Solstace

What does "experience a new culture" mean?  I used to hear the phrase a lot, especially in college.  "I love to experience new cultures!"

I understand the concept, in fact I feel likewise.  But I have never said it like that, it sounds stupid.  Culture is not something you experience.  Culture is the opposite of an ephemeral experience that provides insight immediately upon contact.  Culture is immense, you can't take a picture of it or write an essay about it.

Culture is toil and devotion spread over untold generations, you can't just experience the depth of a culture.  Culture requires more than experiential knowledge.  To "experience" a culture is to be a bystander, to accept superficiality instead of context, to reduce to a semblance.

I have been engaging in the African American experience for about ten years (hmm... count back to the first time I read Native Son and started listening to Hip Hop…), but I would never say that I have "experienced" that culture.  I revere black culture, I admire, respect and dance to it, but I am loath to describe our interaction as an "experience."  Experience is the word you use if you are out of breath or confused.

"It was quite an experience."

Nonetheless, I fully support learning about cultures different from your own.  I also encourage trying new things- things that are trying/difficult or things that are new because you have not done them before.  You don't have to go far to do new things, which is a blessing and can be a curse.  Some things are rewarding even if they seem dangerous or illegal or strange.

But how can you experience a culture?  I don't think you can.  How can you start?  Learning a language, indubitably.  That is the primary barrier between you and the other.  Even if you speak the same language as the other, learning to communicate does not necessarily mean learning another language.

People of different race or different sexuality in my country don't operate on the same plane.  It's incumbent upon both parties to learn, but more so on the dominant group.  Majorities don't ask for understanding, they only ask for uniformity.  Different people say "fuck that," as they rightly should.

People who are different exist in a different realm.  They ask for understanding and usually don't get it.  Learning the how and why of another's existence is a wonderful process and it's never as hard as it seems.  The right frame of mind helps because communication involves a great many non-verbal, para-linguistic, non-uttered gesticulations- not just vocabulary.

Language is not communication and communication is not just speaking.  Exaggeration and 5 words of a foreign language can go a long way, no doubt.  I have always known this, my family hosted exchange students from around the world since I was very young.  There are English language learners who are not timid and know five words who engage more than ESOL who know dozens of words but feel inhibited.  It's about effort and confidence, not knowledge.

I'm learning the idea of language-learning more everyday as a speaker and teacher.

This is partly what brought my desire to know the world into being.  I also never conceived of being as one.  Tossed salad, not melting pot.  We're in this together and all of our experiences contribute to the shared dominion of experience.

So, new cultures, without experiencing them in full- how can you meet them?  Tasting the food, of course.  Seeing the sights, no doubt.  Listening to the music.  Yes, but these are interactions that you can't really take part in as an outsider because you were never meant to.  You can only taste without knowing the backstory.  In fact, your observance as outsider is required for the whole notion of culture to function.  Us needs them.

The backstory is always as delicious as the upfront display.  But there is seldom equality in cultural displays and cross-cultural events.  You can't meet if you're being colonized, and this has been the history of much of cultural contact.  There is more to a culture than an explorer or an enterprising voyager can contain.

Ultimately, I hope people are willing to acknowledge and place themselves in a position to redress the dark history of cultural domination, which as been Eurocentric and colonial to date.  Say something new or thoughtful or just take pictures and leave.  There are already stacks upon stacks of white men's journeys into the unknown (unknown- here meaning a place or space with deep, rich, misunderstood traditions and history that said account will only further obfuscate).

I had a frank discussion with a close friend about being abroad and the Orientalist gaze.  I think the discourse amounted to the fact that I can't escape the Orientalist vision- everything here in Korea is new and different and weird, but as I have said since I started this blog, I want to emphasize the sameness and counteract the hundreds of years of racist "look how weird they are" writing.  I can't do this all here, but I think that's all the more reason to try and document my attempt in any case.

If you're still reading, I thank you.  If you're wondering what I am referring to when I discuss this topic, read some travel blogs or visit vice.com.  This site is the epicenter of pseudo-journalistic exploitation- "look at these strange brown people doing gross weird things"  So, I keep on.

To my fellow Americans, don't despair in thinking your culture has been lost.  Cultures have been universally corporatized and commodified, but the nucleus remains.  Do whatever it takes to reconnect with your people, the results will be unfolding joy.

I leave you with an ancient culture I plan to discuss more later, the Indigenous people of Mexico.  It is the Spring Solstice in the East, March 21st.  At Chichen Itza the monument vibrates with a snake-like light and shimmers with ancient wisdom like this:

Hereis 

"Nomads"

You know those young women.  Young women from Wisconsin or wherever who are all about yoga and travel.  The people who blog and call themselves "nomads."  Yeah, I know a few.  None of them mean any harm, really.  But none of them seem to acknowledge the extent and particular type of harm that has been done, by "us" to them.

The funny and ironic and absolutely shameful part about being a pseudo "nomad" is that middle class anglophone twenty-somethings are the exact opposite, the polar antithesis of actual real life nomadic people. 

Their love of travel is not the problem.  The problem is privilege.

There is scarcely any commons remaining to be shared freely, which is the sort of thing that genuine nomads participate in.  Nomadic livelihoods which include animal herding and small scale foraging in places like Mongolia, Tanzania, and Alaska are without question under siege.  Colonization helped chain people into easily exploited labor pools, and into centralized, national boundaries.

You are not a nomad because you like to travel, you are just a person who likes to and is able to travel, due to financial freedom.  Your cultural tradition does not depend on a nomadic livelihood.  Sorry, pick another word.

If only every nation could have it's own state.  If only.

The nation-state is a European contrivance and it is the map we inherit today.  The places where nomads still live and struggle to survive sit across, between and among states.  India, Mali and Angola, are the types of places where old school colonization persists.  I don't mean to say that elsewhere colonization has stopped.  It never halts.  1492 onward, more on this later.  Nowadays, oppression is alive and well under the aegis of multinational corporations.

So, unless you are one, don't dress/act/speak like one.  I won't accuse anyone of cultural appropriation by blogging, that's not my prerogative.  I do at least want to offer some context and a counterpoint.  At least.  That's a phrase I use all the time, think of it as my blog theme.

The Sami, the Tuareg, and the Yupik are being forced into, fenced into the mainstream consumer culture.  If you are a fellow settler, and I absolutely find it necessary to refer to myself as such, you should not call yourself a nomad.  

Composition/Improvisation- for Charles Mingus

South Korea is my home now.  Although I heard before that the school I was hired to teach at is in a very rural area, 동송(Dongsong) is actually larger than my hometown in Ohio.  So, me n my girlfriend are in Dongsong, dang.  It's cool, let me tell you.  Dongsong is a city of 20,000 people in 철원(Cheorwon) country, on the westernmost point in the province of 강원도 (Gangwon-do), straddling the De-Militarized Zone (DMZ).  Plug it into your google.

 Now that you have a specific idea where I'm coming from, let me tell you more generally: Korea is amazing.  Korean people are incredibly welcoming, thoughtful and warmhearted.  So far I have experienced absolutely none of the cultural tension that Westerners report.

Which is not to say that the stories about being ostracized or stared down are true or untrue.  Negative stories tend to blossom online and in print, perhaps as a friendly precaution or when the person telling the story feels like the world is unfair because of a minor inconvenience.  I am not telling my dear readers and fellow travelers to "toughen up," in fact I am advocating the opposite.  Be gentle.  Americans tend to speak loudly and throw things.  Kindness, vulnerability, is a human universal.  Not being loud, pushy, or rude is a prerequisite for successful living anywhere, particularly abroad.

I have been in Korea for three weeks but I was surprised by how quickly it felt like home or a home.  I have studied Korean in earnest for 5 months and have been learning about the Korean political economy since I was in college.  I remember attending a Korean folk music performance at OSU with a Korean ESL conversation partner and having my mind blown that Eastern music could be so badass.  That's just the start man you don't even know.

That was then.  Now that I'm in the flesh in the land I read about for months, I have a lot of work to do.  Even with my studies I can understand less than 1% of spoken language, less than 2% of written language.  It's scary, it's tiring, mostly it's fun.  The tiniest of Korean phrases goes a long way in showing you care about the place and the people you live among.  There are stories I dread of Americans who have been here for three years and don't know how to speak any Korean.  I mean, it is possible to live like that, gesticulating goes a long way.  My thoughts I give, when we communicate I live.

Language is like acrobatic sonar jazz for your tongue.  Oh Yeah!  

The cusp of the void is right up there.  Every road running North-South in this town reaches end in a military base.  Really, I long for a long steeped tea discussion with my new Korean friends about the middle class, democracy and economic development, but so far there have only been glimpses into their perspective, which is more than I expected.  It seems many Koreans are very lighthearted about the potential for military conflict.  There are cartoon paintings on some of the walls of the military bases.

The story of division is a lot more complicated than Dictatorial Communism versus Democratic Capitalism.  I am still attempting to understand what it means.  I'm attempting to unpack my Western culture and undermine the racist stereotyping that persists in other seemingly sympathetic media.  I have no tolerance for intolerance.  Love is really all that matters.  

Cornel West says that justice is what love looks like in public.  People in public are hard to understand, especially if you're cynical.  So, let us expect the best and assume the best in others.  Narratives of the ignorant, the victim-blamers, and the conservative reactionaries are all bound by their anticipation of what other people are like: bad.  I utterly and completely reject such a mode of thinking.  I've found it helps me not only accept what facts I don't find immediately comfortable but it also forges unity.  I will be discussing reunification, democracy and domination at length in this blog, within the context of my own observations.  
I mistrust the capitalist world system's promise of happiness and development but I am more certain that individual people are good.  People are born good and slimy.  Smell me?  MF DOOM was 'born like this' forever longer ago than a GoGo problematic Gal who shall remain nameless.  DOOM is a prophet for all that is good.  He raps that if you don't get it then it's not for you.  Nothing critical, just different strokes for different folks so on and so on.

My blog will not be coherent, it will not be ordered or orthodox.  Pics may come later but I want the imagery to be literate for now.  Start with a deep grove; old fashioned boom bap out cruddy shacks.  Imagine if you will, a juke joint, Korea has that vibe.  Old pals shooting the shit over at a 노래방 (Noraebang; a karaoke place).  I have a hunch that privilege doesn't really have any idea what culture sounds like.  Culture has to be off key a little or at least off the cuff.  To a rich person music is like classical or popular, not the saved scrap and steamed stem and seeds that become an ersatz for high rise living.  Music is life.  There is signification space in this culture for improvisation and the unpredictable. 

Without essential, generalizing and fetish-driven admiration, I do want to express my deep respect and adulation for the Korean people.  I don't love explaining a person's character from her circumstances or race, but I have a tendency to love the common person.  Low wage workers, poor folks, marginalized people, fat people.  Love explains more than amusement does.  A cosmopolitan worldview advances all over the travel blogosphere like the word blogosphere itself; peppy, ugly and shat out of the double millennia for want of genuine context.  The travel blog is a uniformity of posture and content, while lacking any composure and contentment.  I am writing to make common ground.  With whomever.   That's all.

Geography, history, social sciences, math, and economics are all tools of conquest.  Orientalist scholars have endless explanations about the Other and they all share a common denominator: the other is other.  Travel blogging is an amateur version of this.  A dilettante version, but here's where it gets paradoxical- look up the word dilettante.  The word means both one who dabbles and one who is deeply devoted.  Enter jazz.  Enter me.

I have written before and still believe that all wars are civil wars.  Jazz came about in the American Civil War, when clashing souls rested over salvaged instruments to create complex simplicity.  Poly-rhythm: the hearts together.  Add more heat, it has to beat.

Jazz has a liking for a good dose of reality, which is always as weird as it gets.  Music had to become modern with the crossover.  White people had to give in and crossover because their European melodies had no ass.  Baroque bullshit, say something real.  Like Mingus' "Myself When I Am Real" I hope this blog will be true to myself and an honest reporting of one US citizen life on the DMZ.    

Jazz is irresistible, don't resist.  Affability makes life better.  Bigger the sore, bigger the laugh.  The first law passed in the New World was to ban the use of the African drum.  This way the people facing enslavement couldn't communicate.  They did anyway.  Resistance is not pretty but it generates an art.

What are you doing?

I want to talk about life, love, sharing and the world.  I want to talk about sharing information about the world.  The world is never exactly what we say it is.  History and reality are two different things.  It's like saying "Save the planet." True, we should, but it's really us we're talking about saving.  The planet will just do its thing, it's ourselves that need radical re-evaluation.  

This is what I'm talking about, fiction and friction.  Fortune cookies are what I'm talking about.  Unfortunate cookies.  Flammable/inflammable.  Ravel/unravel.  Civil/Savage.  We make up words to comprehend but the ideas end up meaning the inverse.  Relax the tension with more tension.  Foment, forget, fugue, what it do, torch the torturer.

I want to discuss colonization, militarization and jazz.  I want to talk without a colonizing discourse, in order to decolonize what seems to me so inept, so insincere, immunized, and imperial-- travel blogging.  I don't want to start there but I think it's necessary to write openly from the gut from the heart.

OK, so we dive in, divulge like we're out on my porch together and it's a hot night.  It's a season-long linger, bearing the character of what was but betraying something else.  Think of this as a possibility not a reality.  Blowing off steam, digging through trash, talking between drinks and drags over a campfire, maybe the seeds will grow.  Worth a shot.  Maybe.  Come closer.

The world, in general terms, is a horrific and destitute place to live.  But it's home.  Home is where the funk is.   It would be stupid of me to go on and on about how the world is poor and gross, but it would be more wrong to just photo blog like it's all-peachy-look-at-me-in-Fiji.  I will try to do neither and more.  Somewhere on this blog it might make sense, but the more I see the less it makes sense.

I'm okay with things not making sense as long as the things are beautiful and don't hurt anyone.  Actually I am really into that type of thing if you can't already tell.  Poetry haunts me late in the afternoon.  I write how I like to read.  I hope you're still reading.  I love writing and reading because it's like the opposite medium of a movie.  Make your own image, the contact is one to one ratio instead of one to masses.  Masses are interesting, more on mobs later.

If there is any comfort in getting to the halfway mark of your 20's it's that realizing comfort is scant, at best.  Or at least comfort starts to feel imbalanced- you have too much or too little, no stasis.  Love it where you have it, because being comfortable is a privilege for too many and a condition for so few.  It's appropriate to reconsider comfort in a world where crisis is the new norm.

I'm a compulsive, impulsive writer.  It's a sad fact that a great deal has been written about the Eastern world but very little has been said.  Academic experts are completely stuck, complicit, or enthusiastic in supporting imperialism.

Under this light, the possibility of failure is 100%, impossibility is my outset.  A straight able-bodied white man is writing about honesty and social justice.  I promise to try, but my aim is not to float on my own guilt to better places just for me.  There is a lot of actual real life work to be done in redressing past injustice and I have only general ideas where to begin.  My impulse is to change the world for the better without immobilizing self-reflection.

For me, my relative security and white-male-class privilege enabled me to wallow too deep into self-loathing comfort back in the USA.  I was not happy and did not know what to do so I moved to another country to be a teacher.  Sound familiar?  Actually there was a complexity of factors and processes at play, but basically this is the honest truth.

When I reread this post I do feel a bit of cognitive dissonance.  But in all honesty, honesty is like my shit.  Stay true.

All this shit is what I'm trying to pin down.  I know the pins are on some A Beautiful Mind shit right now.  I'm hoping, dear reader, that you will forgive my lack of citations and concrete examples of douchebagery.  You don't have to just trust my depiction here.  I'm hoping if you've read this far you do have a general sense and acute anxiety that Western twenty-somethings abroad act like there are no rules and further denigrate the already (justifiably) tarnished reputation of folks like just you.

It's the reality, Americans and to a lesser degree Europeans, tend to behave like fucking pricks when they leave their homes.  I don't mean to generalize, but I am generalizing- only regarding those who already are fucking pricks.  I am offering this blog as apology and explanation and counterpoint to all the drunk assholes.  Get drunk, but don't be an asshole.  Learn or attempt to learn the language of the people you live among, no excuses.

The guise of academia, the aegis of American Hegemony has grown big and strong.  Full grown.  Eurodata.  Eurotrash.  The academic and the popular fields of knowledge need to broaden, all of them.  Let's start from ignorance and move to curiosity, from intrigued to engaged, from connected to concerned.  The other is the same with a damaged history.