Each Truth, Each Lie

(The title is a line from Dylan Thomas’s poem, This Side Of The Truth)

This piece is dedicated with love to the Brother’s Grimm Jake Berry and Hank Lazer


The wilderness is like a shallow river, a skin straight from the bark of the tree that acquired its nutrients from the wilderness, the river closing itself off from what made the wilderness a jungle. From the wilderness we have encountered many beings and we have learned from all of them. Cast not out our brothers you could say and our enemies as foes be blessed with our constant attention. A slain enemy is a confidant in the ways in which you stay alive, a slain enemy like a body in an autopsy is a confidant in the ways you stay alive and while on the table the body which is open to the air resembles a ghost that has had skin stretched over it as to defer itself from the one examining it. A coagulated naturalist could find disgrace in silence, an embrace so immodest as to recall the elegance of a tradesman watching the tools of his trade wash away in the river as his limbs hang lifeless.
Joseph Wolf Shenk writes in his book Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness, “The perception of reality is called mentally healthy, ‘one textbook declares, “when what the individual sees corresponds to what is actually there.” The wilderness becomes barren when the ship of discovery runs aground. The earth doesn’t swallow the ship whole but acts as a port of extradition when depression enters the sea like wilderness shore of reason and accountability.
An element of depression is fear of success or something like that; I think I read it somewhere. All I know is that while I have suffered intricately from this disease I have never sat back and wondered if I was successful I would have to blow my brains out. Fear is farther away than courage. Courage like the perspective of our enemies is at best alleged and gaunt, but it must also be kept in mind that a revengeful for can also become a revengeful ally with a shopping list of deal breakers, requirements and stacks of affidavits to the contrary and so it goes with depression.


- Chris Mansel