(Un)fortunately I don't mean lying as in reclension but lying as in volitional twisting of language. Which of course births the question of if all the things we speak are untruths...but we'll get there in due time.
This recent fascination with such matters might be partially attributable to the fact that I really like this new show, Pretty Little Liars. It's pretty darn good, especially for ABC Family, I think because they usually try to at least work towards being concerned with morality and whatnot, but this one is just pretty shameless and gratuitously scandalous, which is probably why I enjoy it so much. Damn it just give me the melodrama so that I don't have to waste any time pretending to care about lingering issues of virtue, which are always such an inconvenience when you are just trying to immerse yourself in the smutty world of entertainment.
Anyway; so in high school I wrote this story and it was supposed to have an unreliable narrator (but then, aren't they always?), so I decided that compulsive lying would my fascinating-personality-quirk of the day. So my setting was the county fair, and my narrator is alone on the ferris wheel, when it suddenly grinds to a halt with her at the very top and all the screws start to pop out and the metal is bending in a terrible shrieking din and down down down she goes.
It might have all ended for her right then and there, but praise be to the deities, because she fell right into the lap of a sturdy man in the unit beneath her! (I have not a clue what they call the thing you sit in...cart? boat? Is there even a proper name at all?)
So she finally collects herself and manages to put herself upright and holy crap whaddaya know, she's staring right into the perfect bluegreen eyes of Matt Damon! So anyway, of course it is love at first sight and Matty instantly forgets about his wife and children and whisks my character off to Rome, where they get married by the Pope himself and then spend the rest of their lives walking along the beaches in Greece and sipping superstrong coffee in Italy and then they jetset off to Spain where they share a brief stint as world-champion tango dancers. Eventually, they return to the world of film where together they star in a the greatest and most epic movie ever made and they both win Academy Awards and their hot and steamy love only grows hotter and steamier as the years go on.
This is all a potential digression. Just a bit.
And when I was 15 I might potentially have been projecting my subconscious fantasies in my writing. Just a bit. I think improvement has been made in that now I can simply just admit to myself that I would like nothing more than to fall into Matt Damon's lap at the fair...
But what I am really getting at is simply the lies that are etched into every possible crevice of the lives we live.
See, whenever the University Writing Program assigns students a subject to write about, I inevitably end up having to read about 30 papers on the same topic at work, and this entire week I've been reading stacks of writing on lying, and it's been an interesting time.
They're all supposed to do a little stint of self-examination and think about the lies they tell, then categorize them and then come up with a nice neat epiphany about themselves and what big life lessons they can learn from engaging in this course of introspection.
So then there is me, and I am sitting there reading some dreadfully-personal papers about these people, all of whom are in various states of life-experience. It is quite fascinating, really, because they are all roughly the same age and yet the spectrum ranges from the worst of the lies being to the parents in high school so that they could actually go to a concert while pretending to be at a study group, all the way on over to lies that involve serious damage to people in matters of love and death and sex and all those things more crucial than a minor divergence from the truth told to the parental units in order to avoid trouble.
And it is not really the baffling range of such things as these, but the reminder that we have to conduct our encounters specifically to the individual. What might seem minor to one person can be far more acute to another. So, while to one person lying about not feeling well to get out of a social engagement might seem a most horrific of untruths, while to another the same might be hardly worth a second thought.
It's just yet another manifestation of the human clash, how we chafe against the ideals of others and of course there is always the perpetual option to either learn from it or to continue on in obstinate denial of that fact that the only way our souls will ever learn is when we let something outside ourselves teach them.
In that way, I guess that all lies are actually doing important work. They will inevitably be untangled, and even if not understood entirely or revealed completely, they will still cause mutations and (un)conscious undercurrents that will edge into interactions and language and they will incessantly be influencing the dynamics between human beings.
Thus, I suppose that it in the most broken of interpersonal systems, it is not in the overt lies that terror is cultivated, but rather in the silences. The actual verbal expression, truthful or not, is at least doing something. Perhaps it is something awful, but at least there is a simultaneous potential for resolution at hand, whereas the silences between people can cause only further damage. Say, for example, in the verbal narrative of a dysfunctional family or relationship in which language consistently and barely continues to limp along on life support. Yes, the unit functions externally but descending into the internal spaces of each individual will likely reveal very deep wreck.
Plato says false words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil. But while lies might be an infection, they do not encompass the deadly malignancy of entrenched silences and the secrets and evils that might be buried within such spaces. They infect the soul with evil, but the unspoken wrongs...it seems that might leave an irrevocable dent on the soul and while an infection might be cured with some sort of manmade drug, you can't exactly fix a dent. Perhaps surgically. But that's getting out of my realm. I have just come to think that even a lie might be preferable to the burying of language...
Plato kind of brings me to another small digression, involving evil, or perceived evil, or perhaps just a sort of swelling nothingness depending on how you choose to go about the world. I was in a coffee shop a few weeks ago, just having a chat with someone, and this man stands in front of me and stares at me very intently and then says, "Satan hates you." And I have not even the remotest inkling what to make of that but it is one of those moments that proves difficult to extricate from the mind.
I don't remember where I was going to go with that...
In fact, I don't really remember where I was going with any of this--if I was going anywhere in the first place. It just seems to be everywhere these days, the overarching tonality of lying and silences and madnesses within hearts.
And lies, almost inherently, don't exactly allow for conclusions. Yes, my narrator and Matt Damon lived happily ever after, but the damages they left in their wake were unaccounted for in my story. His wife collapsed into a deepest of pains after he left her, and his children would be forced to grow up in the flurry of fatherless trauma. The county fair incurred great debt from the lawsuits brought about by those who almost lost their lives in the ferris wheel incident, and the next year the ride was discontinued, much to the great dismay of young children who wanted to see things from greater heights and from young and old couples who wanted to share some kind of mythic intimacy whilst hovering in the air. The Pope who married the two was unaware of the details of this affair, and thus his Catholic sensibilities met an awful sort of maculation in allowing these two souls to join in what the religious canon dictates as sin. And of course, even though the story of our couple ends on a high note, happily ever after is of course no such thing because eventually there is death, and it is always one before the other as lives don't extinguish themselves contemporaneously, so either my narrator or Matt would have to watch the other age and degenerate and die and then there would descend a most terrible of lonelinesses and necessity would insist that what was once the passionate affair must transmute into the grief that arrives upon loss.
And so, always always always at the heart of a lie is grief, as is grief at the heart of rage and fear and shame and all the variations of brokenness that fill in the vast, lacking spaces of this world.
1 comments:
WOW. What a great post. And I mean besides the Matt Damon images.
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