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Last week I was mulling over the idea of how secretly we live our lives. The thread of the essay made a firm warp as I began, lying sleepless, to weave the brilliant thoughts through it. I even (no slouch, me) was aware that I might forget all this brilliance once I'd finally drifted off, so I marked the main ideas in one corner of my mind along with the two key ideas of another brilliant essay that my mind was weaving. These two ideas were so concrete and accessible that I knew they would lead me back to the essay when I was ready. Well, we know how that goes, don't we? In the morning I did manage to salvage parts of my idea on secrecy and wrote these down haphazardly. The other essay—the one I'd tacked to my mind with solid clues—was gone completely.
I was thinking about how we (should I say "I" right out?) want to hide the evidence of aging even as I make a show of talking freely about it. Am I, at 84, to be the example, the beacon that guides my younger friends? At 70, when I wrote Hesitating at the Gate, I referred to myself as a Judas goat leading others to the slaughter (i.e., to aging) with reassurance that it wasn't so bad.
But do I now really want to do that again? The buoyancy and pep of 70 are long gone, which is a good thing. At least I've taken my head out of the sand. But does anyone want to hear what's here? The yoyo that has always characterized my emotions has gone off its string and is bouncing down the steps like a Slinky-toy. We all know that the Slinky goes down the steps but never climbs back up.
What is real? The ninety minutes of TV every evening watching old British mysteries? The three Oxford ones (Endeavour, Morse, and Lewis), Campion, Roderick Alleyn, Lord Peter Wimsey, Sherlock. Or the thirty minutes spent contemplating the immensity of the Multiverse that contains us and the solidity of mountains? The hours I spend reading? The painful withdrawal from everyone—occasioned by the pandemic but abetted by some interior force? The "shoulds" that accompany me more than I like to admit? The satisfaction of going to the kitchen mid-afternoon to begin prepping a meal?
I'm losing interest in all this. Oh, wait! That's one of the themes, isn't it? In response to an astrology column in the weekend paper, I have been watching in vain for the new enthusiasm that will come to me and that I must embrace—but be careful lest it turn into an obsession, I began a knitting project. Just a garter-stitch scarf, but nonetheless the first knitting I've done in over a year. I think I'm fairly safe from the danger of this turning into an obsession.
Let me go back to that secrecy issue I was thinking about before I digressed. Whole parts of ourselves are never revealed to anyone else. I don't mean to imply that this is necessarily a bad thing. Some things are, by their very nature, private. Lying in bed last week what came to my mind was a story I read some thirty years ago as I was looking for clues about how to manage menopause. It concerned a menopausal woman hosting a family gathering—maybe her usual Sunday dinner for the extended family. At the end of the meal, according to the story, her mother-in-law announced, brightly, "Joan had 13 hot flashes during the meal—didn't you, Joan?" The mother-in-law had counted the times Joan's neck and face had flushed red. When I read this I was shocked, imagining how it must have felt to be "outed" (though I'm not sure that was a word in those days). The invasion of privacy! The mean-spiritedness and pettiness!
So this story came back to me as I was contemplating privacy and secrecy in our lives. Surely each of us has the right to determine the level of openness we offer the world.
I think this ties in with reading Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird, and with the idea of writing about other people. Ah, yes. This is part of it. Anne Lamott talks about how, if people object (family members, e.g.) to what we write about them, then, well, they should have behaved better. But this isn't the whole story, is it? Because what we write about someone may have nothing to do with their good or bad behaviour and everything to do with our own home-grown psychological profiles of them—which may or may not be accurate. But writers, someone else has said, must be ruthless when they put others onto paper.
So is that what this has all been about? My personal justification for not writing the truth as I see it? Yeah, I guess it is. I'll have to limit myself to little poems about snow flurries of the day or the poppies that used to grow in my neighbour's garden.
Musings blog: http://www.scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com
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