In Greek, ἀληθείᾳ, the word for truth, might best be translated: “that which makes itself obvious.” There are other best ways to define it.
“The stone the builders cast out has become the cornerstone.” In Psalm 118:22 I found a comfort and a clue. I’d like to say that I repeated this verse to myself ceaselessly, but that would be a lie. I didn’t even know it mattered to me until I happened upon the words as a child happens upon a forgotten toy and remembers suddenly the life that had been in it. Mostly this experience happens to children when they become adults. I just found the words in the box. But the box was my head.
I needed to find the cast-out stone. That’s how to begin. I thought of the names of my daughters: Iris. Hana. Before they were born, before I had any inkling of their existence, they each were such a stone. But not now. Too many years have passed. My love for them isn’t silent. They do not fill me with silence. And what is silent in them is theirs alone. A rock cast away from me. Something I can’t pick up.
I thought of my wife, Kristy. But her silence is the prism that breaks white light into the rainbow.
I thought of a dream I had after I fell in love with Kristy and decided I must become a poet. In the dream I wandered down a dark road through a kept field. The grass all mown. I thought it was a cemetery but there weren’t any stones. A tree by a bend in the pitch-black asphalt, so black I knew it had been raining. That’s when I saw the rainbow. It kept still in the sky as I neared it. The closer I got the more intensely I could see the colors, and in the spectrum I saw lightning flashing like a sensation between synapses. So I imagined it. Going closer I could see the rainbow had no breadth, no depth; it was thinner than a razor. That’s when I saw the letter floating in the colors. Just one letter. It flashed, made of electricity. “It is the letter aleph,” I thought to myself. Then the lightning in the letter struck my hand and the pain woke me up. It wasn’t until years later, when I finally began to study Hebrew, that I realized I’d recognized the letter before I could have known it.
I gave Hebrew up. It took too much time away from writing poetry.
Fifteen years passed.
Now I’m studying ancient Greek. Every hour I spend in declensions and conjugations deepens my sense of my own ignorance. It’s a kind of revelation, I guess. I’m not the student I thought I was.
To mark silence ( ) or * seemed like options for a while.
But the open-close parentheses began to seem like hands closing in prayer, or like hands circling a mouth that is unseen but open and about to yell out.
The asterisk—despite being that mark in Proto-Indo-European linguistics that marks the existence of an ur-word whose primary meaning undergirds and supports every iteration through time of every related word but whose proof etched in mud or in wax or on papyrus has never once been found—just felt like a notation that meant either to look up at the night sky at the grand silence of the stars, or to look at the bottom of the page for a note to help explain what might have been unclear in the text above. Usually, an allusion.
But what I want to point to isn’t in any direction because it’s in every direction.
Ubiquitous. Obvious.
Unavailable by the means at hand.
All.
I want to ask a question about silence.
The answer is in the disappearance of the question.
Asclepiades of Tragilus, a fourth-century poet, records the Sphinx’s riddle: “There is on earth a two-footed and four-footed creature with a single voice, and three-footed, changing its form alone of all creatures that move in earth, sky, or sea. When it walks on the most legs, then the strength of its limbs is weakest.” It’s likely he took the riddle from other authors who have slipped back into anonymity—by which I mean, I guess, that they fell back into time. I have to remind myself those poets had thumbprints like labyrinths unique to themselves, just as I have my own. But it is the riddle, whose answer for each of us is the same, that gets to have an identity more or less permanent.
The Sphinx seized and devoured young and old, large and small. A scholiast, writing about Euripides, notes: “But also the handsomest and loveliest of all, the dear son of blameless Creon, noble Haemon.” How blameless Creon is any reader of ancient tragedy can decide for herself. No one seems very blameless. We sense in the riddle some compulsion to answer, though we know it might be wiser to keep quiet. The words seem to contain a secret just as we ourselves seem to contain one. Mostly we fear what we want—that the answer will let the secret out, and somehow, as if by magic, we’ll be released by letting go of the answer we had contained.
The riddle seems immune to mortality, and though to answer wrong is to face death in the form of the Sphinx’s punishment, to answer correctly admits to the same fact: a man begins weak and gains strength only to become weak again. The riddle is deathless, even when the answer is death. Nor does answering correctly release you from the Sphinx’s crisis. It just presses in the air an invisible button called pause.
Words that, for many years, felt to me they admitted intellectual failure, have changed their nature: I don’t know. Now they seem to me words of spiritual honesty.
When I read Oedipus Rex I say to myself a silent prayer that this time Oedipus, brash man of brilliant mind, might reach the gates of Thebes and in answer to the Sphinx’s question say, I don’t know, and walk past the walled city that he does not know is his home.
But the prayer never comes true.
Today a milk-white butterfly landed on the lavender to take her fill of nectar, and the humble-bee scared her away to sip at the same blossom. I guess they heard the same question though it was silent to me, eating honey on toast.
Such strange hopes persist in silence. The grief substitute. The alternate.
Riddles riddle silence. Pierce it. Bewilder it by betraying it. It is as if a question had been asking itself forever without being heard, somewhere behind the mind or deeper than it, somewhere within the intangible reaches of soul, and then so gradually it escapes notice until it can no longer be ignored, the silent thing called out into voice. The riddle says, Tell me what you know, and when you do tell, you open your eyes to the fact that you don’t know what it is you know.
Wisdom makes the problem worse.
An apocryphal fragment written down by Pseudo-Plato and attributed to Homer speaks to the issue: “He knew a lot of things, but knew them all badly.”
We think we’re talking about others, but later see we’ve been speaking the whole time about ourselves. It’s disappointing even as it’s a revelation. Just another one of Fate’s riddles, even if fate is no more than realizing you are yourself and have been, without interruption, yourself your whole life—even as one late night you cried when you left behind your lovely wife holding to her fragrant breast your son because you needed to return
