Skip to main content

What is Truth?


Historical Fiction

“What is truth?” Sitting in his dismal cell in the Tower of London, Francis Bacon started his inquiry into the metaphysics of truth.  He was found guilty on no less than 23 charges of corruption.  If Edward Coke, his lifelong enemy, was not the leader of the investigation team, he would have been found innocent. 

The Tower
Such is truth.  Bacon knew it very well.  Truth depends on which side of the power you are.  That is why even Jesus could not answer the question.

“What is truth?” asked Pilate to Jesus.  Bacon continued his inquiry.  He was writing an essay.  Pilate did not wait for the answer.  Nor did Jesus answer.  The answer would have served no purpose for either.  Truth is what serves your purpose.

“Truth is like pearl looking best in daylight,” wrote Bacon.  “But it will not rise to the price of a diamond that looks best in varied lights.  A mixture of lie always adds pleasure.  The lie converts the pearl into diamond.  Prose into poetry.  What would a man’s life be without his mind’s vain opinions, flattering hopes, and false valuations?  Men would be poor shrunken creatures full of melancholy, unpleasant even to themselves, without the delights proffered by falsehood.”

He had defended himself delightfully well with the help of the dazzling sparkles of falsehood.  “With respect to the charge of bribery I am as innocent as any man born on St Innocent’s Day,” he had declared to the royal tribunal.  “I never had a bribe or reward in my eye or thought when pronouncing judgment or order.”

That was equivocation par excellence.  I, Francis Bacon, am a philosopher.  He gloated.  When you people of puny minds conquer with the sword, I make my conquests with my brain.  You conquer lands; I conquer truths.

Did I utter any falsehood when I claimed to be as innocent as any man born on St Innocent’s Day?  How many men born on that day or any day are innocent?  Ever?  It is also true that I did not think of the bribes when I pronounced the judgments. 

Didn’t my personal secretary, none other than the chaplain William Rawley, a man of God, declare me innocent?  Didn’t he say that I examine the cases with the severity of an honest judge but pronounce the judgment with the compassion of a tender heart?

And Reverend Rawley is an honest man.  Isn’t he?  Well, there was no need for him to go the extent of declaring that Alice Barnham loved me truly.  She never loved me.  He knew it too.  She was a little girl of 14 when I married her.  I was 45.  Ten years ago, as a more energetic and handsome young man, I wooed Elizabeth Hatton.  She accepted my proposal too.  But just before the marriage was finalised, she discovered Edward Coke.  Sir Edward Coke, whom the Queen had made the Attorney-General just to despise me.  What Elizabeth loved was neither me nor Edward.  Like most women, she loved the power that her husband would wield.  I was just a straggler who never made it to the good books of the Queen.  I was a pauper who lived on the generosity of Lord Essex, Robert Devereux, whom I could not save from charges of treason much as I tried.  The Queen edited my reports.  I created truths to save Robert.  The Queen re-created truths to execute Robert.  What is truth?  

Alice betrayed me too.  If Elizabeth’s truth lay in power and prestige, Alice’s lay in the delights of life.  She relished my sonnets about her while she made love to John Underhill. 

Truth is like diamond.  It sparkles better in varied lights. 

I am a philosopher.  I conquer with my brain.  I create truths and their varied colours.  But the conquerors of lands conquered my women.  For the sake of the record, however, Reverend Rawley is going to write in his biography of me that Alice had “much conjugal love and respect” for me.  He might even lay it on a little too thick.  He might write that she always carried with her the souvenir I had presented her.  Jokes.  Jokes. 

How unbearable would human life be without those jokes?

In order to throw me in the Tower, they extracted my confession by blackmailing me.  “The charge of sodomy will be brought against you,” they said, if I didn’t confess to corruption and bribe-taking.  They would field some handsome young men as witnesses.  As victims of my sodomy.

They can’t ask the King for the testimony, you see.  That is the biggest joke. 

The King, James I, shared some of my proclivities in matters of carnal love.  Now you know why he paid up the enormous fine of £40,000 on my behalf.  He will soon take me out of this prison too.  I know that.  And he will raise me to high positions.  But I won’t take revenge on Coke and Underhill and others.  Reverend Rawley was right: I have a tender heart, after all. 

“‘What is truth?’ asked the jesting Pilate...”  Sitting in his dismal cell in the Tower of London, Francis Bacon started his inquiry into the metaphysics of truth.


Note: Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was was an English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, orator, essayist and author.  His essay on Truth is one of the many classical essays I studied as a student of literature. oHow
For copies click here
or here

Labels:

Comments

  1. wingsNovember 13, 2015 at 10:23 AM

    Bacon's succinct essays intrigues any reader. Still the way you rendered it in your fiction justifies my claim that you are the most intelligent brains that have ever born. Many points discussed from the HEL are beyond my comprehension. Yet there is that simplicity of thought that intrigues me a lot in your writings, especially stories. I'm speechless. Your story here in some way depicts my current situation at my work. A marvellous interpretation of truth. It is true.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalNovember 13, 2015 at 6:45 PM

      I owe my present brain to what happened to me in the last two years of my life in Delhi. You know pretty much about it. My thinking and writing used to be much simpler before the Bulldozer marched into my life. I was highly intrigued by whatever happened in those two years. For example, by how people with the most angelic smiles were actually the most diabolic people at heart. By how people who asserted vehemently that they would run the school "for a hundred years - is that enough for you?" killed the school in a matter of two years. By how pretentious people were. The masks they wore were beyond my imagination and understanding. Even the politics that occurred in Bacon's England was far too simple in comparison!

      Delete
  2. wingsNovember 13, 2015 at 8:33 PM

    The lady who I spoke highly about and was trying to introduce you to also came in my life with that sort of angelic smile. Things went topsy turvy after my points stood high among the 4 for the job applied. You understand. They could not appoint their chosen one.
    Besides their will the proprietor and chairperson wanted me to teach in 11th. My 'good' times started there. 'Happily' going on. When you whatsapped the first message what kind of relief you brought to my utterly depressed soul, you don't know, sir.
    I was silently waiting and kept quiet about the blogs. So the other door is always open for us to flee from these medusas!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalNovember 13, 2015 at 9:18 PM

      I'd already become deeply mistrustful of people when you made that suggestion. I left Delhi because of that mistrust. It took me quite a while even to overcome my foul mood.

      Kerala's countryside is doing me good. So far, at least.

      Hope your 'good' and 'happy' journey continues.

      Bacon's cynicism is my temporary escape route.

      Delete
  3. UnknownNovember 15, 2015 at 5:41 AM

    I wish I had studied Literature too at a masters level! Enhances the understanding of the word in such a profound way. Very-well written!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pranita a perverted genius

Bulldozer begins its work at Sawan Pranita was a perverted genius. She had Machiavelli’s brain, Octavian’s relentlessness, and Levin’s intellectual calibre. She could have worked wonders if she wanted. She could have created a beautiful world around her. She had the potential. Yet she chose to be a ruthless exterminator. She came to Sawan Public School just to kill it. A religious cult called Radha Soami Satsang Beas [RSSB] had taken over the school from its owner who had never visited the school for over 20 years. This owner, a prominent entrepreneur with a gargantuan ego, had come to the conclusion that the morality of the school’s staff was deviating from the wavelengths determined by him. Moreover, his one foot was inching towards the grave. I was also told that there were some domestic noises which were grating against his patriarchal sensibilities. One holy solution for all these was to hand over the school and its enormous campus (nearly 20 acres of land on the outskirts
12 comments
Read more

Queen of Religion

She looked like Queen Victoria in the latter’s youth but with a snow-white head. She was slim, fair and graceful. She always smiled but the smile had no life. Someone on the campus described it as a “plastic smile.” She was charming by physical appearance. Soon all of us on the Sawan school campus would realise how deceptive appearances were. Queen took over the administration of Sawan school on behalf of her religious cult RSSB [Radha Soami Satsang Beas]. A lot was said about RSSB in the previous post. Its godman Gurinder Singh Dhillon is now 70 years old. I don’t know whether age has mellowed his lust for land and wealth. Even at the age of 64, he was embroiled in a financial scam that led to the fall of two colossal business enterprises, Fortis Healthcare and Religare finance. That was just a couple of years after he had succeeded in making Sawan school vanish without a trace from Delhi which he did for the sake of adding the school’s twenty-odd acres of land to his existing hun
16 comments
Read more

Machiavelli the Reverend

Let us go today , you and I, through certain miasmic streets. Nothing will be quite clear along our way because this journey is through some delusions and illusions. You will meet people wearing holy robes and talking about morality and virtues. Some of them will claim to be god’s men and some will make taller claims. Some of them are just amorphous. Invisible. But omnipotent. You can feel their power around you. On you. Oppressing you. Stifling you. Reverend Machiavelli is one such oppressive power. You will meet Franz Kafka somewhere along the way. Joseph K’s ghost will pass by. Remember Joseph K who was arrested one fine morning for a crime that nobody knew anything about? Neither Joseph nor the men who arrest him know why Joseph K is arrested. The power that keeps Joseph K under arrest is invisible. He cannot get answers to his valid questions from the visible agents of that power. He cannot explain himself to that power. Finally, he is taken to a quarry outside the town wher
19 comments
Read more

Levin the good shepherd

AI-generated image The lost sheep and its redeemer form a pet motif in Christianity. Jesus portrayed himself as a good shepherd many times. He said that the good shepherd will leave his 99 sheep in order to bring the lost sheep back to the fold. When he finds the lost sheep, the shepherd is happier about that one sheep than about the 99, Jesus claimed. He was speaking metaphorically. The lost sheep is the sinner in Jesus’ parable. Sin is a departure from the ‘right’ way. Angels raise a toast in heaven whenever a sinner returns to the ‘right’ path [Luke 15:10]. A lot of Catholic priests I know carry some sort of a Redeemer complex in their souls. They love the sinner so much that they cannot rest until they make the angels of God run for their cups of joy. I have also been fortunate to have one such priest-friend whom I shall call Levin in this post. He has befriended me right from the year 1976 when I was a blundering adolescent and he was just one year older than me. He possesse
8 comments
Read more

Nakulan the Outcast

Nakulan was one of the many tenants of Hevendrea . A professor in the botany department of the North Eastern Hill University, he was a very lovable person. Some sense of inferiority complex that came from his caste status made him scoff the very idea of his lovability. He lived with his wife and three children in one of Heavendrea’s many cottages. When he wanted to have a drink, he would walk over to my hut. We sipped our whiskies and discussed Shillong’s intriguing politics or something of the sort while my cassette player crooned gently in the background. Nakulan was more than ten years my senior by age. He taught a subject which had never aroused my interest at any stage of my life. It made no difference to me whether a leaf was pinnately compound or palmately compound. You don’t need to know about anther and stigma in order to understand a flower. My friend Levin would have ascribed my lack of interest in Nakulan’s subject to my egomania. I always thought that Nakulan lived
15 comments
Read more