Blog

Man is what he believes.

–Chekhov, Notebooks

Not that you lied to me, but that I no longer believe you, has shaken me.

–Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

The worst sort of liar, the most tragic, is the one you know is lying to you, but you believe them anyway, because you so desperately want to believe them.

Do yourself a favor: Be that sort of liar. Leave the more pedestrian shit to the amateurs and the bumblers. Because there are surely, at least from a historical perspective, worse things to be than tragic, and the sort of lying I’m talking about here is also a gift. It’s a gift that comes with all sorts of nice little angles and opportunities.

You really should open your fucking ears and listen to what I’m saying. This is some seriously good advice, believe me; I know what I’m talking about. I don’t have any reason to pull your leg, friends. My days here are numbered. And I’m not going to deny that I never quite had the talent to be one of these worst sorts of liars. I regret that, I really do. It would have made my life so much easier, so much more comfortable. I just didn’t have it in me.

I have, however, had the good misfortune to know a fair number of these people, and to marvel at their gifts. Oh, lord yes, I’ve been hoodwinked, and it’s cost me plenty. I never begrudged these folks their lies, though. I was absolutely complicit in the deception, and I envied these characters and their ability to pull the wool over my eyes.

They’ll burn in hell, of course, but I have to tip my hat to them all the same.

In the likely event that, like me, you find you don’t have the right stuff to be one of the more accomplished class of liars, I have some additional advice for you to take out into the world:

Keep your distance. Bar the door, lower your shades, and pull the hood up around your heart.

Whatever you do, don’t let down your guard. Don’t let anyone in –they might steal you. They might steal your soul.

Cover your ass. Don’t give anything away; hold it all close. And for god’s sake, don’t ever tip your hand. Don’t say what’s on your mind.

When you close your eyes at night, don’t wish for anything. Treat rainbows and shooting stars as exactly what they are: random scientific nonsense that is well outside the range of your limited understanding. Leave faith to the dangerous believers and the desperate lunatics.

Do not believe a word anyone tells you. Don’t trust a soul; that sort of weakness will only lead to damage and disappointment.

If you’re lucky enough to stumble across someone –some idiot– that has any of the aforementioned character flaws (and generally these people will have them in spades), take whatever you can get. If they’re fool enough to offer it to you, take everything they have.

If you’re going to be mean, don’t also be a coward. That’s a truly contemptible –and damnable– combination, and the purest definition of an asshole.

And, finally, mark my words: Do not, do not, do not get taken in.

When he pulled his Impala up to the gates of the cemetery it was after midnight. The place was locked up tight, and snow and fog were blowing in off the lake.

It was a huge cemetery right in the middle of the city, a beautiful place for what it was, large and well-kept and overlooking the water. He remembered standing at the grave during the service and staring out across all those gravestones at the sailboats that were gliding around out on the lake.

That had been August, the week before Labor Day. It had been hot and clammy, and he’d felt badly hungover and queasy in one of his brother’s old suits. He had thought hard and couldn’t remember the last time he’d worn a suit.

There was a small gathering of people at the cemetery that day, and he’d been embarrassed and angered by the turnout. He was also puzzled by the fact that he didn’t recognize a majority of the people there, including a woman with two young girls. Probably, he’d assumed, the girls had been classmates of his daughter.

The lock on the cemetery gates was one of those security boxes with push buttons. There must have been some code. The walls on either side of the gate were high, and made of stone. He put the white stuffed bear he was holding in his arms on top of the Impala and tried to scrub the vomit from the front of his nylon parka with fistfuls of snow.

He returned to the car, turned off the lights, and sat there for a moment finishing a can of beer and listening to Ray Price.

Then, in a burst of inspiration that emerged from out of his mind’s muddle, he eased the Impala up against the cemetery gate. Holding the bear in one hand, he managed to climb up onto the hood of the car. He tossed the bear over the gate and proceeded to scramble his way to the top, where there were sharp iron points that dug into his flesh. As he attempted to feel his way down the backside of the gate he lost his grip and fell halfway down to the pavement.

The cemetery was covered with deep snow. After tromping around for a time in what he thought was the general direction he managed to locate the gravesite. His ex-wife’s parents had paid for the headstone, and its plainness struck him as horribly inadequate.

He brushed the snow from the marker and discovered, standing there, that he didn’t have anything to say. He propped the white bear up against the gray stone and turned away.

When he reached the path and turned back for one last look the bear had already been entirely swallowed up by the fog and swirling snow.

“If you think you’re in command of a single thing in this world, little man, you are sadly mistaken, and badly mistaken as well. You are in command of nothing. Your brain is shot full of holes that reveal nothing but dark cataracts of ceaselessly roiling ignorance.”

The Devil tossed his chin in the direction of the moon, cursed, and spit into the gravel of the road.

“You call this a crossroads?” he said. “You fucking people want to call everything a crossroads. Why? Because it puts a little drama in your life? What do I know.”

He stood in the middle of the road and looked one way and then the other, swiveled on his heels and repeated the process in the opposite direction. The Devil shrugged, and lit a cigarette.

“Maybe this is a crossroads,” he said. “But it’s no metaphor. There’s never a metaphor involved whenever I make an appearance. Which means? Which means I have no interest in your soul. Zero interest. You know what a soul is? It’s a useless little bladder about the size of a grape, as expendable as your tonsils or appendix. No, sir, do I look like I’m out of my mind? I wouldn’t trade a stinking thing for your measly soul. What I’m after is that bigger meat behind your eyes. I want your mind.

“You people like to imagine that I’m some kind of deal maker, the proprietor of some forlorn open-all-night swapshop. That’s a terrible misconception on your part, friend, just another of those convenient fabrications you can’t seem to live without. Dispatch with that notion and you fuckers would run out of stories to tell each other in a hurry.

“And, wrong-headed as it is, that’s just fine with me. Fabrications, delusions, and –even better– bald-faced lies are nothing but good news to me, as they get you in hot water with The Adversary. Still, it rankles. It sticks in my craw.

“Let me ask you something: Do I look red to you? Do you see a tail or horns or a pitchfork, or whatever the hell it is I’m supposed to brandish? Do I look so insecure that I need to wear some kind of costume to indicate loud and clear that I’m the bad guy? Here’s a little piece of wisdom you can take back to your people: Don’t be such damn fools. Use a little common sense, would you? Wouldn’t you think that incognito would be the way to go for a fellow in my line of work? I’d certainly think so, but no, you keep expecting this drama, some pint-sized dragon to show up at the crossroads in the middle of the night, gung ho to give you your heart’s desire in exchange for the worthless polyp you call your soul.

“Fat fucking chance. If you think I’m going to trade you a perfectly good guitar –let alone the ability to play the hell out of it– for that, you’re out of your minds.”

People pay for what they do, and still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it simply: by the lives they lead.

—James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name

These angels do not look like angels. They look like old people, stooped and weary, clothed in the rags they have been wearing for centuries.

From a distance it almost appears that they are hanging their heads, but in actuality they are looking down, as they so often do, situated as they are at such a lofty remove from the old torments and joys of the earth.

They are standing together, huddled and peering down over the lip of a cloud, watching a bridge burning far below them.

A burning bridge is one of the half dozen earthly occurrences that is capable of breaking even the hearts of angels.

A bridge –all bridges– are essential symbols of the mission of angels, and the destruction of bridges is a tragedy that reverberates through the most distant and rarefied reaches of Heaven.

A burning bridge is even more tragic and lamented than a bridge obliterated through mere destruction or disaster. It is also, sadly, one of the few acts of human willfulness in which the angels are not allowed to intercede. The burning of bridges is an act of terrorism against Heaven, and reduces even the oldest angels to a pack of numb and speechless spectators at the scene of a disaster.

We are contemptuous of transient well-being, as if there were any other kind. Routinely discounting the preponderance of evidence is not the behavior of reasonable people, nor is devaluing present experience because it may be overtaken by something worse….

Powerless people can hardly demand coherency of themselves, since they must always react to forces they cannot trust, whose wiles they cannot anticipate. They are safe from responsibility, safe from blame….

Our civilization believed for a long time in God and the soul and sin and salvation, assuming, whatever else, that meaning had a larger frame and context than this life in this world. Polls indicate that we in America have not really abandoned these beliefs, and that is interesting, because what I have called our collective fiction is relentlessly this-worldly, very serious indeed about material success, of all things. Success, that object of derision in every wisdom literature ever penned, not more dignified now that it is so very slackly bound to real attainment, not more beautiful now that its appurtenances generally amount to a higher tawdriness. Knowing this, we nevertheless make it stand in the place of worth….

It is because we hope to acquire rather than to achieve –in the old language of religion, to receive rather than to give– that the good we imagine can truly be taken from our hands….

What if we understood our vulnerabilities to mean we are human, and so are our friends and our enemies, and so are out cities and books and gardens, our inspirations, our errors. We weep human tears, like Hamlet, like Hecuba. If the universe is only all we have so far seen, we are its great marvel. I consider it an honor to follow Saint Francis or William Tyndale or Angelina Grimke or Lydia Maria Child anywhere, even to mere extinction. I am honored in the cunning of my hand. This being human –people have loved it through plague and famine and siege. And Dante, who knew the world about suffering, had a place in hell for people who were grave when they might have rejoiced.

—Marilynne Robinson, “Facing Reality,” from The Death of Adam

Yet I turn, I turn,

exulting somewhat,

with my will intact to go

wherever I need to go,

and every stone on the road

precious to me.

In my darkest night,

when the moon was covered

and I roamed through wreckage,

a nimbus-clouded voice

directed me:

“Live in the layers,

not on the litter.”

Though I lack the art

to decipher it,

no doubt the next chapter

in my book of transformations

is already written.

I am not done with my changes.

—Stanley Kunitz, from “The Layers”