Truth

"The search for truth...it's not for the faint of heart." -- Det. Robert Goren, Law and Order: CI

Truth is a major preoccupation of mine. I want to know what's at the heart of everything. I always try to figure out what makes people do the things they do. Maybe that's why shows like CI appeal to me so much.

The search for truth is probably what drives most writers. Some of us are looking for truth in the outside world. Some of us are obsessed with digging the truth from the deep wells and hidden spaces inside ourselves. I think both are equally dangerous. Sometimes the truths are things with which I find it hard to live once they've been uncovered. I find that people weren't who I thought they were. I find that I have spaces of darkness inside.

Those truths take on a life of their own. They shuffle their feet and leave fingerprints on the windows. They perch on the bookshelves and trail dirt on the clean floors. There's a lingering smell of them like the rancid odor of spoiled milk that floats in at odd moments once these uncomfortable truths have been unearthed. They slide across happy moments like a sudden stormcloud across the sun when you're not expecting them.

There's a line in Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" that says, "'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' —that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." I have always believed it to be true, at least in the aspect that truth is beautiful, and that nothing can really be beautiful that is artificial. However, lately, a question has been warring with this old axiom. How can I reconcile the shambling ugliness of some of the truths that emerge with Keats's declaration of beauty?

The only way I can resolve the paradox is that not all beauty is comforting. The glaciers of the frozen north are beautiful, majestic, pure, but I don't think anyone could ever label them as safe or tame. Arenal, in full eruption and framed against the velvet of black sky, stirs the soul with its powerful beauty, yet every time the earth moves with its rumbling, a primal shiver runs through the body and there's no doubt that there's no safety in its presence.

These dark truths come to me from the world in general sometimes, but more often, and more persistently, they come from my analysis of my own character. As I have often said, I'm really not a very nice person when you get right down to it. As long as I know that, as long as I am honest with myself right down to the bone, right down to the marrow, I can use that to keep myself in line. I can use that uncomfortable truth to force myself to do better, its sharp edges a blade to remove everything that I know should not stay. If I can use them to make myself stronger or better, then there is a beauty in that. If they can become tools for change or for increasing my understanding of the world around me, then there is a beauty in that, too.

It's a harder beauty. It's not the beauty of a summer meadow or a butterfly lighting on a dewy rose. It's the turbulent beauty of the sea before the storm, the austere beauty of shifting desert sand. While this kind of truth may bring me pain when it is revealed, if it can make me stronger, then it is worthy of pursuit.