Fictional Truths

Roy Orbison plays on the radio
and for a few short minutes, you are younger,
listening as if the music were new
and you were still an innocent,
but you have become something new as you age,
a believer in the truth of the world around you, but,
with the sources of your childhood gone,
aware that truth has become the domain
not of news, but of poetry and song.

About this poem

This poem has a provenance longer than the poem itself.

Roy Orbison really was playing on the radio in the last diner standing as I began writing this morning.

I spent some time checking email before I started writing. No less than five people wrote me about vast fortunes (millions of dollars US) that were mine if only I would. Two beautiful young women who evidently don’t like wearing much in the way of clothes discovered me on the internet and wanted to start a romance. There was one of those on Facebook too. Four bank accounts and one credit card account threatened closure unless I…… Oddly, I have accounts at none of those banks. Four more emails said they were responding to emails I never sent. And then I took a look at the news online. Roughly 70% of the headlines, once I clicked on them, lied – the stories had nothing to do with the headline. Much of the news that WAS there was out of context. More lies. And even in the truth telling articles, many of them were about lies on both sides of the political aisle. Then… well you get the picture. I figured I was lied to about 40 times before I got my first cup of coffee. We are lied to everywhere. No wonder it is getting harder to trust anything or anyone. It’s work to know what and who to trust.

Saturday I went to Mass MoCA with my son and his fiancée. There was an exhibit at the far end of the museum called “Americantitus.” It referred to a “disease” that resulted in anxiety in America in the early 1900’s. Part of the exhibit was a display of all the elixers concocted to battle this affliction which included anxiety and dispondance in what the world was becoming. It dealt with lost dreams, and surprisingly, the power of magic to help us navigate those emotions.

Which, as I drove home, had me thinking about what many people have said, that our greatest truths do not come from news or textbooks, but by art and poetry and music. And I came out of the whole experience thinking to myself that for me, that way of thinking, that we need “magic”, described as something beyond ourselves and the logic of lies, to find the important truths and offset, or at least balance out, what is thrown at us day after day.

No wonder fascists and dictators often want to ban artists and burn books from early on. The truth is dangerous to them. Even in the form of fiction, song, poetry, art, and humor. Especially in the form of fiction, song, poetry, ar,t and humor.

Hang on to the truth, my friends. Seek it. Protect it. For the truth not only sets us free, it assures our souls, if not peace, at least integrity,

Off my soapbox. Thanks for listening.

Tom