The Secret Writer

Andy is a secret writer. I discover this during a conference about an assignment he is working on. He writes at night, when the family is asleep, but the city isn’t. Its discordant language--its industrial accents and trafficky dialects; the inflections of a human shout, or laugh, or cry--slipstreams through an open window. Outside the window, the leafy tongues of a tree—he says it’s a dusty elm--whisper in the breeze. Andy listens and he writes.

Andy is intelligent, fiercely so, but he works hard to keep it secret, like his writing. A matter of maintaining face among his companions, I would guess; there is vulnerability in too much revelation. His writing for my class, though, reveals what he tries to conceal. It is raw and undisciplined and powerfully evocative. He has a distinctive voice and an unsettling perspective. Mostly, Andy believes, life is an ordeal, an aching tribulation, punctuated by infrequent and evanescent moments of release. These moments become our addictions.

So I infer from our talk in conferences and the writing he does in response to class assignments. I don’t know what Andy’s pain is, whether it is something specific or simply a generalized feeling, his sensed experience of the world. He won’t tell me. Nor will he tell me what he writes about. “Things,” he says, “me and my friends. It’s crazy.” His body language tells me, “I am a secret, like the writing I do. I keep myself. Don’t ask. I won’t tell.” But I can guess why Andy writes secretly: to corner and contain his anguish, to bestow it with structure and, perhaps, even meaning of some kind. Secret writing is his addiction. He self-medicates by imposing the order of grammar and syntax, leavening it with personal expression. Perhaps that secret writing enables him to hope that somewhere or someday or somehow order is the rule rather than the exception. If so, then writing helps him transcend his hurting.

So does soccer. It’s really why he’s here, he tells me; he was recruited, a forward, the one out front, the one responsible for scoring. Each of those 45-minute halves is joyous. It is movement, surging, churning movement, muscle and mind allied, fused, the sheer exuberance of motion synthesized with purpose and strategy. Its goal is a goal. And in that jubilant embodiment, that enclave of play melodied by momentum and flux and fluidity and timing and direction, the carking cares and afflictions of reality are suspended, and, perhaps, Andy finds a moment of transcendence.

But Andy knows that most of his life occurs, will occur, outside the 90 minutes he spends on a 60 x 100 yard field. And so he writes, furtively, afraid that his secret will be revealed, afraid that the hard work of concealing his intelligence might falter. But only the whispering elm outside his window knows Andy’s secret, and it speaks a language no one remembers.