Interpretation and Post-modernism

At school we learned things.
What we were taught was considered to be true.
After compulsory education, you were in the growing-up phase where you did things.
Just like I believed that the bible was the word of God so did I read about Boadicea (as she was then named), about German aggression and how the Empire was a civilising thing. I believed in fairness, truth and justice. I believed in elders and betters.

The world was never like this. Why was I lied to ? Why was my education inextricably intertwined with an ideology I now recognise as not just untrue but obviously untrue and patronisingly simplistic. Nobody told me this but now I see the glimmerings of the doubts beginning to appear. Approaching A-levels I remember how essay writing began to involve the use of the word "perhaps" and how one was encouraged to offer the differing sides of the argument. One still had to use that pompous tone of official authority but in hindsight the cracks were starting to appear. My history teacher told me that no-one needed to know the date of the battle of Waterloo and that History, as a subject, taught an individual to learn to think. Similarly, years later, at an Open University Summer School reading King Lear and the Literary Critics the varying interpretations of the text were offered and rather than judgmentally deciding that one was right and the others wrong I learnt to recognise differing degrees of "Rightness".

Although I make, even now, no pretence to either wisdom or knowledge, I can see in a text (whether it be news documentary, film, or book) the meanings that exist. Not a single meaning but many. The quality of that text is assessed by the accuracy or the emotional response engendered in the work. It is judged by the depth of its presentational awareness and by its avoidance of the banal, the sensational or the dogmatic. Truth is not a single authority nor can opinion be cast as fact. The truth of the fossil record destroys the basis of Genesis but the bible and its believers do tell of power, propaganda, misinformation and manipulation. The bible describes the voice of man rather than the word of God. The organised church, indeed all religions tell of governance and the belief that wanes as humanity both asserts itself and searches for comfort in an alienating, marginalised world.

As an individual I value my capacity to think and dislike it when it is assumed that I will routinely follow a pre-ordained path. I wish to choose my own direction and to power that search not with a cause that I will inflict on anyone else but out of a natural curiosity to find the option which I want to keep. I suspect that the answer to contentment lies in a blending of a multiplicity of skills, talents and thinking. I believe the first step on that search is to satisfy an individual's curiosity to create. The answer starts in that Creativity. And that creativity stems from.........