MMIDDL

On Standing Between Two Things

"the middle is not a place; it is a posture."

There is, in the small hours of a Tuesday, a particular angle of mahogany light that falls only on the bookshelf between the dictionary and the atlas, and it is in that light, I think, that the middle is best examined. The middle is not, contrary to common opinion, a halfway point — a sad and tidy compromise between two more interesting extremes. The middle is the only place where the two extremes are simultaneously legible.

Consider the boxfish hovering in the very centre of its tank: it can see, without turning, both the coral cliff to the east and the coral cliff to the west. It alone holds the room in stereo. To stand at one edge is to know one cliff well; to stand in the middle is to know that there are cliffs, and to be merry about it.

"to know that there are cliffs, and to be merry about it."

The Bauhaus, which we tend to remember as a school of severity, was in fact a school of the middle: between craft and machine, between hand and grid, between Walter Gropius's stern lecture-notebook and the small clownfish that — one likes to imagine — swam unnoticed in the corner of his rented Weimar parlour. Geometric rigour is most interesting when something liquid is also passing through the room.

The page itself, the one you are reading, is a middle: ink on cream, geometry on flow, dark-academic gravity floating above a thin layer of tropical light. Stand here a moment. Notice the binding-stitch at the left margin. Notice the small fish following you. You have arrived at the middle.

"geometric rigour, with something liquid passing through."

— marginalia, written at the desk lamp, half past eleven.

A Brief Inventory of Middles

What follows is not exhaustive. It is the sort of list one keeps in the back of a notebook, added to in pencil over years, and read aloud only to oneself or to a particularly patient fish.

• the middle of a sentence, where the verb conspires with the noun
• the middle of a tide, neither flooding nor ebbing
• the middle of a yellow tang, which is the brightest part
• the middle of a Tuesday, the most honest hour of the week
• the middle of a book, where the spine bends most easily
• the middle of a footnote, where the real argument hides
• the middle of a chord, the note no one names but everyone hears
• the middle of a journey, when one forgets why one began
• the middle of MMIDDL, which is, predictably, ID

— a list begun in 2019, still being added to.

The Middle Voice

Ancient Greek grammars knew a tense that has all but vanished from modern English: the middle voice, in which the subject neither acts upon another nor is acted upon, but acts upon itself, or for itself, in a quietly recursive way. To wash a child is active. To be washed by the rain is passive. To bathe — that is middle. The subject is the river and the swimmer at once.

Most of the interesting verbs of the inner life are, properly speaking, middle. To remember is not quite something one does to a memory, nor is it quite something a memory does to one. One reminisces; the verb folds back upon itself like a fish turning in a tank. To grieve, to long for, to delight in — these are all middle gestures, and our flat modern grammar has only the imperfect tools of "I + verb + object" to translate them.

When we say of the small clownfish on this page that it drifts, or that the cream paper warms under the reading lamp, we are speaking middle voice. The fish does not drift something; the paper does not warm something; they undergo their own action. There is nothing to do but watch and be quietly literate about it.

— after Émile Benveniste, with apologies and a small fish.

Field Notes from the Tank

The small saltwater tank on the librarian's desk has been observed daily, between the hours of nine and eleven post meridiem, for some weeks now¹. Three findings have proved durable.

First, the clownfish does not, as is sometimes claimed, hide in the anemone for protection²; it hides there because it is shy in a way that one recognises immediately as one's own shyness. Second, the yellow tang spends approximately one-third of its life in the middle of the tank, doing nothing in particular, and is therefore a kind of saint³. Third, the cyan damsel watches the reader through the glass and is, I am almost certain, taking notes of its own.

Aquaria, like libraries, are middle-voice rooms. The fish swim themselves; the books read themselves to the patient observer; the lamp warms itself in the corner. One is welcome to participate but never required.

— from the desk notebook, ink still drying.

Of Marginalia and Other Whispers

"the previous reader is also, faintly, in the room."

A well-read book is a populated room. The previous reader has pencilled an exclamation in the margin of page 47; another has underlined a single word on page 89, twice, as if to be sure. The reader of MMIDDL is invited to imagine that this page, too, is being read by someone else, at the same moment, three time zones away, and that their cursor is also moving the same small fish.

There is a particular pleasure in finding, in a second-hand book, a marginal note in a hand not your own — a check, a query, a small underline. It is the trace of a previous middle. The previous reader was here, in this exact paragraph, on a day you cannot know. They have left, but their attention has not entirely left with them.

— for all the previous readers, with thanks.

A Short Defense of the Semicolon

The semicolon is the most maligned and most middle of marks. It is not a full stop; it is not a comma; it is the pause one takes while still in the act of thinking. A semicolon insists that the second clause is not a new sentence but the same thought, breathing.

The clownfish, as it crosses the binding-stitch at the left margin of this page, performs a kind of grammatical semicolon: not a beginning, not an ending, only a small continuation, with a different rhythm. Pause. Continue. The thought has not finished.

— with apologies to those who prefer the dash.

The Lamp

"a lamp is a small claim against the dark."

Every middle requires a lamp. Not a sun, which makes everything equally legible and therefore equally unremarkable; not a moonless dark, which makes nothing legible at all. A lamp — preferably with a brass cyan-glass shade on a small mahogany desk — illuminates one circle of the world at a time, and trusts you to remember the rest.

The reading lamp of the late-academic hours is the patron saint of this site. Its circle is small; its kindness is great; outside the circle, the tropical tank glows on, and the fish have their own light.

— under the lamp, on a chilled May evening.

On Happiness, Briefly

It is unfashionable in serious essays to mention happiness, but the truth must out: a small saltwater tank in the corner of a burgundy room is a happy thing. So is a thumb-worn book. So is the kerning of a well-set page. So is a cursor with three fish behind it, drifting at different speeds.

Dark-academia, taken too seriously, becomes mere gloom; but pierced through with the tropical fact of a clownfish, it becomes something better — a room that is serious and silly at once, which is, I think, the only kind of room worth living in.

— a confession, undated, unrepented.

What the Middle Is For

"the middle is where one chooses to keep going."

We have spent some pages now in the middle, and it is fair to ask what the middle is for. It is for choosing. The beginning chooses itself; the ending is, in some sense, also given. The middle is the only point at which one might still decide what kind of essay, or tank, or evening, one is actually in.

MMIDDL is therefore not a brand, nor an essay, nor a small book of footnotes — though it is all of those. MMIDDL is a posture: the willingness to remain in the bright, burgundy middle of things, with three fish, until the lamp gets tired.

— and so we approach the colophon.