"knot it up a bit more"

Al Lewis -- Grandpa -- in "The Munsters" passed away a few weeks back. Dan Barry wrote about his amazing life and the questions raised since his death. In Hey, Whose Grandpa Didn't Tell Some Tales?, Barry wrote that Al Lewis said

he appeared in Olsen and Johnson's 'Hellazoppin',' the Broadway hit of 1938. He said that he championed the cause of the Scottsboro Boys, nine black teenagers who were accused of raping two white women in a profoundly flawed case. All this while working on a doctorate in child psychology, which he was said to have earned a Columbia University in 1941 - or 1949 . . . Lewis also said that he was a merchant seaman who had to abandon a torpedoed ship not once, but twice. 'You don't know what it's like to be in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean,' he told The Shadow, an alternative newspaper, in 1997. 'There is no more lonely feeling. You see nothing, nothing, nothing.' Maybe this was true. Maybe Mr. Lewis did meet Charlie Chaplin at John Garfield's house, as he claimed. Maybe he did ride shotgun while escorting W.E.B DuBois to the burial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Maybe he did retain Charles Manson as a baby sitter.

And maybe he did keep a blog where he recorded his sexploits with men and women and wrote in great graphic detail about how hard his cock was; how the women swooned for it; how the men shrank from it; how the sun rose daily on new orifices and he only relented from his torrid pace to mainline Redbull; update his HIV test; and pen a few digital lines for his legions of diehard fans, masturbating at his every word.

And would all these fans be shocked and dismayed if Julius and Ethel didn't actually have a three-way with Grandpa Al, like he claimed? Would they demand his disinterment so that he could be flayed on Oprah, James Frey-like, for daring to besmirch the Blogger-lympic Flame of Truth.

In a veritable M.C. Escher print of irony, where life imitates art imitates life imitates art, there I was talking about truth in "blogging" and blogging the "truth" at the NYC Perverts Salo(o)n. And then a few nights later I had just begun a post on this very topic; the guts of which were:

I am of the opinion that our society has made a fetish of truth to the detriment of storytelling. We live in a world where the journalist has replaced the author as the principal voice to which we listen, and I think we suffer as a result.

Then I woke, not only to learn that Grandpa Al's fabulous stories have been exactly that - fabulous -- but Julia Glass in the Op-Ed section chimes in with "In the month-long fray over James Frey, one question has gone largely unexamined: Why do readers suddenly seem to prefer the so-called truth to fiction?"

Why indeed?

Here's the question that sends the masses howling like Grandpa's son-in-law, "Does it matter?"

Does it matter to your cock or your clit if your masturbatory fodder doesn't have the swear-to-tell-the-truth-the-whole-truth-and-nothing-but-the-truth seal of approval? When we read about sexblogger and sexbloggerette and their legions of sexblogger coquests, aren't we indulging in fantasy? Don't we project ourselves into those stories and imagine ourselves the cocksmen and cuntswomen of which we read? It's already a lie that we're bringing ourselves to pleasure with our own hands, while pretending to live someone else's sex life. It's a lie in which we're all deliciously complicit.

If our orgasms are true, what matters the truth of what made us wet or hard in the first place?

Oh, go on. Take the next logical step. How often are our face-to-face sexual encounters rife with something other than the truth? The stories we tell ourselves to get through the night -- or to extricate ourselves from the night. The stories that get us into bed -- or out of bed. Could it be that our fascination with truth at all costs is an unwillingness to be honest with ourselves about our own deceits? Would we be better to step away from the black and white of truth=good, fiction=bad and enjoy the best stories we can, regardless?

Wouldn't you rather give yourself up to the story? As Ms. Glass puts it:

"When I give myself over to a good novel, I surrender to the truths fashioned from one writer's heart, mind and soul. I do not waste a nanosecond wondering whether what I'm reading "really happened."

But she's talking about the relative the merits of fiction and non-fiction. She's not talking about someone writing fiction and pretending it's truth. There is something morally objectionable about lying, isn't there? There is a line that the James Freys of this world go beyond -- exceeding the limits of memoir and creating events out of whole cloth, and that is just wrong.

And you know what? You're absolutely correct.

But the question is "what are you going to do about it?" Do you throw out the baby with the bathwater? Do you squander your own growth as a person due to these stories because you find out that is "all" they are?

I came out as a blogger because I read blogs that made me think I could write about my life. If those blogs turn out to have shades of truth and tints of lie, that doesn't change the empowerment I have felt from putting my own words out there. I am grateful for the words that have helped me feel confident about expressing myself to the blogosphere, and have led to sexual decisions and experiences that otherwise I would not have tried or been exposed to. If those words are exposed as fanciful or fabulous, for me that doesn't detract from the paths I have taken as a result. Or to shift the metaphor, in this case, it matters nothow poisonous the tree is, if the fruits are that delicious.

"Fiction writers work tremendously hard to make things that are patently untrue seem as true as possible. 'Let me tell you a story that isn't true,' beckons the fiction writer, 'and I will show some of the truest things you'll ever know.'"

Thank you, Ms. Glass. That's got to be the right answer. The only answer. It's the story, stupid.

Or as Jeanette Winterson wrote in Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit:

"Of course that is not the whole story, but that is the way with stories; we make them what we will. It's a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained, it's a way of keeping it all alive, not boxing it into time. Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don't believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It's all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat's cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more. History should be a hammock for swinging and a game for playing, the way cats play. Claw it, chew it, rearrange it and at bedtime it's still a ball of string full of knots."

Freddie Mercury had it right too:

Is this the real life?
Is this just fantasy?

Knot it up a bit more, my friends. Knot it up a bit more.