Open Wounds and Closed Worlds - Our Secrets and our Sense of Self
“He who has his highest home in a secret place also has his tabernacle on earth.”
Have you found that at times the secrets we keep better reflect an aspect of ourselves or rather a hidden interior? Today, Dolli and I discuss how the cloaked parts of our lives, the little wounds and other mysterious worlds we hide reveal our general character. Whether it be a son using secrets to protect himself from his prying father or two teens gathering secrets from their peers to use against them, the unrevealed has a power and yet the privately kept facets are so close to our hearts. Secrets have the power to both heal and hurt. Would you agree? What do the secrets you keep tell you about yourself, dear listener? And how have you used your secrets? For good or ill? A fascinating topic for today’s episode.
Hünengrab im Schnee (Cairn in the Snow) 1807 - Caspar David Friedrich, Albertinum, Dresden
I tell my secret? No indeed, not I:
Perhaps some day, who knows?
But not today; it froze, and blows, and snows,
And you’re too curious: fie!
You want to hear it? well:
Only, my secret’s mine, and I won’t tell…
- Christina Rossetti (1830-94), ‘Winter: My Secret’
“A secret is like a dove: when it leaves my hand it takes wing.”
Der Träumer (The Dreamer) c.1835 - Caspar David Friedrich, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg - The paintings of the German romantic landscape painter evoke a world both intimate and secret, as if we were distantly participating with the solitude of his figures, living next to them like ghosts.
I was constantly watching myself, my secret self, as dependent on my actions as my own personality, sleeping in that bed, behind that door which faced me as I sat at the head of the table. It was very much like being mad, only it was worse because one was aware of it.
…
I passed on with an inward shudder. I was so identified with my secret double that I did not even mention the fact in those scanty, fearful whispers we exchanged. I suppose he had made some slight noise of some kind or other. It would have been miraculous if he hadn’t at one time or another. And yet, haggard as he appeared, he looked always perfectly selfcontrolled, more than calm—almost invulnerable.
- Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), ‘The Secret Sharer’