“We did not develop language to tell the truth. Yes, we first used language to communicate, in desperation, in fear and pain, to voice our suffering, our hungers. Danger, pain and death were our first truths. We used language to survive. We learned the advantages of lying, how untruths could also help our survival. But it is when we learned the many, perhaps infinite, comforts of telling a story that we began to develop our communications into real languages.”
These two masks come from my growing pile of unpublished Geranium Lake Properties comics. Yost wrote the word “verity” on the back of the artwork for first mask and “frankness” on the back of the second. The quotes in today’s post are from “Verity and Frankness”, the fourth essay (lecture?) in the book, Elffin’s Wife’s Finger and Other Stories (later published as Talking and Telling) by the onetime-Buddhist-monk-now-a-barista Yixilmaq Alkupera.
“Once you begin to tell a narrative, you are telling a story, and you are no longer telling a truth. We cannot tell a truth. Not with language. There was a time, perhaps, when a person could cry out in pain, cry out for help, and it was the truth. Then we learned to cry wolf when there was no wolf. Disbelief in what was real, which we could call Vyattim Yizenda, entered the world of language as a hungry monster. Vyattim Yizenda devoured language until only a ghost, a fantasy, of the real remained.”
vyattim-yizenda – This can also be translated from the Inultaru language as the curse of greed.
Vraicking 