On Acts and Facts

Facts resemble acts in that something actually has been done. The sophistication of theatricality can prevent this understanding. We think we’re superior, having the truth. Is truth whatever people can be led to believe? Or whatever the big man says it is? Is it the result of an equation? Or something studied under a microscope? Once enacted, do facts remain the same?

On certain roads, I seem to travel through time. Even where trees and buildings have gone, replaced by blocks of other meaning, I feel their hidden presence. As on a ship, floating away, leaving behind acts of the past captured in these places. With them float my errors, strifes, and pleasures, and every word with its fact-making power, falling helplessly into the past. A fact can’t be altered, but what it means to you isn’t what it meant to me. Deaths and births reshape the casting: seeing life whole changes the emphasis. Consequences reveal themselves anew. Facts may be prisoners to mutable memory.  

We’re placed in a world of endless transmutations, swirling among desire and destruction. Be a little easier on yourself. God alone is eternal, and you are not in any way a god. 

On Reflections

3 February 2020

At the bottom of a drawer, I found a mirror from Norway, given me as a child. It had nothing to reflect there: decades of happenings passed it by. Typically a mirror should reflect yourself; this reflected only the wood. If the mirror gave a Norwegian reflection, would another give a different national reflection? Or do nations reflect?

How do we know what happened? What is actually happening or what will happen? Is it the responsibility of facts to convince? Do we scrutinize motivations with a scrubbing-brush?

There are witnesses. Witnesses, as anyone who works in court will tell you, vary in reliability, suitability, and being in the wrong place at the right time. Mary Magdalene is the most reliable witness we have, though she wouldn’t have been allowed to testify in court. It’s not who you saw; it’s who you are.

Many arguments, political or religious, fail to reflect their surface subject. In the end, they’re about something called “plain sense”. Overriding scholarship, scientific analysis, history or philosophy, “plain sense” derives from the interpretation of a dominator. It reflects himself, his view of the bottom of the drawer. It’s plain only to those who buy it.