The Miracle of Context

Image Source: Minds.

Can you recognize the truth, if it's taken out of context? The Internet has lately become Pandora's Box, spilling out its contents to those who dare to look (or look again - or again).

Images Source: Hello! Magazine / Getty.

Last week, a friend dismissed my claim that people want to see the truth. He thinks people are not interested in abstracts like 'truth.' They just want to get on with their lives.

Whether they want the truth or not, the signs and symbols of truth are on the move. Conversations float around and skim the surface. Another friend wondered out loud tonight, "It feels like the virus is more of a meme than anything else."

In the wake of the US inauguration, disinformation, strange rumours, and weird info dumps are circulating online. Everything feels off, but bizarrely connected. There is something bigger at play.

Image Source: 4chan; also here.

Truth and fiction overlap. There is no way to drill down to bedrock. It will be impossible to write an accurate and neutral history of this period, since every piece of information is challenged by political spin and technology so advanced that everything can be faked. I see netizens trying to read the tea leaves, but that is impossible. There is no truth. There is only context.

Conan the Barbarian (4/9) Movie CLIP - Knocking Out a Camel (1982) HD (28 October 2011). Video Source: Youtube. Reproduced under Fair Use: Conan the Barbarian (1982) © Universal.

As for that context, truth arrives through coincidences and synchronicities. Coincidentally, two film scenes keep running through the back of my mind. They both involve the hunt for camouflaged or concealed transgressors. The first is a scene from Conan the Barbarian (1982):

Subotai : How about two snakes coming together over a black sun? A magnificent standard!

Black Lotus Street Peddler : The only snakes I know of are those of Set and his cursed towers. Their evil has spread to every city. Two or three years ago it was just another snake cult, now... they're everywhere. It is said that they are deceivers... they murder people in the night... I know nothing.

The other scene is from Silence of the Lambs (1991), in which Clarice Starling kills Buffalo Bill in his shuttered basement.

The Silence of the Lambs (11/12) Movie CLIP - Pitch Black (1991) HD (30 July 2013). Video Source: Youtube. Reproduced under Fair Use: Silence of the Lambs (1991) © Orion Pictures.

Coincidences everywhere. Image Source: LBRY.

Also coincidentally, while editing some of my poems last night, I read over my notes from June and July of 2019. They speak of organ harvesting and viruses, although these were not themes in the poem I was composing. I also copied and pasted a comment from under a Youtube video, which described vaccines as a covert form of cannibalism. Beneath that, I wrote down a quotation from Ovid, Finis Coronat Opus, "the end crowns the work." The page looks like a jumbled vision of the future.

On that same page, I wrote a line about eating the ortolan:

"A delicacy, like the ortolan bunting, drowned in brandy / That you eat whole behind a veil, to hide your shame from God."

And tonight, I coincidentally ran across the image below, a photo of a dinner party eating ortolan buntings. The truth is not arriving through argument, rational deduction, and revelation of facts. These truths defy logic or expectation. They appear non-linearly across time and space, by juxtaposition and synchronicity. Does it prove anything? No. But it is poetic. This is a miracle of context.

Image Source: 4chan.