Poems on Truth by James Turner

James Turner.

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HAKESPEARE'S   ONNETS

	Poems on Truth by James Turner

	SAY
	Say there were no such thing as truth but only your word versus mine, say crowing victors were correct and victims wrong because they whine - say there were no such thing as truth, just rebels and the party line: you'd lick your story into shape till I believed it with my eyes - your telling it would make it so - you'd gag the baby when it cries, you'd lick your story into shape and there'd be no such thing as lies.

	In The Carved Angel
	Table for two, the other chair empty, pot of Darjeeling and a notebook. It's my day off and I want to write. It's my day off work, effort, achievement, failure, emotional self-harm, the struggle to remember. It's my day off fashion, keeping up a front, modernism, postmodernism, theory, maps, manifestos, spin. "When the finger points to the moon, the fool looks at the finger" (Chinese proverb). That's theory. That's the current obsession with language. But I still want to write. Listen to this. A word is an object in its own right. So is the moon. The word "moon" is not the moon. When we look at the moon, when we see its light, we are not in output mode. We may never perceive directly the moon as in itself it actually is, but we don't invent the way it appears to us on our screen. "The truth is what is" (J. Krishnamurti). What is there, what is happening, now. However wrong we might get it. What you or I say about it, coming later, maybe only a split-second later, won't change it. Can't change it. It's my day off poetry. It's my day off literature. You could pile up all the words, all the books ever written, it would weigh less than a butterfly. And I mean a butterfly, not the word "butterfly," not even the memory of a butterfly. See the difference, and in that difference is liberation and all happiness. A cessation of hostilities. The denial of that difference is mendacity. Spin. The more I labour the point, the more you look at my finger! It's my day off argument, politics, war, spleen, swipe. You say all this is pure arrogance on my part. You say, "Without argument, we'd all just languish." I let you have the last word. It's my day off argument. I told you.

	And Then There Was That Conference On The Subject Of Truth
	And then there was that conference on the subject of Truth that Louisa's brother told me about    attended by Engineers and Literary Academics and no-one else. On whether Truth exists out there, in here, in Spain, or anywhere, guess how the final vote went. It grew dark,   the stars came out, a full moon rose,   the stars went back in again,   the sun rose,   clouds formed, altered shape, dwindled to nothing, re-formed, and all of the Literary Academics asserted that there is noTruth, there is only interpretation and a fiddling of the books, there is only what we think, what we imagine, what we socially construct, what we collectively project onto the screen that forever hides the noumenal unknowable. Outside the taverna in the town's main plaza two men were arguing and shouting and calling each   other a liar, and there was about them that peculiar atmosphere of emotional violence familiar in families the world over, a livid green flame in the darkness blotting out everything except itself, while in the air-conditioned calm of a lecture theatre the Engineers all listened respectfully to the arguments of the Literary Academics, but said they wouldn't be able to do their job properly without at least the illusion that at some level they were dealing with Truth. Elasticity, viscosity, electrical resistance, tensile strength, and how they alter with temperature,   pressure, time - these appear to Engineers to be properties of the materials themselves, to be measured, read off from reality, not projected onto it. The human creation of data might save time in the early stages, they said, but then the engine   would fly apart, the bullet miss its target, the aeroplane fall out of the sky, the space-shuttle explode ("for nature cannot be fooled," says Richard, not even under pressure from the government of the most powerful country in the world), and as for the beautiful bridge over the sacred river, not even a Literary Academic would drive across it if he or she found out. And the Literary Academics listened respectfully to the arguments of the Engineers but continued   to insist there is no Truth. And that's how the vote went according to Louisa's brother and I believe him though he is a   Literary Academic. Then they all drove home, safe and satisfied in their cars, under the awesome sweep of a mackerel   sky lit from below by fire from the setting sun. And I still can't get over it. A conference on the subject of Truth attended solely by Engineers and Literary Academics,   what a stroke of genius! And what a chance was missed! Dealers in words, dealers in matter-and-energy, what if you'd really got to grips with that elusive   devil in the room with you, that poisoner of illusions, shatterer of barriers, spawner of revolutions? There might have been an explosion down there in Southern Spain, an explosion big enough to   turn the whole of human history round and send it  whimpering back up the valleys of thwarted desire to its source in the dismal mountains of forgotten childhood trauma, but nothing changed. Not even anybody's mind.

	Personal Message To A Poetry Competition Judge
	Now, for the poet, he nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth - Philip Sidney   Hi, Judge! - it's me. My surname rhymes with "learner." I'm on a learning curve. I want to be a forger, see. This poem's a forgery. Are you a fake as well, or True Discerner? Surely a Judge should seem a whole lot sterner. This ain't a Poem, anyhow - or we should redefine the concept "Poetry." I'd love to be a Judge - nice little earner - but I'm no Poet. That stuff's all innate. I always lacked it, even in my youth. Its language I have never understood and never will. I do not deprecate myself, I speak the truth. I speak the truth, and not some damned Persona. Got that? Good.   Note The judge of this particular competition was Les Murray.

	The Truth Is A Woman Who
	looks like a man who looks like a woman who stands in front of a mirror opposite a mirror in a room within a room at the end of a circular corridor in space. She's a bastard. She doesn't miss a thing. Loves it when she's misunderstood. Sighs with pleasure when you say she doesn't exist. Never uses make-up. To her that clever stuff about the blueness of the sky being an illusion is just an illusion. Language wasn't her idea. There's nothing quite like a philosopher to make her laugh. From time to time she does a double-take at a scientist. Then laughs almost as long. The way they concentrate only on the curvature of the smudges her long gown makes in the dust. She's there when forests and cities burn, but has no history of her own. Give her a rifle, she'd only pick her teeth with it. She's the friend, if only they knew it, of the outcast mad (survivors of torture too vivid to remember). She's no psychotherapist, but if you can look into her eyes, you don't need therapy. She's waded in the same river so often its mud continually anticipates the soles of her feet. She blushes the colour of leaves and listen, nothing frightens her. Even nothing doesn't frighten her.

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  File created 13 Feb 2006.