Honesty and Truth

It's sort of funny, sort of ironic—and irony is a sign of truth—that explaining the pleasure of being able to tell the truth can sound insincere. It demands that the telling itself is as truthful as possible. That the telling itself doesn't become a stage for ostentatious writing. The telling itself must be so simple and true, and it must not be forced. If it is forced, it will show and outshine the message intended to be conveyed. At the same time, though, to write simply isn't easy. It takes the most careful crafting; which is, ironically, precisely what one does not associate with honesty.

We tend to think that honesty is saying what is on your mind as it comes to mind. We think, “say what you feel, belt it out if you have to,” as if raw spontaneity were most sincere of all. We tend to think that honesty doesn't require exactness of language, that honesty cannot be premeditated. Such a presumption isn't necessarily incorrect, for raw spontaneity ultimately conveys the very same message as any carefully crafted honest verbalization. The important difference, however, is that the former message is “spoken” not necessarily by the words alone, but by the multi-faceted language of the act of expression, itself. That is, body language, tone and volume of voice, even the degree of control the speaker employs while communicating the message. As I said, the sum of each of those communicating parts adds up to the same message as the carefully crafted verbalization. However equivalent the passionate rant may be in theory, it is almost always the less intelligible mode of expression, as the message is delivered via distinct modes which are difficult to process into a single, unified statement. Where this method fails, the carefully crafted method succeeds.

So, it is erroneous to believe that honesty must gush out of someone who can no longer hold back the words he's been keeping secret for so long. It is erroneous to assume that a delay in response can only mean that the respondent is wordsmithing with an intent to deceive. Just as reasonable is that the intent of the respondent is to place his words in such a way that they can convey a clear, rather than a cryptic, honest response.

So it can be that the person who's been holding back those words, that message, for so long, hasn't been holding them back for any reason other than his deep desire to speak them correctly. His fear that he would convey the wrong message with the wrong words binds his lips so that he can organize his words in the fortress of his mind until he has figured out exactly how to say them, and more importantly, determined if they are still relevant after sober reflection.

What else is honesty but the telling of a truth, any truth? And all truths have a lifespan, so to speak. An emotion can be true for an instant; for example, the desire to kill somebody who wrongs you, or the desire to sleep with somebody who fans your ruby coals to flames of lust. Such responses to certain experiences are true, insofar as they are responses, but they are ephemeral insofar as they are not acted upon, in the end.

Similarly, a thought can be true to whoever conceives of it and believes in it. That thought, whether other people agree it is true or not, is no different than beauty: true, at the very least, to its beholder. Now, the longevity of that thought's truth depends on if a more convincing thought replaces it, just as scientific theories or “facts” have been true until they are replaced by more accurate theories. This change of truth value is inevitable in a world of evolving minds and their natural progress towards increasingly sophisticated understanding.

So truth isn't what we think it is. It isn't the eternal thing we'd like to believe it to be; not anymore. To accept that description is tantamount to a man of this century who still believes that the world is geocentric. Such a fanciful interpretation of truth is no more than the eternal, disembodied “Forms” first discussed by Plato.

Today, in the age of carbon-dating, we must acknowledge a parallel between the artifacts we date with modern methods and the truths with which we must live, regardless of whether we accept and believe in them, or reject them immediately. Much like the materials of the physical world, all of which either perish and decay or transform into an entirely different classification, a truth lives and dies. A truth may live and breath in the minds of single men or entire generations, and a truth falls from the branches of the tree of knowledge and becomes a shell of a once living thing; and that shell may or may not be discovered later only to be inspected like the artifact that it has become.

Most truths, however, are never mined from quarry that is the human being. Instead, they die inside a man. These truths will never be wrapped in the cloth of perceptible language and lay in the manger of acknowledgment. As I said, in most cases, a truth will die in a sound sleep.

Now, honesty and truth are related; that is intuitive enough. I don't think I need to detail their differences to illustrate that they are not the synonyms. A suitable analogy is that truth is the coin that purchases trust, whereas honesty is the agreement that the exchange of truth for trust is a fair deal. Honesty, then, is the means by which truth is delivered. Or, in other words, honest is the man who barters with truth; and truth is his currency. Truth is his capital. But this does not make him a saint in the world of commerce. Remember that, as measured by their longevity, truths are not all of the same value. And often times it is hard to know which truths will preserve their value and survive the sometimes fickle, inevitably changing marketplace of spiritual exchanges. He may offer a truth of his that he believes will endure, only to discover that as soon as he has offered it, its value diminishes, and thus becomes a debt for he to whom that bill of truth was paid. In this case, the karmic laws preside, and the debt he has caused will, in turn, result in a loss of trust in him (for, if you remember, truth purchases trust when accepted).

So the man who seeks to be the honest man must know the nature of his currency, and by knowing the nature of his currency he comes to know himself.

The Honest Man is no less vulnerable to vice and so-called deadly sins as any other. For example, his high regard for his currency might lead him to make too many exchanges. He may even become charitable, giving his bills out to anyone who seems in need of it. Again, karmic law will preside (for, above all, despite the virtue that might inspire him to give, all exchanges must be fair) and he will find that he has abandoned as many friends as have honored his currency with their trust. He will find that, on paper, he has broke even, lost nothing; but he will feel the sum of those frivolously generous exchanges in his heart, for he will see that in losing them, he has lost time. He will see that what he thought was virtuous intent was in fact a mask for frightfully egotistical motivations. If he is strong, then he will accept what he's done not as devastating personal flaw, but as an inherent fallibility that he must appreciate as fertile soil in which he must continue to grow. He must expect to blossom and give, anew. He must feel his storm of his self-judgment as if it were rain come to soak that soil. He must acknowledge that his time is not up, but a new season has come. And, above all, he must not do to himself what he has done to so many others: he must not abandon the Honest Man that he wants to be. He must expect the coming of many seasons, and accept their unpredictable days. He must see that it is not for trust that he gives, though it is trust that's exchanged, but that it is to give that he gives. He must reconcile his dream of saving the world by giving to all with the understanding that giving at all means to give and take wisely. He must accept that while the world is big, his world is small, and that the only world he can change is his own, for his world reaches only as far as the wisdom with which he invests his truth, his money, his power.

California Zen

Depression is the dumps. Some people suffer because they think that they are the butterfly who's going to cause the hurricane that kills thousands. Either that, or they want to be the second coming. Neither delusion is healthy. You can't confirm the former or live up to the latter. For some reason, realizing this is news each and every time life offers the revelation. And each time, it's depressing news.

There is something absurd, almost hilarious, about depression. It's a vanity of some strange sort, wanting to be the butterfly or the savior.

So, today I say be like the lion. Hunt whatever you need to survive and spend the rest of your day hanging out in the shade with people who don't mind if you don't say a word at all.

There is an art, maybe even a struggle, to doing nothing more than blinking to keep your eyes wet. Don't forget simplicity.

Be happy just being.

Tuna Melt

This is a POEM about a guy who wants to thank the creator of his favorite food.

Nothing goes better together than
tuna and mayonnaise

rye bread, black pepper, Swiss cheese,

who in the world
comes up with this stuff?

I wanna meet'm

on the terra cotta patio
of his ocean-side restaurant
on the edge of a cliff.

I want the wind to be warm

and I want to tell him
face to face that
if I could
I'd eat his sandwiches everyday.

Posthumous

This is a POEM in which the artist considers what his life's work will amount to after he's dead, comparing it all to a sea shell.

A jack of all trades is what they'll call me.

Those who bother to pick up my remains
will hold in their hands a painting,
colorful and abstract;
a poem of decided obscurity, dismissed too early;

a short, incomplete story.

They'll say "he never amounted to much
in his lifetime.
He worked at a coffee shop and may have
suffered from a mental illness."

I'd really be somebody
if their inquiry went so far
as to report on the life of my parents
or my conception of romance.

I've never been that good at math;
from all the shapes and words and philosophy
I leave behind, this will seem too obvious to mention,
if I were somebody.

But if they look from a distance
at all the trades I fell for
and where I chose to say
what I was incapable, as just a man,
to say out loud in a word,
or single act, or opus,

they might as well have plucked
a shell from the beach,
saw inside a spiral,
perhaps held me to their ear
and listened to my moan
and how I tried like hell
to be the entire ocean.

A Study On The Space Between Actual Facts

This is a POEM that explores the science and mysticism of seemingly unrelated forms of communication.

Absorb me
Through your softest parts
Beg the words of their
Pupils.
And so you let them invert
in the light that blasts onto the big red screens
In the back of your eyes. They soak up
through cords at the speed of light
but slowed down by Ohm’s Law
So that by the time they hit a fold
In your left brain
And spread throughout to
Broca and Wernicke’s
You realize what you’re looking at
has meaning, but you’re not sure what.

So quietly,
someone is actually speaking to you:

Man drew pictures before he could
Breath delicately through his larynx
And imitate the sound of the bird
That was easiest for his son
To catch.

The apple always falls
The shortest route from the tree
To the ground and so, looking at the moon,
Newton wondered, what else is as constant?
After a few calculations the question of
Whether or not there was a relationship
Between the apple and the moon
Was laid to rest.

So does the
father exist in the bird that is caught,
in the boy who spotted it in the air,
Or in the grown boy, a man, who knows the bird by its call
And is so close to sounding it out?
When the father is gone,
is he then the law by which the bird is brought near?
Also, If the boy learns the bird's caw
Will the father ever hear?

If Newton can prove that the moon was as an apple
to his eye for an evening,
Is he really a mathematician?

Rendezvous

This is a POEM about the complexity of a clandestine relationship.

I can bare-
ly remember what we
said between the moment
you pulled off your
shoes at my door

And raced down the stairs
With your hands in the air, screaming
I don’t care I don’t care I don’t care!

Lunch break wasn't long enough
to confirm the truth of the love
you came here to witness and express, manifest, maybe
yes,

to confirm.
But by coming here, to me, so close we were
both exposed
To gestures, mere gestures, confessing our volumes of doubt
Concerning this thing called love.

I think it was doubt that made us sure
Of what we needed to show and how

To stick together

Since we are friends,
romantics at heart, really, whose
hackneyed script is G-rated
for our audience,

and since, for all intents
And purposes
love is like a
good,

I swear
I believe

It would never tear us apart,
don’t
You agree that we can communicate sublime,
Or at least
That sometimes we have
A long and poetic way of saying a simple yes
Or simple no,

of forgetting all our cares for the moment?

Astrophysicist Excommunicated

This is an ARTICLE exploring the philosophical and theological implications of a modern scientific theory.

Cape Canaveral, FL: Astrophysicist Norman Blackwell has been excommunicated from the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints, also known as the Mormon Church, for his most recent publication in which he presents proof that the Big Bang occurred at least twice in the long history of the cosmos. He has gone so far as to suggest that the Big Bang has occurred and will occur ad infinitum. The conflict with the Church lay in the theological implications of such a description of the cosmos.

Left wide open is the possibility that humans have existed during each new Big Bang period.

According to Blackwell's argument, which assumes that the laws of physics are the same during each Big Bang that occurs, all material would expand in the same way each time. Consequently, galaxies of Big Bang One would look the same as galaxies of Big Bang Two. Even cosmic details such as stars would be composed of the same elements in the periods following each Big Bang.

Simply put, all the forms that we see in our cosmos would have existed in any previous or succeeding cosmos. This means that solar systems like the ones we have now have existed and will exist again, assuming Blackwell's hypothesis is correct.

If there have existed, or will exist, solar systems similar to ours in other Big Bang periods, couldn't they also be suitable for lifeforms?

It seems that if Blackwell is right, the human form could have existed in Big Bang One, and that it will exist in Big Bang two, three, four, five and so on.

If human beings did in fact live in a previous Big Bang, how similar were they to us? Furthermore, if scientific laws were exactly the same for each Big Bang, it could be possible that the exact same people inhabited the exact same planet, only at a different age of the universe's infinite pattern of explosion, expansion, and collapse.

This means that you yourself could have existed several times before and may exists over and over again on a time scale too great to fully comprehend.

Scientist, philosophers, and theologians are baffled by the paradox which has been dubbed by some as periodic eternity. Is this reincarnation? Determinism? Philosophers of metaphysics have speculated that perhaps each Big Bang has exactly the same ingredients. Some have gone so far as to say that Freedom itself may be a fundamental consequence of astrophysical laws.

In the words of Doris Euclid, a tenured professor of metaphysics at the University of Santa Monica, in Santa Monica, California, "Perhaps freedom is the consequence of the passage of Time, and like the formation of a diamond it can only come into existence under the magnificent pressure of a universe expanded to limits; limits that bring into being consciousness; limits that man has come to measure in the intervals of evolution, wisdom, love, humanity, spiritual communion...To know the primary cause has always meant to approach the Divine."

Dana Arlinghaus, theologian, takes a similar stance, "Maybe it is true, in a scientific sense, the doctrine promised by Christ. This theory seems to reinforce the idea that life is literally eternal."

In fact, minds from many disciplines have been moved by Blackwell's findings. Poet laureate, Sophia Grangier submitted the following proposition to an audience in Paris, "Man is formed from the stardust as the sole admirer of the beauty and order his crude constitution has finally achieved."

In his own defense, Blackwell has said to his accusers, "if we are but a moment, fine; but if that moment is repeated again and again, science says we are a Truth. Insofar as that is true, history tells us we must also be divine."

Norman Blackwell is currently living on a Russian space station where advanced studies on black holes are being conducted. His research, although not accessible in most languages, may soon be published by Doksee, an independent research firm committed to the dissemination of cutting-edge astronomical data in accordance with the first amendment rights of free speech and press.