The Game of Art, Part 4

People who have had some humanisitic education but are still poor at traveling, or writing, or discussing ideas in cafes, or arousing erotic desire in members of the opposite sex often console themselves with the thought that their minds are for whatever reason not attuned to the age in which they happen to live, its politics and economics and geography, but properly belong to other, better times and places, wherein they would have made real figures. I have determined that my own mind, as far as aesthetic taste, cultural comfort level, pace of life, compatibility with women, preferences in food and drink and transportation and hotel accomodation seems to measure on the magnetic scale of ages and places somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, hopefully on an ocean liner, equidistant from New York, Paris and London--or, to be more precise, probably Utica, Nottingham and Le Havre, around the winter of 1947-1948, which unfortunately was several decades before I actually happened to be born. Almost all the developments that have taken place since this time--increased specialization of knowledge, globalization, feminism, drugs, computers, exercising, bourgeois luxury (whatever happened to the good old simple but self-respecting middle class hotel that cost $45 but managed to keep the riffraff out anyway?), the reassessment of the Western and more particulary the Anglocentric tradition--have only left me, who remain stubbornly rooted in the mindset of 1948, further and further behind.

People with this unfortunate affliction only become worse when they attempt to go abroad to some country they may have had read a little about. In England I have reached the point where I am able to persuade myself it is just about any time between 1700 and 1960 depending on whatever monument, gritty alley, arrangement of furniture in a tavern or boiled beef dinner happens to present itself before me. I am not able to channel the middle ages or the Elizabethans so directly; however I think I can at least approach the idea of the middle ages with a suitably Romantic mindset or that of Shakespeare with enough of a Victorian sensibility to salvage something of the experience. The modern Britain full of snide people go around calling each other wankers and snogging and easy girls who vomit on the street I obviously have nothing to do with, nor it with me, however much I might wish it otherwise; so it by necessity fades away. France I have taught myself to regard as essentially medeval, which is the only way for me to combat the cult of epicurianism that has consumed the tourist industry of that "fantastic nation", but which besides is still present and haunting in the layout of towns, roads, and the landscape, though I also at times can acknowledge a cinematic France (1930-1970) and an interesting expat France (1850s-1950s). The art, music, literature of the bourgeois France of the post-Waterloo era through the Dreyfus affair interests me greatly also, but as a tourist its spirit has remained surprising inaccessible. The peninsula of Italy is also many things, almost never the current upstanding member of the EU with its standard 21st century problems. I am not deeply intimate with either the glories of the Roman empire nor the lives of the Catholic Saints but I am conscious of being within the pages of those books and the aura that only empires and religions of antiquity can suggest to the mind from the instant of descending the foot of the last Alp, and I know not enough to wish to escape from them for the duration of my holiday.

One of my favorite countries to experience in this vein is the late and sometimes lamented empire of Austria-Hungary, the pleasure of being in which was not the conscious work of my imagination but which came upon me over the course of being in that part of the world for some months. It is not merely that the old routes and railroads of this formerly single state remain largely intact though they now spread across many borders, nor is it exactly a similarly of diet, of religious custom, of musical heritage, of cafe and restaurant customs, of the geography of towns or those haunting empty roads crowded with lines of trees along either side of it throughout the region, that force this impression on one. This is a large area in the middle of Europe that, while maintained beautifully in certain crucial aesthetic points and functioning as a modern society, is loaded with pockets of which the only comparison I can make that captures the deadness, the unrealness, the displacement in time and persepctive, is the atmosphere of Kafka's The Castle. I have experienced on numerous occasions in these lands--walking across a field cleared of trees in a snowstorm in the dead of night in Spindleruv Mlyn (where, I later found out, Kafka actually started writing the book I have referred to); peering through the shuttered windows and wandering around the porch of the doomed Empress Elizabeth's little cottage at the emperor's hunting lodge at Bad Ischl (an unbelievably modest and accessible accomodation--no gates, walking distance to the shops in town, etc--for the potentate of a major power who lived within a century of my writing this, and thousands of whose former subjects must still survive) on a brilliantly but cold afternoon with snow patches over the immaculately kept but apparently unsupervised grounds; walking several miles from any of a number of antiquated train stations in rural Bohemia along similarly antiquated dusty paths or through planted forests devoid of undergrowth with no town or castle or other people in evidence until some natural obstacle can be cleared--the conviction that this must resemble death in some way, which idea I have never felt any place else, though my wife claims to have had the same sensation when she was in the panhandle of Texas. I however, have not been there.

In the Game of Art for the mass consumers of higher culture, this is where Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele--who is promoted heavily in Prague and especially Cesky Krumlov to the tourists that are desperately looking for an historical name or two to identify with these towns full of people who, as Neville Chamberlain pointed out in another context, are about as well known to the general population of the Anglosphere as the Incas--come in. Klimt's Kuss of course is, or at least was in my time, on the short list of college girls' favorite artistic icons (the rest of the list that comes immediately to mind is Doisneau's other Kiss, Prufrock, Truffaut's Jules and Jim, and Billie Holliday's greatest hits). The adoration of this painting however, while striking even when seen on a poster, like much else from the time and nation it comes from, is enigmatic in its origin. Compared to the other items on that list it springs from apparently nowhere and doesn't seem to lead anywhere particularly, for its modern admirers, either. My freshman roommate had the poster strategically placed so as to attract art-minded girls passing by our room (and indeed, it lured a quite amazing number in momentarily, though upon seeing us most retreated hastily). Before this time I had been entirely unfamiliar with it. I observed that people who struck me as more than worthy of all the delights of a good education and a proper introduction to the manifold delights of European culture were often eager to praise and identify with this picture, the idea and composition contained in which seemed to cast a spell over some of the sharpest and most realized people I ever encountered, as if it were their unattainable image of ideal life. What it was about it that made it so, however, I am afraid I was never able to discover.

The Austrian artists therefore have a rather high status in the game, with me personally almost the very highest, because the girls who like these painters are the ones I tended in my youth to feel the most passionate about with the least chance of "getting" however one wishes to define that term. The level of education and humanistic culture attained even by failures in the society that was Vienna 1850s-1930s makes me, I will confess, ashamed of my own mind, and if it doesn't make most modern-day Americans so for whatever reason, should at least make them blush to refer to themselves as learned or possessed of an artistic sensibility or even sophisticated about food (surely you read the article in the NYT about the Viennese steakhouse where the patrons could be counted on to understand what part of the cow each dish on the menu originated from and what it ought properly to taste like. Sadly, these patrons are nearly all dead now). I do not write these words because I hate my own nation or even its positive contributions to world culture, which I believe are not negligible. It must be understood, however, that I have always been a poor American, and I don't think I will ever be a good one. I did not fully understand this until I went to Europe of course. Foreigners did not wish to hear my opinions about opera, or opera houses, or literature, or wine or whatever even if it were their own interest. Such things are not, and never will be, the proper provinces of Americans, especially white ones. Even among Communists and the staunchest anti-modern media cultural conservative types, a real American worthy of their respect is financially successful, even a little ruthless, and is a master, completely free from any torments brought upon by philosophy or liberal education, of the sort of technology and attitudes toward marketing and globalization that are likely to crush smaller and more localized enterprises and cultures. These people may despise the system almost so as to define their being, but as an American and therefore assumed to have privileged entry into as well as no substantial intellectual misgivings against it, to be visibly unconnected to it without establishing a notably vibrant alternative following such as tempts the great system to partially co-opt you, marks one as a failure within the terms of one's one culture, and therefore hardly a serious person.

In brief, my point is that it is perceived to be natural, and not terribly difficult, for a American of ordinary mental abilities to become by global standards fairly wealthy and knowledgeable about markets and technology compared to those of other nationalities but virtually impossible for him (our hypothetical American) to become highly cultured and deeply learned about anything compared to the same; and that this is very painful for the American who was hoping to escape the sense of failure life in his hometown must inevtiably confront him with or find a community of minds more sympathetic to his own abroad. Unless one can demonstrate a very unique and pleasing superiority to those abandoned he will always be measured first by their standards before he will be assessed on any other terms.