Diamond and Gold

Diamonds and gold,

Diamonds and gold, 

Neither will keep you 

Warm when you're cold. 

Still they sparkle and shine 

When pried from the mine 

And something about them 

We find passing fine. 

So we keep on digging 

No matter the toll 

We keep right on digging 

For diamonds and gold. 

It is a silly little ditty that crept into my head, waking me at 3 AM the other morning.  But rather than disparaging avarice, it reminded me that value clings to that which is scarce. Increasingly, for me, the commodity in question is verbiage. When I first wandered up to the front of a college classroom, some 44 years ago, to face a sea of student faces, loquaciousness was an important arrow in my quiver. Never was the old saw "if you can't dazzle them with brilliance, then baffle them with bullshit" more apropos. Give me any topic remotely related to my field and I could ride a veritable tsunami of sentences that, as often as not, would - some 50 minutes later - come to rest on a beach that passed for insight. Later I honed the skill to such a degree that anything less than a three-hour seminar seemed an unworthy challenge. 

Perhaps the ebbing of that tide of prose led to the late-blooming third of the four primary tenets of Distilled Harmony: Distill Complexity. Though my students would no doubt argue the point, I have largely abandoned bullshit, seeking instead to provide genuine insight supported by clear, contemporary, supporting evidence. Trying to hit that small, swift target on the fly has profoundly increased my respect for skeet shooting. 

The problem, you see, is that the classroom demands spontaneous composition. Unless you wish to be reduced to the stereotype of the ivy-covered professor droning on over yellowed notes before a classroom stuffed with dozing students, you need to create lectures that weave the verities of the past together with the evolving evidence of today - extemporaneously. Pull!  Blam! Damn! Missed! 

Perhaps it is the increasing illusiveness of the spontaneous bon mote that leads me to now prefer words upon a page. They don’t slip around as much there as they do in front of a hundred students, when the perfect example is lodged there on the edge of your brain but eludes your tongue.  On paper they behave more like brush strokes on canvas; changing the lighting there, softening an edge there, painting out the ugly parts altogether.  

  

The more I think about it, what I’m talking about - well, writing about - is part of a set of natural cycles of caring and competence.  As we move though our lives we encounter existential niches that capture our hearts and our minds and we invest in that niche to hone the competencies demanded by it.  Across the middle decades of my life, as a camp counselor, an acting major, and then as an instructor in small college classes [15 to 25 students], storytelling was such an important niche.  Whether telling a tall tale around a campfire, depicting Miller’s Willy Lohman, or unfolding the early history of the Pony Express - watching the gleam in the audience’s eye was the key to knowing when and how you would punch the important line.  And it shifted with every audience.  In today’s modern and “online classrooms” clinging to that caring for the individual camper, audience member or student is an exercise in frustration. In today's efficiently humongous lecture halls there are too many students in the classroom [60 to 360] to actually see them as individuals, or in the online classroom, there are no students there at all - just a camera pretending to be alive. 

It is more bland than distasteful.  After all, working in front of a camera isn’t that much different than working from a stage where you can hide in the light and imagine the audience loves you.  It’s OK - but just not much more than that. 

Words on a page however are something else entirely.  The allure is at least twofold, maybe threefold or morefold. One attraction lies there in “morefold” that my software is desperately trying to correct for me. [Psst! Robert, that’s not a word. It should be “more fold.”] But if you accept that correction the software will then try to correct your grammar. The fight can be tedious, but I have come to see it as a personal bond with Shakespeare.  The Bard is often credited with adding about 1700 new words to the English language. No doubt the upper crust looked down from their boxes and sneered, “Bedazzled!? Z’wounds, its not even a word!” But it became one - because it was just so right for the moment.  I doubt that “morefold” will gain the traction of "bedazzled,” but whenever I take arms against a sea of software, I feel a sense of, probably unwarranted, kinship with Billy, as we try to bend the language to our purpose. 

Secondfold, is the idea that the words leave here and make their merry way across the Internet, at least into your mailbox, to Senior Correspondent and perhaps even further afield.  It is not too difficult to imagine you reading them - as some of you write back and tell me that you do. Students, not so much, if tests are any indication of attention.  But still on occasion, sometimes after several years, a student will slide into my email box and say “Thank you. Your lectures were interesting and valuable.”  And, like golf, that one good shot keeps you coming back. 

Thirdfold, is just the pleasure of giving these thoughts and words and sentences a home.  They, I assume, wake me for a reason.  They are notes that are important, somehow, to the chord that is me; to the sentient articulation that is my unique presence in existence. I should give them the attention, the caring, they deserve.  And, of course, it would be silly to get up to write without seeing what was left in the refrigerator. 

And finally, there is morefold.  No doubt I will find just the right words to describe that entity after a small sandwich, or perhaps a doughnut.