1 SOY YO

SOY YO

It’s hard, I think to ever say, “this is me,” and suppose that you’ve got something stable, something essential, pinned down.

“Soy yo.”

I think it’s always an anxiety that one feels, but after being away from any real home for some six months (away from both Berkeley, and away from family and friends—the jewelish rocks of my existence—and away from Irvine which, after some fourteen years, eventually yielded itself to some definition of home), there is a particular discomfort with the phrase. Moreover, I’m not sure what I want you to know about my history, I’m not sure I want to recall any personal history. 

Soy yo.

Well, the thing is, I think place (and Pomp) and circumstance have so much to do with this. I feel I’ve seen several—quite different—iterations of what, I suppose, in some sense is myself.

And, moreover, to establish, to retell, to recall the proper referent of “me” (unspilt by Descartes, unrendered nonexistent by Hume) requires digging into memory, history. But memory and I are not close friends these days; I’ve grown something of a horror for her mythologizing spell. This winter, (my feet in the snow and the snow in my hair) I achieved the death of the illusion of memory, the murder of nostalgia (so I tell myself).

Can I look really into the eyes of their ghosts, just to tell you about myself?

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SOY YO. (I feel bad now, because I haven’t really honored the prompt, I’ve kind of sidestepped the assignment.)

I could (try to) be cut and dry about it, I guess. Here I am, Berkeley senior, twenty-five. I was born here, I was moved to India when I was about three or four (an idyllic childhood, with my sisters and grandparents and my mom (she read to us and gave us paints and crafty things,  my sisters and I playing against the life-filled dull succulent greenery of South India), my dad visiting occasionally. An idyllic existence without any sense of time), saw my father for the last time at seven (he was a pastor and a musician and he bought us a fancy keyboard and brought his twelve-string guitar with him and for some six months we sang), was moved back to the States (the new, crisp, and dead suburban streets of Irvine) at ten (my mother and sisters and I all slept together on the living room floor, or crammed into her bed, for that first month), met my first American (Indian) friend, my best friend, at ten, and I don’t like writing this, so. The end. (The horror of memory? I’ve spent years and years and years with my face turned nostalgically towards the past, and I’ve only just slipped out of the spell of memory and desire, so let it rest). Once it’s out there... . One artist said that once you sort of ‘release’ an artwork to the public, it's not yours anymore. Its interpretation, its meaning, its value, lie out of your control. But it seems that's true of anything you might share—& god forbid histories and memories (and presences and futures, narratives) grow some haunting lives of their own. Searle’s speech acts include declaratives — speech acts that change the reality in accord with the proposition of the declaration — but anything uttered risks the danger of performing a declarative, of stitching an idea into reality. 

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The fearful supposition of which you may accuse me, gentle reader, is that my conception of SOY YO is un-necessarily premised on history. (That or I'm being over sensitive, over dramatic. All of which I grant, uncomplainingly.) Can’t oneself be premised on the freestanding point the very precipice of the present itself? (But—take heed—the Futurists, those goddamn fascists, are all Dead!)