Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?

Certainly not to the Jersey Shore...

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

The Truth According to Emily


Tell all the Truth but tell it slant--
Sucess in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind--
(Emily Dickinson)
Sugar coat the truth lest it serve to slap faces... what a very familiar and successful concept.  However, I believe it is a technique Dickinson advises the teller of harsh truth to use, not the hearer.  Too often people hear what they want to hear, effectually causing them to create fantastical scenarios that never fail to favor themselves.  Disappointment is inevitable... and rightfully so!  Knowing that people practice such sweet censorship makes one wonder why the first party need go through the trouble of telling with ’explanation kind’ in the first place...?
A close friend recently noticed a mountainous structure of falsities silently being formed upon the mere fact that I exist.  Just as I was about to deny all accusations of telling slant truths and speaking indirectly through circuits, she quickly noted that my name is not Emily Dickinson.  I am of the school of blunt truth.  I have, in no way, fueled the fire nor have I given hope to the hopeless.  She rightfully declared that I am not to blame.
The moral here is that people will hear what they want to hear regardless of how bluntly or, conversely, how evasively you tell them the truth.  When a person sugar-coats the already sugar-coated words of another, what do they get?  More sugar than pecan... or... more fiction than fact.  And we all know that an over-abundance of sugar leads to cavities and decay.  At this point, the hearer is so far removed from the truth that he begins to believe the lie.
Its just a vicious candy assembly line, really.  Only, the center is not filled with nut or nougat, but nose nipping, heart hurting, ass biting truth.
On a similar, yet completely different, note...No matter WHAT you do, someone will ALWAYS be able to find fault in it.  You can tell a girl she looks pretty or you can keep silent.  If you say the former, she is liable to bite back with "And do I not look pretty every other day?"  Yet, if you opt for the latter, she is bound to inquire, "Do you think me not pretty today?"  Either way, you’re completely trapped.
And on an even less irrelevant and completely reiterated note...
People have got to stop fashioning realities from figments.
It cannot possibly get any less irrelevant than that.

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