Perspective: Lost in Translation (2 of 4)

For good or ill, each of us begins with ourselves as our own reference point – some of us are keenly aware of just how particularized to ourselves that reference point is, and some blithely assume their reference point is pretty much the same as everyone else’s . . . and so, needless to say, a breakdown in communication ensues. This is not simply a matter of whether or not one openly confesses their presuppositions (which many do not), but that there needs to be an intellectually honest epiphany, realizing that we are all mired in layers of our own context from which we are constantly interpreting everything! In short I am describing a need for a bit of epistemological self-awareness.

Imagine for a moment that you could communicate with fish, what it might be like to have to describe for a fish how they’d existed their entire life in water – and that there was actually a way of existing that wasn’t water. It would be nearly impossible, because it would fundamentally challenge the very way they had always known themselves. Now add to that communication the compounding realization that your own understanding (while making such an explanation) is nothing more than your interpretation of how reality works! No doubt, there is someone reading all of this thinking “I just see things the way they are – I’m not interpreting anything” . . . you have my permission to stop reading from this point forward.

My point here isn’t to extoll or somehow validate the foolishness of existential sophistry that attempts to deny the existence of truth. Truth is indeed a fixed point – it is our understanding of it that oscillates in flux. In the same way that words describing a thing,  no matter how accurate, is still not the same as the thing, itself – our interpretations of truth, no matter how accurate, are still not truth itself . . . they are still our limited appreciation of what we believe to be true. So there is in fact an important distinction between our knowing of truth and truth as it actually exists.

So at best, we can only offer one another an interpretation based on the pieces of the puzzle our context affords us . . . and I have lived long enough to appreciate the limitations of my own context and how few of the pieces I assume I have a handle on.  Maturity has a way of sandpapering down the burrs of hubris. But one of the lessons I’ve learned over the years is that transcendent truth has a much broader bandwidth than we first imagine.  As an artist I intuitively know that all of the linear didactic explanations that pass between us are limited, only able to convey so much, that transcendent truth has deeper contours and textures, and far subtler facets than mono-dimensional discourse can achieve – this is likely why art moves us in such unexpected ways.

Therefore life isn’t worthwhile because it can be explained – it’s worthwhile because it can be savored in a myriad of ways on multiple levels at the same time. Perhaps this is why Psalm 34:8 invites us to come taste and see that the Lord is good! What too often gets lost in translation is our personal experience of the very truths we so adamantly profess. Here’s my point – could it be that our most convincing apologetic isn’t so much in the hard facts of our pronounced truths, but rather in the more anecdotal imprecision of how those truths have played themselves out in our lives? . . . and if you truly believed this were true – how would that change your explanation of what you believe?