Truth

I'm taking a short hiatus from my Ugly Apartments painting to post pictures of my final Harry Potter potion jar. It is Veritaserum, the potion that makes you tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. This potion makes me wonder how different wizard trials must be from muggle trials. I mean, if there is a surefire way to make people not lie, and not even bend the truth to make themselves look better, then wouldn't that make a lot of trials more clear cut? 

I wonder the same thing about the pensieve (for you non-Harry Potter fans, that is what I imagine to look like sort of a magical fog machine that you can store your memories in. Like an external hard drive for your brain. Combination fog machine and hard drive, hookah and coffee maker!). 

This is a pensieve, according to the Harry Potter movies.

Um, anyway if you can take your memories out of your brain and put them in a magical fog machine, then recall them with a sweep of your wand, and/or allow other people to enter your memories and walk around and relive them sort of, then why not just use a pensieve for every magical trial? The jury could literally weigh one memory against another. However, as we see in book 6, it is possible to tamper with memories, BUT its super obvious when a memory has been magically edited.

But THEN we get into the idea that truth for one person may be different from truth for another person. Is there one universal truth or does each person see the world just differently enough to make truth more of a series of individual observations? And what I don't entirely agree with about the pensieve is that it assumes that memories are static and clear. You can walk into someone else's memory as an invisible third party as it replays like a virtual reality movie. Why would you be a third party in the memory? Why wouldn't you take the place of the person who remembered it? And if you did, wouldn't your experience of the memory be effected by the rememberer's emotions and state of mind at the time? And wouldn't you need to understand their entire life to get the full context of their memory? And don't you find that the way you remember things changes over time? How would that be encompassed in a pensieve?

Oh man, deep stuff, people.................

So here is the Veritaserum jar I made:

I am really quite pleased with the shape, my only complaint is that you can't really read "Veritaserum" on the side because of the way the glaze came out. I wonder if this has something to do with the fact that this potion jar is made of red stoneware whereas the other two were made with white stoneware. I guess I'll never know... because I can't make another one because they closed the Cornell Studio forever. I'm still really bitter about it!

Anywho, here is a closer detail of the lettering:

The "rum" part came out more clear than the "veritase" part. 

Alcohol does tend to make people more honest, I suppose.