How The Story Invented Truth
on April 29, 2010 at 1:33 pm
I wonder if we (writers) have enough appreciation of our craft.
No, don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean that we don’t work at it, or appreciate the work of others, we surely do.
But, have you ever wondered how it all got started? I came across this quote today, and was greatly moved. 
“No one in the world knew what truth was until someone had told a story. It was not there in the moment of lightning or the cry of the beast, but in the story of those things afterward, making them a part of human life. Our distant savage ancestor gloried as he told—or acted out or danced—the story of the great kill in the dark forest, and that story entered the life of the tribe and by it the tribe came to know itself. On such a day against the beast we fought and won, and here we live to tell the tale. A tale much embellished but truthful even so, for truth is not simply what happened but how we felt about it when it was happening, and how we feel about it now.”
–John Rouse (1978). The completed gesture: Myth, character, and education.
It is a wonder to me that stories, the bread and butter of our trade, are cradled in such an amazing thing: the invention of Truth.
I’ll have more to say about this in a future post.
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There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio... and isn't it time you experienced some of them?
Discussion (5) ¬
Nietzsche said ‘There is no truth, only interpretation’. I am still trying to discover whether this is or is not true! When you talk about truth being related to feeling, it makes me want to get religious rather than philosophical, though!
Have you seen The Invention of Lying?
It’s a fantasy society (that looks just like earth as we know it) but everyone is scrupulously honest ~ it shows the birth of God and Heaven as a coping mechanism for dealing with death and dying.
Quite interesting and funny, especially at the beginning.
That’s the point Neitzsche is making. The Truth he is referring to is an ‘absolute truth’. Thus from Hegel he repeats God is Dead, meaning there is no absolute truth in this sense. The universe just evolved by itself. But then this is materialism, and Deism, gods if you will within nature. Even the Buddha consciousness is deemed to be omniscent and therefore godlike. I don’t know of any other way to explain the unexplainable, unless the person doing this deems that he/she is god/goddess, and even that’s already been done. Truth though is usually thought of as something known. Feeling as been left out of the equation except for Christianity’s God is Love. Pardon me for being ‘esoteric’ grin grin.
Just took the day off mainly. But can’t go without letting you guys know about the new PostModerns. We’re back to Jesus saying I am the truth. Truth in this view is not language, except that The Word creates what is in Christianity’s view. But these new fangled philosophers, reject the theories of knowledge, and are back to Being, or Metaphysics, or Ontology, your choice of Jargon. But they have another word, from the Greeks, Aleitheia, which means that the truth is disclosed or revealed, and thus it always remains ever partially hidden. This means that even when you eat a banana, that you never are able to comprehend the ‘whole banana’s truth as you eat it. Part of it will be hidden, and part unveiled, and always different from different points of view and at different times. As a writer then, we can’t expect much more in people’s interpretation of our ‘stories’. Trust this is ‘revealing’ to you. I can now use the ‘writer’s cop out’ for this new truth, and say – But it was impossible for me to reveal it all. No writer is capable of telling the whole story. Thank someone, God, the Buddha, or Ourselves, for that!!!!!!