Alasdair Paterson
From: TRUE SAY
1
This is my truth, which is not your truth. But it is the truth.
For your truth, I have a respect that falls short of the utmost only because your truth is not true. I believe you to be entirely sincere in your mistakenness, a searcher, fellow pilgrim on the camino de la verdad, off to a sunny start and striding the undulations into the golden logic of the afternoon: which was where things got hazy and you drifted off track (so easily done, I can show you where) to arrive in failing light in a deserted plaza in the wrong obscure town, breasting a finishing line marked only in your head.
Yet on another day your truth might well have passed for true, at least for a short while, had the truth not been available for comparison, but luckily it was and is: pure and smooth, a beautiful simplicity, and with the advantage of being the truth, which is also my truth.
Beside mine, yours is (no offence intended) devalued by superfluity and contradiction, a tendency to gaudiness and (look closely) those hairline cracks. Flick it with a fingernail: whoever heard of the clunk of truth? Look at yours, poor thing, next to mine, at those tell-tale cracks, widening by the moment.
It won’t hold water. You do see that, don’t you?
Why don’t you see that?
2
This is my truth, which is not the truth. But it will be.
If I keep in mind that my truth is not the truth, then the fact that I know the true facts is in fact what gives me my edge.
Pushing my truth over the line of accepted truth and keeping it there is my lifetime’s work, since the world I strive for depends on 24/7 vigilance against the insidious proliferations of the truth. Obviously, I need all the help I can get and I can get a lot, for my truth is loved by whoever thinks it true and whoever likes the direction of travel, even knowing well it is not the truth but will have to be for all our sakes.
My truth has a budget. My truth has human resources. My truth has occupational therapy with full inoculation package against the virus of the truth. My truth is currently recruiting influence wizards to spin that truth along the cybernet. My truth is now offering confession technicianships for backroom truth enforcement. There will be opportunities forthcoming for specialists in cultural exchange of fire and tourism toxicology as the business thrives. So we progress.
To foster and grow my truth, I need of course to know the truth better than the truth itself. These are the files where I keep it, marked ‘for my eyes only’. Unsurprisingly, the truth is getting larger. Soon the files will need their own anonymous building; one is already earmarked, in innocuous streets still within my easy reach.
Meantime I spend late nights sitting here with the truth, which never sleeps. I speak power to truth, which effortlessly says nothing back. This is all very wearing. Sometimes I think the truth is just biding its time.
1
This is my truth, which is not your truth. But it is the truth.
For your truth, I have a respect that falls short of the utmost only because your truth is not true. I believe you to be entirely sincere in your mistakenness, a searcher, fellow pilgrim on the camino de la verdad, off to a sunny start and striding the undulations into the golden logic of the afternoon: which was where things got hazy and you drifted off track (so easily done, I can show you where) to arrive in failing light in a deserted plaza in the wrong obscure town, breasting a finishing line marked only in your head.
Yet on another day your truth might well have passed for true, at least for a short while, had the truth not been available for comparison, but luckily it was and is: pure and smooth, a beautiful simplicity, and with the advantage of being the truth, which is also my truth.
Beside mine, yours is (no offence intended) devalued by superfluity and contradiction, a tendency to gaudiness and (look closely) those hairline cracks. Flick it with a fingernail: whoever heard of the clunk of truth? Look at yours, poor thing, next to mine, at those tell-tale cracks, widening by the moment.
It won’t hold water. You do see that, don’t you?
Why don’t you see that?
2
This is my truth, which is not the truth. But it will be.
If I keep in mind that my truth is not the truth, then the fact that I know the true facts is in fact what gives me my edge.
Pushing my truth over the line of accepted truth and keeping it there is my lifetime’s work, since the world I strive for depends on 24/7 vigilance against the insidious proliferations of the truth. Obviously, I need all the help I can get and I can get a lot, for my truth is loved by whoever thinks it true and whoever likes the direction of travel, even knowing well it is not the truth but will have to be for all our sakes.
My truth has a budget. My truth has human resources. My truth has occupational therapy with full inoculation package against the virus of the truth. My truth is currently recruiting influence wizards to spin that truth along the cybernet. My truth is now offering confession technicianships for backroom truth enforcement. There will be opportunities forthcoming for specialists in cultural exchange of fire and tourism toxicology as the business thrives. So we progress.
To foster and grow my truth, I need of course to know the truth better than the truth itself. These are the files where I keep it, marked ‘for my eyes only’. Unsurprisingly, the truth is getting larger. Soon the files will need their own anonymous building; one is already earmarked, in innocuous streets still within my easy reach.
Meantime I spend late nights sitting here with the truth, which never sleeps. I speak power to truth, which effortlessly says nothing back. This is all very wearing. Sometimes I think the truth is just biding its time.
© Copyright Alasdair Paterson 2020
Alasdair Paterson’s most recent collections are Elsewhere Or Thereabouts (Shearsman Books 2014), My Life As A Mad King (Oystercatcher 2016) and Silent Years (Flarestack Poets 2017). Born in Edinburgh, he began writing poetry in Liverpool in the 1970s and won an Eric Gregory Award in 1975, later taking a 20-year sabbatical before starting to write again in 2007, when he retired after a career in academic libraries in Britain and Ireland. He lives in Exeter, where he organizes and presents the monthly Uncut Poets reading series.
