Saturday, 20 March 2021

The truth in another story

The way we see things

The pieces that make up the story are fragments of personal experiences, some individual and strange and others are interactions with people known, barely known, or unknown. The circumstances and contexts of encounters are ones of perspective, reflective of the owner of the narrative.

Some of that narrative might be kind or unkind, pertinent or irrelevant, the dispute arises where what is honest and true becomes inconvenient to others, either because they would rather than was not known or it paints them in some rather poor light.

Between the truth and what is told

The question then becomes what is the purpose of the truth and in whose hands should it conveyed without kneading or moulding? For the truth of one might well be the nightmare of another. Then to differentiate between the truth as a matter of perception from the facts as a matter of record from recall if there is no congruence between them.

How will one welcome a peremptory requirement to redact, to obfuscate, to rewrite, or to withdraw from publication the story as it is written? It is funny that in an episode of Murder, She Wrote, one of the protagonists that became a victim of a murder,  said to his stepdaughter, “Your play was amazingly written, but to have trashed your mother like that is unforgiveable.” By that, he disowned her. She wrote an inconvenient story and I know many of us have stories that touch raw nerves too. Would we dare tell them?

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