Songtext Truth is a dimension (both invisible and blinding) Josh Ritter

Truth is a dimension (both invisible and blinding)

I got off the highway north of desert canyon station
I was driving with my headlights off, just stars for navigation
My telescope, my notes, my ham sandwiches and coffee
Sometimes you must be all alone, there ain't no way to not be

I was thinking about Tonya, how things had rearranged
And everything had gone full circle, we were back to being strangers
She was with a man named Neil now, that's all I knew about him
But I was happy she was happy, real happy, that she'd found him

It was just after eleven when I pulled off at the lookout
The parking lot was empty, though the air still smelled like cookouts
And yes, I admit I toked one, that doesn't change what happened
Anyway, you're not my parents, and it really helps my mapping

Of the system 611, a Magellanic cluster
I'd been watching for a while, I got my telescope adjusted
And I turned it on an unassuming patch of dusty sky
That was really fifty million stars a billion light years wide

Then all at once it felt as if time had been suspended
And a vision poured into me like a bottle'd been upended
I was filled with revelation both infinite and finite
That filtered down the telescope encoded in the starlight

It said truth is not immutable, itself is a dimension
Truth can be both weighted down and warped in strange directions
Truth has a shape that alters, each according to observer
Sometimes you must be close to it, sometimes you must be further

Truth can bend and truth can break, depends on how you ask it
It frays or it may blaze out at some Paul bound for Damascus
And it sometimes gets mistook for god, sometimes for its servant
It both exists and doesn't, like a star that's not observed yet

Which all at once return my thoughts to system 611
Still twinkling down the telescope into my mind from heaven
And I stood there looking upward as the darkness turned to dawn
And received that strange transmission until finally it was gone

And I knew beyond a shadow my discovery was real
But the person that I longed to tell was sound asleep with Neil
In some parallel dimension, maybe Tonya was still mine
But in this one she loved someone else, that left me to search the sky

So I went ahead and wrote this to alert you to my findings
I call it, truth is a dimension, both invisible and blinding
You can give me the awards now, you can knight me or whatever
I've got nothing going on now me and Tonya aren't together

Or go ahead and laugh at me all of my conclusions
Symposiums and seminars and think tank institutions
You may even talk to Tonya, let me ask you if you do
Please tell her I still love her, that will always be the truth