As A Matter Of Fact

A fact is something that is true. A fiction is something that is nocturnal. When a fact and a fiction come together the result is superfluidity. Dark matter and antimatter. There are truths in the Bible that are undetectable in a particle accelerator. The God particle is a metaphor for the Higgs boson. The truth it reveals is that subatomic particles acquire mass through interaction with fields of energy. Truths emerge from the fracas of facts. Truth is collision. Facts are the quarks. 

A fact is something that actually exists. A fiction is something that explores the mutability of truth. The kangaroo, for example, is neither fact nor fiction but a marsupial enhanced by the addition of a woop woop. If I make the claim that there is a kangaroo hopping around in my brain this doesn’t mean that my brain is Australia. It simply means that in a linguistically charged field a lexical set of semantically related entities can assume the form of a marsupial. This is particularly true if the words are boiling and the fact that things in this world change causes the coconut palm in your hand to squirt thorny tongues of metaphor at a greasy logic. 

“Do facts,” asked Hannah Arendt, “independent of opinion and interpretation, exist at all? Have not generations of historians and philosophers of history demonstrated the impossibility of ascertaining facts without interpretation, since they must first be picked out of a chaos of sheer happenings (and the principles of choice are surely not factual data) and then be fitted into a story that can be told only in certain perspective, which has nothing to do with the original occurrence?”

Consider the aforementioned kangaroo: is it wearing a hat? This is an important question, because the single fact of a hat can live in the mind like a synergy of bonbons and clouds. I believe in the juxtaposition of hats if the hats are in a row, but if they are not, then I must wear them one by one, in the same way that a series of facts might culminate in a fiction, and create theater. Theaters are to facts what facts are to fairies: a curious glow at twilight.

Facts never win arguments. People reject facts. It happens all the time. Why do people reject facts?

Facts aren’t the solid bricks of information we think they are. They’re contingent. They’re relative. They’re as elusive as glasswing butterflies.

I was born August 23^rd, 1947, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. This is a fact. It is also a fiction. Minneapolis is the name of a geographic location. But that’s all it is: a name. August is the name of a month. It, too, is a fiction. The 23^rd is a number, as is 1947. These are contingent on a system of measurement that was invented approximately 6,000 years ago in Sumeria. And that’s what they are: an invention. Numbers were created to answer the question: how many? When humans cease to exist none of these names and numbers will have any existence. They will cease to be facts. They won’t even be a fiction. They will be nothing. Nothingness is the fact of not existing. But how does one go about confirming such a fact? If something has no existence, then what is it? It doesn’t have it-ness. How can it be a fact? The it-ness is a fiction. One can imagine something not existing, except oneself. Try imagining yourself with no existence. Be a fact.  

17^th century physicist, chemist, inventor and natural philosopher Robert Boyle created a pneumatical engine to create facts. The machine was an ontological metaphor that produced empirical results. The machine consisted of two main parts: a glass globe and a pumping apparatus. It was air-tight. This was crucial to producing a “matter of fact.” The principal fruit of Boyle’s experiments was to prove the existence of a “void in void.” In other words, a vacuum. A vacuum was, at the time, considered impossible. Boyle proved the actuality, or factuality, of a vacuum. He also discovered, by means of this machine, the inverse relationship between the volume and the pressure of a gas. Boyle’s Law, P₁V₁ = P₂V₂, has helped scientists comprehend and predict the behavior of gasses ever since.

Creating a fact is hard. I can create almost anything with words. But I don’t know how to create a fact.

Thomas Aquinas famously said: “Veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus.” In English, “Truth is the equation of thing and intellect.” To which I say, good luck.