The advantage in this honesty was objectively clear. How could people--any person, not just these refugees of the old sexual order--ever satisfy that horrible desire to know another if the other would not permit themselves to be known.
The mystery of otherness is made permeable by the other only; the voyeur, the scavenger, the spy, the private dick--all in the business of discovery--are nevertheless myopic in their versions of reality. Each promotes facts that support theories that are invention when they are not projection. Their enthusiastic research is of dubious pertinence as it pertains to the essence of this entity, this so-called "other." All the parchment in the world cannot contain enough detail to capture even a character's half-life, let alone the nuance and contradiction that exists in flesh and blood. Photographs are two-dimensional, of limited value. They are postcards from complicated days in complicated lives that were bred not by words but by feelings.
Here then, in the effort "to know what is knowable and to know what is not", it can be so breathlessly easy to give up on communication and become lazily cliche: ...having a wonderful time, wish you were here... But even this enlistment of language becomes dangerously reactive. Slid across the table at breakfast--on crumpled napkin or fading business card--such familiar dissonance is hardly the breezy greeting one intended. Passed from hand of author to trembling palm of its recipient, the postcard fails to achieve either the casual note of a profound intimacy or the authenticity of one desperately seeking connection.
And while there was no one who could subject us to the haunting isolation and its correspondent despair more acutely that this "other", the beloved could--if able to melt the wax fallacies of hir/his/her ego--offer an antidote, if not to the curiosity itself at least to the more obsessive features prevalent in its frustration. With patience, with a vigilant approval of not only the substance of our tales but also of the imperfect medium with which we share them, we begin to see outlines of real people (or at least the ghosts they have and will become.
There are, after all too many impossible tasks of explaining with any authority who and what we are. Even to ourselves. What can we tell each other about motivations that mix instinct with theater, about rhetorical conclusivity spoken (or written) against clouds of amorphous emotion? Nothing is said, but what is said will make you red in the face, what is said and what is recorded is the gibberish spoken not be understood, but to be heard. And we know and (slowly) accept this failing first in ourselves and then, only by extension and by begrudging degree in others, strangers at first, then distant relatives, acquaintances,.. We build trust from the inconsequential--a rocky foundation to be sure--with a mind that one day, someday, we might proffer this privilege to those close to us, last of all to the beloved.
You know that lesson instinctively. It is easy to believe those that you wouldn't mind having lie to you; it is only where we fear both the intent and the meaning behind deception that deception can sharpen its teeth, talons and tongue. There is moment, for all of us--often revealed in the first occasion that we see the beloved sleeping--that we encounter the borderlands, the impossible "otherness" of this body, this mind wrapped in sleep and dreams. It reminds me not to speak.
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