in defense of lying
This Week In Reading:
The Isle of Youth by Laura Van den Berg
Short story collections are my favorite types of books to read. This one, The Isle of Youth, by Laura Van den Berg, was particularly good, conjuring up a kind of driftlessness and isolation and introspection. The stories are about lies, about the gaps in knowledge that form between two people because no one bothered to ask the necessary questions. The daughter of a magician learning how much of her family history was an illusion, a wife painting her face white and attending a party for French acrobats, a woman traveling to Antarctica to address the distance between her and her brother, a sister trying on her twin’s life. Deceptions become gaps that widen into voids until the characters realize that everyone else is miles away.
The book feels lonely (was Laura Van den Berg going through a divorce when she wrote this? So many of the stories have to do with struggling marriages); the protagonists insular, lost in their own thoughts. In these stories, each small untruth creates a space between the characters and their loved ones. When you tell a lie, your reality and the outside reality you have contributed to, no longer align. Though this can be inevitably damaging, there is something cozy about being the only one existing within your truth.
I believe in meaning what I say, but I don't necessarily believe in radical honestly. I don’t make plans if I don’t intend on following through, I don’t make promises I don’t feel confident that I can keep. But sometimes, honesty is not called for. Sometimes, honesty is not deserved. Sometimes, honestly isn't in anyone's best interest.
Sometimes the truth is rude and vicious. You can see it, mean and true, so clearly in a situation. It takes willpower to not pick up the cruelest truth and speak it into physicality just because it is sitting there.
Most of the lies I tell are lies of omission. Some things don't need to be shared, are allowed to stay private. Just because someone asks something, doesn't necessarily mean they deserve an answer. We do not owe intimacy to anyone who demands it of us. I have long been weary of public vulnerability. It is true that I am quite candid with both friends and strangers, put dribs and drabs of myself all over the internet, but despite all that, I have boundaries of how much I am willing to share. At 17, I was terrified that if I told one person too much, I wouldn’t have anything left just for me. People, I decided, needed to have a secret or two just for themselves, to ground them.
I’ve let go of that since then. Eventually I realized that even if I told someone absolutely everything about me, they still wouldn’t understand the inside workings of my brain. Even if I gave up my secrets, I would still have my perspective. But still, I hoard vulnerability. Vulnerability is reserved for people who have earned it. I am not available for just anyone. Honestly, so much is just no one’s fucking business.
You don’t make it out of high school in the closet and not end up a very good liar. I have become skilled at ducking and dodging hard questions, offering half answers that deflect and deter persistent inquirers. I have made an entire project about lies I have told.
In television dramas there is always a scene when someone (usually a woman) tearfully cries, “I’m not angry that you did it, I’m angry that you lied about it.” I’ve never related to that sentiment. I am not mad that someone lied about the shitty thing, I’m mad that they did the shitty thing to begin with. I understand why people lie. We lie because we feel backed into a corner, because we are trying to protect ourselves, because we are trying to protect other people. We should not lie for sport, but typically lying comes from a place of vulnerability and fear. How can it be such a cardinal sin to act on our most basic human instincts?
Honesty is the corner stone of vulnerability, which is the foundation of intimacy. Honestly is undoubtedly good. It is how we bring people into our worlds. Lies create distance between two people as they attempt to converge together. Too many, and you end up living in two parallel worlds, built on different foundations. Lie too much, and you end up stranded, alone.
"Who We Are With Our Clothes Off", photograph, 2017
Studio-ing
A lot of my work in the past year or so has been about my distaste for public vulnerability. At the end of college I was making work that was so intensely personal. I was mining my family relationships, my own love letters. I think it was good for the work; high stakes lends a type of potency to art, but it also drained me. I felt like I spooned my whole heart out of my chest and pinned it on the walls of the gallery. I don’t regret making that work, but I felt like I had given too much. After I graduated, I pulled back a little bit, became interested in art that was about riddles with no answers, fabricated folklore. Honestly, this work was not as compelling as the personal stuff, but it was what I needed at the time. I can feel myself drifting back to the personal a little bit less opaque these days.
Over the past year, I’ve been working on a photo series where I peel the skins off of fruit still hanging on their trees, and photograph them with mirrors, fleshy, bare and exposed. I think of them as nude portraits. Stripped of their outer protections, it seems unlikely that they will survive. You can offer all of yourself to the greater public, but what good is that softness in the face of such an unkind world?
Further Reading:
My all time favorite short story collection, and maybe all time favorite book is How to Breathe Underwater by Julie Orringer. Sometimes when I go to a new bookstore I check if they have it in stock just because I hope that someone else will buy it and read it.
I read Intimitations by Alexandra Kleeman early this year. The stories (like her also excellent novel, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine) are precise and weird. I don’t quite know what to make of them but they have lingered in my mind.