XI

There's an idea floating out there that I had written about back in the day that goes something like this: one notices difference. For example when discussing moving from one place to another, one notices the difference between these places. Because we can acclimate so quickly to different places, we quickly loose the ability to notice what is different about these places because we've forgotten what it's like to be outside of them. This can be applied to different kinds of feelings or states. For example if I am happy, I often don't notice that I am happy unless I become unhappy, and vice versa. It is easy to get comfortable with discomfort and fear, just as easy as it is to get comfortable wit  being in charge. Or from the reverse, once a state has "stabilized," we cease to notice it, like the weather. It gets cold or hot, but when it's comfortable it doesn't exist. And so it goes with the body on the level of physiology, or sensation, or what have you, that we only notice deviations.

It has been four months since I got to China. For me to notice my foreignness and write in this blog I have to assume that my vantage is stable. Of course I can know changeability as an intellectual construct, something to know, but I can't "experience" this changeability on a moment to moment basis without also tuning into my sensations. I can't be "happy" or "unhappy" from one moment to the next because happy is not something that one feels. Instead it's a matrix of all kinds of experience and ideas (including the passage of time and linearity) that is too broad to experience directly. What does happiness feel like? It's impossible to describe using a one-to-one equivalency or definition. Only a metaphor can get us there because only a metaphor can point at the holistic sum of happiness: Happiness is a warm puppy, is a warm gun, etc.. Happiness then is a synecdoche of sorts, a single word that stands in for a whole. (All this writing about happiness I suspect will make people think that I'm not happy, which is not true, or at least, I don't think of myself in terms of being happy or not happy, and so I don't really know if I am or not since it's not on my mind. At any rate,) Being happy and being foreign are the same in that they both describe a state.

Sensation then on a moment-to-moment basis may appear to be the only metric for change, however this is complicated by the role of language in shaping the experience of the moment. Because the types of sensations I might experience are also intellectual constructs (heat, cold, itchiness, warmth), there is no noticeable experience unaccompanied by language. Or in other words, I find what I'm looking for. All this is to say, what exactly am I presuming when I say that I am foreign? What am I looking for? Already I've been pointing to some of the ways I've been conditioned and have conditioned myself to notice foreignness, e.g. my experience in Japan and with the Chinese language thus far. It makes sense to me that if I really want to go further into the phenomenon of being foreign then I will need to go further into my presumptions of being an outsider, or "strange." This means going further into narratives of being both in China, and also of where I come from, i.e. being "native." To see foreignness then, I must contrast it with another state.