Conrad writes, in a book enamoured of the darkness its protagonist encounters, “You know I hate, detest, and can’t bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appals me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies, — which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world — what I want to forget. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting into something rotten would do. Temperament, I suppose.”
Strange that the lie be detested for revealing a death which is present in the world, but would rather be forgotten. Strange because that forgetting would seem at odds with the truth implicitly linked to life in this statement. Truth though in this moment—I’ve just paused the film where Lance and another surfer are splitting across the waves, and falling over at the panic of gunfire—is not a discernable object, a fact. Rather it is something enacted, and in this richer sense of the term direct utterances are not impartial to questions of life and death. Accurate statements about things that we are compelled to discern in getting through the muddle before us are really only so much jargon, but necessary if we’d like to tell the difference between a needle and a haystack. The empirically true exists in the world— as a needle in being anything comprehensible cannot also be a haystack.
The truth of thought free unto itself and without arbitrary constraint implies the truth of the particular. If one were to say a needle is indeed a haystack, it is difficult to imagine how thought would proceed freely when faced with falsified relations. Thought becomes turgid, and the idea of thought is here inextricable from the dexterity of truth. Thought and truth are met in a third term, freedom, which is precisely what can suffer from an abrupt mortality. Truth does not exist in particular statements of fact, though it relies on them. Rather truth is an openness of thought toward its own process, whereby comprehension forms the mind in working over the world. Thought becomes the world. Where thought cannot comprehend a moment of its own relatedness to social existence by virtue of a lie, the world itself falters in its comprehensibility. Conrad is here displaying his most naked allegiance with reason.
It wouldn’t be useful to call lies irrational. More fundamentally the lie acts as closure of a social relation, enacts conflict, forms death, and surrenders the freedom of the liar to a bare necessity. The lie betrays its utterance as beholden to a world it cannot, or is unwilling to, fully comprehend. The lie finds itself at the limit of thought’s ability to form its relation with the world— instead the world has given the liar the nub. There is a fundamental inversion here, in that the liar presumes a freedom from necessity in deriding its engagement by lying. Yet in so far as the lie is necessarily a lie to another body or thought, it comes to betray the freedom of its thinker by recognising the dominance of that thought over itself. The lie is given to the superego so as to dodge its punishment. The superego though is ceded its terrain precisely in the fettering of free thought which is the lie.
Conrad isn’t talking about being lied to, but about lying. Truth is not uttered in discernable particulars, but lives in the aporia of a thinking never in itself completed. Even true particulars can be stifling, but they remain in accord with the possibility of transformation. The lie stops, tastes rotten, and to thought is death. In my edition of Heart of Darkness, first read in a mental institution , and given to me by a friend who probably thought it too odd for him but fitting my predicament, there is only one passage underlined—on the same page as the quote that begins this entry. To the best of my knowledge it is not my mark, but it may convey something of the loneliness of a truth thrown back upon itself before the lie:
‘. . . No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence, — that which makes its truth, its meaning – its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream – alone. . . .’
