Poetry

Proof

by
Fig. 9., Benjamin Betts, Geometrical Psychology, or, The Science of Representation
  1. A pre-diction: Language may seem to make possible the lie. But many lie with the eye. The great apes have been known to lie, sometimes to the selves they recognize in the mirror.1

    Hence, the peculiarity of the lie will make itself known to you.
  2. The beady eyes, the eyes like little beads.
    The sweat, beading. Rolling like little beads.
    The twitching. The blushing.2 The nervous laugh, ha ha! ha ha!
    The kneading of hands, as though punishing bread.
    The eyes skipping like lying stones, all over a hateful lake.
    What a bunch of lies. What a load of crap.
  3. We should have a machine that tells liars, and one that tells lies. These machines would be like computers. Then they should play each other in chess.
  4. Don’t be so down on yourself, or low. Take a moment to smell the roses. Which in truth are rose-like lisianthuses. And worse, they are fake lisianthuses.

    I am a little disappointed in you for not noticing the difference.
  5. We look around at each other with deep suspicion. Have you ever noticed people on the street?3 They look at each other like lies waiting to happen – clutching their purses to their chests, they scan the street for eyes, the look of the eyes as they look into their eyes.
  6. Or my father’s eyes when he looked at my mother, or my mother’s eyes when she looked at my sister, or my sister’s eyes when she looked at my sister, or my sister’s eyes when she looked at me?

    Like a big painting of people playing poker? With those faces? And the game is one of those big-money Mafia poker games in a hotel room?

    And the painting is velvet? With Elvis – alive?
  7. A paradox: The liar says to himself, what do I get out of this?

    Nothing?
  8. Grits walks into a bar and the bartender says why the lye face.

    That seems to be lacking something.
    What is a joke anyway? Is it not… a lie of sorts?
    A joke makes people laugh.4
  9. Kant thought it impermissible to lie, no matter what, even if Hitler comes up to you, with a bloody knife in one hand and a dead baby in the other, totally amped on crystal meth, and asks where that motherfucker Ghandi is.
  10. A lawyer walks into a bar and presents the bartender with a Warranted Writ of Summons for Fatal Death by Hanging from the Neck. The lawyer asks, ‘why the long face?’
  11. A paradox: This guy walks into a bar and says, ‘I’ll have a pair of lox.’ Then he takes the lox and eats one and places the other in his car for later. Then, after it has been sitting in his car for, like, ten hours in the hot sun, he totally EATS it!!
  12. Look, I know that you did not beat your wife, as you are, in fact, an unmarried bachelor, so please do not bother answering.
  13. My lies: a catalog.
    circa 3995 BCE: World begins, things sprout, etc.
    circa 1639: These blankets contain no smallpox whatsoever.
    8:     I did not break the earthenware planter and then clumsily glue it back together only to break it
             again
    9:     I pledge allegiance.
    10:   Everybody deserves a chance.
    11:   How are you doing?
    12:   I appreciate(d) you.
    13:   I believe in the fundamental goodness of humankind generally.
    14:   This sentence is false.
    15:   This life is a lie.
    16:   I’m pretty sure you can’t get pregnant that way.
    17:   I don’t get jealous.
    18:   I was recently accepted into Harvard University’s Noteworthy Scholars of Honor program.
    19:   I have a hard time figuring out who is whom. Whom is who.
    20:   I won’t get upset.
    21:   I won’t get very upset.
    22:   I admire your resiliency.
    23:   Remembering names is my forte.
    24:   Death is nothing to me.
    25:   ‘Anathema’ means ‘counter to my point’, coming from anti- and thema-, like thesis, or point.
    26:   I am emotionally available.
    27:   I have broken all ties.
    28:   That ‘begs the question’.
    29:   That is a ‘moot’ point.
    30:   I have reached the point in my life where I am not concerned with lies. I look upon them as
             sociological curiosities. I accept them now as a fact of life, because I have grown more accepting
             as I have grown older. In fact, I don’t care if you cheat on me. In fact, I will be so generous as to
             retroactively deem our relationship an ‘open’ one should that occur.
  14. To lie is to meet the earth. To lie is to unearth the truth, in a manner of speaking. To lie with another is either to lie or not lie, or perhaps to do a little of both. When we worked for the Mafia, we often took a man to lie with the lye, if you follow. He who lies is either a liar or a lier.
  15. Families are ties of lies.
  16. The lie is the only law of all. Each lie is like a brick in the house of society. The liar is a layer. We are the cement. Unless we happen to be the layer, in which case this metaphor is all shot to hell.
  17. An alien walks into a bar. The bartender says, ‘You’re an alien.’ The alien says, ‘No, I’m not.’

    Which ‘begs the question’, can an alien lie? Can an alien tell the truth?
  18. The client had attorney-client-lie privilege. That is how he got away with it.
  19. If our society is litigious, is that the lawyers’ fault? What does it say about us, the represented? One person’s slander is another’s calumny.
  20. Doesn’t it seem like many people are unaware of the fact that they have the right to remain silent?5
  21. In the theatre of life, there are winners and there are losers. And there are those who yell ‘Fire!’ in a crowded aisle so that they can get to the bathroom more quickly.
  22. Let me get this straight: a lie is a belief, or a potential belief. So someone believes it (or potentially believes it in some possible world). What if the liar believes it? Is she then a liar? What if she says, ‘A unicorn has two horns’? Is that a lie? Or, ‘Santa Claus is a fig from our rations’ – I mean, ‘a figment of our imaginations’?

    What sense can be made of the following: ‘Santa Claus claimed to be riding a unicorn, but there was a bead in his eye at the time, and furthermore, he deferred to his lawyer, and additionally, this sentence is, or at some point has been, false’?
  23. Depending on whether the speaker is lying about, or hallucinating, the object or not, ‘jumbo shrimp’ could be either an oxymoron or a pleonasm – same difference6 – or, if from a suspect body of water and put into a blender, neo-plasma (red and neon all over).
  24. When you are ill, lying there in the hospital – from hospitable – forced to eat ‘hospital “food”’, the doctor will lie to you. If you have twelve months to live, he will say you have eighteen. If you have six months to live, he will say twelve. If you have less than six months to live, he will say please pay the bill now. In which case you should hand him a blank check,7 aka a bad check, and sneak yourself out through the hospital laundry for some holistic healing in the West Village.
  25. A doctor, a lawyer, and a rabbi walk into a bar. The bartender says what’ll you have. The lawyer makes the keen observation that there are only two parachutes for the three of them. He snatches one and jumps out. The doctor takes the other and she jumps out. The key to this story is that the rabbi and the doctor are one and the same (and, surprisingly to you I bet, a woman). Also, the bartender was the lawyer, which I neglected to tell you.
  26. I regret to inform you that someone somewhere is dying at this very moment. At the same time, someone is being born. Finally, someone somewhere8 is also lying. A coincidence? I don’t think so.
  27. Thank God for lies.9
  28. War is a necessary evil. Take terrorism, for example. We all agree that terrorists are evil. To stop the terrorists, we need to kill them10 before they kill us. Some say ‘terrorism’ is a concept and therefore not a legitimate object of war. These people are mistaken. What about cancer? That’s a concept. Or poverty? Or Christmas? Do you see my point? War is pointless unless we have something to fight against. Which is terrorism.

    Send us your sons and daughters.11
  29. Contra Kant, lying is sometimes justified, is all we’re saying.

    Like, e.g., under the following circumstances, at least in some cases of them, but not limited to them, whom are we to say?: serial killer on the loose, national defense, national interest, affairs of state, impending asteroidal impact, national offense, clandestine operations, pseudonyms, affairs (to spare the feelings of the cuckolded), scientific research, election, reelection, political action committee matters, cookie jar incidents, activities that could be interpreted as ‘criminal’ but when the actor does not really mean it, getting out of telemarketing conversations, when the other person did it first, when the other person did it second and there are three or more actors, with drug-users or communists, when life is at stake, when liberty is at stake, to avoid unpatriotic and oppressive capital gains taxes, when dreaming, when mentally disordered, when drunk or high, advertising, not wanting to ruin the moment, at the end of the day, when one is not sure what the truth is any longer, when one cannot handle the truth, to oneself (to spare oneself’s feelings), to spare the feelings of anyone really, Mom, ticky-tacky shit.
  30. Or what if I were to say this was all a lie? Like, I made this whole thing up with my own private thoughts?
    And if I were lying? Hmmm?
    What would it ‘mean’ anyway?
    Would you crumple this paper12 into a little ball and run away? And play with the ball by yourself,
    refusing to share your little paper ball?

    You probably would, knowing you. ∎
  1. The mirror is a one-way mirrora and there is an ape behind it, with just enough light shining through that the extra-ape can see him/ her, and the intra-mirror ape is being neuronally manipulated remotely by an ethically-challenged neuroscientist in Creech Air Force Base, Indian Springs, Nevada, using wifi cables exiting the back of the intra-ape’s head.
                   aAka, two-way mirror, three-way mirror, one-way glass, two-way glass.
  2. As Emil Kraepelin notes, it is established sociobiological fact that the blusher is valued for her honesty, for when she lies, her face lights up like an applause sign, thereby making her a less-than-convincing liar, which therefore makes us think that she is honest (this also explains why blushing is so erotically ineluctable) (Kraeplin, Lehrbuch der psychiatre). In fact, an early abandoned prototype of the Stoelting Portable Deceptograph® measured the subject’s blush by means of a CountenancerTM recording mask attached to (and enveloping entirely) the face, results conveyed via a snaking set of serial vacuum tubes to the main housing (cf. R. Hare, Assembling Dissembling: A Revisionist History).
  3. There are no people ‘on the street’. They are in cars. (One to a car.)
  4. Old English hlæhhan, ‘to bare one’s fangs’.
  5. This is a ‘rhetorical question’. The answer is ‘yes’. This right is right there in the Constitution, did you know that! Though it admittedly took me awhile to find it, as it is acrostically ciphered (by design of the Foundling Forefathers).
  6. I.e., ‘different’.
  7. A ‘check’ being a form of currency (in a manner of speaking) that used to exist – a promise of payment from a ‘bank account’ (which is also a thing that used to exist, or still does maybe, I don’t know, I don’t read the papers [which are also things that used to exist – on paper (which was a substance created when a tree had laid down its life so that the truth might live)]).
  8. (everyone everywhere)
  9. Ephesians 5:4. (New International Nonstandard Version: ‘Quit horsing around down there, you ungrateful motherfuckers!’)
  10. First we need to torture (enhancedly interrogate) them a lot. If they give us a false confession, we (enhancedly interrogate) them more before we kill them so that we can get the truth. This is what the manual, which we ate after reading, says (said) to do. (NB: some of the [redacted] may have been [redacted].)
  11. See the Manual of [redacted] for [redacted] policy on monozygotic twins, dizygotic twins, [redacted] triplets, congenital twins, [redacted].
  12. / ‘paper’