I was not my best self that day. We sat next to each other on the sofa. With the window to our backs and the small sitting room lit by cool winter light. They asked me for my thoughts on such and such a medicine. Whether it could cause this or that side effect. It was a simple question. There was a simple answer. But I failed to do what needed to be done. I failed to inform. I failed to reassure. Instead a part of me that needed this person to be there for me, not the other way around, spoke a different truth that was accurate but unhelpful. In my familiar desperation for somewhere, for someone, I can rest into and who can hold whatever I am, my frustration got the better of me. Until I can undo this longing inside me, which points only towards a small few that I ask too much of, it can overwhelm and distort. I told a wider truth than the question called for. A truth beyond the moment and the relationship and the request to hear that there was a reason for their suffering.
I failed then but the wider truth can safely be voiced here. We know almost nothing. We can’t know if a medicine does or does not cause a particular effect, therapeutic or otherwise. Despite the position of authority we have given to science and the lengthy trials medicines go through before being deemed appropriate for our use, we do not know how they will affect us. Not for sure. What we know is how they performed during those trials. Which were, in reality, very limited. In all of time and space, which is characterised by constant change, we observed for a minute period, a series of phenomena and we declare then that we know something absolute. If 100,000 doses were given during the trials, then we know about those. Retrospectively. What we don’t know is if the 1,000,000 doses given after the trials will have the same effects. Or the 1,000,000 after that… We just predict and assume that they will. It is the same with everything we believe we know based on what we call science and in fact any other way we have of knowing. Our experience and the knowledge we infer from it, even collective, is finite and miniscule. It is all we have to navigate by and very valuable but it is not what we think it is. I am not judging science here, just describing a reality that goes unrecognised for practicalities and comforts sake.
The-fiction-of-non-fiction – Gavin-Birchall
We woke with an undesigned day in front of us. So we set out on foot to walk into the city and visit the museum where an open art exhibition had made its home on the top floor. A regulating rhythm and a splendid display. Afterwards we had tea and a toastie, then walked to the bookshop. The smell, the browsing, the density of treasured language. As we drifted, unrushed, through bookshelves that felt like much loved streets, categorisation caught my attention. Fiction. There was a lot of Fiction. I selected a book that I have been anticipating reading by an author I enjoy. Walking to the till I noticed the ‘Non-fiction’ signs around the shop. On our way out, I mentioned to my wife that it seems strange there are books that are thought of as Fiction and others thought of as Non-fiction. That all books are fiction. Back again to the wider, unacknowledged truth. My wife said that we could call some of them ’Non-non-fiction’. Which made me laugh and I carried this with me as we walked into the parks, through the crowds rolling eggs down the slopes and onwards along the river towards home.
After climbing together for an hour or so, like in the old days, we talked in the car. Still with chalky hands and well used bodies our conversation flowed into discussion of what we can know and how. With a soon to be Master of Physics we could venture far out into the reaches of what we believe we know and what is beyond our knowing. Deep in the scientific realm. So deep that science meets its edge and runs out. Yet, arriving home, ascending the stairs we found a version of the wider truth that has been following me. Settling on our bedroom floor, next to my wife who was looking through boxes of old photographs, I summarised. My wife nodded and spoke a few, light and simple words of affirmation which brought the flow to a gentle conclusion. So easy it was for her and I saw that we are very close in many ways. He, however, had gone quiet, sitting on the bed with his legs dangling over the edge. Like the boy he once was. He looked far away and dazed. Someone I know of once said ‘Be careful how you go with the truth under your coat’. Not to me or about me but their words came to me then. I talked about being able to know the feel of chalk on your skin and the movement needed to reach a hold that looks too far away and the comfort of sinking a little into a bed when we sit on it.
Since new year I have been reading fiction. In the conventional sense. Almost exclusively. I’ve tried reading other kinds of books, those non-fiction ones, but my interest has faltered, there has been too much friction and I have stopped. And gone back to fiction. The most fictiony kind of fiction I can find. Fiction that I can sink into and that swallows me whole and reads like another life alongside the life I already lead. Fiction, that, somehow, feels more true than the most ardent of non-fiction. Stories wrought in language woven by explorers of their own experiences, masters of translation and willing students of how we know what we know and don’t know as our lives unfurl. So much space for not-knowing, being unsure, living humbly and bodily. So much humanity. The wider truth that shadows me and defies the conventions of our culture feels at home tucked away in these narratives. Wrapped up in poetic prose and comforting resonance, for now at least, their worlds feel truer to mine than anything that claims to know what it can’t.