorphizes institutions, assigning coherence they don’t have. It narrates complexity as control. And that narrative, he warned, becomes dangerous.

Language, for Hayek, was both symptom and stroma. He used it to expose how central authorities claim epistemic authority they lack. The belief that planners can redesign society from above is a fatal conceit: a linguistic delusion leading to authoritarian drift and the erosion of liberty.

You are as many people as the languages you speak…

Then there’s multilingualism, not as ornament, but as survival logic. To speak multiple languages is to process reality through parallel grammars. To grieve differently in Spanish than in English. To thread memory differently in Mandarin than in French. Each language carries its own emotional realism, its own cadence of contradiction. Multilingualism isn’t decoration; it’s refusal to be singular.

You are as many people as the languages you speak: Not poetic flourish, findings. Language doesn’t merely express identity. It multiplies it. Expands emotional perimeter. Redesigns the self. Versions of this idea echo across traditions: Goethe, Charlemagne, Czech and Turkish proverbs. Each subscribes to the same logic: language as multiplicity, voice as perimeter.

A polyglot is a chaos garden, not curated, but cultivated through separation. Fluency isn’t built; it’s triggered. Each language isn’t a flower, but a biome: rooted in distinct syntactic soil, pollinated by emotional realism. The garden doesn’t bloom uniformly. It flourishes through ecological dissonance: grief germinating in Spanish, memory sprouting in Korean, silence flowering in Arabic. Syntax is soil. Grammar, the weather. Pace the migratory pattern of meaning. An engaging omnipresent force that refuses to be possessed or confined to a single relationship.

A polyglot’s lover doesn’t have a partner. This lover is simultaneously loved and falling in love with perspectives. Stable. Consistent in passion. A polyglot is constantly rediscovering and finding new depths in their lover. A polyglot sees their lover through each language. New. Exciting. Every new sentence, linguistic nuance, or idiomatic expression becomes a moment of profound love.

In chaos gardens, multiplicity is not optional. It’s required. It’s how we process disagreement across lexicons. How we hold grief in one language and release it in another. How we redesign the self not through translation, but through simultaneous inhabitation.

So, what can new writers learn?

Every writer named in this essay could be a school of thought unto themselves; their own soils for chaos gardens. To answer fully would take a lifetime of excavation. But there are configuration new writers can break down now. Lessons from those who didn’t just give language a place to grow but a place to explode.

• Language is what it is, not what it ought to be. Debates over “good writing” are proxy wars for taste, ideology, control. I treat language as I treat truth: neutral until perspective is applied. And when perspective seeks to suppress, ban, or limit expression because style doesn’t conform or topic is inconvenient, it misses the point. Language isn’t a courtroom. It’s compost. Restriction doesn’t protect it. It starves it.

• Restricting language damages societies. It robs nations and individuals of literary, cultural, emotional wealth. In an age of accessible information, empowering readers with seeds to plant their own chaos gardens isn’t duty, it’s urgency. Fitzgerald and Hemingway prove the point. They didn’t inherit orthodoxy. They opened it.

Fitzgerald and Hemingway are taught as opposites: ornament versus restraint, lyricism versus minimalism. But when they emerged, neither replicated dominant form. Both redesigned it. Fitzgerald digested saturation into rhythm. Hemingway absorbed restraint into omission. Both treated language not as inheritance but as opening.

Fitzgerald’s early work succeeded not because it was polished, but because it exposed. His sentences weren’t clean. They were excessive, musical, emotionally imperfect. He wrote like someone trying to score ache beneath glamour. Hemingway stripped language to perimeter. He refused adornment not out of lack, but fidelity. His prose was a challenge to excess, a redesign built on silence.

New writers need not choose between them. Study the fissure. What mattered wasn’t style but fidelity: to rupture, to contradiction, to emotional realism. Neither wrote what language ought to be. They wrote what it was: volatile, unfinished, metabolically alive.

That’s the lesson. Don’t inherit syntax. Compost it. Don’t perform coherence. Thread contradiction. Don’t ask what good writing looks like. Ask what fidelity demands. Let architecture follow.

So, how do we build our own chaos gardens?

By recognizing that even chaos has a skeleton. Gardens, no matter how unruly, operate within patterns. Serious writers (anyone writing to communicate to more than one person in the marketplace of ideas) must construct their own skeleton of literary wealth. If you write poetry, or economics, or self-help, don’t confine yourself to your lane. Build a library that reflects the complexity and diversity of the human experience. Yes, it will take forever. So, begin! You only have one life.

Let your brain be the soil. Let knowledge and language of others feed your seeds with diversity of thought and history. Read widely. Read dangerously. Be threatened by unfamiliar syntax. Be uncomfortable with books you wouldn’t normally touch. Rethink. Then rethink again. Never treat language as dogma. Our job as writers isn’t to preserve syntax; it’s to advance it. Not to contain language, but to let it rot, process, and bloom.

So, what do I mean by syntax in the soil?

Not grammar as governance. Not punctuation as performance. Grammar as grief logic; an architecture that processes disagreement rather than conceals it. In this frame, punctuation isn’t decorative. It’s the perimeter. It marks where emotion holds shape, where memory refuses to collapse. Sentence length becomes trauma architecture: short when breath is stolen, long when grief refuses containment.

Clarity, in this soil, isn’t virtue. It’s residue. It survives contradiction. It doesn’t perform coherence. It doesn’t reward polish. It rewards fidelity: to rupture, to memory, to the unfinished scaffolding of thought.

In chaos gardens, we don’t prune language. We compost it. Let it rot. Let it break down. Let it bloom, not because it’s clean, but because it’s alive. Because it carries the weight of what it refuses to resolve.

So ask yourself: What narrative thread refuses pruning, and why does it bloom?

Next Thursday: Seeds Without Permission: “Succession isn’t a handoff. It’s a breach. And the best systems bloom without permission…especially when the boardroom misreads restraint as evasion.”

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The Chaos Garden is a five-part essay arc threaded across each of my Substack sectors. It’s not a metaphor for disorder. It’s a design logic for survival. Each installment carries a motif that mutates under pressure. Misrecognition becomes emotional imperfection. Fidelity becomes ecological tension. Defiance becomes redesign.

The series will publish every Thursday

Each Thursday, a new installment will drop, strategically threaded across one of the five sectors: Policy Without Apology, Unsentimental Letters, Boardroom Mechanics, Profit & Play, Working Under the Unqualified.

And because this space is built for more than serialized architecture, I’ll continue publishing standalone pieces every Monday: essays, critiques, and tactical reflections independent of the Chaos Garden arc. Mondays are for the unexpected. Thursdays are for the thread.

References

• García Márquez, G. (1982, December 8). The solitude of Latin America [Nobel Lecture]. NobelPrize.org. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1982/marquez/lecture/

• García Márquez, G. (1996). News of a kidnapping (E. Grossman, Trans.). Alfred A. Knopf.

• Hayek, F. A. (1988). The fatal conceit: The errors of socialism (W. W. Bartley III, Ed.). University of Chicago Press.

• Hayek, F. A. (1945). The use of knowledge in society. American Economic Review, 35(4), 519–530.

• Lebowitz, F. (1981). Social studies. Random House.

• Neruda, P. (1974). El deber del poeta. In Confieso que he vivido: Memorias. Editorial Seix Barral.

• Neruda, P. (1971). Las palabras. In Obras completas (Vol. 3). Editorial Losada.

• Paz, O. (1950). El laberinto de la soledad. Fondo de Cultura Económica.

• Paz, O. (1974). Los hijos del limo. Editorial Seix Barral.

• Paz, O. (1971). Translation: Literature and Letters. In The Bow and the Lyre (R. P. Scholes, Trans.). University of Texas Press.

• Plato. (1997). Gorgias (J. M. Cooper, Ed.; D. J. Zeyl, Trans.). In Plato: Complete Works (pp. 791–869). Hackett Publishing Company.

• Unamuno, M. de. (2005). Del sentimiento trágico de la vida. Alianza Editorial.

• Unamuno, M. de. (1937). Selected works of Miguel de Unamuno (A. Kerrigan, Trans.). Princeton University Press.

• Grosjean, F. (2010). Bilingual: Life and reality. Harvard University Press.

• Kramsch, C. (2009). The multilingual subject: What foreign language learners say about their experience and why it matters. Oxford University Press.

• Pavlenko, A. (2006). Bilingual minds: Emotional experience, expression, and representation. Multilingual Matters.

• Scarry, E. (1985). The body in pain: The making and unmaking of the world. Oxford University Press.

• Sontag, S. (2001). Where the stress falls: Essays. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

• Woolf, V. (1925). Mrs. Dalloway. Hogarth Press.

• Calvino, I. (1972). Invisible cities (W. Weaver, Trans.). Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

• Elguera, C. (2021, February). Octavio Paz: Paths Towards the Untranslatable – Latin American Literature Today

• Revista Altazor. (n.d.). Pablo Neruda: Las palabras

• Harkema, L. J. (2022, January 11). Miguel de Unamuno in Spain’s Memory Battle – Public Books

• Speakola. (2016, April 13). Miguel de Unamuno: Last Lecture, 1936

• AnOther Magazine. (2021, September 3). Fran Lebowitz’s Top Quotes

• Peterson, B. (n.d.). 40 Great Articles and Essays about Language and Linguistics – Tumblr Essays That Work

• Mengu, J. (2021, November 19). El libro rojo del cole y la censura de libros en España – Negritas y Cursivas

• Clarín. (2023). La censura franquista pervive en libros y películas tras 50 años de la muerte de Franco