Truth and Illusion Walk into a Bar…

[Image: “Childhood Memories,” by Liz West (from Flickr; shared here under a Creative Commons License — thank you!). This — evidently an entry in a group contest on Flickr in 2010 — is actually a composite of several photos manipulated into one: the children; the tree and barn in the distance; the tree trunk at the left; and the underlying texture.]

From whiskey river:

Looking back at the worst times, it always seems that they were times in which there were people who believed with absolute faith and absolute dogmatism in something. And they were so serious in this matter that they insisted that the rest of the world agree with them. And then they would do things that were directly inconsistent with their own beliefs in order to maintain that what they said was true.

(Richard Feynman [source])

…and:

Living with the News

Can I get used to it day after day
a little at a time while the tide keeps
coming in faster the waves get bigger
building on each other breaking records
this is not the world that I remember
then comes the day when I open the box
that I remember packing with such care
and there is the face that I had known well
in little pieces staring up at me
it is not mentioned on the front pages
but somewhere far back near the real estate
among the things that happen every day
to someone who now happens to be me
and what can I do and who can tell me
then there is what the doctor comes to say
endless patience will never be enough
the only hope is to be the daylight

(W. S. Merwin [source])

…and:

In the beginning there was the ‘One’ and it was bored out of its frickin’ mind…  and so it became two, just for something to do. Yin and yang, nothingness and somethingness, space and object, tumbling eternally.

I imagine those two would have quarreled endlessly had they not become lovers and given birth to an eternal spring of impermanent forms, the “ten thousand things” (as we are known in Taoism and Buddhism).

Perhaps this ephemeral impermanence of things is a sort of truce that was made between the abyss of absolute nothingness and the possibility of something actually existing…  a truce that makes it possible for everything imaginable to rise and fall, in and out of existence temporarily, throughout the boundless cosmos, for eternity.

(Alan Watts [it certainly sounds like him; unsourced, but see citation here])

Not from whiskey river:

A group of blind men heard that a strange animal, called an elephant, had been brought to the town, but none of them were aware of its shape and form. Out of curiosity, they said: “We must inspect and know it by touch, of which we are capable.” So, they sought it out, and when they found it they groped about it. In the case of the first person, whose hand landed on the trunk, said “This being is like a thick snake.” For another one whose hand reached its ear, it seemed like a kind of fan. As for another person, whose hand was upon its leg, said, the elephant is a pillar like a tree-trunk. The blind man who placed his hand upon its side said, “elephant is a wall.” Another who felt its tail, described it as a rope. The last felt its tusk, stating the elephant is that which is hard, smooth and like a spear.

(Anonymous [many sources, in many wordings; this one cited by Wikipedia])

…and:

Makeup

My mother does not trust
women without it.
What are they not hiding?
Renders the dead living

and the living more alive.
Everything I say sets
the clouds off blubbering
like they knew the pretty dead.

True, no mascara, no evidence.
Blue sky, blank face. Blank face,
a faithful liar, false bottom.
Sorrow, a rabbit harbored in the head.

The skin, a silly one-act, concurs.
At the carnival, each child’s cheek becomes
a rainbow. God, grant me a brighter myself.
Each breath, a game called Live Forever.

I am small. Don’t ask me to reconcile
one shadow with another. I admit—
paint the dead pink, it does not make
them sunrise. Paint the living blue,

it does not make them sky, or sea,
a berry, clapboard house, or dead.
God, leave us our costumes,
don’t blow in our noses,

strip us to the underside of skin.
Even the earth claims color
once a year, dressed in red leaves
as the trees play Grieving.

(Dora Malech [source])

…and:

#100: In dreams, thousands of little truths — I run, I am I and not you, a lion stretches and roars, I can button my shirt, the woman in the bus smiles at one child but not the other, the airplane is in the sky, I fall, the motor-vehicle office has a ceiling fan — all the myriad little truths coalesce into one grand but wholly imagined falsehood: we watch fantastic events unfold one into and one after another, over and over, our eyes beneath their lids playing so rapidly over the surface of the unseen-seen that all discontinuities blur and disappear. The story is seen smooth.

(So, dreams. So, memory. And so, now that I think of it, everyday waking life.)

The whole process resembles the work of a master furniture maker, once all the pieces are assembled: going at it with rasp file and coarse sandpaper, with fine-grained sandpaper, with oils and wax: polishing, polishing, polishing… With reason, we admire the woodworker’s skill — yet we rebuke ourselves for producing and holding onto lovingly burnished dreams and memories. Perhaps we should recognize the skill and the final product for what it is, regardless of the medium: why celebrate the finely wrought woodwork, but sneer at the well-crafted nostalgia?

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)