[This is a post in an ongoing series on what is art and how we should be approaching it. Please use the label at the bottom to see other posts in this series or continue to monitor this blog for updates.]
I’ve heard Ravi Zacharias tell a story (and you must forgive
me, but for the life of me I cannot find that tale again, otherwise I would
cite it properly) about how our sense of wonder and amazement diminishes over
time. In this story, he tells of his
children, and how he would tell the story to his eldest about a room with a
door, and the character opens the door, and outside is a dragon – and the
eldest child’s eyes go wide.
To the middle child he tells the story, and there’s a room
with a door, and the character opens the door – and the child’s eyes go wide.
To the youngest he tells of a room with a door – and the
child’s eyes go wide.
And while it was not Ravi’s application of this story at
all, the more I have mused upon it, the more I am convinced that the people who
need to be telling stories of the wonders of dragons are the ones who were
excited in the first place about the door.
And this is what I mean by that. The painting of the spectacular isn’t at all
spectacular if the details are not right.
And the details won’t be right if the artist doesn’t care about
them. The great battle in a novel isn’t
worth anything if the path to that battle is not properly laid. The catharsis of the poem isn’t there without
the tension before it.
To say it another way – the audience may leave the movie
talking about the scene where the hero leapt out of the helicopter, guns
blazing, falling into a lake surrounded by burning debris; but none of that is
worth its salt if we haven’t explained how the hero, the helicopter, the sea,
and the debris all got there.
If the debris by itself makes your eyes go wide at the
possibilities and mystery of it all, then you are the one who should be telling
about the jump from the helicopter.
When Wordsworth asks the question, “What is a Poet?” he
comes to the answer:
He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the Universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them.1
To say it another way, he is a man of wonder.
This idea was renewed in my attention very recently as I was
reading through Douglas Wilson’s Wordsmithy,
in which he tells us:
The gift of language is one of the most versatile tools imaginable. Not exploring what it can do exhibits an incurious frame of mind, one not suited to the life of writing. A writer in any form needs to be constantly inviting the reader to see more, to open his eyes wider. But if the writer only uses two buttons on a remote with 150 buttons, if he uses a Swiss army knife for cutting bits of string, and only for cutting bits of string, and if his sense of culinary exploration is limited to brown gravy or no brown gravy, then he is not excited enough about life to be exciting to anyone else when he writes about it.2
Is this something we lack?
The first thing that pops to mind, undoubtedly, is the fact that we’re
in an age of miracles and wonders when it comes to visual effects in film. We’ve gotten so much better at the bang, but
older ages were better at telling about the trigger. We are an age that either goes the route of
the ugly and offensive (which we call “edgy” and “authentic” in order to avoid
calling it what it actually is), or the route of being bombastic with lights
and sounds so much that we forget that there was a point somewhere in
there. Or maybe there wasn’t.
Oh, yes, we can all name exceptions. Whenever we speak of trends, we always have
someone who pipes up and says, “Well, such-and-such was good,” because logic
isn’t taught anymore in schools. But exceptions
does not mean we turn a blind eye to the trajectory. There is a darkening about, a cacophony of
noise and bluster, because we sometimes forget that a small voice filled with
wonder speaks more loudly than a thousand explosions.
Think about it – we’ve been talking about Mona Lisa’s smile
far longer than any Michael Bay film.
So all of this has be in thought on exactly what this would
look like, and the answer is, of course, that it depends. Wonder can exist in all genres, but it does
not manifest itself in the exact same way each time, else we would all be
writing the same thing. But if I might,
let me point to one example that should have you thinking for considerably more
time than it took to read the work in the first place. In the final Calvin and Hobbes strip, the two
eponymous characters sit before a landscape of fresh snow, completely white
with almost no added detail. Calvin
cannot contain himself as he explains, “It’s a magical world, Hobbes, ol’
buddy. Let’s go exploring.”
In that frame, Bill Watterson has hit the nail on the head –
he was constantly and consistently able to tell stories of dragons because he
understood the wonder of the door. Or, we might say, we can only really have fun with a stuffed animal and a cardboard box if we first wonder at what the stuffed animal and the box might be.
And it is exactly because Watterson had that wonder that he
could teach it to us and make us sit back and consider a nearly blank panel in
a comic strip.
1. William Wordsworth. "Preface to Lyrical Ballads." http://www.bartleby.com/39/36.html. Accessed 9/23/15.
2. Douglas Wilson. Wordsmithy. Also found https://dougwils.com/books/born-for-the-clerihew.html.
