Man has always found it easy enough to speak about truth abstractly and equally hard to express the truth verbally. This bitter experience has a many-thousand-year history. Still, dreaming obstinately about two inaccessible things, immortality and knowledge of an ultimate truth, is so typically human. The latter is impossible due to the discontinuity of human existence, so it is a dream that will never come true. There is a surrogate, though. It is the so-called “truth of one’s own.”
Beyond the shadow of a doubt, ours is the age of simulations when, all too often, a replica replaces the archetype. Jean Baudrillard’s simulacra have become symbols of modern culture and the media which are constructing a new reality. What is, for example, a journalist, for whom the truth has dissolved in flows of informational fakes, supposed to do? What should a reader wandering in this info-labyrinth do? What is to be done in cases of the supreme authorities becoming the late lamented of whom either good things or nothing must be said? What are we to do when the whole world has got entangled in the webs of the endless post-truth and it is next to impossible to make out what kind of stuff we are consuming? How can we make head or tail of anything in the whirlwind of different truths replacing each other in history textbooks? Brothers the day before yesterday, fallen-out relatives yesterday, hard-nosed enemies today, what shall we be tomorrow? I suppose, it has always been so. All-holy gods became nothing but wooden idols only to perform a job swap at the top once again in the future. Temples became swimming pools and vice versa.
What are man-made surrogate truths, anyway? Might they be just undeniable human fallacies? A poet wrote:
“My Lords!
Man finding no path to Truth-The-Holy,
Let’s honour Madness for giving us a Dream of Gold!”
These bitter words, begging for the question rather than exclamation mark after them, make perfect sense. The truth is sometimes blast-furnace for an unprepared soul. In the childhood days many of us played with a toy kaleidoscope tube. Oh, what wonderful patterns, always different, enigmatic, thrilling and shining so brightly! One day, eager to see the miracle-worker doing all that magic from the inside, I took it apart only to find just a few mirrors and a handful of good-for-nothing pieces of bottle glass. What a bitter disappointment it was! Oh, how I wished I had never made that discovery!
Well, if we are so preoccupied with “opening the closedness” and find no escape from yearning for the Holistic and striving for the Absolute, consuming our whole minds and souls, may the “Dream Of Gold,” Art, save us lest we should die of Truth! As Nabokov liked saying, art always walks on the brink of the irrational. It is a divine game so taking part in it makes us Creators too. Not in a make-believe manner but for real. If so, nobody can tell us from which tree we may pick apples and from which ones we may not. All we have to do now is understand or feel exactly where the game stops and the life starts. Might it be the same thing? This I know not.
Lara Lychagina
Editor-in-chief
