Prose, Poetry, Song: three venerable envoys that carry words from our inner musings to the world outside. Which form we choose is determined by what we intend. Prose is usually better for complexity. Song is usually better for emotion. Poetry can be used for both.
Sir Kenneth Clark said: “that which is too silly to be said, may be sung”. That’s largely true, but some songs, such as Amazing Grace are profound. beautifully written prose can be described as poetic, and poems often become lyrics for songs.
The borderline is regularly transgressed. No one cares.
Ideas of their Own was the title my wife, Joyce, gave to one of her poetry books. She had in mind the way words speak to each other. One word calls to another. Ideas contend, and the words you started with start edging toward their friends – who have something slightly different to say.
Wise writers listen when their words have ideas of their own. We deceive ourselves with the conceit of linear thought. Our minds work in nebulous twists and turns. Linear thought happens only when we assign clearly defined words to our vague intuitions. Then, those words bicker amongst themselves. “I’m the right word” “No you’re not”. “I am” “You’re both wrong. I’m the perfect word” and so on.
The writer must listen carefully to the argument, and choose. The arguments continue through every sentence. Finally, when the choosing is done well, the words and sentences settle down into respectable works of prose, poetry or song.
That’s on a good day.
Even on a bad day the process of linking word to thought is useful. Fuzzy thoughts are forced into coherence. Shadowy notions are given clear form. What was dimly considered is now actually said. This creates understandability. It doesn’t guarantee good sense. Perfectly clear language can convey foolishness just as well as it can convey wisdom. This is true of both speech and writing. But writing offers an advantage over speech.
Writing reveals what speech blows past. You can look at what you wrote, again and again. Spoken nonsense can slide by undetected by either the speaker, or the audience. Not so the written word. It’s nakedly there for all to see. And, the written word can be edited; giving us multiple chances to get it right.
For some people getting it right has been replaced by, close enough.
We live in a time when speech for a lot of younger people has disintegrated into, empty phrases like, “whatever”, that masquerade as speech without saying anything at all. Pictographs such as emoji along with the icons of the digital world forgo language altogether. Meaning isn’t much stated anymore. It’s mostly implied.
Why?
Richard Mitchell in his book, Less than Words Can Say contends that an inability to string words together in cogent discursive prose also indicates an inability to think. Mitchell wrote his book in 1979. Every year since literacy and cognitive skill have gone downhill in tandem. That’s because schools have steadily replaced the time spent on reading and writing with time spent learning politically correct social gobbledygook.
Language and thought are inextricably entwined.
Difficulty putting thoughts into words is usually the result of thoughts that don’t make sense. Clear words flow easily from clear thoughts.
Is thought totally impossible without words? Not exactly. Animals manage to have ideas without words. “It’s almost time for dinner”, “My human always picks up that long thing before we go for a walk”, “Antelopes turn their heads in just like that before they zag to the left”, “There’s nothing but trouble in that part of the jungle”, and so on. I’ve put these thoughts into words. Animals don’t have words. If not words, what is going on in their heads?
Temple Grandin has an idea.
In her book, Animals in Translation, she suggests animals think in the same way autistic humans think - in pictures. Temple Grandin has unquestionable authority on how autistics think: she is autistic.
Is she also right about animal thinking?
For most of her life she only understood the world as pictures, sounds, and scents that run on like videos. These videos are precise down to the smallest detail. One impression follows another in strict processive order. The slightest variation throws everything into confusion. Generalization is unthinkable because a generalized picture is impossible to imagine. There are no categories. One hat has nothing in common with any other hat. What we think of as a variation on the general idea of hat is to an autistic person – and animals - a new item that is completely unrecognizable.
That will sound familiar to anyone familiar with animals.
Thinking in pictures is thinking, but it’s limited. Temple Grandin’s impressive career didn’t start until she learned to use words. A single word can contain more information than a picture. A simple word like Hat conveys a string of concepts and associations: a thing worn to shelter the head from sun and rain; a thing sometimes worn as a fashion accessory; a headpiece that comes in many styles; and on and on. A picture conveys none of that. If you didn’t already know about hats, a picture of a hat would tell you almost nothing.
Words pack a great deal into very little. Every word in the dictionary requires at least a sentence, and often a paragraph to explain. The best part is that after you know the word, you can write more succinctly. And, if you don’t know the word, you can look it up. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but you’ll still need those thousand words to describe the picture to someone who hasn’t seen the picture.
That said, it would be hard to convey much if the words were allowed to run helter-skelter unsupervised all over the page. That’s where the Literary Traffic Police come in. They’re small, and may not seem like much, but they get the job done.
Most writers are grateful for the good work of these officers-of-the-written-word ( , ; : - “ ‘/ ? ! . Parenthesis, Comma, semicolon, full colon, hyphen or dash, quotation mark, apostrophe, slash, question mark, exclamation mark and the most used punctuation of all: the period.
Where would we be without them?
Unnecessarily confused!
Not all writers agree on the value of these little managers of traffic flow.
Gertrude Stein hated commas. She preferred short sentences; entirely because she wanted to avoid commas. James Joyce, Proust, Beckett and many other authors achieved some portion of their fame only because they eschewed proper punctuation. I suppose they did this as an act of rebellion against authority. Did it improve their work? No. I’ve read Ulysses. I wouldn’t want to do it again. The confusion adds nothing to the work.
The desire to be different gets in the way of the desire to be good.
I’ve always thought that words and pictures should be friends. Yet, in the last years of the 1800’s a rebellion was launched against the linking of narratives to pictures. The event that brought this notion to the larger public was the so-called, “Armory Show”, of 1913. This show featured the work and ideas of the Parisian avant-garde. Their impressionistic and abstract art came wrapped in shiny new concepts of how to think about art with a capital A.
Previous centuries of great art always had a story to go with the art. The art was always about something: Venus on the Half-Shell; Abraham sacrificing Isaac; The Rape of the Sabine women; Susanna and the Elders; Perseus with the head of Medusa; and so on. This could not continue. The enlightened few of the avant-garde declared that Great Art should not be burdened with parochial narrative. Aesthetic brilliance was enough. The parochial-many bought-into the declaration of the enlightened few. Since then, it has been considered gauche to ask what an abstract painting is about.
This presented a problem.
If a painting isn’t about anything, what can be said about it? The descriptions became as abstract as the art. Slowly, an abstract painting without any story became: “harmoniously truncated, textually rampant, vividly nuanced, and a tour de force of angular innuendo”. The descriptions also became longer, and longer until, finally, the abstract picture - without a narrative - had a story attached to it. Tom Wolfe has written about the process in, The Painted Word.
People like stories. If you don’t give them one, they’ll make one up. Even if their story doesn’t make any sense.
Each of our lives can be thought of as an epic tale of many episodes. In fact, our lives can’t be thought of in any way except as words that coalesce into sentences, that then coalesce into stories. Most of these stories are spoken, but not written. They fade in time, and are usually forgotten. Some few are written as prose, poetry, or song. These last - sometimes for ages.
I have many acquaintances from hundreds, even thousands of years ago. I can’t talk to them, but they talk to me through the words they wrote all those long years past. It’s an ancient technology that has something almost magical about it.
There is a little known Canadian film: Black Robe, that depicts this aura of magic particularly well, The movie is set in 1634. In one scene the explorer Champlain is contesting with a local Iroquois Chief over who makes big-medicine best. The Chief has a dwarf sorcerer on his payroll who pulls several items from his bag of neolithic tricks. Champlain shows off clock, compass, and music box. Each side is impressed, but not overly impressed. Finally, Champlain asks the Chief to whisper something that only the Chief knows into the ear of one of Champlain’s soldiers. The soldier listens, then writes down what the Chief has whispered. He walks over to a fellow soldier some 30 ft. away and silently hands him the note
The second soldier reads the note aloud.
The Chief is dumbstruck.
This is magic - big, big magic.
It’s the written word.