Strangers and strangeness - a special section on cultural geography

STRANGERS AND STRANGENESS

LIFE IS DIFFICULT, as we all know, and there are few places on earth where people appear to have found genuine happiness. One place is suburban Australia. In a book on Australia, called Their Shining Eldorado, Elspeth Huxley wrote, "I recall a suntanned young man standing in the sunshine on the steps of an office block in, I think, Perth -- buut it might have been almost anywhere -- and saying, 'It is too good to last. I've got it all -- a good job, my own home just the way I planned it, a pretty wife, healthy kids, the garden's coming on nicely, at weekends I go fishing. I enjoy fishing. I enjoy my work. This is what human beings have always wanted, and now I have it and it's wonderful.'"

What more is there to add? What more can one ask for? While reading this passage, my mind drifts to the fictional world of Kenneth Grahame's Wind in the Willows. Mole has returned to his cozy home underground.

Soon he laid his head on his pillow in great joy and contentment. But before he closed his eyes he let them wander round his room, "mellow in the glow of the firelight that played and rested on familiar friendly things." He could see how plain it all was, but also how much it all meant to him. He would not want to abandon the new life above ground and its splendid spaces, to turn his back on sun and air and creep home and stay there. "The upper world was too strong, it called to him still, even down there, and he knew he must return to the larger stage."

What lessons can we draw from these texts? The contentment of the Australian homesteader seems impregnable. Not only the awe of nature is tamed by suburbia, but also that of religion. How can a premonition of the wholly other, or mere strangeness, penetrate his world? Mole's life is more ambivalent. He loves his cozy shelter, "mellow in the glow of firelight," but he is not content. He never ceases to long for the open spaces of sun and wind with their whispers of danger. In this easy, I explore the experience of strangeness, not only in nature but also in the midst of the familiar human world, as a mode of religious apprehension.

NATURE VERSUS CULTURE

The earth is our home -- we have no other -- yet we do not feel at home in it. Alterations have to be made. These may be small and imperceptible, such as naming the parts of nature; in the mere process of naming, strange plants, animals, and rocks are subtly altered to become suitable denizens of the human world. Large, tangible changes occur when we apply physical force to clear bushes and trees and convert wild nature into orderly fields and houses. All these changes -- tangible and intangible -- are works of culture. Human beings everywhere distinguish between nature and culture. We are proud of culture, for it is that which elevates us above other animals. The first and most important aspect of nature that we transform, is ourselves: we do so by classifying human individuals, by establishing their relationships to each other with the help of a more or less elaborate kinship terminology, and by applying cosmetic art to our bodies. Many societies use the honorific term "people" for their own members. Outsiders, by implication, belong to a lower order. They are strangers who have not submitted to culture at its best. They are raw, unpredictable, and dangerous.

As a result of classificatory science and of cosmetic art, we live in a world of familiar people and setting. Outside this world is nature: the primordial and chaotic bush or forest haunted by demons, witches, and strangers. Note that the words "forest" and "foreigner" have the same root. The basic idea is derived from the Latin foranus, which means "situated on the outside." Forests and foreigners lie outside the known world of kinsfolk and cleared fields. They are strange, vaguely threatening, but because they are out of the ordinary -- extraordinary -- they also carry an aura of mystery and hint at the existence of the superhuman or of a grace beyond the good as ordinarily conceived.

Human beings generally prefer culture to nature, the familiar to the strange. But there are striking exceptions. Nature rather than culture may have the higher status. We know how this has come to be true in affluent Western society, in which the most ambitious creation of culture -- the city -- may be an object of fear and a target of disdain while encomium is lavished on wilderness. This reversal of values is shared as well by certain primitive peoples. Thus, to the Gimi of New Guinea and the Lele of Africa, whose livelihood depends on a combination of simple agriculture and hunting, what carries prestige is not, as one might expect, the fields and huts of culture, but the natural forest. The forest is viewed as a sort of sacred place, cool and generously nurturing. In the forest, edible plants and game can be obtained pleasantly, with little effort. The natural foods of the forest seem a gift -- the gratuitous gift of a nonhuman world and stranger. The clearing, in contrast, is hot and infested by pests. It provides food, but only after a struggle. Culture is regarded not as creativity -- the creation of a secondary world out of the primary one -- but as maintenance. Domesticated plants and animals, the clearing itself and the huts in it, require the kind of care and work that must be done over and over again. To the Gimi and the Lele, such maintenance has no prestige; neither has the constant and often frustrating effort to maintain social ties. Vastly different and superior is the surrounding forest. Life there is viewed as wild, spontaneous, and spiritual. When the Gimi and the Lele take up hunting and plunge into the cool dark forest, they feel free.

Close-knit social life offers many rewards, but it also imposes severe constraints. life in a traditional village combines neighborliness and human warmth with conflicts that invevitably emerge from the tensions of living close together during long periods of time. The familiar can be suffocating. People seek liberation from the common routines of life. In premodern times, they can do so through two practices: one is the festival, and the other is the pilgrimage. In a festival, people move from the ordinary world of work and social obligations to another of communion with sky and earth and with nature's gods. In pilgrimage, they abandon the local community to undertake a demanding and dangerous journey, for a "center out there," a sacred center and a strange place at which pilgrims, all strangers to each other, nevertheless feel a common bond: they have moved from a local community to something larger and freer -- to "communitas," a term that Victor Turner has usefully introduced into the sociological discourse.

THE GOOD STRANGER

A kinsman or neighbor can be counted on to help. A stranger, by contrast, threatens harm, but he may also be a savior. People in various parts of the world -- the Incas and Aztecs in the western hemisphere, certain groups in Africa, and some Pacific Islanders (the Marquesans, for instance) -- have legends that mention the existence of superior and kindly beings beyond their own known world. The truly good cannot come from the local and familiar. It must lie elsewhere. Even sophisticated Europeans can entertain such belief. A notable example is the attitude of the philosophers in the eighteenth century. To them, Europe was a patch of darkness surrounded by a circle of light, and in this circle lived the noble primitives of the New World and of the South Seas as well as the wise Chinese. These strangers may not be saviors, but they are sources of inspiration and of renewal. It may be that people have a psychological need for the existence of a powerful and benign stranger. We still seem to have this need. Consider the popularity of cowboy movies such as "Shane" and "Pale Rider," in which a stranger appears mysteriously and saves a town from its villains, or science-fiction movies such as "ET: The Extra-Terrestrial" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," both of which feature intelligent and kindly beings from outer space.

The high value placed on the stranger has a variety of sources. For a start, note simply that friends begin as strangers. The tie of friendship has the ring of romance, because it is a consequence of chance -- a chance meeting, for example -- and of choice and freedom, distinct from the unchosen bonds of kinship and of neighbors. Lovers may also begin as strangers. They leap over the wall, figuratively or literally, thus demonstrating a willingness to depart from the protective boundaries of the known and the familiar. Exogamy itself, a widespread if not universal practice, implies a recognition of the importance of the "outside," or foreign, for internal strength and renewal.

The stranger offers not only excitement but also, paradoxically, intimacy. Perhaps only an hour of conversation can establish it. We have all known such experience. Composer Ned Rorem wrote," 'To know well' means an exchange between two participants of permanent portions of themselves. In the four or five meals I had with Eluard, in chance tearful meetings with Tchelitchev or a hilarious single supper with John Latouche, I feel a contact, a generosity, a participation, a heat, a curiosity, an indelibility which permit me to say I knew and know and will always know them well. Meanwhile, I'm indifferent to some people seen daily for twenty years. To know has to do with intensity, not habit." And if we ask what makes it possible for strangers to open up to each other, the answer is the absence of socially defined statuses and roles in the initial encounter. In the absence of a familiar script, people are encouraged to speak as unique selves, or not at all.

A world of strangers is potentially a world of intimate, though fleeting, exchanges. The word "intimate" here may suggest a crude and dreary meaning -- that of the one-night stand. The intent of such sexual stands is that they have no consequence. By contrast, intimate intellectual exchange with a seat-mate in a Greyhound bus is almost bound to have a lasting effect: once impregnated with another's viewpoint it remains ours forever. And indeed this is one reason why we rarely feel that we have "stolen" another's idea. When we take another person's material possession, whether legally or illegally, time must lapse before that material object can seem to belong to us. But another person's bright idea, at the instant that we recognize it to be such, is immediately and intimately ours.

TYPES OF RECIPROCITY

In a traditional community of kinsfolk and neighbors, mutual assistance in times of need is commonplace because they are frequent and urgent. Exchanges occur in closed small circles. Reciprocity takes place between people who know each other and have the means to help. The basic idea is: you give me this and I will give you that, either in material goods or in assistance. What is to be exchanged and under what conditions are well understood and sometimes stated in explicit terms. One way to characterize this type of narrow reciprocity is "back-scratching." I scratch your back and you, in turn, will scratch mine. The system of mutual help, put bluntly thus, lacks any note of sprritual elevation. But people whose standard of living is not far above survival cannot afford to be uncalculatingly generous.

There are at least three important exceptions to this tight system of exchange. One is distant trading with outsiders -- strangers who in the course of time may become one's friends -- and the mutual regard that grows from the relationship can rival or even exceed that which holds between kinsfolk and neighbors. Of course, the trading hsa to be viewed as fair by the concerned parties, but because the exchange occurs infrequently over a distance, and because nonessential goods rather than necessities are involved, it is touched by an air of excitement and romance. As a consequence of distant trading, something exotic and vaguely mysterious intrudes refreshingly into one's familiar world.

The second exception is the reciprocal help between parents and children. Parents take care of their young. In time, the direction of support is reversed, and the grown children help their aged parents. This form of exchange, called piety or filial piety, receives special esteem, for which there are at least two reasons. One is the lapse of time. Many years have to pass before the flow of support is reversed, and because of this fact the exchange does not seem to rest on a prior calculation. The second reason is the natural and instinctual love that parents have for their offspring. In their turn, the offspring may assist their parents out of genuine gratitude and affection, and not merely from duty. Where this kind of love exists, there is also a sense of freedom: of being compelled and yet free.

The third exception to the narrow exchanges of traditional communities is the inclusion of ancestors and nature deities in the net of exchange. The net can then become very intricate. However, despite this enlargement and elaboration, the character of the exchange -- the spirit with which it is undertaken -- may remain little altered; that is, it continues to rest on practical needs and calculations. The dead are induced to help the living by offerings of food and sacrifice; induced likewise are the nature deities which preside over mountains, rivers, and forests. They all have the power to bestow blessing. If the blessing is not forthcoming, the people are disappointed, but not helpless. They can still do something: they can, for instance, increase their offering, can threaten to diminish it, and can even appeal over the heads of the spirits of the dead and of a nature to someone in higher authority. This someone may be a more powerful god, and in China it might have been the emperor who, as the Son of Heaven, ranked above the local spirits of nature.

Consider now modern society. Narrow exchanges of the kind I have described for the local traditional community are less common. Where people are affluent, they do not have to borrow sugar or a lawnmower from their neighbor. Human ties are established more often on the grounds of shared interest or of personal chemistry than on those of survival. Practical calculations of an immediate and direct kind diminish. Helping each other and performing services for each other remain the necessities of life. But the direction from which the rewards for extending help come is less clear. In a modern society, the circle of reciprocation may be so large that it cannot be encompassed by direct experience. What is experienced seems linear. Thus parents care for their children who in turn care for their children, and so on down the line. The same may be true with other types of relationship. You help someone as a teacher or as a social worker; the person thus helped in turn helps -- out of gratitude, perhaps -- someone else. The favor you do is not directly returned to you. Your action does not necessarily gain for you an ally or a friend because you may never see him again. In a large modern society, we often help strangers and are in turn helped by them. True, we pay and are paid for all kinds of services. But the relation between the size of the check we get at the end of the month and the service we render, for example, a student or a welfare client is seldom clear. Moreover, almost inevitably the amount we pay is too little for the goods and services we receive. What we receive at a department store, an art museum, or a hospital is the accumulated labor, skill, and knowledge of a host of strangers, of whom some are still alive, but most are dead.

In modern society, we are, to quote a line from a famous play, constantly dependent on "the kindness of strangers." This lack of closed, small circles of exchange contributes to the much-noted modern afflictions of impersonality and loneliness. On the other hand, people in modern society are freed from those self-seeking, petty calculations of reciprocation that remain the coin of needful neighborhoods. Strangers can and do make claims on us as we can and do make claims on them. In this large and open world, we never quite know what may be demanded of us: what may even deprive us of life and limb. We also never quite know when and from what source, through impersonal channels such as the mail or telephone, gifts, offers of help, or words of encouragement may fall in our lap. It would be paradox if grace, considered as an unearned and unpredictable gift, is experienced more often in a modern secular milieu than in a closed traditional community.

THE SAVING SUBLIME

Early in this essay I posed the antithesis between culture and nature, the familiar an dthe strange. A principal aim of culture is to extend the realm of the familiar at the expense of nature and the strange. Even people of the simplest material culture have at least the tools of language and conepts with which to domesticate nature. What distinguishes a technically advanced society is that its verbal and conceptual conquests are quickly followed by physical results. People in modern times have grown so confident of their mental and physical powers that they may lose the very idea of the strange -- of the existence of things totally beyond human comprehension and control. In the near future, nature may seem so predictable and so much under human sway that language will change to reflect this new level of confidence. When science has perfected the techiniques of cloud-seeding, we may yet learn to say "I rain" rather than "it is raining," just as in an earlier period of self-confidence we have learned to say "I remember" rather than "it remembers me."

In a Charlie Brown cartoon strip, the hapless hero in his capacity as the captain of a Little League baseball team looks up at the sky and says, "When, I don't understand it. The weather sure has been bad lately." This bland remark is rather typical of our hero, but Linus, a junior member of the team, is indignant. He refuses to let the observation pass without a crushing rebuttal. "Don't criticize the world, Charlie Brown!" he shouts. Then follows the ringing declamation: "Where were you when He laid the foundations of the earth? Who laid its cornerstone when its morning stars sang together? Is the wild or willing to serve you? Do you give the horse his might? Is it by your wisdom that the hawk soars and spreads his wings toward the south?" Poor Charlie Brown is reduced, first, to silence and, then, to asking plaintively, "How would it be if I just yelled at the umpire?"

In the Bible, Job is reduced to silence by the voice of God, which calls forth images of the strange and the awesomely beautiful. Job is humbled, not humiliated, in the presence of the sublime. His experience of willing submission is not an uncommon one: it occurs each time a person encounters an manifestation or presence that shockingly transcends the human scale, that clearly cannot be tamed by neat human schemas of harmony and beauty, that throws into doubt all socialy approved notions of the good and the proper, and that threatens to disrupt and overwhelm ordinary life. Indeed, in the face of the sublime we undergo a sort of death. The striving, manipulative, and self-righteous part of the self is extinguished, and if religious teachers are correct, the self that remains, seared of delusions, is ready to experience a resurgent yearning for the ineffable good.

The sublime is known under different guises in Western thought. To Plato, it is embodied by the starry heavens, which inspire us to geometry and thus to philosophy, austere disciplines that can prepare the ground for a direct vision of the eternal forms. To Kant, mountains and the sea are capable of embodying the sublime. Contemplating them draws forth a delight that has more to do with our moral faculty than with our senses. However, in the course of time, most of these embodiments of the sublime have been humanized -- tamed -- by abstractive thought and a sentimentalizing imagination. The starry heavens, it is true, still resist. Their immensity puts us in our place, and the fact that we can more or less measure them does not significantly reduce their awe. The numbers used in atronomy, no matter how precisely stated, are able to sustain by their sheer size an aura of strangeness. Compared with the heavens, the things of the earth, including mountains and the sea, have lost much of their numina -- their power to impose on us a respectful distance. Terrestrial presences have been taken over and made familiar by romanticism and material progress. romanticism, as it becomes a school of thought, has succeeded in turning the irregular and the outre, the dark and the dangerous, into a convention and a pose. Progress in transportation, for its part, has diminished travail and risk -- the risk of confronting the unexpected -- from travel.

THE STRANGE IN THE FAMILIAR

In 1969, men went to the moon in a spacecraft. At the time I wondered: suppose I were offered a choice between spending an hour on the moon and leading, literally, a dog's life for an hour, which would I choose? Which of the two experiences would offer me something new and strange beyond comprehension? Answer: the experience of being a dog. A visit to the moon would be exciting, but, apart from the curious sensation of lightness that is an effect of diminished gravity, what I see would not differ greatly from what I can see in the drier and more sculptured part of Arizona and New Mexico. On the moon, moreover, I shall remain a human being with all my habitual ways of thinking, the possessor of earth-hewn linguistic tools that are as effective in protecting my mind as the unwieldy space suit is in protecting my body against the shocks of the new. But leading the life of a dog is another matter. I shall experience reality without the aid of a system of symbols and language, and with a sensory equipment radically different from that of a human being. What is it like to move around with another kind of musculature, close to the ground on four legs rather than vertically on two, without color vision, but with a sense of smell that is many times more keen than that of man or woman?

Suppose we are in a comfortable study, reading a book on space travel, with our pet dog by our side, wagging his tail. What is strange in this scene? Is it the world of outer space described in the book, or is it, God forbid!, the mind of our canine friend, a presence that is as familiar to us as an old pair of slippers? When God wished to shake Job out of his complacency, he pointed to the bands of Orion and the Pleiades, the crocodile and the behemoth. These phenomena are recognizably magnificent or bizarre; they lie well beyond the normal compass of human experience. But what I wish to suggest is the existence of the strange and the ungraspable right in the midst of our familiar world. The familiarity may well be an illusion which culture creates so that we can feel more or less at home. Culture schools us to recognize forms and patterns in our corner of the earth; the longer we stay at a place the firmer these images of order become; and they give us the reassuring feeling that we understand. But what is it that we understand? A short answer might be: the devices of our senses and mind plus reality to which devices or schemas are supposed to conform in some as yet unclear way. Of course, our images of order do touch base with reality; otherwise, we who live by them cannot survive. But they touch base only at a few limited sets of points. All else -- all the remaining reality -- is either unknown or known but suppressed. For example, we may not know that our solid chair consists of tiny bundles of energy swirling in empty space. That we are ignorant of many facts is not surprising. More a cause for wonder is that we often turn a blind eye to what we know or can know if we only pause to think. But we suppress what we know and we continue to live in a swooning, unreflective fashion for a good reason, namely, to sustain a mood of ease and of at-homeness in the world. And we may well ask, what is wrong with that?

ENVOI

A popular hymn has the line: "Rock of Ages, cleft for me. Let me hide myself in thee." What a threatening place the world can seem! The human story is one of making the earth and all that live on it less threatening, more supportive, more predictable, and more familiar. Sometimes we seem to succeed. There is the example of the sun-tanned young man and his family in suburban Australia. Now the question is: how much of the strange do we admit into our lives? In the abstract, we can confront and indeed welcome the strange. Moreover, from experience we know how the strange and the unexpected can give us sudden, joyful infusions of life. But we also fear the strange for obvious reasons. It disturbs and disrupts; it resists our grasping ego; it frustrates our desire to place, classify, or make consoling forms. There are, no doubt, different ways of being relgious: different modes of religious apprehension. One mode is this awareness of the strange not only "out there" but also in the midst of the quotidian. With this awareness is the desire to extend to the strange a welcome -- sometimes unqualified, other times equivocal or shadowed by fear -- for its twin gifts of life and disruption, which includes death.

COPYRIGHT 1988 Point Foundation
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