Yesterday I was reminded of the fragility of language.  Words are spontaneously used, transparent, selected for a purpose almost by reflex.  As a man working on a motor instinctively reaches into his tool tray for the 3/8 inch socket because he “just knows” that’s the one that fits–so we chose our words, you and I, to accomplish the joint projects between us.  A friend asked yesterday for me to explain my concept of truth.  That’s not something that one thinks about every day.  Thinking out loud as much to myself as to him, I said that truth is something that is created in the relationship-space between us, by our language, by our choice of words.  Communication is achieved when we are both able to get on with life, to make common cause.

Yesterday the president called an impromptu press conference.  I listened to a few minutes of his sullen exchange with reporters.  His purpose was to attack the press.  His exchange with a black female reporter lingers with me.  Asked about his intentions to meet with the Black Congressional Caucus he verbally attacked her in return, challenging her to arrange the meeting since she apparently knew the members of the Caucus.  It was a primitive display of dominance.

Each time the president reached into his tool box, every tool was used as a weapon.   Words weaponized.

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What, then, is truth?  A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins……………….

On Truth and Lie, The Portable Nietzsche trans. by Walter Kaufmann

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There is no end, but addition: the trailing
Consequence of further days and hours,
While emotion takes to itself the emotionless
Years of living among the breakage
Of what was believed in as the most reliable-
And therefore the fittest for renunciation.

Dry Salvages by T. S. Eliot