They say it was Aeschylus who said “In war, truth is the first casualty”. We really don’t know if he heard it from someone else. Some say all is fair in love and war – but to equate them suggests that they play on the same field. And further, when we look at our modern world, it might be said that capitalism boils down to a war for attention, a war for mind share. I’m making these conflations to point at a common denominator, that being that truth is what lies bleeding on the pavement as we click on to this or that. Oh, I believe this, or that, or some other thing, and all the contraries are subordinate to the scheme by which I ascribe value. Salty is good. Fried too. Fried and salty? Umhmm.
Therefore, to borrow a little from Calvino, to proceed without fear of wind or vertigo, to tickle dead Fred (when in doubt tickle dead Fred) who asked in grand style “1. The Will to Truth, which is to tempt us to many a hazardous enterprise, the famous Truthfulness of which all philosophers have hitherto spoken with respect, what questions has this Will to Truth not laid before us! What strange, perplexing, questionable questions! It is already a long story; yet it seems as if it were hardly commenced. Is it any wonder if we at last grow distrustful, lose patience, and turn impatiently away? That this Sphinx teaches us at last to ask questions ourselves? WHO is it really that puts questions to us here? WHAT really is this “Will to Truth” in us? In fact we made a long halt at the question as to the origin of this Will—until at last we came to an absolute standstill before a yet more fundamental question. We inquired about the VALUE of this Will. Granted that we want the truth: WHY NOT RATHER untruth? And uncertainty? Even ignorance? The problem of the value of truth presented itself before us—or was it we who presented ourselves before the problem? Which of us is the Oedipus here? Which the Sphinx? It would seem to be a rendezvous of questions and question marks. And could it be believed that it at last seems to us as if the problem had never been propounded before, as if we were the first to discern it, get a sight of it, and RISK RAISING it? For there is risk in raising it, perhaps there is no greater risk.”. Ever chucking caution to the wind, that Fred, but still, the injection of uncertainty and ignorance into the discussion, I think that’s a very fair offering. We’d like to think of truth as some cosmic boolean, is or isn’t, voila but we discover that it’s not that the truth doesn’t exist but that we don’t have the capacity to grab it. It’s immense, after all, and tremendously interconnected. Small reductive observations stand only briefly in the existential storm. Not really atoms, you say? Nor quarks? An n-dimensional manifold of relations between strings? Surely nay, and quantum entanglement, why, if we accept this we are accepting, as probably we should, that the limits of our knowledge are very strict. Heisenberg. Godel. Can we be saved from ourselves? The stock market rose or fell yesterday, I’m pretty sure. They say the movement was driven by investor sentiment.
Alright, so whether all is war and indeed there Truth lies dead or mutilated before us, or Truth was never accessible in the first place and it’s just that we have to constantly revise our system of approximations in order to feel that we have a sufficient adjacency to the possibility of it, we’re told on considerable authority that Nobody blinded Polyphemus. But what happened then? The tale is told for the hero. The legacy of Arges, Steropes, and Brontes however, (these were the original Cyclopes) assuredly lived on. In scattered caves on Mediterranean edges, edging up Mt. Etna here or Olympus there, or in the Atlas range. They’re there. Still. It is at this point that I feel compelled to further risk truth, compelled by evidence, if the collective unconscious can be considered evidence, or at least the perspective of a given self upon that mighty miasma. Let’s go with the first picture now – and you’re right, it will take some explaining
I’m sure the first thing you notice is “That’s not a Cyclops!”. We hold this truth to be se1f-evident. But from whence then? The original explanation, still much debated, runs like this – that where the Cyclopes once dwelt, also dwell, seldom seen, a certain very special sort of giant snail. Almost the size of a cow there lingers in them a magic that science is only beginning to fathom. Perhaps radioactive materials gassified by volcanic activity was the cause, that much is uncertain, but something they want to call rapidly assimilative genetics seems to operate within them. Let’s say a poor shepherd boy was unfortunate enough to die in an avalanche. Giant snail (it’s noteworthy that they were omnivorous) consumes him. Or is it that the slug coccoons him? There are seen occasionally, it is rumored, snailtaurs – half man, half giant snail. Poor blinded Polyphemus, it is even said, dying in his cave, well, a cyclopean snailtaur is not too far a reach. The theory holds that the snail assimilates the genes of another creature and incorporates them into itself. The horns are difficult to explain. It’s not known if the snails can assimilate more than one creature in a lifetime. Indeed so much is not known, for example, if they are sterile. Also little is known of their culture though pottery shards are beginning to provoke some interesting conjectures.
Here’s another – this one pointing to the fact that it may not only be cyclopes that these snails can assimilate.
And another two, these especially interesting because of the eye stalks.
It’s fairly clear, based on the presented diversity, that a variety of assimilative possibilities exist, yet no one has ever witnessed an assimilation!
There we are. Further evidence that Truth may be a casualty far outside the ravages of war. Indeed though, it may be that what we are seeing here and in the larger culture is the stepping forward of uncertainty and ignorance, that outright truth and outright falsity are juvenile props for true believers, and true doubters (and are not belief and doubt truly of the same nature? I invest a certain amount of credence (N) in a proposition. It may be a negative number. Just recently at a convenience store in Sardina, it was reported that a seemingly drunken cyclopean snailtaur became enraged when the proprietor would not accept bitcoin. All hell was said to have broken loose. The snailtaur escaped into a nearby tunnel before local authorities could respond.
More to come on this
