The Global Soul

"The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land." --Hugo of St. Victor, a 12th century monk

I have not seen nearly as much of the world as I would like, but I am wildly curious about it. Aside from attending preschool in the home of an elderly Swedish couple and a single visit to a Greek dentist when I was 11, I don't think I met people from other parts of the world until I was in college, and then they arrived in my life in a swirl of bright cloth and deliciously accented syllables from Libya, the Philippines, Poland, India, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Zimbabwe, China, Colombia, and Malaysia. My husband and I were one of three American couples in the married student housing complex that year. Four sets of cinderblock apartments faced the courtyard in which I first witnessed the midnight feasting of Ramadan and forged a rough understanding, through gestures and broken phrases, of the horror of my friend Grezyna, who had just learned she was pregnant when the radioactive fallout from Chernobyl crept across Poland. It was the Reagan era. On TV, there were instructive news clips of Iranians chanting "Death to America!" and burning our flag. Our next door neighbors, Muhammad and Zahra from Tehran, said, "If the people don't do these things, the police come and torment their families, arrest them. They write down names of people who do not make the signs and light the fires." These learned travellers were the friends who brought gifts and blessings when my daughter was born. Theirs are the faces in my mind's eye as I hear news of the world.

Later, I had students from Korea, Russia, Bosnia, and Sweden, a colleague from Argentina. It was hard not to notice their eloquent command of my native language and their surprising knowledge of the geography of my country. Their eager love for all things American baffled me, but I sensed underneath it a genuine affection for who we thought we were then: the Land of the Free, Home of the Brave, and all that. I marveled at my brilliant luck of birthplaces, right in the center of the very place that people from all over wanted to call home. I learned how to pace my questions so they weren't like an interrogation, how to nudge out the details of what was missed and what was escaped when they arrived here. Their good humor and generosity never failed to astonish me.

I ventured off my continent once and went to London completely alone for a week, knowing little more about it than where to find a B&B owned by a nice Indian couple near the Paddington Station. I walked miles through the city, got off the Tube at random stops just to look around; I don't think I said more than two or three sentences to anyone the whole week. I did not shop, I hardly ate, but I saw as much as I could, and I listened. Then next week, I connected with two friends and we drove out past Avebury, Stonehenge, the moors, and the wind farms to Cornwall. Grafitti on a bridge near Bude announced CORNWALL IS NOT ENGLISH. I held this thought as we walked the coastal path in silence. For me, Cornwall became that worn path with its observant cows, its stone cairns and Celtic crosses. In that two-week period, I felt more at ease in the world than I have felt before or since.

Now I live in a city where a half-dozen languages--Spanish, Polish, Russian, Greek, Urdu, and Mandarin--jockey with English in any day of commerce. I find myself comforted by the rhythms of these conversations I cannot understand. The words are unfamiliar but the subjects are not. I feel almost ashamed that I have only absorbed the dialects of my America, though they are many. I am too shy to use even the little bit of Spanish I have learned from our Mexican waiter at our local Indian restaurant. Will I mess it up or somehow be insulting? Would it be too familiar, too presumptuous? Is it perhaps better not to paste the stamp of empire on every breath?

The quote above is from Pico Iyer's book, The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home, published in 2000, before "9/11 changed everything." Iyer posits that the 12th century monk who made that observation was pointing the superiority of those whose feet are secured in heaven, but I see yet another possibility for those of us living in a country that has twisted off its foundation and suddenly does not feel like home. We find ourselves suddenly in exile in a place that was only recently the only place we knew. Freedom has taken on militaristic connotations, morality is defined in boardrooms and other dens of criminality. We can hardly bear to stay but we do not want to go. Cobalt strangers, we are, in a strange red land. Now is the moment when the veil is ripped away and we see with new eyes the world as it is, not as we believe it to be. We have become perfect in the truest sense, "without defect or omission."

We are the ones who appreciate the wonder-working powers of gay white men adopting unwanted black children, the salutary effect of Icelanders married to Turks living in Germany. We don't need to see our reflection in every shiny surface. We see God in every convergence that creates new forms. We enjoy the synthesis of seemingly unrelated elements because it affirms our integrity. We are the ones who can willingly endure the discomfiture that will upset our tribal sensibilities and nationalist tendencies, possibly even release us from the devisive delusions that drive our interactions now. Too many Americans admire George Bush for his insular, antagonistic world view, but they and George are simply scared of what's out there. It is a world that defies their simplistic categories and provincial tastes. It will not be subdued by any one god. These tender beginners fear the wild world cannot be kept from the gates of their McMansions.

The rest of us love this planet in all its dazzling complexity. We love its vicissitudes, its noise and confusion, its contradictions and knots even as we hear the single pulse underneath. We are unconvinced by the lines on the map because the image of this swirling blue ball was burned into our consciousness along with our respective languages. Many of us found families quite far from the ones into which we were born. We want to tuck our fear out of sight with our passports and money and go look for our friends in the places we don't know. In an odd way, we thrive in this disconcerting, uprooted age. We're the ones who will be here when the rest have been blasted off to Mars or Hoovered up to holiness. In this week's fondest fantasy, we reach across the latitudes and longitudes, link up across every kind of barrier to form a swift and powerful antidote to the gloating and preening snakes who have appointed themselves master of all they survey. We shift our gaze from their perceived power over us to our shared resistance. We don't wait for a leader or words of praise. We do it now, in our own remote interiors. Maybe this moment--this realization of each other, our apologies given and accepted--is the beginning of the paradigm shift we've waited for so long.