Lies

[kate_schaefer]

I've been posting in my own LiveJournal for a year now, a year today. I don't post every day; sometimes I'll let a month go between posts.

It's an odd thing, living even this much of one's life out in the open where strangers can see it and misinterpret it. Those who know me, of course, have far more context in which to misinterpret anything I write.

I used to know someone who said that all attempts at communication fail; that is, no matter what message one person tried to get across to another, no matter what method used for the communication attempt, the full communication would not make it; some meaning would be lost. We're always all alone in our heads. Even something as simple as please pass the salt? I asked. Especially something as simple as please pass the salt, he said. And because of this loss of meaning, we're all of us lying, all the time, no matter how hard we try to tell the truth. I'm lying as I say this to you now, he said, and you're lying right back to me.

There is, of course, a loss of meaning in my relating this long-ago conversation. I've edited out the things that I don't remember, the things I didn't hear at the time, the things I didn't grasp clearly then, edited them out without even thinking about them. They've always been lost to my memory, since they never got into it. I've left out the back and forth that I know we went through; I've left out the variations on the conversation we had over the course of months, wherein I tried to get closer to understanding what he meant. Did he understand a difference between deliberately saying a thing known not to be true while wanting the person hearing it to believe it to be true, which is what I think of as lying, and saying something that one mistakenly believes to be true but which is not, and again, saying something which one believes to be true but which is incomplete? Yes, he understood those differences, but all of them were still lies, as was trying to tell the complete truth.

I was never sure if I really heard him say that because everything everyone says is definitionally a lie, there is no more moral opprobrium attached to a deliberate lie as conventionally defined than to any other statement. We circled around that idea in several conversations; it seemed as though the closest he got to a definite statement on the subject was not to deny it, but then he'd point out that by his definition I still didn't know what he meant by denying or not denying anything.

He was right, of course. He was also deliberately, obtusely, perversely wrong. When we say the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, we are triangulating on an approximation, and we know it. We want to know those things that are germane to the matter at hand; we don't want to hear the witness's entire life story, no matter how whole that truth may be. Does that make the request for the truth so defined a lie? No, not as most of us define it, but yes, as he defined it.

It depends on what the meaning of is, is.

And what's my point here? I'm not getting to it yet, not just yet.

Many years ago, I had to take a prescription drug for several months which had the side effect of making me a little bit stupid and clumsy. There was no alternative to the drug, so I put up with it and apologized to the people around me. One of my friends reassured me that no one could tell the difference.

I was dismayed. No one could tell the difference? I could tell the difference; much of the intricate and entertaining inner life of my mind was missing. The delicate nuances of everything I had to think (and therefore to say) were flattened, so that the world I inhabited was much less interesting to me than the world I normally inhabit, but there was no difference to an outside observer.

And from these two anecdotes, about incomplete truth and incomplete thought, imperfectly presented, I arrive at LiveJournal, for incomplete narration. What do I write in LiveJournal? Whatever I feel like; whatever is at the top of my head when I begin to write; what I would write in a letter to a friend, barring personal content. What do I leave out? Most of what makes my life meaningful.

And what about you?

A later addition, because memory is faulty:

Glenn reminded me that what that conversation was about was not so much lying, although lying was part of the context, but manipulation: that all attempts at communication are really intended to manipulate the other person into doing something, and that the thing is usually hidden.

I find myself to be an unreliable narrator and go off to set some sleeves, knowing that the peculiarities of LJ make it unlikely that most people will see this addendum...

Comments

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

Perhaps the reason nobody could tell the difference re your "stupid and clumsy" is because they were not privy to the fuss blocking the pathway between your thoughts - or your desire to think - and your expression of them.

Precisely. The revelation for me in that experience was the realization that most of what I think I never express aloud, and the fraction that I do express aloud didn't change much even when the thought behind it was much less complex than it normally is. If this is true for me, it is likely to be true for other people as well, and if it's true for other people, then probably a lot of people I had dismissed as uninteresting are in fact living more interesting lives in their heads than I had suspected.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

People with interesting thoughts in their heads that they cannot adequately express are the banes of editors everywhere.

[redbird]

Or at least, the subset of same who think they can adequately express them; the others are sitting happily at home, thinking their thoughts or building their models or reading their books.