As a personal aside, today is my one-year wedding anniversary. It's a happy occasion.
I mention it because I am more-and-more interested in the relationship between our personal institutions [For me, marriage and a PhD program would be the 2 big ones] and feelings of security, loyalty, censorship and self-censorship, and -- especially -- guilt.
The important question for me is, Can we experience our "personal institutional affiliations" (if you'll accept the term: PIA's could include family, church, & even artistic or business community, i.e. a person who feels a "commitment" to the modern dance community of Greater Cincinnati) and the effect they have on us? I can experience my wife, and I can experience my love for her, her love for me, and the ways we change as a couple, ... even the ways she changes me. But can I gage myself vis-à-vis the marriage itself? Similarly, I can experience the writings, the opinions, and the personalities that I am exposed to in graduate school. But, can I experience myself vis-à-vis the experience of being a graduate student?
Guilt comes into the mix -- as does pride -- because the "PIA" confuses what one expects of oneself with what one feels that one owes to the institution.
You will say to yourself, and with reason, Wait. How can he confuse what he owes a person to whom he has made promises [wife] with a contractual relationship [graduate fellowship]? Answer: It is a question not of the person, but of the role.
The classic text that explores this problem, for me, is Kafka's aptly-titled "The Judgment." Georg, its main character, faces the intersection of a number of "roles" in his life (friend, son to an aging father, fiancé, & [nouveau] bourgeois & businessman). Because of the competing roles, and Georg's own insecurity, he becomes unable to use his normal discernment. The reader constantly suspects that he might be imagining things, or over-reacting, yet he can't be certain. Every perception depends on Georg's understanding of his role. How well does his know his father, his friend or his fiancé, in terms of their motivations? It would depend upon his understanding of his own effect upon them, and he's unsure. He's faced with their persons as they might be changing vis-à-vis his relationship to them.
For me, the question of role was crystallized twice last week.
In the first case, Ellen and I went to see the performance art piece/ play of one of her film-school colleagues (which combined film, staged theater, museum installations, and interactive elements, & is a little hard to characterize). First, as always, any such experience for any literature grad student naturally becomes a sort of negotiation with oneself, since you're automatically aware of yourself as a "trained" critic and the extent to which you resemble or reflect that training ... or the extent to which you experience art "purely" as a human. The problem being that you seemingly lose recourse to how much of a critic you were before someone introduced you to the idea of being one.
Also, at the reception party, one of the other young filmmakers mentioned that he had seen me walking through Rittenhouse Square and that I looked very much the part of a grad student, something that a couple of other people had also mentioned to me recently. He saw me, specifically, at a time when I was shirking my work a lot and felt specifically very far away from that life. In fact, I was obsessed with an idea for a film script and very much trying to think the part of the person who would be its protagonist, an urban wanderer of sorts with a very different life.
In the second instance, last Thursday, I got a call in the evening from a girl who tried to engage me in phone sex. She knew my first name, but I couldn't place her voice. She kept asking me questions, in the normal phone sex way, but seemed to be especially eager for me to reciprocate in some way ... to give her *something* other than my laughter and my questions about who she was, someone I knew or a friend of someone, and whether it was a prank. She seemed partially satisfied when I gave her an ambiguous response: "Sure, why not?" to "Are you hard?" or "Are you turned on?" In fact, I just was trying really hard to place the voice before hanging up.
I was disconcerted, of course, but not totally out of my element. I've had my share of crazy calls, most recently from a self-destructive uncle (who, apparently, is in jail as of last night). And something about it attracts me. I have, as the Spanish would say, a constant sense of "morbo. Like many a relatively responsible man, if I smell something weird, evil, or even tragic, I'm eager to be close and to see how it goes down.
The question for both instances is: How did my inability to experience myself in a PIA-associated role lead to me being unable to recognize myself, briefly, in 2 situations? In the first, I am surprised to find that my perception of myself is flawed. I felt most like the academic critic in the theater, yet I was recognized as being one most when I felt that I was actually wandering the city in the role of artist (even dressed more like one ... At the theater I was actually wearing the uniform of tidy jeans and loafers, whereas when I was spotted in the city I had been at my sloppiest.) In the second situation, I can't perceive myself even though I want to. Should I feel guilty? I'm a little worried, also morbidly curious, & certain that either emotion might be related to the role of husband, to the very stereotype of the married-man-when-tempted. I am sure that I am being faithful to the person of my wife (as per my intentions), and yet, I can't tell the difference anymore between that personal loyalty and the PIA. The caller, I'm sure, was testing me ... was provoking this ambiguity. I'm instantly certain that the person knows I'm married. But is that necessarily true? Or just something I'm projecting on her?
So what about guilt? Guilt at not fully embodying a role ... or guilt for embodying one too much? [Guilt is bad, because it can lead to allowing others to censor you by pigeonholing you, or to self-censorship based on fear of betrayal. And, surely, censorship is the worst enemy of self-knowledge.]
I worry that neither moving closer to, nor further from, the roles of "husband" or "intellectual" will give me a better sense of who I am.
Can I even perceive the difference?
The whole consideration forces me to consider the very real possibility that PIA's are not much of a factor in one's life, other than the fact that they offer one a bit of cover for imposing feelings on oneself that one had wanted to impose anyway. "You do it to yourself." No room for materialist thinking, for imagining big, weighty, social institutions that concretely limited you and change you as an actor in the world ... or is there?
No comments:
Post a Comment