truth burials

i'ma get back to film critiques on the next one, i promise

Antoine Wertz, The Premature Burial, 1854.

in my previous article – you LIED! – i ruminated about the nature of truth in the context of a rap beef. in the pageantry of the feud, i wondered, what are the repercussions of Not Like Us becoming the hit of the summer, sonically pumping the allegation that one of the biggest pop stars in the world is a paedophile through the airwaves of popular culture?

“there is unknowable collateral damage happening before our very eyes”

i stumbled across this tweet yesterday. 

it made me think further about “truth” – the obfuscation of it, the delivery of it, the consumption of it… the burial of it.

i must admit – i am not studious enough to go and look for these unsealed court documents. 

just as i wasn’t studious enough to look through the court documents of amber heard and johnny depp, or the panama papers, or the mountains of declassified CIA files on UFOs, or Wikileaks, or Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks, or x, or y, or z.

or rather… i am studious enough, but i do not have the desire to dedicate time and brainpower to deciphering these things. 

the spectre of the quote, “if you want to hide something from Black people, put it in a book” haunts my mind as i confess to y’all that i do not care to excavate the truth about (some of) these important topics.

but then… i consider the quote as my brother Robert Jones Jr examines it:

“It’s an expression that’s meant to, at once, slander the intellectual capabilities and motivations of Black people and, in some contexts, admonish us into proving it wrong. It’s supposed to function as both insult and warning. And it weighs heavily on a lot of us, particularly when, in our attempts to escape the race-libel by dedicating ourselves to the act of literary enlightenment, we discover, in many instances, that literature isn’t quite enlightened on the subject of us.”

i consider that the anxiety towards excavating truth is not an aversion to truth itself, but a rightful wariness of its delivery system, a distrust of the ways truth is warped before it even reaches our understanding. 

i look around and consider how western culture historically leans into misinformation. its been exemplified recently as trafficking an appearance of incompetence over malevolent intent. it is much easier to scapegoat a fool than accept that we are ruled by hidden tyrants. the result has generated a sustained opiate of distrust from the people. the average person doesn’t really know what to do with that distrust. do we buy into conspiracy theories? do we riot? do we vote for brexit? do we blame immigrants? 

even the language of truth is deceptive, in that any attempt at concision becomes drawn out, overly bureaucratic swamps of jargon. so wordy and inaccessible, as if they’re supposed to be these impenetrable obstacle courses of information that no person would spend their free time looking through, let alone anyone who’s just trying to live their day to day lives.

the legitimacy of these documents fluctuates in importance depending on where you stand (and how much power you have). in this recent article by The Guardian, they report that the United Nations International Court of Justice “​​found multiple breaches of international law by Israel including activities that amounted to apartheid.”

Israel has been judged to be an apartheid state by an international court. <– why is that sentence so difficult to say clearly? 

i recognise that in my reluctance to excavate and verify truth there is a tacit belief: the revelation of the truth does not transform the drifts of power in the ways we often believe.

for instance, we believe that if a truth comes out about a person then that person will have to account for it. comeuppance is so much more complex. yes, there is court of public opinion. yes, there is “what can you prove in court”. but there are many more hidden layers that influence whether a truth will truly transform a person, systems much bigger than them to consider. sometimes, the personal truth doesn’t have the power to override the larger one.

this is my second piece that doesn’t have shit to do with cinema. and i’m sure, if i put my mind to it, i’d be able to find a way to link this to film... but what i’m contemplating is something that feels important, not fully formed and still in progress. and i wanted to share where i’m at with it.

when i think about truth, even within the walls of my own life, i think about how difficult it can be sometimes. concern about how others might receive what i honestly have to say. concern about how i’m perceived, about how damaging the truth might be, whether it might be irreparably so.

i try to weigh my words carefully, maybe too carefully. i try to present myself in the best light. that last thing is maybe where, generally, the truth becomes sticky. where the truth picks up lint. best lighting can do wonders for the appearance but is it honest if its so artificial?

we are living in a time of warped truth, contorting until it becomes an echo of itself and i think, we are inundated with many, many echoes – craving a navigation through the noise and to arrive at the source. 

but the more time passes, the farther away the root sound gets.

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