Euphoria

by Lily King

‘It’s that moment about two months in, when you think you’ve finally got a handle on the place. Suddenly it feels within your grasp. It’s a delusion—you’ve only been there eight weeks—and it’s followed by the complete despair of ever understanding anything. But at that moment the place feels entirely yours. It’s the briefest, purest euphoria.’

A good day for me is when no little boy steals my underwear, pokes it through with sticks, and brings it back stuffed with rats.’

I asked her if she believed you could ever truly understand another culture. I told her the longer I stayed, the more asinine the attempt seemed, and that what

I’d become more interested in is how we believed we could be objective in any way at all, we who each came in with our own personal definitions of kindness, strength, masculinity...

‘My first report card. I wasn’t sent to school until I was nine, and my teacher’s comment at the end of the first term was: “Elinor has an overenthusiasm for her own ideas and a voluble dearth of enthusiasm for those of others, most especially her teacher’s.”’

You don’t realize

how language actually interferes with communication until you don’t have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense. You have to pay much more attention to everything else when you can’t understand the words. Once comprehension comes, so much else falls away. You then rely on their words, and words aren’t always the most reliable thing.

Nell and Fen had chased away my thoughts of suicide. But what had they left me with? Fierce desires, a great tide of feeling of which I could make little sense,

an ache that seemed to have no name but want. I want. Intransitive. No object. It was the opposite of wanting to die. But it was scarcely more bearable.

He saw us at our lowest and in some way I think his presence,

his enthusiasms about each of us has helped us remember what we like about each other.

My mind has circled back again to that conversation with Helen on the steps of Schermerhorn about how each culture

has a flavor. What she said that night comes back to me at least once a day. Have I ever said anything to anyone that has come back once a day for 8 years? She had just returned from the Zunis and I had never been anywhere and she was trying to tell me that nothing we’re taught will help us to identify or qualify that unique flavor that we need most to absorb and capture on the page.

Why are you thinking about the common man? Bankson asked me the second night. What does he have to do with the nexus of thought & change? He turns his nose up at democracy.

If I were married to a banker would I be able to relish this success more? Would I be able to show him the letter from the director of the American Anthropological Association

or the invitation from Berkeley? All the downplaying I must do starts to rub off on me so that I don’t even allow myself a few minutes of private pleasure before the squelching kicks in. But then he surprises me, plucks out the letter from Sir James Frazer and says ‘Good onya, Nelliecakes. We’ve got to frame that one.’

I do know I can lie awake all night and it feels as if someone is cutting out my stomach the pain of having lost her is so awful. And I am angry that I was made to choose, that both Fen & Helen needed me to choose, to be their one & only when I didn’t want a one & only.

Why are we, with all our ‘progress,’ so limited in understanding & sympathy & the ability to give each other real freedom? Why with our emphasis on the individual are we still so blinded by the urge to conform?

I think above all else it is freedom I

search for in my work, in these far-flung places, to find a group of people who give each other the room to be in whatever way they need to be.

The pleasurable part of the fantasy was always in the coming home and relating what she had seen. Always in her mind there had been the belief that somewhere on earth there was a better way to live, and that she would find it.

Today Malun brought the medicine man Gunat who placed charms—little bits of leaves and twigs—in the corners of the house and sang a song through his nose. The Loud Painful Nasal Song, Fen called it. If it doesn’t kill you, nothing will.

‘Nothing in the primitive world shocks me, Bankson. Or I should say, what shocks me in the primitive world is any sense of order and ethics. All the rest—the cannibalism, infanticide, raids, mutilation—it’s all comprehensible,

nearly reasonable, to me. I’ve always been able to see the savageness beneath the veneer of society. It’s not so very far beneath the surface, no matter where you go.

tendentious

I couldn’t help questioning the research. When only one person is the expert on a particular people, do we learn more about the people or the anthropologist when we read the analysis?

She claimed that because of the emphasis in the West on private property, our freedom was restricted much more than in many primitive societies. She said that it was often taboo in a culture to have a real discussion of the dominant traits; in our culture, for example, a real discussion of capitalism or war was not permitted, suggesting that these dominant traits had become compulsive and overgrown.

She claimed that conformity created maladjustment

and tradition could turn psychopathic. Her last sentences urged acceptance of cultural relativism and tolerance of differences.

Another part is that our

innocence, our utter ignorance of what lay ahead for Germany and the world, is now nearly impossible to comprehend. And another part still wonders: If we had not come up with the Grid, had not had that experience together, and if I had not stayed but gone back to the Kiona, would any of the rest have happened?

Orientation. ‘The idea that cultures have a strong pull in one direction, at the expense of other directions.’

In time we did work out definitions for each point of our compass. The cultures we put in the Northern vector were aggressive, possessive, forceful, successful, ambitious, egoistic. The id of the grid, Nell said. By contrast the Southern cultures were responsive, nurturing, sensitive, empathetic, war-averse. To the West were the Apollonian managers who valued unemotional efficiency, pragmatism, extroversion, while the Easterners were spiritual, introverted seekers, interested in the questions of life more than the answers.

And this led to another round of mapping as we separated men from women, finding that while the male ethos usually represented the culture at large, within a culture women offset the ideal. ‘Sort of a built-in thermostat,’ Nell said.

We believed we were in the throes of a big theory. We could see our grid in chalk on university blackboards. It felt like we were putting a messy disorganized unlabeled world in order. It felt like decoding. It felt like liberation.

They want to tell their stories, she had said once, they just don’t always know how. I’d had years of study, and years in the field, but my real education, this method of persistence I would draw on for the rest of my career, happened right then with Nell.

I try not to return to these moments very often, for I end up lacerating my young self for not simply kissing the girl. I thought we had time. Despite everything, I believed somehow there was time. Love’s first mistake. Perhaps love’s only mistake.

So often a woman’s pleasure felt to me a mystery, the slightest wisp of a thing you were meant to find, and she having no better idea of where to look than you did.