lmf@drutx.UUCP (FullerL) (01/18/85)
Lying is done with words, and also with silence.
When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for
more truth around her.
To lie habitually, as a way of life, is to lose contact with the
unconscious. It is like taking sleeping pills, which confer
sleep but blot out dreaming. The unconscious wants truth. It
ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.
An honorable human relationship -- that is, one in which two
people have the right to use the word "love" -- is a process,
delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved,
a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.
Women have often felt insane when cleaving to the truth of our
experience. Our future depends on the sanity of each of us, and
we have a profound stake, beyond the personal, in the project of
describing our reality as candidly and fully as we can to each other.
When someone tells me a piece of the truth which has been
withheld from me, and which I needed in order to see my life more
clearly, it may bring acute pain, but it can also flood me with a
cold, sea-sharp wash of relief. Often such truths come by accident,
or from strangers.
-- Adrienne Rich
from On Lies, Secrets, and Silence
Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying
My silences have not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.
But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made
to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made
contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world
in which we all believed, bridging our differences.
In the cause of silence, each one of us draws the face of her own
fear -- fear of contempt, of censure, or some judgement, or
recognition, of challenge, of annihilation. But most of all,
I think, we fear that very visibility without which we also
cannot truly live.
-- Audre Lorde
from The Cancer Journals