I haven't actually spoken to David in a long time, but we converse almost daily, anyway. He finds me in bookstores, disguised as T.S. Eliot. Sometimes he speaks to me in my own writing.
On my very first day of college, in my very first class, I sat down nervously and excitedly in a small room with four long tables (arranged in a rectangle), a chalkboard, a dry erase board, and a giant whale skeleton. David walked in wearing khaki shorts and one gold earring, a long-sleeved t-shirt tied around his waist, and began ranting about how much he hated the beach. He gave a long, well-rehearsed speech, designed to provoke -- grasping at the wide expanse of the sea, swimming in its depths, and then spitting it impertinently back out. I took hardly any notes. In fact, apart from the list of texts we were supposed to purchase, I wrote only one thing: dead reckoning.
It is a navigational term. Dictionary.com will tell you that it is the "calculation of one's position on the basis of distance run on various headings since the last precisely observed position". David simplified it for us. He merely said it was figuring out where you had been, so you could know where you are, and determine where you are going.
So when I read Fasolt's third principle of the past, "you cannot tell where you are going unless you know where you are coming from, " I knew that this was going to be a conversation I had with David (ix).
The concept I am most drawn to is that of the subject, the self which interrupts time and sits forever in the present, dividing what has happened from what is yet to come. Not only is our conception of history constructed; so is our definition of self. It is a place we have made. What intrigues me even more is that "history performs a special role in linking freedom to subjectivity" (9). David and I have discussed Self and Other ad nauseam over the years; I have read as much Descartes as I could stomach (which, admittedly, isn't much), and David has tortured me with as much Lacan as he pleased/dared. The question we circle back to is, how do we destabilize the notion of self, and to what end? In Michael Taussig's Mimesis and Alterity, we read about how two cultures encountered each other, as Selves and Others, and mimicked each other until they were mutually inextricable. The edges were crossed over so many times they became the center -- much like in Hegel's dialectic...or?
David never answers my questions, you know. He thinks I should figure out everything for myself. So when I ask him what he thinks -- what happens to history, when we blur the boundaries of the self? -- he just smiles, faintly. He tells me a story about the Hmong, and raises his eyebrows, as if that explains everything.
I think it is David's fault that for years, now, I have already been cynical about history. "Wie es eigentlich gewesen" is clearly a myth, I think. I don't tell David that, though, because he'll play devil's advocate and I don't want to have to think through it all again. Instead, glancing at his chewed-up, painful-looking fingernails, I point out that he's been living on coffee, cigarettes, and chocolate for the past two weeks. David's body is full of stories. He seems to approach his own history as one would an ancient myth; he has written and told different versions, each vague and dark and dramatic, and illustrating some deep cosmic truth. His fingernails tell the story of the time he was captured, in Thailand, and tortured. His bald head betrays his secret blood illness, his cancer: leukemia. And I've never seen it, but he says there is a scar where they cut him open to fix his heart, which was full of holes.
Sometimes I become frustrated with David. I feel like I want a timeline. I want to know in which year he flew to Thailand, and in which year his first wife died. I want to know how many years he spent reading Foucault and Derrida, reaching in the strangest places for sanity. I want a picture of him before he was sick, when he still had hair on his head, when he smiled without the slightest hint of irony. But David protects his own history; he avoids all questions. I have learned to take him for what he is. I have learned that to write another's history can be a form of violence; "[t]o be subject to that authority is to be violated.... Not because the examiner failed in his responsibility, but because he executed it" (39).
Dead reckoning. Fasolt says that we must know where we are already, to know where we have been. I might modify this a little, and not necessarily to disagree: by looking back to where we have been, we create where we are.
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