So a wise man, or a man who was at least passing for wise, started talking about truth. And the first thing he did, the clever bastard, was admit that nobody has the first clue what it is. We’re all just monkeys with car keys, little fizzing bundles of electricity piloting meat-suits around the planet, and we haven’t even figured out what the fizz is. Consciousness? Human thought? We don’t know what’s running the projector, but good lord, the movie is colorful, brief, and loud.

And yet…

Out there in the great electronic shrieking festival… pow! slap! kick! BOOM! you’ve got no shortage of bloviators, of sidewalk saviors and cable news prophets with shellacked hair, their faces glowing in the 4k pixel bath, absolutely convinced they’ve got the universe on a leash. They are selling Truth like it’s a used car, a timeless, irrefutable, low-mileage beauty that can be yours for the low, low price of your own brain. And the loudest dealership on the whole cosmic car lot is, of course, religion. These fanatics, these apostolic holy rollers with their eyes spun back in their skulls, insist their particular brand of Truth is the only one that gets you to the bliss of heaven. Just have a little faith, they say. Which is a five-dollar word for blind credulity. 

And so on…

Sometimes, you see, you have to do more than just believe. Sometimes you have to get up from the couch and move your feet. Take Vlad Dracul III. There was a man who put his convictions on a stick. A very long, sharp stick. He wasn’t playing around with faith and hope. He was a man of action, a walking thunderhead of revenge. Why? Was it because the Ottoman Turks read the wrong magic book? Nope. It was because his own father traded him and his brother like hockey cards to the Sultan, who was not a nice man. It was because while Vlad III was learning to hate in a Turkish dungeon, his father and brother were being tortured and murdered by his own people.

This sort of thing can change a boy’s outlook…

Vlad’s truth wasn’t a holy whisper in his ear; it was the hot, screaming fact of betrayal, and his answer was a field outside Târgoviște decorated with two thousand screaming, writhing, shish-kabobbed exclamation points aimed at a merciless sky. 

That was his dark sermon… that was his truth…

Now, let’s rewind history to Simon the Zealot, a different cat altogether. For him, the truth was a revolutionary tinderbox just waiting for a match. He saw this Jesus fellow, this Nazarene miracle man, and his synapses started to crackle with visions of Roman eagles falling out of the sky. He saw the critical mass, the juice, and he wanted to turn the power of popularity into a revolutionary battle-cry. He was trying to shove a prophet shaped like a question mark into a political hole shaped like a sword. This, you might imagine, made the local authorities a little jumpy. While Simon was trying to crown a savior king, the Romans were sharpening their nails. Was Judas the real betrayer? Or was it the man who tried to turn a movement about turning the other cheek into a bar fight with an empire? As a wise old Chinaman is supposed to have said, “If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.” Simon may have changed his tactics, but his all too mortal king wound up in the same place as Vlad’s unfortunate enemies: pinned to a piece of wood, proving a point about the interaction of truth and power.

Undeniable truth? Not so fast. It’s a road, not a motel. Anyone who tells you they’ve checked in and unpacked is either running a con or they’re so lost they think the lobby is the entire universe. The best we can do is what that magnificent, gloomy German filmmaker suggests: you can actually stare into the void until misty clouds of undifferentiated nothingness take shape and stare back. Who knows? You might find something interesting in there. Mostly, you’ll just see yourself, your own egocentric story reflected in a million broken pieces. But if you can lose yourself, as the poet from Detroit once said, you might stumble over a shard of something real. Something inspiring. Just be wary the winds of power can short circuit your heartfelt illusions. 

For now, until we actually begin to understand the wellspring of consciousness, could we please interrupt the merry-go-round of inherited cruelty, this endless cycle of pain passed down by people who were taught to be main characters in a story written by a mysterious, all-powerful Sky-CEO who actually cares to keep a running tab on every thought, every misdemeanor, every everything. The horror show starts when these people realize… and they usually do… that the Sky-CEO, in fact, isn’t watching and doesn’t care. 

Anyway… what if we tried something else? A little compassion… a little kindness… a pinch of skepticism and doubt. After all, the points of light seen in the dark night are mostly distant clusters of billions of stars and their satellites. That the universe allows for individual micro-particles such as you, me, astrophysicists, theologians, filmmakers, schizophrenics, etc. a glimpse of itself is nothing short of miraculous. What we know (we’ve learned quite a lot over the last couple centuries) amounts to no more than a quark, on a barnacle, attached to a massive seagoing cargo barge. We’re as good as bats experiencing hearing loss, we’re constantly bumping into reality in the barely audible darkness. 

But so what?

Don’t be afraid…
Keep stumbling…
We’ll see you there…
Fishing for ecstatic truth…
…in the gallery of the void.