Identity Search

Last night, my husband and I and some friends went to see the film Into the Wild. It's the fictionalized account of a true story, a real person - a young man, Chris McCandless, who, after graduating with honors from college, gave all of his money ($24,000.00) away to charity, shredded his ID (social security card, driver's license), and took off, travelling the country without so much as a hint to his family or anyone who knew him that he was leaving. He travelled for over two years - first by car, but mostly by walking and hitching rides. As he travelled, he kept a diary in which he wrote about himself in the third person, calling himself "Alexander SuperTramp," and he introduced himself as such to everyone he met. His goal, in part, was to leave all social conventions and just be "out there," scrounging for survival, testing his limits, creating an identity for himself that had nothing to do with the family he grew up with or with the parameters Western society expected. He ended up in Alaska, alone, far from human contact, far from the gaze and expectations of others. The tragedy is that after a stay of about a month or two, he decided to leave his "Alaskan Adventure" as he styled it and to reconnect with the human race, but he found himself trapped, unable to cross the raging river, full of early summer's melting snow and ice. He ended up starving to death - dying alone in the wilderness. Before he died, he records in his diaries he loneliness; he wanted, in the end, to be back in human community, and his last note, written to whomever might find his body, was signed, not with the identity he had taken in in his two years of travelling, but signed, "Christopher McCandless," the name his parents had given him, the identity he thought he'd wanted to leave behind.

I'm not sure exactly how this fits in with our ideas about perception, our questions about how important others' perceptions are of us - but I think there's a connection somewhere here. It was important to Chris, in this re-creating of himself, not only to re-name himself, but to tell others his new name, to make sure their impression of him was of someone without ties, without family, without parents, siblings, even friends. He wanted to be a free agent - unconnected and unaffected by those closest to him, even to those he met in his travels. But in the end, he longed for that connection - but the realization that he even had that longing or need came too late. I think in many ways, we, too, want to feel we are free agents - only affected by others when and how we want to be affected. But as with Joan Didion, when her husband died, as with Chris, when he came to his own death, they both realized that their identities, who they were, were bound up in the lives of others. And that when that bond was ripped from them, they almost could not bear the loneliness of it. I suppose the fact that our lives, our identities are so bound to others is both a joy and a terror, a blessing and a burden. We cannot live without it, and in certain moments our fellowship with others - their gaze upon us - is one of the greatest of joys. But at other times, the gaze is a great weight, and Chris came to a time when he did not want to live with it. So what do we do with these two halves ourselves?

Through the Eyes of Others

About six months ago, I read Joan Didion's book The Year of Magical Thinking - it's an extraordinary account, an account of grief, grief in the face of the death of a beloved spouse. I did not realize that in reading that book I would not come away unscathed - it is a book that burns, burns because it is both so extraordinary - how many significant writers can you think of who have spent an entire book describing such a grief? - and so ordinary - will not all of us, at some point, face the horror of the death of someone dear to us? Since I read it, I feel in some ways, I'll never really be the same - there's a kind of knowledge that changes you, and Didion has that dangerous giftedness that all eminent writers do to get inside you, inside your experience of life.

As we've been talking about perception this quarter - how we perceive, why we perceive in the way we do, how we perceive others, how and why we don't perceive others - and I realize that much of my own perception of the world is shaped in significant ways by books. Certain books, not all books. Didion's book has forever changed my perception others of who are grieving, my perception of death, my perception of myself and others as a mortal beings, and my perception of my connectedness to those closest to me.

One thing that Didion wrote has particularly haunted me - she writes, "Marriage is memory, marriage is time. . . . Marriage is not only time: it is also paradoxically, the denial of time. For forty years I saw myself through John's eyes. I did not age. This year [the year of John's death] for the first time since I was twenty-nine I saw myself through the eyes of others. This year for the first time since I was twenty-nine I realized that my image of myself was of someone significantly younger" (197). Is this not an observation almost that cannot be tolerated? (And yet, I revel in the despairing truth of it. Isn't this the joy and pain of great writing?) We do not realize, I think, how much the eyes of others, particularly of those closest to us, affect our perception of ourselves - and if we are with a dear other for years upon years, is it not inevitable that that "other" vision becomes so much a part of who we are that if it is torn away, the shock of it, the abrupt awareness of new eyes looking at us, might be too much to bear?

When my grandmother died after 55 years of marriage to my grandfather, my grandfather at once became much older. I noted it then, but could not really make sense of it. He became a different person. I cannot say for certain that his dementia and the rapidity of his physical aging was a direct result of my grandmother's death, but saying that it was, at least in part, makes a great deal of sense to me. Without her vision of him, he, in some way, lost himself, I think. I do not mean to be so grim here, but I feel I must respond to Didion's book in some way, for it touches us all so nearly. Her book - with this insight into death, and grief, and into how the lives of others are so intertwined with our own - is a gift - a terrible one perhaps, but nonetheless, a gift.

Looking in the Mirror

It's interesting how life works sometimes, in that, often when you begin thinking about a thing, that thing crops up everywhere. We've been talking about perception, about the way that our physical senses lead us to believe certain things, particularly, as shown in the film Crash, things about others. My 6-year old daughter was telling me about a new girl that's just come to her class. She quite carefully explained to me her process when she encounters new people - "first," she said, "I look at their faces - I look to see if they're pretty - and if they are pretty, then I like them." At first, I was so shocked and horrified - have I been teaching her this?! That this is the way we judge others? But as we've been thinking about perception in our class and watching a movie like Crash, I wonder, is this, rather than a product of my training of her, merely a human trait? Isn't what she does what we do in some way or another? We do look at people, we look at their faces, their bodies, to see what they look like, to make a judgment about their "prettiness," as my daughter phrased it. Our senses give us these impressions of others - as adults, I guess, we learn to hide the reactions we have to what our senses tell us about others - we learn to suppress those reactions - we learn to remember to look beyond the surface. But my daughter's comments and the claims that Crash makes force me wonder just how much we actually do dismiss our senses and look beyond the surface in the attempt to sympathize, understand, and love.

We are physical beings, but isn't that rather strange? Don't we sense and resent the dichotomy sometimes? How much does our physical structure actually represent who we are inside? I think it was the writer Simone Weil (or perhaps her contemporary Simone de Beauvoir) who once said something to the effect that 'every beautiful woman looks in the mirror and accepts the image, and every ugly woman looks in the mirror and knows that it lies.' I understand what she meant, I think; who doesn't?

I recently listened to an interview with the writer John Updike - he's struggled his whole life, apparently, with psoriasis- an unsightly skin affliction that can be treated, but never cured. He said, "It's a strange thing, isn't it, to be born into a certain body rather than an ideal body . . .[and] the whole idea of a face is slightly funny. If you can put yourself outside of the species a moment, [to see] these faces we carry around, the holes -- the shining holes, the dark holes, the one that shows a lot of teeth -- [it] is all odd beyond belief because it's my face, but it isn't really my self." And so we've been given these bodies, skins, faces and we are in some part judged by others because of them, but we are not sure how they are actually "me." Plato seems to think we can move beyond the senses, we can move to a reality which contains only an abstract ideal, but I don't know just how far we can do that - we, our beings, are both physical and abstract - what do we do with those two halves of ourselves?

(The cool picture in this blog, by the way, isn't mine - I found it on Flickr.com - here's the link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fouad_bechwati/461745327)

Autumn Gardening

I suppose I could write about Bacon or Rosaldo, but I think I'd rather take a break from them for this post and relish the autumn season for a bit. We've just moved to a new place this fall and for the first time, in my life really, I have a yard to call my own (well, sort of -- we still rent), and I can plan out a few flower beds for the spring. Mmmmm. I love this time of year, in part because I love the feel in the air -- the coolness, the new smells -- drying leaves, wet grass. I love the rain and clouds and wind because it makes the indoors so cozy and inspires me to bake and to invite friends over for conversation and tea. There's nothing like a steaming mug of tea in your hand and a good friend across from you on a rainy autumn day. But I love this time of year, too, because it makes me think of the cyclical nature of our world -- we prepare flower beds and plant our bulbs now, anticipating the spring -- and we know it will come. It always does - isn't there something glorious in that regularity? And there's something lovely about this time of working with the earth and then the waiting, waiting, waiting. My summer flowers are still here - my double impatiens was vibrantly pink and green today in the soft rain - but I know the frost is coming soon and the impatiens will quell and die in its sharp cold bite. But I have this new patch of ground, ready for the spring -- it was so invigorating to get out in the air today, into the rain, and shovel some compost onto this new space of ground. I never thought I could get so excited about compost, but oh, I love the rich, brown, crumbly-ness of it -- it looks so ready to grow things. I have only to wait.