Scrawled in Wax

Readers of Scrawled in Wax are likely familiar with Nieman Storyboard’s “Why’s This So Good?“, an ongoing feature which takes a work of long-form journalism and, well, tries to explain why it’s so good. It’s a brilliant bit of insider baseball because the vagaries of long form excellence – the narrative arc, those short, punctuated paragraphs that reveal fascinating tidbits, the careful restraint by which a writer often speaks through circumlocution – are difficult to tease out, even for experienced writers.

But what about the sentence? Sometimes, it is that basic unit of long form writing that can be so beautiful. The precision and care of the well-crafted sentence, after all, is writing. It is that fastidious love for the ordering of words — a la Jakobson’s view of poetry as an emphasis upon substitution rather than sequence — which makes writing an art.

Utterly awash in utterly banal language, I rarely have the patience for poetry or a poetic appreciation of language. But it was the following paragraph from Ta-Nehisi Coates that reminded me of something which I used to hold dear:

When your life is besieged, the music is therapy, vicarious mastery in a world where you control virtually nothing, least of all the fate of your body. I had a friend in middle school who would play Rakim every morning because he knew there was a good chance that he would be jumped en route to or from school by the various crews that roamed the area. But, in his mind, the mask of rap machismo made him too many for them.

It was that last clause which stopped me dead in my tracks. I mean, not too big, not too strong, not too tough – too many. What a brilliant turn of phrase, one that in just a fragment manages to evoke the dialectic of virtually projected image and the material body, and the aching desire for one pole of the binary to supersede the other.

So what about a “Why’s This So Good?” for the sentence – except rather sentences in fiction a la traditional literary analysis, we look at sentences in journalism, on social media, etc – i.e. the language that makes up our daily interaction with words.

I know I’ve talked a lot about Twitter over the years, but it’s always fascinated me to watch so many gifted writers work within the constraints of the medium, crafting and then re-crafting clauses to fit in that tiny space. Wouldn’t it be great to sit back and think about what makes the truly great ones work — what rhetorical devices produce what effect; of how the linearity of language can be used to conjure an expectation, only to have it reversed just a few words in; of how to foreground a particular ethos through vocabulary or tone; and what distinguishes the brilliant ‘standalone’ sentence to a tweet very much ‘of its time’, almost down to the minute?

But Jesus: too many for them. It’s that which is really the concern. How might we emulate the spirit of a sentence that does so much with so little?

Which is to say: how, as a swirl of forces constantly tugs at attention and soul, might we learn to say so much more with less?

I spent the first quarter of 2006 living in Galway City, a small, nearly perfect town in western Ireland. Here’s one thing I learned while there.

In the early 1960s, on the site of what was once a jail, Galway chose to erect something rather surprising: a great stone cathedral, in the tradition of similarly grand religious buildings scattered all across Europe. It’s sorta’ brilliant. Situated on the banks of the river Corrib, it’s a relatively new building that feels old. Entering it is almost akin to experiencing what a medieval cathedral must have felt like shortly after it was built. Sitting inside it was as calming as it was awe-inspiring.

Sometimes on Sundays, I and Roxanne, the charming lady with whom I lived at the time, would saunter over to the Cathedral to partake in the Sunday service. Though I’m far from ‘a believer’, the lingering antagonism I had toward theism simply gave way in the face of the peace and ritual of a Sunday morning spent with others, heads bowed.

What struck me most, however, was the idea of taking time each week to reflect upon one’s life and its relation to one’s principles. The priest’s sermons, though obviously underpinned by the Catholic faith, nonetheless had a way of speaking to me. It wasn’t so much about the assertion of a particular set of principles that drew me in, though. Rather, what appealed was the opportunity to ask myself whether I was living by mine. What I heard was something like “Are you, good Christian soldier, spending your time chasing one definition of success and abandoning what’s really important?” But put Art, Pleasure or Family in the place of God and the question once again becomes relevant to those who don’t believe.

Instead of simply fostering an ethos of ‘self-help’, however, I also liked the anti-modern feel of the whole thing. I can’t find it now, but scholar Alan Jacobs once tweeted something like “modern Christianity is transgressive because, in its refusal of selfishness, it resists the tenor of the age.” I may have that wrong, but that’s the idea which stuck with me. Regardless of what you think of that, there’s something very interesting about a ritual and community space explicitly  not meant to fit within economic structures of consumption and the attendant focus upon self-concern. In our imaginary secular meeting space, there is no equipment to buy, no smartphone through which to access something, no purchase or insider knowledge to conspicuously perform. There is only a desire to put yourself somewhere and pause in order to think about whether there is a disparity between the kind of person you are, and the kind you wish to be.

So. Idea #6 is the secular Sunday service: a weekly gathering, led by a rotating set of speakers who, in relating a tale or a series of thoughts, beckons you to always be on two seemingly contradictory paths that are in fact one and the same: of ever being on the verge of becoming a radically different person; and being just about to truly become yourself.

Oh: a really really nice building also helps.