Yervant Odian and the odious truth

A classic joke attributed to Yervant Odian goes: Why is the truth always being raped? Because it is naked and beautiful.” I can accept the first part of the punchline, "Because it is naked,” since nakedness has been associated with truth since ancient times for reasons too obvious to explain. The second part of the punchline, however, I find more questionable and less obvious. Is truth really beautiful? It’s true a famous Romantic poet once wrote: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” But I can’t help it: though I mostly live on earth, I need to know more. How many people have been persecuted for nothing other than displaying it in public? (The truth I mean, not their nakedness. Although, in both cases, people’s justifiable reaction to both is similar: "Cover that up, you maniac! There are children around!”) Beauty is certainly a force of some kind; something akin to gravity, since it has the power to pull all things, voluntarily or involuntarily, to itself. In everyday speech, we say that something beautiful is attractive; that is, it has the power to attract things at a distance toward itself, like a magnet. Truth, however, frequently has the opposite effect, pushing all things away from itself. If, failing to observe the niceties of polite society, one were to speak their mind in too unfiltered a way, they would quickly find themselves all alone in the corner. Imagine saying the following to someone hosting you at their home: "I don’t really want to be here. So, I’m going to hang around just barely long enough not to seem too rude and then I’m quietly slipping out. By the way, your breath stinks. Also, the room temperature chikufte I had earlier isn’t sitting right and I’ve been emitting brownhouse gases this whole time…” People are encouraged to be honest by "being themselves.” But if one is naive enough to follow this advice consistently, after inevitably alienating friends, acquaintances and strangers alike, too few people are willing to admit that their "self” that they were "being” is far from pretty. No drink was ever splashed in someone’s face for lying; or, if it were, it’s because the truth behind a lie came to light. So, starting with the premise that the truth is repulsive, here is my more truthful alternate version of Odian’s joke: "Why are people repulsed by the truth? Because it is naked and old.” In this version, truth is still naked. But why old? Because the truth doesn’t come into being or pass away; it has existed since the beginning of time. Since it has existed since the beginning of time, it follows that it is very, very old. And how often are very old things beautiful in the eyes of the common person who doesn’t judge things on appearances, but on very first appearances? If love is represented in myth as Cupid — a blind, winged baby shooting love-tipped arrows at random — then the god of truth would be called Veritas, a hunched over geriatric nudist who, though he has seen and knows everything, can get no one to listen to him because, on earth, all most people indeed know is "truth is beauty and beauty is truth.” At best, some compassionate person might draw near Veritas, but only to throw a blanket over him for his own and for everyone else’s sake. In life, a person’s first experience with the truth is probably like my first experience at a nude beach. It was on a one-month long college study abroad program in Greece 20 years ago. When me and my friends heard there was a fully nude beach nearby, I immediately had visions of the intro to the 90’s TV show Baywatch and a golden-haired Pamela Anderson running in slow motion out of the ocean like a surgically-enhanced golden Aphrodite coming ashore on a clamshell. But as soon as we stepped foot on what I thought would be the Promised Sand, there was no milk, no honey, no Pamela and no Aphrodite either; just the loose, leathery, liver-spotted skin of a pod of unjustifiably uninhibited gray-haired, pot-bellied old men. In other words, the god Veritas in the flesh, literally. Just as I was disgusted and disappointed that day on that beach, the shock and letdown of seeing the ugly truth for the first time in one’s own life and experience, leaves such a bad taste in most people’s mouths that they rarely, if ever, ask for or seek it out again. This is why when the truth is presented to people at large, they are more than happy to turn away and distract themselves with more palatable things, like opinions, lies and, at best, half-truths, which, like darkening solar eclipse glasses, allow a person to look directly at the sun without going blind. Lies are like flies: they move quickly, make a loud buzz relative to their insignificant weight, and are born and pass away every 24 hours. Truth, on the other hand, is like a behemoth boulder that sits silently on the side of a mountain for a long time, ignored and overlooked by all until, one day, by some accident it gets dislodged, tumbles down and blocks traffic on a roadway, forcing people to begrudgingly pay attention to it until it is cleared away. Once it’s hauled off, it’s out of sight, out of mind once again. Because lies are born every day, they are always younger, more attractive and more pleasant than the truth which has always been, therefore, old-fashioned and not much to look at. Nor does the truth have the charm of the remains of an ancient Greek temple which, though lying in ruins, has a kind of quiet charm and magnificence about it. Such ruined structures excite the imagination, but an old truth has no such charm. To prove this conclusively, there is a dedicated word for an old truth and it is never, ever used in a positive sense; for, an old truth is cliché and dismissed out of hand as tiresome and even meaningless. Our very familiarity with old truths brings them into contempt, as in the old truth, "Familiarity breeds contempt.” The truth is, the truth is not beautiful, but weathered, disfigured, fragile, helpless and in need of the constant care of a diligent and steel-stomached guardian. For, not only is truth not beautiful, it isn’t powerful either, contrary to the debate in the Old Testament which compares the power of beautiful women to that of truth, in which truth comes out on top. "If men gather gold and silver or any valuable thing,” the proponent of women’s beauty says in 1 Esdras 4, "and then see a desirable and beautiful woman, they forget everything to gaze at her. With mouths wide open, they stare at her. All choose her over gold, silver or any other valuable thing.” The proponent of truth then goes on to make a much less convincing case for truth as all-powerful, saying that "truth endures and is valid for all time; it lives and succeeds forever. With it, there’s no charade or preference, but it does what is right instead of what is wrong or evil. Everyone approves of its deeds.” Everyone…? Who’s "everyone”? On the contrary, few approve of truth and no one has ever been protected by taking refuge behind it. How many whistle-blowers and truth-tellers have attempted the weak defense of "But it’s true!” only to hear what the Roman satirist Persius was told by his friend: "But why grate delicate ears with biting truths like these? Make sure the doors of your powerful friends are not closed to you after this. Don’t you hear a snarling dog already?”1 Or the words spoken to the great comic poet Aristophanes after he forcefully spoke out against the shrilled-voiced Pashinyanesque demagogue Cleon who was perpetuating the senseless inter-Greek civil war between Athens and Sparta instead of directing his efforts against the enemy Persians: Second semi-chorus: By Poseidon! he speaks the truth; he has not lied in a single detail. First semi-chorus: But though it be true, need he say it? But you’ll have no great cause to be proud of your insolence!2 If you’re going to take refuge behind the truth, make sure the truth in turn is taking refuge behind a brick wall. It surely means something that only three types of people speak the truth with any consistency: children, the elderly and the insane. Children speak the truth because they don’t know any better; old people because they’re tired of lying their whole lives and have nothing left to lose; and the insane both because, like children, they don’t know any better and, like old people, have nothing left to lose, having already lost their minds. 1. snarling: Satires, part I, translated by G. G. Ramsay. G. P. Putnam’s Son, 1918. p. 326, lines 107-110. ↩︎ 2. insolence: The Acharnians, translated by Anonymous, under the title The Eleven Comedies. Liveright, 192?, p. 113. ↩︎

Yervant Odian and the odious truth

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