Group of Evan

Something I’m often thinking about (besides whether I am going to be allowed back at the Golden Griddle) is the idea of ‘truth.’ Usually I get depressed when I think about an absolute crushing imperative order that dictates the state of reality and everything in it. But maybe the truth is just a comprehensive description of the present state of the universe (or the Tao or the happenscape, or the Big Waste, or whatever you want to call it) and it does not imply an ominous organization. It is not ‘intended’ for anything, least of all the destruction of peaceful delusions, and there’s no harm in facing it. Or at least rigging up a system of carefully arranged holes and mirrors so you can watch it while its changing.

The truth, I like to think, is something I value – despite its tendency to contradict things I care about momentarily, and its unsettling ability to severely upset precious things like ‘delusions’ and ‘innocence.’ Although you might be tempted, by certain liberal propensities, to dismiss most of what you perceive as ephemeral and untenable half-truths dissolving in an unending stream of changes, I like to think we can occasionally isolate certain objective-ish states that seem to endure. Doing this helps me focus on the things I value, like making fun of everything. I might, through a process of misguided connection-building and sense-making, discover, codify and incorporate a certain perception that suits my present mind-state very well and even supports a satisfying and integrated world view; however, being that a world view is just an aggregate of perceived instances of harmonious truths drawn from a limited catalogue of impulse-driven experiences, it might be completely incompatible with another set of ‘truths.’ This causes a lot of problems. Basically, my psyche (or headwomb, or mindcage or ‘tunnel of haunted mirrors’) is a flimsy and tenuous bricolage of flimsy tenuous beliefs, concepts and obsessions, all balanced on rickety planks of eroding logic that threaten to implode with the addition of any new information.

The point is that the truth is both compelling and repulsive. The best truths always create and destroy, and I have a good personal story to illustrate the revolutionary power of information:

When I was in grade three, I was sitting on a carpet in a classroom one day, surrounded by other grade three children.

I mean, I believe that’s where I was. I know I can’t trust my memory to be true and I apologize to people who were there and synthesized other aspects of these events. I figure that in storytelling one shouldn’t make apologies for one’s perspective but I’m trying to remind you that the truth is a slippery thing.

Yes, the room was filled with other children, also with wildly erratic and unpredictable mechanisms of perception snapping away inside their little heads (I am a child in this story too, so I definitely can’t be trusted.) My recollection is that on this day we were being taught about flowers or plants or something and one kid, in an expression of wildly-inspired free association, asked the question “Where do babies come from?” I remember that I understood the significance of the question and knew I didn’t want to hear the answer but – in what I now recognize as a performance of incredible bravery and devotion to truth – our teacher, Mme Gallant, actually proceeded to spell the whole thing out. In a very matter-of-fact way (and I’d expect no less from a true adult) she explained that a woman becomes pregnant as a result of sex, which is when a man puts his penis inside a woman’s vagina. I can’t remember whether she opted to colour this description with some hazy nonsense about the process being catalyzed by love or fairy dust or ben wa balls coated in powdered MDMA, but her biology was straight and the effect was earth-shattering for me. I remember being psychologically discomforted to the point that I crawled gradually toward the back of the classroom – to escape the truth. The feeling I had wasn’t really incredulity or disgust, it was more a sort of shock at the fact that I hadn’t imagined this truth already. It made perfect sense:

A boy has this thing that sticks out and a girl has a hole that leads in.

It should have been so obvious to me and I should have welcomed the truth but it scared me because it was so apparent and I had failed to figure it out on my own. Being taught this simple lesson hurt my pride but it also affirmed the presence of a sinister pervading logic at work in the universe (or “the Big Tummy,” or “The Wheel of Bad Jokes”) that would always elude me.

I think that maybe, a potential ‘take-away’ here is that figuring out how to adjust your mind to incorporate the best truth you have available is more important than fortifying whatever dome of blissful occlusion you’ve been toiling under. Maybe where it doesn’t harm anyone, you can still take refuge in ignorance once in a while. For example, even though I now know that it’s meant for something else, I still like to use my penis to press buttons, such as the power switch on the TV or the keys on a computer keyboard.