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The first tenet of Distilled Harmony is Foster Harmony. It is important to realize right up front that “fostering harmony" is inextricably woven together with our use of language. You cannot manifest harmony while using the language of anger or hatred, suspicion or fear. Harmony demands the language of caring, of affection - the language of love, if you will - since those vocabularies articulate harmony while blunting the discord of anger, hatred and fear.
Harmonic speech is a type of artistic expression. And like any other art form, it requires attention and practice - especially if your personal or cultural experiences have been rooted in a language of confrontation or conflict, a reality which is, unfortunately, rather common. Dealing with dysfunctional relationships - including the language employed in those relationships - keeps thousands and thousands of therapists in business! Not all that surprising given that, for the most part, we live in a competitive culture. We tend to focus on winners and losers. There are certainly benefits to be derived from this "meritocratic" perspective. Ideally, it leads to a general improvement in the culture, better education, better science, consumer products, medicine, etc. But there is a dark side to the meritocracy. And the Dark Side sees people as winners and losers as well. And the language of “I win, you lose” leaves at least half of the conversation feeling anything but harmonic. And, of course, bullying and internet trolling both rest firmly on the use of discordant language.
Stay with me here on what may seem an unrelated diversion. Crafting a harmonic vocabulary, springs from a harmonic view of life. Both require a delicate existential balance. To over-compensate for the often harsh vicissitudes of life by declaring that everybody is a winner results in "participant ribbons" and the distortion of the very real line between ordinary and exceptional. Better, I think, is to realize that we are all “differently-abled.” I like to think of life and our place in it as a jigsaw puzzle. We are each a unique piece of the puzzle. Our abilities and inabilities form the contours of our individual puzzle piece. In a perfect world, we blend with all the other pieces of the puzzle to create the picture on the front of the box. And that would be lovely - but we see little evidence of such a global harmonic consolidation. A less intimidating objective might be to try to fit with the pieces in our immediate vicinity. And this implies dialing down the notion of individuals as winners or losers, and focusing instead on the value of our differing abilities. I mean its not much of a puzzle if all the pieces are square, right? But I’m letting the analogy steer the ship here. So let’s back up a bit.
The challenge in Fostering Harmony is to explore the ways in which our real and very valuable differences can fit together to create a harmonic whole that is truly greater than the mere sum of its parts. And that is where harmonic language plays its part. Prayer and its secular cousin, poetry, are the most obvious forms of consciously harmonic speech, but outside of a religious institution or a Shakespearian play, they are rarely used in everyday conversation. Try conversing with someone on the street in prayer or iambic pentameter and folks begin to edge away from you or fake a call on their cellphone. However, there are other ways to practice harmonic speech that will not only increase your skill in the art form, but will also allow you to more successfully Foster Harmony.
Here, again, we find ourselves on a bit of a balance beam. Harmonic language, and harmonic conversation in particular, is driven by a legitimate interest in and at least a potential agreement with the other. Unfortunately, politicians, salespeople and advertisers have discovered that appearing to be interested in, and in agreement with, voters or customers is also the most effective way to achieve personal and often selfish goals. Honest harmonic language rests on a foundation of actual interest in, and a sincere desire to seek agreement with the other. And both of those characteristics rest on a genuine curiosity about the other and a willingness to accept that the other may know more than you about a given topic.
Pragmatically that means that in the course of a conversation words and phases like, “Yes” and “That’s interesting” and “What do you think about . . “ need to come out of our mouths more often than “No” and “What you need to do is . . . and, “Well, I believe . . .“ That does not mean that you simply abdicate your beliefs, values or attitudes. Rather, part of the artistry of harmonic speech is exploring how your beliefs, values, and attitudes can find common ground with the beliefs attitudes and values of the other. And that brings us to a consideration of the aesthetic component of harmonic speech.
In an earlier post, The Wonder of Words, I wrote about how “long form” compositions were far superior to texting, SMS posts and Tweets because they allowed for a more complete expression of a thought. It is probably worthwhile to note that it is not simply the number of words that informs harmonic speech, it is the aesthetic quality of those words. In that post I point out that when we had "art" in 3rd or 4th grade we would pull out our trusty Prang water colors - 8 basic colors in a shiny black metal tray. And that was the extent of our "palette." Nowadays, in the bright digital world of Photoshop et. al., we have come to expect millions of colors to be available at the beck and call of a clicking mouse. An examination of language reveals the same variation of breadth and depth. This aesthetic component of harmonic speech draws upon the second tenet of Distilled Harmony - Enable Beauty. It is patently obvious that there is a universe of difference between “Me Tarzan. You Jane.” and “My Love is like a red, red rose, That’s newly sprung in June.” Yet both articulations are driven by the same emotion. The difference is that Tarzan is working with Prang’s eight color palette, while Robert Burns is speaking Photoshop.
Enriching our aesthetic linguistic palette requires effort, especially in the popular digital environment that seems to privilege compositions of 140 to 160 characters - a convention that would seem to advantage Tarzan: "I ❤️ u J!” while leaving Burns struggling to decide which words in his poem are - after all - superfluous: "My ❤️ is a nu flr” ? Definitely something lost in translation there. To construct a rich linguistic palette, it is perhaps best to leave the struggles with emojis and phonetic truncation alone, and return to three dependable, though time-consuming, strategies: read, listen, perform.
Reading is the first among equals. To use a word, you have to know the word, and while you can come to know a word by hearing it, or speaking it, reading the word has a significant advantage: the word does not move. The experience of hearing a word ceases when the sound waves no longer strike the ear to be carried to the brain. Speaking the word ceases when your vocal cords lie still. The written word, lines and curves, or bumps on a page stay there, allowing you to reflect upon it. Study it in the context of the other words that encircle it. Speak it if you choose to do so. Absorb it.
So read and read widely. My biases? For power and precision read Hemingway from the 1920s and 1930s. For linguistic complexity, Jane Austin and Charles Dickens. For American brashness and humor - Mark Twain, and not just the novels. For words and attention to scene that are rarely present in contemporary works try popular novels from the late 1800s and early 1900s: James Oliver Curwood, Gene Stratton-Porter, Louis L’Amour, Zane Grey. None of this last group are ever seriously considered for inclusion in the canon of great American novelists - except maybe if there is a sub-category for Westerns where both L’Amour and Grey should get a nod. Also, if you are unable to separate the novels from the time in which they were written, you will find them chock full of “cultural insensitivity” - as was the world in which they lived - so parts of the works may make you uncomfortable. But if you simply ignore them because of those chronological foibles, at least part of your palette gets short-changed. And then read everything. Magazines, fiction, non-fiction, news sources, blogs, poetry. Stuff as many colors into your palette as you can. You probably noticed that my reading recommendations are from days gone by. That is intentional. I remember when I was young, if I wanted to learn how to write or speak “proper English” I would go to a book. I didn’t know it then, but I was trusting the editors to make sure that the basic rules of grammar, spelling, etc., were being followed. If there were intentional deviations, our attention would be drawn to them by quotation marks: “quittin’ time, y’all!” or something like that. While I’m sure today’s editors still struggle to protect the language from flagrant abuse, I am “a’feared” that with the flood of self-published works they may be fighting a losing battle.
Listening is the easiest palette builder in the 21st century. With streaming video, audio books and podcasts available on our computers, tablets and phones, it would seem that we need never listen to the sounds of silence or another commercial. But with all this linguistic wheat out there, it is inevitable that there is even more chaff. Remember, we are trying to augment our aesthetic harmonic linguistic palette. The purveyors of digital content realized long ago that as a culture we will still listen to the commercials if they are embedded in content we find entertaining or informative. In May of 1961, Newt Minnow, then Chair of the FCC said, "When television is good, nothing — not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers — nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse.” The same holds true for today’s Internet and video streaming options. And unfortunately it is mindlessly simple to find the linguistically discordant. Ranting podcasts, “self-help” shows that are the audio equivalent of cage wrestling, “news" programs built along the same lines, endless dramas featuring dysfunctional families, and of course, crime dramas each episode of which places the world as we know it danger from the “terrorists d’jour.” Hard to bake good bread from all that chaff.
Still, almost all those good options I listed up there under “reading" exist in audio versions. Our public library has a wide variety of audio offerings that you can download to phones, tablets, etc. Great for trips. In addition there are wonderful podcasts available in the both the arts the sciences. They may not be the first options you stumble across, but they are out there if you look for them - so look for them. Listen for the words, listen for the sounds of cooperation, of harmony.
Performance is an option we often tend to ignore. I came to it quite early, and I am not really sure why. However, my sister has provided me with photographic evidence of my playing Peter Pan to a Captain Hook played by a girl much taller than I. Beverly C something? Copenhagen? Nah, couldn’t be. Anyhow, 2nd grade? Maybe 3rd? I recall similar photos from a 1950s Wittenberg College production of Mrs. McThing - in which I played the dual role of “Howay” and “Boy.” Casting for which I hold my father responsible. However, I have to take responsibility for my choice to recite - in maybe 4th grade?- Stephen Vincent Benet’s very long poem “The Mountain Whippoorwill: Or How Hillbilly Jim Won the Great Fiddler’s Prize,” which was at least partial inspiration for the Charlie Daniel’s hit "The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” The poem was the inspiration - not my recitation of it, which, no doubt, bored my classmates past all understanding.
I was in a number of plays in my high school which was blessed with an excellent drama department, and went on to major in Theater in college. While there I performed in - which, remember, meant both memorizing and performing the words - a variety of roles from Arthur Miller to Shakespeare. And I have come to realize that the process of memorization and performance is perhaps the best way to add entire new families of colors to your aesthetic linguistic palette. So give it a whirl. Community theater, your local version of TED talks, storytelling. Or just read Shakespeare aloud - probably at home, by yourself. “Gather ye palettes while you may.”
In conclusion, If we were to pull the third tenet of Distilled Harmony - Distill Complexity - into this rambling discussion of talking the talk of harmony, we might well compress the whole post into a slightly edited version of an aphorism that we have all encountered: If you can’t say something nice, and nicely, then don’t say anything at all.
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