Exactly as it must, it starts in misrecognition... I expected mutual understanding, intuitive translatability, possibly a homecoming ceremony. It took a month of varyingly imaginary conversations (e-mails, books, weblogs etc.) across asymmetrical epistemic grounds to unhinge every line in my configuration of culture. The expectation of coming aboard the mother-ship – of finding not just one’s own world recapitulated but maybe even having its unknown periphery instantly resonate with others-– shuts down the capacity for shutting down, leaves open a chance for disorientation to set-in.
It’s a misrecognition that it doesn’t shock but instead wears you out; things were immediately wrong but marginally right. My reperatoire was known; its characters largely unusable, sometimes accepted: Pound yes, Lautremont yes, Musil not really, Ashbery yes with a but, definitely not Stevens, Beckett more-or-less and Godard yes but Sarraute not at all. More poignantly, T.S. Eliot was relegated to middlebrow anodyne next to the higher-Modernism of the unfamiliar Louis Zukofsky (this one still hurts five years later). And somehow Kerouac was an innovator.