Culture shock, part 2

Oh, those crazy Germans. 

A few weeks ago a German theater group staged a city-wide presentation of Infinite Jest as a play.  The play was performed at various locations throughout the city of Berlin, and lasted 24 hours.  Yes, 24 hours.  Although I have as of yet had a difficult time making it through Infinite Jest, I am a fan of David Foster Wallace.  I love his essays, and what I have read of his fiction I really like.  But 24 hours of trudging through post-Cold War and post-industrial Berlin, following what seemed to be a fairly literal translation of IJ?  Yeah, that might be too much. 

But in a very weird way, a literal transcribing of IJ through the streets of Berlin that I did not see, could not have seen, and probably wouldn't want to see, seems much more real to me than a lot of what we are experiencing here on a daily basis. 

A quick example and comparison.  Every day on our run we pass a fairly large temple complex in the park.  It looks like there are five gods and goddesses present at this temple, and every morning there are a host of people engaged in quite a wide variety of practices, some of them fairly familiar, some of them rather new to us.  So, for the comparison: I haven’t made it all the way through IJ yet and I didn't see the play, and I also don’t know what gods and goddesses appear in the park temple that we pass on our run very day, but I do know, and am starting to be able to distinguish, the various practices that people enter into at the temple, enough to be able to join in.  But in all these cases but one, with a little work, I can learn whatever I don’t know; I can read the book or do about five minutes of research to figure out who is at the temple and what people are doing.  Except for the actual experience of trudging through Berlin watching IJ the facts of these practices are available to me.  Second, I have never been to Berlin, and I pass this temple every day on our run.  At this point, Berlin is an imagination, while I know, in quite intimate detail, the park and the park temple.  I know what stray dogs will be there waiting to be fed, I know that if we get there on time we will get to see the laughing/yelling guy performing the best worship I have ever seen, I know the order of the gods and goddesses, even if I’m not quite sure who they are, etc.  The space of the temple and the way that space is used are things that I am very familiar with.  And finally, I don’t know theater, especially experimental theater; certainly I don’t know it at all in comparison to what I know of religious practice.  I have a whole vocabulary and an entire set of logics for understanding what is going on at the temple, and next to nothing for understanding a theatrical production of IJ. 

Even though I seem to know more about what is going on at the temple the 24 hour production of IJ seems more real to me than the worshippers I pass every day.  Or rather, a 24 hour production of IJ is a part of my life and I can imagine myself as someone who would experience a 24 hour experimental German production of IJ in a way that the temple worship is not a part of my life, just as I cannot imagine myself as someone who would go to the temple in the park every morning.  And this is not just a case of religious belief either; it is not that I cannot imagine myself at the temple because I don’t believe, even though that really isn’t the right word here.  I can’t even imagine myself as becoming the kind of person for whom that kind of practice would make sense.  Within all of this it is probably important to keep these two feelings distinct: the first is a feeling of what I have become so far, up to this point, while the second is a feeling of what I might become.  It is a feeling of a real past and a possible or impossible future.  And in this particular case of temple practice the first feeling becomes a constraint on the second; history, or my history, becomes a constraint on what it is possible for me to imagine as the future. 

Working through culture shock is not simply then a matter of developing the skills and habits of inter-cultural competence.  Or rather, inter-cultural competence is not simply becoming a person who can fully experience cultural difference as they are presented or as they might appear in the future.  It is also a practice of finding the openings in history, the openings in my own history so that that history allows me to experience something new; an opening in history to be able to imagine a new future; an experience of history as open in order to be open to possible futures.  The practices that our cultural training tried to offer us are practices for grafting a present-that-will-become-my-history onto my own history, a procedure that requires a series of openings, of incisions, be made in my own history. Maybe culture shock is not best understood as an external encounter with difference, but as an internal encounter with the limits of my own history, providing an occasion to open those limits to something I didn’t know I could experience.