The art of lying is no art at all.

 The art of lying is no art at all. 

It’s what we do as soon as we put the third word behind the second.

          But do not generalize. Do not write, “Everything we write is a lie.” Write instead, “I am writing lies.” What I begin with, when I sit down to my keyboard, may resemble the truth; but as soon as I type that third word I know that I’ve slanted that truth if not turned it upside-down and backward – because sentences are not stones but inventions.

          This doesn’t mean I write fantasy as if it were reality. I don’t, in what I write here, change my shirt or the car I drive. I don’t go places I’ve never been, become intimate with women I’ve never met, eat drugs I’ve never tasted. I don’t pretend to things I cannot do: play the sitar or shoot 68 from the tips at Montrêux Golf and Country Club, read minds or fire handguns. I don’t pretend to have washboard abs, the strength of seven, the grace of a gazelle, or the wood of a 63-year-old oak.

          Those might make a better story, how I acquired a 1962 Citroën from an antique car dealer in Reno, how I slashed an 8-iron out of deep rough on the 17th, lofting it 162 yards to within four feet of the pin (and managed to slide the putt in the high-side door), how an uninhibited young red-head came unbidden for a string-lesson and stayed to assay my strength, my grace, my . . . savoir faire.

          I could write of any of those things – and with a little bit of research (on Nevada geography, stringed instruments, resort courses, and female anatomy), I could write about any of those things in great detail, and believably.

But here I stick to what I know at the ends of my fingers, whether I have a pencil in hand or a keyboard on my lap. That isn’t terribly much, but at least the lies begin close by. That’s what I’m saying when I say I begin with something that resembles the truth. I begin close by.

          No redheads close by, no Citroëns or sitars; it’s the Valley of Virginia, not Reno. I do not write of a new heaven and a new earth. I write of a new earth and an unseen heaven. The earth is rich though not black. The heaven is a pale, pale blue.

06.13.16