[MUSIC] Welcome to the fourth and final week of our course on the craft of style. No ideas but in things. Well, what's the matter with an idea? An idea is probably the matter of most essays. It's the matter of most, say, newspaper articles. But it's not exactly the matter of a piece of fiction or a piece of story. Why is that? Well, here's a poem by William Carlos Williams that I think illustrates the subject. In fact, it's from this poem that we get the title of this week's module. It comes from a reading he himself gave of the poem in 1954 at the 92nd Street Y in New York. The poem goes like this. Let the snake wait under his weed and the writing be words, slow and quick, sharp to strike, quiet to wait, sleepless. Through metaphor to reconcile the people, and the stones. Compose, no ideas but in things, invent! Saxifrage is my flower that splits the rocks. I find this poem tidy and very problematical because it actually gets it's thrust across most plainly when it actually articulates itself as an idea. No ideas but in things, but in other parts of the palm it really embodies the larger problem that it's trying to be about. Let the snake wait under his weed. A snake, a weed, that's a thing. That's not an idea. And things can hold emotion. Things can, in a way, hold an idea in a story in a way that's much more persuasive to the senses and persuasive to the imagination than an idea is within a story. And that's really the problem that we're getting at. If you really have something that you really want to say in the form of an idea, well, then the a narrative might not be the form that you're looking for. But if you've got an experience that you're trying to get across, the story is probably the way you want to go, and the matter of that story is going to be concrete language. That is, I think, at the heart of Williams' recommendation to us. In that last line of the poem, saxifrage is my flower that splits the rocks. Splitting, that's a thing happening. A rock, that's a thing. A flower, that's a thing too. So our objective here is to write with words that are concrete. There's a great old book on all matters of writing called The Elements of Style by Strunk and White. I really highly recommend it to you. They make an example of a wordy piece of work. They're actually quoting in this book from George Orwell whom we remember from Animal Farm in 1984. It goes like this, objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity. But that a considerable element of the unpredictable must inevitably be taken into account. Now, that's certainly very wordy. But it's a particular kind of wordiness that we're focusing on this week. Note how thinky, how idea-y words are, words like conclusion, success, activities. Tendency, commensurate, capacity. None of those words have sensuous qualities to them. Now it would be a terrible snore to have to read very much like this. But here is how the King James Bible does it. You'll see in a minute that this is a passage familiar to many of you from the book of Ecclesiastes. I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill but time and chance happeneth to them all. Now, not all of those words are sensuous words, but they have a kind of firmness and clarity to them, men of skill, for example. Or the race is not to the swift, the battle not to the strong. There's nothing abstract about that language. It's as clear as it can possibly be. You remember the advice from Jamie Gordon from earlier in this course. With beginning writers one begs for more vivid detail and concreteness at whatever price.
