I see you clearly |
Men seni zhaksy köremin (Kazakh proverb)
There is a lecture I have never forgotten. It was delivered by Professor Dushyant Rampal at the University of Jammu in 1982, during a postgraduate course on modern drama. We were studying T.S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party. Rampal was the kind of teacher who did not merely explain a text. He inhabited it, turned it around in his hands like a man examining a stone for hidden light. At some point during that session, he set aside Eliot and reached further back, to a thought attributed to the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, though Rampal offered it in a rendering more lyrical than philosophical:“If you take a dip and come back, neither you are the same nor the water is the same. Both have changed.”
I was a young man then, yet to enter a life in uniform. I did not know it in that moment, but those two ideas would quietly follow me through more than three decades of policing. They whispered at the edges of every encounter, every case file, every face I was certain I already knew.Eliot’s play proposes something unsettling. Every person we meet is wearing a mask. We ourselves are masked. And most human misery comes from our refusal to see past these performances. He deepens this thought in his prose: “We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken.”
That phrase stays with me. Useful and convenient social convention. We freeze people in memory because it is easier. A face, a file, a label. These become our........