Here's something to do on a quiet summer night. Join the antisyllabist movement. We here have decided to make a game of communicating completely in monosyllables. It's not that we're against syllables, we're big fans. Huge fans of books and pens and keyboards and syllables. In fact, I have been planning for years that my pen name for my first novel (in which I tell the entire story that my mother once asked me not to write until after they were both dead) would be Polly S. Labesque.

However, just for the fun of it, communicating in only one syllable at a time, we have become much more creative with our body language and facial expression around here. It's like karaoke night, which we haven't had in a few years, but it used to be Tuesdays. We do a Patsy Cline's "She's Got You" that would bring tears to any cowboy's eyes.

So to join this movement is just to reconnect with that which makes us all and every one so brilliant, so gifted, so fucking lucky. Just for a few minutes. Or, as I was recently reminded, one could choose to return to the morose pleasure of wallowing in depression, guilt and shame, but what's it for? Is penance ever really served? Will we ever forgive ourselves? Guilt's a warm and comforting blanket we wrap ourselves in.

That's my theory, anyway. I think that depression has invaded our collective psyche like kudzu took the south after World War II (was it?) and I see people choking on it in every corner of my life. I want desperately to grab them, cut the vines free and pull them into the lightness of air but they resist! It's like trying to save a drowning man who doesn't really want to be saved. He calls for help and splashes about but fights your efforts to pull him out by trying to pull you in after him. So why is this sadness so cancerous, so contagious, so pervasive?

I present you my theory that depression is mired in guilt and shame. Some of it, of course, is that self-flagellation that we take to crescendo heights so that any reasonable person would say, "Enough already!" and help us rationalize and justify our way free. But some of this guilt and shame, I'm afraid to say, is well-deserved. We treat each other terribly, we humans.

Not counting the terrible violence that we at least have laws against, we could look in everyday society to the lying that occurs in the most intimate and most committed of relationships. I know people who lie as easily as they breathe and think nothing of it in terms of conscience. Or so one might think. They say that, they say there's no guilt and they can rationalize themselves into feeling downright saintly ("I was just trying to protect you") but it doesn't change the inner knowledge of what one has done. One cannot help but remember the pain of looking into the eyes of a loved one as the realization of a deceit is realized. We see it every day, everywhere we look. We provide each other endless opportunities to voyeurism in our daily lives and we watch the dramas unfold over and again on reality tv shows. We have become experts in guilt and shame.

What if we stopped lying to each other? What if you said today, I am never going to tell another lie and you stopped that addiction the way you quit cigarettes and the way you stopped drinking and the way you left him after he hit you that last time. You just quit cold-turkey. The lungs recover a smoking addiction ... organs often heal the damage of addictions and those blue bruises of our worst relationships fade with time. Can a conscience cleanse itself in the healing of recovery from the addiction of lying?

I believe it can. I know that living a completely honest life has brought me great heights of joy and depths of happiness. I see clearly the relationships between the lies and the feelings of depression of persons I love very much and know very, very well. I don't believe that emotional punishment or penance will really do any long-term good until and unless we stop offending ourselves. I'm not saying "offending God" and I'm not saying "offending the victims of our lies" because I want to highlight the needs of the precious victim who suffers most when we choose to live our lives in the framework of dishonesty: oneself. I know it sounds trite to say that we only hurt ourselves when we make that choice, but it could never be truer than in this context.

There's a big difference, of course between telling a lie and maintaining one's privacy. We've talked about that in other contexts. Here, remember that the difference is simple: withholding that which another has the RIGHT to know is dishonesty. Withholding information that another person has NO right to know is maintaining privacy. Determining the difference requires rigorous honesty in answering this question: If the shoe were on the other foot, would I have the right to know?

I'm absolutely NOT recommending that anyone go off any medication nor stop seeking their therapy. In fact, the experiment would be useless if you changed anything else at all but your insistence on telling the truth (and ask your therapist what s/he thinks of the theory). Try it for a month. Thou shalt not lie. And then see if it doesn't feel like you could swim a mile and laugh out loud at the stupidest monosyllabic words you ever heard.

-- "There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, which demanded that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same." --N.Mailer