The Naked Truth

At best, the legend revealed beneath this image is apocryphal; I prefer allegorical. Over the years, I have read and digested a lot of books on mythology and symbolism. Indeed, Joseph Campbell and I were on a first name basis, so familiar was I with his many books especially those on myth, mythology, and the hero with “a thousand faces.” At times, I have been drawn to works of art, toured museums, and have been privileged to have stared in awe at the magnificence of a Rembrandt or sculptures by Rodin’s The Thinker or his Iris, Messenger of the gods or Michelangelo’s The David, the latter’s majesty and beauty drawing tears from me each of the 3 times I have seen it at The Galleria in Florence. Very recently, I came across the image below and read its legendary derivation and meaning:

The Truth coming out of the well by Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1896.

According to a 19th-century legend, the Truth and the Lie meet one day. The Lie says to the Truth: “It’s a marvelous day today”! The Truth looks up to the skies and sighs, for the day was really beautiful. They spend a lot of time together, ultimately arriving beside a well. The Lie tells the Truth: “The water is very nice, let’s take a bath together!” The Truth, once again suspicious, tests the water and discovers that it indeed is very nice. They undress and start bathing. Suddenly, the Lie comes out of the water, puts on the clothes of the Truth, and runs away. The furious Truth comes out of the well and runs everywhere to find the Lie and to get her clothes back. The World, seeing the Truth naked, turns its gaze away, with contempt and rage. The poor Truth returns to the well and disappears forever, hiding its shame therein. Since then, the Lie travels around the world, dressed as the Truth, satisfying the needs of society, because the World, seemingly, harbors no wish at all to meet the naked Truth.

The story – and Gérôme’s painting (on permanent display at a museum in Moulins, France) – bursts with significance and meaning for me. Truth is so elusive; we live in an age wherein Donald Trump, the former president of the United States is reputed to have told more than 20,000 lies during his time in office. And we do speak of the honest truth. Why does truth need the adjective ‘honest’ if the truth is true? Often we are challenged to face the naked truth; it is an expression in our culture. Truth is a woman, a naked woman conjuring for me the Garden of Eden and the myth of Adam and Eve ‘discovering’ their nudity with some shame. Truth is angry when first emerging from the well in the image and I speculate on what her facial expression would have been going back to the well when shunned by the contemptuous World. Naked women in art has been so common for centuries and it’s not her nudity that astounds, it’s the story inherent in the image. Lies are said to “masquerade” as the truth, true then to this legend. Was it not Voltaire who declared, now famously, ‘history is just a set of lies – a fable – agreed upon’ by those of us yearning for the truth. [One of the greatest, often unheralded paradoxes is this, “history is not what happened, but what survives the shipwrecks of judgment and chance,” so says Maria Popova. History is what happened and yet, we can never know its as-it-happened truth]. And, we even say, ‘don’t go to the well too often!’ Perhaps that expression is not directly related to this legend and yet, it takes on new meaning, for me, in relationship to this compelling little parable.

Many years ago, when teaching Undergraduate Kinesiology students canoe skills at Camp Ak-o-mak near Parry Sound, I used conundrums on long trips to take their minds off their paddle-weary woes. To this day, I don’t know where I learned the conundrums but I had about a dozen in my repertoire. This Truth/Lies paradigm reminded me of my favourite – and probably most perplexing – conundrum. It is this: you are a prisoner in a room with two doors, no other exit or way out. The only furnishing is the chair upon which you sit facing the two doors. In front of each door is a guard; one of the guards always tells the truth, the other guard always tells lies. Each guard knows this characteristic about each other but you, the prisoner do not know which guard tells truth, which tells lies. The dilemma in the situation is that one of the doors is the door to freedom; the other is the door to death. Each guard knows which door is which; you do not. You have one question you can ask one of the guards and if it’s the correctly-worded question, you will know for certain which door is the door to freedom and you can exit the room with one hundred per cent confidence that you are taking the door to your freedom. What is that question? Turns out, the only possible question that will generate an answer to make your choice 100% certain, is a question that solicits a lie no matter which guard you ask; you will get a lie dressed as truth and you will know it’s a lie. The conundrum is a lesson in understanding truth and lies, as is Gérôme’s work of art and its symbolism.

And when we have disagreements between two people or two groups or two factions, we often say, the truth lies somewhere in the middle or in between. Does it? I have come to believe that seemingly opposite points of view about one concept or fact can both be true. That is, is it not possible that for many things, there is no absolute truth (yet another expression about truth)? Truth might be relative, certainly it can be elusive. Science searches for the truth proclaiming the scientific method as the closest possible system for deriving truth/s. There is a wonderful essay by Jessica Wildfire, It’s All About Repetition Repetition Repetition: How Lies Work and How to Fight Back published online in OK Doomer. Wildfire does a superb job describing and theorizing about the anatomy of lying, the process of creating lies, most notably, the perpetuation of lies about the Covid-19 Pandemic. In the latter regard, westerners en masse choose to believe the big lies such as:

The flu is deadlier
Kids won’t get it
You’ll only get it once
Immunity lasts for decades
The vaccinated won’t get it
Everyone’s going to get it
It’s mild
Kids are sicker because of immunity debt
Long Covid is a mental illness

because those lies preserve people’s perceptions of normal and the truth about Covid-19 seems so inconvenient (I’m reminded of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth re global warming). And the greatest lie western society tells itself (as of 8 January 2024) is either a) the pandemic was a hoax and/or b) the pandemic is over. Pandemic conspiracy theorists – liars dressed in Truth’s clothing – abound repeating and repeating their lies and in so doing, gathering more and more “believers.” Honesty – and truths that should be repeated and repeated – is lauded as such a virtue in our culture as though it’s something we know when we say s/he is as honest as the day is long. How do we know that to be true about anyone? If, as some say, we are what we believe, then it might be our beliefs create “the” truth just because we believe. Fiction we characterize as ‘not true;’ whereas non fiction is derived from fact (fact = truth?). Stories invented in the imagination (fiction) can be stories of truth and yet not “true” stories.” Is there really a difference?

“Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all” ~ Neil Gaiman

A brief exploration into this painting tells me it has been interpreted and used in many ways. What I love about it is how it creates an image, gives meaning to concepts – truth and lies – that are exceedingly difficult for us to pinpoint. Like all good stories, this painting and its legendary description appealed immediately to my imagination. And so, I tumble home in this blog to think about truth, about lies dressed as truths, and how truth often remains hidden as we struggle to see, both within and outside ourselves, what might just be the naked truth.