Clarity for Teachers: Day 11
‘If you are true in your efforts to be clear, you will get what you need.’
As I work my way deeper into the landscape of this advice, I find that I’m guided more and more by the teachings of fairy tales and myths. One of the lessons of the old stories is to be alive to the riddling nature of language: the promise, prophecy, blessing or curse that seemed so straightforward turns out to have a double meaning, the double meaning turns out to be a trap, or the trickster knack of finding a double meaning is what breaks the spell. ‘Be careful what you wish for!’ they say, because your words may be taken more literally than you meant them.
It occurs to me that it could seem perverse to bring this tricksy spirit into what’s meant to be about the pursuit of clarity. But I think it has to do with something I said on Day 2: ‘At some level, the world in which we find ourselves has the quality of a joke, rather than the quality of a checklist.’ A riddle is a lot like a joke, after all, and we all know about double entendres. My hunch is ‘getting’ clear is a lot like ‘getting’ a joke.
So here we are on Day 11, and just like yesterday, the advice consists of a promise — you will get what you need — and a condition: if you are true in your efforts. Though somehow the tone doesn’t trigger the same reaction as I had when I pulled out the Day 10 card; this one sounds more like it came from one of those old stories.
What does it mean to be true in your efforts? The kind of truth we’re at ease with these days is the pub quiz version, the determination of factual accuracy: ‘True or false: Charlie Davies wrote lyrics for Russian girlband t.A.T.u.’s second album?’ This kind of truth isn’t always trivial: the witness who swears to tell ‘the truth and nothing but the whole truth’ is upholding a more solemn version of the same thing. In the age of ‘fake news’, there’s more agitation about truth-as-facts than ever, and with good reason. But I’m not sure it helps much with today’s advice.
Instead, my thoughts slip to Swedish, where tro is the word for ‘faith’ or ‘belief’. The etymology is the same. It’s the ‘truth’ that lies behind being ‘a true friend’, which finds its opposite in an old expression like ‘he played me false’.
‘I don’t want to stay folded anywhere,’ writes Rilke, ‘because where I am folded, there I am a lie.’ I picture the ways a body can be taken out of shape by the tension of things carried inside and not spoken. The fold in which I try to hide the part of me I don’t want to think about, or don’t want you to see. The trust it takes to unfold. (There it is again, that etymological thread, linking trust and truth and tro…)
I think there are clues here to the truth that is called for in the bargain offered by today’s advice: faithfulness (a quality which comes into being over time, so we seem to have moved beyond the immediate benefits of yesterday’s promise), and a commitment to unfolding myself, to noticing the places where I’m contorted by fear or shame and learning to trust enough to let these go.
What of the other side of the bargain, though? Pay attention — it doesn’t promise you what you want, what you thought you would get, or anything of the sort. The deal is clear: you will get what you need. The stories say this may not look much like what you were expecting. Be ready to roll with it, to laugh at yourself, to be kind.
Later in the poem, Rilke writes, ‘I want to describe myself … like a saying that I finally understood.’
Be ready to get the joke.
Västerås, 15 March, 2020
This is the eleventh in a series of commentaries on ‘A teacher’s advice on how to be clear’, Charlie Davies’s reworking of the 1000-year-old Buddhist text, ‘Advice from Atisha’s Heart’. I’m writing these as I take part in Clarity for Teachers, a course that Charlie is leading. You can find out more on the How To Be Clear website.
