"It's a very heretical idea, what I'm about to say: Latvians would be able to focus for a while if they didn't have gasoline. […] You shouldn't have to give private citizens gasoline so they can drive around. And if there weren't any telephones either… we'd write letters to one another, once again in our own thoughts, not in these shouted half-sentences with their chatty tone, gesticulating over the telephone. And if there weren't any televisions—I think we could collect ourselves very quickly if it were like that. If there would just be the necessary maintenance—you need gasoline to bring you home, to till the field—but we have so many cars, all these lightweight cars that we drive all around without knowing why. Let's sit at home and reflect."

– Imants Ziedonis, "on what's necessary in order to think," 1991 (via Žanete)

Any Latvians out there—Rich?—feel free to correct me if I got anything wrong. This is the first time I've really translated something without the written text in front of me. Mr. Ziedonis is an articulate man, but my ears are not always as sharp. Related: the NRDC's page updating the public on the oil spill in the Gulf. Write to your senators; ride your bike. Or sit at home and reflect.

© Zan McQuade. All rights reserved. 

Last time I met up with Rich and Maija, we talked about swapping lives. Cobblestones for Central Park; herring for hot dogs. This time, we talked about the economic crisis. About inflation rates, accountability. How the entire staff of the major newspaper in Latvia up and quit because of questionable practices of the owners. How friends live paycheck to paycheck and who knows what will happen next?

With the bad comes the good. The arts spaces that have popped up thanks to cheap rents, the second-hand bookstores and art collectives in old warehouses. Melnais Knābis — The Black Beak Barbershop and Reading Room — and Pērle — bar/used clothing shop/art space/exercise equipment supplier. Places that could never exist the way the bubble swelled a few years back.

We dissected both sides of the coin. Wondered which would fall heavier.

I joked that I would write about our conversation, about how I subconsciously foisted food upon them and joked with the waitress about starving children in Latvia as she carted away the last bite of a biscuit. I didn't think I would write about it, until I came home and saw that a catalog had arrived in the mail, a catalog filled with magnets that look like precious stones, little rubber thumb sleeves for taking dishes out of microwaves, special towel mitts made for drying the paws of one's pets. A doorstop that does double-duty as a putting practice hole. And, as if it couldn't be more obvious: a fake to-go coffee cup made of porcelain and silicone.

The things we think we need.

Immediately the minimalism of a Latvian summer house floods my mind: blankets and a mattress, a platter, a long-handled scythe for mowing grass, wooden chairs, a paring knife, and a bucket. A window flung open to the breeze racing across a field of dandelions.

And it made me think about what it means to get by. What comfort means. I'm certainly oversimplifying the issue. Or overcomplicating it with imagery and — here we go again — allegory. What we were really talking about, the lives of people living day-to-day and paycheck-to-paycheck both here and in Riga, can't be simplified into a blog post written late on a Monday night. But sometimes the thoughts come without ration.

The restaurant we dined in had a woodpile by the front door, used to feed the stove that gave my ribs their smokey flavor. Rich pointed to the woodpile, and said "just like our old apartment."

Flavor, or survival, I think. Two sides to the coin: flavor or survival.

I once read about a Latvian poet who renamed himself "Sudrabu Edžus" — "Silver Edges." I like to picture him in his wooden house, surrounded by bare birch trees creaking under the weight of freshly-fallen snow. The poet writing away by the fire, his felt boots hung in the hall, composing his poems about tears in the gloomy Daugava, and taking a deep, satisfied breath before he signs his chosen name at the end. As if his name could wipe the soot off his brow, tip the snow from the trees. As if his name could drag the sun kicking and screaming in through the window on a dark and gloomy night.

The importance of names. I sometimes translate the names of my Latvian friends: Partridge. Basement. Daugava dweller.

I wanted to write something warm on such a cold day. Create words that could melt snow. Something I could wrap my hands around so that they'd be toasty again. Instead, I play these word games, changing one word into another to see the world a new way. Like lying on a bed upside down.

Imants Ziedonis's wrote in his Epiphanies:

Words flirt, vowels are coquettish, consonants vamp. Here anecdotes are told. A deceptive mosaic of words shining in a playful light. Are you going to eat those pepper-cakes, or are you going to decorate the Christmas tree with them? Tonight are we talking about caradmom, cinnamon, or vanilla?

I love those coquettish vowels. And for some reason I feel warmer.

Could it be that these words come from such a cold place that, when bent and twisted into my own words, broken like a pocket warmer, they begin to warm my hands?

I don't know how it works. But somehow the sky doesn't look so gray anymore, there where the silver edges peek from under the clouds.

(Related: At Granta, Jeffrey Yang wrestles with translation, via Maud.)

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.)

mom, thanksgiving, 2008

• The music of geography: Ohio is a piano
  I love it when people put this much energy into the things they think up.


• How do you say 'zaglis' in English?
  Rich Kalnins, again getting it right about what it's like to try to perceive and qualify Latvia. A triangular birch hayrick leaning against a craggy apple tree. The deep, coffin-like cold emanating from the boarded-up windows of an abandoned brick building on a hot summer day, interlaced with the caustic stench of Soviet-era construction materials. Those perfectly straight paths cut through the meadow grass from house to woodshed, well to garden. The sharp angle of a barn roof on a misty morning. Two bulbous-nosed drunks dressed in ratty slacks and blazers, shuffling arm-in-arm to a musty basement beer bar in the middle of the afternoon. "Miglā asaro logs" belted out at three in the morning on a rainy Vecrīga street. And he's spot on about those DIY hipsters.


• Something, Something, Something Detroit
  Sort of what I was trying to say. Why is it, though, that even when I agree with them, Vice kind of leaves a bad taste in my mouth? On second thought, better not answer that. (via Tomorrow Museum)