A poet long since forgotten by most wrote of how the Autarchs of Argorn turned from “truth’s terrible spare beauty” in constructing Argo and instead relied upon mere additive artifice to curry the favor of those anogenic autodidacts, suggesting not even indirectly that the Autarchs were so naïvely narcissistic that they equated great art with greater masses of artistic forms and objects.
Truly great art as sometimes, but not often enough, manifested in Averra, occurs when no element of a building, object, or representation stands out from any other, and, when the whole is considered, any addition would detract from the impression, rather than improve it. That forgotten poet also observed that too few words, no matter how accurate and how powerful, are often bombarded into obscurity by a barrage of banality, while too many words bury their meaning in blandiloquent boredom.
All too often, in the misuse of words, men brandish their “truth” like a weapon, claiming that it is the only one, a talisman or touchstone that will reveal all to those who believe, a blandishment that blinds rather than reveals, just as the sprawling pleasure gardens of the Autarchs and their ever-higher walls left them unable to see beyond the confines of their creation.
Words create walls as well, barriers in the perceptions of the mind built on meanings ascribed to those words not supported by the world beyond. How and what we name limits what we perceive, yet, without naming, we cannot communicate, and in that paradoxical observation lies the importance of words and naming and the need for great care in the use of names and descriptions, particularly when describing or seeking the “truth.”
How many men and women have sought the “truth,” creating verbal and theological structures of imposing weight and verbosity? How many have sought it in the form of the unseen supernatural? Or laid it out in the imprisoned confines of logic?
“What is truth?” ask so many.
Truth is simply what is. Truth is a single perfect rose or a jumbled myriad of wildflowers at the edge of a wood. A dead soldier with an arrow through his eye. A carelessly stacked woodpile. A ruined and burned villa. Averra as it is at this moment.
Those, and a million other examples of what is, are truth.
Nothing more and nothing less.
AVERRA
The City of Truth
Johan Eschbach
377 TE