It is a perpetual feeling that I now realize I do not think will ever go away. It is the idea of being in a country which does not suit you; and feeling like you wake up and.. you feel like some hand is down over your mouth, I suppose, covering you, not wanting you to completely breathe. That is how I feel in the States almost constantly, and have felt for years now, and it is a very terrible thing because it is like an inescapable sorrow.
After all, the reality of my actually getting out of the States is slim to none. I can hardly afford to travel around here. Getting the chance to actually thus leave the country--and set up residence permanently elsewhere, like in Florence, or London--is thus nothing short of fantasy. It might as well be equivalent to walking outside tonight and going for a walk in the woods, entering into a cave, and finding Gandalf the Grey there fighting a wizard. Or becoming the next Brad Pitt and starring in my own Troy...or Fight Club. It ain't gonna happen.
A lot of people will of course tell me that I am, what, a wee little cry baby who just needs to accept my "lot in life", and that I am trapped in the USA,and that this is the country I have to live in and, you know what, I ought to love it actually becuas...."Hey, you could be in Africa, or North Korea, y'know? You could be working for pennies in some iPhone factory, or maybe an Ivanka Trump factory, sewing blue jeans together with a sharp needle for 14 hour shifts." The problem with these people of course is that I don't think they understand a little thing I suppose we will call RELATIVITY.
What is relativity? Well, I think it is basically the fact that, as someone who speaks English, I have an incredibly distinct connection to Europe that, obviously, people in Africa and North Korea do not have. Most people in Africa or N. Korea don't sit around, one imagines, reading in depth chronicles of the history of England or Wales, in the language that they were born with, like I do. This is relativity you see: I am speaking a language that connects me to this Old World, and thus makes me very sad, on the regular, because I am constantly reminded of this other world, and how it is ILLEGAL for me to live there or work there, as just a commoner making pizza or something, etcetc. I am speaking the language of a country in which it is actually illegal for me to live, that being England. That's weird! And trust me, it doesn't happen often. You won't find many other examples of this....
Which is why I think Americans really underestimate, in a sense, just how wide - and thus culturally confusing -- the ENglish language is, in a way. Most languages are, after all, like I was saying in a post the other day, only really spoken in one country, that being their country of origin. This means that, though many Italians and Poles do, for example, watch a lot of cinema from other countries, what often tends to happen is that, first of all, they usually dub the films over with their own language (which makes all the characters seem much more like them), and secondly, since they do this, they don't actually speak and they especially do not read the language, and so ...when they are reading, what happens?
Well, they tend to read everything with solely an Italian, or Polish viewpoint. Someone who reads in Italian doesn't have the experience of being able to read someone from a completely different country comfortably in their own native tongue, like I do, when I read authors and history from England. They don't keep accidentally - even if they don't want to - bumping into these notable minds and intelletuals from some other country, like I do, literally constantly.....
They, you see, can only read their own history from Italy, and the intellectuals that they do find are probably majority Italian, and if they find foreigners, they've all been translated, so they seem distant and removed. They are therefore, in my opinion, not constantly reminded of this "other world" -- because there is no other world for them that exists in their OWN LANGUAGE.
I am endlessly reminded of it, of course, the second I want to go ...well, basically anywhere, since authors from England, Scotland, Wales or Ireland pop up constantly. So too do television shows, like one I am watching now, the White Queen (not a single American actor in the entire English cast). With the Internet this reach of English is especially evident, the moment you upload some videos to YouTube, too. Many of the songs I've uploaded there are much more popular in Wales or Sctland, etcetera, than the USA. Because I am singing in English, and especially because I am singing old songs , I have to somewhat keep England in mind. If I were to write a song called "To Hell with Queen Elizabeth the Second, She is a Traitor to Us all" (the current sitting Queen of the UK), and it was t obe written in English, I might come up with thousands of angry comments from people actually living in England...even if the song was addressed to Americans as a joke. If I wrote it in Italian, guess what? Most likely, no one from England will ever hear it. Strange how that works. And I put this on display just to show my reader how, even though most of us in the States will never see England and don't even know anyone who has, we are still in pretty intimate contact with it just as a result of our tongue. Therefore,it's quit eoften in our minds. For instance, I cannot even begin to tell you how frequently I am directed to the English newspaper the Guardian when I am running searches on Google -- even if I am running searches about the States!
This is strange, in a sense, because we Americans often have the idea that everyone all over the world is constantly being reminded of us, but the truth, again, is that the Italian running searches does not ever stumble accidentally upon papers from here. Neither does the German or the Finn or anyone else.....
And this leads me to one other thing I want to express about the specific "perception" with which, I believe, those Italians and other Europeans watch our cinema or our television shows, which are of course so often set in America, and which you would think serve to constantly remind them of America; and what I think one has to realize is the fact that, as I always say, many of the "unique things" that can be found in the USA, that you would think make the show seem to be American, these things can actually also be found in Europe. Therefore I am of the idea that many a European watches our TV shows, dubbed into his language, and he probably oftentimes might feel as though he could just be watching Europeans. Essentially, he isn't seeing anything that he doesn't recognize. He sees skyscrapers, hamburger joints, Starbucks, department stores, and highways. Well, they have all of that too. So none of this really serves to constantly remind him of our country. It ...basically just looks like his country -- with a lot of stuff missing.
Which, of course, is precisely when you realize that this interesting little phenomenon doesn't go the other way around. This means to express that, when you watch something like the DaVinci Code, which is set in Florence Italy, or even Harry Potter, when it starts in London, I believe, you know, as the viewer, that you are seeing a sort of city and set up that you will never ever see in this country. You are seeing buildings that cannot be authentically rebuilt. You are seeing towns that cannot be rebuilt here . I, after all, watch a show like the White Queen, and then I read of a medieval village like Canterbury in the U.K., and I start aching to live there, tomorrow, because it is just so radically different from anything here, that it looks like something out of an actual video game to me. So you think it would be basically the same for EUropeans when they watch something set here, in Orange County, California, say - and that would give you some satisfaction, I suppose, because at least we both want something the other has. There is this idea that the game is even, and perhaps maybe that we have someting over them.
Unfortunately -- and I really do mean unfortunately -- it is not to be. Because, unfortunately you can find literally all of the things we have in America in Europe, as well. Literally: all of them. . There is nothing that they will see in any American broadcast that he cannot have somewhere in his own Euro country. Nothing. My friends from Bolzano, Italy, right under the tip of Germany and Austria, have often sent me WhatsApp videos of them hanging out in hamburger joints with people rolling round on rollerblades serving them bad looking hot dogs.. "frankfurters".... with Elvis Presley blasting in the background. Its actually almost insulting..... "This is supposed to be for me..you fucking people..."
But then, an hour later, they send another video of themselves cruising their some gorgeous medieval town, that looks like it is out of some movie about where Santa Claus was born in 1350, and you're about to weep at seeing the beauty, and then you remember your sad lot in life, for you remember that these places -- probably places my own ancestors slaved to build back in 1201, long before we heard of America -- you see that these places, they literally cannot be recreated. Those things, and those very unique towns (literally, whole medieval towns you can be 'enveloped in' and live all your life in, like a theme park) are only able to exist in Europe. And this, in my opinion, is the thing that...well, to put it simply, sucks. Because what it shows you is that the Europeans, in many ways, literally do have the best of both worlds. They almost get to hop between worlds when they want. For us Americans, this is not the case. We are quite literally trapped in the New World all the time. I always remember something a girlfriend from Venice said to me: "I suppoe when I think about it, I could never live in a country with no history. How do you do it really? What do people do? What is there to see? I just...don't understand. Where do people go when they want to see things? What is there to see if one has no history?" And the truth is that there is really nothing here to see. We are not made with this "tourist" bone in our body. In fact, if anything, many American vacations tend to revolve around going even further into "nothing": they want to go camping in the deep wilderness, or they want to go to the Grand Canyon, etc. Our whole perception of what it means to travel is rather different. We don't go "in". We go "out".
Hence, you see, there is truly never any escape from the New World and its relative emptiness -- unless of course we want to fly 14 hours across the Atlantic after paying for a plane ticket that costs $1400, and then some hotel we can't afford, to stay for a mere week, at a cost of what is probably our years earnings . But of course we can't do tht anyways, because Americans actually have the least vacation time out of any country in the entire developed world. Many Italians, for exampl, even poor ones, apparnetly have three-four entire weeks every summer where life simply shuts down and they go adventuring, sampling ancient historical sites in their own cities by train. This is even better (more vacatio time) in Germany and Denmark and elsewhere, and almost every single person I have met from all of those countries seems to have tale after tale of city after city they have seen, all over the European continent. It's like these people are all constantly seeing something new. "Oh we're going to go to Athens to see the Parthenon...oh we're going to go to Naples to see the Palace..oh to Venice...to Berlin.." on and on it goes. It literally is like a theme park. They have 900 theme parks to go see every summer. Which is perhaps why they have collectively decided as a culture to offer all this vacation time. They understand there is something to see. They're almost like ...you could say...'collectively' basking in the fruits of two milleniums worth of building. They are enjoying a finished product.
We here are not. We are still building a new product, hence this is all absolutely unthinkable in America. You are in the rat race from bith until death here, or you have nothing and all the Americns don't want to know you. There is no chance to see Europe ,oftentimes, for anyone but the wealthiest American .
I, in some sense, actually had to risk my life to go there: I gambled on a random person from the Internet letting me stay in their house for a summer for nothing. For all I knew, I could have gottne off the plane and gotten my throat slit. Had I not done that, I could have never probably gone. I was so desperate to see it, however,after endlessly reading of its history and watching shows like the intolerable White Queen, that i took the risk.
Honestly though, to get back to what I was saying before, about how mad it has driven me, having to be constantly reminded of these Europeans: I do not think I had ever really known jealousy, until I first really discovered what was going on in the Old World. I don't think I ever knew jealousy a day in my life until that day, and so in a way I really do think I curse it. For you see, I was really always very content with my life here, for as long as I can remember, and I am even still contented with it, when I look at it all from **solely** an American point of view. This means to say, for example, that nothing else going on in America has ever really left me feeling low, or wanting. I do not have any sincere envy for people who live in a single other Americn state, or city, or anything like that. It's almost all entirely irrelevant to me, especially since I do live in the northeast,which is one of the wealthiest regions on this entire continent, anyways. The only state that probably really attracts me is California, but it's so far from my line of interest, in so many ways, with all the Malibu barbies and the reality TV show stuff, that I don't really think of it too much, so I'm not driven 'mad' by it. There are surprisingly few novels set in California. So again I say, I really never felt envy a day in my life, until I begna to discover just how differnet and awesome the Old World was. And I think it ties me to a Mexican in a way, because that's really what I feel like when I look at Europe: I feel like a Mexican who so badly wishes he could get in, that I'd almost actually be willing to shotgun somebody for the right just to be able to have a gig cooking pizzas there....
Strange ......
-ending
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