Of Roses and Razors

I've had a lot more opportunities to read since I began my pastorate here in Mountain Grove. I've probably already read more in a month than I did all of last year. There's something to be said for such rich intellectual stimulation - in fact, it's been such a difference that it has affected my dreams at night. They've been more vivid, and for only the second time in my life, I had one in which I recognized that I was dreaming and was able to control myself within the dream. In all the reading I've done, though, some authors stand above others.

Eugene Peterson is my hero. Finally, writing for the sake of fidelity to idea and not immediate digestion. Sometimes there is a concept in your head that can only be made incarnate by virtue of one word. I don't want to tell you about what I'm thinking. I want to tell you what I'm thinking - and Peterson apparently agrees. Propinquity. Vacuous. Miasmic. Braggadocio. Ostensible. Blithely. Pedagogue. And that's just a few pages' worth. In one book. He could have made the concepts he talked about accessable to lower thought...but it would have required tiresome explanations that would have mandated blather about the general concept. Blather populated only with words easily understood, whatever that means.

And I'm sure some stupid editor probably highlighted all of his chosen words and told him he needed to find alternatives. Some poetry thankfully escapes the bloodletting of editors' pens. I love reading a fellow lover of language, who rightly regards it as art instead of a bloody cudgel - who uses words as seed in a garden of high rhetoric instead of splinters in the handle of a propagandic hammer. Language is to idea as physical intimacy is to love - the unutterable given utterance in the flesh, expression in action.

If language and rhetoric and semantics aren't passions of yours, that's fine. But don't expect me to goosestep under the banner of this ridiculous notion that we have to mushmouth our speech and cripple our penstrokes for the benefit of people who are unable to divine contextual clues of meaning from a printed text. If you write, instead of writing so the masses can understand, write so that people who actually read can understand - the rest needn't be catered to, because they don't care. They're too busy living their lives vicariously through someone else and allowing themselves to be thought for.

This insipid Basic English movement is distastefully unromantic - rose petals crushed beneath tank treads. It's like shaving your wife's head - much lower maintenance, but at an unacceptable cost to beauty.

Everyone has gnawed their fingernails to the quick over the economy. But a quick overview of history reveals that we've had money before. Several times. And the funny thing is that, despite porcelain promises long shattered, it never solved our problems. Given its company again, we would just as quickly give it to whomever whispered most insistently in our ears that we deserved something it could buy.

Money we've had. It's beauty we need. So for God's sake, put the razor down.