The Fading Sun You Grasp In Your Hand

Last night I dreamt that everyone I ever knew came to a party at my parents' house. Of course all the Latvians showed up; they were probably the first to arrive, bearing flowers, of course they were the ones who helped set out the food, who sat on a bench up against a garden wall, passing around a bottle, waiting for the sun to come up. Of course I was most excited to see them.

In my dream, though, as soon as I greeted them, they disappeared into the house, and I couldn't find them again. I have these dreams a lot. No sense over-analyzing it; I already know what they mean: I fear losing my Latvians. Or more correctly: I fear losing my Latvianess.

Whatever that is.

My friend Rich has already been down this road most recently and evocatively in an essay I linked to a few weeks back. In the essay, he tries to answer the eternal identity question: how can you try to become X without even knowing what Xness is?

Fifteen years ago while living in Riga as a very un-Latvian-looking brown-eyed Scotch-Irish exchange student, I had decided I was becoming Latvian when I started to smell like one. When I didn't have to remind myself to salt the water for potatoes. When I was told I said "beidzot" like one. When I had come to appreciate curd snacks. I never went mushroom gathering, but I took part in a potato harvest, kneeling in the dirt, digging up tubers to be handed over to men on tractors wearing wool sweaters and felt boots. I stayed up with the bonfire late into the night, watching the sun barely dip beneath the horizon, a wreath of woven flowers in my hair. That was enough for me.

I often wake up from these dreams (and, yes, I was the one Rich refers to in his essay who Twitters about waking up with the taste of strawberry soup and biezpiens in her mouth) needing to see my friends. I went to my computer and found pictures of my friends in the countryside, men behatted and leaning shirtless against the rough wood of an old house in a beachside resort town. Barefoot. Holding bottles of water, or beer, or something else entirely. Women in skirts and scarves dancing under a string of lights in someone's garden. Older pictures of friends playing soccer in a field, in the fog, just after dawn, silhouettes of motion, bending to reach the ball just out of frame. Even older pictures of the same friends wearing winter hats and shirts and coats too big for them. Holes in their sleeves, standing next to a jeep belonging to the policija next to a wall I know for a fact smelled most often of urine. Smiles that belonged to another era. Back when I thought I might be becoming Latvian. When I knew what that meant.

I'm clinging to my Latvians. Or at least to what I remember.

A Swiss artist named Ruedi "Rūdis" Schorno recently embarked on an identity search of his own, a 12-week endeavor to learn how to become Latvian. He's documenting his progress here: How To Become Latvian. His English isn't perfect, but to me that's even more Latvian of him. (Ojars Kalnins also wrote a piece on Rūdis and his project for the Latvian Culture Center blog.) In one of his early videos, he interviews several ridzinieki, asking them what he would have to do to become Latvian. Two old men on a bench proffer an interesting psycholinguistic answer: "You have to speak in Latvian and think in Latvian. Not speak in Latvian and think in Russian, not speak in Latvian and think in English; you have to think in Latvian." Two police officers tell Rūdis essentially that to be Latvian is to long for home. Among other answers.

I wonder if Rūdis will ever find an answer to satisfy people like Rich and me.

I was watching one of Rūdis' videos, in which he takes up the challenge of learning how to go mushroom hunting, when, in the cracks between dialogue, I picked up on the strains of accordion, sweet soft vocals of a story told late in the night. It was the sound of that night I spent in a house on stilts under wool blankets, boys throwing kopeks at my Doc Martens. It was the sound of my memory making music. And, you guys, the words:

The fading sun you grasp in your hand: you won't warm up like that,
If you want, put it in your pocket. But the real one is the one that burns
Fading happiness survives in boredom,
Like in a slow whirlpool, in fear of the dark, of madness, of the unknown

I'll never understand how people can listen to some songs without crying. (For that matter, I'll never understand how some people can live without crying.) In particular, songs that connect on a level that you weren't expecting, a surprise emotional reaction that was hiding around some corner you didn't even know was there. These are the songs that will be played over and over until the emotions run dry. Until the images of bonfires disappear, of friends passing a ball in the fog, the singing late into the night under wool blankets.

What I do know, what I can finally understand, because I can remember and can feel it when I hear a certain chord on an accordion, the rounded sound of a vowel taking shape in the chorus, is that part of me is Latvian. Irreparably, impossibly, unexpectedly Latvian.

I think I'll put that in my pocket to keep me warm.

(See also: Things I Learned In Latvia. Listen to the Gaujarts album on their homepage [I'm especially fond of Lovestorijs — "I'm sorry for the sunset, you don't have to look at me like that" — and Prosnulsa ja], or sign up for their newsletter to receive the entire album for free.)

© Zan McQuade. All rights reserved.