A short story I wrote:



He could not live. He did not know what life was. And yet, it seemed to him at the same time the most practical question of all and the one that everyone in time had forgotten. Who was conscious? Who was alive around him? Were life and time and thoughts and ideas all occurring within some vacuum? He didn't know and he knew he couldn't live if he didn't.

Surely, on holidays and such, he could escape to some temporary abode in his mind which allowed him to masquerade as one living. The events of life surrounded him and he had just enough smile and shyness to shake it off into the attic of haunt--the same attic whose lantern never tired and could not be silenced, even when enough noise was around to disguise it. He would return there after a time (again wondering too just what that passing time was and where it floated off to) and dwell on an antique story.

The story going around was a very old one about a man and another man and one big fat event. The first man was good. Really, really good. His intentions were pure and while he didn't impose himself on others, he didn't operate behind their back either in a malevolent way. The other man was a liar and that was everything. When I say a big event, I mean to say a gigantic lie. The first man, being all there was for a time, was true, true in the good way and true in the ontological way. He was the bedrock under the ocean, the light buried beneath the shadows. These two truths, or facts, if you want to think about it in a scientific context, they was the motivation for the lie. Truth in the sense of a pure will, intentionality, that courageous and mysterious move to be a good first man and truth in the sense of existence or place, as in "I was here before you were". So we're talking about reality, it would seem.

Even in the rules of the normal course of what he knew of living, to take such offense with the first man as the second man had done would seem to be quite a horrible act. It clearly tainted things, and introduced a putrid odor into the pure air the first man enjoyed.

But what is more telling, I suppose, is that the first man not only enjoyed, but shared. He gave away. This was the sort of merging of his two truths where we can come to get a fuller picture of this, well, it would seem, beautiful man--that he held and possessed what was, that 'pure air' we speak of and that he did not hog it. In fact, to even talk in terms of the possibility for hoggishness does not tell the story straight. Indeed, who could even cast a judgment on one who would be the very source of the possibility, the time, the place, the scene, the chance, all of it--everything--to judge in the first place?

And yet, there came to be the grand lie. Now, you may think, when you realize what I'm about to relate to you here, why did the first man allow the lie to happen? Who would permit such a lie? But I think that question, while important and unavoidable in this story, cannot be answered, for the same reason that one could not offer a verdict on the possibility for hoggishness. Who can know the reasons for such a thing when all of the reasons in the world were brought about and allowed--whether on the mark or not--by that first man? There was clearly a place in the universe of the will that every man after that first had not visited and there was no time machine to get him back there. If anything, that reason too would have to be a gift, should he receive it, like everything else he knew.

The lie. We can speak of the lie as a sort of conversation between the two men. Have you ever been lied to? In everyday terms, if I'm going to lie to you, a few conditions have to be in place. You obviously can't know my true intentions. You can't know that what I want to do is appear honest and out for one thing when I'm everything but. You cannot know what I truly want to do or not do, depending on the case, or the lie fails on the spot. Lies are about secrets. They are about deception. And deception is about knowledge. I have to have a slight edge in terms of what I know--not smarts or brains--but simple understanding of a situation. And I have to do some necessary work to execute my secret will in exactly that--secret--or again, the lie fails. We all know this. If I lie to you, you won't know it, because I've created enough fog and distraction to sneak something right around you. And I dance off into the sunset knowing more than you again. I know what I wanted to do and that I've done it. To lie is to change the appearance of reality, but not reality itself. That is very important. Lies, you know, are often clouds that cover that light we spoke of earlier.

In our story here, however, there is a twist. You now know that the first man knew everything there was to know, so far as we can tell. He knew at least one more thing than the second man, that being, what happened before the second man. And all of us have come to know that we do not know even as much as that second man, who came before us. And many men in between. But we all stand in some sort of like distance from the first man--we all came after him and beyond that, what do we know?

The second man, knowing less than the first man, could never lie to the first man. He could try, but his attempts would all be in vain. Our conditions, in science terms, for the experiment that was to become the big fat lie were not in place when only the two men would converse. The second man would stand silent, head hung, and I'm told if we could only see his face, we would see a strained, sober arrangement that perhaps we've only felt when our entire insides seem to be twisted up with the cold contemplation of isolation. The first man would honor the silence of the second, never imposing, but knowing all the while what would be the outcome of the second man's calculation.

The second man knew his plan was dead in the water shortly after the two met. What a fate! He knew that he would spend the rest of his days (and ours) operating under this constant see-saw of enhanced excitement that perhaps if he lied to himself even, that he could get around the first man, and thereby all the other men, and of course, he would be reminded by the endless pull of reality that he was defeated already, that his lie would always remain exactly that--a big, empty, hollow, but delicious to his wild will lie. An alteration to the appearance of reality, even if the reality in question was the stuff of his own mind.

So the second man was trapped, you may say. Perhaps he could appeal to the goodness of the first man and it seems from what we know of the first man, that the second man had the chance to give up the lie and get serious. But that was not to be and the why of that can be stored away in the category of the unknown to those not privy to that brief conversation between the two men. The second man's silence would remain, at least in part, and his focus then turned to those who knew less than him. In the story, it's often told, "to you and I."

Now all men after the second, as you know, knew less than the second. They only knew of this story of the conversation long after the fact and often, long after it was too late. Late because they did not know that they were to become a part of that very story. You see, the second man, keeping his decision firm, would still lie, insanely, even in the midst of his defeat. We know this. And we can guess now how it would work: the second man would turn to every other man after and of course, never let in that there was an eternal breach and silence between the first and second man. At times, if really successful, he may get the men to think there was no first man or that all men were the first and only men or that the first man was away for the weekend and left them the keys to the place. Many men had come to believe that all was well in the cosmic universe, that, whatever they did not know would not hurt them (you hear this often) and that what happened in time, even up to today even, was simply as if that first conversation had never happened.

So that is largely, I think, what is so interesting about our story here. It brings us to today. It would seem to cast a certain light, in some way, on the holidays, on the everydays, on the things and stuff of today. It would seem to raise curiosities maybe about why a man living today could not live.
This second man was a liar. His lie was based largely on keeping that first interaction between himself and the first man a secret and then telling every man after him that he has not been lied to, that indeed, to even think a lie was possible was a horrible mischief of the imagination and that the silly men who dreamed up this very story here should be ashamed of themselves. You can easily see how this can get so out of hand. Imagine everything being really that way, and yet there is the second man here telling everyone the direct opposite.

But it can work. This story is a dark one, but not completely. It is too difficult to distill in extremes, I think. For let us not forget the first man. Where is he in all of this? A spectator to the lie, we know, and the one who knows more than everything else, he is safe from the lie by his existence, but not by his goodness. How amazing. He was pierced, you may say, by the lie. He was wounded by the echo of this horrific story and every 'story' told by the second man. He woke up in the middle of the night to the screams. One may wonder if this story was real if that first man would not still be weeping over the chaos and confusion.

The good man, the first man, the true man was a weeping man. He was a man who was, in a sense, trapped as well. Or so it would seem. Trapped in the sense that the lie had slid in between the cracks to antagonize him and everything he had begun. There was a cloud over his light. All else after him, one would think, was supposed to carry on in the same spirit of goodness that was in motion when he himself was alone. Before the second, before every man. But the lie. The lie had come to be almost the entire picture. Not many men alive knew the story, and if they did, many could not believe it, or did not want to, or never really paid attention. Who had not been touched by the lie, however? What a tremendous vibration this lie sent through existence. What a story this lie had made.

Time, in the story, was not something that could be erased. Memories were not machines where the men could forget the sounds they once heard. There was a very real sense in the story that there was no going back, that what had happened was very real, very crucial, indeed. It had happened, and for that, for its existence at the very least, it had mattered. The tangle for every man that lived was where he stood in relation to the lie, and thereby where he stood in relation to the first and second man, and really, every man. The lie, for as much as it had divided men from the first man and what really happened, still had preserved this sense of unity. It could not erase the fact that there was a limit to the lying, that the lie could never reach its fullest potential, that, being a lie, it was forced into frustration that it would have to remain a lie, and that reality still hovered over it, yearning, I think any man would hope, for its murder.

Ahh--that reminds me! When I was told the story, the man mentioned to me that the second man was a murderer. And I thought, "well, who had he killed and why?!" The man assured me that no one was murdered directly by the hand of the second man and after my momentary sigh; I began to realize that that was actually a worse fact. Should the second man murder anyone himself, he would have not been a liar, and what better attack on the truth than a lie? I can imagine the second man becoming a murderer himself should he no longer be able to lie. He'd be forced to come out into the open to execute his plan and I wonder how successful he would have been should men actually see what was happening.

But no, this second man had murdered through the hands of all the other men. He murdered first their reality. In telling them lies, he murdered what was! The horror! He murdered their minds, their knowledge, their consciousness. All through deception, all through smiles and false assurances and constantly ducking and moving away to avoid being seen. And when he got control of their reality, he got control of them. It was as if he was behind the wheel and only under the appearance of the senses were the other men driving. He had possessed them, one may put it. And with that, he could work in them, through them and should they come to enjoy the lie, with them. A conspiracy, a partnership of lying.

The second man was a liar and now, a murderer. He was a man of action. Those vibrations of the lie that run through all of time are his footsteps and his cackles.

The man who told me this story never got to finish it. He was interrupted by something that had dawned on him and I was left in mystery and despair over its conclusion. And I have been forced to accept that maybe there was no conclusion. Or maybe the man just didn't know it. Or maybe he did, but didn't want to tell me. Or maybe everything he told me was itself already a conclusion.

You see, I was left to wonder that day many things, but none more striking than the resonance of the story the man had told me. It seemed like something I had always known, and yet, when I confront the details of the story, I was compelled to dwell on whether or not the man who told me the story was telling the truth, or whether I had myself twisted his words around. Everything seems to have a cloud of uncertainty around it, even the seemingly innocent exchange of words between myself and that man that day. I have often wondered if that man was a man of the first man or a man of the second or a man of neither or someone in between. I have often wondered whether the man that day was himself the first man or the second man. I have wondered if the man just had an unusual imagination or if he knew the greatest secret in the world.

From that day, I have wondered myself who I was.

I was left in silence that day by the man with these parting words, words that seemed the only words I could really say were 'true', even if my times of greatest doubt of all other things. He said to me, and I pray that I have remembered them correctly, he said to me just before he left: “I can not live.”

no love?

thats not short

Thanks for the insight.

i know a liar.

he admits it. he's also a murderer, like the story, through the lying to others, and they committed the acts. he thinks he's pulled the big lie, and that's so funny when he gets anyone else to help with it. one of his targets called his bluff, willingly moving through each lie in full knowledge of it, humiliating him, taking humiliation too, but still strong inside with self-pride, because evil cannot touch those of pure heart.

and that is what enrages the liar.

Who is they, as in "they committed the acts"?

The last part of the next to last sentence seems confused. One of his targets is the subject, and then it says still strong inside with self-pride, which would seem to refer to the subject. But then you say "because evil cannot touch those of pure heart." And that seems disconnected from the meaning up to that point...

they - the ones he lied to who in turn murdered inadvertently.
subject (target) - the one still pure of heart, untouched by liar's evil intent.