Show, Not Tell

I took a writing course recently and for a moment thought I could write. It's been a dream that has hung around on a shelf in my mind all the while I have been careering, putting food on the table, surviving. I have written much and on occasion have gotten a good sentence on paper. I dream of writing the Great American Novel, all the while convinced I have only enough talent to write the Great American Paragraph. Then I read Don DeLillo and am at first intimidated then inspired. DeLillo's Cosmopolis is what prompted this blog. 

In the writing course -- the best I ever took, from a teacher named Sands Hall -- we learned, really learned, how to crack that Show Not Tell code. DeLillo knows how to show, as in this Manhattan street scene, described by the book's protagonist, billionaire Eric Packer: "He saw a woman seated on the sidewalk begging, a baby in her arms. She spoke a language he didn't recognize. He knew some languages but not this one. She seemed rooted to that plot of concrete. Maybe her baby had been born there, under the No Parking sign. FedEx trucks and UPS. Black men wore signboards and spoke in African murmurs. Cash for gold and diamonds. Rings, coins, pearls, wholesale jewelry. This was souk, the shtetl. Here were the hagglers and talebearers, the scrapmongers, the dealers in stray talk. The street was an offense to the truth of the future. But he responded to it. He felt it enter every receptor and vault electrically to his brain."

I am surprised to find that the reviews of Cosmopolis are mixed. John Updike wasn't so impressed and wrote that when one writes a book where almost anything can happen, the trouble is that nothing happens. Perhaps. I'm no Updike. But in showing me what he thought of United States culture in this new millennium, DeLillo told me that he thinks  we have arrived where Marx predicted we would when he wrote his alienation theory. Marx believed that Capitalism would cause such a divide between the haves and the have-nots that people would become alienated from one another and from the cold reality of consumerism. 

Have we arrived at the doorstep of Alienation? I'm not sure. There certainly are signs -- the obscene wealth of the few and the abject poverty of the many. Crime is so serious in some cities that it chases fearful citizens out to live in the hinterlands. And greed trumps crime on the scale of cultural cancers. Can anarchy be far behind?

Read Cosmopolis and see if any of it sounds familiar. It seems that we are at a place where we need a spiritual awakening, a renewal of values and ideals that once offered promise and hope. How do we accomplish that? I guess we start by doing it individually -- being kind to ourselves, being kind to that person closest to us. By showing, not telling.