Jeanette Winterson: Art and Lies

Entire? Honest? I doubt it, but why should I? Even science, which prides itself on objectivity, depends on both testimony and memory. Scientific theory has to be built up from previous results. Scientists must take into account what others have recorded and what they themselves have recorded previously. Science deduces and infers from past explanations, past explorations, the investigative technique that tests its theory against all known facts.

But not all facts are known and what is known is not necessarily a fact.

There is a further trouble; no matter how meticulous the scientist, he or she cannot be separated from the experiment itself. Impossible to detach the observer from the observed. A great deal of scientific truth has later turned out to be its observer's fiction. It is irrational to assume that this is no longer the case.

Part of the problem with the neutral observer, who is in fact romantically involved with his subject, is that some time must always elapse between the experiment and the record of the experiment. Infinitely tiny, perhaps, but even without a lover's gaze, how many fantasies can force themselves in an infinitesimal space?

I know how difficult it is to say exactly what happened even a moment earlier. If someone were with me, their testimony might corroborate my own, or it might not. And if there is a photograph? The camera always lies.

The most awkward fact in all this doubt is this: remembering, which occurs now, at this split second, does not prove that what is remembered accually occurred at some other time. I may be convinced that it did, especially if a number of others, the more the better, are convinced too. When I am alone, and the experience, the emotion, the event, was mine and mine alone, how can I say for certain that I have not invented the entire episode, including the faithful memory of it?

It could be that this record set before you now is a fiction.

On what can I depend if not my past, if not objectivity, if not the clean white coats of science? Should I acknowledge the fiction that I am? A man made of nothing but space and light, a pinpoint on a pinpointed planet stitched among the stars? Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie. A man caught on Time's hook.

What can balance the inequity of that vast space, which never ends, and my bounded life? Bounded yes, but not by mortality, which is not what I fear, but by smallness, insignificance, which is what I do fear. The unlived life. Life in its hard shell safe from the waters above and the waters below. The home-and-dry life. Sound. Dependable. True?