TARGET IS ALWAYS THE TRUTH

Poetic Cinema

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A Companion Poetic Cinema Testimony from “Thrill”

BENSON

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Being left-handed is bad enough in a right-handed world.
That alone can make you feel like the world was built in the opposite direction of your spirit.

Then add being Black.

Then add the streets.
Then add the lies.
Then add the chemicals.
Then add the television.
Then add history written by men who never wanted to explain the full blood cost of anything.

Now you got a person trying to understand why life feels crooked.

We need to understand the slave trading we still support.
Not just the old ships.
Not just chains.
Not just whips.

I’m talking about the systems that still feed poison into brains.
Chemicals in the food.
Chemicals in the promotions.
Chemicals in the habits.
Chemicals in the way people are taught to live and then judged for how they survive.

They feed the brain until the eyes go dead.
The mouth goes dead.
The ears go dead.
Then they point at the body and say,
“See? Look at them.”

But we are the foundation.

Black blood is in everything built with strength.
Black love is in everything built with feeling.
Black emotion is in the music, in the rhythm, in the labor, in the force.
Sunlight creates energy,
and I know that energy lives in us in ways this world still don’t fully understand.

Even anger is natural.
Anger is part of being alive.
But they use Black anger like evidence,
instead of asking what made it rise.

The bottom of the boroughs is the foundation,
but the top don’t turn on the lights for the bottom.
So people down low fight everything—
the system,
their hunger,
their sickness,
and each other.

Then the media comes.

The news don’t explain why things happen.
It only shows that they happened.
It programs the witness before the witness ever meets the people.
So now they are already scared before they understand.
Already suspicious before they ask a question.
Already convinced before truth even enters the room.

That is the act.

That is the magic trick.

The poor become the stereotype.
The stereotype becomes the story.
The story becomes the programming.
And the programming becomes policy.

Then they call it normal.

But facts hurt blind eyes and deaf ears.

No other animals fight more than humans
who call themselves the most intelligent beings on earth.

I don’t know the highest power completely.
But I know darkness in the skin means energy.
Resilience.
Endurance.
A battery that keeps going through storms.

And TV?
TV is like waiting for the dark to find your face.

The target is always the truth.

Right and left.
Blue and red.
Happy and sad.
Black and white.
Weak and strong.
Law and lawless.
Organic and processed.
Smart and stupid.
Street and educated.
Nature and fake.
Work and art.
Hot and cold.
Whole and half.
God and evil.

Everything is living in opposites.

So maybe being left-handed taught me something early:
that the world can call you backward
just because you move different through it.

But maybe that difference is also sight.

Maybe the hemisphere that struggles more
also sees more.

And if we ever get stronger in mind, heart, and spirit,
maybe the next generation won’t have to guess
why the world felt so poisoned.

Maybe they’ll know.
Maybe they’ll heal.
Maybe they’ll see clearly
that truth was always under attack.

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VERNON

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Benson’s testimony here widens from personal survival
into structural analysis.

This is no longer only about being chased, watched, or conditioned by fear.
It is about how entire populations are shaped by environments
designed to confuse biological reality, emotional expression, and public perception.

He begins with a powerful symbolic entry point:

left-handedness in a right-handed world.

This is more than handedness.
It is a metaphor for misfit consciousness.

To be left-handed in a system designed for the right
is to live with a constant low-grade awareness
that structures were not built with you in mind.

Benson then extends that metaphor into Black existence.

Blackness, in his framing, is not merely identity.
It is burdened visibility.

Visible enough to be judged.
Invisible when it comes to cause, pain, labor, history, and manipulation.

He is especially focused on chemical influence—
food, addiction, stress, environmental toxicity, and media saturation.
What he describes is a theory of social programming through multiple entry points:

• nutritional disruption

• emotional destabilization

• stereotype repetition

• informational framing

• historical erasure

This is why the line
“they talk about what is happening without understanding why it’s happening”
is so important.

He is arguing that mainstream interpretation is almost always post-event,
surface-level, and stripped of root cause.

People are trained to react to the image,
not investigate the mechanism.

Thus, media becomes not just reportage,
but preloaded expectation.

By the time the audience encounters the Black subject,
the narrative has already been assigned.

This is why Benson says
the witness is programmed before the encounter.

That observation is extremely sharp.

He is also trying to restore a broken equation:

Blackness = labor, creativity, emotional force, solar energy, cultural transmission.

This is his rebuttal to dehumanization.

When he says Black blood and emotion are in everything,
he is naming the hidden infrastructure of civilization.

Not just physical labor—
but style, sound, movement, invention, adaptation, and survival under pressure.

The section on opposites is equally important.

It reads like a flood of binaries,
but beneath it is a philosophical claim:

Human beings are trapped in false divisions
while trying to locate wholeness.

Left/right.
Black/white.
law/lawless.
organic/processed.
street/educated.

He is not merely listing opposites.
He is showing how categories become prisons
when systems weaponize difference.

So what is this piece ultimately saying?

That truth becomes endangered
whenever power benefits from distortion.

Hence the line:

“The target is always the truth.”

That may be the core sentence of the entire companion piece.

Because once truth is attacked,
history can be rewritten,
illness can be blamed on character,
poverty can be blamed on culture,
and survival can be mislabeled as defect.

Yet Benson does not end in surrender.

He returns to mind, heart, and spirit.

Which means his final move is not accusation alone.
It is reconstruction.

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THE CURATOR

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This companion work expands the field of “Trill”
from nervous-system survival into civilizational critique.

If the first piece documents hyper-vigilance,
this one documents interpretive warfare:

Who gets defined.
Who gets seen.
Who gets blamed.
Who gets studied.
Who gets fed poison and then called broken.

The language here is intentionally incantatory and accumulative.
Rather than presenting a single linear argument,
the text builds pressure through layered association:

slavery → chemicals → media → misperception → division → false normalcy

That movement matters.

Because Benson is not speaking as an academic analyst.
He is speaking as a man whose body absorbed the consequences
before his language fully organized them.

This is what makes the work powerful.

It does not merely state a theory.
It performs what it feels like
to realize that the environment has been shaping consciousness all along.

Three major symbolic systems anchor the piece:

1. Left-handedness

A metaphor for structural misalignment.
To move differently through a world built for another dominant hand
becomes a model for racial, psychological, and social displacement.

2. Chemicals

Not just literal substances,
but all forms of penetration into the human system:
food, stress, addiction, media repetition, and environmental instability.

3. Opposites

A field of binaries that reveals how reality is divided, sorted, and weaponized
until people lose access to wholeness.

The phrase
“The target is always the truth”
functions as the curatorial key.

It suggests that distortion is not accidental.
It is necessary for unstable systems to continue appearing natural.

What this work preserves, then,
is not only testimony.

It preserves counter-perception.

A way of seeing through poison.
A way of naming manipulation without surrendering the soul.
A way of recognizing that the attacked mind can still produce insight.

In an exhibition context, this work would sit beside the first “Trill” piece
as its philosophical twin:

• Trill I: The body under pressure

• Trill II: The mind discovering the structure of pressure

Museum note:

“This artifact records a consciousness
moving from reaction to recognition—
from survival inside the machine
to awareness of the machine itself.”

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VISUAL SKETCH DESCRIPTION

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Title: Target Is Always the Truth

A black-and-white graphite scene.

At the center stands Benson, full-body, slightly turned, one hand open at his side, the other near his chest.
His face is serious, alert, thoughtful — not panicked, but deeply aware.

Behind him, the background is divided into layered symbolic zones:

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Left side of image

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• A giant tilted classroom blackboard, half-erased

• A left hand drawn in chalk, glowing faintly

• Broken desks and scattered papers

• A television screen with static and a shadowy news anchor silhouette

• Faint headlines, unreadable but aggressive

• A child-sized figure looking up, confused

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Right side of image

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• Factory smoke blending into clouds

• A city block with dark apartment windows

• Fast-food wrappers drifting like leaves

• Faint chains dissolving into electrical wires

• Faces in the walls, watching but expressionless

• A staircase rising upward but fading into darkness

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On the ground beneath Benson

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A checkerboard of opposites in rough chalk words:

LEFT / RIGHT
TRUTH / LIE
BLACK / WHITE
LAW / LAWLESS
ORGANIC / PROCESSED
WORK / ART
GOD / EVIL

Some words are cracked.
Some are smudged.
Some are half-erased.

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At Benson’s chest

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A subtle white glow — small but undeniable.
Not dramatic.
Just steady.

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Above the scene

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A television-shaped halo of static hangs in the sky,
but a beam of natural light breaks through it, touching only part of Benson’s face.

The feeling of the image should be:

psychological, political, poetic, intelligent, wounded, but unbroken.