I wonder what ‘most people’ means in the question today? For most people in the world neither know me or care to know me in any way at all and that is not necessarily because they make a point of excluding me or because there is nothing to know about me – although both of these things are possible explanations. How, though, would I ever know? For ‘most people’ are not known or even knowable to me – distributed across the world in space, even in the time to reach across that space might make really knowing them impossible, except on social media. And if I could speak to them, do I speak their language sufficiently well to say anything that mattered, and do they have a different cultural framework for understanding things or understanding their significance. Our diversities, in which I rejoice, are still also immediate barriers if neither of us have the will or effort to break through them and touch the surface being of the other until it is no longer other, but known, respected and perhaps even loved as a person. Thus so much for ‘most people’. In truth, how could anything about me be ‘known’ to them.
And then comes the hard part. That is when you ask yourself, do I want to be known and , if so, how much do I want to be known? Maybe I want and perhaps need to control what is known about me and what is not known, regulate it to ensure that what gets known is filtered by my need to appear in light they, and I find acceptable. Sometimes this is because of a persona or mask that individuals feel the need to play or wear (respectively) in a public or even intimate social situation – to sustain a role they enact in work or in each of their informal social groups (it might not be the same role in each or all of these groups) or even in front of the person who is supposed to know them best – a spouse or partner, for instance. The need to keep secrets and avoid transparency is a barrier to being known: one we often build sky high to avoid trespass or access to some ‘inner me’.
Sometimes the thing unknown about you is even unknown to yourself – one of those things that sometimes emerges and surprises you or which never ever emerges – the huge base of the iceberg that sunk the Titanic massively present but unseen below the water surface line. Some people go to extreme lengths to find that submerged element – the painter Philip Guston, for instance, who tried to see himself, a humanistic and atheist Jew, deeply aware of the Holocaust in Europe and of the activities of the Clan in the Southern towns of his youth, in the hood of a Klu Klux clan member:
Yet, if the question today means anything, it is about something about myself that is not known that I want to be known, that I feel is hidden because it has been unnoticed, or if noticed, ignored and become unconscious to people who find that knowledge of no significance to them. And implicitly it is about publicising that ‘fact’, as it seems to oneself, and advertising it in blatant form as widely as I can achieve. And social media of all kinds, including WordPress blogs, give these opportunities.
However, there is another attraction in the question – the notion that I have hidden virtues and/or talents and that I choose usually – though here I might just let them slip – to keep them secret or available only to a few. I think then that the prompt question today is REALLY about that contradiction. While it is self-evidently asking that you tell ‘the world’ something, it flatters you with the belief that, even if you hold back and still reserve that information to the few, there is in you that secret power, ready to appear in full form at an opportune time – as the Incredible Hulk or Superwoman.
We love secrets. Robert Browning wrote a great poem exposing this fact entitled Evelyn Hope, a title that ought to read I think, as it sounds, ‘Evil in Hope’ (the poem can be read in full here: https://allpoetry.com/Evelyn-Hope). In it a man of 48 (he tells us that in the poem) speaks privately to the corpse of a 16 year old girl laying on a bed in her room and tells her, a forbidden thing by many standards and across many boundaries, that he loves her, urging her to keep his secret. He tells her that thing that is ‘something most people don’t know’ about him. For that reason it is a chilling poem – literally and viscerally, for he either writes the secret down on a leaf of paper, as it is written on the page leaf bearing the poem in a public place, or imagines he is doing so in spirit writing on the leaf of a geranium that is ‘beginning to die’ too in the bedroom, and shuts it in her hand. That word ‘shut’ does a lot of creepy work, especially next to the ‘sweet cold’ hand in which it is shut – – cold because this is the hand of a corpse past the stage of rigor mortis.
So, hush,—-I will give you this leaf to keep:
See, I shut it inside the sweet cold hand!
There, that is our secret: go to sleep!
You will wake, and remember, and understand.
Poor Evelyn. What a thing to wake up to – in Heaven or Hell who knows! What he knows is that command to silence (‘Hush!) is not needed. Evelyn is already in the process of irredeemably (and without hope of forgetting) taking this secret to her grave.
In terms of our question, I do not think there is anything I can think of that most people do not know about me, except for ‘everything’, which is the point with which I started. I have long now lived a life that strains to transparency – usually to the chagrin of people who pride themselves on keeping secrets (their own and those they persuade other ‘private people’ to share them and to mutually shut them within their iron-bound6 chests). My husband helps for he is genuinely a person who has learned openness of being, so that we share most things – even things we feel are unshareable. I try to write openly even in the public medium of these blogs. And most people still will not care either way. Such is the world and this is not a thing to complain about.
Indeed I sometimes think people like to share ‘secrets’ because to do otherwise would prove to them how uninteresting and common the content of these secrets is and how easily they are sometimes observable in their behaviour alone. As for the unobservable secrets – I wonder how long such monsters would survive if shared in the light of common understanding and a groundswell of human care and solidarity with our differences. Many would not appear as monsters, for they have only become so by being kept locked up for so long. It always amazing me that Evelyn Hope is not recognised as a poem about a Jimmy-Saville-like paedophilia – perhaps the nearest we get to the monstrous abuse of unequal power.
But had the gentleman narrating Browning’s poem made his feelings known when Evelyn lived and in public, would not love have found its place as something less pernicious and possessive as it is in the poem. It could have become a feeling about the hopefulness of youth and of not being possessed by any man (or woman) but free to make choices in the world.
Would true openness in public life had rid us of the peril of the simpering sentimentality and child-obsession of Jim’ll Fix It sentimentality, so admired and publicly vaunted by Margaret Thatcher. But let’s rid ourselves of that image immediately above. Let me tell you something ‘not a lot of people know’, as a character played by Michael Caine once said (apparently quoting Caine himself as an in-joke) : there is isn’t much to know I won’t tell you.
Of course, if anyone wants to know anything about me, ask! By all means. I won’t expect a long queue. Lol.
All my love
Steve
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