Category Archives: writing

The necessity to lie

There are some relationships that can only be maintained by agreeing to lie, omit, reframe, delete, deny, pretend.  I mean ones where this agreement is a prerequisite for the relationship itself.  I have been forced to oblige in some cases, with my father and a few other close family members. 

It was always hard for me, but it is unsustainable now, the requirement that I continue to suppress my true feelings to maintain the illusion of love.  Maybe it’s my artistic fucking temperament, I don’t know.  Understanding my feelings and dealing with them is of supreme importance to my life.  My health suffers, my sleep turns unrestful, if the requirement of a relationship is pretending that I’m wrong to feel whatever it is I am feeling, no matter how precisely and reasonably I can describe those feelings.  

Beyond that, we all know in our hearts that a feeling itself cannot be wrong.  It is truly what we feel, whether we deny it or embrace it.  We may feel hurt based on a misunderstanding sometimes, and it’s always a relief to work that out afterwards when it happens that way, but the hurt we felt is just as real, even after we understand we felt that way based on an incomplete understanding.  The feeling itself often disappears once we learn more about why we felt hurt.  A mistaken feeling can be neutralized by the truth, a beautiful thing.

Pain, unbearable, terrifying pain, causes people to lie.  I understand that.  Shame and humiliation cause people to blame others for their pain.  I’ve seen it up close, when I was too hurt to see anything else.  It is a bad place to be. Doing it reflexively is a childish way to live

To me, reducing the world to this flat, dry, one choice right or wrong place is a kind of death.   My father stated it succinctly and poignantly, hours before he died “if only I hadn’t seen the world as black and white, winners vs. losers.  I think now of how much richer my life would have been if I’d allowed myself to see all the colors, all the nuance of this beautiful world.”   The poor guy was dead a few hours after expressing this.  More tragic words are hard for me to conjure at the moment.

The personal, of course, is also political.  If you defer to tyrannical demands in your personal life — act like you were never hurt, no matter what — you will be apt to do the same when it comes to political choices.  You compensate by pretending to be the hardest hard-ass in the world.  You accept one lie and the next, and feel righteous in your anger, blaming others for complicated mutual dilemmas.  You can wear a red baseball cap and passionately claim that the elected president is a fraud, an imposter, a lying puppet of some sick, dangerous people.  And your life is great, because you’re not a fucking loser.

The demand that you deny your own feelings launches you directly into an incoherent, intellectually indefensible world.  Everything becomes a reflex to deny, oppose, prevail.   Accede to this demand, accepting as true the opposite of what you deeply feel, and you cease to exist as an agent of your own heart.  You were hurt?  YOU WERE NOT! You are confused?   NO, YOU ARE NOT.  You feel misunderstood?   NO, YOU DO NOT.  In the end everything you feel is reframed to something else, all problems are yours alone and can only be resolved by pretending they’ll resolve themselves if you ignore them.  Does it make sense?  Who cares?  

To which an artistic, self-expressing fuck like me can only say “fuck that.”   It is no way to live.  You can do it short term, to weather some emergency, maybe, but as a long-term plan for love or friendship, it sucks its own crusty ass. 

Pathos

The last surviving friendship from my childhood, dating back to when we were best friends at eight, is no more.   Both old friends are still alive, but one is too, what used to be called neurotic, to remain friends with the other.  There were specific issues that became unbearable to me, a series of unsuccessful attempts over the course of a few years to talk them through, and hurt, mutual silence for several years after that.   The most terrible death is the stubborn death in life of a once close relationship while both parties and their loved ones are alive for the shimmering moment we are given to breathe here.

Thinking about this estrangement, and my old friend’s basic decency and true inability to see his own role in angry conflict (he fancies himself so gentle, reasonable, meek) I decided to call and break the ice.  I sent him a text.   He wrote back that he was delighted to hear from me and it was only a few days before he was able to clear a 45 minute block on his busy schedule for us to talk.

During our talk I told him of a friend’s psychiatrist’s indisputable insight that our lives take place in a vast school where we either learn or don’t move out of sometimes crippling childhood pain.   Here are a few of his rules:

12. A lesson is repeated until it is learned. A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it. When you have learned it, you can then go on to the next lesson.

13. People always do the best they can. If they are doing poorly, it is because they have not learned the lessons that will enable them to do better.


14. If you forget what you have learned, a refresher course will be presented to you.   You will take it.

15. Learning lessons does not end. There is no part of life that does not contain its lessons. If you are alive, there are lessons to be learned.

One lesson I learned, I said, is that unless a friendship ends in violent, damaging attacks, it can probably be resumed.   My friendship with this guy ended in more or less mutual mildness.  Though we were both hurt and angry at each other, neither of us mauled the other at the end.  This, I told my old friend, was an encouraging sign going forward.  He agreed, told me he had to go, but that next time he’d tell me the revelations he’d had since last we talked.  I told him I looked forward to it.

We spoke once again, briefly, a month or so later.  He had no idea what revelations he could have been talking about, but it was great to be talking to each other again.  Last I heard from him.  

He has taken spiritual refuge with the Chabad community where the rabbi is wise and compassionate.   He prays every morning and studies the holy books.  I guess it didn’t occur to him that we should speak during the ten days of making amends when Jews are supposed to try to heal all past hurts and move forward in a better way.   True, I could have called him, but the idea of how hard it would have been to schedule must have made me put it off, especially while I am trying to save another old friendship that is not doing very well on its respirator.

Love without right action

Love without right action is as useless as an expensive friendship card with a handwritten note expressing how important your love is.

Right action reassures those we love of our intentions. We take immediate steps when we see they’re hurt, to comfort them, to protect them.

Love that can’t listen patiently but jumps in to interrupt and object, defensive, deflecting, anticipating hurt, is not the kind of love that can heal anybody’s hurt.

You can declare your love with a torrent of heartfelt words, and with complete sincerity, but only love you demonstrate by compassionate action is worth more than an expensive Hallmark card and an impressively pricey token made of gold.

Note to a hurt friend who will not talk

Two old friends come to a painful impasse, each blaming the other for causing the hurt and extending their deepening  estrangement.  Everything that happens between them afterwards seems to confirm their view that the other person is a hurtful asshole, probably hurtful beyond redemption.   

This pain between them, and the corrosive blame they place on each other, will resolve either into eternal silence, that resolute death during life, or they can learn things they don’t really know how to do regarding friendship:  how to make amends, how to forgive, how to heal after an angry, traumatizing conflict.   

These lessons must be learned by both of them before there is any hope of fixing their mortally wounded friendship.  Silence, whatever comfort one may take in sheltering in it, may not be the best way to learn these difficult arts.

The world at war

We sometimes find ourselves in the middle of wars we don’t understand.  We can be under siege long before we even find out about the attempt to starve us into surrender.  Sometimes surrender is not enough, only by offering our lives will the blood debt be settled, if the enemy is implacable enough.  This has been going on for thousands of years, among Wise Apes, homo sapiens. 

At one time, within tribes, there were wise elders you could go to when you found yourself under attack by someone intent on destroying your good name and erasing you from society.  These elders would listen carefully, ask questions, pose other questions and broker peace, except when peace was impossible, in which case they’d render a judgment.   If you lyingly assassinated a fellow tribe member’s reputation you would be censured by the tribe, or sometimes sent packing.

Today we have a different system.  Nowadays we must rely on self-help.  Sometimes, we are told, we just have to suck it up if we find ourselves on the wrong end of somebody’s undying need to prevail, no matter what.   We either pretend everything is fine, or so much the worse for us if we still have the childish need to remain in pain, just because we were treated roughly, unfairly and told to suck it up and stop being a fucking baby.

Mel Brooks’s timeless truth about empathy comes to mind, when I think about others on the outskirts of the war, quietly taking the side of the righteous aggressor by taking no side:   Tragedy is when I break my fingernail.  Comedy is when you fall into a manhole and die. 

I can’t stop communicating

Some people, when they are hurt and in turmoil, keep themselves occupied every minute of the day, programming even their breaks so as not to allow time to reflect.   Reflecting means only more hurt and turmoil to this kind of person, so it makes sense to squeeze in an hour of strenuous exercise in between work and a social evening, and then whatever is next on the program.

In contrast, there are people like me.  If something is torturing me, I cannot stop my thoughts until I’ve worked out some way to make the pain stop.  The process involves communicating, with myself and others, to understand as much as I can about my predicament.   This is done by thinking, writing, reviewing and running it by people I respect.  It involves getting advice, feedback and insight from others, unless there is a privacy issue involving another person’s shame or anger that prevents me from sharing it with someone who knows them.  In that case I seek out someone who doesn’t know the party, and run it by them.  It is a very helpful, healing process, I find.  You hear things you never thought of, you see things from other perspectives, you learn new things, you get other things confirmed.  Importantly, you listen to things you may not want to hear sometimes.   Those things are sometimes the most helpful.   All of these things are the result of communication.

The thing I‘ve never been able to do is keep myself so busy, so programmed, that I don’t have time to focus on what is eating me from the inside.   I had a friend I’ve known since we were eight.  The guy loved me and told me frequently that I was his very best friend, that there was nobody else like me in his life.  I had fond feelings for him, having known him since we were boys.  His impulse to bend the truth when in a tight spot never bothered me, because I knew he couldn’t help it and his little untruths never unduly affected me.    Like his mother, who I know well (and God bless her sharpness at 95), he always runs what my father used to describe, referring to the mother’s frantic life, as a “full flight pattern”.  He meant that since so many planes were constantly taking off and landing in her mental airport it was impossible to concentrate on any one flight for more than a moment.

A full flight pattern prevents being present, you can’t be present, it’s too dangerous, all the planes will start to crash, thousands will be killed, it will instantly become an international scandal and all the fault of the distracted flight controller.

I called this guy a few months back, after a long period of estrangement.  Told him a few revelations I’d had since we last spoke three years earlier.  He told me I’d never left his life, that, odd though it might sound, he sees me in dreams quite regularly.  It’s truly like I never left.  He was happy to hear from me and promised to tell me his revelations next time we spoke.  It took a while.  About five or six weeks later, when he had an opening in his schedule, I asked him to tell me about his new revelations.

“I have no idea what those revelations could have been,” he said, the 6:02 coming in perilously close to the 5:57, with the 6:05 already on a dangerous trajectory.

A lie is more powerful than the truth, if needed

When someone is desperate, they will cling to a lie with the religious fervor of a martyred saint.   The lie, you see, is their rock and their foundation.  Without it, they are humiliated.  The lie protects their good name, their true intentions, their very value as human beings.  The lie becomes essential to their integrity and they will defend it as though their life depends on it.

Take the example of a woman married to a criminal.  She has been shocked and angered over and over by his criminal acts and the lies he told her to conceal them from her.  It is humiliating to her that he has never acknowledged being wrong — every “crime” he ever did was for her sake —  or asked for her forgiveness, even when his crimes, and the lies surrounding them, destroyed her dreams at the moment they were about to come true.  

Think about this scenario for a second.  If she ever said aloud what I just wrote above, how could she live with herself?  She couldn’t.  So… the lie!  It’s not her husband, it’s her fucking brother the self-righteous, unforgiving prick who is judging and torturing her entire family, always a threat to blow the lid off decades of carefully guarded shame.   He can’t keep anything secret, his mouth is an open faucet, he doesn’t care who he hurts with his pernicious moral uprightness.   He self-righteously hides behind “truth” when all he wants is to hurt people and feel virtuous being a sadistic piece of shit.

How do the sister and brother retain a relationship in this hostile situation?  They talk about books, movies, a little celebrity gossip, dogs, some commiserating about the political cesspool we are all bobbing in, their health.  Everything else, everything personal and important, is off the table.  The lie that her brother is a liar remains undisturbed. 

The brother tolerates this the best he can, which often is not very well.  His name is assassinated, since he is a threat to the children if he starts fucking blabbing and telling his precious “truth” to the kids.  The kids must be kept away from a destructive agenda-driven fuck like that. 

On the other hand, the brother must remain eternally patient, hopeful and generous.  If he ever shows frustration, or, god forbid, anger, he has shown his hand, proved the case against him and that’s the ballgame, ladies and gentlemen.

And so it goes.  You could say that a lie, if desperately needed, is more powerful than the truth.

Making amends

Making amends is trying to fix something that’s broken. If a guest’s bone gets broken, as a result of you accidentally placing a stumbling block in a place that resulted in a fall and broken bone, making amends might be contritely driving the person to the hospital to have the broken bone treated. It might be helping the person while they are hindered by the broken bone. It should include assuring the person that you will do your very best to make sure never to put a dangerous obstacle where they can trip over it and get hurt.

It doesn’t seem to me that making amends with somebody you have hurt is all that hard. Unless you consider that you must take responsibility for the pain you caused, which makes you vulnerable, which puts you at risk of being rejected by the person you are trying to make amends with. Making yourself vulnerable is the price of trying to make amends. It is also the price of meaningful friendship.

I understand it may seem a fearful price to some, but it is hard for me to understand how to retain a facade of friendship with a person who is incapable of acknowledging the pain they cause. Fake friendship with people I can no longer trust is not for me.

It is particularly hard to do during this time of year when we Jews are instructed to make amends, to speak the truth, to move beyond lies that people tell to make themselves feel righteous, instead of ashamed, when they are wrong and continue to act badly.

I understand that some people are weak, damaged and desperate to be right at any cost. If the cost is my friendship, so be it, I suppose. As long as they refrain from assassinating my good name among mutual friends. The inability to behave with emotional maturity confers no right to kill.

כל עכבה לטובה

Every pause is for the best.

This was written on a pocket-sized card in a small meticulous hand by the paternal grandfather of an old friend of mine. He’d write down these aphorisms to remind himself of things that he wanted to remember.

One thing was this phrase. If you are upset and thinking about doing something decisive, a bit more delay is rarely a bad idea. If you are thinking of doing something that will hurt somebody, and you hesitate, that little mercy is a good in itself.

I suppose it’s a good thing to remind yourself of once in awhile, if you don’t know what to do, if you’re in turmoil, if you feel hurt, in a tight spot, it’s not a bad idea to hesitate rather than take an action or say words that you might not be able to take back.