The sky this morning was so blue it appeared artificial; that is, the pure unblemished blue that a child or student might paint before being instructed that it appears artificial and needs a touch of cloud or variation from on high to horizon in order to signal the eye of the viewer just what it is they are seeing; a need to lie in order to tell the truth, that it was blue; but this morning it was blue, from tree line to the blinding sun, in every direction, so deep it appeared to be a substance more than air; not dark or light but simply blue; a liquid perhaps; certainly not as fragile as a mere gas. This is the sort of fact that makes a day, but which we will often deny as too plain to say. You can’t talk about it. What more can be said? It’s not exactly weather, which is our interpretation of the atmosphere. How do we describe it without moving on to some more interesting topic, such as, it was hot yesterday, or that it will be hotter tomorrow? It might rain, you know. Actually, you never know.
And then, one day, you wake up and see a sky so blue you are breathless. What do you say to that? Well, then you talk about yesterday, or perhaps that time once when you were a kid.
The important part of this disquisition is that we lie to tell the truth. We do that every day. It is habit. It is expected. We interpret what is said to us in ways that recreate a truth to fit our own view of things, or describes what we think the listener wants to hear. We elaborate detail, or not, depending on what we want to say. But we seldom say, the sky is blue. Not since we were very young. And when we do, it is because we are impatient to move on to some more important mater—meanwhile we have missed the greatest event of the day, when the sky was blue. What a joy that was. What a feeling it made in us.
We learn to lie to tell the truth. We are all unreliable narrators in our own lives. It is only moments later, after we have filtered an experience with nouns and verbs and adjectives and adverbs, that we try to explain what was right in front of our senses.
Now, this is not saying that all truth is lost. No at all. It is saying that our engagement with the universe that surrounds us is subjective. It must be, in order for us to survive. It is saying that society is the intersection of hundreds or thousands or millions of subjective interpretations. And that is what is true. Not some achromatic designation. A machine might give that a number, but it is useless for any human interpretation. The achromatic number given to a ‘plain’ blue, by a machine is not the color you see. The machine cannot see. It can only match. You do, however, have that sense and can designate whatever number or name you wish to what that machine can only grade from what it was once programmed to label by yet another single human being.
Our success as human beings is directly related to our ability to lie. That, if we live alone, is how we interpret what we see or hear or feel, and is far different than if we live with someone else. And that is different than it would be if we lived with four or five, or a dozen…I can’t imagine what it would be like to live with a dozen. A small family is enough confusion. Just walking on a city street gives me a social vertigo. A sort of agoraphobia. I might be more disagreeable than I normally am, or affable, depending on the weather. If the sky is blue, I might even be dumbstruck. Gobsmacked is the current word in use. But it is just possible, for some brief moment, I would not lie.