Spinozablue: An Eclectic Journal of the Arts

The Grand Canal, by J.M.W. Turner. 1835

For many of us, the for­eign is entic­ing, excit­ing, a call to leave our­selves behind and find the new. To oth­ers, it’s some­thing to fear, dis­tort, and avoid. Think­ing again about Woody Allen’s movie, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, I won­der if famil­iar­ity breeds some­thing less than con­tempt, and more like indif­fer­ence and for­get­ful­ness. Con­trast truly is the key here. Con­trast in the way we act socially, in love, at work, with friends. Con­trast in the way we han­dle emo­tions, especially.

I was born into a soci­ety that is largely at odds with the things I value the most. This is not an uncom­mon expe­ri­ence, and I am far from the first per­son to feel that oppo­si­tion. It has, in fact, been a com­mon theme in the arts for thou­sands of years. The feel­ing of alien­ation is per­haps the sin­gle great­est dri­ving force behind the arts, though I think great art comes from the strug­gle to under­stand and tran­scend that alien­ation, not the fact of alien­ation itself.

To me, it is inter­est­ing to con­tem­plate the direc­tion of the for­eign. If some­one comes from a land where emo­tions are high, quick, and flash at the drop of a hat, if they come from a world that believes in liv­ing pas­sion­ately in the now, and they move to a much more sober, gray­ish land … what then? There are many sto­ries in our cul­ture in the other direc­tion — of sober, seri­ous, sun-​​deprived peo­ple mov­ing to fiery climes and their evo­lu­tion under the sun. Do all of us who desire change in some form, desire it because our cli­mate bores us, or is there a log­i­cal, higher, bet­ter cli­mate we seek in common?

By cli­mate I mean every­thing. Beyond the weather, does the cli­mate encour­age free thought, sex­ual free­dom, pro­gres­sive pol­i­tics? Does it pro­mote the arts, an under­stand­ing and appre­ci­a­tion of the arts? Does it value edu­ca­tion, knowl­edge, wis­dom, earned sophis­ti­ca­tion? Is it cos­mopoli­tan? Is it pas­sion­ate about the now?

For those who are born in such an envi­ron­ment, the for­eign to them would be some­thing much closer to that gray world I men­tion. Some might will­ingly choose it and want to escape from their pas­sion­ate place in the sun. They might long for sobri­ety and a diminu­tion of the sensual.

Con­trast.

Woody Allen could make a very inter­est­ing sequel. He could send Javier Bar­dem and Pene­lope Cruz to some non-​​descript Amer­i­can sub­urb and watch their trans­for­ma­tion into gray. It might even be what they truly want, at least for the summer.