abandoning reason and suspending sense

I hope to lay bare the ridiculousness of the issues we are dealing with in this course; how all these notions are at their heart built on fictions that people have bent over backward trying to maintain.

White lies can seem harmless, we make up an explanation, something simple, something neat, something that sounds agreeable.  We tell these white lies and like all lies, they stare back at us, their well meaning parents, and make us do and say things that we may have thought otherwise quite ludicrous.  We pull a tooth out from under a pillow and replace it with a coin, things that go bump in the night, clumsy lies in clean white smocks.  We told a tale to humour ourselves, but now it has us fishing in our pockets, rendering between the sheets what belongs to Caesar.  White lies are pleasant, they are spun like spider’s silk across the map, writing fiction so believably onto what is real.  A realist’s map would describe what is real; elevation, a road, a body of water, a cemetery, a swamp.  When the map is under the poet’s pen; the landscape may be crowded with myths and delusions; borders and boundaries.  

When we share a myth and all behave as if it is a reality, does that make it real?  If we repeat to ourselves our precious white lies long enough, will they, as Adolf Hitler declared, become true?  Are we past the part of civilisation's course when facts had to prove themselves under human scrutiny and the laws of nature held sway?  Have the leaders of the free world finally freed the world from all things cold and hard, have we escaped the glare of the enlightenment?

It helps to have consequences and symptoms, coins beneath pillows if you will, to make the fantasy jump off the page, to make the borders jump from being spider webs on otherwise trustworthy maps to being real, impregnable, however intangible, slashes on the face of the planet.  Who could doubt that the borders are real, provided such consequences garnered in crossing them?  So we tell the white lie that there is a line in the sand that separates I from you and we make the Isolation and yousolation seem real by sending you back to your side and bringing I back to I side.  You can stay in the third world, and I may stray into the world as I see fit.  Thus our mythical narrative goes, our shared fantasy, our white lie.