Worthy Words, Part 3: Walker Percy

In Walker Percy's 1991 essay collection Signposts in a Strange Land appears a previously unpublished, thought-provoking article, "Is a Theory of Man Possible?" containing this sentence:

Ignorance, if recognized, is often more fruitful than the appearance of knowledge. (page 113)

Percy's sentence seems prophetic more than a quarter century before the truth became relative in American politics and beyond. Philosophers have sought to define and describe truth for more than two millennia, but all their work has vaporized in a time when polemicists and even academics refuse to ground their observations and summations in commonly accepted principles of morality and ethics. 

We can surely find many more examples of prescient wisdom, such as comedy writer Robert Orben's oft recycled 1974 aphorism, "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance." I suppose we have always known this "truth," but what are we doing about it?

Worthy Words, Part 2: Albert Murray

Albert Murray (1916-2013), soldier, scholar, teacher, cultural commentator, music critic, and community leader of Harlem, where he lived his later years, came to my attention because of my love of jazz. Murray was a cofounder of Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City, a beautiful multivenue facility where I have seen numerous shows. So how could I not love him too? Arguably, his most famous nonfiction work is his collection of essays The Omni-Americans (1970). In that book , he writes this 73-word sentence:

In all events, it is not only possible but highly probable that the “cultural dislocation trauma” suffered by Africans transported to frontier America was considerably less than European-oriented polemicists imagine, precisely because the African’s native orientation to culture was less static or structured than they assume, precisely, that is to say, because the African may have been geared to improvisation rather than piety, for all the taboos he had lived in terms of. (Library of America's edition of Murray's Collected Essays & Memoirs, page 158)

This assertion is only one of Murray's many insightful observations in The Omni-Americans, a provocative reflection on Black identity in its many forms as perceived within and outside the race. We see examples of cultural dislocation trauma appearing in the United States whenever refugees land on its shores. But the first Blacks here were not refugees choosing to flee to America for their safety; they were unwilling arrivals subjected to slavery. In casting a spotlight on the Africans' vibrant and organized orientation to culture, Murray forces his reader to imagine not the European's polemicist or the dominant culture 's viewpoint but to reckon with Blacks as equals, human beings who think, create their own culture, and live and die by their own mores. Note the phrase improvisation rather than piety, whose context is better understood by reading the entire essay. As for the taboos Africans had lived in, think first of their past in their native continent, a past over 250 years in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, virtually impossible for any of us to fully comprehend, as well as the interdictions imposed on them in their new continent. Murray fashions a quandary that his readers will contemplate long after they close his book.

Worthy Words, Part 1: Wallace Stevens

With this post, I begin a series of memorable words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, dialogue, or stanzas by writers who continue to inspire and inform my own writing. 

Ever since I started reading the poetry of Wallace Stevens in 1988,  I have expected surprise. While I understand that by definition, surprise must be unexpected, I hope this post explains the oxymoron of the previous sentence. 

Stevens's poems are so deep in their reaction to experience and their immediacy of feeling that their full meaning might not penetrate my senses until a second or third reading, sometimes ten years apart. When I do capture glimpses of their essence—I doubt I ever get their complete meaning— I look back realizing I just was not ready to accept his message, I misunderstood it, or I dismissed it too quickly. For sure, I can read any one of his poems a dozen times wondering about what he was trying to accomplish. 

Take "Chocorua to Its Neighbor," his 130-line poem comprising 26 quintains. The title of the poem itself is laden with ambiguity. Does Chocorua refer to the 3,500-hundred-foot mountain in New Hampshire or the 500-person community at the mountain's base? Is Chocorua talking to its neighbor, is Chocorua's neighbor forming an impression of it? Is Chocorua's neighbor the closest mountain to it? The sky? The forest embedded in it? Is it the poet or the mountain speaking? Or is it we who are perceiving what the poet describes? Consider the first verse of the poem:

To speak quietly at such a distance, to speak

And to be heard is to be large in space,

That, like your own, is large, hence, to be part

Of sky, of sea, large earth, large air. It is

To perceive men without reference to their form.

After a recent reading of this poem, nearly four decades after reading it for the first time without much of an impression, I emerged from this stanza feeling larger than humanity itself, a maker of mountains, an omniscient being. Perhaps not even a being, but something that comprehends without availing itself of senses.

Let's look at the oft-referenced nineteenth stanza, which struck me in an entirely different way after reading the poems decades later:

To say more than human things with human voice,

That cannot be; to say human things with more

Than human voice, that, also, cannot be;

To speak humanly from the height or from the depth 

Of human things, that is acutest speech.

Upon first reading, I took this stanza at face value, interpreting it literally. I assigned great worth to its denotative meaning. Once I reread it, the eighteen stanzas preceding it as well as the seven following it, brought a greater metaphysical, existential connotation to my consciousness.  

I do not see my job here as clarifying any of Stevens's poems, but simply (or not so simply) as explaining my reaction to them in the hope that you might read some of his verse as well. Reading his brief poems "The Reader," "Debris of Life and Mind," or "Human Arrangement" would be a good starting point.

Linking Writing Theory and Practice

Since I am a big proponent of using transitions sensibly, I am sharing an interesting and useful teaching aid, "Linking Theory and Practice" from Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia. The two-page handout takes no more than five minutes to read but days to absorb. 

My intention of presenting this tool is to orient writers not only to the links between writing theory and practice but to employ linking ideas in their own writing. I have long taught that we writers need to stop thinking of transitions as simply words (and, but, therefore) or phrases (as a result, in effect, in the meantime), but also as sentences, paragraphs, and documents. The writer of this resource evidently supports my position.