I want to believe too Mudler.


Even though he spoke with such surety, Mulder was always thwarted in his quest for the truth, although you always thought he would get there in the end - after all this was TV - and th at was reassuring. You liked the idea that somewhere there was a road map to understanding, and that clarity was attainable, and that if you struggled hard enough you’d find it, and in big capital letters too: not just truth, but THE TRUTH.You used to think that such a state of Truth-knowingness would come naturally once you’d grown up: once you’d reached adulthood. That it would fall on you like the gentle rain from Heaven and that from then on you’d know THE TRUTH and you’d speak with the same authority and wisdom that adults used when they spoke to you when you were a kid, but then your 20^th, 21^st, 25^th and 30th birthdays passed and you were no closer to feeling grown up, or acquiring any kind of sageliness. No matter how much you age d, you never seemed to get any older, any smarter, any clueier about the world. You remained clueless. 

 Just realised that Mulder's love interest Scully, is played by GILLIAN Anderson. It never worked out for them either.

And that’s when you started watching the X-Files reruns on TV and even though you thought it was a bit corny, the notion of there being a TRUTH, and of it being attainable, came to replace your idea of osmotically acquired adult-truth knowingness. Enlightenment, you came to understand, through conspiracy inspired TV logic, would not descend upon you, but mus be sought and earned and so you set out on your quest to investigate your own personal X Files in order to do so.Not than your whole appreciation of what THE TRUTH is was is based entirely on the musings expressed within one late 20^th Century sci-fi soap with postmodernist pretensions. There were earlier, just as powerful, influences. Star Wars, for instance, with its slightly more mystical notion of THE TRUTH: The Force. How many times did you stick a bucket on your prepubescent head, a la Luke Skywalker when he attempts to fence using The Force instead of his eyes, in the vain hope that, like him, you’d still, magically, be able to see? 

How fervently did you hope that inside you too was a more powerful element, a guiding force, for want of a better word, which would lead you away from worry and endless doubt, because the you on the outside, the you others saw always seemed pretty second-rate? You can trace that yearning feeling back even further than that though, to some movie called 'Overlords of the UFO' you saw on TV when you were a kid. 



How incredible was that Uri Geller? Such powers. How you rubbed and caressed your mum’s keys and spoons after watching that. How you trained your meagre mind on them in the hope that just one would bend, or at least warp or twist, just a little, and even though they never did, that didn’t make you stop believing, rather it just intensified your search for that nameless thing that was always missing, even from that early age. It wasn’t called THE TRUTH back then, though, it didn’t have a name then: instead it was an undefined gnawing, a craving for something other than what was: some point of difference. Something that would release you from that crushing feeling of inadequacy and transform you into someone better. Not that you could have articulated that feeling, and as for transcendence you could no more have understood, or even spelled, that word than you could have leap-frogged the Harbour Bridge. You just knew it as a feeling of unease, of dissatisfaction which manifested itself in an obsessive need to investigate and analyse everything, to pull apart wrist watches and unravel the insides of golf balls, to endlessly arrange and rearrange your Lego bricks looking for what? The perfect something, space rocket, supercar or fortress: who knew? You were Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, you were compelled to build that truncated mountain, but not on your dinner plate, in your brain, over and over again until you found, perfectly, its dimensions, driven relentlessly to discover its shape, without knowing why, knowing only that you must, must, must. 

Eventually you’d gnawed your way through everything within reach of your hands and your tiny little mind and so you turned on yourself, dismembering and rearranging your own cogs and wheels, in a desperate attempt to understand. Because once you’d understood yourself, once you knew who you were perhaps then you could break free, you could leave yourself behind and become someone else, someone who didn’t doubt, who believed, who was content, who was right. And then along came first year physics at university. No amount of transcendental yearning, or unarticulated angst, was going to save you there. Physics was never going to help you find any truth, let alone THE TRUTH. All the stuff you were interested in had already been explained away, according to the lecturers. There was nothing other than that which is quantifiable and how do you quantify unease? Electron microscopes, oscillators and spectrographs, wonderful tools they may be, can’t help you locate a state of mind, or a feeling. You could not be with both THE TRUTH and first year physics at the same time, you decided. No two objects can occupy the same point in space at the same time, any first year physics student knows that, and so there certainly wasn’t room for both of them in your head. Hence your spectacular failure and hence the transfer to drama. Did you actually want to make that move or did that’ just happen’ too? You were so out of your depth when it came to that final physics exam that all you could do was laugh. You tried to answer the first few questions, the easy ones, but by the time you came to the meaty part of the paper you were utterly defeated, so instead of trying, you drew a picture on the answer sheet of yourself waving bye, bye and you walked out. Despite failing so massively, you did learn enough physics to be aware that even though you could not be in the same place as THE TRUTH, you would be able to observe it, if you knew where it was. But you also knew enough to know that wouldn’t help you either. Because as an observer your very observations of the object you were observing, as you observed it, would change it, and so your observations of THE TRUTH would be spurious, as THE TRUTH admits no change: it is of itself perfect, and therefore any change to it renders it no longer itself i.e. no longer THE TRUTH. To know THE TRUTH through observation is, therefore, to know only a version, or more accurately, a perversion of THE TRUTH. That’s a mixture of first year physics and a pop-philosophy book you read once. Still you weren’t completely convinced by all that and you still carried that feeling of unrest around inside, no matter how well it was ever explained away, which probably explains why you failed physics and chemistry and biology too, because all of their explanations were always too simple, no matter how complicated they were. And then along came The X Files, which both intensified your distrust of the information you were sold at university and inflamed your belief that there must be something more. You knew the show was a nonsense, but then wasn’t everything? Why should a TV show be any less real than a nonsensical real world? Then the X Files Movie arrived, blowing away all your faith in Mulder and his search in one fell swoop, when its producers claimed, in all the trailers, that it was finally going to reveal THE TRUTH, while in truth it just created more uncertainty. This spoke volumes to you. You were finally becoming convinced after over 100 episodes that THE TRUTH wasn’t out there, or rather in there, as in the TV, after all. Let down by both institutionalized education and by TV, left with just yourself, once again, you were as lost as the Warren Commission, marooned on some grassy knoll, destined to go over and over the same ground for the rest of your life without any possibility of there being an answer. 

Lost.

Not LOST the show, although you did dally with that one for a bit too. They too searched for the truth about their lives. They too believed it was out there, but life for them was so cruel, so twisted, so unexpected and non-logical, that it became boring after a while. It promised so much and yet all it did was go over the same old ground (and how we found the same old fears) too, week after week, until it disappeared up its own diminishing ratings figure. Maybe, you thought, THE TRUTH was so hard to find because there was no truth. Or maybe they were right in saying, “The Truth is out there,” but maybe out there was not a specific place: maybe it was everywhere. Maybe THE TRUTH was actually readily available, astonishingly evident and not mysterious at all. Maybe THE TRUTH was the chaos and haphazard nature of nature, the blind uncaring savagery with which a lion eats a baby wildebeest alive: the way a male gorilla, although driven mad by a life spent locked up in a zoo, nurtures a human baby which has fallen into its compound, keeping it safe instead of killing it, until it is rescued by the keeper. Maybe THE TRUTH is cold and unfeeling and offers no solace at all. Maybe THE TRUTH is lies and lies are The Truth. Could it be true that Double Speak and Double Think are THE TRUTH? 

Does two and two really equal five? Sometimes, sometimes three, sometimes four, sometimes five, sometimes all of them at once, it is hard to remember, but you think you knew once. That you had a moment of clarity once, when all was certain and the wind stopped howling and the rain ceased and you popped your head up out of the now calm water and you saw land, but just for a second. 

warispeacefreedomisslaveryignoranceisbliss

After all, they say truth is beauty and yet they also say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, rendering it subjective and inexact: mysterious and unreliable. Maybe THE TRUTH is that there is nothing out there: there is nothing to search for. Maybe you already know THE TRUTH but are unable to recognize it. Maybe THE TRUTH is that ache in your guts and that buzz in your head. “Trust no one,” was another of Mulder’s favourite lines and you got to thinking maybe that was THE TRUTH. That there is nothing to rely on: nothing on which you can build, no one in whom you can confide, no one to believe in. You will never ever be grown up, you will never understand, you cannot comprehend and so it is better never even to try. THE TRUTH changes from day to day, it is fluid, it is malleable, it is a deluge of dross and an ocean of perforated meaning it is love and anti-love. You can investigate and seek all you like but all you will ever discover are more questions, greater discomfort and harsher harshness. Better to abandon your search and just exist. Actions not words. If nothing makes sense then nothing needs to be explained; you owe nothing to a world, which refuses to give anything to you. Never complain and never explain. “THE TRUTH is out there, maaaaan!” they should have said as in out of sight, wild, weird maaaan, as in the truth will blow your mind Jimi Hendrix-style. THE TRUTH is the biggest head trip you will ever, ever take, higher than LSD, speedier than speed, dopier than grass. It is a trip. It is the only trip. THE TRUTH will set you free, but freedom, to quote Janis Joplin, “Is just another word for nothing left to lose”. 

What else could you do once you’ve discovered that there really is nothing going on other than stuff? That’s all there ever has been and that’s all there ever will be. Stuff. THE TRUTH is stuff, your stuff and my stuff. Our stuff, however crappy and underwhelming that might be. The TRUTH is not something to look for THE TRUTH is what we are, it is you and me Mulder and we are IT. How can you believe in anything, or want, or need, or belong to, or desire to do anything after learning that? How could you? Why would you do? Yet, why doesn’t that stop you pulling the world to pieces? Why can’t you stop dissecting it even though you know you’ll only find stuff? Why can’t you stop searching? Because you KNOW that there is nothing to find but you don’t BELIEVE it.
BUT I WANT TO BELIEVE.
This idea that has just bubbled away in the back of your head all your life, along with that buzzing fridge, is becoming harder and denser, reducing like a master stock into a thick, glutinous mass of intensity. Forming slowly into the cancer that will one day, surely, take your life. For the truth, according to the newspapers, is that everything gives us cancer and that everything we do destroys everything we are and it’s just a matter of choosing your poison. You chose, however subconsciously, to poison yourself with yourself. It’s now just a matter of time. Unless…

Sometimes it feels as if your mind, like the molten iron core of the Earth, is slowly revolving inside your head, and like that mass of white hot magma, it’s constantly searching, under tremendous pressure, like your fingers, like your tongue, for a crack in the mantle through which it will burst, shattering your whole skull, just like Lee Harvey Oswald shattered JFK’s (Or did he? The truth again, slippery and gistless, like great gobs of presidential grey matter, sliding down that grassy knoll.)

 Spraying your brains all over the room in one final, orgasmic mind-spasm. Ending, in a hail of bloody butchery, your lifetime of empty fussing and frustration. This idea that there is no absolute, no law, no yardstick other than that which we create for ourselves, and that your mind is nothing more than a squirming knot of acid worms, would be abhorrent to you if you were able to admit it to yourself, or come out and say it: it would make you appear awful to others too. But maybe you already are awful to others. Maybe you’re just awful. Maybe that’s the truth. You’re so far from understanding anything that you aren’t even aware that there is anything to understand, until you’ve destroyed your life, until you’ve unraveled the only thing you have left: yourself. Until you’re lying in a bed broken, separated and alone. Until your best friend’s wife calls you a wanker and a loser, a no hoper and a dreamer. Only then do you realise what THE TRUTH is, only then do you realise that the truth is writ small: all lower case and that it is you and that you don’t matter and neither does it. Even so, if someone asked you then what the truth was you’d say something trite such as honesty, or you’d try and dredge something up that you read once, because you could never say that the truth is just made up, You could never openly admit something so bold because that would mean you’d have to make your own truth. It would mean you were responsible. That you were in charge, and then whose fault would it all be?