©
Today’s blog is more
or less a copy of a post which I plan to post on a Latvian internet site that
uses the English language as its main communications medium.
Thursday (Sept.
19) concludes the 56th day (8th week) that I have been on a liquid and fish soup
diet. I propose to carry on with it until the 18th of November, the Latvian
Independence day of the 1st Latvian State (1918-1940) and will carry on until at least that date. Latvian State
(May 4, 1991 until today) is a de facto
pseudo State Brussels
During the past
week, I have spent some time on my “Apple branch sculptures”. The method by
which I make these sculptures consists of cleaning the branches of its bark,
sanding the rough understructure, sometimes burning it with a torch after the
sanding. Then impregnating the wood with a disinfectant, then giving it several
coats of linseed oil or self-polishing wax. This brings out the inherent warmth
of the wood. An old Latvian folk song of an orphan who is herding cows springs
to my mind: “I pressed myself to the apple tree as if it were my mother./ The
apple tree sheds white blossoms, I shed bitter tears.”
The end result is
a sculpture that consists of any number of branches—which may be up to 2 metres
long and may themselves be branching,--which I place together in a structure
that looks expressive. Such a sculpture will look different every time the
sculpture is moved to a new location. It will be up to the owner to reconstruct
it or, if he or she wishes, to hire a designer to do it for him.
My sculpture Project
makes me think of the Latvian language, which—as I have stated on previous
occasions—was (like the apple tree) mercilessly ‘deconstructed’ with the
arrival of the written word. An elemental phenomenon of Latvian language is the
‘endearing word’. This ‘word’ --when the Latvian language was used only as oral
communication--became ubiquitous, i.e., every Latvian word, no matter which,
could be ‘endeared’. It pulled the word as symbol of a ‘thing’ much closer than
the ‘thing’ could do by itself. While attempt to translate this phenomenon into
another language projects with a laughable awkwardness, there is felt no such
awkwardness in Latvian, but the projection seems as inevitable as it is natural.
Thus, ‘a finger’ (pirkstiņš) may translate as a ‘fingerling’, a ‘nose’
(deguntiņš) as ‘nosey’, a ‘road’ (ceļš) as ‘celiņš’ or ‘roadsey’, a ‘war’
(kaŗš) as ‘kariņš’, etc. etc. This
‘endearment’ also could be extended to verbs, which were added an extra
syllable, for example ‘sasiet’ (to bind) would be pronounced ‘sa(sa)siet’. The
extra syllable would often be used when two people did something together, for
example, ‘sasatiksimies’—let us meet again. In short, if Wittgenstein believed
that the limits of language are also the limits of reality (and philosophy),
then the Latvian language was much richer when it was in possession of the
‘endearing’ word. Indeed, it stood for the ‘religion’ of Latvians.
The current world
order, today better known as the post-modern order, similar to language
deconstruction, also deconstructs the wood and many an old apple orchard. When
my neighbor, a local farmer, saw my sculptures, he said that he could get for
me similar branches (as yet unprocessed)—all I wanted. In other words, the
process of ‘deconstructing’ the Latvian rural landscape by the 2nd State still
proceeds apace. Elsewhere the world has known this process as ‘alienation’.
Whereas as a young
boy I made myself useful as a cowherd and learned to love every one of the 25
cows that were under my supervision when in the field, today one of my
neighbors has just finished a barn that will hold 100 cows. In due time the
cows will be trained to enter the automatic milking station site by sixes, then
proceed through a turnstile flanked by large brushes that look a little like the
roto-brushes at a car washing station (the cows are said to ‘love’ this
service), then go for a drink of water, and then return to their berths. In
other words, ‘endearing’ has been replaced by a ‘no nonsense’ “cow meat and
milk” factory, though for all I know, my neighbor will introduce to the factory
music by Mozart to increase the level of ‘cow contentment’ so that they give more milk (and perhaps the flesh be
more tender), and some enterprising Latvian psychologist will arrive to give a
scientific assessment of the degree of the ‘contentment’ of the cows.
To what end the
above—what some may call—‘irrelevant’ digression?
The following link
provides a discussion about Witgenstein’s philosophy and his reflections on
Language https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgW_PFl-Xs4
It
is worth listening to the entire discussion as, in my opinion, it directly reflects
on the status of the Latvian language before it was ‘deconstructed’ by the
written word, on behalf of which ‘deconstructed’ form the NA (Coalition of
Latvian Nationalist Parties) appears to ground one of the reasons for its
being. The more significant observations in the link comes following the 18th
minute, re, that one the functions of language is not to describe, but to
“express our state of mind”. If we apply this observation to the Latvian
language and the absenting of the ‘endearing word’ (see also my blog 210 at http://esoschronicles.blogspot.com
) by the written media, we come to the conclusion, that the Latvian State has
killed the founders of its language by killing the state of mind that founded
the Latvian language.
If this is so, then the acts of the 2nd State of Latvia , a government whose leadership does
everything in its power to bring about a demise of Latvia Latvia by
the Soviet Union in 1940. In a curious coincidence
a Latvian
deputy at the Parliament of the EU has just asked that as of 2013 all of Latvia
What a laugh! The Latvian language (as well as literature) as
envisioned by its originators is not only long dead in the 2nd State of Latvia,
but has been dying throughout the preceding 46 years of Soviet occupation. The
deputy who is making the proposal from his seat at the EU Parliament is the
same deputy who a few years back gave ‘the finger sign’ to the demonstrators
who were demonstrating to have the Latvian Parliament dismissed. The incident
was photographed (the photograph has been removed from public access). It is a
cruel paradox that this anti-reform legislator would now lead an ultra-Latvian
party on behalf of the Latvian language.
The only logical solution or revival for Latvian is not an imposition
of the language on a population that no longer is familiar with its language in
depth (least of all its political leadership), but to consider founding a
pseudo-religious organization that would imitate the ultra-orthodox
Jews of Israel as described in a recent article by the Washington Post. While
the ultra-orthodox Jews of Israel number 800,000 and Latvians in Latvia number
about 1,200,000, the additional 400,000 thousand should give these ultra-orthodox
Latvians (led by a deputy of the EU Parliament) that much greater momentum
toward success. I am not in the least opposed to Latvians taking a religious
perspective of themselves and their language. I have illustrated this sympathy by
creating at my countryside residence a Temple
[I hope that ‘P.S. Reversed’ will evolve into a new series of
blogs about the future of Latvia as a geopolitical entity
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