O Come All Ye Faithful.<\/em><\/p>\nWeary and at the end of his life, this truth about clich\u00e9s discloses itself to him like something come upon in the pocket of a childhood coat\u2014a thing put away in one\u2019s youth, forgotten, recovered by sheer circumstance. It is the kind of revelation that brings down the castles built over a lifetime.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll is straw,\u201d said Thomas Aquinas, of the million words he had written when compared to the vision he was granted of his Lord.<\/p>\n
Despite their pejorative connotation, it is the clich\u00e9s that we hold in our heads (more in our hearts) the longest\u2014fundamental notions in their simplest, commonest expression. We recognize them immediately, grasp them atavistically.<\/p>\n
Is this what is meant by the counsel to \u201csee as children see\u201d? A widespread misinterpretation of the axiom is that it means to \u201cfathom as children fathom,\u201d to understand as they understand. But that cannot be the case.<\/p>\n
The depth of the mature mind is obviously superior to that of the unformed, regardless of our preposterous age\u2019s quixotic notions about infancy.<\/p>\n
No, what must be meant is that a child sees the things that are most important\u2014the outlines of the particular face that are so dear and crucial, the exact comforts that truly warm, the precise joys that bring satisfaction, peace.<\/p>\n
A child is not distracted by a price tag as we are, or by the illusions of grand association. He may play with a prince, but that his playmate is a prince is not why he plays with him.<\/p>\n
And so it may be with words and the concepts that they encapsulate. We come to find that the most basic are all that remain consequential; other simplicities are likewise appreciated at last, not at first\u2014and even so, only if brutal honesty about them is admitted.<\/p>\n
Stereotypes (in French, les clich\u00e9s<\/em>)\u2014again, for all their negative undertones, would not be stereotypes were they ungrounded in lived experience; archetypes\u2014more respectable\u2014would not stand as they do were they not so key, the under-bones and crude (but who am I to call them crude?) network of elementary contacts that tapestry our brains like cave etchings from Lascaux.<\/p>\nTrue, these things are not the stuff of art. We love our conceits, are transported by them. The best are collected like sculpture made of glass. Some of my favorites:<\/p>\n
\u201cHe looks like right after the maul hits the steer and it no longer alive and don\u2019t yet know that it is dead.\u201d (William Faulkner: As I Lay Dying<\/em>)<\/p>\n\u201cThe swamp was now all-enveloping, dark and at the same time vivid, alarming\u2014it was like being inside the chest of something that breathed and might turn over.\u201d (Eudora Welty: \u201cMoon Lake\u201d)<\/p>\n
\u201cLet us go then, you and I; When the evening is spread out against the sky; Like a patient etherised upon a table.\u201d (T.S. Eliot: \u201cThe Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock\u201d)<\/p>\n
\u201cOh Rose, Thou art sick. The invisible worm, That flies in the night \/ In the howling storm: Has found out thy bed \/ Of crimson joy: And his dark secret love \/ Does thy life destroy.\u201d (William Blake: \u201cThe Sick Rose\u201d)<\/p>\n
Ah, yes. That is the way of art, we must admit. We strive for novelty like this\u2014to make things new, to create fresh angles. Soaring similes, spearheaded with \u201clike\u201d and \u201cas\u201d\u2014metaphors, barn-solid or diamond-pure; they will always be the Shangri-La of the word-smitten. It has a decided vanity to it all, this business: playing God in the Garden of the Dictionary.<\/p>\n
And maybe that\u2019s the only way to make art. As Browning said, \u201cA man\u2019s reach must exceed his grasp, or what\u2019s a heaven for?\u201d Nevertheless, it is heaven that is our purpose, not the making, doing, toiling.<\/p>\n
Our loveliest paths are but shimmering ways back to the thing in that old coat pocket. The pursuit is fine\u2014good\u2014necessary, even. But maybe the great wide world and every means of transport through it is just a roundabout way of learning a lesson: that it is the end of the trip\u2014the finding, not the seeking\u2014that we want.<\/p>\n
For all our airy flights\u2014our great darlings\u2014paragraph and page, stanza and couplet\u2014we are really only talking about the clich\u00e9s, the melodrama of crayon scrawls that first made our world for us\u2014mother, father, help, love\u2014and at last, when we become children again, \u201cragged coats upon sticks,\u201d that make the only world available to us anymore.<\/p>\n
We spend our youth and adulthood rolling our eyes at things that I suspect, in the end, are the only things we want to roll our eyes toward.<\/p>\n
\u201cI go to seek a Great Perhaps,\u201d said Rabelais, at his last.<\/p>\n
And what a fine line that is, uttered by a true artist. How clever, how apt, how arch.<\/p>\n
But still and all, I\u2019ll bet that underneath such a gallant, witty bon mot, giving it meaning and purpose, was that old clich\u00e9 for which he searched, longed, hoped: that robed, white-maned gentleman, august and eternal\u2014\u201cSmiling like a Sun.\u201d Alpha. Omega. Beginning. End.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In his great work, Earthly Powers, Anthony Burgess has the main character\u2014Kenneth Toomey, a doddering, debauched, eighty year-old novelist\u2014remark upon the insignificance of his life\u2019s quest, the search for the \u201cright\u201d words: I was thinking like an author, not like a human, though senile, being. As though conquering language mattered. As if, in the end, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1049,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,48,49],"tags":[334,188,335],"class_list":["post-3111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-g-harmon","category-faith-topical-categories","category-writing-topical-categories","tag-cliche","tag-creativity","tag-metaphor"],"yoast_head":"\n
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![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/162\/2013\/04\/rose.png\" "\\"rose\\"")
<\/a>In his great work, Earthly Powers<\/em>, Anthony Burgess has the main character\u2014Kenneth Toomey, a doddering, debauched, eighty year-old novelist\u2014remark upon the insignificance of his life\u2019s quest, the search for the \u201cright\u201d words:<\/p>\n