Story: Apologia

I write this to you. I do not know you, and you do not know me, but this is for you from me nonetheless. Because I do not know you, you are anyone. You are everyone. You are the person who sits across the table from me in the classes I am taking, the classes I have taken, and the classes I will take, that person who does not understand my silence, whose laughter I do not understand, and who will therefore only remember me – if at all – as a curiosity. You are my friend, whose history I have crafted with my gaze and mind, and who likewise creates me. You are my best friend. You are my mother, my child, my third long-lost twice-removed cousin, shared of my genes and yet separated from my DNA. You are from Mars, from Pluto, from the thirteenth planet lost in the oblivion of collective amnesia, or only waiting to be discovered by those who would know you. You are the person who does not know I love you. I love you. But even if I told you you would not understand, because you would equate my love with sex, with roses, with torture, with childhood pets, with loss, with taking out the trash, with a flood of sounds passing through my lips, and I would equate my love with something quite different – an amorphous, shifting, unnameable emotion that lurches within me whenever I look at you. This is why I do not tell you, because I do not know myself. I do not know you either. This, then, is why I write to you: of and for the space that eternally lies between us. But this is not why I apologize to you.


I wonder, sometimes, whether you think about me, and, if you do, what thoughts brush across your mind. When I consider you, whether you are sitting there in your chair or whether you are passing by me on the pavement, I wonder what it is that you see when you look at me, what it is that I notice when I look at you, and I wonder whether either of those things are any more than illusions we graft onto each other with our imaginations. I wonder where you end and my version of you begins; I wonder what capacity for distortion and enhancement is in both of us. But the longer I look at you and listen to you, the more I think about you, and the more I realize that what you are is entirely what I think you are. If you are to walk up to me and interrupt my thoughts, even if you are to tell me precisely who you are, you will not be able to control my interpretation of you. Even if I agree with your assessment of yourself, it will still be my choice, and my agreement will still be different from your assessment in all the small ways that end up making all the difference in the world.

It appears to me, then, that you must likewise be responsible for creating a version of me. When you listen to my voice, when you size me up, when you bump against me or when your hand brushes mine, when you eat the sweet you take from my palm, and when you wrinkle your nose at my thrice-worn clothes or when you inquire after the brand of shampoo I use, you must create a similitude of me as well. ‘You’, then, are truly mine, and ‘I’ must be truly yours, whether we are shadowy presences making up each other’s numbers, or known elements in each other’s social diagrams.

But if we are each other’s creations, then everything else must likewise be refracted through the disparate lenses of each of our minds. “Not everything is about you,” people cry insultingly, but as I have shown to you, how can it be otherwise? You are the one who experiences everything, and so am I. Even if a person we both know dies or marries, you must feel your private grief or joy, as I do mine. From Plato, who in “The Trial And Death Of Socrates” writes that “the mind (is) the disposer and cause of all” (96), to Immanuel Kant, who in “The Critique Of Pure Reason” writes that “it is impossible for human beings to escape from their own psychology” (“The Critique Of Pure Reason” 79), to you and I, each of us who has lived, are living, and will live in this world, then, cannot help but adapt it to our own versions. And so you are there, while here am I, and we are separated by this space that exists between our minds. When everything from a supernova to the meaning of ugliness must resonate uniquely within you and I, how can there be such a thing as a meeting of minds? You can only create me, as I can only create you, and so we can only lose each other.


It is this that infuriates me, that makes me think we must ask each other, for both our sakes, “Who do you think I am” and “Who are you,” phrases that have echoed and will undoubtedly continue to echo in infinitely and uniquely vain strains. But when the explanation of one word that means different things to you and I must necessarily involve more divisive words, I suspect that we will be reduced to silent fools, pointing at objects that again widen our understandings of each other. But more than this, I feel that I should object to certain words that you might use, not because they would be wrong, but because by using them you will have made them a part of me. If, for example, you were to call me arrogant, and point out aspects of my behavior that led you to that conclusion, I might see your point, and I should afterwards always wonder whether those aspects are indeed deliberately, if subconsciously, arrogance on my part.

It is this multiplicity of selves, then, that further gives me pause. Already I question my own actions and motives. When I push my chair back from the table while all my colleagues are tucked in, do I do so because I am reticent, or do I do so because I wish to be noticed being reticent? I cannot answer this question, because, being conscious of either possibility, I must concede that both are equally true and equally false, and that selecting one would be an entirely arbitrary, and misleading, decision. It seems to me, then, that no one, not you and I or anyone else, could ever tell another, “This is who I am,” not only because other selves exist, but also because other selves might exist.

And yet what is “This is who I am” but what we tell each other every single instant of every single day that we are together? Brent Staples writes in “Just Walk On By: A Black Man Ponders His Power To Alter Public Space” of “(whistling) melodies from Beethoven and Vivaldi and the more popular classical composers” as his “equivalent of the cowbell that hikers wear when they know they are in bear country” (610). This is his equivalent of telling others, “This is who I am.” What is your equivalent, and what is mine? Style of clothes. Silence. Laughter at a brand of humor. Books. Movies. Likes. Dislike. Even when you ignore me, or even when I snub you, it is a choice, like every other choice, that enables us to proclaim ourselves and thereby negotiate each other. But these choices, like all other choices, are entirely arbitrary and hence entirely questionable. These are what we use, you and I, to say to each other, This is who I am, trust me, but I am afraid that we are different people when we are with different people, and so how can trust be possible? I cannot trust you, because I cannot trust myself. I am afraid that when I am with you I am unable even to recognize that “I instantaneously make another body for myself,” as Roland Barthes writes in “Camera Lucida” (14). I am afraid that you do the same, for how can you not? And so the unknowable people that we really are shrink further into ourselves, crowded and obscured by these infinitesimally different selves, and the space between us expands.


It is this that I wish to convey to you, this enduring sense that I am never quite myself, and that you are never quite yourself as well. It seems to me that only by this mutual admission can we move towards each other, and so what I really want to tell you in addition is not who I am, but that I am a mess of contradictions, qualifications, and justifications. I can only imagine that it is the same for you. It seems to me that only by embracing this complexity of selves can we begin to close the space between us, and so oftentimes chaos of sensibilities clash within me when I look at you. I wish to tell you not who I am, but all that I am, whether the pieces are incongruous, harmonious, or extraneous, and even if what I know of myself can only be the fragment of a whole. But as I consider the words that are at my disposal, I cannot help but feel that language itself has failed me. These words that we form with our lips and tongues and teeth, these letters that scribble themselves across a page into coherence and meaning – none of them are adequate for the emotions that I feel and wish to convey to you.

“Language is form and not substance,” Ferdinand de Saussure writes in “Literary Theory: An Anthology” (89), and it is precisely this artificiality of language that repels me. I cannot help but feel that language is a ramshackle construct we lock ourselves in, and that the more words we add to this sprawling artifice the more lost we become in it. I wish to tell you that I love you, but love is a word with flowering meanings of affection, attraction, infatuation, and more, and I do not feel all of those things for you. I wish to tell you that my love is of a teasing, whimsical, terrifying quality, and yet none of those three words are entirely appropriate either. I wish to tell you that I hate you, but from hatred are born a million derivatives as well. And so while you sit there, I am compelled to remain silent, even as letters clutter within me in my impossible attempt to translate feeling into word. I can only watch you, and hope that you have also once experienced this paucity of language.

And yet what is there left to you and I, if we should not have recourse to words? Stefan Georg writes in “The Word” that “where a word breaks off no thing may be” (“Das Wort” 1), and it is in this amorphousness of untranslatable emotion that we are equally lost. “It is language that creates and forms our reality,” Martin Heidegger writes in “On The Way To Language” (“The Linguistic Dit-Mension Of Subjectivity” 5); how can we think and grasp what has no name? We can only sense it vaguely, this part of you and I “which feels… lonely and abandoned, and… out of place and out of sync with the rest of the world,” as Andre Aciman writes in “Underground” (118). It is this part in each of us that we feel to be in unison when we cry together, laugh together, or shout at the cusp of the Grand Canyon together, and yet it is also this part in each of us that we can never confirm to be in unison, because we can never pin it down in words. And so it is this part in each of us that remains forever a mystery, to others and to ourselves.

It is an uneasy truce, then, that we have with language. We can never truly find each other in the primal vastnesses of the cries of grief, the laughter of joy, and the screams of rage and frustration. We can never truly find each other either in the misleading confinements of language, because, as Ellie Ragland-Sullivan and Mark Bracher write in “Lacan And The Subject Of Language”, “language names things and murders them as full presences” (4). But we can move towards each other, however awkwardly, in the interstices between word and feeling. “All speech possess a beyond,” Jacques Lacan writes in “The Seminar, Book 1, Freud’s Papers On Technique” (242). Happy, sad, angry – all words hint at something bigger than themselves, and yet smaller than the sounds that are their purest form. It is in the space where all these somethings dwell, then, that we will come the closest, and so it is in this beyond that we shall sense each other closest by, even if we can never meet.


It is not understanding that I ask of you, then, but your attempt at understanding. This space shall always exist between us at any point in time because of the limitations of language, the multiplicity of selves, and the impossibility of ever matching our versions of the world. And so when you break down in tears at something I find utterly prosaic, I ask you to attempt to understand that my stumbling and insufficient words and actions are not deliberate, but the limit to which I can strain towards you in providing solace. All I can offer you in return, then, is the same attempt at understanding, in the moments when you are unable to reach me just as I need you most. So it is with tears, so it is with screams, so it is with laughter, so it is with everything. So it is with lovers, so it is with friends, so it is with family, so it is with even strangers, so it is with you and I.


This monumental attempt at understanding, however, is not all that I have to ask of you, because this space between us is not only always present, but also always changing. Ngugi wa Thiong’O writes in “Enactments Of Power: The Politics Of Performance Space” that we must ask of any space “what memories does the space carry and what longings it might generate” (485), and because the future, the present, and the past are connected in myriad constantly changing ways, you and I must constantly readjust our answers to these questions. So, then, must we constantly renegotiate the space between you and I.

How can you and I, for example, predict the future, which is by definition something that does not and might never exist? And yet predict the future we must, because if one instant does not affect the next to come, then you and I are simply atoms drifting carelessly. And so if the present is to cause the future, you and I must believe in promises that can only be phantoms. Perhaps you will talk to me because you think you will like me. Perhaps I will shift my attention elsewhere because I think you will be dull. Perhaps I will not be likeable, and perhaps you will not be dull, but there can be no certainty in any scenario, only possibilities. The future for you and I, then, can only exist as a world of shadows, wavering between non-existence and permanence, and yet we must acknowledge its power in affecting us now.

But if the future reaches back and guides our way, so too does the past stretch forward to give us signs. Perhaps you will not talk to me, because you have heard the whispers from the grapevine. Perhaps I will be interested in you, because I have seen your vivacity. But if the future is a world of shadows, so is the past. Perhaps those whispers about me were exaggerated, and perhaps your show of verve was an occurrence as rare as its intensity. Even ignoring the rampancy of conscious lies and the rise of the occasional blue moon, who can deny the human failings of misremembrance and simple forgetfulness? The past, then, is such a fragile thing, so easily shattered and remade, and yet what choice have you and I but to believe in the distorted reflections that we see in it, if we should not become like blind children groping in the dark?

Emile Zola writes in “Therese Raquin” that “what one doesn’t know, doesn’t exist” (41), and this gap in knowledge is and can only be the state of things between you and I. And yet even if the past and the future can never truly exist because we can never truly know them, they still possess us. Hannah Arendt writes in “Between Past And Future” that “we are living and struggling in a Protean universe where everything at any moment can be almost anything else” (95). This, then, is what you and I must endure; each step we take can only bring us to a new brink, because the future is changeable and so is the past, and even if we are not experiencing change we must expect it, and so let it change us as well, like the man who saves a coin in case of poverty. And it is because of this, because we are constantly changing, that your attempt at understanding is not all that I have to ask of you. I have to ask of you faith as well, faith in shadows, and this faith is all I can offer in return. I have to ask of you honesty as well, honesty when faith fails so new compromises may be found, and this honesty is all I can offer in return.

But these are not all that I have to ask of you. I have one more thing to ask of you, and it is for this last thing that I apologize.


You might ask me, as I have often asked myself, why we should struggle with this space that divides you and I. If this space borne between us of language, act, time, and subjectivity can only forever separate us, because words betray us, because proclamations of motivations can only be deliberate and thereby inherently suspicious, and because time and subjectivity conspire to make liars of us all, why should we struggle at all?


Why should you and I hold onto who we are as individuals, and not simply adopt a commonality of clothes, mannerisms, lingo, and all other trappings and suits, in order that one day the same gesture, the same word, and the same object can bypass this space and strike the same chords within us? Or why should we not simply let go of each other and all others, and thus give up the struggle that accompanies such spaces?


The only answer I could give to you, if you should ask me these questions, is that neither conformity nor isolation is living. If I should become you, or if you should become me, we should both disappear, the individual becoming the pair becoming the individual. If you and I should let go of each other and all others, you keeping entirely to yourself and I keeping entirely to myself, even when you and I are with each other or amongst others, then we should disappear as well, because without others we cannot define ourselves; there is no good without bad, not smart without stupid, and living alone creates an invisible life, until it passes into oblivion like the sound a falling tree makes when nobody hears it. Jonathan Lethem writes in “Speak, Hoyt-Schermerhorn” of the “Doppler-effect fading of certain memories from the planet, as they’re recalled for the penultimate time, and then the last” (574). If you should lose yourself in me, or I in you, if you should keep entirely to yourself, or I to myself, then we can only become those memories, affecting no one and not changing ourselves, until we too ultimately fade away.


This, then, is why I apologize to you: not only because you must attempt to understand where no understanding is possible, not only because you must have faith in what can only be shadows, and not only because you must have the honesty to admit doubt when faith has failed, but also because, above, beyond and during all of these things you must do, you must continue to struggle, to be forever divided and yet forever linked to me, and so acknowledge me, even when all I can offer you are the same intangible things in return. This, then, is why I apologize to you: for this space that eternally lies between us and causes our strife, and yet defines us and allows us to live. This, then, is why I ask for your acknowledgement, even as I acknowledge you. This, then, is why I write this to you. This is my hello, the first step in many to come. And now it’s your turn.



WORKS CITED
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Aciman, Andre. “Underground”. False Papers. Farrer, Strauss and Giroux Publishing. 2005. 118.

Arendt, Hannah. Between Past And Future. Penguin Books. 1993. 95.

Barthes, Roland. “Camera Lucida”. Writing The Essay. Ed. Darlene A. Forrest, Randy Martin, and Pat. C. Hoy II. New York: McGraw-Hill Custom Publishing. 2005. 14.

de Saussure, Ferdinand. “Course In General Linguistics”. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. In J. Rivkin and M. Ryan. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. 1998. 89.

Georg, Stefan. Das Wort. Trans. Sebastiono Severi. 1994. 1.


Heidegger, Martin. On The Way To Language. 2004. 5.
< http://www.ul.ie/~philos/vol8/dit-mension.html>

Kant, Immanuel. The Critique Of Pure Reason. Trans. Norman Kemp-Smith. 1929. 79.

Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar, Book 1, Freud’s Papers On Technique. 1953-4. Trans. John Forrester. London: Routledge Publishing. 1987. 242.

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Plato. The Trial And Death Of Socrates. Ed. Shane Weller. Dover Thrift Editions. 1992. 96.

Ragland-Sullivan, Ellie and Bracher, Mark. Lacan And The Subject Of Language. 1991. 4.

Staples, Brent. “Just Walk On By: A Black Man Ponders His Ability To Alter Public Space”. Writing The Essay. Ed. Darlene A. Forrest, Randy Martin, and Pat. C. Hoy II. New York: McGraw-Hill Custom Publishing, 2005. 610.

Wa Thiong’o, Ngugi. ““Enactments Of Power: The Politics Of Performance Space”. Writing The Essay. Ed. Darlene A. Forrest, Randy Martin, and Pat. C. Hoy II. New York: McGraw-Hill Custom Publishing, 2005. 485.

Zola, Emile. “Therese Raquin”. Seeds Of Modern Drama. Trans. Kathleen Boutall. Ed. Norris Houghton. Applause Theater And Cinema Books. 1963. 41.