A recurring fight I used to have with one of my oldest friends involves the issue of competing truths. We’d be at a party or gathering together and she’d start telling a story about some event or conversation we’d both witnessed. I’d hear her version of the story and barely recognize it—it was shocking, and often infuriating, to realize how differently we experienced the same event.
I remember one time this happened, at a party in the backyard of a now-shuttered dance-y bar on Franklin Avenue. We were talking to different people but standing close enough that I could hear snippets of what she said. I recognized the story she was telling, started listening to her version of it, and flipped out. I remember the cloudiness in my brain, the inability to focus on the person in front of me. Instead, I wanted to turn to my friend, shake her, scream to everyone she was talking to that that wasn’t even what had happened! That the story she’d just told wasn’t the truth. That my version of events was objectively accurate, and she was mistaken.1
Somehow, in hearing what she’d said, I felt like something was stolen from me.
That was a long time ago, and that particular friend has a habit of (successfully, entertainingly) embellishing details when retelling stories for an audience. She’s a storyteller; an artist. She’s good at what she does.
Occasionally I would interject and try to correct her during one of her stories. At the time I thought I was being “fun” and “jabby,” though probably came across more as whiney and critical. It never panned out how I wanted anyway. I could never convince her that my story was accurate, and hers wasn’t. And now, after a decade of maturation and some occasional good therapy, I’ve come to understand why.
I’m not sure I’ve ever believed in objective truth. Even as I sit down to try to write this post, the word itself—truth—evades me. It feels squirmy and surprisingly strong, like fish do when they’re out of the net but not yet unconscious.2
Thankfully, I’m not going to approach the question of what is truth. That’s for the philosophers; that’s why I abandoned the idea of pursuing an advanced degree in religious studies. Instead, I became a lawyer! [groan] And my take is that lawyers deal in facts, not truths. Come at me.
A few years ago, my friend Alex contacted me about a project she was working on. Alex and her creative partner Tali make incredible art that sometimes involves law or legal concepts—this particular piece, it turns out, was about “truth.”
Alex was interviewing people in a variety of professions whose work touched on the concept of truth for a film partially inspired by Bertolt Brecht’s essay, “Writing the Truth: Five Difficulties.” She wanted to include an interview with a judge and was reaching out to her lawyer friends to see if we had connections or ideas.
I thought the project sounded interesting, but it also made me squirm (see fish discussion, above). My first thought was, perhaps it would be tough to find a judge who’d want to be involved with a film coming out of the Whitney Museum’s vaguely Marxist Independent Study Program, in which Alex was a participant. My second thought was that, from my perspective at least, truth doesn’t have much at all to do with the law.
