The following was delivered as the keynote address at Image’s 2026 Glen Workshop in San Diego, California.
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FEW WEEKS AGO, I was watching an old interview with the writer and classicist Anne Carson. It was the kind of revenge internet procrastination that happens late at night after you’ve spent your day tangled in stressful, uninteresting minutiae and, instead of just going to sleep, you fall into a digital rabbit hole on a quest for dopamine and proof of your own freedom as an actor in the world.
Mostly this is a bad idea. Ninety-nine percent of the time, you should just go to bed. But just this once, late-night scrolling worked out for me. Carson was talking about Descartes’s most famous line, Cogito, ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am,” the pillar of Cartesian philosophy and a phrase that—as Carson points out—is screen-printed on T-shirts all over the world.
But then Carson said something you might already know, though I did not. She’d recently discovered that the phrase has a less-repeated initial clause: Dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum. “I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am.”
Dubito, as Carson says, has gotten some bad press. Nobody’s putting doubt on a T-shirt.
Perhaps it verges on a bad idea to begin a conference grounded in faith and art with a discussion of doubt as something foundational not just to thought but to the very nature of our existence. And now, like so many people trying out a bad idea, I’ll take it one step further: I wish all of you doubt—in great measure—this week.
I promise I don’t say this because I secretly hate you, and if that feels in question, remember that the brilliant Thomas Merton wrote: “The man of faith who has never experienced doubt is not a man of faith.” Just bear with me.
Recently, I’ve come to understand myself as a pretty avowed doubt apologist, interested in doubt as a state that’s fundamentally capacious, something that invites us to slow our pace, to look, then look again. An agitated I don’t know always invites further inquiry and observation. And precisely because it pinches and nags at us, some measure of doubt compels us to make our first response to the world a question, or a series of them: What if? What if not?
A little anecdote: For the last few years I’ve lived in the very high desert of Laramie, Wyoming, where the wind is a nearly omnipresent aggressor and frequently cold enough to kill you. As you might imagine, it’s a place that for large swaths of the year does not encourage idling outside, and often when you are outside, you’re just trying to get from one shelter to the next as quickly as possible. Earlier this year—while it wasn’t kill-you cold, but cold enough—I was hurrying through the wind. Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, in one of the big cottonwood trees that line the university’s sidewalks, I saw—I thought—a squirrel, hanging out in the branches, holding a lollipop in its tiny hands—one of those little candies they keep in a bowl at the hair salon or the corner store to give children. The squirrel was licking it like a little kid delighting in a treat after Saturday errands. I stopped short and looked fully left, where the squirrel had been, just in time to see the blur of it darting away like a flash of television static.
I think about this squirrel conservatively three times a week. Was it, in fact, savoring a lollipop? If not, what was it doing? And why did I think it was a lollipop? If so, do squirrels innately understand that you should lick a lollipop to get the most out of the flavor, or was the candy just too big for its tiny squirrel mouth? What flavor was it? Cherry? Watermelon? The questions are endless.
We’re going to return to this squirrel. I promise.
But for now, back to doubt. Probably something about the way I, as a Catholic, understand the Trinity—simultaneously one in divine nature, but also three distinct persons; singular, but also plural; all God, who is not divisible, but also fully each Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; inherently a logical impossibility—makes me capable, if not exactly comfortable, of thinking about doubt as more than just the opposite of faith, as we so often position it. I sometimes think doubt is not even a state to be worked through so as to arrive at perfect, unassailable certainty. I conceive of doubt, instead, as something almost consubstantial with belief.
Think about it this way: Perhaps belief is a room built of yearning—a room many of us would call faith—and conviction is the studs and plates, the scaffolding, the things that give it sturdiness, shape, the capacity to shelter. Maybe doubt, then, is the open window, which admits that the walls do not hold everything: What if? What if not?
Doubt means we don’t just build a static space then look at the weather and the world outside, apart from us behind a pane of glass. It means we experience elements we can’t anticipate, control, corral, or always even understand. The sun streams fully into the room—if you’re in Southern California in July—but so might the sudden wind and rain roiling from a storm over the ocean, or the greenish smoke of a wildfire, the unobstructed clap of thunder or the buzzing of hummingbirds, or the cry of someone somewhere suffering in a way you’ve never heard before, the kind of cry that changes much of what you think you know of sound.
None of this knocks the walls of the room down—none of it entirely unseats conviction—though it might threaten to. But the open window lets the wind, the birdsong, the wailing breach the perimeter. The weather is in the room with us, changing it. Whether beautiful or brutal or some combination of both, it becomes part of the space of belief. Deepens it. Charges it. And, because the window in the room of your belief is open, somewhere, someone else can hear when you wail or shout or sing or keen, celebrate or fall to the floor. The weather of your living changes their faith too.
This unwieldy metaphor may be giving something away: If my status as an eternally wrestling Catholic is part of what allows me to understand faith and doubt as in some sense one, then the other part is my training and orientation as a poet.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a poem by Natasha Trethewey called “Myth.” It begins like this:
I was asleep while you were dying.
It’s as if you slipped through some rift, a hollow
I make between my slumber and my waking,The Erebus I keep you in, still trying
not to let go. You’ll be dead again tomorrow,
but in dreams you live. So I try takingyou back into morning. Sleep-heavy, turning,
my eyes open, I find you do not follow.
Again and again, this constant forsaking.
The poem is miraculous and heartbreaking, and I find something new to love every time I return to read or teach it again. But among its most miraculous elements is the marvel of its form. The entire poem is a palindrome. After these first stanzas, the poem repeats its lines in reverse order, with different punctuation, so that you end where you began: “I was asleep while you were dying,” and the poem can be read either beginning to end or end to beginning.
And you thought Madam, in Eden, I’m Adam was an impressive palindrome.
But what does any of this have to do with doubt and faith? “Myth” is not exactly a poem about either. It’s a poem about grief: losing someone, missing them, hunting them in dreams, getting them back only to lose them again when you wake into the world. But it is a poem that enacts doubt. It’s as if Trethewey gets to the end of its first half—“my eyes open, I find you do not follow. / Again and again, this constant forsaking”—and still has questions. She thinks: What if? What if not? And so she tries the language again in reverse, as if saying the incantation the other way around might be the thing that resolves the impossible chasm of death. Again and again, this constant forsaking. And while it doesn’t ever resolve cleanly—the last line of the poem is the same as the first, giving you the sense that it could run back and forth forever—the interplay between the poem’s certainties—I love you. I miss you. You’re gone—and its doubt—What if you’re not? I’ll just test the veil again—is what makes the miracle of its form possible. You don’t know where the walls are, where the room ends.
The poem instantiates, just for an instant, an act of impossible time travel: You move through it backward, dream, and for a moment death is undone, even if it doesn’t stay that way. And the room you’re in when you emerge from the poem—the house of your soul—don’t tell me it isn’t a little bit changed.
I believe in doubt, as I hope is clear by now, as a posture of humility and of desire, of possibility. But it’s not out of either an impulse to be provocative or an imprecision in thought or language that I don’t just use that word possibility instead. Or, for that matter another word in this same constellation, like receptiveness or even mystery—a word you know we love at Image and that feels so near to doubt they brush one another in orbit.
I think it matters that doubt is challenging, sometimes awful, that it has pain and vulnerability in it. An open window requires us to make ourselves vulnerable, to admit we can’t be certain the house we’ve built will withstand a hurricane. Doubt doesn’t allow conviction to calcify into an impenetrable fortress—and it doesn’t allow a wound to fully scab over, or for us to shut the door against our own suffering or anyone else’s. Again and again, this constant forsaking.
I won’t say I’m certain of it, because that would run afoul of everything I’ve just professed, but I do believe it’s our responsibility to stay open to one another in the way doubt demands. Especially right now, when the world is dense with suffering, violence, injustice. This kind of openness is hard, but it’s also exactly the magic that art facilitates: a call through that wide-open window; someone’s voice calling back.
When I say I wish you doubt, this wide-open window is what I mean, but I know it’s not a gentle wish. Even if you do as I instructed earlier and go to bed instead of doomscrolling, there might sometimes be enough pain in it to wake you up at night. If there is, look out the window. Through the smoke, you can see the stars.
But I promised we’d get back to the squirrel. I’ll just say this: I stood for a long time in the cold wind, waiting for him to come back so I could be certain I’d seen him and his lollipop. It hurt a little bit—the wind. And he didn’t return. I hope I saw him there; I loved the image of him. But I’ll never know for certain, and in a way I’m glad. I’m still watching. The doubt makes me a better and more careful observer. I’ll leave the window cracked for him.
Image credit: Khamkéo. Unsplash, 2017.
