the healing

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A good story is like the sweetened or flavorless outer coating pharmaceutical companies put around a healing medicine. The coating makes what may be a bitter truth more palatable, whether literally or metaphorically, and the patient is more likely to stick to a prescribed regimen. It is, in one sense, a lie surrounding a quite good truth.

And so, occasionally, I forgive my own love of stories.

But then the curiousness evolves -- what would it be like without the lie? And in trying to depict the unvarnished and perhaps bitter truth, I am led into what amounts to a bitter lie. That is the nature of words -- tantalizing (whether bitter or sweet) but always at one or more removes from the truth.

Stories entice and suggest like some undulating belly dancer. Flowing, swaying, and delighting in their expression of the music ... but never quite the music itself.

It might be nice to get it straight -- no experience can ever be depicted by words. Experience is the healer, the music, the limitless. Words are OK and might as well be sweet, because, whether bitter or sweet, they can never capture the benevolent, swaying, limitless healing.

There, there ... take your medicine, dear.
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