Sometimes I feel very close to an anthropologist--the emic kind, not the etic kind. The emic kind is the person who is so involved within or implicated in the culture they are studying that their observations stem from close knowledge, involvement and even experience of the culture as a subject themselves. (If I'm reducing the definition, dear Sarah, you must forgive me). The same applies for me as a person. I am an emic person. I don't merely observe people as spectacles or as objects of study; I try becoming them. This becoming is not a literal thing--I have no desire to be in anyone else's place, but I wish to be part of an experience larger than the confines of my closed physical and mental space. So when I meet someone interesting-- a potential friend, a mere acquaintance, a friendly child, an interesting old man--I am drawn to their own interiorities. I implicate myself in their being by becoming more than a spectator. And clearly, this is a very rigorous and very exhausting process because I can only involve myself in so many people at once. The most invested and yet the most complicated of all these subjects, is of course, the person who borders on more than a friend, and more than a mere acquaintance. What do I do with this person? How much do I moor myself in an emic attachment? How much is the problem of falling in love a problem because I am just so completely lost in someone else's mental processes? Or worse yet, more. What really gets me is when I become the subject so fully in the process of this emic excavation that this other person has really taken over my role. How, then, do I stop being the observed?
What is worse is that I have begun to write love poems. After what seems like forever. And I really find that detestable. To write for him is to desperately use those words to grasp his face, some kind of futile attempt to circumscribe his presence in these letters, and that is totally frustrating. At some level, this truly is me, but at some other level, this is very unlike me. I detest attachment at this kind of primordial level. It makes me uncomfortable, and it makes me feel as though there is something beyond myself that keeps me grounded. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Just to be clear, I don't feel this way about every person I meet. It's just this one particular person who has had me revise my my-ness.
On another note, also, Mami thaathi passed away while I was in the US and the same thing happened as when thaatha died. I pulled out that book about what happens to the soul after death and couldn't just wrap my head around this absence. Surely it is a filling absence, one that has its presence flourishing elsewhere, but I am just never epistemologically satisfied with these pulls and pushes that emerge from the physical self. And often, I just want to not be me, this enclosure of boundaries, this head full of thoughts and this body that controls everything I do, or at least does so because I have no way of reining it in. Sometimes, and this will sound strange, I spend a lot of time just looking at my hands, and they feel alien. They feel as though they belong to someone else--like they've made from earth from someone else's backyard and as much as amma keeps commenting on how I stare at myself in the mirror, I can't help but feel completely alien in this thing. Sometimes, I think, when I buy a dress or something, how strange it feels to say that I am a size eight or something. I took this Bodylore course in my first semester at Mason and my professor spent a lot of time talking about what makes us us and how we use the body as a way of identifying with us-ness. But is that all I really want to do? Really? Sometimes when the slip disc comes back and the nerves pinch really hard, and I am lying down or something, I try feeling the line between my back and the bed, and to be really truthful, I can't feel it. It's not physical numbness; it's just that in those moments, I have to consciously bring myself to spell out that this is just a symptom, just a thing of physics and anatomy. That is indeed comforting. It is comforting to know that the vehicle is indeed what I am in control of and not vice versa.
Coming back, therefore, to the whole love problem, feeling this strangely comfortable otherness also makes me more aware of how much my own body controls me in those moments. I mean, have they found out where this love thing originates? Random people have theories about it and I remember watching this program on podhigai once where this shastrigal was trying to explain how the tying of the thaali was symbolic of some kind of mooring the self in another and vice versa. (Or maybe my understanding of it is totally messed up). But I found the whole thing amusingly and scarily too close to the truth. What is more confusing than some kind of ritualistically (or better yet, a spiritually sanctioned) otherness?
I am just glad that my subject is being highly recalcitrant and is honestly not interested in taking over the role of observer. Perhaps it is not the time for these kinds of attachments.
