Is clarity next to godliness?
Is it really the best policy in writing?
I am now prepared to state
that comprehension is the end for most communication, but that clarity is
merely one of the means to that end.
So rarely do we even achieve
clarity - and, yes, confusion is rampant - that we rarely consciously recall
that our intent is to understand each other. Clarity is one simple solution.
Poetry is one way we might
find how we have lost sight of our intentions. It would be simple, and clear
enough, to say that Mr. Eliot’s ‘The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ is
primarily about growing old. And clearly, many people are not interested in
following phrases that leave them scratching their thinning hair. Measuring out
our life with coffee spoons; rolling or not rolling our trousers; do I dare to
each a peach? Really?
I think Mr. Eliot has marked
his impressions on the page not unlike Mr. Monet. Realism and accurate
representation have their places, but our minds are not mere mechanisms. If we
are willing, we are capable of taking experiences and ideas - in fragments, out
of context - and shape them or let them come together into something unexpected
and meaningful in our minds.
Of course, we often want to
share these things with each other and language is our means to this end. But,
and I cannot over state this, the world and our minds are analog – not digital.
Now I am doing my best to
measure out my words so that the idea that is in my mind will match the thought
that comes into your head, but I am also likely a fool on several counts. Only
on the page are these words fixed. Aspects of the thoughts themselves remain
fluid in my own mind. I have some hints as to what I am thinking, to be sure,
but several of the primary notions we all have about our own thinking processes
themselves are, at least in significant part, illusion.
Rationality and irrationality
are inseparable in reality. As are consciousness and unconsciousness and many
other word pairs. Even this particular moment, as I have tried to pin it down, no longer exists as
I reach the period at the end of the sentence. I don’t mean to pull us too far into waters whose depths
are beyond fathoming, but I can’t let this discussion entirely remain on the
surface. Some murk will always lurk, although we attempt to generalize and
categorize.
But to return to what I think
Mr. Eliot is trying to do, which is to draw us out of simple, shallow ideas and
give us a glimpse of some of the mysteries of our existence, he paints with
words as his colors and his brushstrokes, dashing them in ways that are not
always immediately clear. And indeed these metaphors themselves are embedded in
our language.
There is much chaos and
confusion in our speech and our writing and that kind of misunderstanding is not the direction to which
I am pointing. What we need for what we are trying to express at different times calls for various approaches, but muddle and carelessness will almost never serve
us well.
But particularly when we are
writing about things that we truly do not fully comprehend ourselves, and with
the realization that we are still processing thoughts that people have thought
about long before we ourselves began and will continue well after we have
ended - a more open approach with our words may yield more understanding.
In a sense, my objection
really is to a kind of precision – let us call it clarity – which does not and
possibly cannot exist. Words will not contain the reality Mr. Eliot is
exploring. His expression has reached my mind, likely in ways he never intended,
and the words are printed there on the page, to be reviewed and discovered. And it is only his words have solidified. Many have found that in a real sense those words live, I suspect, that because of some ambiguity, perhaps misdirection,
certainly some absences of obvious meaning that he left there in his poem and that we
bring along with our own minds into the search for meaning. At some pause in the
process of reading ‘Love song…’ - it appears that we somehow might share with Mr. Eliot and other at least
a resonant meaning.
Poetry is a special case
within language. That is poets give themselves permission not to be entirely clear
as it suits their purpose. Some results seem unnecessarily muddled, to me. But
poetry is also a quality. Perhaps you could say that poetry is the other part
of clarity, the music to the lyric, if you will.
So even in more prosaic
speech, there might be more than one best way to arrange our words to convey
meaning. Conventional, clear writing will never go out of style – I hope. It often
serves us well. But clarity is not my ultimate intent.
I want you to know and recall
just how beautifully words can express the longing and delight in my mind.
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread
out against the sky …
No comments:
Post a Comment