Nothing to hide

"If what has happened in the one person were communicated directly to the
other, all art would collapse, all the effects of art would disappear" - Paul Valery

With a pack of cards you can play bridge or patience, you can foretell futures,
gamble, perform tricks, or build towers. Like card-playing, poetry is an
overlapping range of pursuits but you never know when one turns into
another. Asking for the wrong card you get the king of hearts. Well, in
crosswords you do, the answer's 3 words - (4, 2, 6). "card" is the literal
clue, and "wrong" is an indication that there's an anagram - in this case
"Asking for the" mutates into "king of hearts".

Poetry also lets you take apart something that has meaning and re-assemble it
into something new - a life into verse perhaps. It both transforms and projects
so that others can see, like an item gran arranged family slides into.
Here the
whole phrase is the literal clue, and the answer's (5,7). "item gran" arranged
is "magi tern", into which you slide "clan" (family) to get "magic lantern".

Some people take things apart without immediately recreating. They store the
dissected pieces for easy retrieval - in dictionaries, in encyclopedias, or
chronologically, or by theme - the sad episodes clumped together. Some people
remember their lives as these fragments, shuffling and dealing them out so that
no-one knows the whole truth. Their words are like the dummy hands of bridge -
only part of the story.

But it takes more than that to be a writer. It's said that the blind have acute
hearing, that Autistics observe people more thoroughly. What handicap do poets
compensate for? Perhaps it's shyness, not wanting to reveal all, hiding behind
words and disguises, depending upon the curiosity of others, being expert at
flight rather than fight - flight from appearances, from self. Or perhaps they
want to believe that things never die, they merely change. Transformation is a
form of hiding more radical than disguise, a Willow Pattern of reversable
changes where nothing's lost.

People with secretive personalities defer responses and seek matching
environments to feel comfortable in. Literature provides an ideal setting,
where there's profit to be had in delay: when several things are left in
pieces you can mix them up - taking a nose from one person, a smile from
another. Writers have perfected techniques of hiding and disguise, and where
there are secrets there are discoveries. The moment of revelation is especially
important in whodunnits, but sequences of lesser revelations drive many texts
along. The writer needs a good excuse to hide the information otherwise readers
will feel cheated or manipulated. The standard shared conventions of
storytelling can be viewed as excuses for secrecy -

• Point of View - once this is established, readers understand why they
  don't
  know what's happening elsewhere, or why they can't see inside other characters'
  heads
  


• Narrative - If events can only be told in chronological order, there'
  s an
  excuse for not telling all straight away
  


• Show/Tell - If only "showing" is allowed, explanation may have to be
  delayed.
  

Take for example a situation where a man's going to the kitchen. These
conventions all might explain why we're not allowed to know his motivation
until we're told that he raids the biscuit tin.

The trick as ever is to know which game you're playing and let others know
too. Just as in some card games the dealer choose trumps, so the writer chooses
the genre and the reader has to play along. The genre determines when it's
acceptable to hide and when to seek, when to challenge and when to bluff, when
to twist, and when to stick. At the end you may be amazed, penniless, or
defeated but at the very least you'll be different. Must everything change?
Grand works result (6,8).