IDENTITY 2

Looking back, am surprised how much I depended on having a specific identity at certain times of my life. Not just child, adolescent, adult. But a certain type of character. The older I got the more dependent on specifics. When I was seven, I wanted to be Kim as he was portrayed in the Hollywood adaptation of Kipling’s novel, “Kim”. Kim is an orphan of a British soldier in the Imperial Army and Irish woman living in 19th Century India, but is raised by an Indian woman of low status as if he were a native street urchin who lives by his wits and is seen by Indians as an Indian. Later he is sent to a school for whites in India, but then becomes both a disciple of a holy man and a British spy against Russian spies in the Great Game of competition between the British and Russian empires for influence over Central Asia.

I would pretend to be Kim as he walked through street markets, flipping coins he had just begged, and shouting to other Indians in the street.

By the time I was 13 I wanted to be an intellectual, a weight lifter, an outstanding track and field athlete, a running back on the football team, an anthropologist, a psychologist, a historian, a nuclear physicist, a romantic lover. At the age of 16, I added to this list a European intellectual, a cultured European gentleman far away from anything American. Being American was to be stupid, without history, without traditions, without a way of life that was rich in customs, ways of cooking and eating, ways of being in the world that had some kind of collective, traditional substance and beauty. This was a selective stereotype of Americans, heavily skewed to lower middle and lower class characteristics. The films of John Cassavetes were perfect demonstrations of the way in which people in America often just did not know what to feel, what to think, how to act - and so they entered a state of catatonic like embarrassment, a state of non-being. I hated it. It made me sick.

So when our Dad sent the two of us elder boys to an English boarding school, I thought I could escape. Could become a person of culture, and live among traditions that would enable me and those around me to live in a way that was substantial, dignified, ordered, beautiful, good, rich in the things that made the good life and the good society possible. An absence of arrant commercialisation of everything, from doctors to junk food, to jimcrack buildings and vast expanses of tarmack and concrete roads and streets. Of prejudices against effeminate men who read books and liked concert music, and women who demanded that men engage in brutal fights before they would look at them. The brutal humour and humourless bitterness of the class of people (JDs or teenage ‘hoods’, ‘boppers’ and others) who had made Elvis Presley famous to begin with. Again a stereotype, but partly right. It was a popular amusement for young men of this class to beat up teenagers and homos, as well as engage in blood-letting fights at least once a month.