"Hermogenes argued that language is arbitrary and the words people
use are purely a matter of convention. Cratylus, like Humpty Dumpty,
believed words inherently reflect their meaning - although he seems to
have found his insights into language disillusioning."
—from "Kiki or bouba? In search of language's missing link,"
David Robson, The New Scientist

I live with a certainty that 99 percent of what can be known is unknown. As a poet, these odds work in my favor: in order to write, I must affirm that contrary to popular belief, there is still a lot more left to say in literature. Truth, I believe, is an extension of imagination; a long arm grasping at reality. Imagination is wild territory, the mind feeling blindly at an incomprehensible landscape. Truth, therefore, is subjective.

Why my deep distrust of truth? Because I believe in words more than I believe in ideas. Letters have physical weight; they take shape, strike poses. Together, they make noise. But ideas? Listen. Can you hear them? Can you see them? Thoughts are puffs of cloud, empty air. They have weather, to be sure; they can be hot, cold, wet, freezing. But mostly they are weightless. Words, on the other hand, have heft.

Like a zebra, language is a sturdy beast whose outward colors create optical illusions. Thought is a road runner whizzing by. So if I were truth, I wouldn’t bother chasing thought. I’d hang out by the black and white stripes of language, plant my feet in that warm savannah grass, try to blend in, not attract too much attention. If I were truth, I’d follow language to fertile ground.

This is not to say that language and meaning are completely arbitrary. But language is an invention, a tool which helps us intuit meaning. And if language is an invention, and truth gathers around language like a soft foam (rather than being created by language or preceding it), then the question of what is really true in literature is an arbitrary question. Once I tell a story in words, it is an invention. Although it springs from a real mind in a real body living in a real world, a story is made of words and nothing else. So it is as real as words are real, and it takes a certain amount of faith to believe these squiggly black shapes can really refer to anything outside themselves. Truth is what we expect words to refer to, and usually they do the job well enough. But capital “T” Truth cannot be known; it can only be approximated in language.

And yet our culture is obsessed with what it calls “reality.” We are hypnotized by the promise of reality TV, as absurd and silly as we guiltily claim it is. Deep down our hearts quicken at the possibility of being shown something real, something that wasn’t made up. It is no coincidence that reality TV and memoir have both gained increasing popularity in recent years, accompanied by scandals about the veracity of “true” stories. Why did people feel so deceived by James Frey? Because they were promised capital “T” Truth, and what they got was an engrossing, partially embellished story.

But what would an actual True Story look like? It would be nauseatingly boring, because life is nauseatingly boring. Do you want to know that I got up and brushed my teeth, took a shower, ate an omelet for breakfast, almost missed the bus, caught the bus, didn’t get a seat on the bus, went to work, what I did at work, every minute of the goddamn day, how I came home, watched some TV... ? No, you want to know what I struggled with, what complicated my day, at what angle the sunlight hit the window when I had the revelation that would change my life. Or that my life didn’t change at all.

I am a huge fan of personal essays and memoir. Not because I’m a voyeur (though of course we all are to some degree), but because I like great stories, and I enjoy prose in its many forms. I also love poetry because of its ability to throw a punch in a way that prose doesn’t, for the gasp in the back of my throat. But I couldn’t care less if anything written in prose or verse is actually true. I do care if the words strung together form a pattern I recognize, or one I’ve never seen before, or one that looks slightly like myself but at a different age or time period: a pattern that moves me so much I want to frame it and hang it on the wall, study it for years, discover its intricate hidden shapes, and wonder at how it all works together.

The notion of truth is a comforting fiction. It whispers to us that we finally know something; we can relax, breathe a sigh of relief. But great literature teaches us that we don’t know anything for sure, and we had better not get too comfortable with what we think is true. Great literature raises the blood pressure, keeps us in a state of tension: it is not valium. It may take pity on us and give us a rest here or there: punctuation, line break, denouement. But it holds us in its grip for the entire time it has our eyes on the page. Unlike reality, it holds us, and does not let us go.

Truth

Untruth

We Don't Know and TheyWon't Tell Us

We Don't Know and They
Won't Tell Us