Layer One: Something Brief about language and the inescapability of appearances
I’ve lost confidence in my ability to make claims about the world. There is a lot I can attribute to this loss, but what troubles me most is how vacant my thoughts and feelings appear as they pass through speech. Bound with this experience is the effect of appearances and their power to aestheticize one’s spirit behind speech. I am troubled by the weight of how permanent language is once it’s spoken and how our perception of ourselves, or others, ought to intimate any proceeding sentiment.
Regardless of how clear my feelings are, what I think and feel cannot withstand the variability of meaning imposed on a sentiment that was already an abstraction. What I think and feel stays intact until the moment it’s forced to take shape; when it does, it falls flat. What was in me becomes unrecognizable — I become unrecognizable. It’s like I’m without a grasp on the risk it seems to take to export myself freely — to give language, and the spirit that drives it, the opportunity to display themselves together.
Recently, I was with a friend. I look up to this friend — they way he navigates the world and the conviction he has in his own ideas and theories. He’s a person that’s out there, writing, talking, and allowing these two things to help him edit his ideas. He models a way of being among others that I admire and wish to emulate — he lives what he thinks and commits his ideas to the perception of those around him. It’s a way of living that is inebriated by oneself, not others. His commitments and interests seem unbridled by the entanglement between what he feels and its resulting object before others.
My admiration of him forced my abstract conundrum over language into a confrontation with what I fear: my fear of what speech does to what I mean. If I confronted this fear, I would be letting language happen without trying to reconstruct the thought with too much care over my interiority. Which brings me to the other side: confronting the control that physical appearances have over the life behind a sentiment. This means facing myself, and what I mean, in a world that seems to have its priorities fixed on how one appears — their object-self.
There are moments that instruct this feeling. They are often unexceptional, but they reveal the ordinary experience of how appearing before others can reorganize one’s interior life.
I was sitting on the train when couple takes their seats across from me and a little to the left. The guy wore one of those Urban Outfitters trucker style hats with an embroidered gas-station brand and the girl wore a faux-weathered leather bomber. She was letting her gum hang down her chin and slouched with her feet stretched into the aisle. My attention drifted from them just before his gaze fixed on me. His look was lazy, interrogative with no motive. So was hers, until her attention drifted to her phone while he remained looking in my direction. I felt his eyes move over my bag, my new yoga mat, then around my scarf, back to the walls of the subway car, perhaps on an advertisement over my right shoulder, then back to me. His attention, its shifts and observations, remained self-consciously uninterested but inquisitive.
In an attempt to ignore the inventory he was taking, I got on my phone and started taking notes. I noted their appearance, what they wore and how they sat, and how their awareness of me affected the way I felt I appeared. While his gaze shifted from one article on myself to another, I sat there puzzled feeling an involuntary and sad expression fall over my face. He effectively removed me from myself, forcing me to concentrate on my object, away from a day of rare solitude and bites of joy.
His gaze stabilized my suspicion of appearances — that our understanding of them occurs before our understanding of what insulates someone’s being — and tightened my paralysis caused by the fear that to be seen is to be falsified. His gaze felt like a threat to the organic movements of my mind, and I was forced to view myself through what I have on my body. I imagined any word we’d exchange having to act as an extension of how I appeared: my things in conjunction with what his gaze assumed. In that moment, I seemed the kind of person with a new yoga mat jutting out of a slouchy, over the shoulder, denim-like, Baggu. I use these things but I am not these things.
These looks are everywhere. We are never not pulled into the view of the other, regardless of our consent. It is seldom that I’m in spaces where it is safe to meditate over pure articulation of what’s sacred, where my utterances are a demonstration of who I am rather than my presentation. What I’ve been circling isn’t a private pathology, but a nuanced condition of social life as I’ve experienced it.
It’s a lonely place, New York City, the trains into Brooklyn and their nosy passengers and the subtle violence of being read before being known. I just wish my mind would melt away some of its boundaries so I could let go of the fear that speech will fall short — abbreviated by little care for the spirit that powers it or too much care over aesthetic synchronicity, how it appears. I get to see my friend every couple of weeks, perhaps not enough. Around him, I feel free to experiment with what I say and how I think. He accepts the instability in our freedom to express ourselves and understands this as an affirmation of our human experience. Together, he and I bind books or talk about the latent life of bodies. He’ll play my piano too loud while I concentrate on food on the stove. Together, we are free to be who we aren’t and speak and play without worrying what either makes of us.