What I Am Reading, Pt. 1

So after four days away from my usual schedule, I feel the anxiety of not writing creeping up on me. Still, the enforced stillness is good, because it makes me reflect on what I have written so far. I already see some major changes that need to be made to Vol. 5, moments that I knew felt wrong when I wrote them, but I can now see why they were wrong. On a related note, here is the first book I read on my vacation:

The Future of Truth, by Werner Herzog

A breezy 110 pages, it reads more like an extended pisstake by that one great-uncle who has been on the schnapps since 1973, but really is as smart as he thinks he is. The whole book, all of it, is clearly a setup for the epigraphic final chapter, reproduced here in its entirety:

Truth has no future, but truth has no past either. But we will not, must not, cannot, give up the search for it.

Something I desperately wish I had come up with for Slumrat, but what can you do?

Yes, the quote above is the whole chapter, this is Herzog we are talking about here. The man made Fitzcarraldo, one of the most batshit productions ever undertaken, all to make a pretty meh film. The Cave of Forgotten Dreams is halucinatory, and lands somewhere between madness and miracle. I'mma let you google a summary of his Antichrist. It is not for the faint of heart, weak of stomach, or those uninterested in Willem Defoe's wedding tackle. Man's been crazy since before a lot of us were born.

So fair to say I had some idea of what I was getting into, and it's about what I expected. Not the most brilliant read, but it's thought provoking. His central thesis is that 'truth' is a very tentative construct, and "mere factuality" is not enough to establish it. One must also be open to a sort of esctatic or emotional truth, as part of the quest to find 'truth.' Truth being something that, in the original Greek was defined in negative- not false.

To this end, he loads up the page count with anecdotes of dubious provenance, some personal, some not, references to things you may or may not have heard of, and a five page summary of one of the most absurd operas ever concieved by the Italians. I'm not sure he sticks the landing, but that epigraph I copied above is a banger, and his writing style is often memorable. You can practically hear his gravely, scratchy voice reading it to you.

If you are interested, I'd have a hard time reccomending buying it at list price. Out of a remainders bin, sure, or if your library has a copy it's worth the hour or two it takes to read it. I don't feel like my time was wasted- Herzog is a lot of things, but not boring.

Fun bit of trivia, the chorus of the first track of Clipse's new album Let God Sort Em Out , The Birds Don't Sing, is a Herzog quote from a documentery about the making of Fitzcarraldo. When describing the junge and how awful it was, Herzog said "The birds don't sing, they screech in pain." This, of course, requires us to recognize the awful truth of either Pusha T or Malice being a fan of not just Herzog, but of documentaries about the making of Herzog movies.

I don't know how literally true their song is, but the emotional truth of it has people breaking down in tears as they listen to it. So Herzog might be on to something.