By Heart

It has probably been about 75 years since I last memorized anything beyond my pin number. Now, I consider myself fortunate if I remember where I parked my car in a multistory garage. How embarrassing it is walking around waiting for an answering beep.

So much of my college experience was 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 the gray matter.

By heart, is what we say when someone recites a few lines from Basho or Emerson. It is such lovely phrase. As a habitat for deathless words, it confirms the heart's status as a lonely hunter.

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 Guttenberg’s printing press. (Safe to say nobody knew their phone number in the 15^th 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. More than likely the Iliad and Odyssey were the final agreed-upon versions of a consortium called Homer when set down on parchment.

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. It not only plays chamber music but is a repository of all we have let in, by heart.