August 2000
In lieu of any actual WRITING, which would require both TIME and ENERGY to produce, here are some cryptic notes for you to ponder.
- Deceit among Howler Monkeys: C.R. Carpenter, 1931, p.181.
- Ekman’s rule of thumb: Do I care about the future of this relationship? If not, it’s okay to lie.
- Ask people to submit first remembered lie.
- Poll: Who was worse liar: Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Wiley Coyote…
- Other pick-up lines in The Sensuous Man.
- More Dorchen rants.
- All writing becomes a lie…
- “We Get Confessions.”
- Philosophical accounts of self-deception.
- Quote from Letter: “As I myself had always said, we point away from the truth, we know the truth but point in the opposite direction, because deep down we don’t want to look at the truth, we don’t want to face the truth. That’s the truth.”
- Bateson’s remark about animals not having capacity to lie.
- Sacks’ account of Reagan’s speech in “The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat.”
- Distinction between selfish and altruistic lies. One wonders what is altruistic.
If you’ve read My Bio, Kinda, you know that I can rattle off a long list of past professions, including director of a national college scholarship, fruit vendor and professional blackjack player. I’m here now to confess a lie from my days as a bingo caller.
I began calling bingo at fifteen. It was my second job ever, proceeded only by paper boy, a position I quit after just three weeks due to my inability to collect payment from a third of my customers (I actually LOST MONEY as a paper boy).
No, wait, I forgot golf caddie. At fourteen, I spent one wretched afternoon as a golf caddie, during which I inadvertently picked up the wrong ball during a game of alternate two-ball – a transgression for which I was stiffed by the enraged young Ivy Leaguer whose bags I carried.
I obtained my bingo calling job through a friend whose grandmother was president of the Ladies Club at her apartment complex. This club had 50 some-odd elderly members, all of whom, it seemed, were addicted to bingo. They played every Tuesday night, and for about a year I joined them, sitting at the front of the room behind a small metal bingo wheel, calling out numbers. For my services I received six dollars an hour plus all the fresh-baked cookies I could eat.
Now, to understand where the lie comes in, you have to understand a bit more of what a bingo caller does. Aside from spinning the wheel and calling out the number/letter combination of whatever ball comes rolling down the metal chute, the bingo caller must confirm the winner of each round; to do this, he must keep track of each number/letter called. The keeping track part is done with the aid of a big piece of cardboard with lots of little indentations arranged in a grid. The grid has a place for each ball, and so the caller simply places each ball, once called, into its proper slot. When someone shouts “Bingo,” the caller asks the player to read off the five number/letter combinations that constitute her “bingo.” If these five have number/letter combinations have indeed been called, the player is paid. (If I remember correctly, it cost two dollars to participate in an evening of bingo, and the winner of each round received five dollars.)
At the Ladies Club, the money part was handled by my friend’s grandmother; all I had to do was confirm the bingos. Surprisingly, perhaps, players often made mistakes (I doubt that they ever tried to cheat), and thus I’d usually catch a few false bingos each night. I didn’t enjoy this part. It is no fun to publicly inform a gleeful winner that she is in fact a humiliated loser. But this was my job, and of course there were the cookies to consider.
Actually, I took my work quite seriously, being particularly careful to place the called balls in their proper slots so that I wouldn’t screw up the confirmation process.
And then one day I noticed something. Well, before I noticed this something, I noticed something else: a woman with no friends. She liked to sit in the front row with a chair between her and the next woman. During the intermission, while I was chowing down on cookies, she sat alone, eating cantaloupe out of a plastic container. It was sad. I would have gone up and talked to her myself, but I really had no idea what to say to an elderly woman aside from thanking her for her delicious cookies. But then I noticed the second something, and this second something made me realize how I could be of service to her.
The second something was this: no one but me could see the little balls. Actually, I noticed this from the beginning, but it didn’t occur to me at first what it meant; which is to say, what power it granted me.
Do you see what’s coming? I’m guessing that you have some sense of what’s coming.
Here’s what coming: one day I decided to cheat on behalf of the cantaloupe woman. It was quite simple. During the intermission I lingered past her table and memorized a row of letter/number combinations on one of her bingo cards. In a subsequent game, I called these self-same combinations during the first ten balls or so, virtually guaranteeing her of victory. And it worked: she yelled “Bingo” loud and strong, then read me her winning row. (As a precaution, I had placed the wrongly called balls on the slots belonging to the winning number/letters. Why? Because I was concerned that the cantaloupe woman might OVERLOOK her bingo, in which case the game would continue and I would need to confirm another woman’s bingo. But why, you might wonder, was this such a concern; couldn’t I have confirmed ANYTHING? No, I could not have confirmed ANYTHING, since one of the sharper players likely would have caught a false bingo if I didn’t, and that would have spelled trouble for me, the trusted keeper of the truth.)
I made it a practice of awarding at least one bingo a night to the cantaloupe woman, and several times I granted her the final game, which was worth double. I was never caught, nor did I ever have the sense that anyone even realized that such a thing was possible. I fancied myself the Robin Hood of bingo callers, stealing from the rich Ladies Club members and giving to the poor cantaloupe woman. It was a stretch – even possibly a lie – but us self-styled outlaws must forgo such considerations. The truth we carry is our own, and it is by this that we must live.
To continue last night’s story: Oddly, I can’t remember what it was that Lori Sitner told me in confidence about David Hess which I then ran and told David. Was it something involving Penny Sue Gold? I think it was. Later, David started seeing Penny Sue – this I do remember – so I suspect that Lori may have told me that Penny Sue liked him. I, however, liked Penny Sue (yes, I also liked Lori, but I REALLY liked Penny Sue), so for me this was bad news, crushingly bad news. Why then did I pass it along to David? Alas, I have no answer. Could it be that I am confusing the order of events? Yes, it could be. In any event, not long after, another girl I knew, a red-haired girl whose name escapes me, told someone who told me that she and I had kissed at a party. This was a lie – I had never kissed anyone at any party, least of all her.
I can’t recall who informed me of this lie, but I do remember my reaction. My reaction was pity. Or rather, indignation followed by pity. Who hasn’t lied or wanted to lie about such things so as to keep up appearances? The red-haired girl, who though perfectly nice was not on my “desirable girl” radar, wanted her friends to think that she had kissed someone, and for some reason she chose me as her fictional accomplice. Frankly, I was an strange choice for someone trying to impress her friends, but then perhaps she was shooting for BELIEVABLITY most of all. Certainly if she had claimed to have kissed Mark Goodman, she would have been hooted at.
As you might imagine, I felt awful for her and wished I hadn’t found out. I even considered asking my friend not to tell anyone else about her lie, but then quickly changed my mind for fear that my friend might suspect me of lying when I said I hadn’t kissed her. I regret this now. It was cowardly, and the red-headed girl suffered for it, for word of her lie quickly spread. I myself said nothing to her and tried rather to smile in a such a way as to indicate that although I wasn’t interested in kissing her, I felt bad about the turn of events and also flattered that she had chosen me as the object of her lie. Was I successful in this? I doubt it. Most likely, the poor girl thought I was mocking her and thus dreaded seeing me and my cruel smile.
My friend Lee Winkelman reports that Bateson’s theories about Schizophrenia (see post from August 20) have been pretty much discredited. “Like Bettleheim’s theories about Autism,” he writes, “they led to a blaming of the mother and much resulting guilt. Current thinking is that Schizophrenia, perhaps more than any other mental disorder, is caused primarily by a chemical imbalance, and not by child-rearing environment – i.e., by nature, not nurture. Thus, if current thinking is true, Bateson et. al. caused a lot of guilt for nothing.”
A confession: Even if it’s wrong, I still prefer Bateson’s theory, for I consider it beautiful.
Another friend wrote to say that he’s met Paul Ekman, the guy who believes that the human face betrays emotion in a universal language. Feeling acutely self-conscious about his expressions in Ekman’s presence, my friend spent most of the evening hiding from him. However, when they finally spoke, my friend noticed how little expression Ekman makes.
This segues nicely into a discussion of my social life these days. Maybe I’m imagining this, but it seems that some of my friends have been acting a little funny since I began CROWBAR. Actually, I’m CERTAIN about this. For example, one person – a friend of long standing – made me promise that I wouldn’t mention anything in CROWBAR about the project we’ve been working on together, not even in a veiled way. If you knew what this project is, you would wonder what my friend was thinking when he made me promise this, but unfortunately I can’t tell you anything about it, not even in a veiled way, so you’re going to have to imagine the sort of project that no one in their right mind would ever have such concerns about. There have been other, similar incidents, and what they make me think is that I should announce my privacy rules to all the world, so that the world, such as it is, no longer fears that I will betray its puny secrets. Here then are my privacy rules, or rule, for there is only one: If I want to write about something from my personal life which may embarrass someone, I ask that person if I can include it. If this person is not comfortable with such inclusion, even in a veiled way, I don’t do it. That’s my rule.
Now that I’ve stated my rule, I should mentioned that when I was 14 or so, Lori Sitner, on whom I had a crush, told me some secret about my friend David Hess on the condition that I never tell David. I swore that I would never do so, then immediately did so. (Unfortunately, I have forgotten what it was that Lori told me; otherwise, I would tell it to you, as the statue of limitations has run out on that particular promise.)
Did I lie to Lori when I made the promise? Well, it certainly appears that I lied, but the way I remember it is that when I made the promise, I really had no intention of telling David, so in this sense I wasn’t lying. Admittedly this is a lame defense: I promised I won’t, and then I did, and that makes me a promise-breaker, which is a kind of liar. Yet it is a different kind of liar than the kind that NEVER INTENDS to keep his promise. This is a deceiver, and deceivers are worse in my book than promise-breakers. If I end up violating my privacy rule above, I will be a promise-breaker, not a deceiver, as I truly have no intention of doing so.
More on this tommorrow.
A relevant quote by Nietzche, from “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” contributed by my good and great friend John Shaw: “What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms – in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.”
Also, while I have a minute (very busy doing web stuff, very busy), here are a few paragraphs from an email I wrote this morning to a gifted young man who, admiring my stories, wrote that he is afraid that he will never be about to write like me.
As to your college writing requirements, I have to agree: most likely you will never write like me. I suggest, instead, that you try writing like you, since this should prove easier. It took me about 20 years to learn this lesson, so if you learn it in 15, you are ahead of my miserable curve.
One additional word of unsolicited advice. You will probably do well to ignore everything that everyone says about how to write and what constitutes good writing, particularly well-meaning instructors in writing classes. These people, as nice as they may be, are out to DESTROY you.
Paradoxically, I seem to fall into the category of “well-meaning instructor.”
I own fifteen books, tops. It’s this thing I have about things: they weigh on me. The only books I keep are reference books: my dictionary, thesaurus and computer manuals. The sole exception is “Steps to an Ecology of Mind” by the late great social scientist Gregory Bateson.
Sadly, Bateson is best known for having been married to Margaret Mead and not for his own intellectual accomplishments, which were considerable. Bateson’s work – spanning anthropology, psychiatry, biological evolution, genetics and most broadly, systems theory and ecology – had at its core a single insight: to understand a thing we must understand the larger system to which it belongs. Nowadays this seems a pretty basic idea – in large part, I believe, because of Bateson’s influence – but sixty-four years ago, when he wrote his first book, “Naven,” it was plain weird.
Okay, okay, okay, I love Gregory Bateson. I’ll get to the point.
In 1955, Bateson and others wrote a paper in which they reported on their research into a new theory of Schizophrenia. The theory goes like this: Schizophrenia arises in an environment in which the child is continually caught in “double binds” – situations in which no matter what he does, he “can’t win.”
At the heart of this theory is Bertrand Russell’s Theory of Logical Types, which Bateson applies to communication; specifically, communication between parent and child. The idea is this: certain communication – often really important communication – is ABOUT communication. The mode of this meta-communication is usually but not always nonverbal: posture, gesture, facial expression, intonation, etc. We need this information to determine what people REALLY mean; whether they’re serious or joking, or what they are. Schizophrenics are notoriously bad at this kind of communication, both in giving it and interpreting it. Why? Bateson and his colleagues theorized that Schizophrenics have been conditioned through repeated “double binds” (Bateson’s term) to ignore all meta-communications. Oddly, this enormous and in many ways debilitating blind spot is necessary to their survival.
Here is Bateson’s description of the three general characteristics of the “double bind”:
(1) The individual is involved in an intense relationship; that is, a relationship in which he feels it is vitally important that he discriminate accurately what sort of message is being communicated so that he may respond appropriately.
(2) And, the individual is caught in a situation in which the other person in the relationship is expressing two orders of message and one these denies the other.
(3) And, the individual is unable to comment on the message being expressed to correct his discrimination of what order of message to respond to, i.e., he cannot make a meta-communicative statement.
If we get a bit more concrete, Bateson’s theory – and the reason I mention it – should become clearer.
Bateson builds from the idea of a “double bind” to create a hypothesis of the general characteristics of a “Schizophrenic” family – that is, a family capable of producing a Schizophrenic member (Bateson established much of the theoretical framework for what later became Family Systems Therapy, among other family-based therapy modalities). Again there are three conditions:
(1) A child whose mother becomes anxious and withdraws if the child responds to her as a loving mother. That is, the child’s very existence has a special meaning to the mother which arouses her anxiety and hostility when she is in danger of intimate contact with the child.
(2) A mother to whom feelings of anxiety and hostility toward the child are not acceptable, and whose way of denying them is to express overt loving behavior to persuade the child to respond to her as a loving mother and to withdraw from him if he does not.
(3) The absence of anyone in the family … who can intervene in the relationship between the mother and child and support the child in the face of the contradictions involved.
Bateson gives the following example to bring home how this works:
For example, if the mother begins to feel hostile (or affectionate) toward her child and also feels compelled to withdraw from him, she might say, “Go to bed, you’re very tired and I want you to get your sleep.” This overtly loving statement is intended to deny a feeling which could be verbalized as “Get out of my sight because I’m sick of you.” If the child correctly discriminates her meta-communicative signals, he could have to face the fact that she both doesn’t want him and is deceiving him by her loving behavior. He would be “punished” for learning to discriminate orders of messages accurately. He therefore would tend to accept the idea that he is tired rather than recognize his mother’s deception. This means that he must deceive himself about his own internal state in order to support mother in her deception. To survive with her he must falsely discriminate his own internal messages as well as falsely discriminate the message of others.
Bateson provides a second example, this time of an actual case, to further illustrate the mechanism of destruction.
A young man who had fairly well recovered from an acute schizophrenic episode was visited in the hospital by his mother. He was glad to see her and impulsively put his arm around her shoulders, whereupon she stiffened. He withdrew his arm and she asked, “Don’t you love me any more?” He then blushed, and she said, “Dear, you must not be so easily embarrassed and afraid of your feelings.” The patient was able to stay with her only a few minutes more and following her departure assaulted an aide and was put in the tubs.
It would be downright diabolical if the mother had any idea she was doing it, which of course she doesn’t. Bateson makes the following observations:
(1) The mother’s reaction of not accepting her son’s affectionate gesture is masterfully covered up by her condemnation of him for withdrawing, and the patient denies his perception of the situation by accepting her condemnation.
(2) The statement “Don’t you love me any more” in this context seems to imply: (a) “I am lovable.” (b) “You should love me and if you don’t you are bad or at fault.” (c) “Whereas you did love me previously you don’t any longer,” and thus focus is shifted from his expressing affection to his inability to be affectionate. Since the patient has also hated her, she is on good ground here, and he responds appropriately with guilt, which she then attacks.
It is enough to make one crazy, and according to Bateson, it does. (For more on Bateson, including lots of online stuff, try ikos.org.)
A woman – a young woman presumably, although I don’t know that for a fact – recently emailed me about my short story Kinkajou. If you haven’t read this story, the kinkajou of the title is owned by Kirstie Alley, and much of action takes place on Kirstie Alley’s estate. However, the story has almost nothing to do with Kirstie Alley, who puts in a cameo appearance on the other end of a cell phone call. My correspondent said that she was a big fan of Kirstie Alley and that she wanted to know if the story was “real,” by which I assume she meant true (obviously the story was real; she read it). I debated whether to write her back. Would you have written her back? Probably you would have because you are a nicer person than me. The fact is, I didn’t want to tell her what was true and what wasn’t because I hate that question. Admittedly, I bring it on myself by writing my stories in the first person, but I still don’t like it. So unless you happen to be my girlfriend and the story happens to concern a romantic relationship, I will either refuse to answer such questions or change the subject.
However, tonight as I was cleaning up my email In Box (I like to keep my In Box empty by either deleting stuff or saving it to other folders), I came across the woman’s email again and decided for some reason to write her back. Why did I decide this? Well, you shall see why I decided this. The catch, though, is that while I decided to write her back, I decided not to answer her question. That is, I decided to write her back in order to tell her why I could not answer her question. This was an asinine idea; I come up with some really asinine ideas sometimes, and this was one of them. Here is what I wrote:
Dear
Dave’s Web of Lies is not very interesting, so don’t go there. I think it’s a cultural thing: Dave appears to be English, and most of his jokes are English-seeming. The site presents a Lie of the Day and includes lies from Celebrity Liars. The current such person, author and actor Stephen Fry, makes the not very funny claim that Belgian males remove their trousers while driving. Probably this plays better in England. Fry also states – and again the humor of this escapes me – that “journalism is an honourable profession, attracting some of the most talented and thoughtful minds in the world. Its aim is to inform, elucidate and uplift the human spirit.” I mean, there has to be at least one person in the world who actually believes that statement for it to have even a chance of being funny. The same goes for the Belgian thing. This site gets only one and a half “CROWBARS.”
Whatever I write tonight is going to sad, because that’s how I feel tonight, sad. If you can’t abide sad, skip to the next entry.
Whatever I write tonight is going to sad, because that’s how I feel tonight, sad. If you can’t abide sad, skip to the next entry.
Yesterday I thought of keeping track of my lies for a proscribed period – say, a week – and writing them down. Or not writing them down necessarily, since this would be a bitch, but counting them.
This reminds me. Many years ago I went on a long bike trip. A very long bike trip. And on this bike trip I kept track of how many flats I had. I had 17 flats plus two blown tires. When I got back, people would ask about my trip, and I found that this fact more than any other communicated what it was like: it was like 17 flats and two blown tires.
Today I had a 26-lie day.
Actually, I made that up; I don’t really know how many lies there were.
Recently I had another lie-related idea: a year of the truth and nothing but. Without question this year would transform my life.
From an email I sent tonight to a dear friend: “The worst thing about this project is that though my topic is lies, there are so many things I cannot ever say, nor ever would. And of course these are the things that matter most.”
Walking back from Dojo’s, Hijiki’s Tofu Dinner in hand, I realized that many of my stories (that is, my short stories, my works of FICTION) concern lies in some form or another – usually self-deception but also plenty of plain old other-deception. So although these stories are available elsewhere on this site, I have decided to officially include the more lie-centric of the group in CROWBAR. Thus, please welcome our newest additions: Letter, The Fudgy-Wudgy Guy, Pervert, Badger, The Tums, Resolve, and Kinkajou. If you haven’t read them yet, you don’t know what you’re missing. (This being true about every unread thing.)
The first lie I remember telling, though certainly not the first lie I ever told, concerned shit. Specifically, the shit in my pants as I told it. What’s most interesting here is not the lie itself, although that too is interesting, but how the lie relates to my success later in life at poker.
Let us begin with the lie. A lie, I have just this moment realized, must always have, for lack of a better term, a liee: a person to whom one lies. Nietzsche observed that the most common lies are those we tell ourselves. Assuming this to be true, which I for one do, it would appear that we often play both roles – liar and liee – a seemingly impossible trick. How do we manage it? I don’t know, let me think a minute.
Okay, I’m done thinking. The trick is no trick at all, for we never truly believe ourselves. Yes, we ACT as if we believe ourselves, but the truth is, we don’t; we’re lying, and deep down we know it.
The key phase is “deep down.” In my newly invented model of a person, there’s a “deep down” and there’s a “not so deep down,” the former being considerably less deep down than Freud’s “unconscious,” which in my newly invented model is known as “very deep down.” Since I can do nothing else, I will ignore the “very deep down” and speak instead of the “deep down.”
For example, right now I can’t obtain a phone. I have this new studio apartment in Williamsburg for which I am paying a sizable rent, but the phone company has been unable to give me a telephone connection. It has been six weeks now, and last week the phone workers went on strike, so it could very well be another six weeks or more before I have this thing that I absolutely must have to do my work. While I wait for a phone, I am living with my girlfriend Susi, who I am slowly driving crazy, and her brother William, who I am slowly driving crazy. Why do I mention this? I mention this to tell you what I did when I discovered that the phone company was on strike and would likely be on strike for many weeks to come: I took a nap. Although it was one o’clock in the afternoon, and although I had a ton of important work to do, I took a nap and slept for something like four hours, sleeping as badly as I have ever slept. When I woke, unrefreshed and barely able to move, I made a decision. My decision was this: Since I am at the mercy of this monolith that cares not a whit for me or my problems, I am going to “make the best of the situation” by “accepting my lot” and “moving on.” Whenever people ask me how I’m dealing with this, I say that I am “making the best of the situation” by “accepting my lot” and “moving on.” More importantly, I repeat these words in my own head whenever the thought begins to occur that I am experiencing a MAJOR DEPRESSION brought on by the UTTER HELPLESSNESS I feel in the face of this SPIRIT-CRUSHING monolith. In other words, I lie to myself. Deep down, I am depressed and enraged, while not so deep down, I am the life of the party, blithely typing one lie-related anecdote after another.
That was a long semi-digression. In fact this whole “deep down” thing has been one long semi-digression. I seem to be in some sort of semi-digression mood. Could it be that I don’t want to tell the story I sat down to tell? That could be, for the story I sat down to tell is yet another in a series of embarrassing stories, all of which I am obliged to tell because I promised myself that I would tell them.
So, fine. The liee was my father. I was much older than I would like to admit, perhaps seven. This is why I say that this not the first lie I ever told, but rather the first lie I REMEMBER telling. Without question, I must have told hundreds if not thousands of lies before this one; however, for better or worse, this is first one I can actually recall, and for reasons that will soon become apparent.
Okay, the liee was my father and I was seven and I had, as you may recall, shit in my pants. How the shit got there is difficult to explain. Many years past the usual age, I would sometimes have “accidents” of this type. No doubt there were reasons for this, and if I ever develop an online journal/report about discipline, I promise to explore them with you. For the present discussion, however, you need only know that this was a known phenomenon: Michael and his occasional “accidents.” Which explains my father’s behavior on noticing an unpleasant odor as I walked though the room in which he sat watching a football game.
”Son,” he said, “did you crap in your pants again?” “No,” I said, feinting incredulity.
Actually, this isn’t true, I don’t think; I don’t think I feinted incredulity at all. Rather I looked at him and calmly said, “No,” believing the low-key approach more convincing. Yes, this is what I did, I’m almost sure of it. In any case, my father didn’t believe me, and for several good reasons: 1. At seven (or however old I was) I was already a known liar, having been nailed for lies large and small, none of which I am able to remember. 2. My father knew about my problem. 3. The smell.
Would a jury of my seven-year-old peers have convicted me? I do not believe so, for there could have been, as unlikely as this seems, another explanation for the smell. Understandably, my father was less generous. “Don’t lie to me,” he said, firmer now. “Did you or didn’t you crap in your pants?”
Here I had a choice: I could admit the lie, for which I would be punished, or I could persist in the lie, for which, if caught, I would be punished more. Being a child, I chose to persist. “No, Dad,” I said, “I didn’t.”
A brief digression here about poker. A surprising number of poker players employ the same unsophisticated tactic as the seven-year-old me. That is, realizing that their bluff is likely to be called, they refuse to fold the hand and instead increase their bets, hoping to scare away their opponents. It is a approach that rarely works.
My father looked at me with real anger, as he was not a man who enjoyed being lied to.
Desperate now, for I knew I was in for a beating, I did the only thing I could think of: I offered to pull down my pants. I even began to do so, unbuckling my belt and starting in on the pants themselves.
”That won’t be necessary,” said my father, and it took all my strength not to cry from relief. Well, maybe it didn’t take all my strength not to cry from relief, I don’t really remember. But I sure as hell remember my father saying “That won’t be necessary.”
Until a few days ago, which is when I realized how relevant this story is to CROWBAR, I was certain that I had succeeded in bluffing my father. But then another interpretation occurred to me, and for these past few days I have gone back and forth between the two, believing one, then the other. The second interpretation, which may have already have occurred to you, is this: my father took pity on me. When I began writing, I still couldn’t make up mind which was true, and I was half-hoping to come to a conclusion in the process of writing. Unfortunately, this hasn’t happened. In fact, I’ve moved even further from deciding, largely because a third interpretation has arisen which I now consider more likely than either of the others: he wanted to watch his game.
Whatever the truth, I have always traced my “inner poker player” to this incident, although in a surprising way. You see, for me this has never been a story of how to WIN at poker but rather how to LOSE. The skilled poker player bluffs as little as necessary to maintain his reputation as a player who’s willing to bluff. Which isn’t to say that he bluffs to get caught. No, he bluffs to “steal” SELECTIVE hands, and is inevitably caught now and then – not a great thing but not an entirely bad thing since it helps later when he has a good hand and wants his opponents to suspect him of bluffing. This contradicts the mythology of poker as presented in stupid films. In stupid films, successful poker players are outrageous bluffers who offer to pull down their pants right and left. This is stupid and wrong and would only work in a world in which no one had ever seen any of these stupid films; a world, moreover, in which people rarely if ever lied.
A world we cannot imagine.
Yesterday morning my friend “Bridget” emailed me from “England” (she’s “English”) to say how much she enjoys this site and other nice things, and then offhandedly added, “I always tell the truth. Unless I have a crush on someone.” Thus began an exchange in which Bridget revealed a devious strategy for approaching an attractive building-mate, one that I expect many of my readers to want to rush out and employ once they know what it is. Lucky for them, Bridget has graciously granted me permission to share it with the entire world (as defined by the readership of this website – as good a definition as any, in my opinion), so here is our exchange, nearly exactly as it was written, beginning with my initial response to Bridget’s crush comment.
Why would a crush crush your truthful resolve? What is love if not the harboring of another’s truth?
Michael
*
Is my truth a web of lies?
No, it’s just the dramatic romantic in me. It seems more fun to weave a story. And they’re not big lies. Just stupid little ones. Like the way I invented to meet the guy who lived down the hall many years ago… Addressing a birthday card to myself, erasing my name… putting his, opening it and returning it to him saying “happy b-day, I accidentally opened your card…”
Well, anyway, I didn’t do it. Borrowed a screwdriver instead. Dated him for a month. He was an asshole. Semi-stalked him for a couple years. Slept with his friend.
Bridget
*
I don’t understand this birthday card bit. You wrote your name, then erased it? I don’t get that. How did you know when his birthday was? I’m really confused.
Michael
*
Okay, I wanted it to have a postmark. So I mailed it. To myself. So that I would receive it and have something in hand, an excuse, to knock on his door.
However, the letter had to be addressed to him, so that I would be able to “return” it to him. So I had this idea to write my name in pencil. Receive the postmarked letter. Erase my name. Put his. And say “oops, I accidentally got your mail.”
Got it?
Bridget
*
This leaves but one question: How did you know it was his birthday?
Oh, and here’s another: Who “signed” the card and what was the return address?
Frankly, if I’m this guy, I’m thinking the card is bogus and that you like me. So it was probably good that you went with the screwdriver.
Michael
*
No, no, no. It was very clever.
It WASN’T his birthday. Oh, and I’m sorry, I didn’t use HIS name, I made up one. So that it looked like the letter was perhaps to an old resident of the apartment in which he lived. (And I signed a made-up name too.) And he could say “Oh, that’s not me. I’m not Alan, I’m Thomas.” And I could say, “Hi. I’m Bridget. Wanna go out with me for a month, dump me, be semi-stalked and then marry someone else and sit next to me at a co-op orientation?” Get it?
Bridget
*
Got it. Genius. Sorry about the co-op, etc.
Michael
A quick review on how it’s done for those readers who may have spaced out:
- Develop a crush on someone who lives in your building.
- Buy a birthday card and sign it with the name of a made-up person.
- Mail the card to yourself, with no return address, writing your name and address in PENCIL.
- When the card comes back, erase your name and address and replace it with the name and address of your crush.
- Go to the apartment of your crush, card in hand, and when your crush answers the door say, “Happy birthday, I accidentally opened your card…. Hey, wanna go out with me for a month, dump me, be semi-stalked and then marry someone else and sit next to me at a co-op orientation?”
This reminds me. If you’ve been around this site a while, you know that a few nights back I attended a party in which I asked my fellow party-goers to tell me their most recent lie. One woman – a rather beautiful woman, if you must know – said (I didn’t mention this before), “Is this some kind of line?” No, it wasn’t, or at least not in the sense she meant. However, her response made me remember something I read in my father’s copy of “The Sensuous Man” when I was perhaps ten. What I read was a collection of pick-up lines – or not pick-up lines so much as pick-up PERFORMANCES. The best one was this: You approach a desirable person and, crazy as this seems, embrace him or her and say, “Chris, oh, Chris, I can’t believe after these years to find you here, at a co-op orientation. I’m so glad to see that your skin has cleared up,” whatever you say, and then Chris says, “Who the fuck are you? I’ve never seen you before in my life!” and you say, “Chris, Chris, it’s me, [your name here], the one who pulled you from Lake Such-and-such just as you were about to drown. Could it be that you’ve really forgotten?” etc. (the version in The Sensuous Man was only slightly less outrageous). The desired person will doubtless insist that he or she is not this Chris person, has never had ache or been to Lake Such-and-such, etc., which finally makes you realize, or pretend to realize, what a HORRIBLE MISTAKE you’ve made, whereupon you say, “My god, what I have I done?” etc., etc., followed by the punch line, “Well, if you’re not Chris, then who are you?”
Ten-year-old me found this terrifying. Was there not an easier way?
At eighteen I approached a young woman in a public library, saying something to the effect of, “Excuse me, but I couldn’t help but notice you here in the poetry section – I’m really into poetry, you see – and I wanted to meet you and this was the only way I could think of doing it. I’m Michael.” I really did this. I was shivering with fear. The woman was kind. She invited me to sit with her and proceeded to tell me that she was a sophomore in college, liked psychology, and had a boyfriend. I have never tried it again. Ever. Approaching women at parties is not the same thing. Parties provide a context for connection (that’s largely what they’re about), while the poetry sections of public libraries do not.
I mention this incident to talk about truth in advertising; specifically, self-advertising. When the time came to approach someone, the line I chose was the truth. And through the years I’ve basically stuck with this approach, at least within the context of courtship, in part because of my desire – an idealistic desire if ever there was one – to be loved for me, for who I am; not some gussied-up, watered-down version of who I am.
A funny story in this regard. I met my now-ex-girlfriend through a personal ad. We had a wonderful chat on the phone and agreed to meet for lunch. I really liked her and wanted to make a good first impression, so I asked several friends, all women, what they thought I should wear. The consensus was a nice shirt and nice pants, so that’s what I wore, a nice shirt and nice pants, despite the fact that I don’t feel very comfortable wearing nice shirts and nice pants; I’m actually a plain shirt and plain pants person, but my friends – all women! – convinced me that it would be a sign of respect, both to myself and my date, if I looked my “best,” which meant wearing a nice shirt and nice pants. I still remember waiting outside the restaurant and thinking, “This isn’t me. I’m standing here in a nice shirt and nice pants and I don’t feel right. I wish I could run home and change into my plain shirt and plain pants and run back, but there isn’t enough time.” Then my now-ex-girlfriend appeared and as it turns out she was quite attractive (which of course was another thing I was thinking as I stood there: how attractive is this woman going to be?), and then we went inside and sat down and started to talk. I immediately had this feeling that she didn’t like me – and I was right (one is rarely wrong about these things): many weeks later she told me that she’d had a certain impression of me on the phone, one that did not include any nice shirts or nice pants, and that it wasn’t until we talked for a while that she remembered what she had liked about me and could get herself to ignore my damn clothes.
Well, fine, not only was that story fun but it helped make my point. However, to be honest, I could have told any number of other stories that make the opposite point – stories in which I persist on being my plain-shirt self and pay the price for it. That price being rejection, as all of these stories concern a courtship that failed. And failed rightfully, I might add, because the woman in question was looking for someone I wasn’t.
Bridget’s approach is brilliant, in my opinion, but it points toward something I find both distasteful and sad: false advertising of the self. Actually, Bridget’s example is not so apt here. What I’m thinking of, rather, are those people who, wanting love (and who doesn’t want love?), make themselves into a kind of bait for the creature they wish to capture. One can get devoured this way – not by the other one desires, but by the other one creates.
I made myself a promise last week. I promised that whenever I thought of something that seemed too embarrassing to write, I would write it. So here goes. It’s a kind of thought experiment, one designed to test some of the ideas in the previous paragraph. I posit a woman who, wanting to attract a certain sort of guy, gets breast implants. Big ones. She’s right, too: suddenly guys of this type are all over her. Now here’s the scene. She’s in bed with one such specimen and they’re fucking and they both have these little thought bubbles hovering over their heads. His says, “God, I love those tits!” Hers says, “God, I love those muscles!”
Well, fine, presented this way it doesn’t seem so awful: she wants to fuck a guy with big muscles and he wants to fuck a woman with big tits, and here they’re both getting what they want; it is a perfect win/win arrangement. Actually, I believe we should call it a win/win/win arrangement in acknowledgement of the big score capitalism makes for convincing these two that they are products to be marketed – marketing inevitably requiring a budget. And around we go, buying and selling our brains out.
Of course, Bridget’s birthday card ruse has little to do with buying and selling; it’s just a wickedly clever way to meet someone. (Oh, how I wish she had tried this and that it had worked and that she had married the guy and had kids, because then she could tell her kids the story of how their parents met, and the kids could say something like, “God, Mom, you’re such a freak,” and Bridget could say, “Shut up or it’s into Lake Such-and-such with you,” or whatever cutesy thing she says when they’re getting on her nerves.)
Ever hear of Paul Ekman? Me neither. This is unfortunate because Ekman, a seminal figure in the relatively new field of evolutionary psychology, is one of the world’s leading experts on lying, having written or edited nearly two dozen books on the subject, including the not-quite-bestseller, “Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage.” Ekman’s central insight, so far as I can glean it from various synopses of his work, is that the human face betrays emotion in a UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE. Over the past thirty-plus years, Ekman has developed a Facial Action Coding System (FACS), which breaks down human expressions into 46 individual facial movements. Researchers have codified these movements into seven universal emotions: happiness, anger, fear, contempt, disgust, sadness and surprise. According to Ekman, few of us are capable of hiding these expressions. Try as we might, “micro expressions” slip through, revealing our true feelings.
Ekman’s research has many practical applications, most of which I can’t think of right now because I’m not in a very diabolical mood. But get this: scientists in Japan, in an attempt to boast flagging morale among assembly-line workers, have used Ekman’s FACS data to create a robot “co-worker” who, using a camera embedded in her left eye (yes, the robot is a she, complete with wig and dentures), observes her fellows and responds to their emotions with a “near-human expression of empathy.”
In case you were wondering, and I imagine you were, the FACS code for happiness is 12+6. Sadness is 1+4+6+11.
My friend John Shaw sent a recent email in which he took up my piece from two days ago on the Freud/Jung split. John discusses Janet Malcolm’s book “In the Freud Archives” and the subsequent libel trial initiated by the book’s central figure, Jeffrey Masson, who according to Malcolm was angling to become the caretaker of the Freud Museum in London and make it a place of “sex, women, fun.” John writes:
The story of Freud and Jung’s mutual deceit is interesting. I had not heard that consensus opinion had decided that Freud’s affair with his sister-in-law was undisputed. I highly recommend a book about the emergence of the theory of the Freud/Bernays affair called “In the Freud Archives,” by Janet Malcolm. Amazing book. The first half of the book is a profile of the handsome, glamorous, womanizing (what an interesting word that is!) Freud scholar Jeffrey Masson, and how he pissed off the Freud scholarship establishment by using his position as a staffer at the Freud Archives in New York to get access to material that gave substance to his theory that Freud LIED when he stopped believing women who said that they had been “seduced” (the more contemporary word is “raped”) by their fathers. Masson (a Canadian psychoanalyst) had his suspicions about Freud, but he hid them and “seduced” the aging founder of the Freud Archives – a Viennese psychoanalyst named Kurt Eissler (I think “Kurt” is right, though my memory may be Deceiving me).
The second half of the book introduces a third major character to the romantic farce of scholars and Freudian partisanship: an independent, bohemian, lower-class, never-been-to-college (interesting topic in itself, oh Michael), English, former-roadie-for-the-Rolling-Stones, energetic Freud scholar named Peter Swales. Swales has this theory that Freud and Minna Bernays had an affair, but he wants access to the Freud Archives, so he “seduces” Masson and Eissler, and the whole thing ends badly, with everyone hating each other, and broken hearts all around (I mean between the 3 Freud scholars). Swales comes off as the shrewdest of the three. Though the writer, Malcolm, plainly finds him distasteful, and thinks that both Masson and Swales are wrong in calling Freud a Liar. Masson comes off as an arrogant, ridiculous, amazing, very very smart, very very gifted, very very foolish buffoon.
Great historical footnote to the story: Masson sued Malcolm for libel. Longtime successful seducer that he was, he thought that there was no way a woman journalist would make him look foolish in a book. But she did, and how. Among other things – many other things – she wrote of how he had planned to “win over” Freud’s aging daughter, the psychoanalyst, author, and keeper-of-the-flame Anna Freud (Freud used to call her “my Antigone,” who, if you don’t remember, was the daughter of Oedipus who was put to death for loyalty to him and his sons – how’s that for a fucked-up nickname for the author of the Oedipus complex to lay on his daughter?). By “winning over” Anna Freud and Eissler, Masson would eventually have become the caretaker of the Freud Museum in London, Freud’s old house. And Malcolm quoted him as saying that he would make it a place of “sex, women, fun.”
Masson sued for libel, and got Malcolm’s notes and tapes of their conversations. That phrase, “sex, women, fun,” was nowhere to be found among her backup material. The lawsuit took many, many years. I don’t remember who “won” in the end, but if Masson won the jury awarded him no damages. It seems that at the trial, Malcolm’s clever lawyer had lured Masson into a trap. You see, the terrible things that Malcolm COULD have written about Masson were not automatically admissable into the trial. But the lawyer got Masson to open the door with the question, “Do you think Malcolm made you look as bad as she possibly could?” and Masson said, “Yes.” And it turns out that he told Malcolm that he had had an idea to write a book about sex in different the countries in the world, and he would write this book by traveling the world with a woman, and by each of them having sex with men and women in all the countries they go to, and then writing about it. And Malcolm – demurely? out of pity? – kept it out of her book. And Masson lost the trial.
Other footnote: During the course of the trial, Malcolm wrote a book about another journalist being sued by a person he had written about. In the book, she says that journalists are fundamentally seducers, trying to get people to open up to them, so that they can use them to their own ends – writing a story. And she says something to the effect that any journalist worth his or her salt knows that what they do is dishonorable. And of course, journalists everywhere hated her for it.
I’ve just returned from a cafe where Susi and I were to have brunch with some friends of hers – folks who have become my friends as well – Dayna and Jerry. Susi is still at the cafe. I left because Dayna and Jerry surprised us by bringing along two other friends, which meant there would be too many people at the table for my liking. I’m funny this way: I don’t enjoy large groups; more people means less intimacy, and intimacy is what I’m after. This relates to lies, for to me intimacy demands my true, or truer, self; by which I mean the self I think of myself, the self I enjoy being. The larger the group, the less chance this guy has of making an appearance.
The deconstructionists would argue that this guy doesn’t exist, that the authentic self, so-called, is no less a performance than the rest. I don’t agree. Or at least that’s not how it feels. How it feels, rather, is that it’s not safe in a group for me to be myself – the self whose says and thinks the truest, most interesting things – and that what is required instead is the least common denominator; meaning: witty banter about whatever mindless junk is in the news or in the theaters or on television. A person who makes “serious” remarks in these circumstances is considered a party-pooper. I am a party-pooper, and I don’t like it.
When Susi and I arrived at the cafe, we were introduced to the “extra” people as I thought of them, and here I had a quick decision to make: Do I stay or do I go? I decided to go. Turning to Dayna and Jerry, I said, “I can’t stay, but I wanted to stop by to say hi.” This was a lie, of course: I hadn’t wanted to stop by to say hi; I’d wanted to stop by to have brunch – but with four people, not six. Dayna and Jerry seemed to take this in stride, and we made small talk for a bit (an apt phrase: small talk). However, as I was about to go, Jerry surprised me by asking what it was I needed to do instead. Perhaps he asked this innocently. I believe he asked this innocently. Jerry can be a troublemaker (in the best sense of the word), but in this case I think he was simply curious about my plans, or perhaps just being polite. I said, “The truth is, I don’t feel comfortable in groups; the bigger the group, the less comfortable I feel.” This was really the truth; I told the truth. What inspired me to do this? Was it because I trust Dayna and Jerry? Yes, in part, but I believe there may have been other reasons. For instance, time. Starting from the moment Jerry asked his question, I had but a few seconds to think up an answer. If you’re going to lie, you need to lie on beat; awkward pauses draw special attention and possibly signal your lie. So I may have told the truth not because I wanted to, but because I didn’t have sufficient time to come up with a suitable alternative. (Does it seem odd that I don’t know why I answered as I did? I find it odd. But it’s true: I don’t know.) Another factor may have been Susi, who, had I lied, would have known I was lying. It’s not as though I feared her betrayal – she’d said nothing when I claimed to have stopped by to say hi – rather I preferred to be honest in her presence, and to her friends. So for this reason, or perhaps one of the other reasons, or even possibly all three reasons, I told the truth. And it went well. Understanding, respectful remarks were made. I left.
Reading this, one is apt to wonder why we ever bother to lie. You tell the truth, the story says, and everyone understands. But this, as we know, is not always the case. In fact, it is rarely the case. The truth hurts people, so we lie. The truth is not to our advantage, so we lie. The truth is complicated, embarrassing, dangerous, so we lie.
Last night I went to a party. I don’t often go to parties, but this one was thrown by a friend I rarely see, so I went, figuring that at worse I would talk to a few people, have a beer, and leave. However, to give myself something to do, a purpose, I decided to ask people what their most recent lie had been. The answers I received surprised me, for they were all so… well, pedestrian, everyday. “I’m not mad at you,” said one guy. “Fine,” said another.
I’ve more to say, but there will other days to say it. For now, I leave you with a much beloved passage from a book called “Freedom and Community” by the French philosopher and world-class party-pooper Yves Simon. Better than I ever could, Simon lays out the problem in its purest terms.
Let us keep in mind the present situation of the societies in which we live. I do not know, I cannot imagine, any group which does not include amongst its current ideas an enormous dose of lies. That being the case, the alternative is inevitable: either one must like falsehood, or one must dislike the familiar setting of daily life. Let us understand that it is hardly possible to ask of a man a harder sacrifice than this: for love of truth, he be ready to say No to what is thought and said every day by “his brothers and his fellows”; ready to discover the ravages of falsehood in the souls of those who are dear to him, and to continue to cherish their souls whilst he hates their lies; ready ceaselessly to unveil the lies of his own conscience. Negation and revolt are attitudes which have certain charm, provided that the attitude which I reject and against which I revolt is voiced at a comfortable distance from my own person. But if I adopt the attitude of saying No to all falsehoods, including those which are manufactured and propagated around me as well as those which I feel welling up in myself, I know that I am setting out into a fearsome solitude, into a desert country, without roads and without water. There my dearest companions will fail me. My habits, my tastes, my passions will abandon me. With no support but truth, I shall go forward, stripped and trembling.
One thinks twice before making such a decision. Furthermore, it is a decision that will never be made once and for all, because the seductions of falsehood will never disarm. It will have to be repeated, all the ruptures that it implies will have to be accepted over again, each time that the wish for an easy life makes itself heard. Reflecting upon this program for life, we feel ourselves overwhelmed with agony. The real problem is now propounded: we must learn whether we love truth so much that we are willing to live with it, if need be, in agony, or whether we wish to avoid agony at all costs, even at the cost of truth.
Why does Pinocchio’s nose grow longer when he lies? Despite the fact that I saw the Disney film as a child, and despite the fact that I just read an online synopsis of the more recent film, The Adventures of Pinocchio, I don’t know the answer to this question. However, somewhere, it may have been in the synposis, I recall reading that Collidi’s story was intended as a morality tale for children, the moral of course being: don’t tell lies or you’ll be kicked out of school and forced to have incredible, life-transforming adventures.
A poor memory is a mixed blessing. On the downside, you lose a lot of valuable information such as where you parked your girlfriend’s car, or, well, other stuff I can’t think of right now. On the upside, you get to do various fun things like lie in bed and try to figure out why Pinocchio’s nose would grow longer when he lies, as I did this morning.
Here’s what I concluded, and I don’t care if it’s “wrong”: lying is a libidinal act; Pinocchio’s giant nose is a giant erection. I realized this when I thought back to Tuesday’s story of the lunchtime cyclist and his frantic, sweat-inducing couplings.
And, um, speaking of erections, I had this dream last night (I only just remembered this) in which Susi and I were babysitting three babies. All of the babies were naked – which is not such an odd thing for a baby – and one, the smallest, had this enormous erection. I mean, the erection was larger than the rest of the child. I pointed this out to Susi, though it didn’t really need to be pointed out, and Susi said that despite the giant penis, the baby was actually a girl. This filled me with pity, for I realized that this baby was going to have to go through life attempting to hide a rather impossible-to-hide thing – a thing, moreover, that belonged to the opposite gender. Whatever she did to fight it, this thing, this lie, would forever define her.
A footnote about dreams. Last night I read an abstract for an academic paper by one Martin S. Fiebert entitled Sex, Lies and Letters: A Sample of Significant Deceptions in the Freud/Jung Relationship. The Freud/Jung split is well-trodden ground, I know, but I still learned a few things. Namely that Freud had a long-standing affair with his wife’s younger sister, Minna Bernays, and that Bernays secretly revealed this to Jung, who was shocked and never told Freud that he knew. Feiberts states that Freud’s affair “stimulated and sanctioned Jung’s growing desire for his patient and student, Sabina Spielrein,” with whom Jung began an affair a year or so later. Naturally, all this screwing around and concomitant secret-keeping led to a rather complicated and comical scene when the two men sailed together to America in 1909 and conducted mutual dream analyses. In short, both were forced to offer the other bogus dream associations, with Freud looking particularly pathetic since Jung knew the truth about Bernays. Jung lucked out here, as Spielrein had written to Freud, telling him of her romance with Jung, only Freud had fallen for Jung’s explanation that Spielrein was emotionally disturbed. Three years later, just before the two men split, Spielrein visited Freud in Vienna, and the two became close. It was then that Freud realized the truth.
I’ve spent hours today (hours!) working on puny things for this website which no one, even if I receive oodles of traffic, will ever notice. Thus, just in case you were wondering, the code for letter spacing in Cascading Style Sheets is “letter-spacing.” Unfortunately (“unfortunately” is the first and most important word you learn in web development), the Netscape 4x browsers don’t recognize this part of the simple-as-pie CSS standard, so you have to live with the fact that a quarter of your audience will see unspaced letters. This matters, right? Of course it matters! I just spent hours (hours!) working on stuff like this so that you, my beloved multi-browser, multi-platform audience, will have the best possible online reading experience.
Speaking of which, here’s a brief passage from a well-known children’s book:
And the Fairy looked at him and laughed.
“Why are you laughing?” the puppet asked her, quite embarrassed and worried about that nose of his that was growing before his very eyes.
“I’m laughing at the lie you told.”
“How do you know that I’ve told a lie?”
“Lies, my dear boy, are quickly discovered; because there are two kinds. There are lies with short legs, and lies with long noses. Yours is clearly of the long-nosed variety.”
Pinocchio, not knowing where to hide himself for shame, tried to run from the room; but he couldn’t. His nose had grown so much that it could no longer pass through the door.
I bring up Pinocchio for several reasons. One is to speak of memory; or more specifically, the lies of memory. But before I get to that, I must confess something: I lied yesterday while quoting the dictionary definition of the word “lie.” Well, I didn’t exactly lie: the definition I gave is really what it said – “to make an untrue statement with intent to deceive” – but I left out the second definition – “to create a false or misleading impression.” Why did I do this? I did this because the first definition worked better with my argument, which if you recall was that lies are intentional. The second definition leaves this open. The matter becomes clearer when we consider the three definitions of the noun “lie,” to wit: “1 : an assertion of something known or believed by the speaker to be untrue with intent to deceive; 2 : an untrue or inaccurate statement that may or may not be believed true by the speaker; 3 : something that misleads or deceives.” Actually, it occurs to me that in the context of yesterday’s discussion of polygraph tests, the first definition was most relevant, so I can hardly be called a liar for not mentioning the others. Thus, I withdraw my confession. I won’t erase it, however, as this paragraph has been a bitch to write and I would hate to have to think of some other way to get to what I really want to talk about it – which is this: what do I mean when I speak of a lie?
I mean something that misleads or deceives, intentionally or not. The broadest meaning.
Which brings us back to the lies of memory. Or more specifically, my memory, which is horrendous. I was reminded of this by a site I found during one of my recent internet lie research forays. The site was for a 1996 film called The Adventures of Pinocchio. Did this film bomb? I’m figuring it bombed since I cannot recall having heard of it. (I rarely see Hollywood films of any stripe, let alone kiddie films, but I do tend to learn of their existence through the miracle of modern saturation advertising.)
Though not usually a sucker for such things, I downloaded a 30-second Quicktime trailer for this film. It was awful. Do not download this 2 megabite monster. It ends with a boy, presumably the boy version of Pinocchio, presenting a block of wood to the puppet maker Geppetto (Martin Landau) and saying wide-eyedly, “How about carving me a girlfriend?”
Speaking of girlfriends, my dear Susi is now asking where we should go for dinner, so I better get to my point.
What is my point? My point is that, intentionally or not, one’s memory is a great big liar. And one day very soon I’m going to write about what a great big liar memory is, and why I think it is, and all kinds of interesting lie-related stuff, only right now I need to stop ignoring my hungry girlfriend.
Professional polygraph examiner Martin Schermerhorn offers polygraph tests for a fee at truthorlie.com. He charges $300 for a standard test and $400 for a test involving issues of fidelity. (Could it be (I rather doubt this) that infidelity is more difficult to detect than other lies?) To the surprise of no one, Schermerhorn thinks that polygraphs are great and claims that no liar can beat them, assuming that said liar knows he or she lying. That is, unless the liar is one of those rare individuals, all of whom are sociopaths according to Schermerhorn, who can tell a lie and honestly believe it. This part interests me. Are there really people who can tell a lie and honestly believe it? If so, can such people even be said to be lying? The dictionary indicates not, defining the verb “lie” thusly: “to make an untrue statement with intent to deceive.” A lie is intentional. Can one intentionally attempt to deceive someone while honestly believing the truth of what one is saying? Such double-think seems impossible, does it not? At the same time, I seem to remember lying as a kid – lord knows about what – and feeling totally convinced that what I was saying was true (although I knew damn well it wasn’t) because some larger thing was true. I would switch the larger true thing with the smaller false thing, and in this way convince myself of my truthfulness. Maybe convince isn’t the right word. I don’t know what the right word is. Is it distract? I think it’s distract. I would distract myself with my own puffed up righteousness. Ah, but would my righteousness have beaten Schermerhorn’s lie detector? Certainly Schermerhorn thinks not; unless of course I’m one of his lie-believing sociopaths, which for all I know, I may be. (Do such people know who they are? Something tells me not. Which roundaboutly points to another use of Schermerhorn’s handy-dandy polygraph: the detection of lie-believing sociopaths. You ask people to lie; if the test doesn’t indicate that they’re lying, they must lie-believing sociopaths.)
Speaking of infidelity, I once had a date with a woman who told me that her previous boyfriend had managed to cheat on her for four years straight, despite that fact she knew his whereabouts nearly 24 hours a day, in part because her best friend worked at his office.
How did the cad pull it off? Bike rides. During lunch he would go on bike rides and return all sweaty.
I don’t know about you, but I find it weird that she knew where he was all the time. Do you keep track of your significant other (assuming you have one) to this degree? I thought not. So she had to have some reason to keep him under such intense surveillance. Well, either this or she was simply the super-suspicious type. Personally, I suspect a combination of the two, because later in the date she mentioned that she was making a radio documentary about polyfidelity and was considering having a “secondary” relationship with one of the guys she was interviewing. “What is a secondary relationship?” you ask. Well, it is a relationship that is both less significant and less permanent than a primary relationship. Within this certain polyfidelity community (apparently there are many such communities, with varying practices and lingos), a member could and often did have several concurrent secondary relationships, but only one primary relationship. At a time. My date believed that this primary/secondary deal pretty much did away with cheating and jealousy, which was why she wanted to try it: she’d had enough of cheating and jealousy from her relationship with the lunchtime cyclist. I may have chuckled when she explained all this to me, I don’t remember. I certainly hope I didn’t chuckle. The more I think about it, the less I think I chuckled; I’m not the type to chuckle at my dates. Moreover, as I recall, I was quite attracted to this woman, in large part because she reminded of another woman I was also quite attracted to but who as it turns out she was nothing like. This being utterly irrelevant to the subject at hand.
I just checked my journal to see if I noted when she brought up the fact that her father had repeatedly cheated on her mother. Unfortunately I did not. However I did write about something I’d since forgotten. My date’s friend, the one who worked in the office of the lunchtime cyclist, sat a mere five feet from the guy, in the next cubicle, and therefore could hear him when he talked on the phone. This is key. The friend was monitoring the guy’s calls. Why was the friend monitoring the guy’s calls? I’m going to make a guess, in lieu of additional information, that the guy had a history of infidelity, either in his relationship with my date or before, and so my date had enlisted her friend to monitor his calls. He eluded her, however, by using a beeper. His lunchtime lover would beep him, and he would take a quick break and call her on the pay phone in the basement of a nearby pizzeria. (Details, details, love those details.)
I confess that this business with the beeper and the bike makes the whole thing rather thrilling to me: I imagine the lunchtime cyclist racing to the apartment of his lover, his head filled with images of their frantic, sweat-inducing couplings. Which is to say that my date’s over-the-top surveillance – which one assumes the guy knew about; why else bother with the beeper? – upped the payoff for successful cheating. This is natural. I see it as a little dance, cheater and cheated, liar and lied to, each requiring the other to make it work. Which is why the relationship lasted so long: deep down they needed each other.
Which brings us to the key question in all this, a question I unfortunately have no way of knowing the answer to, since I neglected to ask it at the time and as it turned out only saw my date one other time, that being at an awkward party thrown by the guy she was already seeing when we had our date, though she never breathed a word of him to me at the time (no, not the polyfidelity dude; another guy): how was the lunchtime cyclist finally caught?
May I guess? I would like to guess. His lover turned him in. Why? Because he cheated on her as well.
(Oh, former date of mine whose shoulders I adored though I never dared say so: in the unlikely event that word of these scrawlings ever reach you, please email me and tell me if I have guessed correctly.)
While 
searching online for the full and proper name of the play by Mickle Maher commonly known as An Apology, I stumbled on a site for WNUR’s brilliant, web-accessible radio show, This is Hell! The connection here is Jeff Dorchen (pictured at right), who together with Mickle and others founded the legendary-to-me-at-least Chicago theater company Theater Oobleck and who had or perhaps still has a regular gig on the aforementioned radio show. Jeff’s gig is called The Moment of Truth. As it turns out, the dear souls at This is Hell! (god, how I hate titles with exclamation points) have kindly archived 42 of Jeff’s splendiferous rants. I had time to read but three: Why Kids Kill, Reagan Monuments; Kukoc’s Wisdom; and No Opposition to Me! (hate that exclamation point!). Just to give you a taste of Jeff’s cooking, No Opposition to Me! begins, “Hi, I’m mejeffdorchen and welcome to the Moment of Truth, the one moment in all of broadcasting when the truth is let out of solitary confinement, released from its damp, windowless cell to stagger around in the light of day for three minutes on its painful feet which have all but rotted away before being locked up again for another week by its capitalist media prison warders.” Jeff is a charmer and should be read by everyone living or dead.
The name CROWBAR comes from a decade-old play by my friend Mickle Maher. The play is actually called When Will the Rats Come to Chew Through Your Anus? but I’ve never heard anyone call it anything but Rats. Is this because of that Anus at the end? I think it’s because the title is too long to bother saying, particularly when one can say Rats and be done with it. More recently Mickle wrote a play entitled, if I remember correctly, An Apology for the Course and Outcome of Certain Events Delivered by Doctor John Faustus on This His Final Evening. (I stopped trying to remember that title halfway through and looked up the rest.) People call this play An Apology, which in my opinion is a better title. As is Rats. Perhaps I’m a prude, but I don’t like the full title of Rats; it’s trying too hard to be provocative. None of this has anything to do with what I’m trying to say.
The main character in Rats is a man named Willard who is evidently the same Willard featured in that 70’s made-for-TV movie, Ben. Does anyone remember this movie? I do, barely. It’s about a boy, Willard, and his super-smart pet rat Ben who in the end leads a rat revolt against Willard. Rats picks up the story years later. I loved it but can only remember isolated bits. It is my fate to only remember isolated bits of what I love. This then brings me to my point. Toward the beginning of Rats, Willard describes a horrific psychology experiment in which a crowbar is plunged through the brain of a human subject, causing the subject to believe, as Willard tells us, “Lies. Nothing but lies. Red is green. The moon is made of wood. Kennedy is cancer spelled backwards. The crowbar is our friend.” This is what inspired the name CROWBAR. By which I mean the thought that something is causing us to believe the most outrageous and dangerous lies, including the lie that this lie-inducing, brain-splitting something is our friend. There are other reasons I like the name CROWBAR, but this is where it comes from.
I was asked to write a brief bio of myself to help publicize a reading. I didn’t want to write it at first – such things have always irked me – but then decided to have some fun with it. Which is what I did, I had some fun with it.
In 1991 Michael Barrish attempted to ride a bicycle to all the towns in the United States named Freedom, Liberty, or Justice; he has not ridden a bicycle since. A freelance web developer, he has worked as director of a national college scholarship program, a personal care attendant, a professional blackjack player, a fruit vendor, a film projectionist, a golf caddie, manager of a cooperative supermarket, caretaker of a bed and breakfast, and a bingo caller. At all times he carries a list of the forty-two houses and apartments he has lived in since childhood. Michael currently resides in Brooklyn and is writing a novel about a man who suspects himself of stealing his girlfriend’s bras.
Reading this again, I’m not entirely sure who this Michael Barrish person is. Is he an itinerant pervert? A post-modern anti-hero? A random demographic sampling? More importantly, how did he get the same idea for a novel as me?
I kid, but still it’s unsettling to read a bio of yourself, one that you yourself wrote, and to feel that you don’t know that person. Would my friends know that person? Would my mother?
Well, yes, they all would, but only because they already know me. Which is to say that they would recognize certain facts about me (the bingo calling, for instance) and go from there, conjuring the person they know. A stranger, on the other hand, would be forced to rely on the largely irrelevant things I say about myself.
This reminds me of a story. On a train Picasso met a man who announced with some disgust that Picasso’s paintings didn’t look anything like real people. Picasso asked the man to show him something that did look like a real person, and the man pulled out a photograph of his wife. Picasso studied the photograph for a moment and said, “She’s awfully small, isn’t she?”
This reminds me of something else. When I was trying to come up with a name for this website, I considered calling it “variouslies.” In this I was partly inspired by a quote from Milan Kundera: “On the surface, the intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth.”
Bios and the like are intelligible lies. This explains why they irk me: I’m more interested in the unintelligible truth. Which is why I prefer fiction.
This reminds me of another quote, this time from the poet Muriel Rukeyser: “The universe is made of stories, not atoms.”
Think what you will, but I take this statement quite seriously and consider it an important epistomological insight. Maybe I should even put it in my bio somewhere: “Michael Barrish believes that the universe is made of stories, not atoms.”
Whoever Michael Barrish is.
08 August 2000 | Insanity
“I should have gone to college and gone into real estate and got myself an aquarium, that’s what I should have done.” – Jeffrey Dahmer
As part of my research for my novel-in-progress, I recently spoke with a friend, a forensic psychologist, about sexual deviancy. In the course of our conversation, my friend said something that astounded me: most serial killers are sane. As an example she cited Jeffrey Dahmer, the guy who killed and dismembered several dozen young men. (Did he also eat them? I think he may have eaten some, or parts of some. In any case, he definitely killed them all and dismembered some, storing their remains in his freezer.) Dahmer was sane, my friend said, and her reasoning – the reasoning of her profession – hinged on whether Dahmer could distinguish between right and wrong. About this there could be no doubt: Dahmer went to great lengths to conceal his actions, a sure sign of a person who knows he’s done something wrong, something for which he would be punished if caught.
I assumed that my friend was talking about criminal responsibility – a more narrow concept than sanity, one that applies only within a legal context – but it soon became clear that her definition applied more generally. The key issue was whether the person possessed an accurate picture of reality.
“So whose picture can be said to be inaccurate?” I asked.
“People who suffer from extreme paranoia, hallucinations, delusions. People who believe the KGB is after them. People who think they’re god, or that god is instructing them to do things.” (Nearly every Christian saint was insane by this definition; but that’s another matter.)
It’s funny what I thought when she said this. I thought of arguments I’ve had with computer manufacturers, or rather their tech support people, about whether a particular problem was hardware- or software-related. Tech support types inevitably claim that one’s problems are software-related, which means that they, the tech support types, are not responsible for fixing anything, that in fact they can’t fix anything because nothing is broken.
My friend was saying that Dahmer’s problem was software-related. Yes, something strange had gotten into the machinery, but the machinery itself was in good working condition: Dahmer could hear what we hear and see what we see, and that’s what matters.
Maybe I’m being unfair. Probably I am. Because now that I think of it, my friend did say that when called in to interview people who’ve committed sexual crimes, she has difficulty dealing with the so-called sane ones, that it sickens her to be in same room with such people. So it’s not as though she equates sanity with morality.
This is what interests me – that insanity and immorality are conceptionally unrelated; that it’s not insane to be immoral, nor is it sane to be moral; that the two have nothing to do with one another.
Perhaps this is how it should be; I don’t know. But the fact is, Dahmer is crazy. It is crazy to murder innocent people and to cut them up and possibly eat them. It’s not just that these things are immoral (plenty of things are immoral without being crazy; say, cheating on your taxes); it’ that it takes a crazy person to be that immoral.
Psychology passes the buck here, and in doing so becomes a kind of tech support function for humans, one applicable only in cases in which people come to believe grossly false information about themselves or their environment.
Call me stubborn, but I still find this astounding. So much so that I approached my friend a second time to make sure I had understood her correctly. She assured me I had. Dahmer is sane, she said – or was sane, having long since been murdered in prison by a fellow inmate, a convicted killer on anti-psychotic medication who claimed to be Christ because he was a carpenter and his mother’s name was Mary.
You know: a crazy person.
On November 18th, 1999, my great-uncle Al Rubin died of a heart attack while attempting to lift his wife, my great-aunt Dot, from their living room floor. Al was 92; Dot had recently turned 90.
Actually it’s possible that Al died on the 17th; all we know for certain is that his body was found on the evening of the 20th, as much as three days after his death. Husband and wife lay sprawled on their carpet until a neighbor noticed the newspapers accumulating outside their door and became concerned.
Al and Dot were found lying foot-to-foot, their heads at opposite ends of the living room. Al was naked; apparently he had been washing himself when Dot fell and called out for help. A heavy wooden coffee table was turned on its side, most likely toppled by Al during his fall. Dot was alive but badly disoriented.
In the hospital my mother and her sister Dee (Dot’s closest living relatives) agreed to spare Dot the news of Al’s death until she recovered. That is, assuming she recovered, for she was in critical condition, suffering the effects of severe dehydration.
Two days later Dot was alert enough to ask for Al. Where was he? Why wasn’t he visiting her? To these questions, Dot was told that Al was in another part of the hospital, or in another hospital altogether (I’ve heard different versions), and that he would visit when he could.
I don’t think most people would object to the lie, and yet I do object. I ask myself, “Would I want to be lied to like that? Would I want my family to conceal the death of my spouse for fear that the news might kill me?” The answer is no. It is not so much the lie that irks me, but the underlying presumption, born of love and concern, that when sufficiently old or infirm, we can be stripped of the right to the truth. We treat children that way; we tell them stories to protect them. To lie to Dot was to treat her like a child.
Am I being unfair? Most people would say I am. After all, by withholding the truth, a greater purpose was served: my great-aunt’s life was saved; or at the least, not endangered any further. Or so goes the argument.
Kant believed that no lie is ever justified and that we have an obligation to the truth, even if it means leading a murderer to his victim. My own beliefs fall somewhere between those of my family and Kant: I would lie to the murderer but not to my great-aunt, believing that my great-aunt deserves respect, while the murderer does not. Which is to say that I equate truthfulness with respect.
When Dot was deemed well enough to hear the truth, my mother and Dee told her what had happened. “Do you remember falling?” my mother asked. “Do you remember that Al tried to lift you?” Dot remembered nothing. Moreover she had no idea what she was doing in the hospital. When told that Al was dead, that he had died trying to lift her, Dot showed no emotion. Dee, remembering back, believes that Dot never understood. I would go further and say that the thought of Al dying was not something Dot was capable of thinking. She knew what mortality was, and she knew Al was mortal, but she could not complete the syllogism.
A few days later I arrived in Philadelphia and visited Dot in the hospital. She was the same as always, if diminished. We made small talk. No mention was made of Al until Dot asked me how I was doing and I said that my heart was heavy because I missed Al. Her response: “So what’s the weather like in Cambridge?”
This didn’t surprise me. Over the years Dot and Al had refused to accept or even acknowledge their deteriorating ability to care for themselves. Despite failing health, they rejected all offers of assistance. Since neither could cook anything more elaborate than canned soup, they would eat in restaurants each night, and Al would drive, to the collective horror of my family. (Many years before, Dot’s sister Rose, my grandmother, lost her second husband, Andy, in a bizarre car accident in which Andy somehow fell beneath the wheels of his own careening vehicle, running himself over.)
As painful as this was to witness, I also admired it. It took great strength for Dot and Al to be so persistently stupid. I am convinced they survived as long as they did because they refused to face the truth of their situation. Their final years together – sad, pitiful years, but years together – were testament to the power of denial.
I am reminded of the battle between King Arthur and the Black Knight in the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Arthur slices off the Black Knight’s arm, but the Knight insists on fighting on, saying that the wound is “but a scratch.” “Well, what’s that, then?” asks Arthur, pointing to the severed arm on the ground. “I’ve had worse,” grunts the Knight. Arthur chops off the Knight’s remaining arm, and then a leg, and yet the Knight is loathe to concede. Arthur is incredulous. “What are you going to do, bleed on me?” “I’m invincible!” cries the Knight. “You’re a loony,” says Arthur.
My great-aunt is a loony. Living in a nursing home now, she remains unable, or unwilling, to admit that her husband is dead. To hear her tell it, Al is forever indisposed, puttering in another part of the building. Recently, Dee, exasperated by such comments, reminded Dot that she had attended Al’s funeral and had watched his casket being lowered into the ground. Dee expected Dot to claim that no such funeral had ever taken place, but Dot went her one better. “That wasn’t him,” she said.
In the end King Arthur chops off the Black Knight’s remaining leg, and still the Knight refuses to admit defeat. As the King disappears into the forest, the Knight (now a legless, armless torso-plus-head) shouts, “Running away, eh? You yellow bastard! Come back here and take what’s coming to you. I’ll bite your legs off!”
I had this notion to create a monthly online journal, each issue of which would include various pieces on a single topic, all written and/or edited by me. This seemed like a good idea at the time, which unfortunately many bad ideas do, so I started working on the first issue (topic: lies) only to discover what an enormous pain it would be to produce a new issue each month, at which point I did what any marginally sensible person would do: I abandoned ship. However, before hitting the water, I did manage to finish three short pieces – My Bio, Kinda; The Black Knight; and Insanity – the latter of which was actually written for the second issue (topic: insanity), but which might, if one turns the thing sideways and squints, fit into the first.
Only of course there isn’t going to be any first issue because as I said I gave up that regrettable idea. Instead I have a new regrettable idea. It is a daily journal/report thing devoted to lies, more or less, since lies, more or less, are what really interest me. (I say this imagining that, one, it wouldn’t really be a daily journal report thing, since as it turns out I have to work and write other things and do laundry and stuff; and two, that I would no doubt end up writing about other things besides lies, since no one can write about the same damn subject over and over, even when that subject is as compelling to a person as the subject of lies is to me.)
Would you enjoy reading such a daily journal/report thing? Would I enjoy writing a daily, or nearly daily, journal/report thing? Right now I’m thinking there’s a chance that at least one of us would enjoy these things at least a little, although at the same time I wonder if I am not having yet another regrettable idea. Time will tell, but in any case I feel an obligation to my future self, the one who is old and dying, to do potentially stupid things, since as Pushkin says, poetry has to be a little bit stupid, and I want the geezer I will become to feel his life had some poetry to it.
