Truth/truth(s)

By Andrea Scarpino 

I went to the tanning salon. I know—skin cancer. I’ve read the pamphlets. But sometimes I need a little sun. Sometimes I need to feel more heat on my skin than the Great White North provides.

And I thought about truth(s), little t, big T. I lay in the tanning bed and thought about Emily Dickinson’s, “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—” About how it’s a great party trick to tell a philosopher you don’t believe in Truth (big T)—except then you’re stuck with a philosopher for hours while he tries to argue you into believing. That’s what they do—philosophers—argue a poet to death. The heat of the tanning bed. I thought about truth/Truth. About telling it slanted. About brokenness.

Here is a truth: we’re broken. The stars broke open. The universe broke open. Everything continues to break. The project of poetry and the project of philosophy is the same: make sense of the breaking. But the poetry I love believes in tenuousness: this is true. And this. And this other thing. It tells the truth—a truth, one truth—while understanding a bunch of other truths circle overhead, just outside, clamor to come in. 

Sometimes, I watch myself talking with other people. Like I’m watching a movie, I can see myself concentrate to smile at the right time. I can see myself lean forward or back. Into or away. I grew up with an alcoholic parent—I think that teaches you that reality is constructed, that there is no Truth. Because what an alcoholic parent understands and remembers as truth is hardly what anyone else in the family remembers or understands. I think it also teaches you to step outside yourself, to watch what is happening carefully and closely at all times. To watch yourself move through whatever else is happening. 

In the tanning bed, I thought of lying on the beach with the sun’s full strength on my skin. I thought about the ocean. I could smell its saltiness. Couldn’t I have been there, on the beach, in that moment? Couldn’t I have written as if I were? Reality, broken. Truth, broken.

And the last two lines of Dickinson’s poem: “The Truth must dazzle gradually/ Or every man be blind—” Blindness as metaphor—truth too hard to look at directly, to stare deeply into. Truth that will take your breath away—as well as your sight. A tired trope, disability as metaphor. But I love Dickinson’s sense of breaking—even “dazzle” feels on the verge of collapse.

I watched myself, in that tanning bed. I stood at the door of my locked room and watched the bizarreness of the scene—pretend sun, pretend coffin, woman pretending-to-be-somewhere-else. Thinking about truth/Truth. Breaking. Truth broken open, reassembling itself.

I went to the tanning salon to think about truth, little t, big T. To feel sun on my skin. To get skin cancer. I went to the tanning salon to think about poetry and philosophy, their projects. I went to the tanning salon to remember Dickinson. And the universe broke open. And I watched it. 

Poet and essayist Andrea Scarpino is a frequent contributor to POTB. You can visit her at:

www.andreascarpino.com

Author: stevekuusisto

Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University View all posts by stevekuusisto