“The moment that you feel, just possibly, you are walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself, that is the moment you might be starting to get it right.” ― Neil Gaiman
I have, I think, a reputation for being a dreadfully honest person. I like to think so, anyway. My students certainly appreciate my candor: they tell me so directly. Generally speaking, we professors seem bent on keeping students mystified and terrified, which does wonders to keep them docile, of course. Otherwise, how could 2,000 of us control 40,000 of them? So my forthrightness and unguardedness -- and my willingness to be visible and vulnerable in very public ways -- strikes a rare and welcome chord with them, and they appreciate it. I try to model what being honest looks like, what it allows us to be and do, but what it requires from us in the process as well.
I want to be clear, though, that my dreadful honesty has nothing to do with being "brutally honest." When someone asks "Can I be brutally honest with you?", what they are really asking for is permission to hurt your feelings. So my answer is always "Fuck no! You may NOT be brutally honest with me. Indeed, you are going to sugarcoat this sombitch, whatever it is."
I call it dreadful honesty, I guess, because it is so very far removed from how I used to be, how I used to navigate the world. Simply put, when I was abusing drugs and alcohol, I was a habitual liar and thief. Here's an old joke: How do you know when a drug addict/alcoholic is lying? Answer: Their lips are moving. My life used to be nothing but a tissue of lies: lies upon lies about lies to cover the lies I had already told. Being honest today doesn't make me morally superior or righteous. It just keeps me from doing damage to myself or to those I come in contact with as I go about my day. It is also a whole lot simpler and easier this way -- so much less work and stress!
I learned about honesty in my recovery program, of course. There it is referred to as "rigorous honesty," which I like a lot. It's a demanding discipline, this way of being in the world. It requires a certain rigor to be honest and clear-eyed and to keep it up for any length of time, especially when looking at yourself. I really had no idea about how to be honest when I first got sober. I would go to 12 Step meetings and watch people share and think, "Oh, so *that's* what honesty looks like! *That's* how you do it. Interesting."
I had to learn to be honest like learning a foreign language. My mentors in recovery got me there in baby steps. Start with "cash register honesty," they said, because that is the easiest kind. If someone gives you too much change at the store, you stop and give that extra money back. Or if your waiter forgets to put something on your check, you have them correct it and pay the full amount you owe, etc., because if you can't do cash register honesty, you really can't do any kind of honesty.
Oddly enough, to keep on the path of honesty, I had to learn how and when and why to tell little white lies. At some point, an adherence to nothing but scrupulous honesty runs everyone off, makes you a sociopath and a pariah. In like manner, I learned that lies of omission are better than lies of commission. "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all" is some of them most powerful wisdom I know, a deeply ethical and humane way of being in the world. When it comes to honesty, I was taught that the rule is to be hard on myself and easy on others.
My devotion to honesty and truthfulness has gotten me into arguments with some writers of creative nonfiction I know. Some of them have suggested that it is permissible to shape or shave their memories, to collapse events or persons in a story or invent dialogue, for instance, if such things are done in the pursuit of a "higher truth." I am really uncomfortable with such suggestions. They strike me as cheating, as lazy and undisciplined work, so much so that I refer to my essays as *literary* nonfiction, not creative nonfiction, in order to avoid any possible confusion. "Getting creative with the facts" also seems like a quintessential slippery slope. Once I allow myself that much latitude and ease in trying to render the truth, I will be unable to do it straight up anymore. There are many, many memoirs out there that have been proven to be mostly fictitious in nature, and I think this is why. The truth is hard and often unattractive, and lying is both easy and seductive.
Some of the songs I write are purely autobiographical, and some are completely fictional. But most are some combination of the two for a variety of reasons, mostly in an attempt to help my listeners relate to my ideas, find purchase in my stories, find valences and connections with my meaning, which can be difficult in the cramped space allowed by a 3 minute pop song. Nonfiction gives my songwriting substance and fiction gives me a broader canvas and more colors with which to reach people.
These blogposts here, however, are solely nonfiction, as close to the truth as my fallible human perception and memory and the imperfections of written language will allow, doing everything I can to be honest with myself and with you, to render the reality, the truth, the facts as I have experienced them. It is ever more important that I maintain this discipline.
As I type these words, there is another "debate" on television which I am assiduously not watching. According to today's New York Times, the President is now averaging more than 50 false or misleading claims a day. The sheer number of his untruths, the relentlessness with which he pursues them, and the cumulative effect of years and years of his torrential dishonesty amount to an concerted assault on the very concept of truth, not just a disregard for the truth or a mere failure/refusal to acknowledge the truth. Trump's corrosive and long-lasting legacy will be his fundamental assault on the truth itself -- on facts, logic, science, on the basic premises by which we engage with reality, create and share knowledge, form communities, and make sense of the universe. We are careening toward a new Dark Age, and it may be generations before we recover from it.