Lesser & Greater Truths
Compiled by the Staff of Magellan's Log
Truth, a slippery subject in the best of times, has lately taken some licks from both ends of the intellectual spectrum. The French, a few decades back, decided that not only was truth relative it was also political, culturally determined, and 100% fake. They then gleefully exported this ill-argued insight to any country susceptible to Gallic charm, plunging American academe into a kind of mini-Dark Ages. While the Ivory Tower crumbled on its newly discovered Dead White European Male foundation of clay, at the other end of the spectrum religionists in various parts of the world once again unleashed the divine right of Those to Whom God Has Spoken Directly and showered the world with several decades of generally pretty nasty absolutist assertions concerning those of us who did not acknowledge their high bandwidth hookup to a deity. Changing the metaphor, we can only point out that what we have been through in recent decades is only yet another flood stage in what those pre-eminent 1960s analysts of many bothersome political, religious, artistic, musical, and metaphysical conundra, The Fugs, came to refer to simply as "the River of Shit," a.k.a. "history." Trying their best to ignore the mega-decibels emanating from the so many temples of the academy and of religion, plodding searchers and researchers continued their age-old quest for shards, however tiny, of that mysterious something which, in the light of both heart and mind, appears to have a quality for which the only term available is-- pardon the expression-- "truth." Not, mind you, the always seductive negation parading as truth with which Mephistopheles leads Faust around by the nose for 12,000 or so lines of intoxicating verse. Nor the destructive, hate-filled self-glorifying messages shouted from lecterns and pulpits in the last half of the 20th century. Glimpses, rather, of light beyond light. Words of direction toward another, distant shore beyond words. Magellan's Log has lately been more deeply immersed in things of the moment (but not necessarily things of real moment). Political turmoil can be profitable, but also after a while merely tiresome and ill-advised. We here reached that point and, as a kind of self-administered purgative, set the staff the task of seeking out good words in which, maybe, maybe, grains of (pardon) truth reside. We came up with 24, which you can access directly from the list below, or consider linearly, going from one page to the next. There is heat here, but some light too. Lesser & Greater Truths
|
Magellan's Log Copyright ©
2001 Texas Chapbook Press
www.texaschapbookpress.com