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Seymour
Registered Member
Date Joined Jan 2002
Total Posts : 105
| Posted 7/2/2002 6:00 PM (GMT -6) |   | Okay I couldn’t find any televangelist on tv so I thought I’d start a new thread.
Is it possible to ever tell the truth?
I read Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale a couple weeks ago. I liked the last two chapters, but I didn’t believe a word of the first chapter. I would have about a year ago, I would have eaten the whole thing up. I could have written the first chapter a year ago. But I just don’t believe it is possible to tell the truth anymore. I believe that confession, truth-telling, unconcealment, is both unprofitable and impossible. But it is impossible in the same way that the gift is impossible and not very many people seemed to follow me when I tried to explain that.
Confession is a sham. When we confess, we tell nothing but lies. When we try our very hardest to tell the truth, when we strain after the truth, we still end up telling a lie. Now sometimes we lie outright, we intend to deceive. I’m not very interested in that right now. Right now I’m interested in when we intend to tell the truth. Even when we intend to tell the truth we end up lying. I think that Dostoevsky agrees with me. I just read, for the first time ever, the Notes From Underground and perhaps here we have the confessions of an honest lier, someone who tells lie after lie but seems to want to expose that this is as close as anyone can get, to stop pretending that you’re dealing with truth. The author of these “notes” writes:
quote:
Heine insists that faithful autobiographies are almost impossible, and that a man is sure to tell a pack of lies about himself. In his opinion, Rousseau, for example, most certainly told a pack of lies about himself in his confessions, and even did so intentionally, out of vanity. I’m sure Heine is right; I understand very well how one can sometimes slap whole crimes on oneself solely out of vanity, and I even perceive quite well what sort of vanity it might be.
And what did Rousseau do in his Confessions except strain after truth, try as hard as he could, and yet he still seems to have the guts to lay claim to the truth (maybe an indication that he was not really trying to tell the truth at all but deliberately deceive as Heine suggests he “makes false avowals, in order to hide his real doings behind them.”)
And what does Heine say?
quote:
The composition of one’s own character description would be not only an awkward task but quite simply impossible…However strong his wish to be sincere, no man is capable of telling the truth about himself.
I used to think that confession was an act of murder, that it was the destruction of the image of oneself to replace it with the truth. But a confession is just another image. It is a carefully constructed window, when what I want it to be is not a window at all but unconcealment. But in order to have a real act of unconcealing one would need an infinite confession, one would never be able to halt. The very fact that our confessions our finite shows that they are edited, that they are images and lies.
And what does Nietzsche say about truth telling? He says that it is a mountain peak, that it is cold, and that one must stand alone. And is the price worth that? No? Is it worth that if it fails, even in the end, even when you’ve strained and been abandoned—after that investment to have it fail? This, this is why I don’t believe in truth, because I made the investment and if I didn’t try as hard as I could I couldn’t have tried harder, and it failed. And Mr. Buechner hasn’t even made the investment, he is still applauded—especially for his confessions. His Telling Secrets is on par with Rousseau.
“To tell the truth you must be prepared to look like a fool.” This is what all the fools told me. So I made the investment, I looked foolish, foolish alone, and gained myself a lousy image in return. It is foolish to risk looking foolish for nothing except what you’ve already got, images and lies, when it is just as easy to retain the origional imaes and lies while saving face on the side.
So what remains? What is the possibility of telling the truth? There seem to me to be only two routes. First perhaps all we can do is try not to pretend that we are telling the truth, to offer our lies as such. Second, it may be possible for some, maybe only five or six in each generation—true geniuses—who can cast images that conceal within them unconcealment itself. Those who can either, a) cast an image in such a way that it corresponds to the truth, or more likely b) cast an image that captures the essence, to say in ten words what it would take others an infinite confession to say. To capture the infinite in the finite. And here it becomes a question of naming, of finding the proper names to contain everything. Or maybe its impossible for everyone.
And so I had recieved this image of the truth, the image of a field with a prescious truth buried in it, and I recieved this image that that truth was worth everything I had, so I sacrificed shame and lost friends and bought the whole field, and all I have to show for it is this image. And I wish I could have my friends back and my shame back. Niezsche didn't write about that part. I was lied to.
Some folks dance cool, all angels and swaying hips, Sensual as all get out and in. Me, I'm a hick, and I dance like one, I just kinda jump around and grin.
--Greg Brown
Edited by - Seymour on 07/02/2002 11:09:41 PM | | Back to Top | | |
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