The Truth

Just yesterday I believe I might have mentioned something about providing The Truth in my blog. Not the truth, but The Truth. It was a very Ali-esque post, as in Muhammad Ali, and thus perhaps a bit of it needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Not that I didn't mean it all, just, in the case of The Truth, well, one cannot really say The Truth. It's a lot like the Eternal Tao in that way; The Truth that can be named is not The Truth. The best one can do is to approach The Truth, preferably at speed, because if one approaches cautiously and slowly one is likely to find oneself mysteriously going in the opposite direction, or maybe just stalled in a field somewhere suddenly realizing that one has just been sitting there for hours. No, you've really got to fly madly at The Truth until you feel the searing heat of its breath, or pass out, or lose control of the vehicle and go rolling head over heals into a ditch.

We are very interested in the truth here at clerkmanifesto, and do what we can with it most days, but every once in awhile we like to make a desperate, sloppy, savage run at The Truth. We take our sight line. We get going as fast as we possibly can. When we get up to speed we make our last aim adjustment. Then we take our hands off the wheel. With our freed up hands we cover our eyes and cower in terror.

That, in case you ever wondered, is why this blog can get so battered. This explains why you sometimes experience a careening feeling in the course of reading this. And it also explains why it might feel occasionally like we hit something here, why there is a terrifying shudder, a crunch, because I can swear we hit something sometimes. Sometimes we clip The Truth in passing and go spinning and tumbling over the weeds. We land in a ditch, wheels up, suddenly aware of an amazing silence.

I am equally sure that The Truth never takes any damage, only ourselves.