memo to my child #2
about lying, the sims, kokoro, jin xing

«lying is always wrong», «lying is sometimes the right thing to do», «everybody lies», «it’s normal for children to lie, up to a certain age», «children never lie»— during your existence so far, you may have already encountered these contradictory platitudes about lying, and you may have felt confused about the subject. if it’s of any consolation, i still am too, and get the feeling that it’s often helpful to be ‘on guard’ about the evasive nature of ‘lying’, and for that matter of ‘telling the truth’. today i want to tell you some stories about lying and telling the truth, which may light up your path and protect you from some dangers: that is my intention.

the form of lying that is easiest to understand is actively saying something while knowing it isn’t true. until not so many years ago, your father said a lot of these lies. i have regretted every single of them: lying always comes with a dark feeling of weakness. ¿so why do people lie, then? there are many reasons, but the one concerning us now is that lying can seem a means to get what you desire, or to avoid what you fear. i will give you an example of a lie from my own childhood. it involves a computer game called the sims, which was very popular at the beginning of the 21st century, especially among girls older than i then was.

people liked to categorise the sims as a ‘life simulator’. one could say that what made spending time in this ‘simulated life’ more appealing than spending it in ‘real life’ was precisely that in the sims one never had to be frustrated because things were not the way one desired them to be. you could build houses in any imaginable style, you could create ‘people’ who looked and behaved as you fancied. you could also use half-secret ‘cheat codes’ to be even less restricted in your designs: «move objects on» revoked any laws of physics that could get on the way of your decorations, «klapaucius» made you not have to worry about the money to fund them.

my lying anecdote involves these ‘cheat codes’. at school, we were often taken on walking trips. on the way, i would talk to different classmates. once, i chatted with a girl who also liked the sims: she played it on her brother’s computer, whereas i did on my neighbour’s. i remember we were walking across a monastery resembling a medieval castle. the conversation turned to cheat codes; i wanted to impress her with my knowledge, but she knew all the ones i knew. spontaneously, i lied that there was a code for making a castle appear in one’s neighbourhood. while it impressed her, my ‘cheat code’ ended up backfiring a few hours later, as she sent me an e-mail saying that her brother wanted to know the castle cheat code— i was horrified.

it is easy to be unaware of the consequences of one’s lying. when lies are small and explicit, the false statement can be checked against reality, so ‘getting caught’ is indeed a risk. however, i am writing to warn you about a different kind of lie, entailing a different kind of risk. these lies are not explicit, but rather implied by what one says or does, or doesn’t. because they are not clearly defined, and the truths they violate may be abstract, private, or even ungraspable; it takes rare insight to discover and articulate them. what happens most of the time is that they are felt as a kind of ‘dissonance’ or ‘darkness’, often non-consciously. instead of resulting in clear blame or regret, subtle lies result in something of a lower, less audible tone than overt suspicion or guilt.

at this level of untruth, the difference between a lie and a secret gets blurred. it is helpful, then, to think of it just as something that is kept hidden, covered, opaque; and of its psychological consequences as the ‘shadow’ it projects on the perceivable realm (of statements, actions, and gestures). natsume sōseki’s novel kokoro is a good illustration of the psychological consequences of such lying, and it’s from it that i got this idea of ‘shadow’. the main character (sensei) is haunted by a dark episode from his youth, which could be regarded as a series of implicit lies. his (unnamed) younger admirer, a keen observer of his character, remarks how sometimes «a strange darkness clouds his face, like the shadow of a flying bird projected onto a window», and describes how guilt causes in him a crippling, self-fulfilling belief in not deserving happiness.

for sensei, his lie/secret is unrenounceable, as if it had solidified and rooted by living it. at any rate, it structures the narrative of his existence, and guides the development of his character, morality, and wisdom; which are found worthy of admiration by those around him. i am trying to express something subtler than «lying makes things worse and is to be avoided»— ¿who knows what could have been better, or avoidable, when confronted with the wholeness of a lived human life? lives of great virtue and positive impact may have been sustained on ‘quixotic’ lies, and perhaps all lives are shaped by lies: simplifications or transmutations of realities that are cognitively unreachable or emotionally unbearable. what i want to do is to draw in the map i’m making for you an imaginary line connecting the idea of ‘lying’ with the idea of ‘psychological dark matter’, and the ‘shadow’ it projects.

but most of all, my loved child, i want to tell you about the opposite of this slippery lying. it likewise resists definition, isn’t as simple as speaking a true sentence; it throws a kind of ‘light’ onto its bearer, which attracts others and illuminates one’s way towards one’s innermost loves and wishes. again, i’ll try to explain by example: this morning i read about an extraordinary chinese woman called jin xing. before becoming a popular television host, jin was a colonel. before that, jin was china’s most successful dancer. before that, she was ‘born as a man’. by being able to discern her ‘inner truth’ (eg. being a woman, desiring to be a dancer) and striving to give it expression, she has walked a route which could seem to defy viability. born in great hardship, she was the first chinese to receive the government’s approval to undergo a ‘sex change’, she is admired by a conservative society, and most importantly is living life as she had dreamed to do, serving as a light to others by doing so.

memo to my child #1
about jens lekman and detached love

your father likes jens lekman. today his new songs were released and i was listening to them on my headphones on the way to the library, and then back home. i had anticipated this moment, because his music, his person, make me feel accompanied through life. i am aware that his music will probably be ‘old person music’ if/when you exist, but you may still find something valuable in it.

jens was born at this time of the year, which makes him an aquarius. i don’t advise you to believe in rigid explanation-systems such as astrology, but i do value keeping an open mind to anything that sparks curiosity. in any case, know that believing is a much more complicated matter than what people paint it to be: we tend to ask things like «¿do you believe in astrology/god/…?» and our answers tend to be «yes» or «no», but the felt truth is always more contradictory and removed from the realm of words— it is better to try not to be scared of this.

i said jens is an aquarius because aquarius people are usually portrayed as loving humanity more than they love specific people. one may think this characterisation does not fit jens(’ persona) because his songs are mainly about his love for specific people. i don’t know jens personally so i should not speak of him as if i knew him, but i think it is revealing that he made it into a life-task to turn his feelings for specific people and factual life events into songs, into messages for the rest of humanity.

your father is a bit like this too: i am really writing this for you, but it is also meant for other people to read. i have discovered that the love i feel for you, existing or not, allows me to speak in a more constructive way, and to distinguish the meaningful from the empty. i feel i can become better for the world if i stand by the thoughts which i would like to really mean if i shared with you: it gives me a sense of duty and purpose.

all this time i am trying to talk to you about a ‘love within detachment’, about loving when it seems you have a different love to give than the one you can put in the world immediately around you. to love love more than you love may be sociopathic and/or messiah-complex-like, but i ‘believe’ the best one can always do is to follow this (/your own) love fully: i think jens has helped me arrive at this thought.