This morning I had time to do two things at once: sipping an espresso and reading a magazine/newspaper. The magazine at play was the current issue of the Rolling Stones, and the article, written by Nicole Frehsée, was about the Flyleaf, group that seems having sold one million copies of Flyleaf.
The article reported that Lacey Mosley, the band’s singer, has had a hectic past. When Mosley was still a teenager, she was a drinker and a drug user. She hated everyone and she ended up having many problems in school, until, after a fight with her grandmother, she entered a church.
Frehsée reports Mosley saying, “The deacon took me by the arm and said, ‘God knows your pain, and he wants to take it from you.’ I felt something happen in me, and I had to listen.”
Most probably, the deacon saved Mosley’s life. Is it not wonderful? I am not a very religious person, but if I imagine myself in Mosley’s shoes, I would melt at hearing the poetic statement. But what if he just said something like, “Oh poor thing, Mrs. Mosley, believe in God, would you?” Both statements contain, more or less, the same meaning. It is just that the language used is different. The idea may be, in both statements, a great idea, but the first statement – that is, the original – is certainly more effective than the latter I made up. The deacon, crafting the idea about believing in God, saved the singer’s life, perhaps. Maybe he saved other people as well.
If I think about it... he could save me too.
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Good point Anna. Once again you help to illuminate the difference between a message, its impact, and the influence of the words in between.
Although we often expect to be wooed with written words and suspiciously probe the subtext for subliminal persuasion, it is the unanticipated bit of spoken poetry that can really move us. Is this Derrida's logocentrism* (no, not Cixous')? Is this the implicit power of the spoken word, or is it the assumed inferiority of extemporaneous speech that makes its better moments really shine?
*"According to Derrida’s critique, logocentric thinking underrates difference in favour of identity and presence. Logocentrism, therefore, expresses a privileging of the signified (Presence/Speech) over the signifier (Absence/Writing), ultimately asserting the signified’s status as more natural or pure."
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