An artist cannot formulate the one truth, any more than he can live by one truth. The only truth he can cling to is that there are no lies. Every sentence that comes to him is the truth, no matter how weird or contradictory, how sacred or antithetical to all human values, or even how true it appears to be. One can live without believing in anything, but only so as to respect everything.
This is a single truth out of millions. A writer who finds it necessary to construct some edifice around himself can only rely on inspired natural selection, sorting out those innumerable truths that he cannot otherwise control.
One drills deep into the mind in search of some truth with which to intensify life, driving down through soil and subsequent rock so that right from the start hard resistance flies to the drill as if to pulverize its power and break it to pieces. One must go where the rock is hardest, cut into it with the utmost power of concentrated thought and recollection. If the drill doesn’t break, one isn’t even trying.
Truth does not come from wanting it. And as a phantom it melts away when I try to take hold. Sometimes it comes unasked if I think on nothing. At the same time there are truths about myself that might never be revealed in this or any other way, and it is necessary to realize that truth can also play one false by concealing secrets never to be obtained by leaving truth alone.
All this is to say that I do not know, and by admitting it I build up more confidence in myself and feel further advanced by time and spirit than if I definitely and positively swore by all the fixed stars that I knew, and put forth an opinion that I defied anyone to gainsay.
The first step in the search for truth is not to know, to accept the dilemma of uncertainty rather than bite the sour truth of polluted bread.
11
Burton voted from time to time at General Elections. In the 1890s he ‘supported’ the successful Liberal candidate for the West Nottingham constituency, a Mr J. Yoxall, who stood on a platform of House of Lords reform, rural education, and industrial insurance. Later in life Burton voted Labour. Much to his chagrin his wife Mary-Ann voted Conservative and they had many loud arguments about it, though this was one issue over which he couldn’t finally have his own way, no matter how jeeringly he went on, which was probably why Mary-Ann persisted in it.
He did not believe that politics could have much effect on his existence. It was as if he had been born before the age of politics, knowing in his deeper self that they could alter nothing, though somewhere wanting to believe that they could. While there were horses in the world, used as the prime force of haulage, he was his own master, and no system could change that. At least it did not for most of his life.
He was never patriotic, and seeing me once with a Union Jack flag that had been given out at school for some jubilee or other, he told me sharply to ‘hurl that bloody thing away’. He was too proud and sure of himself, too skilled in his work to get hooked by any concept of job-lot nationalism. You were soft in the head and the backbone if you were for queen and country, or for king and country. To believe in that sort of thing was a sure form of bum-sucking. You’d got no guts. You were frightened of the dark. As a man you had your work and your family — though you may well like one and not the other. But the country you lived in, in the form of its government, was always threatening both with destruction, so he did not see how anyone could be wet-eyed about it.
Being a man with few friends, everybody in the district knew him. It wasn’t as if they were afraid of him, or distrusted him exactly, but he was recognized as the smith, the man apart, a person with secrets they could never share. It was as if he had come to the country hundreds of years ago, and then forgotten he had done so, and where it was he had come from, but that look in his eyes as he gazed at the woods in the distance was as empty and far-seeing as if some part of him did after all remember that he had undergone a tremendous and difficult migration. He worked much and talked little, so perhaps that accounted for him having more aquaintances than friends.
The only foreigners he knew were a couple of Belgian refugees billeted on them during the Great War, and his one observation was that they were a ‘rum pair’—though he never said as much to their faces. His wife Mary-Ann remarked that they had to have chocolate to drink instead of tea, which seemed extremely strange to her.
Burton had no belief in God. And after death it was the end, nothing, a disaster you went to sleep under before it hit you, if you were lucky. Nevertheless, his children were packed off to Sunday School for nearly ten years of their lives, the result of which was a glass-fronted case of books in the parlour recess, sober volumes they had brought home as prizes, and the first such collection I’d seen in a private house. From time to time Mary-Ann would give me one to take home and keep.
Burton only bundled the kids off to bible class so as to get the house clear and make free with his wife without too many inquisitive ears wondering what they were up to and what those noises were. If the Sunday Schools of England in all their Godly work did not produce a nation of Christians they at least helped, when living-space was intolerably cramped, to keep a bit of private love-life on the go. One wonders if those sanctimonious men and women really knew what they were up to, or whether they didn’t just look upon Sunday School teaching as a sure way of keeping themselves out of mischief.
Even in their sixties Burton and Mary-Ann, when I used to stay here, went upstairs on Sunday afternoon ‘for a bit of a sleep’ as they put it Burton tried to get me off to Sunday School with the Ollington children who lived in a cottage on the edge of Robins Wood, across the Cherry Orchard, but I came out with the statement that I did not believe in God, a straight answer which amused him so much that he winked at Mary-Ann, laughed loudly, and didn’t mention it again.
He either recognized me in him, or gave in to the unknown part of me stemming from my father, whom he implacably disliked — though he never said so. Rather than face the truth he preferred to keep silent, and thereby enrich himself in the only way possible.
12
To define the hidden truth is to change life for the better. One becomes more aware and more alive when it is no longer concealed, and a truth that reveals other hidden truths expands the limits of consciousness in such a way that it would seem one was hardly born before that first truth became apparent.
The greatest truth of all would be to control the visionary light that flares in the mind for a split second at the point of dying, but which is put out for ever by death — and so is denied to us. I ask too much. Burton, who was strong in other things, was unfortunate enough not to realize that such questions existed. In one sense he was too strong to think they were necessary. Where illiterates ignore many things, literates question them so as to bask in the comfort of ignorance when they get no answer.
To want truth is the beginning of defeat. To distrust truth is the first step to paradise. Life ends where truth begins. The search for truth is a momentary aberration that will not last, though a person should not refuse any experience that clamours to mind, for it may be a lock on the canal of life, carrying him to a higher level of consciousness, or at least suggesting it to him.
Paradise, desired by everyone, is a place where neither truth nor lies exist, and where all is provided. But paradise can never be real, though the desire for it is. The truth this leads to is unimportant in that sense. But I am different from Burton, able to believe that an answer of yes or no to such a question may produce the first truth that will open the door to this search, or make me so despair of it that I will give up and go on in the darkness as before. People who cannot make decisions are in the hands of destiny. Those who do not ask questions are in their own hands.