It was this time that I’d managed to climb onto the back of a time traveling Narwhal; a unicorn like subspecies of whale found near the Russian area of the Arctic Ocean and occasionally in interstellar space drifts while Technicolor dreams dance fantastically in the sky. It was in the latter that I caught this beast, and rode him through the annals of history and weaved a mystical web of grammatical mishaps and false calculations. I was taught about the adverbials by a misshapen and angry colon in 1930’s Antarctica, I learned the way of the conjunction by a gentle old man in Predicate, New Hampshire, and danced a lovely waltz with a beautiful Period who had the tendency to up and quit in the middle of a song. It wasn’t until I arrived home to dictate my findings did I come to the conclusion that I’d run into a number of situations regarding grammar and rhetoric, “A sign from the gods of Language!” I declared, and quickly set to work on the essay in your hands. Time travel, as most know, is a lifestyle remarkably keen on rules and stipulations, when one flows unevenly in a drift through space and time it is possible to miss the conjunction that could help one find their way home.
The most vivid of comparisons in time travel and grammar are rooted in the laws of punctuation. After all, without points A and B the process of traveling through time is an impossibility at best. The exclamation point; whom I shared a beer with in a small pub in 1888 England while avoiding the Ripper, is a key element of transcending space and time. It gives the time traveler power, that is, to apply a direct sense of emotion to a time, enabling said time traveler to venture into the depths of history. Without this handy point of exclamation it would be difficult for one to stop the narwhal from traveling. It’s a loud period indeed, and with that pesky ripper loose (possibly a relative of mine, Severin Klosowski) I didn’t stick around with the exclamation point for too long (in fact, I do have to admit here – where I’m certain he’ll never read it – he was a bit loud for my taste).
I’ve found several periods of time in which I’ve enjoyed more than others, which brings me to one of the more obvious comparisons. You see, the period, the symbol portraying a sentences’ end, and another’s beginning, well, it’s much like the periods of time that I’ve stayed in. I first met Period in a small Compound Preposition in front of a jazz club in New York. She was a beautiful girl, with a round shapely face who always had something to say. It was her that first explained to me the idea of the time period: the Renaissance, The Great War, Potty Training, Free Jazz, and etcetera. Of course I never mentioned to her my hobby of time traveling, it was merely a topic in the seemingless endless conversation in which we had. It made sense; after all, I had been referring to locations in time simply as astral planes before. Time periods made much more sense. Transvestism aside, Period was a bright person, and I’ll always remember the subjects that she taught me.
It was when Period and I parted that I returned to my narwhal again, as a cosmic sailor I set my course. Past the Nebulan Horse in the palm of the universe I came to heaven’s gates, and traveled eastward on a chariot of stars to a distant section of the sentence known as the V.E.R.B. It was here where – no, I never quite got all the way to V.E.R.B. – in fact, that chariot simply carried me on and on, as though my action was being propelled by something outside my control. I suppose that is what time travel, at its bare minimum, really is: one big verb. The verb is what gets one through time, and exemplifies the state of being there, or here, or then. Without that handy verb, the term time travel wouldn’t even make any sense, and as everyone knows, if the diction doesn’t have a feeling of cohesion, than the act is completely implausible.
It was in the Adverbial Conjunction that I met my own grammatical god, METADISCOURSE (she had a pompous flame that forces me to now write her name in large, annoying, capitol letters). I had, after the chariot of stars returned me from my attempted trip to V.E.R.B., hopped back upon the narwhal’s rear, brought my hand upon his unicorn tooth, and supplicated to be brought in front of my god for a cup of tea and a delightful conversation. I had expected something more along the lines of Zeus or Achilles or Buddha or Abraxas, but was happy enough with her holiness METADISCOURSE (how couldn’t I be!). She asked me what time travel would be without discourse, what discourse about discourse would be without time travel and what the discourse of time traveling discourse could be without communication! Needless to say, I was a tad bit out of place, and unprepared for her questions. But she did have a point. For example, how could one begin to assess the prospect of time travel without the signals of metadiscourse? Nevertheless, I was a bit dumbfounded, and when I told her this (although she must have already known, I could feel my face contorting with confusion) she only said to me one sentence, “Consequently, you will have to study a bit harder the object of traveling through time.” “What could she mean by that?” I asked myself, and once more returned to the narwhal.
It was this that marked the end of my journey, and although I have many more stories to tell not mentioned here, I have since begun to try to understand METADISCOURSE’s final words to me. I had, before this particular journey traveled through time on a whim, enjoying the ethereal feeling of ambiguity as I marched through the periods of time with only the thoughts of ancient mysticism and a blanket of stars on my mind. Just I had approached the rules of grammar as a useless forum for snobbish aristocrats, I had approached the rules of time travel as non existent, or if nothing else, simply there to be broken.
Those words still linger though, the “object of time traveling.”
So I ask myself, “What is the object of grammar?”
The object of grammar is to place structure upon the relationships of language, to mechanize the objects of a sentence; therefore the object of time travel must be to assess the subjects of the past, present and future. Time travel, my chosen profession exists in this world to structuralize human beings conception of the epoch. The rules of grammar apply here just as thoroughly as they apply to most concepts of life. In fact, they drive the system in which we have chosen to live in, and can be related to even the most absurd of conditions. So then, let us walk together down to the V.E.R.B. and take an enchanting ride across the Adverbial Phrase to give your grammar god a Subjective Complement!
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