Blog 2317 – 02.26.2022
The Best Communication Is Still Face To Face
It is a terribly hard admission especially to a writer, today’s title, but, in spite of or perhaps in part because of advances in communications it is nevertheless still true that face to face and voice to voice is still the most precise form of communication. John Irving, one of my favorite writers in his book, Wife For A Year, which was made into a movie, Door In The Floor, starring Jeff Bridges, as a children’s book writer, has Jeff’s character telling his summer intern/driver that in writing the details are all important.
It is the details that help the reader to visualize what the writer is trying to picture with words. Words are indeed symbols for the pictures in our heads. Most of us are visual learners and except for those gifted with what is called a photographic memory we must see pictures/words over and over again to memorize them.
Did you ever notice how much easier it is to memorize words when they come to you wrapped in an addictive melody. The advertisers learned that trick long ago and have for years paid singer/songwriters handsomely to create jingles to hawk their products and services. Starving artists sometimes refer to such people as whores, sell-outs, for allowing money to shape their art, as if amateur, not-paid, status were some kind of badge of honor, or as if art created for a patron or for pay were some how less beautiful.
The un-paid Apostle, who wrote much of what became the New Testament himself, had some trouble being recognized as an real Apostle because the eleven without any clear instructions from “the Boss” had a rushed election to replace dead Judas. You hear little if anything else about the “elected Apostle” but a great deal indeed about the Jesus personally appointed, albeit after his death in a vision on the road to Damascus, Paul, previously called Saul of Tarsus. That Paul wrote a great deal of the rest of the New Testament, and that The Gospel of Luke and The Acts of the Apostles were both written by Luke the “beloved physician” and friend of Paul that he mentions, by name, in three of his New Testament letters may partially explain why Paul himself got so much “good press” in Acts and Matthias, the elected replacement of Judas a lot less.
Both Luke and Paul were masters of the written word and knew how very important the details are. All the red letter words in the Bible, the ones thought to be actual quotes of Jesus, are really very few in comparison with the rest of the Bible. All the songs recorded by the Beatles, that made them rich and famous icons can all be listened to in well under a day. I have already written in not quite seven years of daily blogging more words than the 783,137 words in the Bible. To borrow a phrase from funny man Jimmy Durante, “Ha Cha Cha, I got a million of them.” I have written and published more than four million of them already, but who’s counting?
Details are what make written words, I think, the next best form of communication after face to face and voice to voice, and I am not referring to abbreviated texting which is often so confounding for it’s acronyms and lack of specific details, especially to us old school folks.
Not just the devil is in the details, but a more complete and descriptive picture. Someone has said movies are the books of the twentieth century, but even the Gone With The Wind movie which left out a ton of writer Margaret Mitchell’s details of her beloved and mostly mythical pre-civil war plantation civilization – gone with the wind, leaves way too much out.
The segregation nonsense we can all do without, but the character studies are I think still worth the read, for their details.
Your friend and fellow traveler,
And ever “Wordy Guy”,
David White
Like A Mockingbird
theencouragingword 