Sentences can increase desire. I'm thinking this way because I'm addicted to the HBO's series Deadwood, a drama about the American Wild West, which was shot dead after a short run, 2004-2007.
The series is written in Shakespearean prose--with large stretches of iambic pentameter. (For my look at its poetic meter, see my posting at Barnes & Noble, here.)
I wasn't conscious that the HBO series was happening in iambic pentameter when I first started watching. I just knew that the language was both smart and a little off-putting. Watching these fast-talking whores, gold-diggers, and gunslingers felt like walking into a room in which everyone knew everyone already.
But here's a law about talk: If someone's language demands that you spend energy, and if you are paid back by the energy, it can spur a love bond.
Shakespeare (who shaped the dense language that inspires HBO's Deadwood) knew this. He found a perfect balance between how much energy he made a listener spend and how much he paid her back. You have to work to unpack Shakespeare, but if you do it, you get the gift of some fresh idea.
Shakespeare's sentences are tricky insofar as they often invert subject and verb, or suspend the verb, or use words that look like nouns for verbs.
For example, in Henry V, King Henry rallies his troops for the Battle of Agincourt with these words:
"He today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition."
"Gentle"--almost always an adjective--is a verb here. But that word is a meaningful verb--because, after all, Henry wants to describe this day, in which his troops are going to enter bloody battle, as a caretaker. He gives the day with a non-active or non-aggressive verb.
In parallel, here's a sentence from HBO's Deadwood. A father is arguing with his daughter's decision to stay in goldmining country:
"Alma, watching you struggle with what is beneath your spirit to understand is always painful for me."
You have to run through a couple words which feel like verbs--"watching" and "understand." But they are not verbs--just descriptors of the father's pain. The verb is really a weakling thing: a silent "is," which links the father to the word "painful." The grammar of the sentence conveys a father's weakening spirit.
There is a psychology of grammar: Through style, a sentence can soothe or cheat or beat you up. Psychologists have a sense of that truth. After all, therapists work hard to phrase their sentences to trigger the right emotional spot. The way we speak is almost more important than what we say. Offering a verbal "intervention" is like doing acupuncture--you've got to hit the right place, with the right balance of intellectual words and pure gut.
I'd like to hear how you think about the divide between the message and the medium, or the packaging of any idea. There's a difference, for instance, between the sentences "You never cook me dinner," and "Wouldn't it be great to cook dinner?" They have a similar message, but one's an attack and one feels like an open hand.
I'd like to hear examples of how you've used style to modify some thing you've wanted to say.
