I'll just give a brief introduction. I was recently, at the end of last semester, asked to observe Octavio Paz's style of writing and how he went about defining and understanding what it meant to be Mexican and was then given the seemingly incomprehensible assignment of doing the same for America. However the task was harder than it would have seemed, as what I had were memories, thoughts, meandering in the broken streaming pondering of the mind and how the mind works, struggling to grasp, to isolate, to grab hold of that experience that feeling of Americanness. Of course it is hard to find, in some sense it doesn't exist in that there is nothing taught that makes you American, no real life Experience that suddenly leads you too it, it is, as I stated, something that I must have merely breathed in with the air.
The following short essay is not meant to put down American, but merely to try and grasp what it is that makes it so for me, and everyone else's personal experience and ideas on this will likely differ. Mine is not meant to be critical or laudatory, but merely to understand.
I wonder if it is perhaps something to do with growing up an American that part of the deal is one does not feel like an American; there is nothing that makes you American—it is a right as open and egalitarian as the forgiveness of Christ—not give me your sins and through me you may enter Heaven but give me your weak and weary and they may enter the land of opportunity. It is startling to realize that I have never considered in the truest since what being American is to me, how it is tangled within me, my actions, my personality, my very being.
How could I even begin? Am I special? Is my experience unique? Do I have a socio-economic and regional culture more than I have something that is an American culture in me? I am no one to judge or decide what lies in being an American; I have no knowledge, I have no study—all I do have is myself and I am as well-equipped to understand and explore that as I am to sit at a beach and understand and explore the entirety of the depths of the ocean.
It is said that without dark there would be no understanding of light and so it should be with culture; I have never been abroad, I have never realized my otherness, never felt the stares of foreigners upon me, never realized in the strange environs around me the true substance and nature of my being—that sudden realization of those intrinsic characteristics that do make me what I am, that do make me an American. I have only the passing thoughts and reflections of myself but lack the ability to put them in contrast—all I see is my broken reflection in the water but never ever a true glimpse of myself, uninterrupted.
Television. I find my childhood so often intertwined with this intangible substance, this thing known as television. Some of the earliest images I can recall are Bugs Bunny cartoons, Tom and Jerry, Scooby Doo... These images make up apart of what I feel in my heart to be childhood in a strange way, like a distant companion, an indescribable feeling, a transient friend; the subtle plots of cartoons rambling vaguely in my head as memories of my life, as pale shadows of things I did and I lived. Is that what it is to be a modern young American?
At age 7 Zelda takes up a seemingly enormous space in my life. I watched my friend play it for hours a day until he beat the game, captivated by this thing called a video game. Eventually I moved onto games of my own with a Sony PlayStation1, my prized possession of the world, and I spent days playing games like Spiro, Crash Bandicoot, and memories of my playing them suddenly enter into my consciousness. It is impossible for me to deny that these things are part of me at some level; they form things that truly did make me happy, that I loved, but what do they say about me being American?
But I do not wish to give the inaccurate impression that my childhood was spent glued to a television set watching TV or playing games; it is much more than that. I lived in a poor, older neighborhood of Lafayette, La. Much of it was more of a throwback to earlier times because I was poor; there was no cable TV in my house for many years after I was four, there were no video games for me or computer—they came much later. Most of my time was spent running around barefooted playing with other boys in my neighborhood—in fact until I was eleven or twelve I refused to wear shoes if I had a choice in the matter and occasionally still refused when I didn’t.
As a child my idea of a good time was to have a bamboo fight, grabbing bits of bamboo from the grove in the field, (where we had our club house as well), and then standing on a concrete foundation where a house had once stood and attacking one another with them. The goal was to hit your opponent’s bamboo stick in a way that broke it down and gave you an advantage in reach, allowing you to hit him into submission while being safely out of range for him to hit you back. Even better was standing on a hill of dirt in that same field and pretending to be fighting off enemies in some giant fortress.
Then there was Mardi Gras, the love of my life, my favorite time of year: the crowds, the acrid clouds of cigarette smoke and the smell of liquor drenching the earth, evaporating in clouds off the asphalt itself, while I darted in and around people snatching doubloons, candy, bustling to the front and screaming for hours at the top of my lungs, "Throw me something mister", fighting with adults over ten cent beads and finally, after three hours, hoarse and drenched in sweat, laden down with a massive haul, I’d head home with my victory load of treasure.
But what for all the grasping at faint straws can I find of my Americanness? It is not there in the past, not in physical form, nothing where as a child I was taught to be an American, no memories of sudden realizations that this or that made me an American. No it is just as subtle then as it is now; it is not about a society or learning or acting a certain way, it is a transcendental substance of the Atmosphere of America itself; I didn’t just get it somewhere or at some point from someone, it was something I breathed in the air as much as it was anything.
The intoxicating fire of ambition, the love of reality, (because reality was something completely in my hand like two bits of clay), the blustering and happy feeling of being unique, of everyone celebrating your individuality—you rose and grew not as a part of society but as yourself and society was just the means to express that; that is my sense of myself and the best attempt to, (in mockery of my own complexity), say how exactly I became that way.
This feeling can’t be traced it was just always there, a part of me, the only thing of my Americanness that I can find within myself. For it did I dump bounds of Mardi Gras beads onto the floor and dive into them holding them up against the light pretending that they were precious jewels. This feeling is what drove me to wander my neighborhoods alone for miles as a little 6 or 7 year old kid, barefoot on the hot September pavement, knocking on the doors of hundreds of absolute strangers, selling for school fundraisers in hopes of being number one.
The image imprinted on my mind of America is burrowing into a closet full of clothes, closing the door and imagining it was all money, bundles of money and I could press a button and more would fall from the ceiling, that I could fill the room with money, and I would plan how to spend it; putting up vast walls and a giant mansion with intersecting tunnels between its towers, ever more complex, ever more buildings and additions as I tossed away the trillions of dollars it would cost. The feeling of elation in that, of power, that is my culture as an American; or the closest I can come to discerning a single burning element.
I grew up poor, I grew up unspoiled, I went hungry most of the time because I could not stomach chicken and rice which was our dinner nearly every night, and I was often unhappy; I feel I was hardly an outlier of some brat spoiled by permissive parents, (in fact both my mother and stepfather were verbally and physically abusive at times), so I feel that the source is not in family, but beyond that, beyond memory itself. It lies in the thread of ravenous and burning desire, sheer confidence; I would get what I wanted, it was only left to take it, to seize what was mine, that this was what America was, your dreams were your reality, no dirty slum would hold you back from greatness, for greatness was yours, for greatness was America’s promise to every young boy, and oh was its taste sweet.
Yet it still seems transparent, a ghost that will fade away at the touch of my hand. For how can such scattered and, (with such limitations), impossibly incomplete, recollections and feelings of me, myself, where I came from, how I grew up—hope to isolate what makes me, me? That is a job better suited to biographers to analyze and break down for I cannot. All that I can find, searching myself, vainly trying to discern what makes me American when all I know is me—the philosopher trying to discern when there is only light whether a thing exists for him which is not light—and I can only find this sense of America in myself: an idea, a burning desire, not a dream, a confident prediction of success, and in that earliest and purest sensation of myself and what my world was, and in how I saw—innocently or naively—(whichever way you are inclined) this world, success was the most important thing—success came first, and everything else would flow from it.
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