The Truth Is Shitty
The thing happened last Friday. We were driving back from the TUBRI when we stopped at an intersection in New Orleans and my partner pointed it out. [1]
“Uh oh,” she said, “somebody’s naked!”
The five of us turned to see a heavy-set man scuttle by, briefs around his knees, displaying all that he was for the great wide world to enjoy: round, satiated belly; dust-matted tattoos; biscuit-flat buns; and an impressively large brood pouch. What was most interesting, however, was the way he contemplated whatever it was nestled in the fingertips of his left hand; it seemed to him to be the most beautiful object in all the world.
But we recognized it immediately.
“He has a poop in the hand!” My partner cried, in her charming Puerto Rican accent.
Panic ensued in the car.
The man, still engrossed in his nugget, disappeared behind us, and, for a moment, we were relieved. Then he reappeared on our left, which sent us reeling again, not being sure what to expect. Would he smear his prize on the glass or on the hood? Toss it into the intersection? Pop it in his mouth? We were clueless.
Instinctively I began to narrate. What else to do in such a situation but to proclaim the truth?
“Cute, he’s walking in front of us,” I said. “Aaannnddd now he’s stopping.”
The panic escalated with him standing before us as, I believe, we all ran the same calculation in our heads: there was a fifty-percent chance he’d either turn to us, in our white-as-a-canvas Altima, or pivot to the Ranger before him, stopped at the matching red light. What would he do? Who would be his victim?
But Lady Fortune was on our side: he turned to the latter and preceded to smear his rufous prize under the latch of the tailgate, deftly and defiantly. Then—and this came as a surprise—he spread his arms as gracefully as an alighting swan, ran his fingertips across the tailgate the while, and adorned the fresh red paint with chocolate pinstripes.
Now, I need to emphasize the magic of this moment. The way the man spread his arms, he did so with perfect synchronicity, and what’s more, the pinstripe to the right seemed to appear as if miraculously. We all knew he had a poop in the left hand, but whence in the right? The pinstripe was as unexpected as a rabbit appears from a hat—or better, I suppose, a gopher from its hole.
Anyway, I continued to narrate in detail as the others continued to panic and the truck lurch against the commanding power of the red light. I must confess that I was particularly happy to see the truck go that way rather than the other, for my only real concern at that point had been that the driver might back over the nugget-slinging man and into us, or worse, jump outside the truck and blow him, and us, to smithereens.
As the truck continued to lurch forward, the magician challenged the driver by folding his arms across the top of the tailgate, as innocently as a curly-haired child looks at the rain through the window. All the while, the light refused to change, and it began to feel like the man had cast a spell on the situation, forcing us to bear witness to this shit show for eternity.
But, finally, like the truck, time lurched forward too, and the driver ahead sped away. Without a care in the world, the poopy man folded his hands over his head, then pulled up his briefs and disappeared. As for us, we too sped away, passing, I shit you not, a cop car at the light adjacent.
Obviously the thing was the hot topic of the evening. The running assumption was that the man in question was either homeless or on a bad trip, or perhaps both, or perhaps neither but obviously unwell. But the way the conversation unfolded, it got me thinking: why these assumptions? Why these . . . judgements?
The reason seems obvious: the man’s behavior was abnormal (thank the pearly gates). But more importantly, we made these assumptions, I think, because the man had made us uncomfortable. How? Well, playing with poo isn’t the most hygienic way to pass the time, we know, not to mention you don’t usually see people doing so past childhood, if at all. Another source of discomfort, though, which is perhaps less obvious, is that the man refused to be unseen . . . yes, unseen, and O how we love to ignore the uncomfortable! even when it pertains to those in dire straits, or those whom we assume to be in dire straits. I mean, it’s a simple fact: we don’t like to see the truth when it refuses to play nicely with the way we think the world ought to be, as if the truth only were the truth insofar as it be positive and nice. So we find ways to efface it, when the truth makes us uncomfortable, to “unknow” or “unsee” it—and that’s where things get interesting.
When we think of ignorance, we typically think of it as an innocent state of simply not knowing something. True enough, that is a kind of ignorance. Let’s call that ignorance proper. But there’s other kinds of ignorance. There is, for example, necessary ignorance, which might be defined as such: in order to be conscious of something, you have to be unconscious of everything else. In other words, in order to currently know some one thing, you have to unknow literally all other things. Yikes! Of course, consciousness wouldn’t be possible if it didn’t play this predominately negative, or negating, role. I mean, just try to imagine writing a letter and swimming in a lake at the same time. You can’t. You’ll simply imagine one at the expense of the other. (Try it.) But there’s a third kind of ignorance—we might call it willful ignorance, the most insidious form of ignorance there is—which is perfectly captured by the root word itself: you are ignorant of those things you actively ignore. What’s so curious about this kind, though, is that it’s a sham, since, in order to properly ignore something, you must know precisely what it is you’re ignoring. Hell, it’s not just a sham; it’s a contradiction! but one, oddly, that obtains, at least when it pertains this our great human drama. [2]
To return to our anti-hero, what I’m trying to suggest is that what this shit-slinging man represented for us was something we were willfully ignoring, namely the fact that not one of us knew, or knows, rather, how to end the homeless crisis in this country, or the drug crisis, or the mental health crisis—which is damn vexing, especially when you face all three in your day-to-day city life. So what to do? What to do with these feelings of powerlessness? Ignore them! Ignore them and ignore the things that trigger them! But this man, he refused to be unseen and confronted us instead with that truth we grasped-in-order-to-ignore, and we reacted. Yes, that’s what we did: we reacted.
To be sure, there’s many ways to react when faced with the failure of your own willful ignorance. You can, for example, pontificate about it (as I am basically doing), you can squarely face the truth (as I hope I’m doing), or you can double down on your ignorance (as I certainly hope I’m not doing). But we reacted in the third way: we doubled down on our ignorance by assuming the man was homeless, drug addicted, or mentally unwell— assumptions which were nothing more than pernicious forms of revenge. Yes, they were merely ways of chastising the man, in the privacy of our own minds, for making us uncomfortable.
“You’re like this,” we seemed to be saying, “and it’s your own damned fault!”
At this point you might be thinking I’ve blown the whole thing out of proportion and my friends would be right to string me up by my toes for the conclusions I’ve drawn. But the simple fact of the matter is that we didn’t, and we don’t, know why the man acted the way he did; all we know is how we reacted to him. Nor, I might add, did the assumptions we made jive with my initial impression of this man. I was shocked, to be sure, but initially what I saw wasn’t someone struggling with homelessness, drug abuse, or mental health but rather someone acting with an incredible amount of grace, in his movements, and authenticity, in his execution. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve seen something more genuine in ages. It was like watching the perfect execution of some performance piece, one meant to sling the truth in my face despite all my efforts to the contrary.
In fact, reflecting as I am, I can’t help but wonder if this initial impression isn’t the reason why I can’t help but fancy the man a kind of philosopher now, a cynic sage, maybe, a Diogenes of New Orleans. The cynics, after all, were known for engaging in all manner of taboo behavior in public in order to coarse their fellow Athenians into a life of magnanimity and virtue, and I can certainly say, without a shadow of a doubt, that he has caused me to reflect on all manner of things philosophical.
As for the truth of the matter, or the truth as such (whatever that is), we’ll likely never know why the man acted the way he did. I do know one thing, though: he was way more than we originally took him for, it’s just that sometimes the truth is shitty.
- TUBRI stands for Tulane University Biodiversity Research Institute. My partner and her colleagues were doing field research on parasites found in certain kinds of fish collected in the Pearl River back in the sixties.
- I wish I could say these reflections on ignorance were my own, but they come from Jean-Paul Sartre, Truth and Existence, ed. Adrian van den Haven, trans. Ronald Aronson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
