I won’t lie—I am seven months behind in my National Geographic subscription. It’s not that I’m okay with letting things pile up. There’s just so much demand on my time. It’s a problem, but it only affects me. What am I to the big, wide world?
Even still, I try to keep up. National Geographic not only contains illuminating reporting and excellent writing, but it’s also a vestige of hope. I get to read about all kinds of people putting in their time and effort to make a big impact on an ever increasing target. I admire their effort and determination.
Anyway, it was Nat.Geo.’s June 2017 cover story, Why We Lie, which caught my attention and intellectually derailed the rest of my day.
“Patrick Couwenberg’s staff and fellow judges in the Los Angeles County Superior Court believed he was an American hero. By his account, he had been awarded a Purple Heart in Vietnam. He’d participated in covert operations for the Central Intelligence Agency. The judge boasted of an impressive educational background as well—an undergraduate degree in physics and a master’s degree in psychology. None of it was true. When confronted, Couwenberg’s defense was to blame a condition called pseudologia fantastica, a tendency to tell stories containing facts interwoven with fantasy. The argument didn’t save him from being removed from the bench in 2001.”
It was the bolded definition of pseudologia fantastica, or pathological lying, that stuck with me. My mind went to literature. It probably didn’t help that directly previous to taking Nat.Geo. with me to the toilet, I was eating lunch over Charles Baxter’s The Art of Subtext. When I read the above, the definition of compulsive lying overlapped with fiction so perfectly, I had to consider whether I, the vessel of fiction, was the liar.
***
Facts interwoven with fantasy. I may not be the most well-read writer, but I will extrapolate: any fiction will likely have this quality. Even the farthest out, experimental read will (presumably) use words. Whether as symbols, sounds, letters, or just lines on a page, language is fairly fantastical, but when two or more people share that language, it becomes more fact than fantasy.
Without getting experimental, there are more obvious examples: science fiction uses current knowledge interwoven with fantasy to project the future or reimagine the past. Literary fiction may appear to present all fact, but the way it’s arranged or staged or developed is fantasy. Even memoir can be questionable, given how memory can change as its accessed over time.
But fiction teaches us so much. It has truth to offer.
***
A tendency to tell stories. One thing about engaging with other writers, is finding out that the compulsion to write isn’t a unique phenomenon that I suffer alone.
Besides whatever tendencies you may have be born with, you can get better at fictional storytelling with practice. I think it’s common enough knowledge that to write well, you have to write a lot. Brain scans showed a finesse come with practicing lying, too (Yaling Yang et al., 2005):
“The researchers found that the liars had at least 20 percent more neural fibers by volume in their prefrontal cortices, suggesting that habitual liars have greater connectivity within their brains. It’s possible this predisposes them to lying because they can think up lies more readily than others, or it might be the result of repeated lying.”
Which made my mind leap back to Nat.Geo.’s May 2017 cover story that asked What Makes a Genius?
At the Marcus Institute of Integrative Health at Thomas Jefferson University Hospitals (what a mouthful), an MRI contrast technique is being used to map neural pathways of creative people. In the tests, subjects are given everyday objects and asked to come up with novel uses. The basis being that, “one sign of creativity is being able to make connections between seemingly disparate concepts.” In a way, an effective lie uses a plausible reality to cover up actual reality…like pulling a nearby blanket over yourself when a parent walks in on you masturbating. A disparate concept is brought in to substitute for reality.
The study’s findings speak again about brain connectivity:
“On the subjects’ brain scans, swaths of red, green, and blue illuminate tracts of white matter, which contain the wiring that allows neurons to transmit electrical messages. The red blotch on each image is the corpus callosum, a centrally located bundle of more than 200 million nerve fibers that joins the two hemispheres of the brain and facilitates connectivity between them. “The more red you see,” Newberg says, “the more connecting fibers there are.” The difference is notable: The red section of the “genius” brain appears to be about twice as wide as the red of the control brain.”
This is a different part of the brain that the lying study, and correlation is respectfully not causation. But they found more than just a central hub of connectivity:
“‘There’s more flexibility in [the “genius” brain’s] thought processes, more contributions from different parts of the brain.’ The green and blue swaths show other areas of connectivity, stretching from front to back—including dialogue among the frontal, parietal, and temporal lobes—and may reveal additional clues, says Newberg. ‘I don’t know yet what else we might find out. This is just one piece.'”
***
What if I am the lie? Not fully Latino. Not pure enough to have passed the Nazi’s racial policy. Not First Nations, although sometimes Cree people mistake me as a compatriot in grocery stores. My physicality is a lie: one day I’m Jewish, one day I’m Rasta, one day I’m off the reserve next day I’m a white appropriator; some days I’m a city kid, some days a country bumpkin; another day I’m a conquistador, a hipster, a homeless drug addict. I don’t mean to confuse people, but it happens. And it is my fault for misleading them, isn’t it?
***
But I feel like fiction is the only place where I can be honest. Where I can admit: I’m not this nor that. If I have to be anything, it’s a little bit of a lot; a victim of the pancake people approach to education.
Not feeling tied to absolute truth in relative things: it’s a privilege, I know. (Admittedly, not one I always have). For many people, how their identities are perceived have life-or-death outcomes. They are not being mistaken or misidentified. Someone clearly sees who they are and doesn’t like it.
It’s a privilege and maybe a little clemency from the subconscious: You don’t feel like you belong anywhere? At least you can feel like it doesn’t matter to belong. In the Nat.Geo. May 2017 article, a different MRI brain scanning study out of UC San Francisco looked at jazz pianists playing prepared pieces versus improvised solos.
“Their scans demonstrate that brain activity was “fundamentally different” while the musicians were improvising, says Limb. The internal network, associated with self-expression, showed increased activity, while the outer network, linked to focused attention and also self-censoring, quieted down. “It’s almost as if the brain turned off its own ability to criticize itself,” he says.”
I wish this function was more on-demand.
***
In my perspective, living things do not allocate energy where it is not necessary. I think if we manifest a behavior, there is a use for this behavior, even if time/space/society has changed enough to have eliminated that purpose. I suppose there can be perceived behavioural aberrations—rapists, serial killers, people who find Friends funny—but social norms can make any of these acceptable and justifiable. When our society accepts and even rewards a behaviour, we usually put our energy towards that. It may turn out to be a sad song, but any behaviour is just one way that the genetic piano is played.
The social norm around fiction currently demands honesty. And that makes sense. That makes good fiction. But fictional honesty will always necessitate a lie, no matter how innocuous. We define the liar as the enemy of truth, but we also demand that our truth comes packaged in lies.
The consensus wants authenticity. A similar consensus brings forward a knack for turning every incidental phenomenon into a calculated political deceit. The lack of authenticity is real. There is a strong & totally rational response against dishonesty. We’re being ruined by lies.
Lies are the greatest sin, assuming an absolute truth. Absolute truth is a gong bell—not a piano. It’s monotonous, not symphonic. That be how the absolute truth of the universe is, but our lives are played out on that genetic piano. Maybe we can sit up from that piano, stretch our legs…but first, we’ll have to remember that we’re the player and not the keys.
***
In (good) fiction, the liar becomes the teller of truth—when the lie is deployed consciously. There almost has to be a sense of self-awareness—to be able to discern the Others’ reaction/response to the lie and use that anticipated reaction/response to inform the lie’s use. Scenarios are built—not around a central Babylonian tower of truth, but from many small pieces of truth.
The psuedologia fantastica part is hard to avoid. It’s making the truth come out of the lie—squeezing the distortion until its productive, life-giving—transforming pseudologia fantastica to fantastica conficiens—that is equally hard to achieve.
***
This was a misleading blog entry. Almost looked like I was building to a conclusion. But I have no final answer. Only observations—little pieces of truth (?) cobbled together. I guess I’ll have to see what’s in the next six months of National Geographic.
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