Wednesday, February 29, 2012

What happens if the truth is never told.


This picture is a lie. Not exactly a lie when I told it; but it is a lie nevertheless. Tomatoes and citrus do not grow on my deck, regularly.

They did for a brief time, on a warm summer day.

The truth of this picture is its in-exactitude, its temporal status. A truth like this exacts all kinds of conclusions, leaves the watcher with a taste for a forever insistence. Here, on this spot, in this micro-climate, citrus and tomatoes have a tough time surviving, an impossible time fruiting, an adverse time leaving seeds and future happenings.

Here, they come to take their last breath.

I wonder how every four years we come to see pictures of a future painted for us with such certainty that we swallow hard, and make these pictures our whole truth. Yes, our whole truth. We forget to ask questions, to examine the rest of the evidence that is not laid out neatly in front of us.

If you lived anywhere on this latitude, with the wind factor similar, precipitation similar, you'd be skeptical about my picture. Your comments would ask for more details, more particulars.

We do keep the whole truth from our children because we want to spare them the harshness of life. We  tell them just enough to help them cope with what's in front of them, with the circumstances they can understand.  School experiences, job experiences, and life experiences will be teaching them plenty, we hope.

I wonder why we love fiction so much!
I wonder what it says about us.

10 comments:

  1. Can the whole truth ever really be told, Rosaria? Is it possible to even know it? It seems to me that The Truth and The Lie are two sides of the same coin...

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  2. It's the political season, and I'm trying not to get too excited!!!

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  3. Rosaria, when I look at a photo, I always try to remember that it is a snap-shot in time. How things are now or were then, but not how they will always be, or even how they were an hour or a day after the photo was taken. Perhaps that helps with dealing with the forever pictures painted by the politicians.

    PS I follow your Presidential election with considerable interest too.

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  4. I'm afraid I've become too skeptical, given the way our politics has developed over the last 30 years. These days, when I look at a photo, I'm zeroing in on ways it may have been altered.

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  5. and sometimes they keep the whole truths away from us too
    :)

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  6. You remind me of what I went through last presidential election. I so wanted everything to change for the better. Now I'm like you, trying to temper my enthusiasm . . . well or just tolerate all the silliness.

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  7. Fiction is definitely escapism from the truth of the real world for me Rosaria.

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  8. it says we're lazy and we want to be lied to. and then when we're lied to we get all crazy but it is really only a ruse, a lazy crazy that we don't have to do too much about except complain. we're a bunch of damn fools:) or at least, so it seems to me (myself included) even in this other country.

    xo
    erin

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  9. Truth - now that is a subject would could discuss forever. I love a quote a friend of my husband's had. "The truth is negotiable. Perceptions are rock solid." I don't know if he adopted that quote before or after he served many years as an assistant principal.

    I seek truth. I try not to be afraid of it. I prefer to read fiction.

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  10. Is it because we feel safer in fiction? We know it's not real so is this why we don't fear it.

    We all don't like being hurt so maybe that is why we never really want to hear the truth but then again if we don't hear it we lose the trust.

    This is a never ending circle we have created.

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