The great writer and filmmaker Jean Cocteau had it very clear when he said that the secret has the shape of an ear: this hidden knowledge is secretly poured there, which, although under eight keys, always struggles to emerge. To the extent of such a question, a proposal has just appeared that invites you to listen to whispered, buried, unspeakable plots, unraveled by some highly inciting feathers of the local scene. Unpublished or discontinued works, difficult to find, coexist in the episodic podcast I'll take it to the grave, recently launched on different platforms (Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts...). A project that, so far in 2020, will deliver pieces that surround "the secret and its consequences", the voices slipping through leafy interior gardens, removing the veil from shameful thorns, addressing pacts or taboos from the most diverse genres. , going from the essay to the fictional. Read with the necessary intention by their own authors, works by writers Camila Sosa Villada (“The Precocious Assassin and His Irresistible Memory”) and Mariana Enríquez (“Family Secrets”), by Franco Torchia and Esther Díaz ( "Anal Autobiography"), to which will be added installments by the director and playwright Maruja Bustamante, the singer and composer Juana Molina, the journalist Pablo Schanton, the storyteller and novelist Aurora Venturini, interpreted from her text recovered by the actress Sofía Gala Castiglione … To reveal more about I take it to the grave and its vedette, the secret, one of its creators, the writer and journalist Liliana Viola, provides her answers, who together with Torchia and Tomás Balmaceda, has devised an initiative that will delight of those who want to discover -not without a bit of morbidity- revelations usually considered embarrassing.
They have been working on this exciting topic for more than two years. Based on the investigation, do you find that there is a modus in how it is created and how the secret remains hidden?
- One of the most interesting aspects that define it is the danger of its disclosure. You can have thoughts and feelings that nobody knows, but they become a secret when you share it, or when someone can find out. That is, when you put him in danger. A secret is not something that is simply kept quiet, it is something that is entrusted to someone. Why? Partly to get him off your back. And what happens to the other one who suddenly becomes a custodian? Between power and weakness, as in a seesaw, are the two actors who secrete. Not only do all of us have secrets, but we are a secret even to ourselves. In this sense it is a social engine: because despite not knowing, we move forward and with the fragments we observe, we form an image of ourselves and of others.
You mentioned, in fact, that it is the foundation of social relationships.
- We could spend the whole afternoon listing formulas of the social and the regulatory of the social where the word secret appears: confessional secret, professional secret, indictment secret, state secret. The law deals with protecting the private against the damage that could be suffered if it becomes public. The idea of the secret as a form of socialization continues to be valid, as Georg Simmel thought a century ago in his essay on secret societies.
Can you find any link between the secret and the female universe?
- For centuries the secret has been linked to the universe of the feminine. In fact, modesty, associated with shame and the protection of the body and sexuality, is a feeling that is attributed to it, and is required of women. There is a line of underwear called Victoria's Secret! And when you talk about beauty, you talk about beauty secrets. But it is also true that this mode of expression that circulates in letters, intimate diaries and whispers also meant the possibility of a parallel life. An extreme example is the language invented by and for women in the 19th century in a town in southern China. The nüshu, which means “female writing”, was a secret way of passing information, teachings and traditions out of the male gaze. The secret means an extended life on the margins of public life, in this sense we can think that "the second sex" has had "a second world."
Would you say that there is an intimate architecture of the secret?
- Yes, but it's not always the same. The architecture of privacy is not the same today as it was in Victorian times. Links that once depended on mutual dissimulation are now considered false. The universe of privacy from social networks is increasingly lax, the limits of what is tolerable to be shown or said about one are less and less. I, for example, have always rejected having my photos taken. I remember Lohana Berkins calling me the faceless editor, there were no photos of me on Google for years. Today I am able to remember that feeling, but I no longer have it. And it's not that I've overcome a phobia: it's that the habit of taking photos and uploading them to the web is so established that refusing would mean taking a position that I don't have either. I see that they point and I hold on, I see that they record and I don't even realize it; it has lost the weight it had for me.
What led the creators of I'm taking it to the grave to delve into the ever-winding paths of secrecy?
- Try to think about it in relation to the present moment: the Internet as a place where we shout a secret but since we all shout it at the same time, it is not fully heard. We want to try to listen to each other.
They have had the good sense to think of it as a podcast, a format whose interest peaked during these months of confinement.
- The podcast is a format that has a lot to do with a radio program, the voice message you leave on a cell phone, and an audiobook. The listening mode that he proposes is ideal for the topic of secrecy. Listening to the voice of Mariana Enríquez telling a story that is not in any of her books and that begins by telling you "I'm afraid that my mother will find out that..." makes you dizzy and that you don't trust whether it is a fiction or a truth. The same thing happens in the text that Camila Sosa Villada reads. Is she that child who betrays his mother? And the other way around, when you listen to Sofía Gala Castiglione telling you something that happened to her with her mother's husband, you might think that the horrifying story she tells is a confession. But no, it's an impressive interpretation of a story by Aurora Venturini. The secret is not simply not giving information, but a particular way of giving it.
The online works cover two of the most popular secret routes: the sexual secret and the family secrets. Would you say that these are the main aspects of I'll take it with me...?
- Not necessarily. The episode that we uploaded this week, written and read by Maruja Bustamante, is called "Manual of lies." You can interpret it as a family secret but the most interesting thing is how a father, who needs his daughter to lie to her mother, makes it clear that the art of lying is a subsidiary of the secret. And I say art because the darkness of others, the opaqueness of oneself, is necessary to relate to each other. Pablo Schanton tells a story of olfactory reminiscence. The secret appears here as a reconstruction of memory...
Can you anticipate some of the works to come, including your own, that of Juana Molina...?
- No, I can't, it's a secret. And for that… I advance something to you. I am going to work with what happens in the bathroom, a space created to do things in secret. We do not conceive of facing a subject without a sense of humor, which is present in practically all of them. But the episodes of Juana Molina point to that side of life... The team that we make up with Torchia and Balmaceda is called CON, which alludes to the fact that everything that comes out of here will be done "with" other people, their points of view, communities, collective readings. In this sense, the people we summoned seemed ideal for this, we told them what it was about and they did what they wanted and how they wanted.
Will there be a next branch of the project? You mentioned a possible theoretical essay, a book of chronicles...
- It is a research project whose most audible part is the podcast series, which by the end of the year will be completed with 12 episodes. We are going up 3 per month. There is also an Instagram account, with notes that are sometimes theoretical, sometimes delirious, always about the secret. Next year more episodes will surely appear, we are getting texts, confessions, comments from people who have something to reveal or uncover: I imagine a sound chest with terrible secrets of famous people, famous secrets of common people. And a lot of silence.
*****
The unfathomable paths of the secret: an impossible cartography
Since the world began, what the RAE defines as “something that is carefully reserved and hidden” has aroused fascination. Note that, between the mid-16th and 18th centuries, European printing presses published book after book of a certain popular and widely used genre: the literature of secrets. Especially successful in Renaissance Italy, they were works of fashion with practical information, with its esoteric touch, collected by diligent seekers of secrets who delved into the hiding places of nature and dispensed as much knowledge as can be imagined: from herbal medicine to metallurgy techniques, alchemy , fabric dyeing, perfume making, etc. Some famous titles: I Secreti del reverendo donno Alessio Piemontese, from 1555; or the Liber de experimentiis by the indomitable Caterina Sforza (1463-1509). Countess who, in addition to standing up to the Borgias and the papal troops, earning the admiration of Machiavelli and making good friends with Da Vinci, took a break from political intrigues (a fertile field like few others for the secret to sprout!) and He left some 470 potions to cure diseases and preserve beauty. Among the most precious, heavenly water, a tonic based on sage, basil, rosemary, and carnation that promised to delay aging. Perhaps by rhyme, fennel to sharpen the view (the fine eye). Lead and bat blood for non-definitive but long-lasting hair removal.
Stealth also cooks between stoves, Puig knew well, soaking even recipes from grandmothers and aunts who have known how to keep them safe, only to pass the spiced torch in pursuit of keeping the culinary legacy alive and delighting. Apron aside, even the most consumed cola drink is veiled by the enigmatic halo, its original formula jealously guarded underground in a vault in Atlanta. When a radio program, This American Life, claimed to have found its composition, such was the stampede of visits that its website collapsed in no time, three hundred people anxious to find out what was hidden behind the supposedly irreplicable bubbling concoction. Marketing does move like a fish in the water of confidences, profiting from alleged "secrets" that promise to help people achieve happiness, the first million, the better half, the most lustrous of long hair... Notorious nonsense that of that hugely successful book, with candid believers trying to practice their preached “law of attraction”: the bestseller The Secret, by Rhonda Byrne, labeled a scam for presuming science.
It may be that today comic book makers are making public the DNI of superheroes and superheroines, freeing them from the double life -to the inri of those who had a great time watching how they dealt with such intricacies-, but from the beginning, the secret identity has been an inexorable pillar of these comics, a defining aspect of the superhero mythos for more than a century. Managing more in clumsiness than in those little glasses, Clark Kent was able to walk at his ease as Superman, although the launched reporter Lois Lane soon suspected who the man of steel really was. Wonder Woman dressed in the clothes of Diana Prince, undoing the lasso and parking the helicopter to work as a nurse, businesswoman, astronaut or member of the United Nations with the passing of the cartoons... A prototype that, according to comic historians, owes a lot to a flesh and blood British baroness: Emma Orczy, who in 1905 created The Scarlet Pimpernel. Such was the nom de plume of the protagonist of this classic of the swashbuckling genre, Percy Blakeney, an apparently fatuous and vain dandy who, during the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution, saved innocents from losing their heads via guillotine. Before the Orczy saga, say voices in theme, there were characters who assumed the occasional disguise (Sherlock Holmes) or mutated from one identity to another (the Count of Monte Cristo), but his clandestine hero maintained the duality in a sustained way, serving as inspiration to Zorro and the extensive course of covered that would not be long in coming.
For dark secrets of the past, those anchored in the true lineage of the protagonist, those of the soap operas -oh, Thalía, what a way to suffer!-, and its antecedent: serial dramas of the soap opera. Although if it is about tearful needs, don't miss the handkerchief to see the melodrama Imitation of Life (1957), a masterpiece by Douglas Sirk, which echoes the prevailing racism by showing the mestizo daughter of the most humble black Juanita Moore maintaining secretly his Afro origins. Torment that of Don Draper, plunging into an endless abyss in the 7 seasons of Mad Men, dragged down by the weight of having stolen the name of an officer killed in action in Korea to escape combat; a suffocating secret to force out because, as the proverb dictates, there is nothing hidden between Heaven and Earth.
. secret amount! of female authors who had to use ambiguous or directly male aliases to be able to publish in the past; among them, Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë: read Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. And miraculously! secret the life of tana Elena Ferrante, who has the literary world in suspense for having achieved the strictest anonymity in the hyperconnected era, with very devoted accomplices, delivered to a seamless pact... still. Because sooner or later, one way or another, the secret emerges... or explodes! But ask Catalina de Erauso, the Nun Ensign, who during the Spanish Golden Age, was a maiden and Don Juan, a novice and a soldier: after running away from the convent at 15, the wayward girl cut herself a masculine suit with the fabric of her habit , and passing for a man, he managed businesses, seduced women, toured the Americas and fought a thousand battles, reaching the rank of second lieutenant. He only made the deception public to save himself from certain death, then his fame spread to both sides of the ocean, and lasts until the present.******
The heavy burden
Who knows a lot about these hidden needs is the psychoanalyst and writer Laura Palacios, who has been in charge of studying with dedication the intimate construction of the secret, how it is developed and with what elements it is sustained, what is the final cost of the “ finished work”, if one can speak of a finished work as it is under continuous maintenance... Author of the essay El Secreto y el Chisme, Palacios is an adherent member of the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association, and has written unmissable books such as Fairies, a natural history, Province of Buenos Aires and the bolero. I sing to clandestine happiness. Currently, every Wednesday at 9:00 p.m. he agrees to reveal -with his characteristic complicit humor and his erudition without fanfare- bolero stories on his program Soy lo prohibido, on Radio Alter Sapukai. Jovial, he takes a break from these stories that embroider lovers drunk with eroticism, between the honeys of triumph or the galls of passionate failure, and talks with Las12 about how confidences are woven between words that should not be said. You have the floor Laura Palacios...
Is there a secret if it is not shared?
- Generally requires an accomplice, and one or more excluded third parties. In that sense it is similar to gossip and jokes, where there has to be something that involves a significant other. It is a fact of word, interpersonal; a hidden knowledge that is put in reserve and taken out of circulation. Family, love, and political secrets that are subtracted from spoken discourse and kept. They remain underground but, being made of words, they always end up coming out. Because the law of the submerged, especially when it concerns the things of saying, is to refloat... Sooner or later, it escapes. It is not for nothing that famous saying exists: “We are owners of our silences and slaves of our words”. Because there is no word-proof burial: when it is buried, it is buried alive, and down there in the shadows, down there in the damp, it is always stirring, it never stays still. It has an autonomous pulsation: it beats constantly, it never stops working.
Unfulfillable, then, the famous “until the grave”.
- A whole topic of metaphors... After analyzing the issue from etymology, I found a certain obscure origin: the word secret has a common root with excrement. It comes from the Latin secretum, to separate, to set aside; term related to an ancient agricultural operation: the sifting of the grain using a sieve, a tool with which the good grain was separated from the excrementum, from the undesirable residues. Secretum, then, is associated with waste, that which must be thrown away, hidden... It has to do with discarding and separation, at an almost phenomenological level. And what do people do? Keep the rotten grain, and where do you keep it? In a closed container, underground. A secret is "buried" or "buried", and the person who knows how to keep quiet is compared to a grave. Le secret de la vie est dans les tombes closes, said Leconte de Lisle. And Benjamin Franklin thought that a secret can be kept between three... as long as two of them are dead. Other metaphors are also used, such as culinary ones. To signify that a secret has been revealed, it is usually said that the cake was discovered or that the pot was uncovered. The French, for example, use the expression découvrir le pot pourri, to uncover the rotten saucepan. And also, with the same meaning, découvrir le pot aux roses, a fragrant and very delicate metaphor, which -according to philology- is the same as saying: the wimp was uncovered!
To promise secrecy, secrecy, we talk about “sewing our mouths shut”, a figure that oscillates between metaphorical cruelty and the culinary?
- Linked to the senses, I would say, which play their part here. Smell, for example. People “stick their noses” where they are not called, that idea of snooping around to find something that they should not and cannot find out. In other words, the putrid. Psychoanalysis also compares it to the mechanics of holding and letting go, withholding and incontinence. The sphincter closes but one day it explodes, everything comes out, and with a whiff...
According to your psi expertise, what do people seek to hide that makes them unspeakable?
- What dulls shine, what gives shame or generates guilt. There is everything: infidelities, incest, crimes, psychosis... If you send yourself a baton, it is better that no one knows about it; and if a few know it, they better shut up.
According to Marguerite Yourcenar, trust is always pernicious when it is not intended to simplify the lives of others Does keeping a secret make a psychological impact?
- Absolutely, because the secret is dense, a very heavy load. Whether it's nonsense or something serious -a small encapsulated cancer that is eating away-, it acts to the detriment. Whoever keeps it has a secret, hidden and mysterious garden, well fenced so that nothing can get out. Gossip becomes a rhizome, in Deleuze's terms: it moves, advances, ramifies, but the secret must be pruned all the time so that it does not escape, and that implies enormous psychic wear and tear. In clinical cases that I have dealt with, many consultations have to do with hidden secrets, which take time to be told, sometimes years, even within the framework of the analysis. Note that, in addition, it alters the relationship with others because, as popular knowledge says, "to whom you tell your secret you will always be subject." That tacit or manifest pact, sealed by planting the "we don't talk about this", transforms the ties. Keeping a reserve thins the bond with all the parties involved, also with oneself... Because it gives a narcissistic joy: I have a little treasure and I don't have it long, and that increases my aura, something of an absolutely imaginary order. In addition, it can be used as a factor of power, to gain the curiosity of others, to make oneself interesting, to dominate... I always say that in politics and in the comedy of the sexes (that is, in sexual life, in the relationship of couple) is the sport that is performed the most.
“Before the whispering installation of the secret, the third party's antennae will find no rest”, you have written about how others sharpen their antennae.
- There is something floating in the air and, suddenly, for that third party the world is filled with clues, the controls increase, the way of looking sharpens, concentrating on every little detail. That is why I believe that gossip and secrecy are antagonistic: gossip wants to get into that closed place, in that sealed compartment, and it sharpens all of its intelligence to achieve its goal.
Historically, the secret has enjoyed a good reputation, related to ethics, honor, and the sacred pact. In times where good reputation and privacy seem to have lost their validity, could it be said that secrecy is in decline, is falling into disuse?
- The secret has dignity, poise, historical, social and ethical prestige; although, as I told you before, it comes from detritus, it has an excremental background. And today it is more crap than anything else that swarms in, for example, the hundreds of gossip programs, which make a trade of the secret revealed with total impudence. Even so, I think that when it comes to anguish, the secret doesn't come out. The more that is said, it is because there is a larger core that remains covered, an unconscious remnant is kept safe; on the side of jouissance, analysis would say. Psychologists know that what hides the secret is not banal knowledge but something that occupies a separate place in a person's body of knowledge. These contents are encapsulated, they profoundly alter their subjective position. Popular wisdom has invented a terrifying sentence: "Don't even think about what you don't want anyone to know." That alteration, for me, is the worst: burying oneself, because it is a double-walled repression, one carries a time bomb... There are secrets that are very difficult to keep, but the jealous guardian still has another resource: succumb, surrender to the relieving operation of talking, talking, talking... In therapy, for example, so that the secret stops ruining your life. Because there is a moment when it becomes unbearable. I see it in patients, in literature, in the movies: at one point, the protagonist, hero or heroine, has to let go, even taking risks, because that's where his life ends. It is the last narcissistic bastion: if I say so, what are they going to say about me? How are they going to look at me?
There are few spaces for catharsis: the psi couch, the confessional...
- There are still people who talk to the priest instead of analyzing themselves, because the priest forgives you, and that is clearly not the analyst's job. Another way to sublimate would be through art. Lacanian psychoanalysis, as a Freudian continuity, promotes this direction of the cure in order to transform the painful and terrible, the pathetic background, into an artistic work. This is called “know how to do there”, savoir-y-faire, with the symptom.
Whoever has not enjoyed the same prestige as the secret is its first cousin, which you mentioned before: gossip.
- If there is a secret going around, the very nature of gossip leads you to find out; It's like a little mouse that meddles, sticks its nose into what's stored. Or like a little snake that goes fast, happy to run. They are opposite movements of discourse: the secret is about constraining, putting it in the box or the saucepan; gossip is more liberating, with an open gate, associated with exchange, recreation, and entertainment. Consciously or unconsciously, it is known that he is going to come out, always disguised in the clothes of the one who tells it: a funny person tells funny gossip, a lead does not add salt and pepper... And any gossip will attest that the more leaven is put on him, the more entertaining and more compelling gossip. Be careful, evil exists, and in the wrong hands, it can be gunpowder: the line can become blurred between seasoned, harmless and playful gossip, and gossip that tries to be harmful, which comes with poison. But, without malice, it fulfills a social function: to update you, provide you with useful information... There is an anecdote that Borges tells about a lady who proclaims how much she hates gossip, how she prefers to spend her days reading and studying Marcel Proust. Then someone points out that Proust's novels... are full of gossip! One after the other they give structure to his works. Where, for example, he slaps down the Guermantes, he gives an account of their hypocrisy and their arrogance... He said that gossip is wonderful because even when it refers to oneself, it reveals aspects that were dormant...
In other words, contrary to what we have been told all our lives, whispering is not exclusive to women.
- Of course not. There is a quote from La Fontaine that says: "Nothing weighs more than a secret, taking it far is difficult for female shoulders", but when it comes to these dense, heavy secrets that we have been talking about, I would say that there is no distinction between women and guys. Yes, there is a female tradition linked to gossip; the literature is littered with references. Etymologically, in French, potiner is called gossip. Potin was the name of the small heaters that French women used in the 17th century at parties, when the men retired to talk about "men's things" and they got together to talk by the fire of these little heaters. Possibly, gossip has to do with this gregarious and conversational thing about women. We give course to this bustling accumulation of small things on the road, details that men do not usually pay attention to. Look, in Los dos hilos, a terrific work by Ricardo Piglia, he states that every narrative has two threads: the manifesto, which is the story that you read, and the one that is not told, the underground, hidden plot. The grace of a story has to do with the density of what is not said and what is not known. Hemingway spoke of "the iceberg theory": of the tremendous block, the story is just the visible tip. I bring these ideas to the field of gossip, which the Royal Spanish Academy calls invention; a fiction, in short: one always thinks that there is more, something that is not told, that is why it is so exciting and we want to keep digging. Knowing that iceberg that we know exists but has no shape puts you in the tunnel of curiosity.
