Generalized ethesia

How does one experience culture?
At the broadest level, you sort of float in it. It's all around you and you can vaguely perceive it's nature based on how you float... Maybe it's viscous, maybe it's acidic, maybe it's transparent, maybe it's warm, maybe it's dense and you float right to the top.

You live in another country and you get this sensation that culture is going around all around you, and you're aware of it because it's different from what you're used to. You can't know very much about any particular aspect of it, because it's in a language you don't understand and draws on knowledge and traditions and inside jokes that you just don't get. But you have a diffuse feeling of awareness, the way you do about everything else that is new and different, the way you do about putting on a new shoes or pajamas that are fresh out of the dryer. It's probably this generalized esthesia I experience when traveling that makes me feel I'm closer to God than at any other time.

~

I'm an American in Europe, which is a thing I've never been before. I study the buildings, I read history, but I also hear the music and watch movies and TV. Of course, I watch more American and British movies because they're in English. I am biased in that way. You get this idea about America, though, of the role it plays in the culture here. There's the huge political and economic forces it represents, but those things run under the surface hard to distinguish most of the time. More often, the cultural products of America arrive here, in the form of music, movies, fashions, craft beer (Yakima {here pronounced Yak-KEE-mah} Valley hops FTW) and ideas and they have this quality of freshness, of rawness, of cultural mixing, of a compelling and somewhat subversive sincerity of emotion. It is more attractive for its peculiar foreignness, which provides a romantic setting for a hazy fantasy.

Back home, we drown in newness, it feels like we have no roots, like we are so mixed that we're just a mess, and those massive economic and political forces are much more visceral. We romanticize older cultures for their stability, their unique customs, their roots, their integrity. Songs, books and film from Europe especially provide a conveniently strange, yet intelligible stage for romance of a world with less disruption, slower paces, life at a more human scale.

I love that people are like this, that they look to other cultures with curiosity and awe. (Side Bar: When is it awe and curiosity but not contempt or fear?)
Being from Seattle, I am exotic here in a way that I did not expect. It's not a particularly important city globally. Most folks don't know that Microsoft and Amazon are based there, or I suppose, they don't care. They know about Starbucks, though. But it represents some mountainous, mossy green fringe on the faraway edge of the easily understood. And coffee and beer too.

I got started thinking about this after seeing Captain Fantastic at a theater here. It's a movie that represents two very different sides of peculiarly American culture. The house was packed.