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Picture: The libraries do not fool us.
Silence can be very noisy
To start with,
If you don't know how
To stay quiet inside.
If you choose silence
Rather than words,
Which is a good idea
If you are good at words
And read a lot of them
For pleasure,
And speak a lot of them
For effect
Or because it is your job
To be a professional loudmouth
Like a priest,
Or a pandar,
Or a politician,
Or a journalist,
Or a teacher,
Or a lawyer,
Or an aspiring human being,
With a maw which vomits vocab
For reasons of personal insecurity
Or glamour –
Choosing silence rather than words
Is a good idea
For such persons as these.
Silence is eloquent,
But in a way which doesn't use words.
Silence is efficacious
Because it gets things done
Without those same things
Getting mixed up
In badly deployed words.
Picture: The libraries do not fool us.
And silence is veridical
In that it promotes
The apprehension of truth
Without subverting that same truth
In a muddled mash
Of daintily spewed verbiage,
If you know what I mean.
I mean –
If you know what I mean
Skip this bit –
I mean that truth
Cannot be poured into words;
The function of words is to disable truth.
Think of any dogma
Or creed
Or catechism
Or systematic theology,
Or, on the other hand,
May be don't think
Of that sort of stuff at all,
If you want to stay free
And light
And truthful.
For goodness sake,
Dogmas
And creeds
And catechisms
And systematic theologies
Don't even tell us about yesterday's
Illusions of truth,
Let alone today's.
The point is
That truth cannot be accumulated,
And repetition is not truth.
That's what words try to do:
Words try to accumulate stuff called truth
And repeat stuff called truth
And assert stuff called truth
Until it bores everyone to death. Picture: The libraries do not fool us.
But real truth doesn't bore everyone to death;
Real truth excites everyone to life.
All this sounds like a phoney mantram,
Of course,
But that's because it's built of words,
Or it may be because
It's just plain wrong,
If there is such a thing as wrong –
And who decides that?
Who decides what is wrong?
And who decides who decides?
The guy with the most pints
At the bar beside you?
The priest with the most altar boys
Under his cassock?
No.
Call me a spiritual fascist
If you must,
But truth cannot be accumulated.
What is accumulated
Is always being destroyed;
It decays inexorably
As life moves on
And leaves it behind
Dumped on the dungheap,
With the thought of returning later,
Maybe.
And language mutates
And words fail to contain
Because truth is too slippery
And changing
For words to hold.
Truth can never decay
Because it is only found
In the present moment,
In a fleeting microdot
Of personally experienced
Smiles
Or tears.
A second's tears
Contain more truth
Than a century's libraries.
A splash on a page
Is closer to the heart of God
Than the word it smudges.
Picture: The libraries do not fool us.
And repetition is not truth, either.
Repetition is a lie.
Repetition is pile of stuff
In a locked boxroom
Without boxes
Or key.
No.
Truth is different:
Truth is a state of being
Which arises
When the mind
And its house-elf, the word,
Ceases to constrain
The veridical perception
Of what only exists
In that pre-verbal domain called
Now.
Words are history.
Words are then.
Words seek to disable truth
By lexical distraction.Picture: The libraries do not fool us. The Name of the Rose.
But we are alert.
And we are confident to claim that
The libraries do not fool us
And that they cannot be used
Against us
By the ancient
Book-appointed
Authorities
Of dust and deception.
Picture: The libraries do not fool us.
Picture: The libraries do not fool us. St Benedict statue at Norwich, England.
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