On Truth & Belief

In interviews filmmaker Werner Herzog has said there’s something beyond fact when it comes to art and the human condition, that there is an ecstatic truth that should be aimed for and reached by any means necessary regardless of what is reality, what is “true”. And this ecstatic truth is what resonates with people, reaching a deeper commonality than mundane empirical detail. This was in response to the reveal that some scenes, scenarios, and dialogue in his documentaries were staged. He doesn’t make a distinction between his features and documentaries, they both strive to reach further, beyond minutia to the universal, to the ecstatic truth.

This divide between fact and what I’ll call capital T Truth is more about perception and belief rather than objective reality. More about the spirit than the body. The simple facts of a situation may not reflect the Truth. Facts do not, in and of themselves, create meaning nor do they allow for nuance, context, or interpretation. And as we are all individuals with our own individual ways of thinking and seeing the world which we then weave together to create a personality and perspective and place in society it is no surprise that the baseness of fact has little to do with Truth.

In law it is common knowledge, almost cliche, that eye witness accounts are the least reliable. If you have ten witnesses to an event you’ll have ten different versions of what happened. I acknowledge when it comes to crime the distance between fact and Truth may be shorter I mention it just to highlight that even then, even in court, there is seldom certainty. What I’d like to inspect more is the interpersonal, the emotional, the psychological where the capital T Truth is more important and more elusive.

When I was in grade school one of the books in rotation that my teacher Ms. Melville would read to us was Crow Boy a picture book about a boy ostracized by his classmates for being different and dirty(literally), who made friends with animals but then was brought into the social fold by a new teacher who saw value in him. I loved the story because I was a messy chubby kid and got made fun of a lot, I identified with the Crow Boy, I felt like I was him. And I hoped that, like in the book, there would come a time that my differences would be recognized as strengths. A couple times Ms. Melville even referred to me as Crow Boy which I took as an incredible compliment and sign of affection. It got me through some rough days of bullying.

Years later in high school I was dating Ms. Melville’s daughter Jessy. At one point, out of curiosity and because it still meant a lot to me, I mentioned to Ms. Melville over dinner how she had said I reminded her of the character from Crow Boy when I was her student. She cackled and said “Yeah! You were such a mess!” She went on to say that I reminded her of the character because my hair was always tangled up and my clothes were always rumpled. At the time it was crushing, one of the fundamental building blocks of my identity was a lie.

In high school I auditioned for YAT(Young American Theater) which was the youth program at the local professional theater NAT(New American Theater). I auditioned once and didn’t get in, auditioned the next year and did. I did the Sam Jackson Ezekiel 25:17 monologue from Pulp Fiction and it seemed to go over really well. It was the first audition I’d done where I felt like I’d been a success. YAT more so than plays and musicals at my high school felt competitive, felt legit. It was the first time I felt validated as an artist.

Flash forward to post college, Chicago had chewed me up and spit me out and I had moved back in with my parents. Richard the former artistic director of the now defunct NAT who had cast me in YAT was running a new theater company and he cast me in that particular season’s pseudo comic murder mystery Murder Center Stage. The play ran for two months and at the cast party I mentioned to Richard how informative and inspiring getting into YAT was, how that monologue was the first good work I felt I did. He responded “I cast you because we needed guys and you were the only one that auditioned”. He went on to say, in so many words, that as a teen I was thoroughly mediocre even boring and that my choice of monologue, which I thought edgy and funny, was irrelevant. Ouch.

There’s a line in the movie Adaptation when Donald is dying he says to Charlie “you are what you love, not what loves you”. And this was an epiphany to me when I first saw the film, it was so striking I went back and watched it again the same day. The fact that Ms. Melville was actually kind of cruel and that Richard was calculating and indifferent doesn’t actually matter. Those moments mean something to me, they were two incredibly informative experiences for the man I’ve become, they are part of my capital T Truth. In some ways the solace I found in Crow Boy and the confidence I gained from YAT have nothing to do with them, they can’t touch it, its mine. No, that’s not exactly right, its not a possession, it is me.

There are shades of Truth, spotlights and shadows, its complex. I have friends I loved dearly who are no longer my friends because of time and distance or some kind of falling out. That doesn’t leech meaning from the depth of our friendship when it was in its prime. Almost all my ex-lovers I don’t communicate with, some of them I still harbor some resentment towards, and they may have forgotten me entirely or feel regret about being with me or perhaps even nurture ongoing hostility regardless I value all those I have ever loved or had a connection with however brief, its part of my Truth, its made me who I am. And their animosity or shame or indifference doesn’t effect that. I don’t need a person, place or thing to reciprocate my feelings in order for them/it to give me value. My capital T Truth is not dependent on corroboration only my own personal belief.

One final example. College was rough for me and, looking back, I think I was searching for a place, searching for an identity. And by happenstance I was introduced to Johnny Cash. I fell in love with his music, his style, and what he stood for. I bought a pair of black cowboy boots and started wearing black dress clothes every day. I learned his music on guitar and I began to learn more about him. In his autobiography and in the biopic Walk The Line there is reference to him getting sober and turning from a life of drugs and booze and sex to a more spiritual and political lifestyle. He was a warrior for the common man, for the righteous. And even at 20 with my alcoholism still slowly percolating this aspect of Cash, this sober Rebel Poet persona is what I latched onto the hardest.

A couple years ago a definitive biography of Johnny Cash came out. In it the author, a friend of the Cash family and basically their familial historian, debunks a number of Cash myths some of which he himself perpetuated. The reality is that Cash struggled with abstinence from drugs his entire life on and off and never gave up drinking entirely. So in reality he was never actually sober. The same was true of June Carter whose purse was always full of prescription medications. He goes on to say that even after they were married both of them were periodically unfaithful to each other into their 60’s. Reading this I was stunned. But then upon reflection I realized I didn’t actually care.

I don’t care about the “facts” of his life. I care about the man, what he represented, and the stories he told. I care about what he meant to me, how he shaped my identity and worldview and ultimately how in some ways he helped me get sober by providing an example even if it was technically "false". The reality of the situation is not the Truth. Regardless, if the story of Cash crawling into a cave with suicidal intent and then being saved by God and led out to the figurative and literal light, is fact doesn’t mean its not True. I believe in the story and I believe in him. I believe in him because I choose to believe, because the image and idea of Johnny Cash means more to me than the reality.

Now I’m not talking about the perversion or dismissal of fact. I’m not talking about politics or policy or the news. I’m talking about the personal, the emotional, the ecstatic truth. I’m talking about the human heart. In affairs of the heart there is no such thing as cold fact. You can dictate your Truth.