profacero
Jennifer - I remember my third birthday party and most of that year. I have isolated memories from earlier, but I can remember that when I was three, I had more early memories than now. The earliest fragment is from before I could walk, being in a playpen with a jungle gym.
But I remember age three better than some subsequent years because it was the year of really acquiring a sophisticated level of English. I could still remember how it felt to be someone who couldn't formulate so many complex sentences and thoughts.
I considered that language was amusing and interesting, a powerful technology, but that it was losing me my connection to the planets.
*******
Jennifer:
Right. I think I stayed much longer at the pre-Oedipal level than you did. At least until I migrated, at the age of 16, I still relied on the general presence of an atmosphere, or the power of gesture, to express what I wanted to say. I think this is because the culture I came from was largely pre-industrial, and conventional modes of communication were not fully systematised yet.
So after 16, I migrated, and it was as if I had to start again to learn how to 'speak'. I also think this difficulty was related to the fact that those who have lived in the industrialised first world for a long time have an ego-centred perspective that I was by no means familiar with. In fact, I had not been exposed to this perspective or approach for the first 16 years of my life.
The other aspect of this is that my parents did not speak to me as an adult, or share their concerns. To them I was a child, with childish concerns, who would magically come into adult awareness at the stage of puberty. So my emotional relationship was not with them but with my peers.
So, in all, I had to teach myself how to understand the Western cultural approach through reading lots of books. It was too late to learn it from my peers in my late teens.
2 comments:
Jennifer Wrote: "So, in all, I had to teach myself how to understand the Western cultural approach through reading lots of books. It was too late to learn it from my peers in my late teens."
Therein lies the rub. This is why you still couldnt fit in. You didnt take this technology for granted, this Western Way of Communication. You were painfully aware of all its little pitfalls, all its devices because you were not coming from a place where you could operate on assumption, or afford to take things for granted.
It was not your MotherTongue and so you adopted it as only a scholar and a perhaps a legalist would.
"Legalism, in Christian theology, is a pejorative term referring to an over-emphasis on law or codes of conduct, or legal ideas, usually implying an allegation of misguided rigor, pride, superficiality, the neglect of mercy,..."
I bring up Legalism though strictly in the paradigm of Law, Codes of Conduct, a very technical interpretation of the world that can really only come from to a person who is extremely literate.
You read Western Tradition the way others might read legal Codes, you identified the rules, both official and unspoken, and this ensured that you were still out step with others.
They did things without thinking, you did things very deliberately, and in a way some might view as overt manipulation--machiavellian even .
You Leapt ahead of everyone around you and that frightens and pisses them off, 1. because you are foreign and 2. because you are a female.
Talk about out of the frying pan and into the fire!
Thanks for the compliments!!!
Well, you indentify what happened to me at the middle part of my (mal)adaptation. But to be honest, initially, I could not understand the culture at all. Not even a bit. (See the epilogue of my autobiography on my profile for the nature of that experience.)
But then later I think people could sense that I was inclined to reject their system and ideology as it did not emotionally resonate with me.
Post a Comment