If "grace is a touch of truth"...

So. The search for truth is not uncommon. Whether it's conscious or not, many people spend a lot of time looking for truth in their lives, and in others. I'm realizing more and more how subjective "truth" really is, though.

In Something's Gotta Give, when trying to get out of trouble with Diane Keaton's character Erica, Jack Nicholson's Harry tells her that he's never lied to her, that he's always told her "some version of the truth." Erica retorts, "The truth doesn't have versions!" It's a nice little comic bit that lightens up a serious conversation, and in the context of the film, it works. Except, perhaps "the truth" does have "versions."

When God is talking to Joan in "Joan of Arcadia," he tells her that grace is "a touch of truth that lets you see the world in a new way," and "it can only be felt when you're open enough to accept it." It "lets you see the world in a new way." To me, this implies that everyone has different truths. I mean, I suppose it depends on your experiences and what you gather from them, but everything depends on that. I like this idea, though--that truth isn't absolute, that it's subjective and varies from person to person. It makes truth that much stronger, I think. Plus, it enriches our lives--in sharing our truth with others, and learning their truths, we grow. It's so easy to simply dismiss other people's truths when they differ from our own, but whether it's something they learn by socialization or by experience, it has at the very least some validity to it. To have the grace to accept that, and be open to other people's truths, truly is a gift.

I bet Andy Warhol had the grace to accept others' truths.

I started thinking about this a week or two ago after reading something for my Story Structure class, which reminded me that stories have their own truths as well. It's perfectly logical: people have truths, people have/create stories, so stories have truths. No fault in my syllogism there, haha. Anyway, this is the first excerpt?

"Story is metaphor for life.

"A storyteller is a life poet, an artist who transforms day-to-day living, inner life and outer life, dream and actuality into a poem whose rhyme scheme is events rather than words--a two-hour metaphor that says: Life is like this! Therefore, a story must abstract from life to discover its essences, but not become an abstraction that loses all sense of life-as-lived. A story must be like life, but not so verbatim that it has no depth or meaning beyond what's obvious to everyone on the street.

"Writers of portraiture must realize that facts are neutral. The weakest possible excuse to include anything in a story is: "But it actually happened." Everything happens; everything imaginable happens. Indeed, the unimaginable happens. But story is not life in actuality. Mere occurrence brings us nowhere near the truth. What happens is fact, not truth. Truth is what we think about what happens."

This got me thinking about the words "fact," "truth," "honesty." Fact is neutral; truth is not. Truth is combining the subjective with the objective. Then what is honesty? My dictionary defines "honest" as "free of deceit or untruthfulness; sincere." Then again, it also defines "true" as "in accordance with fact or reality." But, I suppose that works since reality is subjective as well--everyone has a different reality; there is no absolute. But I digress. Honesty goes either way then, I guess. Depends on context. It can be the fact, or it can be the truth. They can be the same, but they don't have to be.

The excerpt on story structure and truth goes on:

"Every human being acts, from one moment to the next, knowingly or unknowningly, on his sense of probability, on what he expects, in all likelihood, to happen when he takes an action. We all walk this earth thinking, or at least hoping, that we understand ourselves, our intimates, society, and the world. We behave accordingly to what we believe to be the truth of ourselves, the people around us, and the environment. But this is a truth we cannot know absolutely. This is what we believe to be true.

"We also believe we're free to make any decision whatsoever to take any action whatsoever. But every choice and action we make and take, spontaneous or deliberate, is rooted in the sum total of our experience, in what has happened to us in actuality, imagination, or dream to that moment. We then choose to act based on what this gathering of life tells us will be the probable reaction from our world. It's only then, when we take action, that we discover necessity.

"Necessity is absolute truth. Necessity is what in fact happens when we act. This truth is known--and can only be known--when we take action into the depth and breadth of our world and brave its reaction. This reaction is the truth of our existence at that precise moment, no matter what we believed the moment before. Necessity is what must and does actually happen, as opposed to probability, which is what we hope or expect to happen..."

This is where it gets complicated. It's late and I have to be up early so I'm going to have to finish this another time.

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Now playing: Ingrid Michaelson - Glass

There's a distinct difference between "gracefulness" and "grace."

At least, to me there is.

Being able to move through the world with gracefulness is nice. But being able to live with grace - that's truly admirable.

God: What you did up there was true. You found your voice.
Joan: Great. Great. Thanks for the lesson. It cost me my friend.
God: What, because you two don't agree about things?
Joan:I don't have a lot of friends, okay?
God: Do you know what Grace is, Joan?
Joan:Yeah. Pissed off.
God: Do you know the meaning of grace? It's a touch of truth that lets you see the world in a new way. It's a gift that can only be felt when you're open enough to accept it.

Grace was in all her steps,
Heaven in her eye,
In every gesture, dignity and love.
- John Milton, Paradise Lost

Now that is something to strive for.


Original Post 7/21/08, 3:16 AM
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Now playing: John Mayer - Something's Missing

"All that hatred down there...

...All that hatred and misery and love. It's a wonder it doesn't blow the avenue apart."
- Sonny ("Sonny's Blues" by James Baldwin)

Sometimes it feels like the world is so empty. There are lifeless people, shells that don't hold anything, wandering around, chasing something that doesn't exist. Everything is an illusion and nothing truly exists and no one can feel a thing. There is no worth; there is no reason to persist or try. No one knows anything but what they think they see and hear, and all words have no meaning behind them - they are but empty vessels floating through our ears.

Other times it feels like the world is so full. Full of life. Full of love. Full of faith and hope and inspiration and reason. Intangible everythings. Peace and freedom and spirituality and purity. Some shadow and darkness, too, but it's outstripped, outshone, by the lilting grace of everything else. Then it feels like the world is so full of everything that nothing could possibly hold it in, and it shall explode into a supernova that glows with flames that are streams of golden, luminous life and dreams made palpable, that literally flow from our fingertips and lips and eyes and hair and heart. And this phoenixlike blast will be a blessing, a celebration and rebirth of all that is good.

Perhaps like a phoenix, though, the world is left in a state of ash, completely devoid of wonder - emptied - until the good people of the world fill it up again. They renew it over and over within themselves until the world is full once more. And unless the good people patiently and tirelessly work to refill, the world will never reach this apex, where only for a moment, all is right, and we can't want for more.