Of Happiness and Truth
The words in Portuguese are Felicidade and Verdade.
I am doing an online course with Brazilian writer Edmilson de Almeida Pereira, in which he introduced to us the concept of "mundo encaixado" or what we could translate as "fitted world." Today, he wrote to me that he hopes I'm finding happiness in my intellectual pursuits. His phrase made me cry.
For some time now, I've been writing to practice Truth. I jot down everything that I currently Know to be True (intentionally capitalized). I am understanding that when I reach Truth, I fit into the world.
In each phase of our lives, we know something, which means that in each phase of our lives, we can contribute something specific. In the phase of my life when I was pregnant and having babies, there was a boom of Knowledge I had never seen before. I wished more women had written and spoken about everything they learned at that phase. Now, Ulysses is turning three, and some things are fading away.
Of what remains: 1. Women need to invest a tremendous amount of energy in learning and figuring out how to care for their bodies and, consequently, their children's health. In our current society, none of the necessary Knowledge is given to us; on the contrary, we are miseducated, and we learn the wrong narratives and the sickening information. One needs to fight for health and then learn how to relax in true Knowledge despite all the doubts and judging eyes that will come as a consequence of the deep misogyny we live in. 2. Our society, especially the society in the US, but all the societies that live in cities and function within Western capitalist colonial structures, don't have anymore Knowledge of what childhood is and how the spirit of the child functions. All the structures we have in the rationalized, modernized, technology-driven worlds suppress the imagination and wildness of childhood, expecting organized and hierarchized actions that do not support human growth. As a consequence, people pathologize children and then, as a consequence, continue to pathologize themselves later in life. They never fit in. They were never given a chance—a true chance to be happy, to know themselves by first fitting in, and making sense to their parents and the world. Children don't make sense to these adults in this North American society.
When I was in Brazil, everyone acted like my children's cries, sufferings, and childish misbehavior made total sense every second.
What a relief. They ARE children.
I do not obey in advance.
The main lesson of this time in my life has been to follow desire. To learn what True Desire is.
The word true, the search for Truth, has been central to everything in my work in the last eight years. While writing my dissertation, I touched on it only to be called naive by my academic advisor. Truth, he said, is a philosophical term with a long history that can't be approached lightly. I disagreed and kept it in my text, and I am proud of this act of dissent. I carry that Truth is actually the basis for sanity and health. Not only the so-called mental health, but also the biological bodily health. The experience of Truth sustains human life, so we all have it at some point.
However, the experience of Truth can be corrupted; it will especially be undermined for women and anyone who doesn't fit in colonial/capitalist societies. In the fitted world where I come from, everyone fits somehow. In colonial societies, few are artificially made to fit through power and money.
The American society doesn't understand poetry. Here, people think poetry isn't true, that its base is metaphor, and therefore, only brings up comparisons that aim to expand our linguistic capacity, flexing our muscles for representations. They don't know that every word is a prayer. That every word that we utter builds the world anew.
Poetry only exists through Truth; it is effective prayer. Everyone who prays knows that true prayers are effective and that repetition out loud makes the prayer stronger. Poetry is on the path to becoming prayer; it uses words to solve problems and find ways forward. Through poetry, we discover the true potency of a specific word in a particular situation.
The incapacity to understand the word Truth in English might come from a lack of language that reflects the lack of experience in the society. In Portuguese, the word is "verdade," which has the same suffix as "felicidade": "dade," which serves to create abstract nouns that denote an impermanent state, a state of being. The word "truthiness," which would serve the purpose, had its meaning transformed into the incapacity of some to put together fact and Truth, those who so greatly lost touch with reality that they confuse human-invented narratives with experience. So, there is no word to describe the state of being Truth in the sense of its instability, with "truthfulness" having a stable meaning too close to "truth."
What I confront here is that only happiness delivers Truth in the sense of Knowledge, while in this distorted Western world, we are often led to believe that it is through suffering that we learn and that through pain, we achieve clarity. Happiness, however, doesn't depend on privilege and comfort, another misunderstanding sold to us. I see happiness in my children; they only know the Truth because children don't mislead or manipulate. They test the world; they experiment with everything available to determine what is true. Despite everything, children have so much happiness because their connection with Truth hasn't been alienated.
I need to stop now.