I conceived the vague idea that if I could only get to the UK, I would receive entitlements (someone to pick up my toys, the most expensive item on the menu) that I associated more with location than with an accident of birth. Like all fantasies of escape, this one pertained not only to the destination, but also to what was left behind.
Quotes from Far and Away
by Andrew Solomon
Far and AwayAndrew Solomonquote
Any new relationship is disruptive on both sides. Rather than avoiding and minimizing this disruption, I began trying to open myself to it. Sometimes the engagement was profound; often, it was happenstance. While I was good at fitting in under anomalous circumstances, I had to acknowledge my differences and accept that others noticed them, too. You can’t fit in with people by pretending to be just like they are; you fit in by engaging in a dialogue about your differences, and by putting aside the assumption that your way of life is in any way preferable to theirs.
Travel is an exercise partly in broadening yourself and partly in defining your own limits. Travel distills you to a decontextualized essence. You never see yourself more clearly than when immersed in an entirely foreign place. In part, that is because people make different assumptions about you: often, expectations relate to your nationality rather than to the nuances of your manner of speech, the cut of your clothing, or the indicators of your politics. Equally, travel disguises you; one can feel oddly camouflaged and anonymous wrapped in the sketchy preconceptions of others. I enjoy being lonely so long as I am lonely by choice; I can enjoy some place far away and difficult so long as I am missed back home. I dislike social constraints, and traveling has helped me to be free of them.
Travel makes you modest; what is prestigious at home can seem irrelevant or ludicrous abroad. You cannot rely on the veracity of your opinions in a country where standards are different. You often cannot understand why something is funny there; you sometimes cannot understand why something is somber. You question your own standards of humor, solemnity, even morality. Familiar landscapes cushion you from self-knowledge because the border between who you are and where you are is porous. But in a strange place, you become more fully evident: who you truly are is what persists at home and abroad.
Travel taught me how to relate to disparate people with incongruent values, and, thereby, how to be contradictory myself. If I came subsequently to report on mental illness, disability, and the formation of character, that was an extension of my mission to break loose from the presumption that there is a single best way to be. I continue to move between the internal abroad and the external abroad. Each enhances my relationship to the other.
Though travel can intensify life, it also evokes dying. It is a detachment. I grow anxious at takeoff not because of the air pressure and not because the plane might crash, but because I feel myself dissolving. I was brought up to value safety more than comfort, and comfort more than courage, and have spent adulthood striving to invert that hierarchy. Rilke said, “We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it.” As we climb above the clouds, I practice letting go of the place I’ve come from or the place I’ve gone. Though I am sustained in these departures by the prospect of arrival, separation always tugs me toward at least momentary regret. Even in that sorrow, however, I know that I failed fully to love home until I went repeatedly abroad and could not appreciate abroad until I had returned home time and again. Valediction is, at least for me, a precondition of intimacy.
The real source of the chaos of the new Russia is not the weakness of the police, the dominance of the mafia, the difficulty of constitutional reform, the undependability of Yeltsin, the spiraling inflation, the naïve policies of Western governments in their distribution of aid, the shortage of food, or the inefficiency of state-run factories. The problem is the ascendancy, in a society in which everyone was once asked to work for the common good, of a system of values within which everyone has an eye only on his own progress. It inheres in the impossibility of coherence in a country now run on the chance alignments and misalignments of hundreds of thousands of different, singular, individual agendas.
The very decision in China to act as an individual is radical. It runs against a five-thousand-year history of which the Chinese are intently aware and immensely proud, a history they frequently revise (sometimes violently) but that they never abandon. The members of the Chinese artistic avant-garde are individuals every one, but individualism carried too far is in Chinese terms ridiculous; artistry lies not in what the Chinese would deem coarse Western-style self-interest, but in balance. What seems to us to be a disowning of the Chinese tradition of uniformity is really more a means of stepping outside of it so as to prod it to evolve. China, despite its problems and cruelties, is highly functional, and that is much more important to the Chinese, even the Chinese intelligentsia, than any Western notion of democracy. Even iconoclastic artists, horrified by Deng Xiaoping’s government though they may be, are by and large surprisingly content with how their system works. The acts of defiance of the Chinese avant-garde function legitimately within their system; they are not designed to be interpreted within ours.
What looks radical often is radical, but not always in the ways you think. In Nanjing dialect, the sounds i luv yoo mean “Would you care for some spiced oil?” “What the West does, encountering our art,” the artist Ni Haifeng said, “is to think we’re saying we love you, when we’re only having a private conversation about cooking.”
One thinks of the Cultural Revolution as a terrible time for intellectuals: many were killed, others sent to hard labor in mines, in factories, or on peasant farms. But you do not hear in China the tones of horrified disgust with which Russlans speak of Stalin or that Romanians summon when someone mentions Ceausescu. In avant-garde artistic circles, the love for Chairman Mao is ambivalent but Incontrovertible. “Even those of us who were opposed were believers, at least partway,” Lao Li said late one night over tea. Branded a counterrevolutionary at the beginning of the revolution, he was imprisoned for most of it. “Mao was a very convincing man, and we Intellectuals felt we were sad figures. In the Cultural Revolution, the people thought only of building a pure and perfect society. I disagreed with their particular Idealism and fought against it, and would fight against it again, but I can say without hesitation that there is nothing in our commercialist society today that is equal to it. A misguided Idealism is better than no idealism at all.”
The West also tends to take credit for all art that is not brush painting. Today, the Chinese employ visual language that was developed in the West. But paper originally came from Asia, and all works on paper are not deemed Asian. Why should every oil painting be called Western? Why is it that the West feels it owns conceptualism, installation, modernism, and abstraction? The Hong Kong dealer Alice King, who shows work that uses guohua styles in modern ways, asks, “What is a Chinese painting? Is it any painting made by someone from China? Any painting made by someone who is ethnically Chinese? Or is it a stylistic question? Can a Westerner make a Chinese painting if he uses rice paper and a brush?” Westerners sometimes dismiss Chinese work as derivative. “We must as artists solve the problems of China, even if they’re boring for the West,” said the painter Wang Yin, one of the artists of the Yuanmingyuan village.
In some sense, the art of South Africa all feels sullied. The work of black artists has been polluted by their reliance on a white market; the work of white artists has been contaminated by their inevitable complicity in an exploitative system. Oppression poisons both the oppressors and the oppressed, who all long for an imagined, highly romanticized innocence, something untouched and genuine, a prelapsarian rightness.
The greatest landscapes of the Song dynasty will not be on view in Splendors of Imperial China, but masterpieces of calligraphy and later painting will be. It is fashionable to note the failure of Western medicine to reconcile the mind-body split, and to look to the East for holistic cures. The Western division of word and image, sundering literary and artistic history, is no less troubling a split. It does not exist in China, where the character is at once a verbal representation and a visual language, and where the components of a painting are almost as iconic as literary vocabulary. Calligraphy is still the hardest of the Chinese arts for most Westerners to grasp: language is not metaphor but object, and what is signified is to some extent the process of signification: the writing and the content are harder to dissever than the dancer from the dance. It can be epistolary and spontaneous, with an ink trace that is entirely expressive, or it can be formal and ritualistic.
Here’s a story they tell in Libya. Three contestants are in a race to run five hundred meters carrying a bag of rats. The first sets off at a good pace, but after a hundred meters the rats have chewed through the bag and spill onto the course. The second contestant gets to a hundred and fifty meters, and the same thing happens. The third contestant shakes the bag so vigorously as he runs that the rats are constantly tumbling and cannot chew on anything, and he takes the prize. That third contestant is Libya’s leader, Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, the permanent revolutionary.
Though Saif tries to be intimate and casual, his presence, even his name, makes other people formal. He wore a well-cut suit and moved with grace. At thirty-three, he is good-looking and hip, with a shaved head, and he speaks intelligently, though with the vagueness about self and reality that afflicts royalty and child stars, and that comes from never having seen oneself accurately reflected in the eyes of others. He has more than a trace of the paternal charisma, but it has yet to harden into genius, incoherence, or his father’s trademark combination of the two.
There was something Shakespearean about the disappointment, and nothing could be done about it. The British tendency to make the best of a bad situation butted up against the American habit of pursuing impossible dreams; the British and New Zealanders tended to think we had been given lemons and had best make lemonade; the Aussies, Americans, and Africans thought we had been given lemons and might as well throw them at the authors of our frustration.
On the way out of town, I looked at the local peasants and thought that if some of their forefathers had not burned down the houses of such as my forefathers, mine wouldn’t have left. I considered what had happened to my family within two generations, and what hadn’t happened for them, and instead of feeling outraged by the history of aggression, I felt privileged by it. Oppression sometimes benefits its victims more than its perpetrators. While those ravaging others’ lives exhaust their energy on destruction, those whose lives are shattered must expend their vigor on solutions, some of which can be transformative. Hatred drove my family to the United States and its previously unimaginable freedoms.
I understood that the daredevilry of ordering eel for lunch or going skydiving or visiting war-torn lands pale for me in comparison to the adventurous domesticity of being a parent, which involves simultaneously reckoning with the vastness of the world and agreeing, at least for a little while, to be that vastness to one’s children.