The Lost Art of Words...

“Compared to the spoken word, a picture is a pitiful thing, indeed.” 

                          --Charles Osgood

“Those who say  ‘A picture is worth a thousand words…’ have never read The Declaration of Independence, or The Gettysburg Address, or Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.” 

                               --Zig Ziglar

I was having a rather spirited conversation last week with a coworker whose background is education. We were discussing the advent of technology both in the classroom and beyond. She maintained that college graduates should be required to take classes on technology. They should have to be skilled in things like Adobe and Movie Maker. “Because,” as she stated, “YouTube and TedX are more popular now than books.’

My response is that this is very sad.

I’m not against technology. I’d better not be, since I work in the IT department at a major university. But I’m against the way technology keeps lowering the bar on our classrooms and, ultimately, on our imagination. And without imagination, we will die quickly.

Technology can turn an abstract fact into a two-minute movie clip that entertains and informs. The down side is that once the image is embedded into the psyche, there is no need for the imagination that the words could elicit.

I read the Declaration of Independence and my imagination takes over. I imagine that blistering hot day in July, 1776 when those fifty-five men signed their lives away and a nation was born. I’ve seen movies about it, but they pale in comparison to what my mind provided.

I’ve read and analyzed Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech for a college course. Reading it. Committing those words to my heart and thinking about the grammar, the punctuation…the faces that formed and disappeared in my imagination while I read it…that inspired more action from me than any newsreel ever could.

The pain and yearning in Danny Saunders soul in Chaim Potok’s “The Chosen” was more real and more desperate and more heartbreaking that Robbie Benson’s wonderful performance could possibly portray.  

What happened? Why do we take our lexicon and reduce it to 140 characters and “LOL’s” and “OMG’s?”  What happened to poems, and sonnets, and great song lyrics?

I well recall the early days of MTV and the lament from great lyricists like Springsteen and Cohen. They feared that in the very instant you attach a visual to a song lyric; you remove the internal images that the song created for each listener. Images so personal and individual that they cannot be numbered. Every song produces a different image for every listener. That is the magic of a well crafted sentence. And that art is lost.

There are still great word crafters out there. Still writers who paint with the vocabulary the way Monet worked with watercolor. But the audience has changed. In a never-ending effort to lower the bar and make excuses for why some kid “can’t learn” we have boiled the hard, arduous, difficult work of learning down to 140 characters on Twitter, a clever 3-minute video on YouTube, or a meme.

I read Hugo’s “Hunchback of Notre Dame” and was amazed that Hugo took 134 pages to describe the cathedral. The cathedral!  Potok spent page after page describing Hasidic life and culture. Even songs have changed. The opening lines to “Thunder Road” bear this out:

                                

                     

                      “The screen door slams. Mary’s dress waves.

                                    Like a vision she dances across the floor

                                   As the radio plays

                                   Roy Orbison singing for the lonely

                                   Hey that’s me and I want you, only…”

To think that those words were penned by a 25 year old, then-unknown kid from New Jersey.

Twenty Five

He didn’t just wake up one morning, talking that way. Bruce was educated in the old school. He read great authors. He listened to great records. His foundation wasn’t 140 characters and some smiley faces. It was hard-won. And when the time came to write thousands of songs with incredible lyrics, he was ready for the task.

Who is writing this now? Who says things like Bruce said in “Thunder Road” or Cohen said in “Hallelujah” or Willy DeVille said in “Heaven Stood Still?”

Who is the next Forbert or Hiatt, Or Mullins or Elias?

Who is writing the next great short stories influenced by Flannery O’Connor? Or Potok? Or Hugo?  Who is learning to speak great words because they read great words thereby giving them the internal resources to write great words?

All you have to do is go to YouTube to see who the next clever film makers are. But are they moving anyone?

When I was nine, (as I have recounted before) I read Gene Hill’s column in Field and Stream for the first time. It began a lifelong love for words. He wrote of his old bird dog and how she was too old to hunt anymore but she would still come and sit by his side near the fireplace, lay her chin on his leg and look at him plaintively until he relented and scratched her head for a minute. The image made me want to be a writer.

The image.

The words.

It wasn’t a Tweet. It wasn’t a clever video clip. It was a story. A well-crafted, wonderfully descriptive story that let me concoct the corresponding images on the canvas of my imagination. 

The dog that I saw, was a beautiful old Springer. Liver and white, with some gray beginning to show around her muzzle. She waddled a bit because she’d grown stiff with the years. Her coat was shiny and thick. Gene Hill was on a comfortable leather couch. Wearing old, friendly blue jeans that were aged to perfection. His pipe lent the aroma of Captain Black to the scent of the fireplace. The old dog came over slowly and softly and let out the gentlest sigh when she laid her chin on his knee.

As Hill stroked the crown of her head, between her red-brown ears, he thought of the ducks, and the pheasants she’d retrieved. He remembered when she was just a pup. How much training time he'd spent with her. He thought of all the years they ridden together in the pickup truck.

He caught himself with a lump in his throat because he figured, she was healthy, but even so she only had a few more years left. Four. Maybe six if she was lucky. He wasn’t ready for that.

Gene Hill didn’t write any of that in the original story. I imagined that while I read his words. Because he took a lot more than 140 characters. I have no idea what that wonderful old dog looked like in real life. I do know what she looked like in my heart. I don’t know if Gene Hill smoked Captain Black. I’m pretty sure I recall that he smoked a pipe.

But his words fertilized my imagination and I that is how I saw him. 

And that is what I lament these days. That is what I fear is lacking in education, and in our individual conversations, and in society.

Words can inspire. They lend themselves to creativity. They foster imagination.

And they are vanishing.

" I miss the peace of fishing..."

This past Saturday I went fishing.

If you know me, especially if you knew me as a child, you would not be surprised by this statement. In fact, you might wonder why I made it at all, and why I am writing an entire blog article about it.

It’s funny…I grew up loving to fish. I would have fished in a mud puddle if I thought there was an outside chance that it had a fish in it. I would practice casting in the above-ground swimming pool in our back yard. There was a creek in the county park in our neighborhood, and even though the creek was mostly a dry bed, I would often find myself casting a new lure in the pools that did exist here and there, just to see how it swam.

My friends did the same thing. Johnny, Richard, Tommy. We’d all be outside practicing our casts. When Johnny and I were both twelve years old, we each bought a fly-fishing combo at the New Castle Farmer’s Market. It was a seven-foot rod, a cheap but effective Martin reel, some level fly line and a small box with about a dozen flies inside.

Johnny and I set a Hula Hoop in the street and with a small piece of yarn tied to our tippet; we’d practice the rhythmic, graceful, pendulum motion of a fly-cast. We got good enough to land that yarn right in the hoop every time.

We subscribed to Bassmaster Magazine. We saved our money and bought lures two or three at a time at Shooter’s Supply on DuPont Highway. We rode our Spider bikes to “Nonesuch Creek” to fish the dirty waters that fed the Christiana River. We seldom caught more than a catfish or a carp, but we were fishing. We were out in the sun, eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich from a brown bag, peeing in the bushes, getting tanned and being boys.

In our hearts we were Jerry McInnis on “The Fishin’ Hole” and we were catching twenty pound stripers on Rapala broken-backs in the morning mist of some mammoth Southern Lake.

Life rolled on and we fished less and less. For my entire childhood I dreamed of living someplace where the fishing was generous and the bass were big. I moved to Tennessee in 1997 and, with an unhappy wife and a newborn daughter not long after we arrived, I found myself living in exactly such a dream location, and never fishing there even once.

I did find time to take Morgan fishing when she was 4 or 5 years old. There was a little five acre pond near my house and we caught a few Sunfish. But it was a long, long time before I found myself in a river, seriously pursuing a bass or a trout, with solitude as my only companion.

In 1994 I had returned to Liberty University for one year. That spring of 1995 I spent a few good weekend days in the Tye River, and the James, but I had not been back there to fish since I left in 1995.

1997 brought the move to Tennessee. 1998 brought my daughter’s birth. 1999 brought divorce. It was during those lonely, excruciatingly painful days of my divorce and the years immediately after, that I should have been fishing.

When the pain that is inherent with the end of a marriage –and the death of a dream- was so crushing, that’s when I needed the peace of a river or a lake the most. I don’t know why I didn't think of it then. I don’t know why I didn't spend a few hundred dollars and buy some nice new equipment and lose myself for an entire Saturday now and then. But I didn't.

I guess I simply forgot.

I forgot how good the sun feels on your face. I forgot how the gentle, relentless flow of the river can mesmerize you, and then, eventually, that flow begins to carry the burdens of your soul downstream somewhere. It isn't always about whether you caught anything. It’s what you released. Worry. Doubt. Fear. Pain. Sometimes, on a good day, each cast carries them away from you.

Saturday I returned to something I had loved a lifetime ago. I was thirty feet out in the James River, about a quarter mile below an old, retired hydro-electric dam. 

The James is a beautiful river when you are this far upstream. She’s clean, and clear, and fast in spots. She has a solid rock bed with little if any algae and growth. You can find a path of boulders jutting up just above the surface and, in spots; you can make your way to the middle of the stream without getting your feet wet.

I wasn't quite that far out on Saturday but I was far enough. I had an old Shakespeare spin cast combo that I might have paid twenty bucks for about eight years ago. I’m surprised I still had it, but it was in my closet. It had a chartreuse buzz bait still tied on and I cast it a few times, thinking nothing would hit a buzz bait in a river like the James.

On my third cast, I was pleasantly surprised when a nice smallmouth flashed up from underneath a cut in large bedrock and attacked my lure.

He was hooked instantly and he put up a decent battle before I landed him. I picked him up carefully. He was small, definitely not a keeper. But he was beautiful. A lovely green-bronze that only the smallmouth wears. He was all of about ten inches or so, maybe a second-season fish. But he was game, and I carefully removed the hook, made sure he was unharmed, and turned him loose. With a little luck, he’ll mature and offer someone else a battle someday.

Maybe a little eight year old boy who lives to fish as I once did.

I was excited. It had been a long time. I snapped a picture with my cell phone and sent it to a buddy. I smiled.

I fished for two more hours, hoping to catch another. I drank in the breathtaking scenery around me. I wondered why it had been so long. I thought of Johnny and Richard and Tommy and the days when we fished all day long in the heat of summer, catching nothing worth keeping, except the memories we would carry with us forever.

Do boys fish anymore? I don’t know. Boys don’t do nearly as many “boy things” as they used to do.

But they should.

They should be out there with their buddies, and with their dads and grandpas. Because those memories will get them through hard days when the only thing they can do to assuage the fishing bug is remember when they used to go out on steamy Friday evenings after summer rains and snatch giant night crawlers from the wet grass. When grown-up life rushes at them like an army of Huns, they’ll recall getting up at dawn, meeting their three best friends in the street, and riding their bicycles a few miles to their secret spot.

When the disappointments that life throws at us like so many curveballs take a toll…they could fall back on the best moments of childhood with the best friends they've ever had, learning about nature, and friendship, and luck.

Saturday, as I was casting my line and hoping for another beautiful bronze back, I was thinking about those friends of mine. I wished I could have held up that little bass and seen Johnny Wilkins, or Mark Sterling, smiling at me from twenty feet away, as happy as if they had caught it themselves.

I was alone on the water, but I had the company of the memories of those childhood fishing trips and the friendships that have been swallowed by adulthood, and the miles between us.

At the end of the great thriller, “The Hunt For Red October,” Alec Baldwin’s Jack Ryan asks Sean Connery’s Marko Ramius why he went to the great lengths it took to steal the Red October and bring her to America. He answered: “I miss the peace of fishing, like when I was a boy in Vilnius with my grandfather.”

“I miss the peace of fishing…”

So do I.

I miss the excitement and the skill and the talks we had on the way to our fishing hole. I miss the camaraderie and the bragging rights and the knot-tying contests.

I miss my childhood friends.

I won’t be able to be on the river for a few weeks, but when I do, I’ll carry Johnny and Mark and Richard and Tommy with me. I’ll do something that connects me directly to my childhood. Each cast will take with it just a little piece of the worries and cares that fifty-one years have heaped on my shoulders. I’ll wonder. I’ll squint in the sun, and curse at a snagged line and then laugh at myself when I do.

Hopefully I’ll find another bronze back or two…or three.

And I’ll find peace…