Doubt, vulnerability, and the shared struggle for truth

The truth can be spoken only by someone who is already at home in it; not by someone who still lives in untruthfulness, and does no more than reach out towards it from within untruthfulness — Wittgenstein

I do not know/ who I was when I did those things/ or who I said I was/ or whether I willed to feel/ what I had read about/ or who in fact was/ there with me/ or whether I knew, even then/ that there was doubt about these things — Adrienne Rich

One of the consequences for me of upheavals I’ve faced in recent years — all of it unremarkable for a human creature who has consented to love other creatures — is an impatience with my own garden-variety hypocrisies and inclination to dissemble. There are increasingly frequent times, then, when the taste of my own incipient, mundane lies becomes so bitter that I find myself casting about for a more accurate word, an apter description, a truer truth than the one I was about to utter. In those moments, I shift from being a reasonably well-spoken academic to a stuttering amateur philologist, psychologist, and mystic. I sometimes wilt under the harsh light of this imperative to tell whatever it is as it is, as it feels, and not just in the way that is easiest or (I imagine) makes me look good.

It doesn’t happen all the time, of course. I would, I guess, be more or less dysfunctional if that were the case, but mostly in the company of those I have come to think of as, very loosely, my spiritual companions. Sometimes I identify them as such only after this compulsion towards truth overtakes me when I am in conversation with them. There is something about them. Something about me. But in the presence of such apparently kindred souls, sometimes nothing seems to matter more to me than grabbing the truth by the ankle, or maybe just a toe, and wrestling it to the ground.

I will eventually let it go (this is a catch-and-release situation) but first I must pin it down — my knees on its shoulders — and look it straight in the eyes. And before I set it free, letting it skitter away back into the ether, I seek confirmation from my beautiful friend: Did you see what I saw? Did you see it too? Can we name this thing that we witnessed here together? Sometimes they will join me in that moment and it is an experience of such exquisite non-loneliness that I seek it out again and again. I long for them to take me by the hand too, to tug me into their own murky seas, wherever it is that their dream fish wait to be seen and named.

What I have in mind here, then, is truth(ing) as an expansive activity, an arena of commitment, an orientation, a gestalt, and not as a mere correspondence between a statement and a state of affairs, be it internal or external. To choose to live “in truth” or “from truth,” then, is akin to making an aesthetic choice, one’s life construed as an artistic project bathed in the color of a reality that is, at least for a moment, fully embraced as it really is. Truth in this context is not a mere ethical prescription, part of a long list of “shoulds” to be followed like a recipe if one wants to become a “better” or more “authentic” person, but a way of being.

Most importantly from the personal point of view that interests me here, our clumsy, fumbling efforts towards truth are precious gifts of vulnerability that we can share with one another. For during such intimately philosophical conversations, we effectively invite a chosen other to accompany us while we stumble and weave through the attics and basements of our minds. The preserved (and sometimes perverse) record of our hubris and longing. The dusty shelves groaning under the weight of what most inspires, shames and calls out to us. Come with me. Know what I know with me, as I know it, so that I might, myself, know it more deeply. Hold my hand in the face of what is crying out to be seen and spoken so that I might find my courage too.

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