Crank it Up

The past few days I've had opportunities to see a wide variety of people doing a wide variety of things--things they do well.  There can be no greater gift in life than to be a party to someone doing something at which they excel--and about which they feel true passion.

Some of that energy rubs off, like firefly phosphorescence, and we carry away a bit of their glow.  They don't mind.  There's plenty more where that came from--true passion is lifelong, not seasonal, and it takes more than the cold winds of autumn to dim that light.

Lately I've been knocking around on a few passions of my own, every single one of them involving words.  As long as I've been on this planet that's what it's been about--and one of the toughest things to learn with words is voice control.

Oh, I've got volume.  Just ask anybody who knows me--I can project with the best of them, know no modulation, and don't exactly sport the most endearing of accents.  Volume ain't the problem.  Control is.

Same thing is true of my writing.  I can wax as verbose as any word-y, dictionary-lovin', overblown, overwritten piece of drivel ever penned.  Finding that control knob--therein lies the proverbial rub.

Anyone who knows me (even superficially) knows I carry around a tiny little collapsible soap box.  It comes in handy when the need for opinionated oration arises.  I can whip that little box out, climb up on it, and deliver an opinion before my unwitting listener ever knows what hit'em.  And I can do it with some serious volume.

But sometimes the most powerful word is the one uttered with the most painfully precise modulation.  Perfectly calibrated, exquisitely timed, poetically chosen.  Now that's voice control.

Last night it was the perfectly timed words of old Will Shakespeare himself.  Romeo and Juliet died yet again on that stage, and guess what?  He got me all over again.  Sitting in an open air park on a Thursday night, jadedly aware of every plot twist and character--he still got me.  Gone are the days of swooning over the starcrossed lovers.  From my more elderly vantage point it's all about Mrs. Capulet and the sheer stupidity of her loss.  It's all about the total lack of voice control exhibited by those two families (played out in modern terms 24/7 on every cable news outlet).

Tonight it was Will's countrywoman, Jane Austen.  Fanny Price of Mansfield Park--now there's control.  Of voice, of thought, of life.  Control was the unbidden cornerstone of life for Jane Austen, and she mined it to its deepest, darkest depths in all her work.

Top it off with the quintessentially American character of bouncy little Molly Brown.  A whole different control button on that chick--loud, louder, loudest.  A woman after my own heart.  But don't underestimate Molly.  As soon as you do she will sucker punch the most sophisticated foe into openmouthed submission.

Every voice in every work completely unique.   And every voice one of pitch perfect control, of split second timing, of plain old real world honesty.

That's what I'm going after.  Power, precision, poetry.  And a little class.

"That's dignity--dignity, Mr. Brown, and we is gonna' get us some."

Molly Brown, Fanny Price, even old Will,  had the dignity of people who know how to survive in a thankless world of faux folks--they had the only voice control that counts.  Their own.