Tag Archives: Art

The Degradation of Language

My commute home to our new apartment takes me past a small chiropractor’s office that’s situated right off of the main “strip.” They have an old-style sign at street level: you know, the kind where someone actually comes out and moves letters around manually, instead of the gaudy digital light shows that have become all too prevalent for U.S. businesses. The content of this particular sign struck me more than its design, though:

“Let us care 4 ur spine.”

As I alluded to in my last post, I’m a bit of a technology addict. As such, I certainly utilize text messaging; SMS is the best way to communicate in some circumstances. As the trend has evolved more toward text-based communication, be it email, blogging, Facebook wall posts, or Twitter, there seems to be less voice calling going on, or at least there tends to be less in my world. I’m proficient in text “language;” the short-hand that makes tapping out a message on a standard phone keypad quicker. I also understand that, in many cultures, texting is considered more polite than taking a voice call while with friends or in public.

Since when, though, did it become socially acceptable for advertising to be reduced to text-message language?

I guess I see it as a time and place for everything. When texting someone, I have no problem using the abbreviations that mark SMS language. When typing an email, however, or even tweeting, or in essentially any other written form of communication whatsoever, I stay away from it, because I struggle with the decline of the English language. I struggle with the fact that students in public school systems today think in SMS language. And not just students. I once was asked to proofread a script for a dramatic sketch, written by an adult, that used “lol” in the dialogue. How, exactly, is a character supposed to deliver that???

I’m not opposed to texting, but I think there is a much more limited acceptability thresh-hold than we currently ascribe to it. When it is used in road-side advertising, we’ve passed that thresh-hold. When we permit language to be abbreviated on a consistent basis, we lose the poetry of the language, the nuances of the words, the beauty of the semantics. We allow our language to be degraded into odd character combinations that are the equivalent of misshapen limbs on a deformed body. With the decline of our language follows the decline of our culture. God knows, we’re seeing enough decline in that already, as falling literacy rates and non-existent reading habits of both teens and adults prove. After all, why read a book when you can play a video game, right?

Perhaps when a culture has reached a point where such fast and immediate communication is necessary, we’ve passed a point of no return. I hope not. To think optimistically, however, we cannot permit ourselves to be so hurried all the time that we feel the need to abbreviate and chop up every word and sentence for the sake of expediency, or, even worse, for the sake of what is “cool” at a given time. In doing so, words become cadavers, not living symbols of an existential meaning beyond themselves as they were intended to be. American language and literature is already the object of disdain from most other civilized cultures around the globe. Should we ever hope to move beyond that, we must learn the limits of when to cut short our words.

If any picture is “worth a thousand words,” then how much must it survive on each one of those words? How important must each one be? Hoping against the arrival of a day when we all speak (God forbid) in numbers and algorithms, our words are the most precious way of communicating the contents of our souls. And, if we lose those words, I fear we lose a piece of those souls…or at least the ability to know them as closely…as well.

Here and Now

When I was working on my undergrad, I stumbled by chance onto a play by Beth Henley. I (shamefully) can’t remember exactly which of her plays I read first, but I directed a scene from the play for my senior directing class as a final project. I then performed a scene from Am I Blue as a reader’s theatre piece for a forensics competition and, by that time, Henley was listed high among my favorite playwrights, a place she has occupied since.

I recently found a copy of four of her more famous plays on Amazon, and knew immediately I had to purchase the book. Somewhat fitting to the fact that I recently lost my grandmother, the first play in the collection is The Wake of Jamey Foster, a play revolving around the tragedy of losing a loved one and the dark comedy that tends to play out within the context of the morbid. What stood out to me as I read the play was each character grasping for something beyond the death by which they are surrounded, grasping for the Divine (in imagery that is at times unmistakable), but succeeding only in adding to the darkness of their circumstance. They are existing in a dark moment, but they are inhabiting it fully, clinging to whatever life they can in an effort to maintain a pulse.

I can relate in an offbeat way in the surrealism of grandmother’s funeral, now a few weeks in the past, during which everything seemed to be so detached from me that I couldn’t feel anything until over a week later. I think it was because I was holding back from it, not inhabiting the moment completely, not engaging the life that was persevering despite the observance of her passing.

I earnestly believe that the shift from immanence to transcendence was an unfortunate move in theological thought, because the rift that we place between ourselves and God is, at least in my mind, false. We’re forever grasping for Him “up there” during these times, when He is fact very present, standing with us in our grief, our pain, our joy. I think He wants us to find the life that, like Henley’s characters, we are desperately reaching for.

I missed it when I finally grieved. I lapsed into anger at myself for all of the things I didn’t do and say with my grandmother and would now never have the chance. When my grief finally set in, it was very real, but very ugly. I was reaching for that life, but all I could find in that moment was pain. Perhaps I was reaching past God as He was sitting there with me, just as I turned my face away from Karen as she attempted to be there for me. At least, though, I was finally inhabiting the moment, finally experiencing the reality as everything that it was and is. Until that point, I was only using evasive maneuvers, and, in doing so, I evaded God as well.

Among the lessons I’ve learned from my grandmother’s passing, one of them has been to recognize the truth that God is immanently in the situation with me, not relegated to being “up there” looking down. I think, also, that He much prefers that I engage, even if it is messy, because not moving forward, be it because of uncertainty or numbness, is stagnation. And stagnation, if we are honest, is not living at all.

Celtic Contemplations

I’ve always been a science fiction fan (I bookmarked an interesting piece on the literary nature of science fiction on my delicious page if you’re interested), with a little fantasy thrown in. Karen and I have always tried to “sell” our favorite authors to each other since we’ve been married…every now and again the sale is successful, if only for one book, and we find a treasure…there’s just nothing cooler than stumbling onto a really good book.

My latest adventure at Karen’s request has been back into fantasy fiction: fantasy based on Celtic mythology, to be specific, in the form of Stephen Lawhead’s The Paradise War, a re-release of his 1991 book that I bought Karen for Christmas. I find the nature of the story reminiscent of Narnia in some ways (though I’m only halfway through, so if you’ve read it, don’t argue me there yet). Lawhead’s prose flows smoothly, and his descriptions are beautifully and vividly painted as he sets a scene. A chapter that I read today involved the protagonist listening to a bard sing songs of life: wars and defeat, kindness and love. The character mentions that his entire world became the singing, that he discovered in that moment what it was to be truly alive, and that he slowly forgot his life in the “real world” (he had been transported into The Otherworld for some time as we come upon this scene). The correlating point to this is an earlier description in the book of the noise of the city constantly around him, and the sudden and complete tranquility (defined as the absence of the sounds of an industrialized culture) he experiences upon arrival in The Otherworld.

The striking description of the character listening to the bard sing is that he realized “what it was to be human.”

This evening, shortly after arriving home from work and as the sun was descending for the evening, I was making my way through the apartment to close the blinds. I walked through the kitchen to its single window without turning on the light, and stopped. I was suddenly in a serene moment of sorts, standing in the dark with a cup of hot apple cider in hand, watching the tops of trees move in strong and freezing wind, with just a hint of pink left in the dusk sky to make their bare branches a silhouette. They were reaching up to that sky as it became grayer and grayer, and, as the show ended, faded to black.

Coming full circle, this is what the Celts would call a “time between times.”

There was a huge period of my life in which I was too busy to notice these sorts of things. Thankfully, that period stopped short a few years ago. Like the memory of Lawhead’s character fading of his previous life, I have difficulty remembering the hyper-busy schedule I once kept, not noticing events like this evening’s dusk long enough to even pause. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still incredibly busy, but I’m glad that I’ve learned to slow down and soak in moments like this evening’s brief encounter with the time between times, a moment when God was no longer as much “up there” as He was “right here.” Because, like Lawhead’s character, it was in that moment that I felt truly alive, that I remembered what it is to be human.

Inheritance

My reading time is generally split between fiction, non-fiction, and plays…typically in that order. I enjoy occasionally spending time with poetry, though…I just don’t read as much poetry because it is just that: time-consuming. The time required to unpack the meaning of a few lines of carefully crafted verse can be daunting.

I (like most Americans) wasn’t familiar with the Danish poet Inger Christensen who passed away on January 2nd, even though she was frequently a contender for the Nobel Prize. This afternoon I listened to some of her work read, both in its original language and in translation. I had a much better feel for this person after listening to her work, and reading a few lines as reproduced in the New York Times obit.

We’re hard-wired with a desire to leave a legacy, a work that immortalizes a piece of ourselves in the material world, that leaves a snapshot of our soul for those who continue in life after our crossing over. For someone published as prominently as Christensen, this is obvious to see: her poetry, as well as her other written works, are her legacy. By reading the verse she crafted, we are privy to the thoughts and musings she experienced at the time, to her vision of the world she shared with us, even if at a distance. In short, we know Christensen at some level by engaging in the work she left behind. She lives with us still through her words.

I have a great deal of creative impulse in my family. In most cases, it took the form of artisans and craftsmanship: my father, for example, is a sculptor of wood, an artist in his own right when sitting in front of his power tools. For my recently deceased grandmother, the creative channel was quilting.

Quilting, an all-but-lost art existing primarily (in my experience) through various parts of the Appalachians, is an exercise in visual creativity and specific craftsmanship combined with a cultural heritage all its own. The time required to meld patterns together into a unique creation is astounding, and the precise care required for each stitch (all of which would be identical in my grandmother’s quilts) was a labor of love. Throughout my childhood, I recall her sitting in front of a quilt suspended on wooden saw-horse-shaped supports, needle and thread in hand, a singular focus on her face. Each quilt produced from her hands was a unique combination of pattern and design, not dissimilar to the way I later used composition, color and depth to design shows for the stage. Quilts were of enormous value to my grandmother, and were the most valued thing she could leave behind. I received more than one customized quilt through my childhood. Karen and I discovered after her funeral last week that she had sewn a baby quilt in anticipation of our future family. A quilt was my grandmother’s way of giving a part of herself to someone. She loved through her quilts. She connected through them.

Karen had not known my grandmother well prior to her death, having only met her a few times. Yet, as she remarked this week as were returning home from the funeral proceedings, she felt as though she grew to know my grandmother more after encountering her quilts as we sorted through personal affects early in the week. My grandmother had left a legacy, and Karen had experienced it. Similar to Christensen, and the connection I felt to her vision in reading and hearing her work, Karen began to experience the world from my grandmother’s perspective after seeing and touching quilts that had been born of my grandmother’s hands.

Perhaps our desire to leave a legacy is one of desperation, a desperation to be known by succeeding generations that may otherwise forget us. Perhaps it is a way for us to keep storytelling alive, to pass on to those who follow us. Perhaps it is a cry in the wilderness to make our perspectives known. Whatever motivates this inherent drive, it is easier to recognize in the artist, perhaps. My legacy will be the words others read, and the stories I have brought to life on stage. More than anything else, that will be what others use to discover who I was as they peer back from the future.

To say that the longing for legacy is limited to the artist, however, is shorting everyone else. Regardless of our inclinations or occupations, we long to leave a work that will be a lens through which others can view us retrospectively. Whatever our trade, whatever the avenues we explore and in which we thrive, we are all nearly desperate to craft the masterpiece of our lives for which we will be known, the defining work that reflects who we truly are.

This week I was struck by how critical it is to identify and achieve this in our lives.

I wish you the best as you discover and pursue yours.