APRIL 24, MONDAY

MYTHIC JOURNEY

But as I have thought about why I have trouble fitting back in, I realize that I am making, at least in my case, fitting back into my home town too simple.

Because in my case, having grown up as an outsider in north India and having married a German and adopting Germany as a second home, I realize that part of what makes me feel personally fully alive is the simple pleasure of not to fitting into any culture. When I leave Asheville and the United States I am leaving behind the culture where I‘ve lived most of my life. And this feels really good. Part of the reason that I travel is to escape American cultural conventions. For many years travel was a way to break out of my work conventions, teh academic conventions of Warren Wilson College, and to break out of the domestic conventions of American suburban life. It was, is, a way of floating free.

I have no idea how many people feel this way, but I‘m guessing only a small percentage of people. Most people find their identity within their cultural conventions. They feel most at home in their own language, eating traditional food, embedded in the set of religious values they grew up in, marrying in the traditional way of their culture. Most people feel most comfortable supported by their particular tribe and believe that this way of life is the most satisfying for them.

But I like to break out and float free, not belonging anywhere as I travel, or imagining that this is what I am doing. I‘m guessing that this happens because I‘ve never felt, even in my adult life, that I belonged anywhere. I‘ve always been an outsider.

I‘m not proud of this or even comfortable with it. I‘ve been a nonacademic, resenting academic conventions, all of my time as a college teacher. In class we had personal discussions about personal experience loosely connected with the title of the course, and when on group trips to India for two to four months it was our experience of India and how it dislocated us that mattered and not an academic understanding of Indian history, politics or religion which we only discussed when they were part of our experience. I thought of these trips as being a mythic adventure, I thought of class as being a mythic adventure. I think of my life as being a mythic adventure. And a central part of any mythic adventure is to leave the place where you feel secure and comfortable and to go on the high seas or deep in the forest (or deep inside yourself) and find what makes you most alive. To do that you have to leave everything else behind. For me feeling fully alive comes a least partly, by breaking out of my cultural conventions and floating free in places where I don‘t know what is going on and have to feel my way along.

So for me the reason that coming back and fitting into American cultural conventions is difficult is because the adventure is over and the American conventions I am forced to fit into seem arbitrary and artificial and often shallow and empty.

I am not proud of that either because it makes me seem as if I am somehow more perceptive and alive than other people, which I don‘t think is the case. I simply feel less alive when I am fixed in American cultural patterns and can‘t wait to break out again.

So I think this is a better explanation for at least part of the reason that coming back to Asheville seems to flatten me. It is not Asheville, it is me. And I have to find my own way to make Asheville stimulating, probably by making it into a mythic adventure.