Feel, not tell.

One of my best friends recently read a book by Mitch Albom (it was one of his obscure ones, I don't remember which), and expressed to me his slight disappointment with it. To be entirely honest, I’m not a huge fan of Mitch Albom either. I’ve tried to read Tuesdays with Morrie a number of times, but I just can never manage to finish it. (Granted, that is the only Mitch Albom book I've ever tried, so that is probably a slightly unjust statement.) It feels overly sentimental to me, I guess. Don’t get me wrong—I love sentiment and emotion—but over-the-top sentimentality and warm-fuzziness are two things that make me uncomfortable and that I would generally rather do without. Maybe I just need to try it again or read something else by Mitch Albom. 

I just reread that paragraph, and I realized that it makes me sound like a cold, heartless old bat without any imagination or love in her heart. Trust me, I’m not. Let me explain. These are some things that I’ve been learning about myself in the past seven or eight months. I’m discovering in recent months that emotion and feelings are things that are very private and very special to me, so I don’t like to talk about/flaunt them in a showy or especially verbose way. (Besides, I’m verbose enough in other areas to more than make up for my lack of discussion on the very confusing subject of emotion.) I wasn’t always like this—I used to be very dramatic and emotional almost all the time (i.e., when I was about age 14-15 and earlier--just ask my sister and brothers), but then I decided I didn’t want to be like that anymore. So now, I generally keep my deepest emotions hidden, except from those people concerned with said deep emotions. I think that since I’ve learned how to save my display of that kind of feeling for occasions and situations that truly merit it, I’ve learned how to increase my capacity for love and how to feel even more deeply than before. For me, it’s a kind of “don’t cast your pearls before swine” kind of thing—by talking too much about very special, sacred emotions and experiences, it feels like I profane them with the inadequacy of my mortal language. Often, it seems to me that the simplest, most straightforward of language best describes what I’m actually feeling. Rather than attempting to eloquently describe how I feel about the gospel, the Savior, or someone I love very deeply, it seems to make so much more sense to me to just say it in the simplest way possible, and not try to use imperfect words to describe something so large and abstract as human emotion.

I sound like a modernist. Modernism in all art, literature especially, emphasizes man’s inability to use words or art to describe human experience. They called it “the crisis of meaning”—believing that there is so much meaning in human life, experience, and emotion that man’s flawed usage of words and creative art can’t accurately describe it at all. So why try? Well, the modernists replied, trying, even in the simplest of terms, is better than not trying to express that meaning at all. So there you have it. Maybe all of this is the reason that I like songs like “I Feel My Savior’s Love” and “My Heavenly Father Loves Me” so much more than songs like “O Divine Redeemer.” Hm. Anyway, that was a really long and convoluted and abstract way of saying that I don't like some art forms that seem to try too hard to depict emotion—so much that they feel a little bit overdone and “pearls before swine”-ish to me. And maybe a little emotionally manipulative too? I’m not sure about that one. I’d have to take that one case by case, probably, before I cast that aspersion on them all.

Um, I feel a little bit emotionally exposed now, just by explaining all that. I hope it didn’t come out (my fingers, that is) wrong. Because so often, I feel like Moroni—that “when [I] write, I behold [my] weakness and stumble because of the placing of [my] words” (Ether 12:25). Granted, I don’t “fear lest the Gentiles [or you, for that matter] shall mock at [my] words” or anything, but I do often feel my great inadequacies in writing, and that I’m not able to clearly say what I’m trying to. I’m trying to explain things in just the right way so that perhaps through all those words, something came through that actually got at what I meant. Other times, I use a few words as possible with as much meaning packed into each one as I can get, and hopefully it’ll show through at some point.

As I’ve thought more about this idea of keeping emotional displays entirely honest and sacred when necessary, I’ve tried to learn more about how to do like the Savior did. He hid great, precious truths in parables, and then those who were ready for them could accept them, and those who weren’t didn’t even know the difference. I think poetry serves a very similar function. So I’ve been trying my hand at writing poetry on occasion. I’m really, really not very good, but I’m learning just how intentional I can be with my words, how to save them and make every one of them really mean something, and thus, to not be wasteful with my words. I guess in terms of modernist writers, my prose is like Faulkner (verbose and wordy), and my poetry is more in the style of Hemingway (succinct and using very few words to say a lot). But since I’m still trying to figure out the Hemingway side of things, I’m even more insecure about my poetry than my prose. Sigh. Maybe one day I’ll figure it out.

It goes back to honesty, I guess. I just want to be so, so honest. And I guess situations specifically designed to create excessive or contrived emotion just make me a little wary. The fortunate difference is that everyone has different sensitivities to emotionally manipulative situations, and we're all different enough to have unique tolerance levels for that kind of thing. Thank goodness.

Thoughts?