Love Is To Knowledge

It was poetry that I wrote first, around the age of ten or so, and from there it was fifteen years of poetry and journal entries before I started working on the novel. The novel took fifteen years plus to complete. My excuse is that I was researching, reading, and contemplating throughout most of that time--that I didn’t have everything nailed down enough for it to garner respect as a piece of literature.

The actress was the inspiration to finish the first novel, so I could write plays; to win her heart; to fulfill the dreams of being an artist living with their muse. But maybe I was already out of the game, forever estranged for having come to know too much. Nonsense you say, how could learning too much ever estrange anyone from anyone else? Emily Dickinson once said that hearing the truth is such a rare thing, it’s a delight to tell it; but then on the other hand, Frederic Lorca said the worst thing about seeking truth is finding it. So perhaps like everything, the truth itself is paradoxical, both a delight and a horror.

As human beings we ought to relish the truth because our ability to reflect upon the past, consider the present, and imagine the future is what defines us apart from all other creatures here on our beloved, sexy, Earth. Of course there’s the well-known saying that ignorance is bliss, and so we might say an interesting person, a bold person--perhaps even a noble person--is one who cares to know the truth whether it’s a delight or not. Maybe it’s that the truth is a delight to those who are delightful, and a horror to those who are horrible.

Descartes said never accept anything as true unless you clearly know it to be true. How do we know we exist? Because we’re reading words, and we know things like if it’s day or night, and how day and night are divided into seasons, and everything that follows--all such things we clearly know to be true. We know we exist because we’re thinking--we think, therefore we are. OK great, so what’s the most important thing to us? Wait--why even ask what the most important thing is to begin with? Answer: because we can’t get where we want to be unless we first know where we’re at.

Premise: It can be contested that water and food are more important to humans than knowledge, that without it we wouldn’t be able to know anything because we’d be dead. But how do we get water into our system if we don’t first know where it is? People have died, not because water and food wasn’t available, but because they didn’t know how to get to it; and people have also died because they didn’t know what they were drinking or eating would kill them. That makes knowledge a matter of life and death. So it’s not a conundrum, a chicken or egg thing, nor is it even a question as to which is first in importance. An infant will die if uncared for because it doesn’t yet know how to survive. To reply that an infant needs food first, in order to live long enough to gain knowledge, is to confuse the requirement for knowledge with the importance of knowledge. When we make that distinction we realize that for us little naked monkeys, whether it’s first-hand knowledge--where water is--or second-hand knowledge--a parent knowing to supply it--knowledge always comes first.

To those who say love comes first, remember we have to first know who and what to love. Many people have loved things which were not in their interests to love, which in turn cost them much joy and happiness. And to those who point to Einstein’s comment--“Imagination is everything,” remember, he wasn’t making a pronouncement. How could he have developed E = mc2 if he didn’t first know what energy, mass, and light were? How could Picasso have painted Guernica if he didn’t first know what paint, canvas, and war were? Imagination requires knowledge in order to do what it does.

But what of the position that it’s love which gives us the desire to live, and that without it no amount of knowledge would drive us forward? That we wouldn’t keep making babies, building the human bridge into the future. In that sense, for those with heart, take heart, and happily, that love, not knowledge, is first in importance if you think human existence is important. Love is to knowledge what knowledge is to the imagination; one relies on another to exist, while love simply is.

Although truth is derived from knowledge, is it really paradoxical? Perhaps the notion that objective truth is a delight to the delightful and a horror to the horrible is untrue because there is such thing in the world as deceit, and while deceit often wears the mask of truth, truth never the mask of deceit. Truth is what it presents itself as and nothing else because it can’t be anything but what it is. Truth and only truth escapes the paradoxical nature of existence. And if that’s true, then knowing it and acting in accordance with it is what helps us escape confusion while at the same time vetting us as genuine--if one believes humans should operate on truth rather than deceit.

Can deceit be employed as a means to an end which is true? No, because we do not call that deceit; if it’s to bring about the truth, we call it altruism. Just as being angry and being indignant are not the same; one is due to thwarted desires, the other to injustice. That we humans even make such distinctions and have developed words to render such, that alone would lead one to believe all is based on the love of truth.

Love of truth can get you estranged and cut out of the game if that love is not handled correctly. You can either be right or be happy, but you ain’t gonna be both. Too bad for some they’re not better at hiding their love.