[Image: “Forever on the Outside, Looking In” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]
From whiskey river:
The irony of hiding the dark side of our humanness is that our secret is not really a secret at all. How can it be when we’re all safeguarding the very same story? That’s why Rumi calls it an Open Secret. It’s almost a joke—a laughable admission that each one of us has a shadow self—a bumbling, bad-tempered twin. Big surprise! Just like you, I can be a jerk sometimes. I do unkind, cowardly things, harbor unmerciful thoughts, and mope around when I should be doing something constructive. Just like you, I wonder if life has meaning; I worry and fret over things I can’t control; and I often feel overcome with a longing for something that I cannot even name. For all of my strengths and gifts, I am also a vulnerable and insecure person, in need of connection and reassurance. This is the secret I try to keep from you, and you from me, and in doing so, we do each other a grave disservice.
(Elizabeth Lesser [source])
…and:
One day Chuang Tzu and a friend were walking by a river.
“Look at the fish swimming about,” said Chuang Tzu, “They are really enjoying themselves.”
“You are not a fish,” replied the friend, “So you can’t truly know that they are enjoying themselves.”
“You are not me,” said Chuang Tzu. “So how do you know that I do not know that the fish are enjoying themselves?”
(recounted by Hans Peter Hoffman, apparently as translated (in different words) by Burton Watson [source])
Not from whiskey river:
All of my life, I have been a person in whom strangers have confided. There is something in my face that says, “I am interested in you” to some, and “I will keep your secret” to others. I have my mother’s face, and it is true that my mother was sincerely interested in everyone she met, and that she was a faithful keeper of other people’s secrets. I am not my mother. Sometimes, I think, I am not even myself. But whether a trick of physiognomy, or a habit of expression learned as her child in the way that all children mimic the behaviors and mannerisms of their parents… my face has said, all of my life, “I will listen to your story.”
Pity the introvert with the face of a therapist or a kindergarten teacher. Like the werewolf, we are uneasy in human spaces and human company, though we wear a human skin…
Pity the werewolf. What should a stranger’s sad story mean? Wash off a stranger’s sad story in a green pool. Fall asleep in the clean reek of chlorine and inhabit the fragmentary and uneasy dreams of departed guests whose strands of hair, dander, lardy fingerprints, odd bits of trash, and inconclusive stains inhabit these transitory and poorly lit spaces. If you listen, a hotel room speaks, too. It says: I will keep your secret.
(Kelly Link [source])
…and:
#15: The afternoon was sunny, breezy, and pleasant, and the river’s flow beneath the skiff was slow and easy. I felt no urgency for conversation. The boatman had been poling me along the river for some time before I finally got up the nerve to ask him, “Where are we heading, anyway?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Well, then, what river is this?”
“Not sure.”
“And the towns along the—“
“Nope, sorry. No idea.”
“But how will you know when — if! — we get to wherever it is? What the hell are we even doing in this boat?”
He was silent for a moment. “Yeah,” he finally offered. “That’s a tough one, that is.”
(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)
