Raw Material by Alan; Sillitoe Read Free Book Online

known among his family as a ‘rotten old swine’, mostly because all his actions added up to the fact that he liked making people dance to his tune.

14
    Vindictive parasitic thorn-bushes tangle with free-growing evergreens along two sides of the garden. Physical work relieves the pressure. I still occasionally take a leaf out of Burton’s book.
    Using a short thin-bladed Swedish handsaw to cut through the trunks close to the soil I then (wearing gloves) grip each spiked creeper in turn and pull with all my strength so that its dozen long tentacles slowly ungrasp from the bushes and trees round about. I spend much of the day at this, making a huge pyre of disentangled briars ready for burning in the morning.
    The creepers are no longer strangling the veins and sinews of the bushes, so the greenery will grow more resplendently when spring fully comes. In this work I had no difficulty knowing that the brambles had to be separated from the bushes, and that the bushes were the only kind of truth I wanted to see.
    Yet the creepers also had an existence. They choked and fed off the trees, and their small triangular thorns fetched blood when they scraped my wrist or ran in through a hole in the glove. They too have a tenacious life that has to be dragged out, but because most of the roots are left they will grow and spread everywhere again. The truth of the trees and bushes would not be complete without them.
    Such reality cannot be perceived without struggle or blood being spilled. The heart must be bruised before truth comes out. How else can one find it? When the long thorn-covered tendrils were tugged from the bushes, leaves flew off and twigs snapped. If truth is to have any significance it can only be as a blood-brother.
    Yet when this quest for truth begins to be answered, and these verities are made known after effort and illumination, I give in to the temptation to say they are lies, and find an excuse to disown them.
    They create too much uncertainty, telling me they are not the truth because there are so many million truths, and that my judgement may have been at fault in picking the wrong ones. Every man has to make his own choices, not wait on God to do it. And if I think I have selected wrongly, the truths thus isolated must be lies. All one can believe in is the falsity of truth, and start again.
    But fake truth carries the sheen of hope and optimism—like a counterfeit light before the dawn out of which the real day is bound to grow. A sham truth brings exhilaration, because even though I have decided that it is not the real truth, and have discarded it, at least I can persuade myself that I am getting closer to acceptable veracity.
    The first failure is always the surest sign that I will find what I want, I tell myself, swallowing the light so as not to vomit. In my lit-up state I curse the truth I was so ardently seeking before the blaze of its falsity struck me, before I was lured from the real path that was not solid enough to support the truth but where I was secure in the right of my own heart. Truth is a machine that turns the heart into a computer on which anyone can play a tune.
    This halfway incandescence of the spirit is a safeguard. It can only be my downfall if I go beyond it. Yet if I do outdistance it I must keep possession of my own live backbone, because as a writer it is my vocation, for the benefit of myself and others, to bypass this self-evident falsity of truth and find out what exactitudes might exist in the furthest wilderness.
    The greatest intoxication comes when I realize that there is no downfall. Such a possibility does not exist. I never go down. I do not fall. I can die, shrivel up, perish, rave in anguish at the soil and the sky. But I do not fall. This is so evident a truth that I accept it and know it to be true without any conditions whatsoever. It provides a sense of power and confidence, as well as a desperate strength to go on in face of all disappointments and