Amy Tan | particles of truth

Submitted by Susan Weber on February 13, 2009 - 15:07

I promise to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth - so help me God. Hand on the bible, oath of honesty in a court of law.

But in Amy Tan's cosmology, as she creates something from nothing in her novels and in her life, she rejects absolutes. Here are quotes from her TED Talk, which I highly recommend watching if you spend time with the muse:

"How do I create? By questioning and saying to myself there are no absolute truths. I believe in specifics - the specifics of story - and the past and what is happening in the story at that point.

By thinking about luck and fate, coincidences and accidents, God's will, the synchronicity of mysterious forces, I will come to some notion of how it is we create.

There is uncertainty in everything that is, and that is good. For then I can discover something new.

I create by thinking about my role in all if it, what I do, think, and feel.

If I feel what is in one story, I come the closest to what compassion is. I create by imagining fully and becoming what is imagined and what is that real world, that fictional world. That is how I find particles of truth, not the absolute truth or the whole truth."
All quotes above, Amy Tan

When, as artists, we consider our time spent with the muse a time of deepening our instincts for good (like compassion), we begin to understand the place of art in culture. I've often thought of songwriting as prayer, but not in the sense of asking a deity for inspiration. Rather, as a time of communicating with 'particles of truth' through which emerge my better nature.

Susan Weber's blog
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