Margin

The word for today is MARGIN. I was thinking of writing about the word marginal, but I decided to stick with the noun. As a writer, the MARGIN I think of is the space that surrounds the print on a page (these days either a paper page or a computer page).

There are many other margins. The word is used in business in ways I find too complicated to explain here...to describe the difference between the market value of collateral and a loan or the amount provided as security or the point at which a business barely covers the cost of production. It is 7 am in the morning, and this is making my head swim.

MARGIN also means the limit beyond which something (usually abstract) ceases to exist, such as you have reached the MARGIN of my patience or tolerance. To me this sounds mean, a more distinguished form of time's up, too bad, so sad, or something like that. I have reached the MARGIN of my bank account; I have reached the MARGIN of my sloth. What happens when we use MARGIN with something concrete? I have reached the MARGIN of having clean clothes in the closet, food in the refrigerator; I have a one day's MARGIN of cat food or medication. There is a thin MARGIN between sanity, eccentricity and insanity. I haven't heard the word used that way, but I suppose it could be.

But let's get back to the page, which is where I feel most comfortable, because written words are my security. Since I was a little girl, I have noticed margins. I noticed the layout in books and magazines and how the amount of white space on a page gave the words a different impact. When I was in high school and college (a prehistoric time before desktops and laptops and cell phones), we produced the school newspaper by doing mock layouts on pieces of paper; we pasted columns of text on blank paper on top of a lightboard. White space was like one of the ten commandments.

Subconsciously, I knew that playing with margins was the stuff of poetry. (How unpoetic) Playing with margins is part of the whimsical intentionality of poetry. T.S. Eliot wrote that when the lines run all the way to the right the result is prose.

The margin is where the written word ceases to exist, and when words cease to exist, I am in dangerous territory. Or maybe if I can stay present in the emptiness, I will be in the purest territory imaginable. Maybe there really is life in the margins.


may my heart always be open to little

may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old

may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it's sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young

and may myself do nothing usefully
and love yourself so more than truly
there's never been quite such a fool who could fail
pulling all the sky over him with one smile

ee cummings