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@Jenni_Fagan #Truth

Reading Jenni Fagan’s Truth : The Truth is out (and in) there

Truth is a problem in poetry. Note Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella Elizabethan sonnet sequence which starts:

Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show

The homophone ‘fain’ and ‘feign’ here drives together the two kinds of performance that contemporary queer theorists see as inevitably related. Any social performance of behaviour (a social enactment or doing something) is also potentially a pretence – a theatrical role played in order to deceive its audience. We are locked in a situation where fact and fiction are in practice inseparable.

The end of Keats’ Ode on A Grecian Urn is another problem:

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

The only way I have ever reconciled myself to the vacancy of significant meaning that both truth and beauty are reduced  to is to remind myself that urns might well think this, since their concern is with the appearances of their surfaces not their contents.  Urns merely perform beauty. It is their truth, were they to be conscious beings. In a world beyond such appearances they need to have, as Keats advised Shelley, to ‘load every rift with ore’. Their needs to be meaning and use in the world.

But the origin of Jenni Fagan’s Truth is more likely, I believe, to be the wide contemporary use of  phrases like, ‘The truth is …’, ‘To be honest, …’, ‘Truthfully …’ as a phatic linguistic expression to preface a statement that may or may not be about the truth at all. The phrase demonstrates that I am trying this statement out experimentally. It is my opinion but only my opinion and is therefore negotiable. ‘The truth is I don’t want to go but the pictures, but I suppose I could’.

Truth is a poem in which every repetition of ‘The truth is …’ is only meaningful in an imagined context or situation. Truth is the experience of multiplicity in understandings and contexts and how the understanding of that keyword relates to its context. Some of these contexts, not being mine or known to me otherwise, must to some readers be illegible even if probably meaningful to someone whom we don’t yet know. The legibility of these contexts will vary between different readers but meaning arises nevertheless because we begin to live possible meanings of these truth statements and possible roles and potential thoughts within those roles which we, as readers, have never played, or at least not yet, or even imagined.

The truth is we were always going to make up deities.

We tried out capitalism

Lately that seems to have been failing.

The truth is fascism didn’t work out so good before so why is it rising again?

The truth is the least of our capabilities.

The truth is at war.

We are not left with any sense of a consistent ‘truth’ to be discovered but to the thousands of ways in which truth is the vehicle of little stories that are not elaborated but which start a process in which we will assert things we later, or even at the same moment, contradict and which change from fiction to fact and vice-versa. Truth lies only in the whole and movement through a poem called Truth. Truth is getting to the end of the poem and looking for truth in a process of baffled partial comprehension not in one word, ‘truth’.

There is the poem’s great Satan, Donald Trump in my eyes but clearly Boris Johnson too, for whom lies are fake news. ‘Fake news’ might be ‘true’ of and for somebody but it isn’t newsworthy. Labelling someone’s truth ‘Fake news’ is what makes a hopeless pretence to equality of power fail in the hands of those who control what the ‘news’ can and cannot be allowed to include. That person is also the rapist, the abuser, that actor who stops the communication of the powerless with each other.

It’s men owning women’s bodies.

It’s a war on women being declared legislation by legislation.

It’s voting in a rapist.

It’s voting in a government across the sea (my way) who used to be ran by

a child abuser.

It’s not giving a fuck about the great unwashed.

Were they facilitated in such communion, through exchange of stories, they might progress to the find the mutual truth of each other’s strengths and vulnerabilities. And that is the truth. The fact that my and your truth differs, as the configuration of our vulnerabilities and strengths and how we use them differ, could still lead us to like each other without controlling each other. What I must not do is make my TRUTH dominant, hegemonic, exclusive.

The truth is I need to like my lesser self a whole lot more.

The truth is I am learning to not judge imperfections.

I salute flaws on the crow road.

I leave whiskey out for my demons.

I draw them a picture.

I welcome them home.

If you already like Jenni Fagan, you will love this. If you don’t know her – read this. Feel the rhythm and push of its love, hate, indecision and low confidence, decision and emerging confidence – it’s a belief that we grow as individual people in and with each other, projecting and introjecting, offering and seeking access, accepting temporary failure and respecting it in both of us.