What Is Truth?
In Conjunction With Satyagraha, Part of BAM’s 2018 Next Wave Festival
This article is part of Eidolon’s collaboration with BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) for their “Speaking Truth to Power” series, co-presented by BAM and the Onassis Cultural Center New York. By publishing these themed essays on Eidolon’s digital platform, we hope to spark dialogue about the series and make its ideas and performances accessible to a broader audience. For more on Speaking Truth to Power, check out BAM’s website and the other articles in our collaboration.
There is a scene from the original 1979 production of Philip Glass’s Satyagraha where the character Mohandas “Mahatma” Gandhi settles into an inverted yoga pose, a stillness unusual onstage. The pose calls attention to Gandhi’s bodily or corporeal reality: the public marches, his confinement in jail in South Africa, the hunger strikes in India. The image of the yogi is jarring when juxtaposed with the onstage performance of masses gathered in nonviolent resistance, though the individual and the group require similar discipline and resoluteness. Gandhi’s physical devotion, alongside the visual — and acrobatic, in the Next Wave production — display of the group, highlights the interplay between the one and the many, the individual self-determination to pursue truth and the power of mass organization.
The one and the many perform Glass’s Satyagraha, the Sanskrit term that Gandhi translated as “civil resistance.” His grandson defined satyagraha as “the pursuit of truth.” Similar to the yogi encountering eternity in the stillness of a contrapuntal pose, masses of individuals apprehend the truth (satya) and brings resistance (graha) to bear on the world. This is not the force of arms. Rather, it is the potency of 60,000 colonial Indians marching in 1930 against the salt laws of Britain.
In the American context, Martin Luther King, Jr. interpreted Gandhi’s satyagraha as “soul force,” dramatizing the bodily performance of resistance to unjust laws in the 1950s and ’60s. King choreographs satyagraha in marches across the country, from Selma, Alabama (25,000 people), to Washington, D. C. (250,000 attendants). King claims the truth, the soul force, of divine law as protection for blacks in America from the unjust laws of segregation and Jim Crow.
Without the conviction of satya(“I’ve seen the promised land”), graha has no power, no collective resonance. King cites Socrates as a champion of satyagraha, which is apparent in the latter’s role as condemned defendant of the Apology. Like Socrates, King and Gandhi both faced confinement in prison — and even death — for their convictions. Satyagraha is ancient, sacred and mythic, simultaneously highlighting the force of a single life (Socrates, Gandhi, King) and the scale of collective action, across time.
Through the one and the many, the contrasting puniness of the individual agent and the grandeur of the group, Satyagraha calls attention to a paradox of scale. Glass himself was struck by the slightness of Gandhi’s physique. (He was 5’ 5”, and King was also of small stature, at 5’ 7”.) At the same time, each individual has influence and impact, and thus the opera appropriately scales satyagraha to cosmic, mythic proportions.
Glass heightens the drama, and conveys the grandeur of Gandhi’s action, through the use of Sanskrit throughout. He presents the entire opera through text from the Bahagavad Gita, which calls attention to the larger-than-life struggle in which Gandhi found himself engaged. Jailed in South Africa in 1908, Gandhi cited the Bahagavad Gita as inspiration for his actions (along with the Quran). In the Metropolitan Opera House’s 2011 production of the opera, director Phelim McDermott uses oversized, papier-mâché puppets, designed by Julian Crouch, to represent figures from the Hindu sacred text. Acrobatics figure in the New Wave production. These techniques draw attention to the mythic struggle to fulfill one’s dharma, one’s “duty” or “divine law.” They emphasize the scale and backdrop against which a single person pursues truth.
It is a fair guess that most of the audiences that watch the opera have no understanding of Sanskrit. Void of conscious meaning, the text of the opera becomes a meditation, the yogi’s chant, as the audience finds the truth of eternity in the moment of rapture. But what is truth, beyond the Greek “absence of forgetfulness,” alêtheia?
In the context of civil disobedience in the United States, King’s larger-than-life analogues were figures from Greek philosophy and from the Christian bible. King’s invocation of Socrates provides one context for how we might define truth (satya). In Plato’s Republic, Socrates tells the story of a soldier named Er, who has died and thereby is able to see the other side, the “truth,” as it were. Upon death, souls move from our world of shadows to reality. Before returning to bodies, they pass through Lêthe, the River of Forgetfulness (“They were all required to drink a measure of water, and those who were not saved by their good sense drank more than the measure, and each one as he drank forgot all things,” 10. 621a).
In their bodily reincarnation, souls must come to revelation, to remembrance, as they cycle through life. In contrast, Er “was not allowed to drink of the water” (10. 621b), and thus he has not forgotten what he saw. Even on this shadowy side, he knows the truth, which was revealed in the afterlife, and therefore can “keep our soul unspotted from the world” (10. 621c). The pursuit of truth is a foundational principle of Eastern and Western philosophies and religions. Without the conviction of some truth, some “absence of forgetfulness,” resistance has no force.
Satyagraha presents us with a reflection upon what our truth might be, today. Is truth a matter of perspective? In the American context, opponents of King also called to their defense biblical claims regarding the inferiority of blacks. Or, equally challenging, individuals quietly waving Confederate flags in Richmond, Virginia, in 2018, at the site of the former hospital for Confederate soldiers during the Civil War, might themselves claim to be practicing satyagraha.
They might, perhaps, also see themselves involved in an epic struggle of good versus evil (“heritage, not hate”), as might the British rulers in South Africa and India in the 19th and 20th centuries. This perspective would be something like “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s” (Matthew 22:11; Mark 12:17), which the British could claim in their salt taxes in 1930. Claims to truth are tricky, though such claims underpin the Gita, just as it does the Platonic dialogues. Even if we know truth only in shadows, any repression of it in the public sphere calls for a countervailing force for its expression.
The spiritual discipline of the yogi, as with the physical control of the acrobat, requires balance, and such equilibrium is itself an answer to questions of truth, at least as it plays out in the public space. In classical Greece, a discursive truth of beauty was mêden agan, “nothing too much.” This truth applies to all of nature. In the public, political sphere, I would argue that mêden agan even applies to such rights as that of free speech.
In Ancient Greece parrêsia, free expression in civic space, is a concept at the root of democratic practice. We see the value of parrêsia in Gandhi’s work in South Africa and India, and it is evident in King’s work in the United States. Even parrêsia, however, is a matter of balance for the Greeks, a matter of virtues and vices. The “frankness” of one speaker is another’s “recklessness;” one person’s elocution in another’s loquaciousness. One person’s heritage, another’s hate. In the United States of 2018, where 328 million people reside across an expanse of 3.8 million square miles, inhabiting diverse realities of rural and urban, mountains and plains, coasts and interiors, a plurality of claims to truth coexist, whether or not one might view these claims as coequal.
The complexity is exponential when considered on a global scale. Are certain truths self-evident, such as “all men are created equal,” even if in reality women and minorities were not part of this conception? Gandhi and King provided examples of how satyagraha or “soul force” could be brought to bear on obscured truths, in the public sphere. The working out of truth calls for a balancing act implicit in satyagraha. It is the work of the spiritual disciple, a yogi, or an acrobat. It is the work of puny individuals, like you and me.
Philip Grass’s Satyagraha is directed by Tilde Björfors and conducted by Matthew Wood. The show will run at BAM Harvey Theater from October 31–November 4, 2018. You can find more information and buy tickets online here.
Patrice Rankine earned his Ph.D. in classical languages and literature from Yale University. He holds Master of Arts and Master of Philosophy degrees in Classical Languages and Literatures from Yale and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Brooklyn College, City University of New York. He is an accomplished scholar having published three books, dozens of articles and book reviews; received numerous awards, honors and grants; and delivered presentations and lectures at dozens of national and international academic conferences.
