The last post I wrote was about relationships. And it got a lot of attention, which was pretty cool, and unexpected, because when I posted the blog, even though it was really true, it wasn't actually about the thing that I've really been thinking about that led me to write the blog in the first place, which is, well weird, except when you consider that the relationship most affected by living here is my relationship with language.
This is difficult to explain, and yet I know that there's not a single other Peace Corps volunteer who doesn't at least to some degree feel the same way. So forgive me for being self indulgent in describing how this feels to me and not trying to be universal about it.
I'm a words person. I don't know who many types of people there are, but there are certain people who are words people. I'm one of them - I generally find it a great deal easier to communicate in writing. I appreciate words for the tools that they are: of communication, of beauty, of meditation. I have an unfortunate and terrible talent for using words as weapons, especially against loved ones, especially in moments of anger. I wish words didn't have that power, but they do, and this post isn't about that dark side, of words or of me.
I like analogies. I like words that create worlds unto themselves. I enjoy puns and intellectual conversation that hinge on people's disparate understandings of single sentences. I like to study what words can do. I think that what you say depends on how you choose to say it. I am analytically inclined, whether about people or texts. I use language to gain insight into both the people I know and the ones I don't. I look for meaning, everywhere. I am particular. I really, really try to say what I mean, and to be very precise about it. I write blog posts and personal essays and research papers while I'm running, reading, teaching, and trying to go to sleep and in those moments, I return to mental scripts and edit them, too. I cannot experience something without imagining how I would write about it later (or in the moment). Words are my most prominent lens. Actually, I believe words are really everyone's most prominent lens, since as language using animals, language shapes the way we think, interpret the world, and thus feel about it. But I know that not everyone thinks about it that way. Not everyone is always obsessively thinking about language in the way that I am - but I do think that being in Peace Corps probably turns on that tendency in every volunteer.
I'm also a very serious person. I don't feel comfortable acting silly or being in the limelight, and the jokes I enjoy and the things I laugh at usually tend toward sarcasm, irony, and even a kind of cynicism.
People don't call me because I will make them laugh. They call me because what I say will probably make them think. With friends, I tend to be honest, probably more honest than they'd like in some instances, but I think very hard about how I deliver the comments I make, the advice I give; I try to make sure that what comes out of my mouth doesn't come tumbling out, but is measured, true, thoughtful, and, let's be honest, well-composed. I don't like to make comments in casual conversation unless I know exactly how they'll come out, unless I know my audience and the effect those comments might have. I feel terrible when my words are misconstrued or misunderstood, or when they miss their mark, partly because that's usually when someone ends up hurt, and partly because I think that how someone receives what you say and what they think you mean is as important as your intent. So, you think I'm crazy now, right? Fair enough. (I think I'm a little bit crazy, too.) When operating in English, this constant self-editing, this handle-with-care sense that I have about words, well, it works. Automatically. Easily. Less like a robot than it sounds.
It doesn't work in Thai. It doesn't work in Thailand. And this means that a lot of things that I have taken for granted for my entire life just don't work here. I didn't really expect this to happen, and even though it was probably the case the minute I stepped of the plane onto the Tarmac at Suvarnabhumi (the "v" is a "w" and don't pronounce the "i") airport, it's a fact that has only been slowly seeping into my consciousness and poisoning it. I take to languages easily - I like them - and I learned Thai quickly and easily during pre-service training. At site, those skills impressed people. And that made me feel good. I probably let those early successes with talking about family and fruit and food (fruit is not food, in Thailand) with strangers fool me into thinking that I had this language thing under wraps, that it would continue to be easy and self-satisfying to add to my Thai vocabulary and grammar repertoire.
It hasn't continued to be easy or self-satisfying. I never expected to be fluent in Thai. I don't even know that I expected to be as decent at it as I am now. But I am still a fool.
In short, a few things have converged during this experience to make me feel as though I'm Alice falling through the rabbit hole--un-anchored, watching everything I know disappear until even the point of light that marked which way is up as closed in on itself, the walls too far away to touch, the bottom still a theoretical probability. (Yes, I'm being dramatic. This is that cynical sense of humor I alluded to.)
1) It's really hard to keep learning Thai without the help of your ajaans, even if you were pretty good at it in the first place.
2) If I don't know what's going on in a conversation, I retreat into the inner conversation, the one always running in my head, and the editing and the thinking and the English, by God, block out everything else going on around me.
3) Something about people assuming you know what's going on makes it really embarrassing to ask when you don't.
4) For months during PST we were basically advised not to be direct (this is an oversimplification, I know, but it sunk into my consciousness like this, and I have really stopped being able to be as direct or as honest with people as I probably would be at home. Then again, at home, I wouldn't be encountering some of these situations and would probably be at a loss for English words, anyway).
5) My desire for precision in my own language means that I generally put myself on mute until I know exactly how whatever comes out of my mouth is going to come out. Until I have a sentence mentally lined up, and one on deck, and another waiting in the wings, I generally have trouble joining a conversation.
6) Since I rarely ever know what's going on, I have absolutely no insight, none that I trust, anyway, into what people are thinking or what motivates them or why or even, most of the time, what they're really trying to say when they're saying something.
In my case, it's these last three that have really turned my inner world upside down, left that "indelible mark" I mentioned in the last post. Because I don't really know how to read people's reactions, and I don't really know what's appropriate to say, -- I mean, yes, there are some basic cultural guidelines that are easy enough to follow, and have become automatic enough in a year and a half that I'm not going around offending everybody all the time with impunity and not really knowing it -- and I am always already editing what I want to say, I often feel nothing more than tongue twisted and confused. And isolated in my own mental state (yes, mental state is a double entendre. See how not funny I am?).
The constant second-guessing communication, wondering if I heard people right, if they heard me right, if they understood what I meant and are just ignoring it, or really didn't understand is bad enough with Thai co-workers and friends. That's become par for the course. And also kind of funny, and not exactly a complete hindrance to friendships or work or general existence. It is distracting though, the constant second guessing of what I'm saying, the weird hole in my memory where lots of that English I like to speak used to be--words that were once accessible and readily available to be used precisely when and as needed seem to have disappeared, or else recessed into cobwebby filing cabinets at the back of my brain, the creeping uncertainty about what's appropriate to say in conversations with friends, Peace Corps staff members, Thai colleagues, and relatives, the weird and terrible guilt and shame that creeps in and sits in the back of my throat at not being able to say the right thing in the right way at the right time. The complete breakdown of rhetoric, for the love of all that is good and Aristotelian.
I thought the ants would drive me crazy. It turns out, however, that the break downs occur because the foundation of which I have been so sure for so long - language - has crumbled.
Josh, never one to spare me his thoughts (or the words they come in), tells me that this is all ego. And I suppose it is. But, well, you take out your ego and bash it on some rocks for a while and see how that feels, huh?
Now, none of this seems crazy to me at all because the thoughts and words in this post are so familiar they could be my own. I have struggled with the necessity of letting go of the ego, the imagined sense of self (ego= thoughts and feelings void of true being. Read "being" as: the deep, nitty, gritty stuff words can't touch) for the duration of our service thusfar. And here is where the confusion for me comes in: I can accept the knowledge, the controlled language, situations, scenarios and well-traveled language/culture of America. I felt certain I had a grasp of my existence in that well-worn groove. Then, when transplanted to Thailand, I knew of the need to let go of all we knew before and our expectations, but when I lost my language, I felt like I lost myself.
ReplyDeleteLaura Jones's blog mentioned a conversation she had with another PCV that this experience completely strips away our identity. That analogy couldn't be more true. It shines the light on our shaking vulnerabilities, known comforts, and sense of self with whatever may be hiding within the crevices. We lose control and the only way to come back to the surface is to allow for all control to be lost.
So, for a moment, we ride the wave of acceptance and let go of control. These moments we often find ourselves most present in our Thai communities, cultural integration at its finest. However, circle back to our own culture which we cling onto as an external identity, and the cultural divide that you spoke of in your last post, and we're at a loss again, a loss of retaining the sense of self that we prescribed to our thoughts, language and ideas (false ego indeed, maybe?) and a pull between the necessary acceptance and letting go of control to survive in the Peace Corps Thailand experience. It's the push-pull of these two that leaves us mad as we ricochet in between. It's the deconstruction of self, or in my case, the re-association of a self I'm coming to terms with, one that doesn't cling so tightly to the words I know and ideas I have in my tiny, little head.
A wonderful quote by poet John Donne describes the rich experiences of human nature (think: love, heartbreak, grief, suffering, joy) as this: "To know and feel all this and not have words to express it makes a human grave of his own thoughts."
So on that divide we sit, with our big heads and our tiny hearts, tinkering away, when maybe the answer actually comes not from language at all, but silence.
Food for thought.
julia946.wordpress.com
Julia, Still chewing it all over. Thank you for the extremely thoughtful, and thought-provoking, comment.
ReplyDeleteVery eloquently expressed, Erin, and as someone who also appreciates precision and circumspection in the use of language, I sympathize with your situation. I would like to echo Julia’s comments that none of what you wrote seems at all crazy, and that one answer or at least part of one might come from silence. I say this (ironic isn’t it) not because I’m generally a quiet person, the one who sits and listens while everyone else chats away, (and I don’t intend “chat” disparagingly in the slightest), but rather because I truly believe that relationships are built through both language and silence. Since you’ve professed a love of analogy, how about this: relationships are like music, in that they (must) have both notes and the spaces in between the notes, and of course the differentials and rhythms that bring these into relation. If there were only sounds and no silence, there would be only undifferentiated noise.
ReplyDeleteThere are many theories about the origins of language, some of them tracing it back to poetry and from thence to music, often imitative and usually conceived as a means of making something internal (thought or emotion) external, and thus perceivable by others. There are also various theories of language in general that take up the issue of speech vs. writing and discuss it in terms of immediacy vs. mediation and follow these ideas and valuations back to questions of the very conditions of possibility of language and thought (and by extension, identity and culture).
But although all of these bear on your dilemma, rather than become entangled in that particular theoretical morass, let me cut to the chase as it were, and simply describe a couple ways I’ve come to think about and negotiate my communications, both verbal and non-verbal, with people here. First and foremost, just as I try to assume that people have the best intentions, I try to maintain the hope that they can perceive mine across the linguistic divide (although I realize that I have to try to bridge this gap with indirect verbal as well as non-verbal means and gestures). So whenever communication seems to fail or breakdown, I try to have compassion both for them and for myself. I remind myself that I must try to do my best with what skills and resources I have to convey to them my desire to communicate, my desire to be in relation to them, and my desire for their happiness. And although I know that I will never be able to express my full being to them in language (but is this ever really possible even in one’s native tongue?), I believe that our most fundamental relationship is actually non-verbal, pre-verbal, and it is my faith in this that often sustains me through the trials and frustrations of being reduced to a linguistic idiot-savant (only without the savant), wishing for elegance, subtlety, complexity, or at least clarity and the afore-mentioned precision but capable of nothing rising much beyond the level of: “fire, good.” (I am also actually consoled by limitations of language itself, gracefully expressed in a line from “Madame Bovary”: “Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”)
Of course, it could also be that I feel the tensions and the losses less keenly than some because of my particular path to where I am today. I’ll spare you the tedious details, and only say that I have pretty much always felt distanced from any specific cultural (and to some degree also linguistic) identity, so whenever I’ve lived abroad, I’ve never felt much like I’ve had an identity to lose. And then there’s the whole Buddhist take on identity and control, which I will also spare you (besides which, it’s basically already been covered by Josh and Julia). So, as a parting thought, I would suggest that regardless of whether and how you speak, in terms of both identity and control, you’ve got nothing to lose.
chris