The Rite of Spring

I did not grok Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps (performed here by Pina Bausch’s Wuppertal Dance Theater) until I experienced Latvia’s spring in primitive austerity, in the early 1990s. Our dachas have no plumbing and no electricity. Before becoming a slave to cyberspace, subject to the elements more directly than I was ever before or since, I understood more of what the season means here – after stewing in boreal darkness all winter (something I still can’t deal with very well – it’s very dark here for a very long time), the augurs of spring take on an explicitly magical quality, whether that is the feeble sun gaining enough strength to warm the cheek again or returning to an angle where it strikes the wall with a shaft of light for the first time in months, longer each day, palpably so, birdsong again as snows alternate with thaws, the blades of the tulips, the crocus, and then the erotic fury of flowering trees and lilacs and blossoming roses as we climb toward what is still the main holiday here, summer solstice (even Līgo night already tinged with the knowledge that the days are getting shorter).

These coming months are so lovely that they can even seem illusory (Alberts Bels’ story in which the trees haul up their green sails in summer, whilst humans raise their illusions?), like the mystical twilight of woodlands in June, something I first saw in Sweden – the pale woods of puberty making sense of childhood dances in which the girls joined hands and the boys passed beneath the arches of their arms: Caur sidraba birzi gāju, ne zariņu nenolauzu – "Through a silver bosk I went, without breaking off a single twig."

I’ve begun translating a book about Latvia’s woodlands by Imants Ziedonis, one of our finest poets, and his son Rimants Ziedonis, a remarkable writer in his own right – the book is a guide to our forests, suffused with history and mythology (nearly half of Latvia is forested).

Over coffee, I skimmed the news and read Timothy Garton Ash’s commentary about Tibet in the Guardian. Many of the comments to Ash’s sober piece could act as emetics, but the one that struck me this morning included this tidbit: "Do not limit Tibetans to Tibet. Minorities in reality have been all over China. Stop talking about Tibet needing its own place. Migration is a natural process for every single ethnicity in the world. I personally enjoy being a Mongolian out in the U.S. We are nomads. So are Tibetans. Even the Tibetans and Mongols out here in the West need our identities. So the world is our home, but we will never ever lose the feeling of our own ethnicity, no matter what language we speak, what food we eat, what religion we decide to follow." (Italics mine.)

That is a sublime condensation of a take on ethnos – or is it really nationality? – that not a few people actually hold to, or have found. Perhaps we'll all be metrosexuals in the next life?

Identity is indeed complex, and few places on earth are ethnically homogeneous. But the idiotic pretense that there are not basic bonds between peoples and their languages, lands, beliefs, cultures and even cuisines is especially illuminating when taken to the extreme this commentator takes it to. A gutted identity would then act as a marker – why and how? Wherefore?

As I mentioned in an earlier post, ecology and nationalism in Latvia long ago joined hands. Politically and culturally, land was the major mover – the tens of thousands of landless Latvians, casualties of Tsarist policies, were the Bolshevik base -- whilst the agrarian reform brought about by Social Democrats and the Farmers’ Union was the basis for Latvia’s stability between the wars. After centuries of dispossession, a large swathe of the population got something to call its own. Whether this was economically brilliant or not is actually secondary; the redistributed lands were returned to those who owned them prior to 1940 in the early 1990s.

Rimants Ziedonis wrote re SIA Latviya & Co. long ago – he railed against the Russian-dominated consumerist nightmare that is dragging us into a tawdry globalist Europe, in essence. When Alvis Hermanis, our foremost genius of the theater, refuses to accept this country’s highest decoration, the Order of Three Stars, we should take heed: "Everything has been turned upside down at an ethical level. I do not doubt that Latvia will reach the standard of living of 'old' Europe sooner or later – but does that mean we have to lose all of those spiritual goods along the way? I think that this is very, very dangerous."

Alvis Hermanis declared the Republic of Latvia to be morally bankrupt. I’ll try to be more kind and say that we’re on the verge of bankrupcy. This is mostly because the political elite lives in a world of its own.

The Tibet Support Group (founded by MP Juris Sinka, who died in Lhasa -- a rightist with moral stature that dwarfs that of most of the MPs in this Parliament) is still collecting signatures for its letter to China... does it really take so long to get those of your own caucus among "the hundred wise ones" in that spiffy room to sign?

Where is our land now? Who owns it? How does one make the leap from a command economy into the ravages of an insane globalization -- one that is obviously amok in the West? Why should one apply what is a failure in the West to our country? How can one possibly preserve moral values if neoliberalism has been essentially murderous? Why does "reentering Europe" seem to entail dropping most everything that is ours?

Another take is to pretend that one cannot discuss these things because Latvians were so downtrodden and deprived that one can’t (morally) object to so-called "Western civilization," as in consumerism, filthy lucre, and vacuum cleaners for all.

And so again to the spring – this just isn’t so. There is no objective reason for Latvia’s repetition of the mistakes made in the "free world." The real core of the Third Awakening was not about getting plasma TVs and Humvees. It was about freedom in its deepest sense, which is what Latvian nationalism in a deeper sense has always looked to – Miķelis Valters mostly gets into Kant and Hegel, not kickshaws. The fundament of the Republic was rural. It remains so – and this applies even to the city.

Gary Peach for AP: "Maija Krumina [sic], who lives in a village near Valmiera in northern Latvia, said rural residents have switched to survival mode. Many have stopped going to stores and instead are relying on their own livestock for milk, eggs and pork. What they don't consume, they sell to one another. "

Back in the early 1990s, a few students would supply the entire dormitory with food – the students would take up a collection, getting bus tickets for those with relatives who actually produced food. Real food from real people – unimaginable these days, isn’t it?

Words always covered everything, lovingly, precisely, poetically – which words have we lost? How do you diddle the clitoris of spring?

The pic is by Nikolai Roerich, a set design for Stravinsky's Весна священная; Roerich is intimately tied to Riga, and one of the most beautiful places in Latvia is the Roerich room at the National Museum of Art. For information on the ties between Tibet and Latvia, see "Tibeta – tās problēmas vēsturiskā izcelšanās, rezonanse starptautiskajā sabiedrībā un Latvijas – Tibetas saikne.”

Vair Realism

The Case of the Mysterious Briefcase, which led to the departure of Indulis Emsis from Parliament a couple of weeks ago, is cause for reflection on what being Green in Latvia means. It's rather anticlimactic, though -- by the time Emsis became the world's first Green Prime Minister in 2004, most saw the Greens (who're married to the Farmers' Union in what is sometimes amusingly translated as the Greens and Rustics, or the Green Peasants) as pathetic opportunists collecting a motley crew of politicians under the sponsorship of Latvia's most famous oligarch, Aivars Lembergs ("transparency is not a striptease"). So you have a Green Party in the pocket of the man with "the Pipe." At the other end of the spectrum, there's Latvia's "Green" MEP, Tatyana Zhdanok, the sole ethnic Russian in the European Parliament and one of the most hated politicians ever to have lived among Latvians -- ķoķa Taņa was a leader of the Interfront, the anti-democratic grouping that opposed Latvia's independence.

As Wikipedia observes, "Emsis' political views are described as rather conservative, unusual for members of Green parties around the world." So, some background -- the very backbone of Latvia's independence movement was environmentalist. VAK, which is now also Friends of the Earth Latvia, was at the heart of it. It was VAK, which has roots stretching back into the dark years of the occupation, that organized the 1988 demonstration in Mežaparks demanding the legalization of the Latvian flag, then forbidden (video below). VAK organized the Prayer for the Sea (photo above), in which nearly a third of a million people on the eastern shores of the Baltic joined hands to protest the turning of "our sister" into a cesspool. VAK led the protests against the building of the metro in Rīga. One of the seminal events in the Awakening took place here in Daugavpils. Dainis Īvāns, the young idealist who would later be leader of the Popular Front, led protests against the building of a dam that would have destroyed what's left of the Daugava Valley (the rest of the Daugava is indeed a chain of reservoirs).

The Green movement was radical -- but it was not a fringe movement. Latvians have always been "close to nature" -- the cities still empty out after the summer solstice, when we celebrate the principal festival of the year with pagan songs. Oaks are practically sacred -- farmers plow around them. Large, old trees and big stones are named, catalogued, and venerated. What VAK struggled against was the destruction of a traditional "ecotopia" by the Soviet Union. Nationalism went hand in hand with environmentalism. The metro would bring further colonization, as would the dam in Daugavpils. VAK confronted Soviet soldiers to place crosses upon the graves in the Zvārde civil parish -- the entire parish had been laid waste by the Russian military. Latvians themselves had been infected by the prevailing lack of culture -- one woman, writing about their attempts to restore some of the landscape, describes taking a bus past the ruined churches of Courland, every passenger in a drunken daze, the countryside devastated.

Not a few VAK activists were founders of the Green Party, which was the first political party formed in occupied Latvia (the Latvian Social Democratic Workers' Party, the oldest party in Latvia, had survived abroad). Emsis was one of the founders. In my first winter here, 1991/92, I journeyed to Sabile with another founder, Oļegs Batarevskis -- to Pedvāle (it was nothing then; ruins and choked streams, mansions carved up into flats for transient farmhands, a Soviet landscape of litter and despair). I remember asking Oļegs about their relationship to, for instance, the German Greens -- he answered that Latvians were more realistic; "we don't want to go back to living in caves."

Arvīds Ulme, the "Chieftain" (virsaitis) of VAK, wrote a decade ago that he wanted "to find and bring together those with the divine gift of devotion and ability to give in the name of a bright green beginning. We endeavor first to call together our own ranks, like we did at the start of the Awakening. The same Awakening which we, the Greens, rang in with our audacious black-white-and-black and green-white-and-green marches. The same Awakening which glowed in the maroon-white-and-maroon barricade bonfires and cried out in the joy of new-found freedom. The same Awakening which, before our very eyes, died from a combination of blind faithlessness, KGB-mania, and finally, the money-starved free market economy. Those who rang in and called together the Awakening indeed share responsibility for all that is transpiring today."

The "Chieftain's" mentality is tribal. As to KGB-mania -- he was a KGB informer, as it turns out (to no one's surprise). These days, Greens like Ulme are as likely to be promoting homophobia as they are to be defending the environment. Still, one has to try to look a bit deeper to understand how we got to "blind faithlessness" and the Case of the Mysterious Briefcase. "The money-starved free market economy" has meant, in part, the closing off of public waterfront for the manses of the few. "The first Green politician to lead a country in the history of the world" resigned in ignominy, after playing "should I stay or should I go" long enough to add comedy to his tragedy. The counterculture -- really the essence of the movement -- survives.

There have been Green successes -- the scrapping of the Finnish-Latvian Baltic Pulp project, for example. Reality requires realism. The signs of the times -- not many people show up to pray for the sea, and Daugavpils politicians would like to see the dam built after all. Now that cars choke Rīga, a metro would probably be nice. Belarusian biznismeny are yearning for a canal to link our "river of fate" to the Black Sea. Lithuania and Estonia have deposits on bottles -- in Latvia, they're thrown into the woods. Burning the fields is a Soviet "custom" that has spread to Ireland due to Latvian immigration there. In Rīga, a real estate speculator drives two Humvees at the same time...