Truth

The only real pleasure belongs to truth.

“The poet that beautified the sect that was otherwise inferior to the rest, saith yet excellently well, "It is a pleasure to stand upon the shore, and to see ships tossed upon the sea; a pleasure to stand in the window of a castle, and to see a battle and the adventures thereof below; but no pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage ground of truth (a hill not to be commanded, and where the air is always clear and serene), and to see the errors and wanderings and mists and tempests in the vale below.” - Francis Bacon, Of Truth

I was so lost. From the ages of 18-26, life seemed like a cruel joke, and my suffering was the punch line. I couldn't orient my head in the correct direction and no matter how I turned, the sky was lost to me. I always ended up looking at the ground. 

I lost my religion. I left my family. Boys always claimed to love me when I was in the backseat of their car, moonlight and unfamiliarity magnifying a good sentiment, but I never could seem to keep them from growing to hate me. And I couldn't write enough stories about sad and broken girls finding love to fill the void inside me that only real love could fill.

I didn't understand the truth.

So, what was real to me? When I asked myself what was the truth, what did I think? All I knew was that I was a self-hating slab of meat. My stomach hurt so badly it felt like I was full of screaming animals. Every corridor I turned just led me back to the center of my hatred, a trick house maze with windows only for clowns to peer inside and laugh at me.

I tried to find a worldview that would justify how badly I felt. I knew that dark matter comprised 98% of the matter in the universe. I knew that dead animals orbited the earth, stuck in cruel Soviet vessels. I knew we never found life on another planet, but the deep sea was full of unimaginable horrors, a subterranean mansion of monsters underneath our feet. God was dead, but plenty of villains were willing to use his corpse as a puppet.

Love? Beauty? Truth? Those weren't real. That was just the gold paint flaking on top of a dead hand.

And if that's what you believe, but you're not willing to end the joke of your suffering and take yourself out - the only option is to become a terrible person. 

Fine, then. I’ll be terrible. You want to hurt me? Then I'll hurt you first. I'll turn my body into a fortress to keep all of you out. My eyes will become moats you can't cross without drowning. I’ll sharpen my fingernails to a point and use them to puncture everything I can get my hands on. The universe despises my pleasure, so I’ll get it any way I can. I’ll sneak into the darkness and steal it. I’ll hold its body to mine and suck it dry. I’ll abuse my body and turn it into a bleached and empty canvas to showcase my pain.

Then after all that, I’d still fall to the ground, ribs heaving, clutching my stomach, crying, and ask myself why I wasn’t happy.

Nothing about me or what I believed was designed to make me happy. 

Those early years of adulthood felt like a fragmented nightmare. There are huge holes in my memory, eaten away by shame and bad decisions. I disassociated from myself, and so much I can only remember as if I pressed a warm, damp rag against my face. When I met my now-husband, Robert, he would often quote Francis Bacon when I was in the throes of agony, unsure of where to go, what to do, or even who to be.

“Nature to be commanded, must be obeyed.”

I thought I understood what it meant, but of course I didn’t. I started to get irritated every time he said it. Yeah. I get it. I get it. I thought I had everything figured out, even though I was slowly killing myself. I told myself I wanted to be happy but I sneered at happiness. Whenever I experienced brief moments of joy, it was like a foreign object lodged in my throat. It was something I had to expel or else I’d choke on it. And when I saw others being happy it felt barbaric to me. Look at these idiots, enjoying themselves, surrounded by children and grandchildren, their smiles as bright and effortless as sparkling wine. If only they knew the truth. If only they knew that life was just a funnel straight toward death, a machine to generate corpses. They wouldn’t dare to smile then.

The truth. It’s funny now when I think about it—the truth.

“Nature to be commanded, must be obeyed.”

What I thought to be true was merely the raving, flailing gesticulations of post-hoc rationalization and cope because I didn’t want to feel like a failure. I believed in whatever meant that I could be justified in feeling like I was helpless while I was crawling toward hell. I’d rather have my throat burn with thirst than try to reach out for a glass of water. All the while I’d be telling myself something like, “The desire for water is a clever biological illusion. Thirst is a cruel mandate of evolution. The only appropriate and logical solution is to allow myself to die of dehydration.”

There’s plenty of people like me, too. I know I’m not the only one. They used to call themselves realists, but lately call themselves intellectuals and rationalists. They’re often well-educated and intelligent and dress nicely so that you might miss their eyes are haunted by self-mutilation, and no matter how successful they appear to be, their personal lives are a wasteland of poor decisions. They’re sophists. They’re wordcels. They’ve got the answer to everything, a personal bible full of quotes and facts of statistics to back them up, yet they’re perpetually unhappy. (And if you bring this up they've also got studies to show that smarter people tend to be more depressed because they “see reality as it is.”) They’ve got whiplash smiles and charming party personas, but if you displease them they’re quick to tell you that you don’t matter. Because nothing matters. The mass of human beings doesn’t even compare to the mass of dead insects they walk over, you see. Say, have you read Thomas Ligotti? Have you read Camus? The sense of injustice you feel is just an electrical impulse, everything is an electric impulse, and look here, this optical illusion means that you can’t even trust your eyes, so why do you think it’s reasonable for me to trust you? Just like that, the universe has absolved them of responsibility for their behavior. We are the last vestige of living rot that squirms on top of the dead matter that goes down forever. 

They tell you that life has no meaning, so we’re free to create our own meaning. They’ll usually say that the meaning of life is to be happy, or to love your friends and family. But a meaning easily given can be easily taken away, a meaning that has no real truth behind it, is nothing but a ringing hollow noise. If you observe their behavior you’d see that even they don’t believe in this newfound set of values. They’ll be happy until there’s a convenient reason to complain. They’ll love their family, until they’ve done something to displease them. Marriage doesn’t have to be forever, because a contract for forever is beholden to nothing. Discard your love. Discard your friends. Discard your family. Find replicas to replace them. Look after yourself first, even if that means throwing yourself off a bridge into the churning water below to avoid confronting the unpleasant feelings of failure. They don’t feel that the meaning is actually something that needs to be achieved above all else. Why would they? It’s not real. Nothing is.

Create your own meaning? I used to think I could do that too. It’s laughable now that I think about it like I could conjure “meaning” like something out of thin air, free from my flesh and bone, free from the eternal tug of time, of history like the rules of physics and natural law somehow did not apply to my own thoughts. Like my mind was not my body, and my body was not my mind, and all that I experienced was a floating ghost. “Meaning” was not a joker to be flung out of a deck of cards to get me out of trouble.

I paid for my stupidity. Dear God, did I pay for it. I paid for it in blood and a thousand tears on the bathroom floor. I paid for it in all the people I hurt. I paid for it when I did acid to “fix myself” and all I could find inside of me was shards of broken glass, a ruined cathedral turned into an abattoir. No revelation to be found. I starved myself down to 85 pounds and then, terrified of what I’d done, ran to a doctor who told me my heart was going to fail if I kept it up. Was, in fact, already starting to. Then I resented her for this, because I wanted her to tell me that I was fine. I wanted permission to continue destroying myself.

“Nature to be commanded, must be obeyed.”

I thought I understood the Francis Bacon quote because I understood the truth. All I had were facts. It can be easy to get them confused.

Truth is not just a mere collection of facts that can be assembled on a whim, to be discarded or acquired when convenient. An infinite number of facts surrounds us. Billions. Trillions. If you try to orient yourself by facts you’ll find yourself drowning in them. If you look down into hell, you’ll see facts. If you look upward toward heaven, you’ll see facts. If you already have a preconceived conclusion, you can find any fact to justify your worldview. 

Then you find yourself thinking, “Why do I feel so confused?” when you have so many facts on your side. Then you can start thinking, “Maybe I’m supposed to feel confused.” You begin to believe that the universe is a slanted mouth, a devouring machine. Evil. Bad. Why else would the facts lead you to the dark hole that consumes all your sight?

Truth is the light that dances upon all of reality. It illuminates the world so that wherever you focus your perception, you can orient yourself with it.

Truth is the fundamental structure of everything. It is the mechanism of how things work. It is the ultimate thing that cannot be avoided. Even when you think you’re avoiding it, it bears all its weight on you. Truth is not how I think the world should be. It is not a desire and a whim.

The truth is. It is what is.

I wasn’t obeying nature. Whenever I tried to discern the truth, I thought, “This is how I want life to be, because life as is feels so fundamentally unfair,” and then discarded any revelation that might show me otherwise. I wanted to be free of the yolk of my origins, my animal self. I wanted to make my own meaning. I wanted to be free of God, of demons, of good, of evil. I wanted to be a spirit without a body. I wanted things to be fair.

Reality didn’t care what I wanted. I wasn’t obeying nature, so I couldn’t command it. Instead, it destroyed me.

If you want to understand the truth, you must start trying to understand how things work on their fundamental level. Oftentimes you’ll be wrong. You’ll fuck up. People make miscalculations all the time. But once you learn how to decipher truth, you’ll never feel quite so lost again. You’ll know how to get yourself out of the dark.

If like me, you were so lost you couldn’t decipher up from down, here are some questions you can start asking yourself to find the truth.

• What do I want?

• Is what I want possible?

• If it’s not possible, then why do I imagine that I want it?

• Is it possible that I am lying to myself because I am afraid?

• What has gone wrong?

• What had gone right?

• What would it look like if I stopped lying to myself? How would I feel?

• Does my desire produce positive results for me and the people around me? Do I need to recalibrate what I desire in the first place because maybe what I thought I wanted was a result of ignorance?

• Are my actions leading to the results that I want? If not, then why do I continue to engage in those actions?

• Am I experiencing resistance when I try to put my ideals into practice? Why is that? Is it because the world is wrong or because I don’t understand the world?

• What do I understand about this situation? What do I not understand?

• What actions could I take to move toward a greater understanding of what’s going on?

In my experience, truth is not a black pill that you swallow like poison. Cynicism often masquerades as truth when it's nothing but a twisted mirror of truth. Even the worst truth usually comes with a sense of relief because truth points you toward action and gives you power over what to do next. 

“Nature to be commanded, must be obeyed.”

Truth illuminates the majesty all around you. It reveals epiphanies hidden inside ordinary things. It's immortal, eternal, and omnipresent. It persists no matter how much you try to avoid it and always welcomes you when you run toward it.

It really is beautiful once you see it. As Francis Bacon quoted in his essay, On Truth, “No pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage ground of the truth."