On Secrets

  

 I’ve been watching the Netflix series Virgin River. I have been learning. 

     Each of the characters in Virgin River has a secret, and the series slowly, very slowly, discovers each secret. The steady revelation of each character’s secrets is what keeps me watching. I want to know what is going on, and though I think I know what the identity is of each of the secrets, I continue to watch to discover that I am correct. 

     Virgin River, like Cecily, Alaska in the show Northern Exposure, is a small secluded town to which it would seem people have come to get away from their complicated lives in the City. These towns are populated by a relative assortment of eccentrics. In Cecily I am attracted to the characters by their eccentricities, but in Virgin River it is their secret that makes the characters eccentric.  I suppose that the characters of Virgin River are emblematic of the rest of us who walk about protecting our secrets from being discovered by others. Not living isolated as in some fish bowl our eccentricities are easily hidden whereas the isolation away from the complexity of city life allows the secrets in Virgin River to be revealed unadulterated.. The rest of us possess too many avenues for distraction that permits us to protect our secrets from ever being noticed by others. Too many paths to swim out of view. 

     Of the inhabitants of Virgin River we learn: of Mel, the nurse-practitioner has come to Virgin River running away from the still-born death of her baby and what I suspect (yet) will be either the ensuing infidelity or abandonment of her husband; of Jack, who owns Jack’s Bar (of course) and is a marine veteran wounded several times in Iraq, who hides his abuse of alcohol and who suffers post-traumatic stress syndrome exacerbated by a guilt he incurred from his experience in the war. Of Hope, the town’s mayor, who was once married to the curmudgeon doctor, Vernon, who we discover had a dalliance twenty years ago with the mother of Jack’s girlfriend. That affair ended Hope and Vernon’s marriage though we learn she has kept the final divorce papers in her desk drawer for the past twenty years. We’ll wait to see where this might lead.  Of Paige, who operates the town bakery out of a food truck, and had come to Virgin River running away from something: we learn that her name is not actually Paige and we discover that she is coloring her son’s hair to disguise his identity. When her son wonders when they can stop the disguise, Paige answers, “When we are safe.” Of Lili who has left her baby on the doctor’s porch and the discovery of her motherhood organized the first few episodes.

     The particular eccentricities of the characters drives the continuance of interest in the series as each of the secrets is brought to light as a result of their eccentricities. I think it is the idea of secrets that intrigues rather than the particular secrets themselves: once we become aware of what drives each episodes then we simply await the event that will cause the revelation of the secret. The characters have little depth outside of their secrets; it is their secret that gives them depth and there is no complexity to the character outside of their secret.

     Maybe I am a slow learner. I wonder, however, if the discovery of secrets isn’t what drives so many plots: I think of Crime and Punishment, and Ulysses, Ethan Frome, and Catch-22. Pride and Prejudice. Oedipus Rex, Twelfth Night andOthello. Felix Holt, The Radical. What about Lord Jim, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights? I know I am oversimplifying: the characters in these novels are complex and not defined by their secret. Rather, their secret arises from their characters! I turn to Hamlet. When Rosencrantz and Guildenstern try to discover Hamlet’s secret he accuses, “You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass.” Hamlet is more complex than this one secret and that he keeps this secret stems from his complexity. I think as well of the novels of Henry James at the center of which are secrets but again, it is not the secret that is of interest but what the secret reveals about character. The Golden Bowl or The Ambassadors, for example. In Virgin River, the character is more complex than the secret. And when all the secrets are revealed, well, then I will have no more interest in the show. But of the novels and plays I have listed I would read over and over again and never suffer fatigue or boredom. 

House Hearings vs. Beethoven

I left my spin-cycle class this morning where I happily imagined I had finished last. Lately my goal (my goad!) is to finish in effort neither significantly less nor appreciably more in effort than during  the last spin in the previous spin class. This effort is measured in revolutions per minute (of the pedals and not the earth) and in Watts, though I don’t know exactly what that measures—but I am told it announces my energy output labor. Personally (and what isn’t so, really), I want merely to sweat a little and breathe a little hard. And live a day longer that I would without the cardiovascular effort. The workout is the magic charm.
     I left the Club and it was still snowing. Well, it is December in Minnesota and as I advised my brother who wondered if there was still snow on the ground, yes, it rests there until May. I turned on the car (in the Prius I push a button with my foot on the brake and do not turn any ignition key!) and Minnesota Public Radio emanated from the car speakers. And I had a choice. On the news stream was the House hearings on impeachment. On the classical music stream I heard playing the final movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.     The triumph of that movement and the degraded discourse of the House hearings made the choice simple. Listening to the Republicans on the committee I thought of Dylan’s “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding): “While one who sings with his tongue on fire/Gargles in the rat race choir/Bent out of shape from society’s pliers/Cares not to come up any higher/But rather get you down in the hole/That he’s in.” From their voices there was no singing but only nonsense and refuse. I thought of the Scorsese film, The Irishman, and of Frank Sheeran, devoting his life to protecting criminals often by “painting houses,” a euphemism for killing people. The Republicans on the committee cannot dispute the phone calls, the corrupt directives from Trump, or the illegitimate, lawless regime that organizes and operates the White House and that threatens to kill our democracy.

     That last movement speaks of having weathered the storm. Though the storm menaces still in this final movement, yet I know I have prevailed. Wherever it now threatens, its tensions resolve into triumph. I have become stronger that the storm which continues to rage. The last measures of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony are filled with triumph: twenty-nine out of the final forty-one measures are tonic C major chords . . . The symphony began in C minor. But the final moments in this symphony speak ebulliently. In the symphony’s final measure, the entire orchestra plays the plain and simple C notes: no tension or dissonant element remains anywhere.
     And why would I choose the House hearings and listen to the discordant atonal noise?
     But the storm nevertheless rages and I hope we will survive. 

Herman's Hermits

Freud et al. have taught me where and even how dreams may come and how they might be interpreted and even understood. On my dreams and my readings I have benefitted from his insights. But at present I am interested in the sound track that emanates from that unconscious and might even serve as musical accompaniment to the dream itself. When I awoke this morning “I’m Henry the Eighth I am” by Herman’s Hermits was playing. They sang: 

I'm Henry the eighth I am
Henry the eighth I am, I am
I got married to the widow next door
She's been married seven times before
And every one was an Henry (Henry)
She wouldn't have a Willy or a Sam (no Sam)
I'm her eighth old man, I'm Henry
Henry the eighth I am
     Second verse same as the first

It is a very silly song and if you see the YouTube of their performance on the Ed Sullivan show you will understand how absent of any meaning this group represented. Other hits from this group included “Mrs. Brown, You’ve got a Lovely Daughter,” and “I’m Into Something Good.” Herman’s Hermits appeared in the United States as part of what was termed ‘the British Invasion.’ Rock groups arriving included the Hermits as well as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Dave Clark Five, the Yardbirds, the Who, the Kinks, the Animals, Blind Faith, the Pretty Things, Dusty Springfield, Peter and Gordon, Chad and Jeremy, and Manfred Mann. I am certain there were more, but I cannot remember them because mostly they did not last very long. 

     I do remember animated discussions regarding the question of who was better: the Rolling Stones or the Beatles, the Beatles or the Dave Clark Five. These discussions (and those intense conversations concerning our love lives or lack thereof) consumed our lunch periods. Oh, how I obsessed about my unrequited love to dear Randy whose love was definitely requited. But I don’t remember being jealous of her success—perhaps I was enjoying my ideal longing. But I consider now that that is why Herman’s Hermits this many years later became the soundtrack for whatever my unconscious was effecting. In Digressions and Stories, my in-progress pseudo-memoir, I had been writing about those years of high school when the music changed and when the music changed us. And Herman’s Hermits, though an advance on the bubble gum music that filled the radio waves in the late 1950s and early 1960s, still refused any significance or purpose outside of the enjoyment of the British accents and the remarkable carelessness and fun the music represented.  Herman’s Hermits were plain fun. Oh, yes, some of the British groups addressed our lives in a more serious vein, introduced us to sex and metaphor—I remember two of my classmates heading into New York City and returning with Mick Jagger’s t-shirt. We did not doubt how they had earned that souvenir, and I imagine we were envious of their daring and their successes. And I recall someone suggesting that the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood” was a word play on “Knowing she would.” It was all a beginning of what would become a remarkably eventful and mostly tragic decade: I know that at least one of those young girls was found dead from an overdose on Bleecker Street, and I am convinced that some of my classmates must have ended up in Vietnam. I hope even now that they all returned. I think early during the decade I learned that evil existed. The Sixties were not fun: aside from the psychic pressures from my own personal demons, there was the horror from the social and political world. The existence of The Holocaust reached public acknowledgement and became part of our unconscious and active consciousness. It seemed to me that there would be no end to the assaults on our humanity and that we, and I, would never recover.
     And so the sound track of “Henry VIII, I Am” by Herman’s Hermits appears now in this moment because in the horror that is the Trump regime and with the impending global tragedy that will result from climate change, I would return to the innocence their songs represented. I would like to sit simply again wondering who was better and bemoaning happily unrequited love. Perhaps only in dreams.