The Taste of the Lie

The taste of the lie was good and sweet on my tongue

                     Yehudi Amichai, Israeli poet

I’m sure Homer felt the same way. Of course, there probably was no Homer. He/she was likely a scribe or select group of scribes setting down on paper the agreed-upon lie (myths) which came from a chorus of troubadours or mad poets singing of tall tales and legends from a millennium back in time. These were the lies that spoke truths.

Those in ancient times who lent their ears knew they were receiving wisdom through metaphor, not to be taken literally. I expect that other gatherings also knew the stories were parables of a shared ethos. And so it was that the tribe called Hebrews cohered.

In an oral culture, my guess is that information was passed along in broad terms with an accepted disregard for precise detail. Each happening was embellished and gods were introduced to be the embodiment of events or behaviors otherwise unaccountable. Small truths became big truths at the end of the telephone tree.

Could it be that the liar in our midst is a man of prehistory? His private delusions, which are all self-serving fabrications, are received not literally but as some sort of ventriloquism of the aggrieved followers' complaints and vague aspirations.

Just as a pre-literate society had no concept of literal truth so too is today’s post-literate herd of sheep heedless of fact-based actuality. We are witness to a congregation of the lost. He grunts, they grunt. He mocks, they mock, and it is multiplied by the megaphone of social media. When they chant his curses of an imagined threat, they don’t realize they are vilifying projections from his own psyche. His words are swords, barbed on his tongue, bitter on our ears.         

The line from Amichai’s poem comes out of the mouth of a ten-year-old boy. I went to another synagogue, he says, enjoying the taste of his lie. It is the precursor of a budding imagination, with a fragrance of the faraway. When his father dies, in the poem, he return's the lie, I've gone to another life.

When the sociopath speaks, he is either incapable of perceiving reality or deliberately distorting it to aggrandize himself. If he had written the Greek tragedies, they would have all been about Zeus, not Achilles or Odysseus, and certainly not about Penelope.