far away

Power tends to corrupt.

-- Lord Acton

Cursed is the ground.

-- Genesis 3:17

A long time ago, in a hospice far far away that doesn't exist any more, I sat in a super-heated atmosphere listening to an official of the state board of health.  We had been through an ugly patch with the board of health, who had made it very clear that they could shut us down if we didn't prove in forty days (interesting, those biblical overtones) that we had fixed certain problems.

These deficiencies of the long ago far away hospice were not of a kind that would raise your blood pressure, reader.  We had not stolen money for crackpot investments, or abused our patients, or shorted the sheets, or worn funny hats to a funeral, or prescribed the wrong medicines.  No one accused us of theft or maleficence.  Our sins were procedural.  But we had been within forty days of being shut down for them.

In hospice, an interdisciplinary team delivers specialist-level palliative medical care.  There are many openings in this legal definition that invite an inspector's probing.  To the regulatory mind, it means we must prove not only that we take care of our people, but that the clinician of each discipline is executing a specific plan for that care, and that our plans are undertaken at all times in collaboration with all the other disciplines, because if we do not collaborate then we are not inter-disciplinary.  (Every time a clinician writes the word "collaborate" in a clinical note, a hospice manager gets her wings.)

We must therefore meet in certain groupings at certain times and talk about certain subjects in a certain order, and we must record those conversations in a certain language on certain forms by certain deadlines.  This all takes a certain amount of time which, we grumble, would be better spent taking care of our people.  But there are agents whose operating assumption is that we are thieves, and we have to defend our virtue and our mission from them.

I was sitting, long ago and far away, around the table with a medical director, nurses, social workers and our supervisors.  There was fear in the room, and there was madness.  This was the interdisciplinary team.  The eyes of the clinicians were weary and shifty.  The eyes of the supervisors had glazed over.  The forty days were now past, we had not been shut down and we were on the road to forgiveness, but the regulators had smelt our fear, and had come back with more suggestions.

This is what the regulator said that morning.  The pattern of our visits was not regular or specific enough.  Each of us had to choose a specific schedule of visits for each patient and stick to the schedule.  If I said I would visit a client twice a month, I had to be appear every two weeks by the calendar, at intervals of neither more nor less than fourteen days.  If I chose the weekly schedule, I had to visit on the same day of the week each time.  If I chose the monthly schedule, my visits had to be twenty-eight days apart precisely (certainly not on the same date each month because, given the occurrence of weekends and the variation in the lengths of months, that would produce irregularities).  No kidding, that is what she said.  Nurses and social workers were to observe similar rigors, according to their different caseloads.  Anything else was non-compliant.  Anything else could get us shut down.

In the silence that followed her leaving, I wish I had said something like this:

"The instructions you've just heard are impossible and toxic.  We cannot do this and we ought not to.  It would be malpractice.  So we must be creative.  We must appease this person's anxieties while protecting ourselves and our clients from her fancies."

Sometime it's a chaplain's job to say that kind of thing.

The whims of regulators are as real as tumors, and as necessary to address; but we can't let whims define the mission.  Sick people's needs don't go by the calendar.  Death doesn't follow doctor's orders or state regulations.

What was said to us ought not to have been said.  Spoken to people who had been through what we had been through, these words were harmful.  There was a drunkenness here, a Speaking While Intoxicated with power of the state.  But how did it come to this?  What had we done to deserve it?

A friend of mine who is an airline pilot says that every dial and display in the cockpit is a monument to some catastrophe.  In the same way, every regulation is a monument to some moral outrage, some theft or perversion of care, some harm done by malice or incompetence.  But whose maleficence, whose incompetence are we paying for?

Not ours, we say.  I'm not abandoning or abusing patients, stealing money or selling pharmaceuticals for profit.  I'm one of the good guys.  I'm not part of the problem.  I'm part of the answer to the problem.  Why must I pay the price?  And why must my clients pay the price of my distraction?

The great sad truth is that we don't have to deserve it, but we'll pay the price anyway.  The ground is already cursed, because someone did terrible things somewhere sometime, and we're all of us potential sinners, if not in our own eyes then in the eyes of others, and we must endure the suspicion of those others in order to win their provisional and imperfect trust.  We dream of working in the freedom of our honesty and virtue, doing what seems best in the moment when it seems best to do it, knowing that we mean well and have some skill to do good, sometimes making mistakes but subject to correction.  But that is a dream of paradise, lost long before the age of $646 toilet seats and of lawyers who chase ambulances and of bishops who protect pederast priests and of banks who grow too big to fail by lying about the value of assets.  So a chaplain or doctor -- or for that matter a banker -- who thinks they can work without regulation is a moral idiot.

I suppose that's what generations of theologians are driving at when they say the words "original sin."  You can't just do good, because that option was lost long ago.  All you can do is the best you can do, deformed as it is by ancient wrong, unassuageable suspicion and institutions created to disarm it.  That's all you have to justify yourself with, and sometimes it doesn't seem like much.

That far away, long ago hospice did not die right away.  It lingered on for a few years, mortally demoralized, but never really recovered from the shock, or from hasty systemic changes demanded by state power.  The wisest course, it seems, is not to let the powers get angry with you in the first place.

You can't recruit hospice clinicians by showing them the forms they'll fill out.  You must attract them by showing them the people they will serve.  We mad folks do the work in faith that our benevolence, diligence and compassion are the client's best protection.  Regulators do their work in faith that regulations are the best protection.  The two faiths are not equivalent, and there will never really be peace between ministry and regulation.  That's why those who rise to management of this impossible abyss deserve our compassion: there's no way to do what they must do.  Yeshua said that we should render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's, but what if Caesar and God claim both sides of the coin?  The only hope is a sort of finesse -- well, let's call it creativity.

Showtime.

our sons

They were all my sons.

-- Arthur Miller, 1947

If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.

-- Barack Obama, 2012

So let's avert our eyes from the nasty fandango of obese bloviators.  Let's skip past the animatronic ballet of character assassination they think will make it all right.  Let's concede their claims, just to get them off the stage.  Let's admit (for rhetorical reasons only) that the dead kid may have smoked pot, that he hadn't a perfect attendance record, that he wore a hoodie.  That, followed by an unidentifiable man with a gun, he might have struck out in fear, as I might have done.  None of this justifies a death sentence.


I've got two hoodies hanging in my closet today.  I didn't know till now that this kind of garment had a name.  I know it has a function.  Like, you might wear a hoodie if it's raining.  Which it was.  But if I put on a hoodie, to keep my head warm and dry in dicey weather, I don't expect to be tracked down by an armed and super-empowered fear-addict who finds it suspicious that I cover my head in the rain.  I and every other American have a right to go to the store in a hoodie.  We have the right to walk as slow or as fast as we like.  We have a right to look into store windows.  If that makes Wayne LaPierre nervous, he and his National Rifle Association should take a valium; but don't call me in the morning.  This is America, love it or leave it.  You don't get to kill people just because you're afraid.  Just because an entrepreneur of fear has told you to be afraid.


A minister once told me that on the day her son isn't followed by the store detective when he goes shopping, on that day and not until that day will she say our society is post-racial.  Van Jones asks how he is supposed to protect his sons -- does he have to dress them in tuxedos every day?*  Here in New York we are sick from legalized racial violence against unarmed young men by law enforcement.  Abner Louima (August 9, 1997), accused of striking a police officer and sodomized to hospitalization in a police station bathroom.  Amadou Diallo (February 4, 1999), gunned down in front of his apartment building by four plainclothes policeman as he took out his wallet to provide identification.  Patrick Dorismond (March 16, 2000) shot to death by an undercover office who had accused him of being a drug dealer.  Ousmane Zongo (May 22, 2003) killed by an undercover officer who falsely claimed he fired in self-defense.  Sean Bell (November 25, 2006), shot to death in his car the day before his wedding by an undercover policeman who feared that he was going somewhere else to get a gun.  Perhaps some officers understand that that these actions put their lives at risk, lower their conviction rates and raise the hostility of communities.  All policemen suffer the consequences of such atrocities: where is their passion to punish the perps?


But this was no policeman.  It was a wannabe, carrying a gun when he was told not to and going where he was told not to, looking for and finding a person to shoot.  However the altercation went down, it was the vigilante who chose it. The breach of peace was his.  He is responsible for its result.  If he had done what he was told, there would have been no incident and no one would have died.


I've never thought about being challenged when I put on my hoodie, even if I walk slowly and look into store windows.  I've never had to think about it: and that's the way it should be, for me and for everyone.  That's the way it is in a decent society, in a liberal democracy of the early twenty-first century.  We're not talking about racial matters but about universal human rights even deeper than the Bill of Rights.  We're talking about security -- if you can't go the store without being attacked, then you can't even talk about freedom of speech or of assembly, or about voting rights.  What is at stake here is not Jefferson's "pursuit of happiness" or even liberty, but life itself.


"Living in a civilization," writes Steven Pinker, "reduces one's chances of being a victim of violence fivefold."**  We do not, on the whole, live in violent times.  My city is a remarkably peaceful place, where people of different colors, rhythms and languages rub against each other at least in co-operation and often with exquisite courtesy, where single women go home to their various homes at night without fear.  Gun fetishists should be sentenced to live among us -- disarmed of course -- and take moral instruction from our civilization.  The last thing we need here is a bunch of armed amateurs, looking for a chance to make us live an action movie or a video game.  Stay at  home to spin your fantasies, in the dark and with bare hands.  We don't want the Wild West on our streets, or the Dark Ages.  We want the rule of law.


Carrying a gun makes you want to use it.  That's why they train policemen, and why policemen don't want their neighborhood watch to be armed.  And that's why Geoffrey Canada, who unlike many fantasizers grew up amidst real violence and does real work to bring children out of violence, threw away his gun.  "I knew that if I continued to carry the gun I would sooner or later pull the trigger."***


So a boy is dead, and who was the bringer of death?  If anybody was "standing his ground," it is the dead boy.  There's one thing we know for sure his pursuer did not do -- he did not stand his ground; he went looking for trouble with his gun.


In the last few days the bloviators and shills of America's right claw have indignantly denied that the shooting was racially motivated.  All right, for rhetorical purposes, let's concede their point.  Let's suppose that blackness was not one of the boy's "suspicious" qualities.  What does that mean?


It means that the shooter is a danger to all of us.  He would have shot any of us if we walked too slow, or looked in the wrong direction, or wore the wrong rainwear.  So now, for white people like me, this gets real personal.


Today is my birthday, and I'm of an age when I know I won't be here forever.  I know that my children and their descendents will inherit this world.  In the lingo of my work we call this "generativity," the concern that a person aware of mortality feels for those who will follow.  The shooter of this boy is a threat to me and to my children.


This is personal.  There aren't black kids and brown kids and white kids.  They're all our children and, as President Clinton said, we don't have any people to waste, as this boy was wasted.  They're all our sons and daughters, our common good, and it's our duty as parents to protect them from gun-toting fantasists.  If we don't protect them, then we're all at risk.  The next time I go to the store, who will watch me and decide that my gait, or my hair-style, or the direction of my gaze, or the style of my clothes or the tone of my remarks, makes him afraid?  What's to stop him from blowing me away?


This is personal.  This was not a tragedy.  It was a sin and a crime.


*Paraphrase from This Week with George Stephanopoulis (April 1, 2012). "Jones admitted that the case hits very close to home, saying dryly that if his children couldn't wear the clothes they wanted to when going out in public, he would go broke buying them tuxedos every time they wanted to walk outside. .  . . 'I don't know how to protect my sons.'" (Josh Feldman, "Van Jones, Ann Coulter, and Panel Take on the Trayvon Martin Case on This Week," www.mediaite.com [April 1, 2012]).


**The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011), p. 51.


***Fist Stick Knife Gun: A Personal History of Violence in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995). p. 103.

real scared

You're not makin' it easy for me and Opie to walk down Main Street.

-- Paul David and John L. Greene, "The Battle of Mayberry" (April 4, 1966)

So I wuz' a-watching this episode of The Andy Griffith Show, and it near scared me to death.  Seems Opie was writin' a historical essay for a contest, and they would publish the winning essay in the paper.  The topic was the legendary Battle of Mayberry, when heroic settlers defeated the savage Indians, and made North Carolina safe for little groups of white men.  And the kids were supposed to do a lot of research.  After all, there was a lot of material to work with.  Everybody in town had an ancestor in the battle, and everybody's ancestor was the main hero.  Aunt Bee told about Captain Taylor, and Clara showed up with the actual sword that had won the battle, and Floyd the Barber and Goober fought about their forbears till they stopped talking.  Opie wrote all their stories down in his notebook.  He even talked to Tom Strongbow, who told him how the Cherokee Chief Strongbow (who was of course the hero of the battle) with fifty braves turned back five times that number of white people who had guns, winning the victory and protecting the ancestral hunting grounds.


So to help Opie get an edge in the contest, and perhaps to resolve the conflicts in his source material, Andy took Opie to the big city library to find something more like original sources; and Opie found out the truth.


And here's the truth.  There was no battle.  There was an argument between fifty Indians and fifty settlers about cattle, and they all made up their differences and got drunk together, and by mistake somebody shot a cow, and that was the only casualty.  There was no battle.


"Oh boy," said Andy.


And here' s where I got real scared, because I thought I saw where this was going.  'Cause Opie would obviously win the contest, and then they would publish his essay, and it would insult everybody in town (and their heroic ancestors), and Opie would be the least popular boy in school, and Andy the least popular sheriff.  The real treasure of Mayberry was of course its community spirit.  So no true citizen of Mayberry, no public official or  leader, would want to shred the consensus on which community depended, for the sake of a revisionist history.  So this is where it was going: Andy was a-settin' out to suppress the truth.  And I was scared he would win.


First he tried to corrupt his son.  He told Opie that he didn't have to publish what he knew -- that his essay would still be the best in the school, and he would still win the contest and get published in the paper.  He told him how important it was to keep the peace, and respect people's feelings, sometimes more important even than the truth.  But Opie wasn't having it.


So then Andy tried to corrupt Opie's teacher (who by the way was also Andy's girlfriend).  He said she had to cancel the contest; but that just wasn't going to happen.  So then he begged her to give the prize to some other kid; but that was askin' her to lie.  And then he begged that they not publish the essay after all, and she said it was too late, it was all arranged and couldn't be changed.  And then he lamented how hard this was going to be for him.  But the lady's heart remained obdurate.  Andy had failed to suppress the truth.


So the essay was published, and the townspeople were offended.  And then something strange happened.  The governor got wind of the contest and read the winning essay on the radio.  All tuned in to hear him, and the governor praised the town for its honesty and integrity, for following the truth wherever it led, even to debunking of precious false memories.  And all were pleased.  They agreed that they were a fine and honest community.  Andy and Opie could walk down Main Street again.


And I, of little faith, had doubted.  I didn't think this show about small town values would defend the truth; I had thought the show would endorse consensus over truth.  Ah, those were the days.  When we thought that truth was important.


And this is how truth would win in those days.  Mayberry -- perhaps we have forgotten -- was in the South.  There were no black people there; but its fictional conflict took the form of the great campaigns against Jim Crow and segregation.  The community's consensus -- its civility -- was based on a lie, told and retold by all from morning till night.  Mayberry said they had heroically beaten the indigenous peoples.  The South as a whole said that the "Niggrahs" had been given freedom but had shown themselves "not ready," and now they lived separately but equally, and it was best for everyone.  To question any part of this false history at any time was to make oneself a public enemy, a person who could not walk down Main Street.


When Nine black children in Little Rock challenged false history, walking down their own Main Street to Central High, the scene was ugly.  Officers of the law enforced immoral law, and well-dressed mothers shrieked abuse into the ears of children.  Until, as in Mayberry, a larger authority intervened.  The governor changed the ethical equation in 1966 Mayberry, as the 101st Airborne Division at the command of General Eisenhower changed the power equation in 1958 Little Rock.


This is how truth breaks in upon the world -- by appealing to the higher power or, as Emerson said, by drawing the larger circle.  Revelation is always a power play.  Sometimes truth arrives at a drunken supper party, sometimes in a prayer, sometimes at a therapy session, sometimes in an election, and sometimes -- if we manage it no better way -- in a murderous mass conflict.  But it's never on the lesson plan.


A liberal knows that he can never own the whole truth; but the liberal faith, the pragmatic faith, the American faith, is that greater truth inheres in the larger realm.  Mayberry on the day in question was corrected by the larger truth of North Carolina, and Arkansas on its chosen day was corrected by the larger truth of the United States.  "Around every circle another can be drawn," wrote Emerson.  The search for truth is freedom, and freedom expands in the ceaseless drawing of the larger circle.


The truth is a thing that no one can own.  We can only increase the size of our vision.  Every ideology, every religion, every national epic, every form of life, is a partial rendition of the truth seeking wholeness.  The truth however is not partial but whole in itself; its wholeness is what gives the lie to falsehood.  Beyond the songs of the master and the slave there is a greater song that includes and explains them both.  Truth is what always seeks to be be larger, more complete.  When we balkanize the truth, we give our reverence to the lie.

ugly truth

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

-- attr. to Benjamin Disraeli

What I do is not journalism. The tools of the theater are not the same as the tools of journalism.

-- Mike Daisey*

Beauty may be truth and truth beauty as Keats said, but not in the short run. The Grecian urn speaks not to our present condition but to a transcendent Truth. To write what Keats wrote, or to affirm it as I have done,** is an act of faith. In the short run truth is often ugly, and any beautiful statement of our condition is suspect because of its beauty. That's why we have journalists.

It's a journalist's job to find out the truth about our present condition -- to publish both what we want to know and what we don't want to know. The mayor says the water is safe to drink; the general says there's light at the end of the tunnel; the vice-president says the insurgency is on its last legs; the congressman says we can lift the recession by putting people out of work. The journalist tells us what they said, but cannot stop there -- he must also inform us how much of what they said is wrong, how much a lie, how much a misleading statistic, and how much a damned lie. The journalist makes these determinations on the basis of facts. The official statement is one fact, the documents or statements that belie it are other facts. It's easy to be a stenographer, but finding out the whole ugly truth is very difficult. Journalism is difficult and sometimes dangerous. Persons of stature gather stenographers around them, but they keep journalists at a distance or hate them openly. Journalism is essentially anti-institutional and liberal. And unpopular.

There's a television art-form in which well-known people portray themselves unflatteringly, and their self-deprecation encourages their famous friends to satirize themselves as well. Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Warwick Davis in Life's Too Short, bring us to the boundary of life and art. Their imagery is both true and untrue.  That's really Warwick Davis, we say, and yet we know it is not the reality of him. There is a strange safety in self-pillory; if Larry David knew himself to be so shabby as all that, he wouldn't publicize it. This can be uncomfortable to watch, and very amusing.

It's as if the last few weeks have brought us to a threshold of confusion between the ethics of reality and the ethics of fiction. The quarrel of an essayist with his fact-checker recently became a national spat.***  And now Ira Glass has withdrawn one episode of This American Life because it contained fabrications, accounts of conversations with Chinese factory workers, conversations that did not happen.  These accounts were excerpted from a performance monologue by Mike Daisey, entitled "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs." The workers were portrayed as complaining about the working conditions at a Chinese company called Foxconn that manufactures parts for Apple products. The question posed to Glass, a question that he now admits he answered incorrectly, was this: in a radio show of spoken art that sometimes but not always commits journalism, were these factual-sounding statements on a public ethical issue true in the way that journalism requires? It turns out that the monologist made these conversations up for dramatic effect.

These distinctions need not be complicated, but have gotten so. There is a long tradition of social commentary in fiction, and it's not hard to identify it. The author is obliged merely to follow the rules of literature. He changes the names and a few of the circumstances, admits he is an author, and makes it clear he is manipulating an imaginary world. In return for this concession, the artist wins the rights of poetic truth, to imagine what she cannot prove to have happened; and the beautiful resemblance of her imagination to reality changes the real world with every reading. The genres of art -- the novel, the sonnet, the short story, the monologue -- are created to bracket the fact-like statements of artists, saying "this is not to be checked because it is not a fact-claim;" but the artistic bracket also says, as a pedal-point to all its themes, "Look at the world and you'll see it's like this." There was no Nicholas Nickleby and no Smike, but there are people like them, and the one's compassion for the other must be realized in the world. There was no Anna Karenina and no Levin, but Levin is on the right path for the real world and Anna is not.

These matters are not hard to understand, if you care about literature and have learned from its history. You have a right to your opinions, and you have a right to your vision; but you don't have a right to your own facts, even if you are an artist. It's fun to play around the borders of life and art, but if you want to use the transgressive authority of a fact-claim -- if you want to say to your audience This really happened to me -- you must also accept the responsibilities of a journalist.  Daisey's maneuver was phoney journalism and false art, and raises not only ethical but esthetic questions about his other work. He seems to lack respect for the truth claims of art, the shattering power of the probable impossible that Aristotle thought better than any history. If he understood the power of fiction he would not have tried to pass it off as fact.

Novelists of the last century learned the art of unreliable narration, as we have learned in modern times that no one including a narrator possesses whole truth. But to banish the idea of truth just because you don't have it all is to commit the philosophical howler of post-modernism. It's a juvenile act. A grownup doesn't sweep the pieces off the chessboard just because he can't win.

These unnecessary confusions prove that free inquiry, and journalism, are necessary. We have to keep the faith with truth, precisely because she is never fully revealed.

*Mike Daisey: His Secret Fortress on the Web, http://mikedaisey.blogspot.com, March 16, 2012

**"Still hope," December 11, 2011

***"Deconstructionist Word," March 3, 2012

deconstructionist word

With respect to the requirements of art, the probable impossible is always preferable to the improbable possible.

-- Aristotle, Poetics

There was a battle about truth last weekend, an old-fashioned meeting engagement fought in the open pages of my favorite sources of truth, the New York Times and National Public Radio. There's a book about this battle,* the quarrel seven years ago between a writer and a fact-checker. Jim Fingal the fact-checker said to John D'Agata the  writer that he had made many errors of fact. Said D'Agata to Fingal, don't bother me I'm an essayist and the details are of no consequence.

D'Agato had written about a suicide in Las Vegas in the year 2002. He referred to the young man who had jumped from a hotel observation deck by his actual name and then, shall we say, he mused about what was going on in the city at the same time.  Along the way he made statements of factual form.  He wrote for instance that at the time of the death there were "34 licensed strip clubs in Vegas," and that it took nine seconds for the suicide to reach the ground.  Fingal's findings included the following corrections: there were 31 licensed strip clubs, and the fall lasted eight seconds.**

Ah, if only I had a person of skill at my disposal, who would verify or disprove with more care than I can give the few factual statements I allow in these digital pages! I would be grateful for such service. It's hard for me to get excited about a difference of three strip clubs or one second. But D'Agato got very excited and defended all his, let's call them liberties; he defended them as the prerogative of a writer seeking greater Truth.  Those lucky enough never to have been confused by false pedagogy of the "five-paragraph essay" (a bizarre creature of remedial education precisely opposed to what it claims to be) will know that D'Agato is claiming certain privileges of an essayist. He certainly disdains the title of journalist. He was not, he says, "reporting" on the death, and Fingal is "ruining this essay" by confronting its factual statements with actual facts.

D'Agato's very specific defenses illuminate the literary territory that he wants to live in. 34 is the right number of strip clubs, he says, "because the rhythm of '34' works better . . . than the rhythm of '31.'" (I can't help but note, factually, that the the rhythm of "34" is precisely the same as the rhythm of "31.") He describes the other Vegas suicide of the date in question as a hanging (when it was in fact also a leap from height) because "I wanted [the death] to be more unique." D'Agato assumes omnipotence, in the manner of a poet or novelist, over the figurative world of his text. Works of fiction aim to be true in a way related to fact but at the same time transcending fact.  There was no Oliver Twist, but Dickens revealed the brutality and cruelty of nineteenth-century London more effectively than a hundred books of social history (and this, dearest reader is not a factual statement, so I am beyond the need of a fact-checker as I write it.) Here's the point: D'Agato was not writing a novel.  He might have written a novel.  Many novelists these days write about this kind of subject (Don DeLillo, where are you when we need you?) But the piece of writing in question is not fiction.

If the fact-checked essay had been a short story instead, its writer could invent names, persons, dates, cities, incidents and personal narratives, with only a voluntary and impressionistic relation to fact. Readers would understand his allegiance, and no issues of truth would arise. The truth of fiction, as Aristotle noticed, is the truth of the probable rather than of the possible. The beholder is not supposed to say, "Yes, I was just talking to Antonio the other day in the Rialto," but rather, "Yes, Antonio is like a kind of person I might talk to if I went to some place like the Rialto."  There is no controversy among liberally educated people about the contract of fiction; but if a writer behaves this way outside the bounds of fiction he wanders in the Colbertian wonderland of "truthiness."***  It's truthy though untrue that there were 34 strip clubs. It's also truthy though untrue that Obama is a Muslim. In the South as half my family grew up there it was truthy that "niggrahs" weren't ready for freedom, and in 1988 it was plenty truthy that Willie Horton was coming to rape your daughter.

It's worth saying again that I'm a liberal, was born, raised and will die a liberal. But these days a liberal has to be a conservative as well, since those who now call themselves conservative have abandoned their posts. So as a conservative I must point out that, though I do not own it, there is such a thing as truth. It's precisely because there is truth that as a liberal I must refuse to let anyone claim to own it. The truth is too important to be owned, and everyone who claims it must be tested. There is truth, and what conflicts with it is falsehood, and no human being is completely true.

We don't hold it against Tolstoy that there was in fact no civilian named Pierre Bezukhov wandering through the battle of Borodino. And when Tolstoy says that all happy families are alike, you may disagree with him but your disagreement is not factual, because you are disagreeing with his judgment and his definitions not with the facts. What is "happiness"? How exactly are happy families "alike"? These are not factual questions. You want to know what Tolstoy means when he asks them, and he tells you for a thousand pages, and no fact-checker comes to plague  him. But these are rights of a novelist.

There are different categories of truth. There's the truth of a fact, of a cadence, of a currency, of a soliloquy, of a dialogue, of an epigram, of a quatrain, of a prayer, of a lover's vow, of a plumb line, of a gunsight, of a song, of a self-evident right. The different  categories of truth are tested in their various ways, but factual truth is tested factually. And unless you're writing fiction, every factual statement a writer writes is subject to fact-checking -- and the writer should be grateful.

An essay is not fiction, but it is not particularly about facts, and an essayist who does not want to spend his days with the fact-checker will be sparing in his factual statements. Lucky for him, such a writer is in a great tradition. Montaigne wrote that "I study myself more than any other subject." And the essay is a private musing on experiences not meant in themselves to be questionable, a private musing written in the hope of being so predictably unpredictable, so astonishing in its self-evidence, that it has public appeal.  Emerson's thundering serial aphorisms are meant like an organ concerto to sweep you into another realm before you can wonder about the truth of the first note, which would not in any case determine the value of the last one.  The essayist says "I am here, now, seeing this and thinking that, reminded of a third thing and suffering its experience, following where it escapes and tracking it to the next site where a dying campfire shows that the sprite has once again gone missing."  To read an essay is to go on a journey with a guide who, if she had a map, wouldn't show it to you. If you don't like this, you don't like essays.

An essay is literature not science; it is a singularity not a generalization.  It is verifiable -- or disprovable -- only by the power -- or the weakness -- of its performance. Many of the most important truths are performative. Certain things become true because the right person says it in the right way at the right time. If the pastor says, accompanied by the signing of certain documents, that you are now husband and wife -- well then you are now husband and wife, and if you try to pretend otherwise the law will catch you up. If the Treasury says in writing that a pigmented piece of paper has the value of a dollar, then it really does have the value of a dollar, whatever at the moment that value is; and if you try to pass off another piece of paper as a dollar, a piece of paper that the Treasury has not approved, then you are a criminal no matter how exactly you have rendered the "truth" of a dollar in your counterfeit. Emerson mints his own currency; he gets away with arrogant ellipses because his fireworks blind you.

An essay is not a news report. But when it acts like a news report it is vulnerable to factual correction. There are many today who say they are not journalists, and all they really want is to avoid the responsibilities of journalism. So Mr. D'Agato, if you are not a journalist, don't act like one; if you are an essayist, remember how essayists write.

Yes, as a liberal compelled to be conservative, I say that there is truth, and that to refuse correction is to lie. All discourses are not equivalent in value; and we know this because the Deconstructionist Word once became flesh, and it was George W. Bush.

*The Lifespan of a Fact, John D'Agato and Jim Fingal (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012).  I have not read the book. My source for the facts of their dispute is Jennifer B. McDonald's review in the New York Times Book Review of Feb. 26.

**I do not find the latter dispute in McDonald's review, but I heard it discussed on NPR.

***McDonald also noticed the destination of this slippery slope: "Suddenly there is no difference between essaying the Truth and essaying Truthiness."

deep river

My home is over Jordan.

-- Spiritual

The past is never dead. It's not even past.

-- William Faulkner

The bass line goes so deep I can't sing it, I'm only a baritone. So I sing the upper bass, near the bottom of a sliding column of eight voices. The room is just big enough for sixty of us. When we all hit the chords just right my head rings, and for the next days and nights my brain rings too. I can't find the off-switch. Not an unpleasant condition this, but it I'm likely to get lost in the subway: I could miss my stop while the chords in my head are descending again into the deep.

I don't look very hard for the off-switch. My home is over Jordan, I want to cross over. I'm obsessed with a song from another world: it was not meant to speak my mind. It speaks against me, so why does it stick to me so?

We don't know the names of those who made songs like this. The buyers and sellers of those people suppressed their names and their languages, stole their present labor and their future hope as well, manipulating their loving and child-bearing by principles of animal husbandry. The singers were exiles and unwilling sojourners, and nothing here belonged to them not even their children. This was not their home.

The songs must have had a comforting surface, because it's said that even the masters loved to hear them. From the veranda the singing must have sounded like resignation. There's no happiness for me here, so I'll get my reward in the next world, where my home is. The masters were glad to let the souls of chattel be rewarded, provided that first they got full value of the bodies they had bought or bred. Good, they said to each other of an evening, good. Let them sing. Let the happy darkies tranquilize themselves.

White folks may still mistake the songs for opiate, hearing them as the masters did. Heard that way, the songs offend or bore us. Offend us because they seem to accept what should not be accepted. Bore us, because that is how we stay distant from the suffering our parents profited from. How can we enjoy these songs, knowing what we know now?

The songs of enslaved persons present a conundrum also for descendants who are not enslaved. Can the songs that braced the soul in soul-crushing times model the ways of prosperity? Can survival-songs of the powerless teach the use of power?

The masters were bamboozled. They swallowed a sugar-coated pill, and what they took into their guts, their bones and hearts, was defiance cleverly disguised, exposed and concealed in the same phrase. Frederick Douglas himself said that he "did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of these rude and apparently incoherent songs." It was only as a free man that he realized "slaves sing most when they are most unhappy,"* and this body of their work realizes -- makes real -- their hope.  Jordan is a river of new life -- "Wade in the water, children." Jordan is not Styx but the Ohio.

Naming your home is resistance. To name your home as somewhere else is rebellion. I am a human being, they said; I belong somewhere in this world, but I ought not to be here. Some singers thought death would be better than this. Some thought they could return to their African homelands across the deep river of Ocean. But many were thinking of crossing a North American river, where the kingdom of enslavement met its boundary.  On the other shore was a place where you could belong to yourself. Some were planning their escape -- "Follow the drinking gourd," the Little Dipper that contains the North Star. They remembered that they were people of the Promise Land. And when they got there, there would be no boundaries, and they would "walk all over God's Heaven."

There's no way to do the research that would confirm this, but this art for sure saved lives. Surviving and remembering who you are in the face of cruelty is a victory. The masters knew what was at stake, and they did all they could to erase the memory of home. But actual Jordan is not in question here; the depth of Jordan River is poetic. Neither written nor aural scripture measures the river. The choir was saying, I ought not to be here, I ought to cross the water again, or take the underground railroad to freedom. Who are we? we are the people from elsewhere, people of Promise.

I think all this as I try to remember to get off the train. But when the chord hits just right my head melts and I'm not sure what wall I will walk into next, or what part of the city I'll arrive at. I'm outside of myself. That's what ecstasy is, standing outside. I guess this is why people sing, why they once sang -- to get through the day that they couldn't get through without the song. To escape and save themselves for another day. To remember where they came from.

Frederick Douglass, "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave," The Classic Slave Narratives, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: New American Library, 2002), pp. 349-350.

infinite nutshell

I could be bounded in a nut shell and count myself a king of infinite space.

-- Hamlet

If you build it, he will come.

-- W. P. Kinsella, Field of Dreams

He has at least three diseases, two of which are cancers, but neither of the cancers will kill him. Something else will take him first, and that something is his "hospice diagnosis," the disease whose symptoms we treat. Other teams evaluate and treat his other sicknesses. The latest developments in demise are the stuff of our talks, the threads emerging and submerging in his tapestry of decay. You may think this sounds morbid but - mirabile! -- it is not.

He reviews his life, his phobias, joys and losses, from the kitchen table. We have a grand time. There is a frissive pleasure to be taken from his contrarian thoughts and provoking questions, which he offers in sparkling humor.

He's an introvert, no small talker. He's agoraphobic, and doesn't like crowds. Walking into an office party he wouldn't know what to say. But for life and death, the cruel choices of precedence among disorders competing to dismantle him, he's a raconteur of the first order. He doesn't plan to die. He plans for pleasure -- he wants to get a lesion taken off his nose because it's ugly; the doctors (not ours) say "Why bother? you'll die in six months." But he's thinking of how he will look, what his life will be like, as if he had a future before him. As if he were alive.

Put him in at the wheel of a car, with his oxygen stored beside him, and he's as good as ever. He drove to Pennsylvania the other day and felt like a healthy young man. It lifted his spirits. When he can think this way, like a person without disease, his quality of life improves.

He can do this on his own. I'm flattered that he likes to do it with me. He finds me useful. That's because we're alike. He is quite charming sometimes, and so can I be. But it's an effort. We work at it. It costs.

I too am an introvert. There's a psychological test, one of the assessments to which counselors are subjected at thresholds of training, the first of whose categories is an introversion/extroversion scale. I'm about as introverted as the scale can measure. I've learned, as my cohort has, various skills of presentation -- how to behave with others when you have something to do. Sometimes, if you're one of us, your meter hits Empty. The persons around you are quite suddenly a crowd, and they're taking all the air from the room, and you must go elsewhere without delay, to some place that is at least momentarily your own. You might recover strength in the presence of those you know and trust well, one or two at a time; but sometimes you must be free even of them, must have a room to yourself and your thoughts, or sometimes a room just to yourself until you can remember how to recognize your thoughts. Because that is how you know who you are -- in the quiet of the inner room, and everything you do for others (and you must do with others) is measured and guided by what you heard in the inner room. Or else. Or else you start to go crazy. Which, if they understand what I mean, no one would want.

This -- this writing -- this is a way for me to recognize my thoughts. I have to make place for them, so they will come.

We are, I think, a minority. A lot of us are artists, philosophers, inventors, creators. Some of us learn to be nice about it, but we want to do things our way. The majority do not understand us well. Not only our utterances but our very silences arouse their suspicion, originating as they do from a place that is not of this world. So our success in the world depends to a large extent on how well we learn to pass for normal.

On the other hand, we don't understand the extroverts very well -- the people who retreat from solitude into the safety of a crowd because in silence they dissolve: the people who learn right out there in public, as they say and do stuff, who they are. We detest above all their untragic optimism, their unadulterated hopefulness. We have to keep reminding ourselves that they're not crazy, they're just, well, different. The universe would be incomplete without them. And it would also be incomplete without us.

So it's all right if they leave us alone, because for a long time, much longer than they expect, we'll be perfectly all right. We can keep ourselves company.  Sometimes in fact we yearn for our own company. Prayer, meditation, writing, composing, singing, running, sculpting -- these are our private places, our disciplines of solitude, our temples of contemplation built in faith that the gods will come and a real world will appear.

Over a lifetime, if we learn how to do it well, we become our own good company. They used to say that an artist needs "experience:" if you didn't like Hemingway head for every war, famine, drunken revel and physical ordeal the world can supply you could not be "authentic." But experience can truly arise in a country house, a wheelchair or a bed. My cohort and I, when the time of our dying comes, will be separated from the society we have cultivated in the nutshell of our minds. So it is a good thing to leave some artifacts behind, some trace of our investments and our expeditions. How else will our heirs know who we are, as opposed to who we passed for?