Roads

A little breeze will scarcely blow,
How I loved them, I’ll tell you so.
A little breeze will scarcely caress,
I’ll be a fool, my mind bereft.
I’ll cry. But when with crying I’m done
I’ll go house to house and tell everyone
that there’s nothing more precious than these roads that wind
            from morning until evening time.
            You’ll give me lodging.
I’ll say: thanks, although,
if I stay, who’ll travel my road?
I don’t know, folks, my home is where?
Only this - white dust did fill the air.

(Imants Ziedonis, "Roads")

* * *

We have visitors. Visitors from far away. Sometimes it feels like they're from so far away that they must have broken free from my own past.

1. I take them to Momofuku, where people shout with mouths full of trout roe and market greens. They can’t believe the noise, the way we sit shoulder-to-shoulder with our neighbors. “But this is New York: everyone has to surround themselves with energy, excitement,” I try to explain, mouth full of pork bun. They can’t believe people stand in line for food.

Perspective: In Latvia, a good restaurant is a quiet one. One where you can think while you eat your food. I wonder if they remember bread lines.

2. The sound of the sirens on the roads outside our window. Some are emergencies, others the sensitive car alarms set off by the whiz of passing traffic and the rumble of the train. Shouts at night, motorbikes revving and racing through traffic lights. Louder when you know someone from far away is sleeping in the next room.

Perspective: How many roads have I lived on where I can hear trains outside my window, or the rumble of trolleybuses over cobblestones? Three? Four? Are my dreams of fields of dandelions powered by their engines?

3. In May when the sun sets in this city, there’s a light that falls over the asphalt and concrete, a light much like how I picture the light in heaven. If there were a heaven. “Tāda gaisma,” I say. That light. Our visitors put their hands to their hearts too. This universally beautiful light. Perspective.

* * *

I’m eighteen. Standing on the edge of a ravine, watching these young boys who are now my only friends swing on a rope, knocking each other over like bowling pins on the return, laughing uncontrollably with mouths open. Latvian mouths. Latvian teeth, Latvian tongues. I stand above them, at a distance, surrounded by trees in the last burst of green from the summer, wondering if I will ever understand the things they’re saying. We ride a bus back into the city. They fill out crossword puzzles and make farm animal noises in the back of the bus; I sit quietly on top of the wheel well, watching birches and pines and tower blocks spin by along the road, punctuated by pauses at geometric shelters full of old women carrying baskets. Feeling every mile between me and home.

Fifteen years later, the city streets dipping their tails in the last of this universally beautiful light, we walk arm-in-arm down 14th street. The arteries of roads and sidewalks throbbing with taxis and pedestrians. Clogged at the corners, noise and people and light. And still I feel every mile in between.

(If you have a moment, you can listen to the song and poem that inspired this post here, third song down, Jānis Holšteins - Upmainis (Goran Gora): Ceļi.)

© Zan McQuade. All rights reserved.

On Missing Out

All I can wish for you is that you get what you wish for yourself.
-Čižiks

You can't always get what you want.
-Miks Džegers

This is the point at which we have arrived: we're finally in a place, technologically, where it's possible to feel equally close to and far away from the people you love in far-off places.

Which is worse: knowing or not knowing? Knowing that you missed out. Seeing pictures of a gathering you couldn't make. A reunion. A show. Hearing everyone tell you how great it was. YOU MISSED IT. You should have been there. It was AMAZING. Is it better to be cut off? Left unawares?

A few days ago, I happened to notice on Twitter that my friend Gustavs, one of the biggest recording artists in Latvia, was playing a show for his new album—Trešā elpa (Third Wind)—at a venue in Riga called "Arena." I wrote to my best and oldest Latvian friend, Čižiks—video director, Latvia's official whistler, and Gustavs' partner in rhyme—on Facebook:

"I really, really want to go to this gig. My transporter is on the fritz; can you help? I don't have tickets; am I on the guest list?"

"You're on the guest chart!"

"Shame about the transporter then."

I was sad. I should have been there: I had intended to spend the month of October in Latvia. Things happened, as they do, plans changed, paychecks beckoned, and instead of eating saldskabjumaize and biezpiens and drinking balzams by the sea, I've spent October hard at work, tucked into books, devising projects and getting myself involved in Other Important Things.

So what's the big deal? I'd been to two of Gustavs' shows before. The first was an outdoor show outside the Dole supermarket in the Riga neighborhood of Ķengarags; I stood with his grandmother and watched how afterwards he was swarmed by autograph hunting pre-teens carrying skateboards, all bangs and wide eyes. The second was in a tiny factory town on the Estonia-Latvia border, where young girls stood awkwardly in the front row staring up at the rock star on stage. I'd ridden out to the bordertown with Gustavs' DJ, Monsta, in a responsibly-driven station wagon, making polite conversation as we tried to keep up with the racing BMW in front of us, the silhouettes of girls in short skirts laughing in the back window along the dark fir tree-lined highways. So I'd been there. I'd proudly watched on as he stirred the crowd to throw their hands in the air. What was it to miss another show? And then, online, I saw a video that showed the size of the place.

He wasn't just playing at a venue called "Arena."

He was playing an arena.

(Photo: Kristīne Šumska)

I really should have been there.

* * *

I was an obsessive journal keeper when I lived in Latvia in the mid-90s. The first mention of Gustavs in my journal is on September 1st, 1994, the day a fight broke out in Filharmonijas Square and the police had to come break it up. Gustavs—or "Ļoļiks" as I knew him then—was a new friend, a skinny kid with a shaved head and a baseball jacket, the grandson of a poet, who would end up becoming a poet of sorts himself. He sat with me and calmed my fears as some drunks slashed each other with broken vodka bottles. They shouted things at each other that I didn't yet understand. He was an angel, calmly explaining what was happening, telling me that not all of Latvia is like this.

He was only sixteen, but he was already looking for ways to view the world as a better place. As an adult he still does this, with songs like "Mūsu Soļi (Our Footsteps)." The song, released after the recent economic collapse in Latvia, encourages Latvians to lift themselves up as positive role models for others who have succumbed to stagnation. Even if you can't understand the words, I feel like the video—directed, incidentally, by Čižiks, who makes an appearance at 1:54—conveys such a positive message... it makes sense that these were the people I gravitated towards. People who view the world as the good place it can be, people who see angels in everyday people:

Fifteen years ago, I wouldn't even have known what half my friends were up to, the good messages they were preaching, apart from the occasional note received via airmail, two or three dim pictures thrown in the envelope. Even with visits once every two years to refresh my memory of the what it feels like to be there (and oh! what it feels like to be there), I wouldn't have known about the arena show, how marvelous it was, how uplifting and inspiring. I certainly wouldn't have known what other people thought.

But now? Facebook, Twitter, and Latvian versions of the same have me experiencing the minutae of a Latvian day through the eyes of my friends. With Gustavs and Čižiks, the knowledge is multiplied, thanks to music videos on YouTube, entire performances, rehearsals, radio interviews, photo galleries, articles written about Gustavs' crowdsurfing, blog posts, tweets, even—my god!—foursquare checkins from fans about to see the show.

It leaves me with this odd sense of knowing everything, participating by proxy, but hyper-aware of the fact that I'm not there. I can't taste the same bread they're tasting. I can't smell the sea. And yet it's as if I'm just around the corner. Is it possible that for the first time in my life I'm just as near as I am far? Is it possible that we're going to become closer and farther from each other at the same time, until physical distance isn't even a thing at all, yet there's still just as much heartache, if not more?

* * *

Sunday was a warm day. I walked up to the park to read on a bench, and found myself chatting with Čižiks over Skype.

"I want to come visit you guys!" he said. Just a day and a half after the show, he couldn't possibly know how much I wanted to visit them.

"Then come!" said I.

As I sat in the shadow of Grant's Tomb watching pigeons fight for airspace, I imagined Čižiks in his far-off seaside home with its tall firs and birch trees out back, the quiet flap of cranes overhead in the cold night air. I looked down at his words on the little screen in my hands. I felt calm, happy. And then I realized: sometimes, when you're missing out, it's enough to hear a voice from far away telling you that you're still being missed too.

(More of my ramblings about Latvia can be found here.)

© Zan McQuade. All rights reserved.

Let's sit at home and reflect.

"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. 

What We Need

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.

© Zan McQuade. All rights reserved.

Silver Edges

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.)

© Zan McQuade. All rights reserved.