‘“SECRET EMBARRASSMENTS ARE different from embarrassing secrets,” explains the
blush therapist with a reassuring smile.’
Secrets are among our impurities, the logic of experience crookedly
unfolded at our feet. Once told, they can lash the soul with broken
chains: is it better to live with the shackles? A lie may be a trial run: if it
fails to come back as hearsay, your new friend is probably trustworthy.
A patent is a secret first withheld, then shamelessly advertised.
1st – The Emerald Secret
This is three-quarters of philosophy. Ascending from earth, born of the
wind, unwrapping light, flows the subtlest fire of the path those mercurial
tricksters walked. Imagine a farm intensely enough: its fields will one day
bleat and moo. Inhabit the brand: you’ll dine every evening on a couch.
2nd – The Secret Restored
Digital photography thrives in bedrooms. Gifting the camera to your
dear aunt was risky: what if she loses images and downloads software to
restore them? Are your own unthinkable pictures safely in oblivion? You
warn her on the phone: there are viruses thoughtless salvage may unleash.
3rd – The Secret Sorrow
Big, loud, wild events spark and crackle with harms. It looks and sounds
like coldness: it’s sadness. Regret for what might have happened or might
yet, imagined chaos or catastrophe. It’s the ministry of making do, of
carrying on, the effort and shame of bringing empties to the bottle party.
4th – The Secret Sharer
Imaginary friends are never plural: there’s a space problem. Company
is the tango of souls, one of them dancing without footprints. A quiet
passenger during your rampage in the hen coop, she audits the damage,
self-employed, plumbing your moods, relaxed between invisible ears.
5th – The Secret Integration
Like the classmate who bakes cupcakes for his sister, trainspotters make
plain sense of the world – what’s not to like? There are awesome trains
with hobo cabooses and spy chases flattening themselves for the tunnels.
Commit to dynamic friendship: character jokes, the uncontested dowry.
6th – The Secret Love
She insists he desert his regular soap for her own family brand. So the
husband is olfactorily superior? Silent synaesthete in bed? Could the
roots of this love be hyposmia – nasal polyps, hay fever – nurturing her
compassion? Bath time is a sweet goodbye – the return to echoey ego.
All six – The Secret Room
Touch the Field Marshal’s eyeglass in the crusty old painting. A sanctum
opens like a smile, ranks of classics juddering aside, a contraption at the
end of its remit. Here a veteran grapples with marriage: ‘Leave an outlet
free when surrounding an army. Never press a desperate foe too hard.’
♦
Introduction to Six-Way Mirror | The Index of Hexagrams and Cantos
