metanoia's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Truth, revisited When I began this 'blog', I wanted to write about truth. Personal truth, universal truth, truth as I knew it. In the process, I have found that I do not know truth very well; we are not intimately acquainted. She is an elusive friend, one who I can claim only on occasion and only on those occasions when she allows herself to be trapped for a moment and examined. In other words, I do not know what the truth is, and it has been by trying to write it that I have found out that I know nothing of The truth. My fear, now, is that when I write about any truth, any truth at all, I will find I know nothing about it. It will be almost a process of eliminating everything I think I know and I will write and write and pretty soon end up with nothing to write about because I will know, deep down gut heart-of-hearts know, that I do not know anything about truth - I do not know anything at all. But, maybe I will still write, anwyay. After all not knowing truth hasn't stopped me so far.. Perhaps I will just not try to write the absolute truth, the empirical truth, the pure and unadulterated truth. I won't examine it so thoroughly that I lose it in the process. That way I can still think I know something, and continue to write about it... One could say I know the truth of my feelings; but they are chimerical and change with the wind, or the tides, or the phases of the moon, or something not so regular... So what would be 'truth' to me today would not be 'truth' tomorrow and I would change it and massage it and reconcile it to fit the image of my own idea of truth at the moment; so then would it be truth at all after all that? Is that what happens to all truth at the mercy of our own hands? I could be called Truth of the Moment, like Coffee of the Moment, which changes with each pass thru the coffee press. Down here in the south, we say, "That ain't right." Not that ISN'T right, but that "ain't right" (right is pronounced more like rot, but that's not important, it's just how I hear it in my mind - that ain't rot). This phrase succinctly defines, encompasses and addresses Universal Truth. We use it when something happens that goes against all that is holy (that's a lot of stuff down here - they are all about the holy) - something happens that no one in the world regardless of race, ethnicity, religion or shoe size can think is right. It relies on the assumption that inherent in mankind are certain things that are right and wrong and no one can argue with them - we are all born with this innate right/wrong detector within us and we just 'know' when something "ain't right". Unfortunately (or fortunately) this phrase is used for anything from murder to drinking cold urine. But, then again, I guess neither one could be determined as 'right', unless you were one of the very few (I hope there are only a few, but the world continues to amaze and disappoint me) in this world who adore drinking cold urine, but then the phrase could be used to describe YOU, as in "You ain't right", as in right in the head, because you like to drink cold urine. So, maybe there IS a truth, and maybe it can be judged against the phrase "That ain't right" and if it fits, well, then it's the truth... At least, this is what I think right now. 10:24 a.m. - 2005-01-13 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
||||||
|
||||||