David Beresford Another Country ‘The truth” is a wonderfully elusive thing. The thought reoccurs with the international controversy over The Patriot – Mel Gibson’s latest mind-blowing assault on the verities of history. The Hollywood blockbuster reportedly offers a unique account of America’s War of Independence by which the British redcoats are portrayed as role- models for the Gestapo and the history of slavery apparently much misrepresented. The indignation evoked by this row over factual “distortion” strikes me as quaint, being driven by the assumption that the truth is discoverable. I abandoned that notion some time ago, in appreciation that myth and fantasy have more to do with reality than what we generally considered to be “reality” – those “truths” we believe are discoverable with the tools of journalism and history. It was, I think (in the context I am compelled to hesitate over the definitive), during the Gulf War – said to have been the conflict most intensively covered by the media in history – that it dawned on me that “the truth” is unavailable. It is difficult to pin-point the moment at which the realisation set in. But I like to think it was shortly after Kuwait city’s recapture when I stumbled down the stairs of one of its biggest luxury hotels – where I had been sleeping on the boardroom table – to find a large Arab wearing his robes sitting in the middle of the huge, heavily curtained lobby with a single candle burning on the desk in front of him and, above his head on a pillar, a sign announcing: “Atrocity tours here”. Tour though we did – and this at a time when the entire world was shuddering at the horrors discovered with the relief of Kuwait city – not a trace of atrocity could we find. Whether or not the Gulf War atrocities are “true”, Saddam Hussein will just have to live with them, because one of the penalties of defeat which the descendants of the redcoats have to share is to have the victors write the history of the conflict. In the same way one of the perils of an afterlife must be to witness one’s survivors in the battle against mortality shape one’s personal history, whether through biography, obituary or merely bucolic reminiscences at the wake. “Truth is beauty and beauty truth,” said John Keats. And it is also well said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, or at least the eye of such arbiters of fashion as the art critic. Why else do we value the “beauty” of Van Gogh’s representation of a bunch of flowers – upteen million dollars, unsmelt – so highly over the “true” thing. In the brush-strokes of the Impressionists lie the triumph of subjective perception over objective fact, the power of the imagination over reality. Or, perhaps more accurately, in the imagined lies the magic of reality. As the dusty poet went on to say: “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play onE…” The courts, like the media, attach weight to the “eye-witness account”. But psychologists have shown by experimentation that the images “burned on the brain” by immediacy are the least to be trusted, such is the power of the mind to self-deception particularly in moments of crisis. How many innocents have been frazzled in the electric chair, or danced with broken neck at the end of the hangman’s rope, because of a confusion of images in the traumatised mind of a passer-by? Anyone who believes they have nothing to fear from capital punishment might do well to rethink the nature of their innocence. Which is not to say that the heated pursuit of truth should not proceed. After all, until such as the goodly Stephen Hawking leaps out of his wheelchair squeaking “eureka!”, what do we have to proceed with if not the myth of truth?
Which reminds me that I have reconsidered my last hypothesis on the meaning of life, which had it that we are in the nature of space probes, sent down into this hostile environment that is existence in order to beam information back to our creators. After a reappraisal of the evidence at my disposal I have come to the conclusion that what happened was that many years ago the Cosmic Jester lit an exploding cigar, leading to a Big Bang of such intensity that it scattered his wits. Our existence is the first glimmering of his returning consciousness.
In the beginning was the word and the word was bullshit, but it just had to do, because that’s the way it goes.