An I for an Eye

We had just met and were standing in the kitchen. She a woman about my age from Huancayo in Peru who had come to work in the household’s kitchen and I, well that is the story. 

“Are you a brother,” an hermano, she asked me. I hesitated. 

That word, hermano, has so many meanings in Spanish. I thought maybe she was asking if I was an Evangelical but that seemed out of context and strange.  

“What do you mean?”

She changed the subject, possibly because if I did not know what she meant then obviously the word may not have applied to me.  

Later, I figured out someone had told her I was a Mormon and she was delicately asking if that were true.  

The Mormon part of that concern is less what interests me here, for now, than is the pronoun, I and then later you. 

I seems such a self evident word. It appears, in its tall singularity, as real as a poplar tree or a beehive.  

Yet we could argue that -- other than just sending an index toward the speaker like a big, horizontal, linguistic finger -- it does not mean much. It needs some context, like the hand sending out the finger, or even a sentence to follow it.  

Curiously, the Spanish she spoke came without the pronoun, although one is available.  The conjugated verb es was enough to signal me. This difference between English where we have to use the pronoun is worth thinking about in greater depth because of the subtle differences it affords different speakers, but even more because of the ways people and their selves are created by constantly using the language to express themselves. The pronoun and its context, in turn, the squeezes into them as a part, a major part, of what creates their lived being. 

The anthropologist Milton Singer talked about the self being a sign, something that is constructed within the individual through engagement with things like language.This is a very different notion than that folk idea of Americans that sees the self as something pre-existing and natural within one that is only expressed through language.There is a lot to say on this latter topic, but for now I just want to note it and leave it alone.  

To return to Singer, another way of saying self is to say ego, the word that in English also translates Freud’s Ich, or I. Of course ego itself is the Latin for I.  

If the I -- or the you-- were not so dependent on something following it to give it definition, we could argue the self is a pronoun and feel comfortable. The pronoun is just not able to easily stand alone, no matter how much we capitalize it or try to make it stable. 

Now I want to turn to that Mormon thing.  The I requires things that follow it to give it substance and stability. Those in turn get inside and are a big part of what creates the self in interaction with everything else that is going on inside the person and in interaction with the many identifiers that follow their pronoun. 

If this process were completely solid, Mormons would not need all the follow-ups, props and supports for a Mormon identity, I mean sayings such as “remember who you are and what you stand for.”

But that is not where I am going now, either.  What I want to think about is how the Mormon eye relates to the I. This alone could take volumes to fully elucidate. I am just going to make a small point. 

My I as Mormon is not something I can own alone or define alone, in most Mormon practice I am aware of. It is something owned by the community and potentially can be taken away by the community. It involves an eye, as I wrote in an earlier post, a judgmental gaze that evaluates and determines worthiness to have the I and Mormon come together in the same sequential sentence.  

Although experienced within one, as a potential and massive loss of self -- the valued I -- the eye ultimately exists outside one.  

I think this point is critical. So much of contemporary social and psychological theory involves a notion of the self as bounded and subjective, i.e. within the enclosed head.  Yet this Mormon I because of its association with the eye cannot be closed within the head. It is dependent for the connection between I and Mormon on a valuation from outside.  

Now of course this is not true for everyone, but it is normatively established, I believe, within mainstream Mormons practice and in the teachings of the Brethren. 

I might seem to be arguing that Mormons selves are somehow categorically different from American selves. Nevertheless, I am only making that argument if American selves are really the same as those of the individual typified in social theory.  

Maybe it is my Mormon upbringing but I really do not think they are. Singer’s usage of Peirce to define a sign means that there must be an interpretant, something or someone to bring the sign and its meaning together. That could be something inside one, but it also can be an external community or normative system.

I could go on and have fun with Freud’s notion of superego right now, but do not want to. 

While I cannot narrate everything that was in the woman’s mind that morning in the kitchen -- I simply do not know it all -- I can say that for me that simple sentence that it seemed she wanted me to pronounce, was worrisome.  

I had just met her, yet she seemed to have some knowledge of me and it seemed she wanted me to say “I am a brother”  or maybe “I am a Mormon.” Sure, I could have done that, but what stopped me was not the I, it was the eye.  I did not know which eye she was implying and when I asked for more information she dropped the conversation. 

Being a Mormon, even an inactive one, can be so damn complicated sometimes.