Alpine Liqueur

Sweet on the tongue and stronger than it tastes.

Génépi is an Alpine liqueur that’s sweet on the tongue and stronger than it tastes. Last night I was drinking Génépi with a couple friends and words were falling out of my mouth almost uncontrollably—Génépi was acting kind of like a truth serum, which makes sense because it tastes a little bit like an herbal remedy.

The impulse to lie seems to come from one of two (or a combination of both) places. One is an intensive to deceive and the other is a desperate attempt at feeling like something, anything, is private—and maybe because it feels like the only way for anything to be sacred is for something to be private. 

After a night of Alpine liqueur, I fell asleep and dreamt about drinking truth serum. In my dream I couldn’t stop saying things, “true” things, and everybody around me began to despise me. It was interesting and disorienting and maddening that my truthful dream-self was incapable of understanding what was true.

I think most meaningful lies are lies of omission.

Lies of omission can be at once both a conservation of truth and an avoidance of truth.

There also things that can be true until spoken, and then they become untrue, at which point the truth is both truth and lie.

‘I love you’ can be true, but if the confessed-to makes the confessor feel unloved, a true (even the most true) 'I love you’ can quickly turn into a true ‘I hate you’. 

Speculation is insanity. There is only truth and faith.

“I told myself that religious truth cannot be attained by one man alone, but only reveals itself to a union of all people, united through love. In order for the truth to be attained there must be no separation; and for there to be no separation we must love and make peace with those who are not in agreement with us. Truth manifests itself as love, and therefore if you do not respect the rituals of the church you destroy love. And in destroying love you deprive yourself of the possibility of knowing truth.”

Tolstoy

Seeking truth and seeking meaning are very similar. Searching for signs of the sacred and falling in love are very similar.

“Love is finding the other’s existence miraculous.”

A friend of mine

Things as ephemeral as feelings cannot be true or untrue outside of a given instant, it cannot last as true long enough to get from brain to mouth to the ear of another without being in a different moment, a moment in which it may no longer be true, and if it is it’s not still true, it’s a whole other moment in which it is true again.

What does it say about me, that a dream in which I compulsively told the truth was a nightmare?

I woke up with a pit in my stomach…

Fearing truth and seeking truth work together to conserve faith.

There is a seduction to deception, there is something so erotic about secrecy, about privacy, the lie of omission is a particularly sensual act.

…truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors that have become work-out and deprived of their sensuous force, coins that have lost their imprint and are now no longer seen as coins but as metal. We still don’t know where the drive to truth comes from, for we have hitherto heard only of the obligation to be truthful, which society imposes in order to exist—that is, the obligation to use the customary metaphors, hence, morally expressed, the obligation to lie in accordance with a fixed convention, to lie in droves in a style binding for all.

Nietzsche

Sometimes lies can be more true than truths.

There is a fine line (no line?) between sensual and sacred.

I have asked this question before: Do I have an easy time lying because I question the concept of fixed truth or do I question the fundamental concept of truth to justify lying? It’s fun to question whether we’re philosophizing to justify our lives, or living by the philosophies we create, but I don’t think it really matters.

If a magic truth serum were real, it would fall under the weight of its own contradictions and turn those poisoned with it into mutes.