Continuing with Davidman’s letter
to H.H. Lewis: “These defects [see
the previous post] are thrown in sharp
relief in your work by your habit of mixing styles. You will use the funniest,
the least dignified of slang phrases in the same line with some of this pompous
old stuff; and consequently the slang looks cruder and the fancy language
sissier than ever. Once you pick a style, stick to it. It’s like the tone of
your voice; it adds a great deal of meaning to the words themselves, and if you
changed tones five times in speaking a sentence you’d confuse everybody.”
While Davidman is writing
specifically about poetry, her observation applies to all genres of
communication; though I suppose in post-modernity many people might not notice
– so accustomed are we to discontinuity and disjunction and disharmony. It
seems that communicators and artists and musicians must be asking today, “How
much noise can we make?” when engaging in what passes today for creativity. When
I was a child we had “dot-to-dot” books (do they still publish them?). You drew
a line from 1 to 2 to 3 and so forth and when you were done you had an image of
an elephant or a dog or a house or car. In post-modernity a dot-to-dot book
need not result in a discernable image. In today’s milieu a speaker or writer
can change tones five times in speaking a
sentence and few people will notice, so accustomed are we to our disjointed
world.
Davidman continues, “Abusive epithets have no place in poetry;
they belong on the back fence. Instead of calling Hitler a so-and-so, the poet
must show Hitler doing something which at once makes it clear to everybody that
he is a so-and-so; then you must have proved your case without even needing to
state it.”
This is a tough rule to adhere to
because it requires discipline and sweat and merciless editing. It is so much
easier just to get to the point and call a spade a spade without describing the
spade; it is easier but it is not memorable – not memorable for the audience
and not memorable for the communicator.
When the communicator forces
himself to show and not tell he is likely to gain a deeper
understanding of what he is talking about, likely to discover nuances he didn’t
see, likely to walk down paths previously hidden. Once the communicator takes
the journey himself then he can describe the journey to others, once the
communicator has seen something then
he can show it to others.
Familiar territory is dangerous
territory; we think we know the familiar and we think we can walk right by it
and tell others about it without slowing down, stopping, and pondering what we
think we know. This is one reason why working with children is both challenging
and enlightening at the same time; it is challenging in that we need to
communicate descriptively, we can’t take shortcuts by just telling them things (or at least we shouldn’t take shortcuts); it
is rewarding in that as we force ourselves to describe subjects and objects we
see new images which lead to our own greater understanding. Adults let us get
away with laziness, children don’t. If children don’t see what we’re saying they’ll let us know one way or the other – by
words, by body language, or by looking for something else to do.
A couple of years ago I read a
popular biography of Dietrich Bonheoffer, at times when the author was dealing
with Hitler and Hitler’s ideas he resorted to what Davidman was talking about in
her letter to H.H. Lewis; I recall a passage about Mein Kampf; Hitler’s book
was dismissed out-of-hand without any description of what Hitler wrote in the
book – this was not helpful and it was lazy…it was also poor writing. There was
so much of this type of thing in the Bonheoffer biography that I felt I was
watching a DVD with gouges in it, stopping here and skipping there – shame on
the editor.
Back to the danger of the
familiar; some years ago when preaching through the Gospel of Mark I came to
Mark 12:28 – 31 in which Jesus says that we are to love the Lord our God with
all our heart, soul, mind and strength and that we are to love our neighbor as
ourselves. I’d known that passage since I was fifteen years old, it was one of
the first passages I learned by heart after meeting Jesus, but preparing to
preach that passage by showing what
the passage meant required more sweat and pumping iron than just about any
passage I’ve ever taught; one of the most familiar passages to me required the
highest degree of work, of dogged determination, of perseverance. I also knew
that while my audience may not know the passage by heart that it was a passage
whose concepts they had heard and therefore were likely inoculated against – I needed to take them on a journey to
explore and see the passage. The result was a message that I could see and illustrate and could show to
others.* If you were to put me on a plane land me in an unfamiliar land without
Bible and notes, by God’s grace I could preach and teach that passage because
I’ve seen it and showed it to others. I like to think that my listeners were turned
into viewers that morning and that they could also share the images of that
message with others. If my listeners haven’t seen then they haven’t heard.
Joy Davidman understood the
difference between telling and showing; perhaps this is one reason she
was a gifted collaborator with both William Gresham and C.S. Lewis; Lewis’s Till We Have Faces would likely not be
the book it is without Davidman’s partnership. Her advice is a bastion for
those who strive to maintain clear and meaningful communication in an age of
incoherence; her advice was needful when she wrote it in 1943, it is indispensable today.
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*The message title is; A Ladder or a Loveseat? Is our
relationship with God based on climbing a ladder to earn His acceptance, or is
it sitting on a loveseat with Him in Christ, loving and being loved?
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