Advent, Day 21: I’ll Wrestle Your Stranger

(Day 21 of this year’s Advent series. Yesterday’s piece was about tranquility; today we consider honesty.)

I’ll Wrestle Your Stranger

I.

I’ll wrestle Your Stranger,
If that is my part.

Yet I would rather talk
Heart-to-heart,
Or as with silence
Give up all defense –

II.

Did Jacob learn 
A better way to fight, 
That night?
Lacking words
He used so well in greed –

All tongues, asleep
He left under a stone;

Now, alone,
Stripped from self and home,
He learned the love of
Honesty –
By Your rough embrace.

---

So, about honesty: 

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

I think of honesty not as a value but as a practice. It is a quality I am most aware of when writing; the sense that some part of a sentence or story has taken the easy way out. That’s my sign to think again. 

It is fine if something is told “slant,” in Dickinson’s inimitable phrase. It is not fine if it is told lazily. 

And to be clear: laziness, in the sense of apathy, can be a virtue (I promise you my argument on that one of these days). But laziness in the sense of triteness ranks high up on my personal list of moral failings to guard against. It is a flaw that trips twice: first, by dulling one’s own sense of persistence and care, and second, by dulling others’ sense of urgency toward existence.

…“Urgency toward existence”? Apparently so. 

Let’s be precise. The body is the primary tool with which to experience the world. And only one person will ever experience the world from within your body. 

Only one person can map your uncertainty from the inside. 

Only one person knows the shape of your pain well enough to translate it into empathy.

So: the practice of honesty is one way to pay attention to…all of that.

And honestly – 

Figuring out how to tell truth so it sounds more fun than the proverbial one that got away: it’s not a bad way to spend an evening, stone pillow and all.

---

---