Saturday, January 11, 2025

By Heart

Such a soulful phrase. Too bad we used it up only for memorization. Not to say that poems or Shakespearean passages aren’t worth reciting. Oral renditions are increasingly rare these days, except in theatrical performance. We have ceded memory to the click of a link if we want to listen to words of wisdom or the music of poetry.  

By heart. It should be more than a habitat for deathless prose. It confirms the heart's status as a lonely hunter. So many acts of kindness and caring are done with and by our hearts. What we give with our full heart is returned to fill our heart. Reaching out to our fellow fire victims opens our own hearts.

My college experience was largely a matter of memorizing structural formulas and botanical origins. I would have much preferred the Canterbury Tales in Middle English or a passage from the Bard. All that rote education was a colossal waste except, perhaps, to exercise my head, not my heart.

My dear friend, Frank Dwyer, is a compendium of Shakespearean soliloquies and lyrical poetry. The lines flow like an inexhaustible underground spring, a muscle most of us have allowed to atrophy.

The art of committing passages to memory began to decline with Gutenberg’s printing press. Safe to say nobody knew their phone number in the 15th century.

In preliterate times oral storage and transmission were our social media and about as reliable as Fox News. Hard to imagine Sean Hannity as a troubadour. No wonder the library at Alexandria was burned.

There is a ratio to our sensorium. Literacy has taken its toll on acoustic space. When the visual is extended we diminish the auditory. Thankfully there are folks like Frank to recite the best words in the best order; and they also make great dinner guests with seventeen syllables of haiku between courses and a sonnet sorbet for dessert.

When words come from the heart their provenance is unimpeachable. They not only play chamber music but are a repository of all we have let in, by heart.  

 

2 comments:

  1. As always, amen! In my youth I memorized poetry as an attempt to impress pretty women (my wife will have to weigh in on whether that worked). And I recalled that complaint by - was it Socrates? - that this devious invention called "writing" would in fact weaken the mind and give men only the appearance of wisdom while leaving them ignorant. But I'll admit: I had to Google it to be sure, and haven't actually read the whole thing...

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  2. And look what happened to Socrates. He mistook a hemlock shake for a smoothie.

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