03-Jul-2017

Why is there such a huge following of talent shows?

Because up until the talent shows, the populace was forced to choose among the stars and starlets, the singers, bands, and musicians that executives and corporations chose for us.

The talent shows strike a particular nerve, draw the tears in a way that professional, polished, chosen-and-groomed performers cannot because the talent shows allow the hidden, undiscovered talent that is living in our own town, or the next town over, the average man, the average woman, living through their days, grinding out an existence in factories, fast-food-restaurants, auto-parts shops, or cloistered for some reason of finance or developmental hurdle – the talent show pulls out of this ordinariness the extraordinary and reminds us that those who live among us, that may annoy us on the roadways or in lines at the checkout, that we pass by and think look strange or different are actually talented, that they have a gift that they long for the world to see or hear, that they develop in the long quiet hours of solitude.

The tears tell us that there is more, far more than we could imagine, living in the hearts and minds and souls of the average man and woman than the executives and studios and talent agents tell us about, select for us.

And when we see a massive talent exposed for the first time, when we connect with that life that had been solitary and living strictly on hope and artistic inspiration (perhaps divinely inspired), we feel connected to the real world of Mankind and see ourselves as a moving, living part of that parade and we are forced to acknowledge our own role in that parade, and we are proud that the talent is among us and perhaps for the first time, we are humbled enough to admit our own limitations compared to such talent, but we admit that with pride as we lift a fellow soul from among the masses.

© 2017 KS Culbreth.
All content on this website is the copyright of KS Culbreth.
Please contact: KSCulbrethwriter@gmail.com for rights to
reproduce any part of this website.

In his inaugural address to The Pascal Lectures on Christianity and published as The End of Christendom (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1980), Malcolm Muggeridge states:

So much has been achieved by human intelligence that we have got lost in it. Whereas this other dimension that [William] Blake calls the imagination and that Pascal calls faith is the thing that we most desperately need. I am certain that in eternity when we understand, and no longer see through a glass darkly but face to face, we shall find that all our efforts to convey the reality of our existence are just so much children’s scribble in the light of what it really is. The scribbles that have come nearest to conveying it are those of the artists rather than those of the philosophers or the theologians or the scientists. (p. 6-7)

This echoes to some degree what I have tried to explain to others about the prophetic element of the inspired poetry of the True Poet. When writing poetry, the True Poet enters a state of inspiration that allows him to write (even at a young age, in an immature state as far as experience is concerned) about life and from a perspective and with wisdom that he has not directly acquired by having lived through and he is able to write about these ideas and situations and wisdom as though he had already lived through them. Rupert Brooke provides an example of this by capturing a potential, dreadful state of love in his poem, Kindliness. Muggeridge goes on to say:

These three people, Pascal, Blake, and Dostoyevski, illustrate perfectly what I have long believed to be the case, that history consists of parables whereby God communicates in terms that the imagination rather than the mind, faith rather than knowledge, can grasp. (p. 9)

In one of the tales that included his character, Merlin explained foretelling the future as “remembering forward.”

It seems to me that the True Poet, inspired, is able write about experiences he has not lived and to do so convincingly and especially in a way that eventually proves him correct, by using this seeming wizardry that Blake and Pascal attribute to the divinely inspired imagination.

© 2017 KS Culbreth.
All content on this website is the copyright of KS Culbreth.
Please contact: KSCulbrethwriter@gmail.com for rights to
reproduce any part of this website.