Truth Conditions

I remember the phrase truth conditions from my study of linguistics at Penn, where we talked about how an utterance was true if all its truth conditions were met, both the asserted and the presupposed.  The truth conditions of “The king of France is bald” are  a) there is a king of France; and b) he is bald.  We talked about how negating the sentence doesn’t touch the presupposed truth condition: “The king of France is not bald” still implies that there is a king of France.

I found myself thinking of truth conditions in another context with regard to writing.  In order for a line to go into a poem, it must be true, and it must be what I want to say.  Those are its truth conditions.  Rhymes will eagerly suggest themselves even when they have nothing to do with truth.  It is my job to reject them, even in the most mundane of verses.  Last night I could truthfully write a line about leaving the dishwasher to its burbles.  But I couldn’t, even in a verse far from worthy of posting, write that I would go to bed and dream of gerbils.  Sorry.  Wasn’t going to happen. Didn’t meet truth conditions.

On the other hand, sometimes a song will come to me almost whole, mostly, as it seems to me, following the leadings of rhyme and meter, and afterwards suggest something to me that, though I hadn’t known I was thinking about it, seems to me in some sense true.  The summer after I took a year off of college, I returned to a job that was idyllic in many respects.  But some crucial supports were missing, so there were unexpected tensions.  One day I hitchhiked most of the way to work and walked the remaining several blocks, through the small town of Vineyard Haven.  I saw a kite in a store window, and by the time I got to work a song had formed in my mind, which I hastily wrote down.  The tune was cheerful; the song entertained me.  It was only later that I considered what truth conditions may have been met:

Vineyard Haven Kite Song, Chapter One

Icarus with burning wings

Spoke to the flying clouds as he fell:

How can you

Not doing

Anything

Catch the resplendent sun so well?

The water that caught him was sparkling blue

Like the sun and the sky that he thought he knew

But the sea was still and the sun was silent

Nothing to tell of a fall so violent

Save a few feathers and, up above,

A father that mourned for the sun he loved.

Daedalus, Daedalus, tell us please

What is the lesson you’d teach from this?

Is there a hope for arms such as these

To find the sky and the sun’s great bliss?

©Wendy Mulhern
August, 1978