The Sichuan Broadcasts

  I can't stand lies. That's irrational, pathological. It's a built in fixture of my mental set. I can't tell a straightforward lie either. It took me years to learn how to lie by omission. And, a more subtle art, how to lie by telling the truth, which is a very valuable skill in the sex business. At least when you don't toil at the lower end of the industry, because at the higher end, where you build a clientele, they always end up by falling in love with you, and ask you the fateful question: "Don't you love me?". And if you answer "Of course, I do", it sounds just like "I need some more money". And you don't get any more money. I wanted the money. And I couldn't say that anyway. I can't. I just can't lie, I am disabled in that respect. But if I'd say "No, I don't" only with the right tone of angry impatience that denotes some inner distress, they would ineluctably believe that I was falling for them, but because they were old and ugly, couldn't yet admit it to myself, and they would always hear "I am madly in love with you". I would get more money.

  The innumerable precise little truths of science make up the enormous body of that unfathomable Behemoth, so placidly gone loose from growth exponential that nobody will ever be able to master it anymore, Knowledge. But they don't add up, they never have added up to the great Leviathan, Truth. All the same, the unutterable sentence, "There is no Truth", is uttered, and there is Truth. But Truth can't be but one and unique, and it is many. Truth has divided itself, and multiplied. The Systems stand eternal, mutually exclusive nevertheless coexistent, each one perfectly complete with ontology, logic, epistemology, politics, ethics, aesthetics, and refutation, explicit or latent, of all the others. At first, one is at a loss. Then, the more one wanders from the summit of a metaphysical intuition to the next, which impossibly stands in the same place, not lower nor higher, the more one is amazed that the world should be seen in so many differing manners, and life lived in so many diverging ways. The more one marvels that the magmatic shivering of thought should never end.

  Could it be, since a moody truth can mislead better than a lie, that truth is better told with funny lies?