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kate_schaeferI'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...
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...
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The writing of characters
Date: 2006-06-30 07:49 am (UTC)My problems with this are, it usually is presented as something entirely new and original to the web (as if blogging, diaries, correspondence, etc. never existed before the web), and also I see it as a form of blaming the reader for the choices of the writer.
That the first is manifestly untrue I hope a few names will suffice to show: Barrett & Browning, Durrell & Miller, Mrs. Fitzgerald & GBS, Frank Doel & Helene Hanff. The list could go on and on, obviously.
The second appears to be trickier, because I've had usually smart and sensible people not get it. Which is probably my fault. (And hence, part of my point.)
The reason I'm replying to this comment specifically is the link to fiction. That is, I see online writing of the journal/diary/blog variety as an exercise in creating an epistolary character, comma, non-fiction division (usually). That means, just as with a fictional character, what the reader sees is what the writer chooses for them to see. For the writer to then go and blame the reader for lacking information the writer never let the reader in on in the first place seems to me the height of arrogance, and/or masochism.
So, yes, if I don't "know" the writer secretly makes anonymous donations to help the poor, thereby mitigating all their snarkiness... Well, who made that a secret in the first place?
I'd also say your interlocutor was suffering from a large dose of projection. It may well be he was lying, even by his own daffy, non-standard definitions of same. But to turn around and then insist that everyone lies seems like extrapolating from a very small sample of data. :)
Re: The writing of characters
Date: 2006-06-30 12:11 pm (UTC)A related aspect of this is the "you can't trust people you meet online, because they're only showing you part of themselves," as if anyone you met at a party, or walking in the park, or through your ex-roommate's mother, immediately showed you the entire truth about themselves.
Re: The writing of characters
Date: 2006-06-30 09:46 pm (UTC)I assume that we are conversing here, and that this is a thought connected yet tangential to the conversation rather than a description of what I've said.
All of communication is -- of course -- an exercise in editing as much as it is an exercise in revealing. I think my readers know me, just as my friends know me (and I assume that the majority of my readers are in fact my friends who know me in other arenas), through accumulation of consistent detail, some of it under my conscious control, some of it not. I think the things they don't know about me are the sorts of things most people don't communicate, in non-fiction essays, in fiction, in conversation, in street mime, and they are the things that make it most interesting to be me.
It would be dull in the extreme if I were to write up a commentary on the bugs I watch in the garden, and how they compare to bugs I've seen in years past, and just what the metallic wingcases of the beetles look like in the sunlight, and how much I hope that stain will come out of those pants, and then go on and detail the eleventy-three other things I think in the course of a minute or so. It's not dull to give a summary of such things, because it evokes such a list in your head as well, of dozens of things you notice and forget in a moment. And that's not what I was starting out to say, either, but I'll leave it in, because this is conversation, and conversation is not tidily bounded.
I do leave out most of what makes my life meaningful. I refer to the people I love, the things I do, the thoughts I think, but the reference loses most of its particularity by the time it's turned into words. At that point -- and at the point where I urged Holly to write more fiction rather than addressing the meaningful aspects of her life on LJ -- fiction would be a more truthful medium than the non-fiction essay for conveying the emotional impact of life. It would be a more truthful medium, and it would require more discipline of me than I have ever displayed in that particular area.
And there I go back into that edge between truth and lies again. True fiction? False facts? I have no conclusions.
My interlocutor was suffering from projection, for sure. As noted above, I was suffering from poor recollection of the main point he was trying to make, perhaps because of my own obsession with truth and falsity rather than with a confusion between straightforward communication and manipulative communication for gain and perhaps because there were so many conversational variants on this particular set of topics, so many years ago.
Re: The writing of characters
Date: 2006-06-30 11:51 pm (UTC)Absolutely. I'm sorry that wasn't more clear.
I blame the writer, myself. :)