Culture and Blood

Sometimes this blank page seems--so blank, at the start; as my sister once said, writing is like bleeding and sometimes we bleed freely--and sometimes we are scabbed up.

I'm a bit scabbed today--perhaps it was the kind of day it was. When you are consistently using at least 50% of your brain just to drive and understand the little things around you: simple conversation, traffic lights, store trolleys (not carts), bank machines, RTA customer numbers, car loans, house leases, furniture stores (what does $159 really mean here in real money, and double parantheses, it doesn't help that the money does look more like monopoly money with all the colors), well, it gets full. We've started to forget lots of stuff at home and forget what we're doing at home.

Lynnette and Brad rescued our children from the day; the kids stayed at the little Thornton oasis on the northeast side of Sydney.

Sydney started first around the harbor, that enormous natural harbor that branches mainly west and north of Sydney; the city grew along the branches of the water-tree, which provided easier commerce of goods and people. The first industry, of course, was the prison system, but in time farming, mining, forestry, textiles came. Paramatta, near where we are living, became a sort of second city early on. I think there were attempts here in Paramatta at more humane women's prisons. Along this older water-way of little, new cities, there were built neighborhoods, like Strathfield, of beautiful homes, the particular Australian wood-working decor adding originality. So the northwest is older closer to the city, a more raw picture of the changes of the melting pot that is Sydney. The northeast seems different, somehow, like the side of the riverbank that doesn't get the full force of the rushing water, where tall, straight reeds grow at their leisure.

As in many places in the world, peoples seem to flock together; in Australia, there are waves of immigrants from India, Taiwan, Pakistan, and others on this side of the world; these groups have areas--"This is an Indian area" you'll hear, much like you might have heard it more intensely 100 years ago in New York City. I saw a shop full of beautiful silk saris in Old Toongabbie. And as in many cities like New York, groups of people shift areas, like seaweed on the tides of changes in the make-up and character of the city areas.

So, the more established groups--Irish, English, perhaps?--moved farther out northwest, or farther north and north east. This northeast area seems more established, the desirable part of the city: closer to beaches, but not along the more industrial water-ways of northwest Sydney. It is different from the wealthy areas far out northwest because it seems older...like Santa Barbara versus cookie-cutter plagued Oxnard. The avenues are lined by older trees, and traffic seems less dodgy. It is very pretty, with bouganvellia vines peering over stucco walls and pepper-trees swinging gracefully in the car-wind, as if ushering you past gently. It isn't all huge old mansions, but rather a series of neighborhoods that look a little more sheltered from the ravages of chain-store boulevards, with little village centers (centres).

My cousin lives in a home, not a house. It has been theirs for lots of years, and they've knocked down walls and re-done things in what seems to me like an organic way: not a re-model all at once, but changes which fit the changes of their family. We were fed chocolate chip cookies and lunch, and the kids were invited to stay out there for the night. They got to escape us, and we them, and more importantly, they got to escape the RTA (US--read "DMV").

The RTA was, actually, much more humane and quicker than any DMV I've been in a larger city. Sherlock Holmes with one earring in the left helped us out. We then went shopping--we have to buy/get a house full in a short amount of time. There's something here akin to LanderTalk, but it isn't Wyomingites trying to sell stuff, it is Sydneans giving stuff away--if you can come get it. "Offer: Hoover 5 kg washer. No time wasters." It is called Freecycle. I wish I had a big semi.

Desperately tired and pretty hungry after the maze that was Harvey Norman's (like Walmart with furniture), we went to Outback Jack's because it was just the two of us (Thank you, Lynnette). There was a giant foam alligator on the ceiling. Thaddeus wondered why his feet were on the ceiling instead of the other way round. They had mocked his ferocity by draping him with Christmas lights. A poster on the wall of our booth was really indecipherable--I mean, I could read the words, but it was full of allusions that meant nothing to me: "Eat Lamb for Australia Day and win a bbq" spoken by a man in a business suit with a baby in a front-baby carrier, draped in an Australian flag. My mind just chucked it, and I turned to my meal. The food here, consistently, tastes better...fresher? Not sure. They do have some wonderful cream sauces in Australia that are marvelously tasty. Anyone thought of creamy bacon sauce? Yum.

We then had to ask for directions, and this encounter with the wait staff, like so many encounters we've had with customarily the worst experiences (health insurance companies, banks, government bureaucracy, car salesmen) sparked a conversation on the way home. We've found that Australians seem to, even in tough customer situations like the RTA, genuinely want to help, to understand something about you. They seem really interested; if they aren't, they don't pretend. We haven't figured out why, and what exactly is the subtle difference, especially from California or New York, but even Wyoming.

My take on it was that Americans have a deep and powerful value on independence, self-reliance. We tend to value those who 'make their mark' over and above the crowd, but this makes true community a little more difficult. Super-competitiveness produces lots of great results (unlike the Greek nonchalance about even finishing expensive building projects), but it isn't easy to make friends in the middle of a perpetual football play. I feel sometimes--and this is just my own feeling, not an attempt at absolute truth--that Americans are less truly social, and more intent on the project that they are working on. When I moved to the US at ten, I came from a country that valued family above almost everything else; I remember seeing the mothers and daughters, fathers and children, strolling together ritually every evening in the coolness, just talking. They didn't do things together, they were together. The US seemed to me like being on a subway car crowded with people who were all busy going somewhere, their minds on accomplishing something great. Used to community and true leisure in community (sometimes to a fault in Greece), I spent a few lonely years until I figured out how to make friends by working on stuff together.

When in Canada, I learned not much about the Canadians (we weren't there long enough), but for some reason, to appreciate the American positive, can-do attitude; however, like any strength in a personality, this get-it-going value can have a downside. I sense more genuine contact here in Australia with more people; I haven't yet seen the famous Australian sarcasm (except my cousin Brad who had TJ thinking that their dog only spoke Spanish).

Yesterday I heard again (I've read this and heard it a few times already) that Australians 'mock first until they see you are genuine'--and that 'we find Americans hard to read.' I can see that we would be hard to read. "Do I want a friend right now? Are you useful to my projects? Do I have time? Do you fit into my life goals?" I think in some ways that Americans are perhaps a little more British in their inscrutability; like children, we colonial offshoots (though with the melting pot we must necessarily make our own identities, but the prevailing parent country holds a huge cultural sway, I think, like the deep Puritan lines one can find in the American psyche) take on different characteristics.

Like in a family, certain values are passed on in great strength--cultural mores are, in a way, more traceable than bloodlines. This seems to fit with Aristotle's ideas about imitation as the primary way human beings learn and understand themselves, producing identity through mimesis, the visual not being the deepest imitable things; rather, mimesis of the deep values that are, mysteriously, chosen out of many other values, like that of self-reliance, or leisure. These are more real, more binding, than the color of skin or cooking smells one is used to; rather, the cooking smells and the colors mean something because they are images of deeper realities, deeper connections between generations. What we've chosen, as a community, to imitate is what truly makes us what we are; and we don't, really, chose as individuals, but rather collectively. The real cultural battles are around who chooses what, and what will get passed on as the deeper values, and the outside images are only more shallow signs of these truer Objects, or realities from which the signs of culture come. What are the deeper realities, mores, values of our society? True religion is supposed to make these obvious, to align them with God, with truth, for the Christian with Love--so religion is both meant to form us into established values that are good, but also real, true religion will challenge us away from the bad values, like the idea of the 'genetically lesser human being' of the 18th and 19th centuries that allowed slavery to continue in nations calling themselves Christian, that allowed the British government to consciously try to send a 'criminal class' to the Fatal Shore, that shore now called Sydney.

I wonder if I am hard to read, inscrutable. If so, why are we Americans rather inscrutable? What's up with us?

Why do Australians want to mock change or things they don't quite get? I am very interested to find out, and wonder what are the historical sources? How do you separate it all out, especially in the melting pot intensity here, the shifting culture that really is, like America, part of their identity now?

I'm now waiting to be mocked, so I can say, "Hey, I'm genuine."