I was driving back to Halifax from Middleton, Nova Scotia the other morning and had a chance to hear Jian Ghomeshi on CBC radio interviewing John Patrick Shanley, the writer of the Pulitzer prize-winning play that was recently made into the movie Doubt.
And he said a brilliant thing : that doubt is the space where another person can touch us.
It’s a place inside where we let up on our need for total conviction and actually allow ourselves to be open and even affected by another person’s thoughts, opinions and emotions on a given topic. Even to the degree where we might actually change our own thoughts and emotions in response to theirs!
This is exactly the kind of dialogue that I’m deeply interested in, both between us and within us as well.
It’s been very interesting to watch myself getting clearer and clearer on what I’m really about just by watching what kind of things are moving me to post and how I respond to them.
And I’ve realized that my most favorite topics of resistance, desire and their alchemical meeting place is really, at its essence, an absolute love of the Dialogue. The place where one side meets the other and they transform each other.
And further still, it’s a love for the Space that makes the Dialogue possible. And this is what John Patrick Shanley is speaking to so beautifully.
He said he wrote the original play at the time when the case for the Iraq war was being made and there was a serious lack of dialogue about the evidence for “weapons of mass destruction”. He said that people would tell him that they believed the wmd’s existed but they couldn’t tell him why and he was even more troubled that the very act of doubt itself was made “unpatriotic” in that climate.
Apparently when an interviewer told Meryl Streep (who plays the main character of the school principal) that he was sure her character was right, she replied “Then we have failed.”
We’re meant NOT to know, because what John Patrick Shanley wants most is for the movie to be “the beginning of a conversation, not the end of one.”
My kind of movie! I haven’t seen it yet but very soon, when I do, I’ll expect to be left wondering, and I hope I can be spacious enough to let someone else’s opinions about it truly touch me.
