CULTURE
Thinking more about travel today I am wondering about the culture in which I am embedded and the two sides of culture for me. Again this is a subject that is beyond me. But at the least I can sort out my own perspective on culture as limited as it might be. It is hard to see the culture in which you are embedded just as a fish can’t perceive is floating in a fishbowl, or the ocean, until it is not.
And of course that is what each of us is born into a culture that seems completely natural, absolutely real, until we get out of it and realize that it is not.
This has caused a problem for me. I was brought up speaking English (actually English and Hindi since when tiny I had an Indian ayah or nanny), but then went through the third grade in Hartford, totally embedded in American culture and forgetting all Hindi except for the word, “hati”, elephant. But then I returned to India for grade school and high school and lived in an inbetween culture, attending an American boarding school, Woodstock, in the Himalaya foothills where we played basketball and tennis and had an American curriculum, but with India with it’s many cultures all around us, living in an expat, post colonial, in between state.
When I returned to American at 16 I spoke English, read the Saturday Evening Post and ate hamburgers when I could. I looked like most Americans and spoke like them. But I felt like an outsider, just as millions of immigrant children in the United States do who speak English and often their native language and who do well but never quite fit in with parents from the old country and occasional visits to relatives back home. I felt at home in India but knew I didn’t belong there and was leaving it for good (I have been back at least 30 times since but still don’t belong there). I don’t belong anywhere. I am an outsider, which, come to think of it, everyone in the world is if they only thought about it because whichever hometown culture they belong to is only a minuscule part of the world, everywhere else they are outsiders.
But this created a strange dichotomy for me. American culture seemed artificial and unreal and dreamed up while at the same time the English I spoke and wrote in, the food I ate, the clothes I wore, the politics my parents taught me all seemed very American and very real.
The issue for me is this. On one hand culture, any culture, seemed narrow and confining and strangely artificial. On the other hand the culture that I was now living in, my particular fishbowl, seemed wondrously complicated and meaningful. I was thinking of this as I listened to Bach this morning. This music didn’t come out of the blue. It was the result of many composers before him which developed one form of harmony and rhythm and tones upon which he built. And he in turn greatly influenced the music that came after him. This is true of every part of a culture including language. Somehow we have an innate language ability which gradually developed with our DNA. But out of this language ability have come thousands of languages, each with a different vocabulary, grammar and writing. This reminds me that culture is a product of millions of minds and is an incremental and changing thing, even the fishbowl keeps changing. The old culture quickly becomes outmoded, with technology an example, and continually changes and refreshes itself.
There really isn’t a static fishbowl, only a constantly changing one. I think that part of our current American (and world) polarization is that for some people the old traditional American cultural values seem most real and give identity so they want to go back to these basic, fundamental values. The other half is open to the constant change of culture and is more welcoming of change.
But whether anyone agrees with that, my issue is how to accept and live within my culture when on one hand it seems narrow and unreal and on the other hand seems rich and complex and marvelous. The language I write and think in seems as real as anything could be, and yet I know it was all made up by generations before me and is constantly changing. In a way it is both artificial and unreal and at the same time is the only way to convey meaning itself and wonderously complicated and rich.
So I am left with feeling that I am living within a fishbowl that is artificial and transient and relative and on the other I am living within a fishbowl culture that is absolutely real and meaningful. Fishbowl or not, it is both real and unreal. And I am left with making my way through life within a culture in which I don’t belong but in which I am embedded and given meaning.
I feels very strange and alive at the same time.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 