The Truth in Us
Els Janssens offers her vision of the festival theme, Moments of Truth. She studied the vocal arts, literature and non-Western philosophy. She also specialised in the comparative philosophy of Ulrich Libbrecht, and she is a member of the governing board of the School for Comparative Philosophy in Antwerp. She works in the drama department of Luca School of Arts as a lecturer in textual analysis.
‘Moments of being’ are what Virginia Woolf called a few particular moments of truth in her autobiographical writings. In these texts, she describes an experience she had as an eight-year-old child in a holiday house by the sea. “If life has a foundation on which it is based, if it is a barrel that one fills and fills and fills, my barrel is doubtless based upon this memory.†And then she describes waking in the room with an open window: “It’s lying and listening to that crashing of the waves, and watching that light, it’s feeling that it’s hardly possible that I’m here, it’s the most ecstatic feeling I can get.†And it’s “so big that I can’t describe it.†These are moments when the boundaries of the self fall away and we are absorbed into a greater unity, in which we and everything are very strongly present, now and without distance. Our senses and our consciousness are fully open. Full of presence yet empty of concepts and interpretations. These come later, when thought and the self try to grasp this unity, understand it or intervene in it. However, these are moments that grasp us. They can overcome us or be given to us if we are in nature, at a concert, in a quiet place, with a work of art, in an encounter, etc. They are extremely subjective and yet universal. We find them in texts from all cultures, but they are named and valued differently. Sometimes they touch upon the mystical, sublime, ineffable. For some, they are aesthetic; for others, sacred. The ‘thatness’ prevails over the ‘whatness’: we observe that something is happening to us, but we have difficulty saying what it was.
Are these ‘moments of truth’? That greatly depends on what we understand by ‘truth’. For Virginia Woolf, these moments formed the basis of her life. Based on our Western thinking, we will understand this as a subjective, personal truth, arising from a ‘truthlike’, authentic experience. We place it in this category because, for us, truth is linked to objectivity, scientific theories and empirical research. The rational distance from the research subject that this requires does not permit us to experience unity, assimilation into the other, the feeling of being absorbed in a larger whole. We are accustomed to the truth being outside us, as something that needs to be brought into us by teachers, books, digital screens etc. In other world views such as Buddhism, indigenous culture or mystical traditions, the truth is found precisely in this inner experience. In moments of truth, they experience a unity with all of life, a fundamental wonder at the mystery of which we are a part, an insight into invisible connections. These inner experiences form the basis of their world view and their truth.
But like Virginia Woolf, other Western artists also cherish these moments of truth, convey them to us or evoke the memory of them. Let’s allow this festival to put us back in touch with these moments when a deeper truth is revealed: moments upon which we might be able to build another world.