Lying, and: Lines, and: Orders, and: Sincerity

Abstract

Lying Why you might feel uncomfortable with elaborate weavings, when they're as apt to catch on hard fact as to unravel or become one more maze you'd forgotten the way out of, any one could understand. The prudent shun a purely gratuitous complexity. But this reluctance to pretend you enjoyed a meal, a book – to say to someone you may not like, nice to see you, when it's to your advantage to do so, this pulling back as from a foul smell or window ledge . . . Why fudge, why resort to a "modified version," mislead, concoct, invent, rather than simply lie? Do we intuitively regard the false, not as unreal, but unclean? Are the keenly ironic, ambiguous phrases we toss off – our evasions and/or shufflings, those clever side-steps we do in dancing – done to hide the truth, to keep it from harm's way, secure it, a place for safekeeping? From whom or what? Or is it us? Discretely bending the data, smearing a line you'd just as soon not cross, you're not a fraud so much as someone hedging his bets, testing the ground, noting a nearest window, [End Page 103] door in case an unexpected exit's called for. When was it that simplicity sufficed and like a captured soldier all you had to give was a name, rank, and serial number, and gentlemen – their sacred word? Before the invention of torture, was honor worth more? Was it all there was to lose? Lines There are no straight lines in nature. The edge between lit and shadowed foliage in the grove is straight enough to lay a course by, though it points nowhere. The tree trunks, not quite half round, set it humming a semi- quaver, adding their minor ripples like overtones. Could winds shaking the leaves, which are the insubstantial body of the trees at any distance, blurr a keener division? There's the sharp horizon, like a bow at rest, curved so gradually it can run on for mile after slow mile before you catch on – cracks in ice, in rock faces, slip-planes, faults where the earth heaves and breathes. [End Page 104] Orders 1. Among the young, uniformed food-servers along the glassed-in counter behind which trays of sliced cold-meats and cheeses gleam there's an order – who's deferential to whom, who moves, who doesn't, shoulder feints, side- steps, shrunken, abbreviated to save the busy energy and time – nothing you'd notice, though they know each of them cold. 2. A paper littered table. The bosses chat, straighten their ties, one, jacketed, sitting, another, shirt-sleeves rolled, darting off to snatch a tray left uncleared, napkins from the floor, as if there were hierarchies here too. Of the two guys sweeping, which one is moving up? You guess. You make assumptions: how long do you think you can sit before you're told, seats are for paying customers? 3 Did you know Tokyo restaurants closed for the Olympic Games? They had no way to gage the social rank of foreigners, which Japanese grammar requires for polite address. Once rent, the whole social fabric just might unravel at your feet. [End Page 105] 4. Light and open, the atrium roof five floors up – don't you feel protected from the elements? Or do the stray people sauntering by and those at work seem to say, no where is safe. If no one comes up to tap you on the shoulder, does that mean everyone knows the rules and plays by them, or does fear, what if, bark out the orders? Sincerity There are those who shake at the thought of being obscure, ingenuous, and turn to memory as a wall they can lean against, rock solid, its guarantees basic as desire's gutturals. The facts and their significance they trust blindly, like events beheld, are just the ones that form their lives – knowing they're not made up...