Fact Vs. Truth
It must have been my very first undergraduate creative writing class when I handed my classmate Henry (whom I had just met) his ass. We had gotten into a friendly debate about art and truth during our fifteen minute break. If you counted the number of times I asked what are you on, you’d think we were disagreeing and I think at the time we thought that too. However, eight weeks later, I think we were trying to say the same thing. My contention was that the purpose of art is to get as close to truth as possible whereas Henry claimed that truth couldn’t be farther from the goal of art.
Here’s the thing, if we’re talking about complete accuracy, I agree with Henry. I don’t believe the regurgitation of facts is the purpose of art. But we weren’t talking about fact, we were talking about truth. Truth is different from fact in innumerable ways. I’ll do my best to put some of them on paper the way a well-read philosopher might. A fact is detached from the emotional realm. It is wholly describable and objective. A fact is indisputable. I’m not saying an honest fact even exists, I’m rather commenting on its platonic form. Truth, however, is subjective. It’s colored by emotional reality and lived experience. Truth is personal. Truth is individual. Art is the closest we can get to expressing truth and even then, so much gets lost in translation.
I make music. I make music because I want my truth to be heard. I find it hard to write something, even fictionalized, that doesn’t resemble some emotional reality that is desperate to be heard. My songs feel like birds trapped in a cage waiting to be born and set free. What breeds them is truth. A truth that can only be expressed through art. Quite frankly, I don’t think many writers could write anything other than the truth if they tried. We’re all captives of our own minds when we make art. We’re all prisoners to our own experiences and internal beliefs. Maybe our truth is the cage.
It’s said that reading books makes you more empathetic. I think writing as an artform and thus an exercise in truth telling is exactly why. Writing allows us to approach someone else’s truth which just adds to our own understanding of reality. Sometimes, the facts don’t capture the truth. Sometimes the facts are devoid of an emotional human element that makes up truth. I think this is why fiction exists. We tell stories, we embellish, we change facts to try and get closer to truth, not farther.
My high school mock trial coach always made it clear: it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it. As an opening prosecutor, I was well aware that 90% of trials are won in the opening statement. We’re controlled, even in our most regimented systems, by the story. Even trials are less about fact than they are about truth. That which gets written and performed guides our personal understanding of objective realities. People’s lives rest on the shoulders of how we choose to express a fact more so than the fact itself.
I think this is why it’s okay that I claimed to be on Sertraline in my song “This Kid Ain’t Alright” when I was actually on Prozac. Sertraline fit and sounded better. It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it. The facts didn’t help me tell the truth there the way I wanted to tell it, so I changed them in the name of emotional reality. If I’m being perfectly honest, it’s not even the sertraline or prozac that makes it hard to cry, it’s probably the abilify or my own mastery of dissociation. My point is, I wanted to capture the emotional reality of feeling deep loss and being unable to truly do anything about it, even cry. I aimed to create an emotional feeling of resignation, isolation, and pain that's truer than the specifics of my med cocktail. This, to me, is exactly what Tim O’Brien did in The Things They Carried, or Laura van den Berg in Last Night. I also think it’s the point The Lifespan of a Fact was trying to make.
Facts matter, but they sometimes aren’t enough or even right for telling the truth. I don’t care that O’Brien fictionalized events of the Vietnam War, I care that he used fiction to translate his own experience in a way that would bring me, the reader, closer to his own personal truth, a truth that is entirely based in reality. I maintain that truth is not what is experienced with the senses, rather it is what is felt in response to those experiences. Art and writing exist to take us, the consumer, that extra step.
In Stories We Tell, Sarah Polley shows us how even when all of the facts are the same, someone’s truth can differ incredibly from the next person’s. The story will change depending on who tells it regardless of the facts. The story will change depending on whose truth is being reflected regardless of the facts.
