Of underground cranes and hand movements...

"The Lost Language of Cranes" is a 1986 novel by American writer David Leavitt. It tells the story of a husband and wife and their son. In the story the son comes out to his parents as gay and the novel explores the difficulties this revelation has on the parties involved. Ordinarily this would make for bland and almost cliched storytelling, except that in the novel the caveat is that the son's coming out forces the father to confront his own supressed homosexuality. The man has created an entire life out of his feigned heterosexuality and self-loathing. The title of the novel provides better insight into the dynamics of the family relationship and human communication overall. It comes from a subplot in the novel involving a child abandoned by his ne'er-do-well mother. Left to fend for himself and with virtually no human interaction of substance, the child develops a fixation with the cranes that are visible fom his window, the site of a construction project. Thus he creates a language of sorts with these inanimate objects - which in his puerile and decelerated mind - are sentient beings, that only he comprehends. Thus the so-called language of the cranes becomes lost. The correlation with the larger story in the book is how the family has not just lost all capacity to communicate in a healthy fashion, but created their own dysfunctional language of nuance, secrets and code. At first glance I think of the allegory as far-fetched. Then I ask myself, Do we all speak to one another in a clandestine tongue of one form or another that only a few select understand? An underground network of sorts comprised of closemouthed revelations and tacit understanding? We all know what the answer is. Who really knows how the now ubiquitous LOL or OMG got afoot to common usage. The thought of someone perhaps thinking a meeting with the boss was a joke and trying to secretly express that irreverance to a co-worker by an invented "lol" is intriguing, although obviously imagined. It is what we cannot say to one another that forces us to create our coded languages. The idea that some things are best left unsaid is something of an oxymoron, for something to be declared unspoken would have to mean that at least one person cannot possibly communicate the idea to another human in some way, shape or form. So thus secrets do not truly exist, of course. It is how we maintain those confidences that give the private information its gravitas. When a group of people can truly be trusted with confidential information it becomes an almost illustrious testimony to the frailty of human nature. We see large scale examples of this in the Central Intelligence Agency or the Federal Bureau of Investigations, where information that is quite literally top secret is indeed maintained and the individuals involved do in fact keep their mouths shut. But honorable confidentiality is not confined strictly to federal agencies such as these where information leaked can mean a nuclear bomb dropping on Indianapolis, as an example. It is also found in daily life where people who know they can trust a member of the club let the cat out of the bag with no concerns of a leak. A rarity indeed. And it is, too, that vague but clearly understood facial gesture acknowledging that one fully understands. A subtle movement of the hand indicating one is in on the know. Our own language of the cranes. So covert worlds of message become necessary to hide a sexual orientation, a midnight raid on a terrorist organization's leader or who's sleeping with who. Some are better masters of this esoteric language than others. To those who just cannot maybe they are missing out on the initiation and fun of it all. But if they don't, don't say a word. It's our secret.