Can I, or May I? The Grammar of Desire, What is Taken for Granted, and the Self as Site of Discipline and Terror

The child asks, “Can I go to the bathroom?”

The adult responds, “I don’t know, can you?”

When I was young, I and almost everyone I knew was confronted by this challenge. We had already learned the lesson about gatekeeping: that in many cases, one did not simply address a need. Instead, one sought the blessing of whomever, at the moment, possessed control of our bodies and who decided whether it was permissible to address that need.

Now, we were surprised by a higher-order puzzle. We sensed, even in our unsophisticated state, that this was a cheap shot, but that didn’t matter. Our duty had compounded: where before we had to run our needs up a chain of command, and not-infrequently actively suppress those needs, we now had to solve riddles. What response would satisfy the Sphinx who guarded the holy gate to the toilet?

Before I reveal the solution, let me point out that the puzzle, stripped of its faux authority and wisdom, is revealed to be a petty, sarcastic reply to a plainly-stated request. It calls out a nuance of English that is even less significant to one’s eventual qualification to serve as an adult than the trigonometry, philosophy, typing, and other academic pursuits that American students routinely bemoan (for the record, I did not bemoan any of these subjects).

In short, “I can” refers to what one is physically capable of accomplishing. “I may” refers to what one has permission to do.

Grammar establishes rules for the use of language. Written language, first and foremost, although people (maybe a dwindling number of them) like to apply the rules to spoken language as well. This latter impulse is curious, because I have heard more than once that the artificiality of grammar is ill-applied to speech, which has its own, organic logic. Just think of all the different ways you can express an idea poorly, at least according to your childhood teachers, and still be understood perfectly well.

We have the ability to string words together with wire, hair, dandelion stems; glue them, tape them, melt them into place; tear them up and reunite them like a drunken, sadistic matchmaker, line them up with military precision or let them line up like a roomful of cats and rats, and yet through a combination of inflection, facial expressions, body language, gestures, and context we can almost always render the grammatical aspect irrelevant.

Written language, on the other hand, is often divorced from all such interpretive assistants. Its poverty of contextual assets calls for an artificial set of agreed-upon contingencies, implications, interpretive chain reactions, and thus we can learn an additional set of pseudo-instincts that stands beside? Atop? Within? our more fleshly spoken system. These written rules, ossified, etched in stone, allow us to “understand” what we read in a more or less consistent way. I mean consistent from one person to another, but also consistent for oneself from day to day, as in the case of reading a specific sentence at different times, perhaps in different moods, but always withdrawing the same meaning from the words (this consistency is obviously not as reliable as I am making it out to be, but that is not an essay I’m going to trouble with right now).

I digress. “Can I” or “May I?” It is interesting how early, and in such an insignificant way, grammar is brought to bear to make verbal communication more arduous. “Can”: you are able to. “May”: you are allowed to. I find it interesting that during this little game adults play on children, the implicit message is “I can understand what you are really saying, but you may not be understood (I do not permit you to be understood) until you learn the lesson I am teaching you."

Our first grammar lesson is simply a reminder of who holds the power, and the introduction of a new way that this power can be wielded. I don’t think it is insignificant that this lesson is learned during a crisis of physical need.

Where the walls are, where the gates are, who holds the keys (or the demolition equipment) becomes an awareness - a problem - that haunts us for the rest of our lives. Over my own bio-linguistic biography (conversations one-, two-, or many-sided, lectures, rants, creative larks, love letters, arguments, lies told, secrets conferred or withheld, negotiations, alarms raised, requests for the bathroom in a foreign country, etc), the sword of power constantly hangs. The grammar of power which polices the grammar of basic needs (even though the latter is in fact the older, earlier grammar, one that is artificially, politically made less than) looms, gleams, always ready to cleave any offending expression that drips from my tongue or, as the case may be, from my pen.

In a foreign country, modest forms of power become very plain, very quickly, mainly because of their absence:

• The power of being literally, formally understood
• The power of being immediately understood
• The power of belonging to one or more systems and societies that supplement and shelter communication, compensate for individual flaws, and aid with the fulfillment of needs
• The power to coherently request, question, agree, protest

Multiple times, in Italy, I attempted to eat at a restaurant without success. My gracious host in Roma took me to a Gelateria, and within 10 minutes I was putting allergy-safe sorbet in my mouth. “Can I?” Not on my own...at least not immediately, or easily (after that experience and additional encouragement from my host, I did finally succeed, but that’s for another blog post).

Without a guide, without an endorsement, without accumulating linguistic and sociopolitical cachet, “can I” was pretty well out of reach. “May I?” Well, the devilish trick that the adults never told the children was that can and may are quite interdependent. It’s obvious, isn’t it? If you cannot, it doesn’t matter whether or not you may. Likewise, if permission (may) is denied, who cares if you can?

The body needs, and it wants to be satisfied. It needs to move, to rest, to nourish itself, to feel pleasure. The spirit, which I increasingly cannot tell apart from the body, needs but it must run everything through the body. Which controls which (again, if there is a difference)? If there is harmony, what does that look like?

Let us imagine that the spirit - or the will, the mind, assuming such notions have real power over the body - decides to deprive the body of food. Eventually, doesn’t the body die, and doesn’t this turn the tables? Has not the body taken revenge on the spirit? Or the spirit attempts to ward off sleep for one reason or another, but eventually, the body has its way.

When one is dealing with oneself, one’s degree of success in policing, in applying some set of rules, varies. What we can do to one another occupies a much broader landscape of beauty and torment.

Imagine that you are told that no matter how hungry you are, you may only smell food. You must satisfy the needs of your body/spirit without ever putting sustenance inside of your mouth. Furthermore, imagine that this decree arrived with such unexpected speed, persistence, and force that you are unaware whether you can put food in your mouth. The declaration that you may not is omnipresent, omnipotent. It has such a monopoly on your language of nutrition that you don’t even know how to say “Can I eat?”

Perhaps one day, somehow, you find the words, but the rule has been so deeply carved into your mind that it revolts you to think of saying it. You feel horrified and ashamed at the very idea of asking whether you can eat.

Imagine now that you have never eaten. Perhaps once or twice you risked a nibble, but the shame of defying the grammar of nutrition only solidified the taboo. Maybe you were even caught in the act of running your finger across the icing of a cake and licking that finger, and you were punished to really cement the lesson.

Let us increase the severity of your situation. Imagine that you move through the stomach, the intestines, the arteries and nerves and bones and ligaments of communal life and you observe everyone around you putting one thing after another into their mouths with no apparent repercussions. Not only this, but they have an unimaginably rich, almost poetic, system of speech that seems to be devoted entirely to the concept of communicating hunger and then richly satisfying it through a wide variety of forms of eating.

Imagine that your fear and shame are so deep that merely to feel your stomach grumble, just to sense with your body, “I want food,” becomes a dreaded experience. It is an impulse that you have learned to fight, to repress, it is a need that, in the best possible circumstances, you might quietly, hesitantly confess to someone...but you would do so with prophetic regret, knowing this confession would permanently alter the sub-grammar between you and this person. Despite the fact that they may eat freely, shamelessly, with impunity, you know that they know that you may not eat, and by even suggesting that you want to break the taboo could be met by revulsion or scorn.

What kind of life do you believe you could make from such circumstances? Are you grateful for the imposition of a grammar, or do you resent it...maybe hate it?

Were it not for grammar, we would still find ways to make ourselves understood. Of course, now that I have thoroughly abused it, I must pause to say that I suspect that grammar has given as much as it has taken away (or, since grammar is not intrinsically at fault, I should say that grammar has given as much as people have abused it to steal). I do not advocate for the elimination of grammar - in its literal or metaphorical applications.

Possibly, I advocate that more restraints be put upon the self-appointed grammar gatekeepers. Watch the watchmen, as it were. And I advocate that those who have felt that gleaming, metal edge the closest upon their necks be given a reprieve from using exactly the right words in exactly the right order. I think that maybe they have done enough work in that department.

But then, what if this is not enough? What does one do when a set of contingencies, however good it can be when applied properly, becomes cancerous? When a sense-making immune system hyperactively attacks all expressions within its appointed jurisdiction, to the point that it is killing sensation itself in order to completely remove the possibility that the sensation may ever be expressed at all - and in particular, the sensation of need, of want, of desire - then what does one do?

Need, want, desire, should not be sources of shame and fear. They should not be consistently imprisoned in the fortress of, “May not.” Need should be set free to adventure, experiment, and fulfill itself. It should not have to run a gauntlet of snide tests, artificial proprieties that were set up by forces that are only concerned with monopolizing the distribution of force, and which forces don't care or don't pay attention to how this power-brokering neglects or actively damages the actual meeting of needs.

Some of us live in an invisible panopticon designed to regulate and extinguish personal fulfillment. The grammar of existing in coordination with other people, the grammar of moving, feeling, expressing, giving and getting, becomes a nightmare of regulation and punishment, a lifelong lethal injection.

If this describes you, do you want out? I certainly want out. And I want in: to go to the bathroom, to eat, to do whatever else I desire and need.