Todd Leishman and Dr. Brandie Siegried, English
“love’s function is to fabricate unknownness” -e. e. cummings
In literature and science, in art and religion, two ideas emerge that shape the people and the peoples that we are. Education in all these things brings with it a blossoming awareness of our uniqueness as individuals. No two are the same, genetically or psychologically, in personality, spirit, or experience. Revelation teaches us we are each of infinite worth as individuals.
At the same time, education brings with it a growing sense of communal identity and responsibility. We are cultures, we are societies, we are families and churches. In the same Spirit in which we are told that we are valued for our uniqueness, we are also told to be one, or we cannot be God’s.
I have struggled with these two ideas throughout my life, though admittedly my struggle has been more intense during my years at BYU. I have felt the divine push to be more of who I am, to be unique and to be myself. At the same time I have felt a growing sense of identity with the communities I participate in. I say that I have struggled because in the community setting, I have felt a tension between my uniqueness and my membership. I have fought to preserve my individuality in person and perspective, in the face of pressures to conform.
This project is the result of a yearlong attempt understand the role of individuality in building community. It began the summer of 1997, when I used the ORCA grant to finance a research trip to South America. I spent a month in Uruguay living with a Uruguayan poet and his family. We worked together, traveled together, and discussed and wrote together about the place that individualism has in the national identity, as well as in the establishment and growth of the Church in that part of the world, and in the art and lives of the members of his family. As I had set out to do, I returned to the US with 150 pages of notes and outlines, in anticipation of a writing project. I had ideas and material sufficient for a discussion of the role of individuality in the community; I just had to write it.
What followed was a year of writing. After several writing courses and the close and critical attention of Dr.’s Brandie Siegfried and Eugene England, I have finished a sixty-two page personal essay, which will be used as an Honors thesis project.
The essay begins by discussing the dispersion of tongues at the Tower of Babel. According to Octavio Paz, it was a dispersion, not only of language, but of perspective and community. It was a curse in the sense that people drifted apart and communities disintegrated in the diversity of the dispersion.
I then discuss the way in which knowing two languages has helped me to develop a better understanding of the doctrines relating to individuality. I incorporate personal narrative and journal excerpts into an assertion that identity depends on connections, and that connections themselves can only exist across differences. We must be different to have a relationship. We are each different in our relationships. We are each different because of our different relationships. And, ultimately, we will each be exalted, even as God is exalted, as we perfect our relationships with God, with Creation, and with others. Christ has given us principles that exalt relationships. His life and identity are not meant to be cloned. As we apply these principles in our unique relationships, each in his or her own way, we will become our fullest selves (gods). Our exaltation depends on our developing our individuality in a group setting.
Finally, I end the discussion with a brief account of a regional conference I attended in Montevideo Uruguay, comparing it to the day of Pentecost. Octavio Paz followed up his assertion that the dispersion of tongues resulted in the curse of separation, by declaring that what was done at Babel was undone at the day of Pentecost. The Holy Spirit draws individuals together each according to his unique tongue.
Throughout the writing process I had to develop an awareness of my audience. I learn to write for them, and to overcome the “self-indulgence” of writer-based prose. Other problems I had to resolve were how to portray a conversation that took place in Spanish to an English-speaking audience; how to achieve interesting language without distracting from the ideas; and how to concentrate detail to give vivid images in an economy of description. The result is a book-length publishable (I hope) personal essay that makes a convincing argument for the mutual need that exists between the individual and her community.
1. Spanish: “A together-bound group of unique only ones” (author’s translation).