Tell it slant...
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant--
Success in Cirrcuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind---
Another time, I'll blog about the Milton Center Writer's Group that I'm taking part in, meeting on Friday afternoons at Seattle Pacific University, which is where I heard this little phrase, Tell it slant.
Some describe life as a process of remembering what you didn't know you forgot, and when I heard tell it slant, it was as if a bell rang in my head, alerting me once again to the power of metaphor and storytelling. We were discussing a writer's first chapter of a new novel, wondering if her subject matter might be better served with an indirect approach. And that's when Greg Wolfe mentioned the Dickinson phrase that I've been ruminating on ever since.
Tell it slant.
I also like the Truth must dazzle gradually. Reminds me of C.S. Lewis' phrase the weight of glory.
At Act One: Writing for Hollywood, we were constantly reminded that writing is about telling the truth. Sportswriter Red Smith said "Writing is easy--all you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein." Actors hear the same thing, and I wondered for years what that really meant. If art--writing, acting, singing--is not the equivalent of life, but a reordered something else, then it must by definition approach truth obliquely, circuitously, slant.
There is a key here to much Evangelical failure in the arts. We have no faith in the slant of metaphor, suspicious that slant means spin, watering down the gospel, being obtuse, or at worst, flat lying. But here Dickinson is talking about the brilliance of truth, pointing out what Jesus obviously demonstrated as he taught the people of Israel by parable. We are unable to accept glory all at once (Moses hid his face, everybody else just falls to the ground face first), but need to be brought round to it through a journey, a journey most often taken in art through metaphor and story.
Perhaps there is a key here to the postmodern mind and its lack of faith in linear thought: it's not so much that truth can't be known, but it's knowing is best served by slant approaches.
So instead of "Get over yourself and stop sinning," (sure, we need to do that, true enough), C.S. Lewis calls to us and says, "You and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness."
As we work, God help us do just that--weave the strongest spells of grace and faith, telling all the truth, but telling it slant...
8:55:51 AM
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