Last weekend, I read Robert Caro’s Working, where the prolific biographer of Robert Moses and Lyndon B. Johnson explains his working process, his research process that stretches for years and years as he reads every possible page relating to his subjects and interviews anyone who ever interacted with the subject multiple times. I was impressed with his work ethic; I was amazed by his persistence and wondered what it was like to work on anything for five years. Caro’s obsessed with the truth in a way that compels him to dig deeply and find the most complete picture of the past and of the accomplishments and terrors that his subjects create.
But what is truth in motion, through the dances of living life? Truth feels more ambiguous when it isn’t in retrospect. It would be impossible for a writer like me to work this way, especially in the way that I write, constantly changing my mind and reconsidering week over week as I try to find meaning or direction in life. Imagine a world where I could lock myself into the archives, dig through historical records for years on end, finally emerging with the answers to it all, the map to a clear path in life.
So what is truth, to me? It’s not knowing what I’m talking about or authoritatively offering sanguine clear advice. No, I’m much too moody and self-critical to ever feel comfortable dispensing advice so openly, to suppose that I understand anything better than anyone else. Nor is it some sort of philosophical self-help, pointing to the same sorry over-used set of references to Stoics or particularly talented advice columnists. I’ve pulled too many buckets of words out over the years for my well to be so shallow, I think, I hope.
It must be something stupider, or at least funnier since all that the word “truth” evokes for me is a silly tweet:
The speaker, addressing some unknown ridiculer wearing the cloak of irony that underlies nearly all internet interactions these days, asks for something ostensibly simple but extraordinarily complex. This isn’t Caro’s type of truth — I doubt that the speaker of the tweet would be looking for a particularly handsome fact about President Johnson. No, it’s the type of truth I’m after, that any artist is after, the one that lights up a blank face with its resonance, that creates those tiny moments when a word or a picture or a song lyric or just a single note makes time slow, eyes widen, cheeks turn.
And where does this truth come from? How does one move towards this truth?
With my friends, we make up theories about what makes a hobby and what doesn’t, and we come up with examples and counterexamples and leave with a shared understanding of something. New theories are formed like how a hobby looks like effort towards something with a goal of enjoyment. Maybe a hobby can transform into something else with more effort and intensity. We don’t need to make citations, as we build these ideas together over sips and butter beans and ice creams. We’re finding truth in the making and unmaking of our thoughts, in the laughs over stupid examples, at kitchen tables typing away at our computers trying to make something out of nothing. This is research too, and the poems read, the tears shed, the meals skipped.
I interviewed my friend this weekend who is a musician and DJ, both to help her practice for a radio interview she’s doing next week and because of an idea I had to write profiles about my friends like they’re celebrities. As a part of this interview, I was curious if other types of artists thought about their lives like I did, constantly revisiting the past and drawing narratives between every event that I could remember. And as we talked, I found myself drawing chalky lines through her life: how blowing the budget of her high school orchestra for a trip was the first domino to lead to the latest event she threw for her and her music collective.
Her ability to bring people together, to compose beautiful music, to dig into niche genres of music and connect them together in a DJ set; they all exist beyond anything I can do. I cannot make a crowd ooh and aah at a light show or have them sway and jeer to a transition — those are her truths to share.
Instead, I focus on drawing connections, pointing light to that which might be forgotten, like John Berger describes in “Some Notes on Song”:
Much of what happens to us in life is nameless because our vocabulary is too poor. Most stories get told out loud because the storyteller hopes that the telling of the story can transform a nameless event into a familiar or intimate one.
As I put pen to paper, I’m discovering a vocabulary for myself, how words stick together in unexpected ways and seem to congeal into something entirely new. There’s no clear story or arc or reason to it all at the start or during the middle and sometimes even at the end, it’s a wandering path that only sometimes leads anywhere. But man, on days when the air is just right, the sidewalk ends and the world around looks a bit different.
I’m blessed to have people read my work, especially those who aren’t writers or deeply into reading books or poetry or any of the other nerdy topics that I dedicate myself to. I fear that I sound like other people that most people I know have never even heard of and think about writing more than I think about most things. I throw myself back to the page every week; I spend more and more time with it, look for inspiration everywhere, steal from the greats, so wouldn’t it be so beautiful for my words to transform an event, a second, a bird’s song or floating dust in a sun ray into something significant somehow, for someone out there?
It would be, but it doesn’t always happen. There are many days of writing that lead nowhere and to essays that look like nothing at all. I guess I’m more like Caro than I thought. I point my life towards the pursuit of truth through art, hoping that more effort, more research, more learning, more writing will lead me to it and that one day, I’ll scratch the surface and be able to share it, with you, all at once.
💧 Drops of the Week 💧
ALBUM - Love What Survives by Mount Kimbie - revisiting an artist I loved a ton in high school
POEM - “Meditations in an Emergency” by Cameron Awkward-Rich - I wake up & it breaks my heart.
you always undersell your writing!!!