On truth...again

Adaptation was entertaining.  Mostly, it seemed like a cautionary tale about the perils of telling other people’s stories, of what can happen when someone becomes so obsessed with telling a story that he becomes part of that story and truth and reality bend and everything is confusing and unclear.  In this way, I think this movie fits nicely with a lot of the conversations we’ve had in class.  Here’s something that I read this morning that I liked because it offers another way to think about how we tell and share stories:

...these complex, intractable and perhaps, ultimately, unanswerable questions relating...to how all of us, in a world which seems increasingly to challenge our sense of identity and the stories we tell about ourselves, try and make sense of our lives...It would be quite wrong, though, to believe that a tumultuous history has finally dwindled to a post-modern conundrum.--from The Earth Shall Weep: a History of Native America by John Wilson.

When I read this, a little ding when off in my brain.  I thought: “this dude is onto something, subjectivity is for the masses!”  Then I laughed at myself because I realized that I believe in two things that conflict directly with each other: (1) facts are subjective; (2) facts aren’t subjective. We’ve learned this semester that truth and certainty are nebulous, irritating little things, but we live in a world where we actually, really do, truly exist.  We matter.  What’s a girl to do?  It's baisically the end of the semester, so now seems like the appropriate time to ask questions about what are we going to do with all the contradictory stuff we've learned this semester.  Write it off as a post-modern conundrum?  Tempting...