bearâs heart. Plants too: The mountain laurelâs pollen-coated, spring-loaded stamens are painted a bright, alluring pink. From scent and color, the lady-slipper creates a tantalizing canoe-shaped trap for bees and spiders.
Rocks and cement do not lie. The very idea is absurd. It appears the lie is a characteristic of living things, an extension ofDarwinian notions of natural selection. The liar, whether plant or animal, casts a spell for a handful of reasons: to jump-start the reproductive process, protect its young, defend its territory, escape predation, scare or intimidate rivals, or otherwise appear more fit in the worldâs eye.
The most enchanting things in nature
and art are based on deception
.
â VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Here is a poem that describes a deception gone wild, from Jeffrey Harrisonâs collection
Feeding the Fire
:
OUR OTHER SISTER
The cruelest thing I did to my younger sister
wasnât shooting a homemade blowdart into her knee,
where it dangled for a breathless second
before dropping off, but telling her we had
another, older sister whoâd gone away.
What my motives were I canât recall: a whim,
or was it some need of mine to toy with loss,
to probe the ache of imaginary wounds?
But that first sentence was like a string of DNA
that replicated itself in coiling lies
when my sister began asking her desperate questions.
I called our older sister Isabel
and gave her hazel eyes and long blonde hair.
I had her run away to California
where she took drugs and made hippie jewelry.
Before I knew it, sheâd moved to Santa Fe
and opened a shop. She sent a postcard
every year or so, but sheâd stopped calling.
I can still see my younger sister staring at me,
her eyes widening with desolation
then filling with tears. I can still remember
how thrilled and horrified I was
that something Iâd just made up
had that kind of power, and I can just feel
the blowdart of remorse stabbing me in the heart
as I rushed to tell her none of it was true.
But it was too late. Our other sister
had already taken shape, and we could not
call her back from her life far away
or tell her how badly we missed her.
The first false sentence the speaker recalls in this poemâthe pronouncement and vague shape of another sisterâis the easiest. But a lie is seldom solitary; it begs another and another, until an imaginary skeleton is built, bone by bone, muscle and flesh, a sister-hologram with hobbies, home, hair. The greater the detail, the less likely she will crumble. The longer her history, the greater the strain, until he canât even make the truth believable and must suffer âthe blowdart of remorse.â
Initially, the speaker lies to get what he wants. Perhaps it began with a whim. Or big-brother meanness, like the homemade blowdart. Perhaps indeed the speaker was âtoying with loss,â or probing âthe ache of imaginary wounds.â Whatever the motivation, the lie flatters the liar. Like Joni Mitchellâs makeup denial or the frigate birdâs magnificent feathers, the lie allows him âthat kind of power.â
True consciousness, the recognition of self, separated from world, occurs at around age seven, the age at which a child also begins to lie. Teenagers are notorious liars. They lie about their whereabouts, drugs and alcohol, school attendance, grades, boyfriends, sex, mostly to avoid punishment from various authority figures. But they lie to their friends as well, boosting their intelligence, sexual experience, cool quotient. The high social pressure of adolescence makes them desperate for any and every kind of âspell.â It is often a way of
being
. Bonnie once told her teacher she had been abused and now her parents were divorcing. She noticed how victims were getting all the attention, their status clearly elevated to the point of celebrity. Again, we were pulled into the Sisterâs office as the first step in a kind of
Learning to Kill: Stories