Secrets & Mystery

"Show me how you do that trick  
The one that makes me scream" she said
"The one that makes me laugh" she said
And threw her arms around my neck
"Show me how you do it
And I promise you I promise that
I'll run away with you
I'll run away with you" 
Just like Heaven, the Cure.

Trust me,
You don't want to know.
If you want her to love you,
don't tell.
A revelation for the unprepared
is disappointing enough
to make grown men weep.

I am the son of a magician.
A Showman, and
I know
many secrets.
Trust me.
I show a lot.
I tell a lot.
But I keep secrets.
For I know their true nature.
Fragile and necessarily arcane.
Their existence depending
on not being known.
Their energy, their force,
their power, potency and fuel
is mystery.
Knowing can kill Mystery.
 
The journey is the goal. It is on the Way somewhere we are happiest. All hopes and dreams yet unfulfilled, everything still untarnished by the clash of reality versus dreams and hopes.  With curiosity piqued we have direction and fulfillment. Seeking rather than finding drives us onwards. Mystery is the fire of the human engine.

Roald Amundsen

The quest to be the first man to reach the Southpole, the gargantuan struggle of the journey there and the arduous way back, was the challenge and the goal.
The Pole itself was just a symbolic geographical location. There was nothing at 90º South that was not found anywhere else in the Antarctic. It was all about the Journey.
Could man make it? Could man survive? That was the Mystery.

Hjalmar Johansen

As it turned out it was almost impossible, but a few Norwegian men succeeded where the power and prestige of the English Empire failed. As it was with the North West Passage, so it was with the Southpole.
But what did we learn from this achievement? What did they bring back? Not much in terms of artifacts, but what Amundsen's team brought back, which Captain Scott didn't, was themselves. Without yourself, you have lost it all. No more journey for you to enjoy...
A small group of men went away dancing into the arms of death, perilously close to following him home, but just smart and imaginative enough to avoid his final advances.
Amundsen and his men returned changed. They wanted to know. Life up until then had been building up towards this. After the goal was achieved some of the men became reclusive, one of them even committing suicide. What did they learn out there in the white wilderness? Were they ready to disrobe the mystery and could they handle the knowing?

"Mystery is a Magnet. Whenever there is something that’s unknown, it has a pull to it. When you see a part, it’s even stronger than the whole." David Lynch.

Those who ask to know the secret after seeing a magic trick don't know what they are asking. A magician never tells, because he knows truth can hurt.
The spectator just seeks a cheep thrill, a quick satisfaction of a whim to stave off boredom for another five minutes. The magic trick, the exquisite illusion was impossibly beautiful and genuinely surprising, it created a moment of true astonishment. Does it not then follow that the secret behind the Mystery is even more astounding? Unfortunately not.
The beautiful thing about a secret is the Mystery it creates, not the Mystery it is.
For a Magician, the secret method is only awesome as potential for creating astonishment in a crowd.
Perhaps this is why it is so hard, for so many, to have great mystery explained. Why  are there so many species? Why do we believe in strange things? What was the origins of life? Is there anything supernatural out there? If yes, what? Telepathy? Homeopathy? Do we deny explanations because most of us aren't ready to have Mystery unveiled?

An understandable and rational explanation is not immediately satisfying to our stone-age minds. We cling to creation myths and notions of biological developments of irreducible complexity, because having a secret told when we aren't ready really hurts. Secrets can be weapons. There is power in wielding them, not just in the illusions they can create, but in the illusions they can shatter.

In his mystic poem 'The Augaries of Innocence," William Blake describes this:

"A truth that's told with bad intent, beats all the lies you can invent."

With great secrets comes great responsibility. I think Spiderman said that.

Only with the right preparation will a secret be seen for what it is. An acolyte in a secret society, such as the Showman's Guild, would never be initiated before he was ready. Part of the role of the Master Showman was to know when his Apprentice was ready to know. Nothing must be told before its time. If the acolyte wasn't ready, the secrets would fall on infertile soil and could shrivel and die. Like any seed the gardener must know that the soil is ready to receive a seed before planting.

What prompted this post was a desire to know what Mystery was.
As I continue my quest to understand the similarities and differences of Shamans and Showmen, Mystery keeps popping up. As the Shaman became Showman the Mystery at the heart of the performance disappeared. It got lost in popular performance, in Showbiz. No longer did the individual tricks and rituals point towards anything beyond the entertainment. This is what books on the subject of shamanism, showmanship, ectstatic and mystery religions seems to think. They all speak about the Mystery as a phenomenon, and I keep thinking: What was that Mystery?


Trust me, you don't want to know.
The method
is never as beautiful as the illusion itself.
The illusion points
to something bigger than us,
the always out of reach,
the mystery at the heart of nature.
The ever expanding unknown,
the Hydra of unsolved puzzles.
With every secret unlocked and understood
two new ones appear.
There will always be the unknown,
the Mystery will always be there,
on the edge of what we know.
For each step we take up
we see a little more
of what we don't know
yet.
In this shadowy no-man's land
the seeds of Imagination (the supernatural)
will always sprout.

Perhaps in the end
the nature of Mystery,
the core of a Secret,
Is simply not knowing?

Then again, what do I know?

Joseph Carey Merrick - The Elephant Man

Joseph Merrick - The Elephant Man

"The showman—speaking as if to a dog—called out harshly, “Stand up!” The thing arose slowly and let the blanket that covered its head and back fall to the ground. There stood revealed the most disgusting specimen of humanity that I have ever seen. In the course of my profession I had come upon lamentable deformities of the face due to injury or disease, as well as mutilations and contortions of the body depending upon like causes, but at no time had I met with such a degraded or perverted version of a human being as this lone figure displayed."

"From the intensified painting in the street, I had imagined the Elephant Man to be of gigantic size. This, however, was a little man below the average height and made to look shorter by the bowing of his back. The most striking feature about him was his enormous and misshapened head. From the brow there projected a huge bony mass like a loaf, while from the back of the head hung a bag of spongy, fungus-looking skin, the surface of which was comparable to brown cauliflower. On the top of the skull were a few long lank hairs. The osseous growth on the forehead almost occluded one eye. 

The circumference of the head was no less than that of the man’s waist. From the upper jaw there projected another mass of bone. It protruded from the mouth like a pink stump, turning the upper lip inside out and making of the mouth a mere slobbering aperture. This growth from the jaw had been so exaggerated in the painting as to appear to be a rudimentary trunk or tusk. The nose was merely a lump of flesh, only recognizable as a nose from its position. The face was no more capable of expression than a block of gnarled wood. The back was horrible, because from it hung, as far down as the middle of the thigh, huge, sacklike masses of flesh covered by the same loathsome cauliflower skin."

Sir Frederik Treves description in The Elephant man and other reminiscences of his first encounter with Joseph Merrick.

Thoughts surrounding a poem

Joseph's hat/mask

A man should be measured by the soul, but perhaps not from his soul alone. The man with the noblest and loftiest ideals but a temper uncontrollable enough to cause grief and harm to those it might fall upon is but a flawed soul. Man’s actions springs from his mind so through action a soul enters the world and the persons biography becomes the manifestation of their souls.
The biography of Joseph Merrick stands like a lighthouse. He was a man nature gave nothing to guide calloused minds of common men towards his inclusion in the human race, demonstrated so aptly in the famous words screamed out at the mob in David Lynch's 1980 movie.

“I!… am!... Not!... An animal.”

He acts, speaks and lives as a human being even when humanity shuns him. He did not ask to be born this way, but into this world he came. But still in this misery his humanity found its way through the severe physical deformities, through the torture and abuse by exhibitors and so called friends. Inside the Elephant man resided a soul that could not be crushed by all the worlds hardships. A poem from his autobiography adapted by Joseph from Isaak Watts' "False Greatness" expresses his feelings about himself and his formidable appearance with grace and burning beauty.

Cardboard church created by Joseph.

“Tis true my form is something odd,
but blaming me is blaming God;
Could I create myself anew
I would not fail in pleasing you

Was I so tall, could reach the pole,
Or grasp the ocean with a span;
I would be measured by the soul,
The mind’s the standard of the man."

Never could the poet Isaac Watts even in his wildest imaginations, if indeed the ‘father of English Hymnody’ had a wild imagination, just how fantastically apposite his words would become for a  man deemed by his contemporaries to have been “Gods foulest creation” or “Natures grossest mistake.” To the point that today a google search for "False Greatness by Isaac Watts" brings up Joseph Merrick's version rather than Watts' as the first hit.

Never has there been a man more adept at making us behold the durability of the very essence of humanity. With the troubled and deprived life this brave soul led, he should be a reminder for us all that no matter how much deprivation of those things most often imagined as necessities for human happiness should we let it bereave us of upstanding and heroic dignity.

Still from Lynch's movie