That tingle of satisfaction derived only from an embodiment of great human creativity manifests itself quite differently for each of us. I know some close to me for whom this occurs in the witnessing of a vast, sprawlingly colourful film scene filled with nonsensically perfect dialogue; still, others witness it in a perfect play on the football field, the impossible note in an orchestral combination, the final stitch in a garment, the fade of colour on a canvas, the extended pointed toe. For me, it is linguistic and syntactical harmony. When the words on a page sing to me in a polyphonic symphony, I see the bright glint of Apollo’s lyre and feel the warm touch of my muse’s calloused hand. I was lucky enough to experience such a moment several times within the past few weeks, mostly contained within otherwise rather dry—or dry to the non-historian, a class to which I do not belong—academic articles and insipid email exchanges.
You know when the words sing properly. I will refrain from mentioning the fact that each of these sentences I speak of was written by those trained in the twentieth century, a period devoid of the onslaught of literacy-destroying short-form media that we know and hate today. I also will not mention how comparatively poorly read we in academia—and those we teach, and those we do not teach— have become and how such changes have, in turn, greatly affected our ability to write. But, of course, I have now mentioned all of these things, so please do go read a book after completing this article. Or stop reading now and go read—that is perhaps preferable to those uninterested in the mad ramblings of an aspirationally self-stylized, gender-swapped modern Montaigne.
Yesterday, a professor replied to my email to apologize for an extended absence. He included the following phrase: “I am sorry that I have not been more in evidence myself.” I have now cast the man in my upcoming musical, entitled I Really Appreciate Your Sentence Structure and Word Choice, Simple as it May Be. And I Cannot Explain Exactly Why This Sentence Sings to Me, But it Does: The Musical. Off-Broadway. Next, “the spark” appeared in a 1973 article on early modern Florentine infanticide rates. Then, it was in a text from a loved one. Then, it was in an email my best friend sent to her boss. Then, it was in an article on the twelfth century Pseudo-Turpin vernacular prose cycle.
Let’s take this last example to illustrate my point. In 1986, Dr. Gabrielle Spiegel wrote the following sentence: “No longer the expression of a shared, collective image of the community’s social past, vernacular prose history becomes instead a partisan record intended to serve the interests of a particular social group and inscribes, in the very nature of its linguistic code, a partisan and ideologically motivated assertion of the aristocracy’s place and prestige in medieval society.” This sentence reads like a perfect cheese slice atop a perfectly-sized cracker, topped with an extra decadent indulgence—perhaps a raspberry jam, if we assume the cheese is brie. Incidentally, it so happens that the meaning of Spiegel’s actual words helps to express part of why its linguistic cadence is so satisfying. I will not bore all of you budding lawyers with an in-depth backstory behind the phenomenon she speaks of, but generally understand that she speaks of the medieval proclivity to utilize vernacular verse to tell stories and weave romance, in opposition to history (or “fact,” in this case) chronicled in only prose Latin. There are many other motivations and factors behind this, yadda yadda, blah blah. If a medievalist would like to discuss this further, please put out a personal ad that contains only the lyrics from “Escape (The Pina Colada Song),” and I will duly not reply. Regardless of motivation, the point remains: we as humans have always associated fact with prose and “Latin”—in our modern context, I would say Latin is academic English prose—while verse and lyric are limited to more “romantic” pursuits: poetry, music, crappy love letters.
In 2018, Henry Bainton of the (English) University of York wrote a compelling article on the emotional content and rhetorical form of Herbert of Bosham’s Historia of Thomas Becket. Google who Thomas Becket is if you do not know, but for now, all that matters is that he was the Archbishop of Canterbury killed by four knights who allegedly acted in the service of Becket’s former friend, King Henry II. Herbert of Bosham was a close friend of Becket; he wrote his Historia not only to fulfill his divine and ecclesiastical duty of chronicling events but also to memorialize his friend, a man he truly loved.
Bainton begins the article with a stanza from William Carlos Williams’ poem, “Asphodel, that Greeny Flower.” The stanza is as follows:
“And so
with fear in my heart
I drag it out
and keep on talking
for I dare not stop.
Listen while I talk on
against time.”
Carlos Williams bends chronological time for the purposes of grief. Because grief, and the love from which it is derived, transcends our perception of temporal reality. It bends, folds in on itself, twists, and flips and sobs and tears. Bainton turns back to Bosham: when the man is on the verge of chronicling his friend’s final hours, he freezes, lost for words:
“‘Why do I pause here?’ Bosham asks; ‘why do I hesitate? Why do I delay the glorious triumph of the Lord’s athlete? Why do I draw out (protraho) this joyful happiness?’ ‘Why,’ he repeats, ‘do I delay?’”
His narration of this delay is its own rhetorical strategy. Bosham’s entire Historia betrays the lex historiae and lex scribendi, veering dangerously into lyrical territory. Why? Because the chronological ordering of historical writing, the task he has set out to complete, cannot capture his grief. The persistent song is the only medium that can express it, whether we label it a song of Homer, Petrarch, Shelley, or Dickinson. We sing our grief, we rhyme our love, we strum and fiddle and embroider our heartbreak. We do not narrativize it, for it betrays narrativization. But if we reorient and defy the laws in the name of love for our lost, as Bosham eventually did, we transcend genre. I express my love for my lost grandfather each time I dig through the annals of monastic history. I express my love for another grandfather each time I write a piece for publication, focused on the concision and strength of my message. I memorialize my grandmother in scrapbooks and trinkets and lipstick marks on turtleneck collars. Grief and love are not linear because they cannot be controlled. But they can be redirected to fuel our creativity so one day, we can leave the world with a sentence that sings like a symphony.