MORNING SERIAL
I FORMULATED the minutes which constitute the public record. I reported it all, or most of it. By which I mean that, in my mind, prior to any sift or sequencing into narrative, I held it all. Thereafter, not everything needs to be verbatim, does it? Or elsewhere on this spinning earth, where would we be?
Not everything needs to be out-in-the-open to be known but all requires moulding, assembling out of mess and muddle, if people are to see things one way or the other, and preferably not to understand them another way altogether.
That modelling from raw data is what a Secretary does. It became my purpose in life. To be a dissembler in order to be of use to those who wrestled with, or merely submitted to, the place and time we inhabited for our own time. Or so I once told myself. Other times, this one for example, the one I now simply acquiesce in, might tell it differently even in retrospect.
But I cannot do so. I remain the Secretary of that former time and I do not see the account, the record, I once made as any species of lie. It was the way the truth we required needed to be made available as our truth. I was, in this sense, faithful to the story in which I found myself.
I did not make up the stories of the lives, public and private, which were being framed. I was not there to invent stories. Put another way, I would not tell of things I did not see, or hear, or had confirmed by a trusted third party.
I was thus bland and reliable as a source for enquiry, and I cannot change that now by any pretence of liveliness, of gossip and hearsay. My mode of telling is too ingrained in my sensibility to be either polished for effect or roughed up to seem authentic. As Secretary I was attuned to what was documented and is evidenced, not to speculation or fantasy. I transcribed, and so am myself a transcription.
This has its own sting to be sure. It inevitably makes anything which I may choose to say at this end-point of life, choose to say directly that is, lesser than whatever it once was, although the traces of that are already reduced by the formal telling of it.
> The Crossing by Dai Smith is published by Parthian in the Modern Wales series www.parthianbooks.com