I don't want to be like all the other kids

“The Purloined Letter” is the third and last of Egdar Allan Poe’s stories to feature Dupin, which stories are generally considered the foundation of English-language detective fiction. This parable is excerpted from Dupin’s criticizing of the literal-minded police chief’s search for the stolen letter, which letter is (spoiler alert, but the story was published in 1844, so I think the statute of limitations is over) hidden in plain sight.

I knew [a schoolboy] about eight years of age, whose success at guessing in the game of ‘even and odd’ attracted universal admiration. This game is simple, and is played with marbles. One player holds in his hand a number of these toys, and demands of another whether that number is even or odd. If the guess is right, the guesser wins one; if wrong, he loses one. The boy to whom I allude won all the marbles of the school. Of course he had some principle of guessing; and this lay in mere observation and admeasurement of the astuteness of his opponents. For example, an arrant simpleton is his opponent, and, holding up his closed hand, asks, ‘are they even or odd?’ Our schoolboy replies, ‘odd,’ and loses; but upon the second trial he wins, for he then says to himself, ‘the simpleton had them even upon the first trial, and his amount of cunning is just sufficient to make him have them odd upon the second; I will therefore guess odd;’—he guesses odd, and wins. Now, with a simpleton a degree above the first, he would have reasoned thus: ‘This fellow finds that in the first instance I guessed odd, and, in the second, he will propose to himself, upon the first impulse, a simple variation from even to odd, as did the first simpleton; but then a second thought will suggest that this is too simple a variation, and finally he will decide upon putting it even as before. I will therefore guess even;’—he guesses even, and wins.

The parable, however, stops at the second degree simpleton and goes no further; we are to believe that the school boy never met an opponent who was able to precede to a third thought. Otherwise the boy’s thought might have run: “this fellow might first think to vary from even to odd, but on second thought, he may think to stick with even, since this would display a higher degree of cunning than the first move; but thinking this, and anticipating my thinking of his thinking, he may decide to chose the simple strategy of varying, attempting to fool me by making a choice that I would expect of a simpler opponent; but I, knowing this, will chose ‘odd’ as though this opponent were a simpleton, since I suppose that he has preceded through these three steps. But it may be that a fourth step obtains, wherefore I ought to guess ‘even’, or perhaps a fifth step…” and thus one is caught in an infinite loop of guessing the opponent’s understanding of your understanding of them (you can see why Lacan got so much out of this story, and Derrida took Lacan to task, and so on…). Poe, however, assures us that the student has a certain method whereby he can ascertain the state of mind of the opponent. When Dupin asked the boy how he knew what stratagem his opponent was likely to take, the boy responded:

When I wish to find out how wise, or how stupid, or how good, or how wicked is any one, or what are his thoughts at the moment, I fashion the expression of my face, as accurately as possible, in accordance with the expression of his, and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with the expression.

(This is where one can begin to catch a glimpse of Poe’s genius. Recall, further, that these detective stories are only a tiny corner of his corpus, which includes weird and speculative fiction, poetry, and essays. A prophet is not without honour, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house.) The boy resolves this recursive uncertainty, which is a priori inescapable, by directly intuiting the feelings of his opponent: he knows what his opponent will do, because he knows them. So the question of where to leave the repeating chain of negations falls through to the similar, simpler (but much harder) problem of determining the character of the person across from you.

The boy’s method to determine his opponent’s acuity does not rely on any abstract form of “mind reading”. Rather, it is a perfectly physical process: the boy forms his face to match the opponent’s face and waits; his internal process changes to reflect the state of his face, which he causes to reflect his opponent’s. And so, making his mien his opponent’s, he discovers his opponent’s internal nature.

It is said, “if you keep making that expression your face’ll get stuck that way!” One wonders what the boy’s actual facial expression was. If he goes around matching his face to the faces of those he encounters, then what expression does he make when he’s alone? Does he ever allow his “mind or heart” to determine his face, rather than the other way? If he, at all times, imitates the facial expressions of his neighbors, then his inward-facing being will always form to replicate theirs, and he will lose the cunning which enabled him to interrogate the internal states of his peers; he will himself become the kind of simpleton he formerly impersonated, and their thoughts and sentiments will imprint themselves on his to his detriment.

I am back in Evanston, Illinois, United States of America, North America, Earth. Or, to give the address in the east Asian order, I am in Earth, North America, United States of America, Illinois, Evanston. Yesterday I attended the orientation sessions for the computer course at the University of Illinois; class starts next week. I’m not sure where I’ll end up staying, since the whole purpose of this exercise was to be near my mother, and it turns out that it is not possible to commute down to Champagne-Urbana by train from Chicago for the day: the only trains out are in the evening, and the trains in are in the morning. If class is out there, in the middle of the day, I have to stay down there at least two nights in order to take the train there and back. This is not a joke, and this is better than average for most of the US: at least there is a train to connect the two places.

For the purposes of tuition I am attempting to prove that I am an Illinois resident, since when I applied and read the rules I interpreted them as disqualifying me from resident status: the text as it was presented to me heavily emphasized continuous physical presence in the state in the years leading up to the course, and I haven’t really lived here in a very long time. Nevertheless, for tax and voting purposes, my official residence remains my mother’s house in Evanston. I certainly cannot be construed as a resident of any other state, and I am no longer a resident of Scotland (and anyhow, it’s not clear that that time counts, since it was for the purposes of education).

Michael insists that I am a resident. He is so insistant on this point that even writing this text is stressful: I can hear him saying “you are an Illinois resident” and not allowing me to finish. As though the “truth” were at stake here. As though I really were an Illinois resident. The University has been much more reasonable, in that there is a bureaucratic procedure to “petition” (their word) for residency status. One gathers thus and such documents, fills out these and those forms, and submits it; the hard part is the deadline, but I still have a few weeks. When I called them today to ask some questions about the form, I had the call on the loudspeaker; Michael interrupted and said something like “but he is an Illinois resident: his voting registration and taxes are here.” The person on the line responded that there are many factors taken into consideration, and that ultimately the decision is theirs to make based on the evidence presented. There is no hard-and-fast rule to determine whether one is a resident.

Of course, my hesitation is this: the residency policies for the University all say that the “resident” is expected to remain in the state indefinitely after graduation; I have no plans to do this. I hate it here. That’s not true. I hate staying in my mother’s house, and this part of the USA is astonishingly provincial. And it’s a long way from anywhere, and you have to drive a lot. Or not “have to,” but as noted, the train system doesn’t always go where you need it to at the time you need it to. But at least it has some nice parks, and the streets are lined with trees. It’s not a bad city, but it’s stressful to be around Michael all the time.

My mother’s cognition is beginning to change with age. We knew this would happen: she’s sixty-five years old and her mind is becoming hazier. Not that she doesn’t remember things or can’t have a cogent conversation or recognize people and places; but her administrative abilities are dulling. Though her executive functioning is decreasing, it is still as high or higher than mine. And for God’s sake, she still administers the entire household economy for me and Micahel.

Michael insists that she has “early onset dementia,” and tells her this. To her face. He asks, “don’t you remember?”, even when he’s the one who forgot. He tells her that her family is concerned about her cognition. And so on. Even if it’s true, it’s not helpful to say. She is recieving the best medical care available at this time for the condition, which is to say, she’s being measured and monitored as carefully as we know how to. She’s being administered an experimental drug that might make some difference in a particular kind of dementia, but there isn’t really any long-term treatment for the condition as of 2022. And so, doing what she can, there’s no reason to additionally increase her anxiety.

But Michael has never been sensitive to the internal states of other people: he has never been able to tell when he is increasing someone else’s anxiety and take the signal to stop doing what he’s doing. He has (as long as I’ve known him) always done what he thinks is helpful, even when the person (me) he’s helping asks him to stop because it’s not helpful. Because I clearly am not competent to know my own internal state, and it is not possible that his good intentions are misreceived. The whole purpose of this exercise is to be near to my mother. And I have already been driven away once. I cannot force her to divorce him, but she can’t force me to spend time with him, either.

After Trump was elected president in 2016, Michael described feeling a sinking, dropping feeling in the pit of his stomach and being unable to sleep. He said “I never knew what anxiety felt like before.” I thought, but did not say, “what the fuck is wrong with you? How could you not know? Not feel? Not notice?” It’s not as though he isn’t around high-anxiety people.

He is, of course, deeply neurotic, in the works-based righteousness way of Calvinist Catholicism (because, of course, it was the protestants who enforced the ethic that hard work would save, despite the fact that their entire dispute with the Roman Catholics was because the protestants believed that good deeds were not necessary to be saved). So he works like an animal to save the world. When my mother and I were packing my things to ship from Scotland to the USA, he became impatient with the slow process of sorting things to keep from things to donate. Every time I put something aside, he would cringe; he wanted to keep everything (he still has everything he ever owned squirelled away somewhere in the house or storage lockers). He said, in a moment of frustration when I put aside something or another, “I’m a good person,” as though that qualified him to have the things. And so he works a lot.

Michael’s internal state remains a mystery to me: I have never felt able to communicate with him, and I don’t think I’m the only one. Perhaps I am overthinking the situation: I may be falling pray to the infite return of strategic switches in the marbles game, but I have never been able to judge his internal state directly by aprehension. I don’t believe him to be a first degree simpleton, but it is difficult to read his feelings.

Looking in Michael’s face makes me deeply uncomfortable. He has a tendency to stare at me, as though trying to bore through into my mind through my eyes. He always looks concerned. When I left last March he followed me to the train station and said “I can tell you’re in pain.” Yet he wouldn’t leave me alone, because he was convinced that by his presence alone he could help. But of course he leaves and walks off when he’s frustrated and demands to be left alone, and won’t countenance being followed.

Being in Evanston, I am surrounded by people who are a lot like me. Which is surprising, since I tend not to think of myself as “from here” in any meaningful sense. I certainly haven’t lived here in a very long time. But in my dress, interests, political opinions, taste in food, and so on, I am very typically “Evanston”: left-socialist; comfortable clothes, but not technical fabrics; food spicy and thoroughly seasoned; I even have a MacBook now.

My greatest fear is that I am the same as everyone else. I think that fearing that is precisely the way in which I am like everyone else. I have said before that the US is a hyperconformist society: independence of thought is generally percieved as a challenge to orthodoxy or dogma and is therefore shunned. Even expressing an opinion using a simple declarative sentence without qualifying or hedging adverbials is suspect: “I think that…”; “in my opinion…”; “it seems to me like…”; “maybe…”; “like…”. This pressure probably dates from the puritan origins of US society, which were revived in the 20th century; conformist thinking was actively cultivated as an anti-Communist measure; non-conformists were sought out, publically tried and humiliated before the federal legislature, and often disqualified from work. The name of the group of members of the house of representatives who carried out this task was the “House Un-American Activies Commitee.” People were encouraged to turn in their colleagues, friends, and neighbors. As far as I know, nobody was ever executed or sent to a work camp by the HUAC, though of course the US prison system is enormous. But the ideological conformity stays.

This isn’t a politics blog, and I don’t know enough about the current state of federal politics in the USA to intelligently comment. At a high level of abstraction, I can say the following (and having perfomed my ritual act of self-effacement, I can now hesitantly state my position, though always ready to be interrupted or told to stop — I actively fight this pressure when writing, and it’s stressful): the content of non-conformity can still be formally conformist. In other words, everybody wants to be unique, but nobody wants to be different; the “uniqueness” is itself formally framed in by the sameness that obtains; everyone is different from one another in the same way; everyone is the same in their self-perception as different. When I say, “I don’t want to be like all the other kids,” I am thereby already just like all the other kids, insofar as we all share the desire to not be like one another, and we all escape from being alike in the same way, and are therefore again the same in not being the same. Incriminatingly, we all make the same facial expressions.