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“What is truth?” Pilate asked Jesus. And Jesus answered him not.

One of the poems in Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" is called, "Song of Myself." That poem caught my attention the first time I read it, and I have contemplated its meaning many times since. Singing the song of yourself has a thrilling and dangerous appeal, like skinny-dipping or hitchhiking across the country with only twenty bucks in your pocket.

Many times I have wanted to sing the song of myself, but I’ve never been willing to take the time or pay the price.

What would it take to sing the song of yourself? What would it cost you?

First, you would have to know yourself. And that is quite a thing to consider. You would have to take a long, careful look into what is deep and hidden within you. What is lurking around the corners of your mind? What memories and obsessions haunt you? What causes your glands to seize? What gets your blood moving so that your veins and arteries swell and push to the surface of your skin? What comes from your gut? What do your instincts say? Who or what speaks to you at night when the raw cuts of your home movies are shown on the screen of your mind?

Knowing yourself takes a long time, but even if you take that journey and arrive knowing yourself as well as a person can, you still might not sing the song of yourself. What would stop you?

Cowardly fears and righteous obligations.

Because…

Singing the song of yourself means telling the truth, and the truth has a way of severing ties to people and places and things. The words are spoken and a gleaming scalpel flashes. Living cords are sliced away. There are howls of pain and then silence.

Because…

Singing the song of yourself is like removing your clothes and standing naked before the world. Clothes do not make a person; they make the image of that person. Underneath the clothing lies the vulnerability of flesh. This is my true body. This is all I was given and all I will take with me. There will be no more hiding.

Because…

Singing the song of yourself creates a flash of white-hot fire in the kiln of your life. Everything that is not you is burned away. You lose it all, all the stuff you have accumulated over the years that follows you from house to house, wailing like a wraith. It would be gone forever. Burned away.

Because…

You might lose your community. Few relationships can withstand the song of yourself. People don’t want to hear your song. They don’t want to hear their own songs. They want to sing little love ditties filled with undefined words all the days of their lives.

So if you dare sing the song of yourself, be aware that you might be standing alone at the end of it. Maybe there is one person in the world who can bear the flames and will sing his or her song beside you. This is the person you've longed for and can't get enough of. The person whose voice you would recognize in a thousand voices. The one who draws you out and brings you forth. Perhaps you will find that person.

But probably not. You will probably be alone at the end of your song. The last refrain will echo back slowly, and there will be silence and solitude.

“So what would be so great about singing the song of yourself?” you ask me.

I’ll tell you. Singing the song of yourself would be the closest you could come to real truth. Descartes knew this. He knew that the only truth you can know and sing is the truth of your own existence. And maybe truth is the Siren whose song has charmed and tempted you all of your life. No one knows how you have longed for her, wanted her, pined for her, sought her in the hard places.

When I began Real Live Preacher back in 2002, I had an insane dream of singing the song of myself. I couldn’t do it then, even though I was anonymous. What held me back was your opinion of me. Within days my blog had already formed the crust of a persona, a crust that has thickened over the years.

And persona is death to the song of yourself.

Every time I sit to write, I flirt with the melody of the song of myself. I can feel the song. I can sometimes imagine the words I would lay down on paper, were I to sing it. I also count the cost. Singing the song of myself would hurt people, and that would hurt me. Truth is brutal. The cost too high, and it is getting higher every day.

So I push the edge a bit. I pull a few things out of my gut that are risky and lay them down with language that, ironically, gets its beauty more from what I left inside than from what I put on the paper.

But I tell you this ferociously and with bared teeth. The song of myself echoes in my ears every day. I’m in love with the idea of that song, though I have never even hummed it to myself.

Because I would like to write the truth about one human being. And I’m the only human I will ever truly know.

rlp

I found out yesterday that my college roommate died last week. His name was Kenny Cameron. I wish I could have gone to the funeral, but it was over before I knew about it.

My father was the associate pastor of Tallowood Baptist Church in Houston in the 1970s. I spent a lot of time at church, as you can imagine. Two of my closest friends also went to Tallowood - Kenny Cameron and Mark Carter. Mark sent me an email yesterday and told me about Kenny’s death. I hadn’t heard from Mark in years either, maybe not since I officiated at his wedding close to 20 years ago.

Kenny and Mark. Kenny Cameron and Mark Carter. If I say those names, I can almost feel the 70s. I can feel the heat of Houston; I can hear the Doobie Brothers; I can feel my stomach fluttering when I tried talking to a girl. I can remember the church stuff - the youth camps, the revivals, and youth choir on Sunday nights. The memories are right inside me and also far behind me. Near and far.

So that you can have a feel for what Kenny meant to me, I’m going to break a sacred trust I have with myself. I’m going to tell you the truth about one of the Foy Davis stories. There are six Foy stories so far. Most of them are fictional. But one of the stories is true. “Freckles and Blue” is my best and most faithful recounting of some things that actually happened to me in middle school. If I close my eyes, I can still feel the heartbreak of losing “Emma,” but over the years that memory has become tender. It brings a smile to my face when I remember what a little boy I was and how deeply I felt the things that wounded me.

Kenny and Mark were on the bus from that story. I left for camp a stranger, and I came home a week later, having had my first romance and with Kenny and Mark as my best friends.

That was quite a summer.

Kenny Cameron is dead. I have to keep saying it because I can’t feel it. Kenny was funny. He laughed a lot and had a killer smile with perfect white teeth. He was handsome and smooth with girls. I tried my best to imitate him in this regard, but I was not smooth. Honestly, girls scared me to death until I was halfway through high school. After that they only made me nervous, but after being scared to death, nervous feels pretty damn good. But Kenny was never scared around girls or anything else, or so it seemed to me at the time. That's how I remember him.

Kenny wanted to be a doctor, and we went off to Baylor University together, along with “Emma” from the story and a few others from our church. Kenny and I lived in a tiny dorm room for one year. We hung everything on our walls upside down, for some reason. We thought it was funny. Believe it or not, they used to have an organized panty raid for freshmen at Baylor. The boys would wear their freshmen beanies and sing outside the girls’ dorms. The girls would toss panties out of their windows – specially purchased for this event, one hopes – with their phone numbers written on them. I have seen a thousand boys crowded around a tall dormitory and the air filled with panties. I have seen this. I bear witness to it.

Being very athletic at the time and rather determined, I snagged 13 pair, which was pretty impressive. We hung them all on our wall, upside down, and left them there for the entire year. But I never called a single phone number. You know, that whole nervous around girls thing.

Yeah, Supertramp playing on Kenny’s 8-track tape player, drinking Cokes and sitting in our dorm room, surrounded by upside down posters and panties. Those were the days, right?

But then Kenny joined a fraternity, and I got very serious about philosophy and my religious studies, so I made the cocky decision that fraternities were ridiculous - and I passed up no opportunity to say so. We drifted apart and by the end of college, we were saying hello if we happened to pass each other on the campus.

Life moved on, as it does. I heard that Kenny never made it to medical school and that he had a daughter. Then at some point I heard that he had multiple sclerosis. I never called him. I didn’t know his number, and his friendship was long gone by then. And I missed his funeral. That’s the last chapter I have for Kenny, and now that I write it in that way, I suddenly feel very sad.

Mark Carter lives in Austin now, with his wife and two daughters. We've agreed that it has been too long. We’re going to meet soon for Mexican food, cold beer, and about four hours of long overdue conversation. I’m sorry that it took the death of an old friend to remind us of how precious these early friendships are, but that’s the way it often happens.

Precious things pass quickly. Life and living wrap themselves around you and hold you fast to the present. Years fly by, and you find new friends and new ways of being. But the truth is, new friends are an infinite possibility, but old friends are fixed in stone. There are only a few of them, and no more will be added to their ranks. Some will be taken away.

So I’m coming to Austin, Mark. I want to see what 25 years has done to you and for you. I want to hear about your life. I want to talk about Kenny and the old days. I’m coming to Austin because there were only two of you, Kenny and Mark. And now there is only one.

rlp

There is no kind of loneliness more lonely than when no one in the world knows who you are. When there is no one waiting to see what a tender and fragile thing you could take out of your chest, like someone taking a hamster out of a cage. There is no one there, but you know exactly what it would be like.

Your elbows and forearms are pressed against your ribs and you hold the hamster beneath your chin. You are holding it as tightly as you can without hurting it. The hamster is squirming and wanting to go back to the safety of the cage, but you are going to show it to your best friend and she is waiting, trembling and excited, her hands cupped just as yours are cupped.

The moment of transfer is awkward. She squeals and you both laugh. The hamster struggles wildly and almost gets away, but she makes a desperate grab at the last moment and then it is in her hands, shivering and afraid and completely exposed.

Your heart pounds in your chest, and it is hard to swallow because she has your hamster now. But it looks like it is going to be okay. She is petting it and whispering little baby words to it. And it is calming down and peeking out from between her fingers.

You know the truth of this. You can feel it down in the part of you that no one can take away. You KNOW this is how it would be. But there is no one there for you right now, and you can't think of any reason to take your hamster out of its cage at all.

rlp