THE SECRET LIFE OF THE WRITER

by Wera Sæther

Where, how and in whose life is this secret hiding?
I do not know the meaning, or intention, of the title that I - and others - have been invited into. My not-knowing refers to the individual words of the title and to the phrase as a whole. My eyes, then, are of suspicion. What kind of clothes are these, and what kind of emperor is taking my innocence for granted?
My unknowing - of suspicion and questions - is may be somewhat dry. There´s a time for harsh doubt, and another time for the wanderer who rejoices in what she´s finding, and finding, and finding again, in the wilderness and the dark.
After a minor ordeal of questions, I´ll move on to a more childlike, immediate and maybe ”juicy” place. After having been - in the context of this text - on the road with my camera for a while, I´ll invite you into my darkroom. No other place is secret in quite the same way. It´s exhausting always, and seminal sometimes. And it´s, of course, not what the editor of a literary magazine expects to be named as ´the secret life of a writer´.
This darkroom, my darkroom is a real darkroom, the one for b&w photographs. It´s not a metaphor for a special phase in the process of literary writing. But it does have effects that may be literary sometimes.
I keep a piece of writing paper near the tray for chemicals.
What is it that one knower knows, and not another;
how does it happen; and who can know it really does happen?
When you really know, you don´t even know that you do;
it is it that knows you.
1
A minor massacre of a title
The Threshold, or: What is a Secret?
In my mother tongue Norwegian, the noun for secret is immense, the adjective a little bit less so. You enter the secret and remain within it. After you´ve left it, it remains within you. It´s so much bigger than you, it´s a house. It may be a shelter and it may be exposure to shaking truth. Shelter and nakedness, both.
This noun is hemmelighet. It feels, to me at least, so much more secret than the English secret.
Hemmelighet may be, first of all, a word for children. Children keep and share secrets. That´s what early bonds are made from. Those same bonds are exposed to the possibility of betrayal. Betrayal is exactly this, betrayal of secret(s). This is so for the child. Some say it´s the case for nations as well. A spy betrays his/her nation´s secret. The Norwegian Quislings did so during WW2.
When a spouse betrays his/her partner, it´s mostly for another intimacy. The body then is the secret ”taken” from the other spouse and given to a stranger. Sex and secret are intertwined on more levels than one.
The title of this essay - that I´m obeying - was not invented by me. It could not have been so. It really is complex, difficult and intriguing. It may be misleading, too. It could tempt an essayist to take for granted what this writer/essayist certainly cannot take for granted. Before entering a house of possible secrets, I´m standing at the threshold of the title with questions, wide-open.
I approach the title, word by word, using my associative mind and some handbooks. My German etymology book tells us that Geheimnis, German for secret, belongs to the home. (Heim means home) My Latin book tell us that secretum means separate. The secret is somewhere else, or elsewhere.
The home, of course, is another place as compared with all other places, and the universe. It´s the place inhabited by very few, who eat and sleep there. There is a line and a limit, an inside and an outside. The associations are spatial.
Secret is also a political term. Some very few people are within the tower of political secrets, most are outside. Very few know the nuclear secrets. Those who know have the ultimate power. Should they practice it even more totally than they do now, by intimidating us and holding us all as hostages, we, the uninitiated, would have no secrets and no life any more. Neither would those who now have the ultimate power.
Seen from quite another - and very quiet - angle, the secret belongs to those few who have been desiring Truth and, in some specific ways, renouncing the world painfully and patiently for years, not without joy with no limits, on the path to (esoteric) wisdom that empowers, endlessly so, from within.
In the free-floating mood and mindset of our times, in this openly brutalised society, with much less borders than before, with much darker darkness and much less decency as well, a search for the secret, is intriguing. Our capitalist culture is at its very core perversively tolerant.
Is there an elsewhere still? Does anything at all exist which is not, as a matter of principle, open to all and at all times?
In other cultures, what is secret has always been and still is close to the blood. Men shared blood and were initiated into each others´ secret, or into being (part of) the same secret. Only males did this.
In 1992, I lived for some weeks in an extended family with two HIV-infected members in Kigali in Rwanda. My Rwandan family told me about the secrets of the Rwandans. Only within the enclosure would secrets be spoken.
The traditional King´s might was based upon his knowledge of the royal secret, known only by him, the King, and one other witness. Should the King die, this witness would pass the secret on to the next King. The secret knowledge constituted the very power of the King. The colonizers, of course, despised such a tradition and repressed the old ways of the royal court and the people. As we all know, the people later on killed their own neighbours. Those who were systematically killed in 1994, the Tutsi, were those who used to own the oldest secrets.
It was no secret to anybody in 1994 who were Tutsi at the hour of the genocidal killings.
Secret life
What is described as secret by the title of this essay, is ”(part of ) the life of the writer”. It could also have been her dying, or death(s). The writer´s death(s) may have more to do with her creation of literary texts than her life.
How biological is this life that is wanted? Life is (in the) body. It is where the organism breathes and can bleed. The life of the body, or the body, tout court, cannot be written. The body can be conceived, born, it can make love, be in pain, be reduced by diseases and die.
Is it this very same organism that also writes, or is it another? Is the writer´s life, secret or not, in the body, in the text - or elsewhere?
In unknown and quite mysterious ways, the very same body that has been conceived and can conceive, and that will certainly die in a non-metaphorical way one day, can also produce literary texts. Same eyes, same hands. It is also true to say that it is another body that writes the texts.
It is by the same body, or by an undefinable space of desire and freedom within this ordinary body, that the writer writes.
This may be a metaphysical perspective. It certainly is mine.
Secret, to whom?
A secret is not simply unknown or unconscious. A secret can be known, hidden and revealed. How is another issue. Somebody knows the secret, fully or partly. Can one person´s knowledge constitute a secret? Can a secret really be between less than two? I may not know who else knows the secret. This very unknowing may belong to the very category of a certain secret, at least in the universe of religious or other initiation rituals.
I will reveal parts of my own ”secret life of the writer” as I stumble on in this text. So far, I´m only exploring a certain topography of secrets and lives. To whom is ”the secret life of the writer” secret, or a secret? To the writer herself? But can there be another to know this secret if the writer does not? Does the text know it?
Is it the literary critic who knows the secret (life) of the writer?
How many lives can one writer have?
The writer is in the process of making/writing/producing her text. There, and there only, is her privileged place. Is she, though in thinner air, so to speak, also outside of the privileged intensity, pain included, of being the person who writes?
Am I a writer also when I speak, sleep or make love, i.e. when I have no intention at all to make sentences, chapters or the silences within those sentences and chapters? Is a writer eo ipso always a writer? I´m not now trying to distinguish between those who are and those who are not writers. I simply try to see as I stumble and tremble if the writer always wears the clothes, or/and the nakedness, of a writer.
I am not the child shouting that she knows when the writer is a writer. I am only whispering that I do not know. Is there another space, a non-writer´s space within the writer. Does this depend upon how this particular writer is a writer.
I only write about the writer whose ultimate act is writing. But, then, who can know? Does the writer know? Self-conceit is almost omnipresent always.
I assume a certain topography of existence is taken for granted by the title of this essay. A writer is a writer sometimes, and something else at other times. He, the inventor of the title, may even have had fantasies about the energy and drama of the illicit and secret in the writer´s emotional or (private) daily life.
To repeat the question: Is there another than the writer in the writer? There is the other of the text. But the text is not in the writer. The text is crossing the threshold.
2
The text
The text as secret life
The writer, in the context of my text, writes literary texts that can be read by others. They may not be written in order to be read. But they are not written and then burnt. I do not, however, mean to say that a person who burns what (s)he has written could not be named a writer.
A text or a book is a public object. It belongs to anybody. It may be said to belong to itself. It certainly does not belong to its author anymore. There should be no narcissism, as the text is another. Of course there is narcissism, as attachment is an emotional fact almost always and detachment is a long, long road.
Still, the text belongs to everybody and to literature.
My use of the concepts of secret and of life is long since blurred. If the text is the secret life of its author, then life is no biological concept any more and there is no knower of the secret, as the text is not (fully) known by its author. For that very reason, I limit myself to introducing this perspective. There is no bigger and more secret secret in the life of the writer than the text that does not belong to her and that transcends her. The text is within, in the wind of the spirit, and without, in the universe of mirroring, abuses and negligence. There is no protected space for this secret. It is exposed to jackals and to silence.
To speak with Bengali mystics ”its address is in the wind”.
Examples
Most of the time I do not write. But I write always. ”My address” is in writing. I have no outside when I write. I have no other life in that second. It´s full and ”one” - like meditation. It´s meditative work. For a while I forget the rest. I am just that. I rewrite and rewrite. I may be humming. But I do not think. I have been thinking before and I will think again as I read what I´ve been writing.
Writing is another exposure (to the unexpeced and uncontrolled) than thinking. The thinker has clothes on, the writer has none, or just a few. The road of writing is steeper than the road of thinking. There are surprises.
Twice in my quite recent experience of writing there´s been major surprises within the process of writing - that always implies many small surprises.
Summer 1997: I was working on a novel to be called ”Son of Dust”. I had a privileged month of enjoying ”a writing retreat”, in Umbria, Italy. Going there, I carried the characters of the novel inside of me. The novel´s story had long since been thought out: An old widower Anton is obsessed by a plane crash that happened in the woods - in the real world - not far away from his home when he had just become a father. The plane carried 28 Jewish children who had been selected to come to Norway to eat and to play in 1949. One child, Isaac, survived the crash. (This is quite important Norwegian post-war history, probably connected to the special relationship between the State of Israel and Labour Party post- WW2 Norway.)
My character, Anton, plans to go and find the metallic remains of the plane fifty years after the plane crashed. At the very beginning of Anton´s secret plan and path, the character Rosa happens in the author´s mind and in the story, like the explosion of secret energy and more. Rosa and her secret(s) had been no secret to anyone before. ”She” did not exist before bursting out from an unknown place in the author. She then became the juice of the story, the burning point, so to speak. The very axis.
It belongs to the story of the literary creation that the author then ran into the sunflower meadows of Umbria in utter bewilderment. All of a sudden, her story had become another.
From which territory of the author´s secret life did the character Rosa burst forth?
Fall 2000: I was working on a children´s novel. It had long since been thought out, with its main characters and structure of events. The details, history and energy of the secret (a photograph) that a child would be carrying from Kolkata (Calcutta) to Varanasi (Banaras) by train had been in the imagination of the author for a while.
The protagonist, Sara, eleven year old, is travelling by Himgiri Express on her own. But, of course, never alone, as this is India. She is travelling to find ”the smallest child”, shown on the photograph, and who may be an unknown brother. She carries her secret quietly and shares the ordinary, funny and dramatic moments of the train journey with the others in the compartment.
All of a sudden, Sara hears a strong but quiet song in the omnipresent noise of the train. It´s a blind woman singing in order to beg. The blind woman is accompanied by a girl child who is her daughter. Sara is totally surprised and absorbed by the presence and face of this girl who has her own age. In the author´s draft of the novel, Sara´s ”twin” did not exist. The barefoot girl´s name is Uma.
The character Uma then changed the rhythm and the rasa, as Indians would call it, of the novel as such.
Rasa means juice, mood, colour and all. Rasa is what Indian art is all about.
The event of Uma was more than liberating. I, the author, was not only my own controlling mind any more. It was as if I had been found by another. I then became Sara from another angle. I became Uma and her blind mother. I was this interwovenness and the energy and the joy of it.
This is joy complete. When ”it” happens, it transforms the text. It makes the bond between author-and-text even more intimate and mysterious. It is deeply spiritual. It cannot be ordered but happens in its own time.
What connection does this have to secret life. Maybe none. The reader of my novels will most probably not feel or know in other ways that Rosa or Uma came to happen in other ways than the other characters. But they carry, for their author, another secret.
It is easy for me to distinguish between the parts of a story that happen in the ”ordinary” way and those that happen extraordinarily. Rosa, Uma and the other surprises belong to another level of secret, initiation or freedom. The experience/event could be translated like this: there is more, another ”ocean”, within ”me” than I used to know.
3
Towards the dark
Self-presentation/biography
I live near the woods and the sea, in a country where people used to be poor and modest, at the end, or the edge, of the continent of Europe. Beyond us, the ocean and the Arctic.
I live and write in a time when souls sell themselves with little shyness on a marketplace that knows no limit. In me, there used to be a simple joy at belonging to this place called Norway and this particular history of resistance.
But the resistance to power is long gone. The woods still are there. The part of nature in our, the Norwegians´, collective soul is vibrant still. But a new Norwegian self-image, mirrored by money, has exploded. It´s vulgar and makes me think of post-nuclear explosion mentality in India. The Indian elite was overtly enthusiastic at their sudden visible ”might” (to destroy).
I´m a post WW2 child born to parents who fled from Gestapo to be rescued by ”neutral” Sweden. My family soon came back to Norway and I grew up as a child in the shadow of an immense cement factory. It marked my senses and my political and cognitive perspectives as well. Any huge factory anywhere in the world sends my senses straight back to childhood. The smoke and the dust are accessible within me always.
The plane crash of the above-mentioned novel happened in ”my” woods. I was 4 years old then. The crash was on everybody´s lips and it happened in my mind and emotions: children who came to our land to eat had suddenly died. They had become ours by having been chosen to come to us and they became even more ours by their sudden death.
A stranger was rare back then. A plane was quite rare as well.
Nothing carried secrets like strangers did. And I was always waiting.
Self-presentation/art
The dark I´m inviting my reader into is the dark of the darkroom. I go there with my sorrows sometimes. I´m then enveloped by a quiet darkness with no intruder. It´s like having an extra layer of skin. But it´s also being more naked. I mostly go there to make prints.
By now I´ve left suspicion and the dissection of the title behind. I´m on my way inwards and am becoming more simple. The territory I´m on is mine, but it´s also unknown. I´m inviting you into my home. Remember home, Heimat in German and hjem in Norwegian has an etymological connection to HEMMELIGHET that means secret.
My first book, published in 1973, was a collection of poetry. My last collection of poetry was out in 1989. Since then very few poems have been written by me. At the time of the last one, I had taken up photography. It was modest and unambitious. I was playing with silver, light, time and faces. I had been seduced into it by friends and had no technical fascination at all. I remember resisting the camera as an object. I also resisted the darkroom as a technical arrangement and a special kind of knowledge. But the silence and the secret of the darkroom soon became a strong attraction.
Photography for me had to do with the surreal, the strange constellations and contradictions that can be contained within one frame, from the very beginning. It had and has to do with catching the invisible by being fully there.
Presence of being is the method.
What is it that I want to touch with my eye? The invisible. Or, the structure and mood of the invisible in the invisible.
Writing has to do with catching and holding the unheard (of).
I´m waiting for the poetry of poems to come back. It may never fully happen. The poet has sought shelter in the continous time of novels. The rasa may be the same, but not the genre. Different forms of art have different inherent modalities of time.
The photograph, this creature that is caught in a 1/60 second or less, belongs to another dimension of time than the novel. It´s much closer to the poem. Its raw material, which is light and silver, is presence as well.
I´m mostly out there, faway from my woods, when it happens, often in what is sometimes called ”the global South”. I´m far away from my ordinary home in that other home of movement, wind – and other people´s hospitality. The readers of my books know little about this. Is it my secret life?
If it is, my secret life does not unfold itself within my home, but on the road. And later on, of course, in the darkroom.
With whom do I share it?
The readers of my books do know that I´m sometimes travelling far, as I write travel books and documentaries also. But they cannot know how it feels. And they do not know the dangers, play, patience and rare ecstatic joy of catching ”it” by my Leica.
I never know in that split second if I´ve caught it. I cannot see it happening on the silver of the film. It´s hidden. Sometimes I wait, trembling, to see.
Having rescued my films from possible thieves and my own negligence as I travel, I´m always nervous after my arrival back to Norway:
Is ”it” there or did I miss it or damage it as I wandered?
The photograph as secret
Words are omnipresent, images as well. There´s almost nowhere to hide from them. But when I put my Leica to my eye, what is there, in front of me, has never been seen, not by me, not by anyone else, before. It´s new. It´s as if I´m being seen by the unseen in that split second. I´m porous almost. I am not the old ”I”, controlled, controlling and controllable. I´m out there, in there, wider. When it fully and really happens, then it´s nothing but self-forgetting joy.
Joy is where ”I” is not any more. Or, maybe, ”I” is, but for a split second – which may remain with me for a long time – it´s so much wider.
I do not forget about the light, or the structure of forms, or the focusing. The disciplined thought processes do stay on. Still, I am at the receiving end. Though it´s hard, sometimes harsh, work to do photography, it´s first of all a gift of time. I receive time. Is it another time, or the same time as ordinary time?
And is it because time was the raw material of my mind´s doubt and groping when I was sixteen and my father died very slowly that I was to be, much later on, seduced by the work and the effects of the camera, I who have no technical fascination whatsoever? I have been absorbed by the question of time since my conscious mind´s beginning.
I have had to swallow more technical camels than one. They have been huge and difficult to endure. The connections to explore as long as I live are: photography and time, photography and death, photography and grace.
There´s nothing more secret than a photograph. It cannot be spoken. I, who was there and did the complex act of choosing frame, angle, shutter-speed, focussing, in addition to having already chosen the time and place in history, geography and more, do not know fully what I do. I have chosen. But I cannot know what. I know that most (male?) photographers want to control it all. I am not with them. I may be a child. I do what I do - technically - as best I can. But I do not know what I do. I cannot grasp the constellation of light, silver, my Leica with my mood and my mind. I know that what I do is not all there is. I am at the receiving end - and often trembling. It´s not because of any immediate danger. I do not choose wars. People´s ordinary life on the edge is a drama in itself.
With my Leica, I am at the edge too. I´m exposed. Or, more truly, I´m - via my eye - mingling with what I see. There is no distance.
A Sheep and a Romanian Girl
In January 1991, during the war in the Gulf, my mother died in my home. Before dying she wanted to be photographed. She danced to East European Jewish klezmer music and I photographed her then. After she died, I decided to have her bedroom changed into a darkroom.
Two months later I travelled for a month in Romania with two dear writer friends, Ana Blandiana and Romulus Rusan. We spent Easter in a village in Maramures, near the border to the Ukraine. I was invited into another time, old and undamaged by the Ceaucescu regime, as the region was quite far away from the capital of Bucuresti and the frenzy of crazy dictatorship. I was photographing the Easter rituals. The result became a certain documentation but not much more than that.
We then left the village and I do remember a market place. Yes, I remember a man and a woman, a couple, selling sheep. They wanted to be photographed and even suggested to pay me for it. A very funny picture was the result, a proud village couple with their pride, in addition to the animals, exposed.
What I do not remember at all is much more important. My negative is a proof. My memory is nothing.
Once back in Oslo I studied my contact prints. There was one negative different from the others. This one negative is esthetically, maybe even metaphysically, different from the rest. That particular photograph, a quotation from time and beyond-time, is with me like an extra fragment of heart still.
There´s a sheep. Yes, the sheep is in focus, and there´s a slightly blurred young girl, maybe eleven, twelve, or even fourteen. The sheep looks like it´s seeing the photographer, the girl does not. Her gaze is secretive. Her clothes tell us about Maramures. Because of her clothes and the presence of the sheep, I may know the photograph was ”caught” there, at that Saturday market in a town in Maramures, and not somewhere else. I remember nothing. I have not seen the girl and the sheep. My memory is never perfect. But this memory blankness is different.
I assume I saw the sheep and the girl differently from how I saw the rest. My camera saw them, or what my Indian friends would say, my third eye. This photograph is a secret, in the sense of ungraspable, to the photographer herself. Nothing is closer to her than it is.
There is another moment, or morning in March 2000, that I remember well. All that is in me remembers it. I did not ”catch” it. I laid down my camera that morning, in a village in Birbhum in Bengal. I had spent the night with a family there. The eleven year old daughter took my hand. She and I walked in the village. We met a woman, the girl´s cousin. The woman said: come with me. So we did, Uma, the eleven year old, and I. The woman took us to a hut. It was hers. The children of the village gathered there. Some entered the hut with us, others stood watching and waiting. All of a sudden I understood what it all was about. An egg. The woman had found or bought or borrowed an egg. It was all for me. There was no other egg. She boiled it and found me some salt. She gave the egg to me to eat. I ate it in front of all those who watched. I was the guest, the sudden ”god” who had appeared on their ground.
An egg will never be the same any more. This is my ”secret life”. Is it of the writer?
The darkroom: intimate and unknown
My home has five ”foci”: the kitchen table, the fireplace, the bed, the Macintosh – and the darkroom. The darkroom is where the flat´s bedroom used to be. No doubt, this room – architecturally – is the most secret place in my home. Though it is open always, very few are invited into it. Guests may know it´s there. But few know what it represents. Some say: it´s big! It´s not. But for a moderate downtown apartment in Oslo it may well be big.
Over the last ten years I´ve spent many hours there – to work, to meditate, to seek shelter, my hands doing their old simple and routine movements, with attention, and maybe my eyes full of tears. The darkroom is the best place for grief.
Grief may be private but also connected to having tavelled far, and then, all of a sudden, the place that once welcomed me, in Rwanda, in India, is not there any more. Genocide. Cyclone. Floods. It´s gone. What I photograped then, has vanished. Many of my negatives ”point” towards what´s now gone.
As I write this, an immense earthquake has just devastated the Kuch region of Gujarat in India. I´ve never been to Kuch. But my bond to India is strong. The places of the poor are more vulnerable than ever before. Wefts of culture disappear with the hands and eyes that are buried in the rubble.
In a way this is also ”my secret”. I´ve seen places on this planet in other ways, from other angles, in other nuances of light and shadow than the people I live among in Norway.
The darkroom is a place to digest and integrate the ”knowing” of this otherness.
There is a desire for another knowledge in me. This desire is strong and has taken me far: to songs of esoteric (marfati) knowledge sung by Muslim women on a sand island in the Brahmaputra and to devotional songs in rural and Hindu West Bengal. How to know here, in consumerist Norway, what I´ve seen there? How to carry fruitfully the knowledge originating from other sources?
The darkroom is a place for digestion. It may be seminal also. Another rhythm, no information at all, only from the negatives. The protection of darkness. The mood of concentration. In the darkroom, new insights may move me towards new constellations of form, also for texts.
To work over the trays in the darkroom is exhausting on the level of the tissue almost. I´m certainly being poisoned by the chemicals. I know this working method is old-fashioned, that a much quicker method is digital. But I want the way of the hands. I want the craft.
I may go to the darkroom with different intentions. Sometimes I must produce prints for an exhibition. Sometimes I need to see from another angle in respect to a manuscript. I then choose the darkroom for another perspective. I see in the darkness, sometimes with a piece of paper for writing near the tray for developing the print.
I´m absorbed by the secrets of the darkroom process. So many forms of time are involved. A photograph ”quotes” (John Berger) from appearances in a specific place and epoch. The technical object of the camera has its own range of time, of shutter speed. I bring the secret of my ”quotations” back to Oslo. I see the negatives with my Oslo mood and time, as I dive into the time(s) of the other places and faces. The girl and the sheep are so close to me so far away in the time of another and almost-gone culture. My dying dancing mother is right there.
In the darkroom there are the technical demands of time, exposure, precise time for the print in each tray, the time for washing of the paper print, the time for drying of the paper print, the time for pressing of the print etc. All of this together means it´s very slow.
The mind/heart of the artisan must adapt to slowness.
Secret/revelation
I may now have revealed part of a secret. I´ve used the opportunity to become (more) conscious of my karma yogic path, as my Bengali friends would have put it. The path has to do with what cannot be seen, said or written. The path is – path.
Is photography a more secret act than writing?
The sentence and the chapter can become mine in ways the photograph never can. There is always something alien in a photograph. I do not grasp its processes. I may feel desire, awe, laughter or utter sorrow watching even my own photographs. I feel homesick as well. I become more vulnerable. I am there as well. In Bengal. In Maramures. I am not only in me.
There´s no limit to what can hurt people, animals and trees in the places where I´ve carried my Leica. Yes, I´m there as well. And that may well be my secret life.