Tell me lies, sweet little lies

The stories we tell... (For dearest T. A response to your respone)

Let me tell you a story. No? Yes? Thank you. Gather close. Nice and warm. Tushes in. C, my lovely, you, you’re okay. Why? ‘Cause I said so. Not fair? Not fair?! Yeah, deep. Where d’ya get that from? Philosophy 4U? C, ignore the mean little shites. You’re good. Spread far and wide. Did I say that? Out loud? Fuck.

I’m going to try intermittent fasting. I’ll abstain from swearing from midnight to 6.00 a.m. Hard, I know, but I like a challenge.

When I and other SEN parents say that our kids will, we pray and hope, get better or indeed, recover, are we telling stories - to ourselves and other people? Is this an inability to look reality/the truth in the face?

The telling of stories is a fundamental human urge. We may have a coterie of stories which we wheel out again and again (my dad had his collection of jokes, and we had the cards for those jokes – nul point; though other people laughed), or we may constantly be seeking new experiences so that we have new stories to tell.

There’s a story within which our other stories are contained and that story is, I think, about who we believe or would like to believe we are. My tests are, thankfully not on a grand scale; they are relatively small, but joined together, they build a moral fabric or story of who I am (Murdoch, reading Wittgenstein says ‘ We enact morality): to shout or not to shout; to enter the fray with the system, or this time, to let it go. I try and emulate other SEN parents who seem to have a better sense of equilibrium than me.

‘You believe everything they say is true?’ a friend asks.

I hesitate. ‘No?’ I hedge.

‘No,’ she says.

Without a neatly packaged philosophy of truth, though, can we live a moral life? What if our morality is an open - fluid-sense of goodness (sparked, of course, by Kant’s idea of a moral inner compass; religious or not), and we work it out or don’t as we muddle along, but always pulling ourselves up with the idea that we live to try another day. The opposite, then, of a video game – each quest does not lead to a higher level; it does, though, lead to another door, through which we can skip through or rest there a while.

Is the only way of imagining an alternative to a truth to see it as its contrast- a lie - or if we are being kind, a fabrication/a story?

Stories which we tell ourselves and others may be true or false. In order to live, to want to continue to live, both might be necessary. If you can hold onto a truth, can you hold onto a lie? One can imagine a scenario where each position would break a person or be sufficient to keep him/her intact, afloat.

I adore ‘The Matrix’, but given a choice between seeing and tasting a meal as gruel or as a five course gourmet meal, I think I’d choose the vision and taste of good food. It’s a Pak thing. Other cultures eat to live; we live to eat.

Truths are hard. Not only to stomach but also in the sense of being implacable. Shakespeare again, and as always.

Cordelia, Lear’s favourite daughter, and the one who, when he gives up the crown, he intends to pass his old age with, begins the play as a truth-speaker. When Lear’s other daughters are asked, before the court, how much they love him, they reply as both daughters and courtiers; their words fit to please a king. Cordelia says, ‘I love your Majesty according to my bond, no more nor less.’ When pushed to elucidate, she says she will give half her love to the man she marries.

When one of her two suitors, the Duke of Burgundy, asks if Cordelia’s dower still stands, Lear says, in a line where the delivery of venom should, I think, be subtle, a deadly pin-prick rather than an arrow, ‘Her price has fallen’; thereby rendering his beloved daughter into a prostitute.

Later in the play, when Lear, grown mad by the understanding that he has, his life-long, understood nothing, says to Cordelia,

‘I know you do not love me, for your sisters

Have, as I do remember, done me wrong.

You have some cause; they have not.’

She replies,

‘No cause, no cause.’

The irony is, of course, embedded in the words ‘some cause’. Even now, he can’t face the complete truth, completely.

It is often said that Cordelia represents a Christological figure. Perhaps it might be more apt to say that she moves from being Christ (the bearer of truth) to Jesus (in his humanity). She learns the value of lies to preserve the fabric of the family. The lies she learns to tell are now seen as having greater value - family unity - than the truth she once espoused – whose value was her identity as a speaker of truths. In this context, truths serve the individual and lies, the community.

Howard Barker, one of my favourite playwrights (though favourite is too mild a word for what Barker’s work means to me) did, many years ago, a riff on ‘Lear’ and Jacques’ seven stages of man speech in ‘As You Like It’. In his play, ‘Seven Lears’, the truth-bearers are the dull, sanctimonious ones and the liars, the ones who match, in their essence, the vitality of life.

Maybe the game/lie we play with ourselves is that getting to the truth is vital for our being. The truth is out there, as the ‘ The X Files’ says. But do we really want or need it?

I think of ‘Candide’. A man goes searching for the teacher who will teach him the truth. After a trepidatious journey, he finally arrives at the teacher’s door. He knocks, the door opens and the teacher tells him to piss off (It’s okay, I can say that; it’s not my witching hour yet). Voltaire may, it’s true, have used slightly different words.

And then in ‘The Upanishads’, a man leaves his home and family and goes on a similar quest. This time, the teacher is more explicit and says he should learn to live in the world first. That is the hardest test. And then, he can come back.

Why, then, isn’t transience as valuable a concept as the truth? If we look inside our heads (and God, it’s messy in there) and if we could look inside the heads of others, we’d no doubt see that we are governed by a modality of subjectivity.

Your truth is this. My truth is this. We may battle it out, or agree to move on, or to part ways. A truth is only a truth. The truth belongs to the provenance of God.

Living in the world, we learn a shared common response but it’s the business in our heads that governs us, moves us (emotionally) and makes us move (as actors/agents).

We’re on another train. We’re at the mid-point of our journey. My son’s having a Martin Luther King moment, ‘Free. Free at last!’ He’s run from one end of the train (it’s one of those carriage-less ones, dammit) to the other end, and is ready to start off again. I’ve finally got him to sit down. In she whooshes. Grinning, she turns her head and says, ‘Come on, nan!’ Her nan follows, a little bent, a little tired, as if she’s not sure how she’s got this far. The girl puts the breaks on her wheelchair, picks up the book in her lap and says, ‘You should have brought a book, nan.’

In between glaring at my son to dare to run off again and reading the same line of my book again, my eyes turn, surreptitiously and then openly to the girl. She has such lovely energy, warmth. I put down my book, approach, and ask if we can talk. My son, never one to miss an opportunity, begins swinging round the pole as if it’s a Maypole and a strong wind is blowing him along. I should have listened to him, and let him wear shorts.

I tell her about my son. We all look at him. He ignore us. In his world, the sun is shining and ribbons are flying. And an ice-cream van, playing, ‘Teddy Bear’s Picnic’, is about to turn the corner, any minute now.

‘I’ve got autism, too,’ she says. Not for one minute during the whole time we speak does she drop her luminous gaze. ‘I’ve had health issues since I was a child,’ she says, ‘ I’ve got Ehlers Danlors Syndrome’. She spells it out for me. It’s something to do with connective tissues not building. ‘It means I can’t empty my bladder; I’ve got a catheter. And I’ve got a feeding tube.’

‘No McDonald’s, then?’ I say. Nobody laughs. I am my father’s daughter.

She waits. Measuring me. I don’t, if I can help it, do pity anymore. It’s cruel. I know, because we’ve had it to the eyeball.

‘I want to talk about the lies we tell ourselves,’ I say, ‘I know you’re only young but…’

‘I just look young!’ she says, laughing. ‘I’m twenty-two.’

From where I’m standing, bits of me ready to fall off, as if I’m single-handedly bringing back leprosy, twenty-two is plenty young.

‘Tell her you’re at university,’ says her nan, addressing L, rather than me.

‘Second year,’ she says. ‘Nursing.’

She’d always intended to go into the medical field. She’d thought she might be a doctor but during her GCSEs, she was so ill she missed an inordinate amount of school and so didn’t get the grades. ‘I taught myself,’ she says. She says nursing was, in the end, the right choice, as ‘it’s more to do with being with patients.’

We talk about perceptions/ the stories others build when they see her in this body, in this wheelchair. ‘People look at me with pity. They see this body as the summation of who I am. It’s failed me. They think I have a really miserable life. Not that I don’t - sometimes. They ask me: What happened to you? I think it makes them feel better about their own lives.’ We talk about the wheelchair. ‘People see it as restricting me. I see it as freeing me. Without my wheelchair, I’d be stuck at home now with my nan. Because of my wheelchair, I get to London, by myself, four times a week for my classes.’

People can, we agree, be funny. ‘I was shopping with my friend and the cashier refused to speak to me, to even make eye contact. She asked my friend to log my e-mail into the computer. My friend kept on trying to direct the cashier back to me. The thing is: My friend is blind in one eye and in her other eye, she has impaired vision. She couldn’t have logged in my e-mail, even if she’d known what is was. But to the cashier, my friend looked less disabled than me. I complained, and next time they were fine.’

‘They won’t do that again,’ pipes in her nan, proud.

I ask L about the future, what stories she’s building around that. ‘I’ve had mental health issues when I was younger,’ she says, ‘but I made a shift. You have to be willing to put the work in.’

‘Do you get scared of the future?’ I ask. ‘You don’t know. Some people in my condition get worse.’ She stops as we mull over this idea. ’I’m not just waiting for things to get better, though. That would be a waste of a life. But there are people who get better. You never know.’

‘What about the immediate future?’ I ask.

‘I like reading, getting fresh air, meeting/speaking with my friends. And I love my studies. I’m now a speaker for the university on nursing and disability.’

I realise we’re at our stop. I grab my bits, my son. L and I both say the same thing, our words overlapping. ‘It was lovely to meet you.’ I said I wouldn’t use her name . I ask now what it is. She tells me. My son and I rush to the door. I turn to look back. Although I’ve taken a lot out of her in the telling she gave me, she remains radiant.

In the split of the world between two philosophies: Apollonian and Dionysian, I lean towards the Dionysian. The sense of revelry, of masquerade, of joy, appeals far more than a prosaic world, as if someone had overlooked to colour it in.

I’ve just being re-reading Marilynne Robinson’s ‘Gilead’ – slowly. Only a few books deserve to be read that slowly.

[A preacher opened all the windows of his church] that would still open, so they could hear the Methodists singing by the river, and… some of the women would join in if the song was ‘The Old Rugged Cross’ or ‘Rock of Ages,’ even in the middle of the sermon, and he’d just stop preaching and listen to them.’

And from ‘Ninotchka’, Garbo, in, I think, her finest film, playing a Russian emissary in Paris, drunk and yielding to softness says, ‘I have paid the penalty. Now let’s have some music.’ Let’s.

The melodic beauty of the verses they wrote aside, it is this sense of revelry that appeals to me in the Sufis I study. In that work, and in the work of the Christian mystics (this is no doubt true for other mystical traditions, but it’s these two I study), God is glimpsed, lost sight of, embraced, lost again. I like the not knowing; the possibility that a story could go any which way.

It’s a love story, of course it is; of man for God and God for man, but a love story that goes on…and on. To embrace such fluidity – not from a nihilistic position but from a position of faith is, perhaps, in our world that has grown such straight lined, hard to envisage. In my religious tradition, the Salafi movement has and is making Islam a sombre and rigid thing. They’re the ones who haven’t, I feel, attended close enough to the Seerat-al-Nabi/The Life of the Prophet. Yes, there’s glory in the hereafter but where we are isn’t so bad either.

I don’t want to lean on Weber but…but… there’s something powerful in the opposite idea, not disenchantment but re-enchantment, a return to mira/wonder. Looking out, looking in. That’s where all good stories begin. Once upon a time…