An Elephant of One's Own

Onomatoplop! Picking yourself up and looking around, you notice immediately that the coconut hairs, here in the shade of the letterbox, form thickets around you. Houses always look like that, purifying and punifying and much too big, when you've just been posted into them: thing is to get off the welcome mat, always a dead giveaway. People are standing around, there down the hall. Finding yourself to be much, much smaller than any of them feels like nakedness: but hastily hitching your shame onto your shoulder, for a makeshift parrot, you mingle anyway, all foot of you. "Sorry, that was my makeshift parrot interrumping. You were saying?" You had just attempted a joke. It would have gurgled down well enough out there, in the street, among accustomed slops: but a moment ago's cool rebuffeting, now five fathoms deep beneath the rim of a wineglass, reveals you are no longer among slops, which is sort of what you wanted. Isn't it? You who sort-of would not be amo...

"Tell the truth - or at least don't lie," enjoins J Peterson, in his latest poetry collection  12 Elegies for the Mass Funeral of the Bleedin Obvious . I agree. Readers of this blog (that still-empty set) will have noticed I take this commandment rather seriously. I don't know what he finds to say as a gloss to his version of the age-old injunction (haven't bought the book, nor plan to) but if it was me, I'd probably find it useful to examine, one by one, all the ways in which people are tempted to lie and the (emotional) reasons they have for doing so. Also, as an addendum, the reasons why some of us are unable to tell the truth about certain painful things in our own experience, and, so as not to lie, have to settle for just keeping those things under wraps until we die. That too. One of the forms of lying I'd mention is the one exhaustively picked apart by Orwell in Politics and the English Language , viz. letting the pret-a-porter cliche steer your t...