European Travels

The odd thing is the shift in my identity with each travel venue. In Kham and India I felt like a kind of universal human....not particularly identified as American or Western...more as 'Other'. The Tibetans and the Indians were so exotic and immersed in their traditional life that I felt as if I was in the thirteenth century...impressed with the ways in which the human family was able to adapt to the high mountains or in the desert. Here in Germany , at this particular time, I feel fully and selfconsciously American. Right away, on our first night we had dinner with Dorris who arranged for Eva to teach, and the conversation was about problems in Germany with the immigrant children, particularly in Turkish enclaves, who don't learn to speak or read German. Which led to considerations of our own struggles with integration of non-English speakers in our own country. The whole notion of the 'melting pot' no longer vibrant or compelling...the national myth about welcoming waves of immigrants running up against fear and the gradual shift to non=white majorities in some communities...

Last night we had dinner with Volkmar and Dao overlooking Hansaplatz. Volkmar is a psychiatrist who runs a ward for psychotic patients and who loves R. Laing, psychodrama, seeing the opportunities for change in the psychotic process. Below us, a sexual world of delicately orchestrated choices. In the park are men cruising for men, heterosexual prostitutes, drug dealers; on nearby streets Turkish men, transexuals, more dealers. One street has one porno shop after another, identical on the outside.a kind of industrial age cookie cutter industrial strength production. Who is where undergoes slow change over time: how the small understandings are reached, subtle and unclear.

Hamburg is beautiful with rivers, old buildings...raining here just a little while the tv reports huge flooding in the south and Switzerland. BTW CNN here is a world apart from the US format. Here you get serious and long pieces about Iraq, Iran, the peace movement...

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