The only truths I’ve ever known are those that I have spoken. Innate/self-evident, in my DNA, or nurtured by experience and awoken? The only truths I’ve ever known are those that I have spoken. And when solidifi ed by utterance they could not be broken – incantatem, spellbound, certain, the paths that I had chosen. The only truths I’ve ever truly known are those that I have spoken.
Those inky blots I struggled to osmose, the minim split spilt on the stave, the code with no emotion, were dots and tails from dominant males that in me could not germinate until there came the chance to play, to beat the skin myself and pound the rhythmic rock that was the ground,
on which I built corporeal sounds, the waves on which I sailed around, and when I got my mouth around sweet melody, the sense I found.
Stimulation then abounded when I unleashed the meaning bound in neural paths that when unwound released the truth that I could lash my tongue to –
the only songs that I’ve retained are those that I have sung along to.
I marched the playground as a child to earn the right to one day fly, and all I can recall to date is right wheel, left wheel, eyes right, halt. No mechanics of the plane I flew; just the drill master’s racket that banged its way inside my head became the thing I ‘knew’.
And when it came to understanding, ’twas bound intrinsically to repeating; not two legs bad, four legs good and vice versa, as other contented pigs might order, but from a position of a profoundly discontented porker, unearthing lies like truffles in the dirt, to challenge those that ought to open ears and minds to that which I had lorded over with forceful reason to make the truth be outed loudly.
The truths that I have known the most are those that I have shouted, in rooms of friends and strangers captured by the lure and lie of entertainment or cultures that surround it – the only truths I’ve ever learned are those that I have heard, conceived, repeated. When attempting to absorb that that dripped from others’ mother tongues, I’d dry up until the time would come to écoutez et répétez, and only when my mouth chewed them round with an increase in viscosity would any neologism stick and find a home in me.
The only instances in which I’ve really appreciated any other’s substances have occurred when they have moved me with their vocal utterances.
When an inarticulate mild, meek, modest lover from whom I’d parted met with me to pick the bones of what we’d started, and I took breath, to give her rest from incessant desperate probing, and she looked me in the eyes and whimpered, I miss you, only then did I truly know her feelings.
And no length of love letter, greetings-card gushing or elongated email explanation could do justice to the love she showed me in that one moment.
The only truths I’ve ever known are those that have been spoken.
So stick the rigidity of your dictionary denotations and the self-impregnated, self-important written culture that’s exploded from a printing press that mass-produced a narrow view of what was true to a fifteenth-century goldsmith.
The truth is formed by what I’ve heard and what I’ve said, it oscillates inside my head, it will continue to until I’m dead, and when I’ve gone and rotted down to bones, or dust, and stone or bust, the only access to the truths that I’ve proposed will be from direct witnesses who were present when I spoke. And I hope when those who found themselves within my sonic range have the same enquiry as me, they will assent that truth is assembled in the blend of conception and speech.
In utterance, in utero.
The meat machine, computer code.
In utterance, in utero.
Your governance of cogito.
In utterance, in utero.
Breathe to life, new births, behold:
The only truths you’ve ever known are those that you have spoken.
