Meditations. About Secrets

Sing your life
La la la la la,
Sing your life
La la la la la

Recently, for a reason, the painter and I were discussing a friend of ours, who I will call Friend. The painter was noticing, suddenly, that in many ways we haven't come to know Friend well though we really, really like him. This is because, while Friend will gladly talk to you endlessly and gracefully about lots of interesting and distracting subjects, you will realize, if you think back, not one word will have touched any of the personal life he must be carrying around inside his head. I mean, right? Smart, funny people have an interior life, that's a given, isn't it? Friend tells stories, he is a Storyteller, but all his stories are of other people's lives or of slight, charming, wandering moments of no import, funny to hear and cleverly told. These things being what they are, at the end of the day you don't know him as well as you might if things were different, if, for example, he ever came clean about having any personal likes and dislikes, problems, trials, doubts, stuff of that sort. The apprehension of not knowing was startling, unbalancing, to the painter, a surprise to him that, when closely examined, Friend was so closed, so private. The painter sort of assumes he has come to know people by occupying the same room with them and talking to them about himself.

Sing your life.
Walk right up to the microphone
And name
All the things you love
All the things that you loathe.
Sing your life.

*****

Another day I was talking to another friend who, perhaps in small part because she is a girl, a smart girl, a beautiful, creative girl, a broken-and-repaired girl, an embrace-the-world-and-then-stagger-home-to-sleep-it-off-with-a-fever girl, a girl grown so used to alone days she must at all times hear the beating of her capable, breakable heart, perhaps because she is such a girl, wants awfully to be known and needs deep knowing of others by turns but this is hard, hurts her. I watch as she breaks herself against being known, as if a sharp and dangerous rock stood between us two, a rock only she could run against since only she can perceive it. Strangely one-sided for me to watch, like seeing a person miming an inability to connect. She throws lovely words out desperately, hopelessly civilized, utterly alone. Our talk is important to me, too, and she makes me sleep hard because I have to think so much. I send her ornately worked messages in corked bottles borne by carrier pigeons. On this day our words, I can't remember how, turned to claims of secrets held and kept. When I told her I was a secretkeeper from of old and she told me she was one too, we were not trying to gain the other's trust for sharing but trying to one up each other. We both assured the other that the secrets we each carried, secrets we would never tell, no matter what, were huge, staggering, more impressive, in fact, than any paltry, token confidence the other might carry in her heart's pockets. It became a game, a pointless game since by its rules neither one could put forth evidence, could clinch, could score. We played with gusto, anyway, both assuring the other that one day when it all came out, one day when all was known, the weight and strangeness of our hoarded mysteries, the careful guarding we had given, would vindicate us before the other and each would be brought to confess the other had born the greater burden. Now, we are Christians, believing in an afterlife, a judgment, rewards and retribution, but why, I wondered suddenly, do we both hold the deep and unexamined belief that on some day all will be made known? Every silent, hoarded confidence spoken, hung in the bright open air for all the world's ears to hear? That each little lead secret people have lobbed at us, here, catch and don't you ever tell, all of them rolling weighty and separate in our souls, each secret which we obediently lugged about ever after, listing from them, sinking, straightening step by step, would one day be spoken and shed? Shouted from the rooftops, as the scripture says. Do I believe in that God, I wondered? A God who would one day look at His divine timepiece and intone, "IT IS TIME. SPILL," and everyone would split, heave, cleanse, gush out all the things they promised never, ever to say? Do we take up a forever-secret with a half-formed notion that this ugly or lovely little thing sits in our hearts only on a hundred year lease and one day will be flung free to find its own way, good or ill, to its true owner, whoever and however far removed from the original teller that may be? Are we willing to salt down the secrets because we bargain with ourselves, alright, this for now, but one day...
And won't they all be surprised.

Make no mistake my friend,
All of this will end
So sing it now.

*****

Secret people all around me, never saying what they really think, except those crazy few, harrying us all, trumpeting their whims and passions, fancies and follies, orders and half-cooked, half-cocked notions, poems and philosophies no one outside their originator's heads should ever, ever, hear.

I watch a woman issue orders, marshal her dinner guests, form us up into troops of fun-havers, and I think, ooh. And then, is this me? Am I this person? I have parties, I run things, I'm a director, for crying out loud. Is this me? I could ask my friends, of course, and of course that would be just too much to ask of friends, they couldn't tell me. Am I like that, I could ask and I can hear the answer, good heavens, no, do you think if you were we would...

Do you think if you were we would tell you?

It'd be a secret.

Do you like my hat?
Does this make me look fat?
Do you like him?
Is she pretty?
Have you read anything good?
Don't you love this song?
I made up the recipe, isn't it fantastic?
Does that sound crazy?
Did you like...
Have you met...
Do you remember...
Would you be worried...
Would you have time to...


Lies I tell.
Truths I will never speak.

"It's like this," I said once, to a man, "it's always like this. No one ever says what they really think or we'd just solve things and there'd be no drama, no texture to life. Every Jane Austen novel turns on this point, no one ever saying what they really mean, what they actually think. That's where plot comes from." It was ok to say this to him, he knew Jane Austen novels. And it's true, what I said to him. In books for small children, events move plot, things start happening for better or worse when one or more parent is removed, when the shield parents wield against plot both in life and in art is riven. The moment, however, we step out of childhood into an adult world it will be our words that kidnap us, ensorcel us, dangle us helplessly bound and impotent. My daughter comes home from high school seething at a tiny melodrama, not a teacup tragedy, more of a sports drink drama, spinning out from a girls' choice dance and what came of it; one girl who gave a certain answer to be "nice," and, disliking the consequences, became nasty. "You should have told the truth," my daughter recounts herself saying, "or shut up about it. If you're going to be "nice," you have to keep being "nice" all the way through." Sounds like she speaks her mind, doesn't it? But that's an illusion; the drama spins out and out and my daughter is also piqued that she herself was "nice" and went along with someone else's plan which was rotten, went sour, left all the girls holding sour, rotten feelings and tangled in it all, not able to speak the truths that would free them, send them all crashing into reality. You should have told the truth, or shut up about it.

Others sang your life
But now is a chance to shine
And have the pleasure of
Saying what you mean
Have the pleasure of
Meaning what you sing.

*****

I am the oldest sister and of the many specific functions I have held among the sisters, secretkeeper was never one, with a single, marked exception. Not as a confidant for the older two, they never told me anything and that became a lifelong conversational setting. I am not, in any group, church, school, business or social, one who knows. Ask somebody else, there's always someone who knows, who's heard the latest. No, among the sisters I was only entrusted with a specific set of secrets. They used me as a testing ground for medical issues. It went like this.
A sister would approach and, by way of conversational opener, request that I keep an unnamed secret and never, ever, tell. "Suzanne, there's something I have to show you and you have to promise you won't tell Mom." My automatic internal reservations flared even as I gave the requisite promise. The fact that I had those reservations probably completely explains why they only ever shared health-related secrets with me; I truly could not (can not) be trusted, I really would tell if things were bad, and while that would preclude any confidences touching moral or legal concerns, in a backwards way it was just what the doctor ordered, if a doctor were required. "OK, I promise not to tell."
"Do you swear?"
"Yes, I swear, of course I swear. Show me," and the sister would present the owie. Most of these just got a pass and a caution to wash it with soap and I never told what I had seen, just as promised. No one would have cared, so I never had to tell. Some, however, like the large, yellow abscess above the eye tooth or the jellybean sized and shaped black and purple cabochon on the bottom of a foot the sister said was a "sliver," produced instant, unconsidered, unapologetic breach of contract. "MOM," turning from the shocked and outraged (heavy on the rage) sister, "MOM. C'mere." Medical intervention followed, with the sister screaming from over or under parental arms and shoulders, "YOU PROMISED! I'LL NEVER TELL YOU ANYTHING EVER AGAIN!!!!"
I had told, I explained again and again after the trauma was cleaned up, because I had to. "It was bad. Mom and Dad had to know," I pled to the back of a sister's head that would never, ever, forgive me. And never did forgive, but most assuredly told me the next time there was real worry for life and limb, knowing I would do just as I had done before. You always told, they still say, grown up and sort of laughing and sort of mad. Yes, I did, and look at you now, with all your fingers and toes and teeth still attached.
I am still one people come to when they are scared for life, and I still make them tell, when I think it's bad.

*****

Once, in a hostel in Liverpool, Leah and Zoe were too short to be real people. Their heads were below the range of the light sensors in the showers. We didn't know this at first of course, didn't know it till the screaming started in the shower after the automatic timer had ticked away the grace period since it had last sensed anybody large enough to be real and total darkness engulfed them, and then we had a tough time figuring out what was happening only to them. The moment anyone else (everyone else was taller) entered the bathroom their superior height accidentally ended the crisis. Hard to know, when we did get it sorted out, how to help them; they were flatly uninterested in taller company during their ablutions. In the end we had to leave them to shift as best they could, screaming (which didn't help but which relieved their feelings), jumping and waving their arms when the dark overtook them, defiantly asserting their reality. Too small too be sensed mechanically. Secret people.

*****

In a Chinese restaurant I make everyone read their fortunes out loud (make them, I really am that terrible sort of bossy, arranging woman and no one is ever going to save me from myself because it's a stupid secret) till I open mine last. Everyone is laughing and teasing so when I see the tiny words there, words that drill me and expose me and reveal me, no one notices. And since I cannot read this secret out loud (does God control fortune cookie fortunes? and if so, did He think this was some kind of funny?) I do my best dissolving act, which is very, very good. Some people think they are good at dissolving; I truly excel. No one can see me anymore and no one notices since I was the one making the reading happen and no one else cared. I take the charged paper home and hide it.
Secret.

Don't leave it all unsaid
Somewhere in the wasteland of your head, oh
Head, oh, head, oh, head, oh,
Sing your life.

*****

The painter and I sing in the car. We work at it, hard. Or rather he does, making harmonies for himself to twine around my melodies, since that's all I can ever hear. Don't toss me a note and expect me to toss it back, it'll just land on the ground where we'll both regard it sadly and feel disappointed in each other. Sing a phrase so I can catch the melody, till I'll be able to sing along and then alone and you can go do your harmony thing and I'll be solid in the one thing I can do. Only this will never happen because I'll never, never sing with you. Singing with people, where they can hear me, isn't natural to me anymore. Every child sings its way into the world with a brave and natural voice but not every child grows to be a conversant, singing adult. The painter was the first person I ever tried to sing with, rather than alongside of, and it wasn't easy. Truthfully, he was awful about it. This was long ago, back when he was specializing in awful. Though things are better now I learned then that singing is a place of peril and danger. So, ever one to slay all my dragons silent and solitary by my lonesome, I no longer hazard it, no longer sing in front of people. I sing alone and alone with the painter. For all anyone will ever know of it, our work with words and notes might never have been, since, thanks to me, no one ever hears it. If you catch me unawares, if you lull me into confidence, if you dissolve completely into a background blur, maybe, maybe. Oddly, funnily but not funny, the person most upheaved by my locked down voice is the painter, he wants to sing for people, sure they want to listen. His frustration, gently expressed nowadays, feels very distant to me, very removed. This is the bed you made, I think, and you must lie in it. Odd, too, that he sleeps there so much more easily than I do.

So sing it now,
All the things you love,
All the things that you loathe,
Sing your life.

*****

Here's the truth about Friend. I nearly never became real friends with him because of all this not-truth-telling. He was nice enough from the start, a friend of the painter and a great guy, but not for me, not my style. Too much of that bland niceness spreading out in waves and billows, like thick butter over every food, like boring, sheer curtains softening every view. A relationship where I'd have to do all the serious honesty work, all the heavy lifting. No grit, no tooth to his conversation, just big happy smiles, genial, appreciative laughter and pleasant agreeableness. Who needs that? Nothing to get a hold of so I was always sliding off, slipping away into not having this conversation. Oops! Sorry, forgot you were still in the room. Of course I'd never voice any of this. Never challenge, never ask if there was anything he didn't like, didn't agree with, wasn't amused by. I'd walk my distance secretly, my dishonesty as great as his, no one ever saying anything real, anything from inside. Don't want to raise any eyelids, the painter said once, misspeaking and making wonderful, terrible meaning. Double portions of politeness all round, another helping for my friend here, this one's on me. The two of us, ships slipping away, coasting by, unchallenged, unhailed, in a sea of oily unreality. Where's the tragedy in that? Happens every day, in fact, it's what happens. No monster storms threatening off my bow to send me seeking or offering aid, no sprung water barrels forcing me to send up a flare and I'm not a pirate, grappling, boarding, claiming, gaining the intimacy born of violence. At the last possible moment, just before he disappears over the horizon, just before I fall asleep forever and miss him entirely, Friend mentions, through a toothy grin, how he dislikes certain of his relatives. Crunch, grind, shudder and we have run aground.
Land ho!
Hmph. Now you tell us.

Saved.

But before you go
Can you look at the truth?
You have a lovely singing voice,
A lovely singing voice.
And all of those
Who sing on key
They stole the notion
From you and me
So sing your life.

Morrissey
Sing Your Life (slightly rearranged)




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