Truth
Many of you saw my show last fall, Big Words. By Big Words, I meant those words we learned a long time ago: easy words like mother, father, family, love. Well, they were easy words back. Some of them have become a lot more complicated since.
Early into my Big Words phase I ran into a quote by Winston Churchill: “All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom; justice; honor; duty; mercy; truth; hope.
Those were some big words. Maybe I was onto something. Winston Churchill was no slouch. But most of those words were too big for me. I could think about truth, though. Truth seemed to be a little different for me than for so many people.
For me, truth–like fashion, decorating, cooking and travel—was a bouillabaisse. I toss in a wide variety of ideas; thoughts, feelings, impressions, background, culture, vision and insight—stir them until all ingredients are just mixed. Now I ladle it into a bowl. Let’s top it with a dollop of something good laced with fat. There. My Truth. It controls my inner life; it pushes and pulls at my blood pressure, my stomach wall and my forehead’s creases.
My subjective truth is all the reality I need. All the reality I get, isn’t it? Oh, of course, I’d love for you to confirm that truth; or at least to accept my assembly of it.
My Truth isn’t quite as floppy as “truthiness.” I’m not defending mere reaction. In fact I think that this desire for an objective truth might be what leads to truthiness. For those of you who don’t stay up late, truthiness is a Steven Colbert word that means the leap into the intuitive without bothering about little things like logic, evidence, intellect or examination. You know, the Bush regimes modus operandi.
When I was younger, anxious law students all around me fervently quested truth. Here were young puzzle-meisters, archeologists, detectives, pot heads, and scientists. Ambiguity and fog really bothered some of these colleagues of mine. But not me, I’m not a puzzle-solver. I’m not so bothered by increasing murkiness. I’m not surprised that additional facts often further obscure the situation. I can wait in the not-knowing or the uncertain. I have, I do. No one ever seems to call my number with the answer.
So I assume there isn’t much objective truth out there to discover, just the facts ma’am, scattered like shrapnel, imperfectly re-assembled and interpreted by mere mortals, each through her own lens of neglect, abandonment, rejection, pride and envy, exhaustion and complaint.
I wasn’t meant for the lab, the details, I’m not a “what-if-er” or a purist. No, I’m my father’s daughter—all allegory and symbolism—leaving behind me a wake of untidy details. I find that questions just seem to deepen as I bring more experience to the table.
And what if the truth did make an appearance, a proclamation, announced on all the major networks and basic cable, from every pulpit and consciousness in harmony and clarity? What makes people think we’d even notice? We’d probably tune out and take that moment to craft our response, bask in the familiar comfort of our own voice.