In Taliessan Through Logres Charles Williams writes of King Arthur’s bard:
Taliessin’s voice sharpened
on Virgil’s exact word;
he uttered Italy seen from a wave;
he defined the organisms of hell.
A great poet sharpens the skills of a lesser.
This is true.
Virgil, Dante, and even Williams shame me with their exact and careful use of language. They enrich my illustrations and make my rhetoric more penetrating and less scattered. I cannot read them without wanting to use more care in everything I write.
Each word in the great poets is there for a reason. Even in lesser lights like Williams, I must pause over every page and reread lines. I can savor individual words.
Nobody should try that on this blog post.
One can “blog” or edit, but one cannot really do both.
I sometimes wonder for this reason if it is good to blog at all. The curmudgeon in me laments the sloppiness and the self-indulgence. Those who are given to words can use them all on a blog.
I should know.
The cheerleader in me (the world’s first curmudgeonly cheerleader) recollects that there is a great good in this new process of getting ideas out.
Because writing and publishing is easy in the new medium, the reader has a chance to see a writer craft his ideas and refine them. It is a peek into the process of creation. Eventually what comes of the best blogs will be a more refined essay that circles back to themes we have all seen growing in the writer over time.
I enjoy seeing this process at our group blog.
There I can:
Watch Fred Sanders circle the Trinity seeing it from many different points of view.
See Paul Spears gnaw at educational theory until he grasps some part of it.
Join Matt Jenson as he reflects on theology and church community to the point where his thoughts have come to final fruition.
Watch J.P. Moreland try out practical applications from a lifetime of more esoteric study.
It is a chance that only the rare teaching assistant or aide had in an earlier era and we all get to see it in our political leaders, our churchmen, our scholars, and our sages.
There is an immediacy to the rush of words that pour forth from the new media. We can capture the first verbalization of feelings, and not just the considered response to great events.
That is not bad, if the public will adjust to this new style of writing and understand what it is they are reading.
We will know if a man’s first impulse in a great disaster is prayer or looking for someone to blame.
It would not be bad if we had Churchill’s immediate reaction to events as well as his stately speeches. His best work would not be false any more than his immediate reaction would be the real man. Instead, the considered work is the end product of a man working through the shock of experience and taming it with words.
Watching new media develop is watching men civilize experiences in their minds. Both the raw prose and the eventually poetry are authentic and have their own force.
It would not cheapen Shakespeare’s speech, if we also had whatever unplanned and inspiring words that tumbled from Henry V on Saint Crispin Day. It would be illuminating to compare.
Or it could be.
It could also develop a nasty laziness in me. If I can write quickly, why refine my ideas? Why not hop from one idea to another without ever revisiting them? Doesn’t the public demand something new?
This underestimates the public and threatens to leave me and any other new media writer severely weaker than we need be.
There are a great many more words, but most of them are not better words. They are blunt instruments and have the force of a flood, but lack the precision of a jet of water. The new media words wash over me, but they threaten to drown the culture.
The good news is that a medicine is readily available and Williams points us to it.
Great poetry like Virgil can sharpen our voices.
We must bathe in poetry . . . the harder the better. We must use Dante, Virgil, Shakespeare as guides to sharpen our language. Time must be spent each day forcing our minds to precision and not just merely writing and more writing.
At least I must do this.
The flood of words has value . . . sometimes it takes a great deal of water to cleanse the world, but there are also times for more precise instruments. Since a wave of words is easier for most of us than their fine use, it is in sharpening our words that we should spend much of our free reading time.
I must sharpen my mind on exact words. Poetry is more important than ever in this new media age. . . and not the sloppy, undisciplined verse that dominates. We need the careful and the cautious.
We must memorize the writers who used words with such care that, like Shakespeare, they would invent a word if the right one was not available, not from ignorance but from knowledge of need.
My words have been sharpened by Williams. May they continue to grow more precise so that I can write both in a torrent of passionate prose and in a focussed stream of poetic and philosophical precision.
