“People don’t really talk like that, you know.”
“No, but they think that way.”
—-Diane Kruger (Abigail Chase) and Nicholas Cage (Ben Gates) in National Treasure.
What I love about writing is that it lets me communicate in poetry without sounding self-important and condescending. Never in reality could I talk about a filigree-and-marmalade sunrise. People would look at me as if I’d picked up a spear and donned a breastplate and helmet with horns—and rightly so.
And yet I notice that some things that work in speech don’t work on the page. For one thing, if we wrote out all the dropped “ng’s’s, we’d look like a bunch of hicks, even though that’s how we speak every day. I’m sittin’ down, havin’ a drink.
On a deeper level, I’ve found that I cannot write characters who talk about God and faith and belief explicitly without them looking like religious freaks. And despite the depth and passion of my religious convictions, I do think that is a bad thing. There is an inevitable tension between the things of earth and the things of Heaven, yet the Church exists within the world. It can’t operate in a separate reality. Which of course, was true even when Jesus was treading the dusty paths of the Middle East.
The point is that, in reality, in the context of a discussion with friend or family—or in a blog post, for that matter—I can speak simply about the ways in which the hand of God has touched my life. But frame the same words in quotes and attribute them to a character in a novel, and suddenly they look holier-than-thou. This is why I can’t read Christian fiction. It’s too preachy. I tune out.
And yet change the context one more time—place the images and the insights into a song or hymn text—and suddenly they reach depths in the soul that we didn’t even know were there.
This is what I love about writing. The written word allows us to express both what is thought, but unspeakable, as well as the spoken, but unwritable. Liturgical texts, in particular, can make my breath catch. I live in awe of the great text writers—Dunstan and Cooney and Farrell, to name a very limited few—who are able to catch the essence of faith and use it to pierce the soul. I aspire to write that poetry…I receive the occasional gift from a wandering Spirit…but I’m not that good at it.
There’s a danger in striving for eloquence, though. Eventually, it becomes too self-aware. The process of blogging, though it is an expression of myself, also insulates me from exposing my innermost emotions. Everything I write is honest, but it comes out through a filter—the filter of what is appropriate for public consumption. The more direct forms of written communication, the ones that should be most heartfelt (like a message on an anniversary card, for instance), suddenly feel far too intimate. Or perhaps it’s just that there doesn’t seem to be anything to say that I haven’t said a dozen times before. The writer in me recoils from insipid, sentimental words, no matter how true they are. It feels contrived.
I’m not sure where I’m going with this…this post has been hiding on my NEO for weeks, and with that last paragraph, it veered off in a wholly unexpected direction. Perhaps the point is simply to acknowledge reality, and let it all stew for a while longer, in the hopes that I’ll eventually come to a satisfying, literary kind of conclusion. If so, I’ll be sure to share a spoonful.
Kathleen M. Basi 