Secrets & Lies

"Do I have spinach in my teeth?" I asked, grinning absurdly, artificially.
"Yes, you do."
"I figured, I could see it in your face. I can read you like the back of my hand."
"No you can't."

She said it to me in a tone of someone desperately hoping to keep something a secret when in actuality, she has already felt the knowledge slip out. Secrets are dangerous and usually poorly kept. Certainly, we might keep the specific date of a certain tryst or that I ate a second piece of cake the night before confidential, but the feeling of deceit or self-loathing (or, conversely, self-satisfaction) is worn all over ourselves. I once told Miss Mary Depuydt that a tree at Gustavus was unhappy, which I then explained by describing its position between the sidewalk where it likely lacked proper saturation and was depleting its soil quality. It spoke to me, in early winter, in the quiet, slow, and contextual tongue of trees, one I managed to decipher on that evening walk.

People speak openly, too, even in the midst of keeping secrets or telling lies. My friend in this case supposed that she was not openly communicating some of the secrets she keeps even in the tone and concise diction. I do not know the dates or other attendees of events, but with our previous knowledge of one another, I am able to extricate various feelings, motives, and notions. Sometimes, when I realize that I am reading someone and share my knowledge with them, it is frightening; mostly it is awkwardly humorous. When I met Miss Bri Otis in our junior year at Gustavus, we conversed for an hour and a half, and then I reflected to her my insights and intuitions about her. I later heard from Miss Leigh Clanton that Bri returned home saying, "So, I met Caleb today," annunciating and emphasizing just so to Leigh such that she (and later I) burst out laughing. Bri has the ability to communicate astoundingly well, but generally people are attempting to communicate all of the time what they are thinking and feeling, which often includes what they want to avoid thinking and feeling if not, even more so, what they want others to avoid thinking and feeling.

When one is open to the unique languages we each use to express ourselves--each is rich in contextual nuance and idiosyncrasies--then real communication happens. Reading and writing ourselves and one another is a profound skill I have come to practice at times, times which are both illuminating and frightening in their vividness. I often strain for the accurate term or clearest metaphor for describing my sentimental or theoretical position, but that strain itself is part of routing the path to that position for another to visit, dwell in, and explore the vantage thereof. Strangely, I have witnessed powerful moments of clairvoyance in which I know a position and character of certain persons or events to come, with the acknowledgement that such a future is the result of the dependent arising of variables known and unknown, a future by no means guaranteed but, potentially, hoped for. This too is the result of reading what has been laid out; not necessarily the stars in the sky or the phase of the moon, but what these divine or universal notions might represent: the powerful celestial, physical, gravitational, radiating objects in our personal universes that govern the development of our lives.

When one keeps secrets, one must succeed at keeping secrets from oneself in order to keep them acutely away from others. This writing has come to encompass more than I had intended, but I wish to draw in its parts in closing. In a full-fledged attempt to keep not only the secret itself confidential, but the possibility of a secret unknown, the keeper of that knowledge must store it and forget it, allow it to gain dust in a hidden corner of one's mind. These secrets, like the old genealogies of powerful families or the unchecked gestations of diseases, often gain power through secrecy and can supplant the keeper; one becomes consumed by the effort of forgetfulness, the labor of undoing knowledge. Government secrecy--when portrayed well in fiction--is that which has been swept under the rug by the once powerful such that the present rulers are unaware; this is, in effect, what must be done to maintain secrets, but it is also the breeding ground for myths and deceit. I attempt to live without secrets, but recognize readily the importance of realms of knowledge, interpersonal consideration, and discretion; I will deny you knowledge but acknowledge that I am doing so to your face if it is inappropriate to expose the truth to you. This, I think of as honesty and with it, I like to think, I am able to see and read all the more clearly.