Out of Season

Autumn is coming. I can feel it with the nights becoming chilly, and there is a quality of the air that comes with the cold mornings that makes me very happy. The fruits are ripe, and falling off the trees, hitting the ground with a thump. People are talking about a mushroom that grows on the hills about this time of the year. Firewood is being collected, cut and stored. The sheep will come from the mountains in a few weeks, and the cows will be back at home soon too. I like this colour of sky, just before night has fallen entirely. Does it remind me of northern skies? I was also reminded of a line in a song ‘clouds are stalking islands in the sky, I wish I could buy one, out of season’. My memory might have failed me though! It occurred to me that fieldwork does not last forever.

home

Here my mother caught a moment of laughter on camera. Given that she usually does not deal with the photographic family documentation, unfortunately Mumu’s head was half out of the frame. Siblings can have very different laughs. Whose laugh do you like/dislike? What do you think about your own laugh? Do you laugh loudly often? How many times have you laughed out loud today, for instance?
Home. I miss it, and I keep thinking about what home is, what it means and represents.

Das Wehen des postindustriellen Windes im Minett

Oder so hätte der Titel auch sein können... nun ja, grosse deutsche Literatur hat man ja noch nie in Luxie schreiben wollen können. Oder etwa doch? Das ist hier auch Nebensache... das Hauptereignis ist das Sprengen zweier Kühltürme in Differdange, einer der Städte im Süden unseres Marienlandes, im sogenannten 'Minett', wo bis kürzlich Eisen und Stahl abgebaut wurde. Die Region, so sagt man, hat viel zum Wohlstand unseres Ländchens beigetragen. Globalisationsprozesse jedoch haben den Abbau weniger profitabel gemacht, Arbeitsplätze wurden abgebaut, unsere Ökonomie restrukturiert, und die Eisenindustrie wurde erst von Arcelor, dann von Mittal gefressen (ich sag das hier ganz ungeniert, hab aber meine Recherche nicht sehr gründlich gemacht... Ich bin schon zu lange weg aus dem Land, das soll an dieser Stelle meine Entschuldigung sein... ;-))

'Nur noch wenige Stunden überragt der große Kühlturm des Arcelor-Profil-Luxemburg-Werks Differdingen die Silhouette der hundertjährigen Stadt. Am Samstag um 8.35 Uhr, nach zwei Alarmtönen und einer Kette von kleineren Explosionen, werden die beiden Stahlbeton-Türme für immer in einer Staubwolke verschwinden. Ein Teil der Differdinger Industriegeschichte findet sein Ende.' (Luxemburger Wort, 24.08.07)

bells and flowers

Today I got lost in other people’s stories, on waking my head was light from having fought mosquitoes during the early hours of morning. I walked around the tarmac-ground softened from the heat and wobbly like sand, and thought of everyone far away I love. One man greeted me and I was amazed. Have a good day, Sir, you mistake me for somebody else. I crossed the iron footbridge over the Basarab railway station and looked down through the gaps that remained, stubbornly, square, in the smoothly worn brown-red iron trodden by many feet over a long period of time, each soft step taking with them a molecule or two. What I was looking at was mizerie, smelly garbage. I was half expecting to discover the body of a decaying dog. I did not. An old woman was complaining about the dust, and it settled on my body like a silky surface, mixed with the transpiration (that word choice should make my status of ‘ladyship’ quite obvious), and later on could be rubbed off like flaky skin. I could not stand the sight of one child standing at a crossroad and breathing into a bag. The world is too loud, too indifferent. One big man sat on the same spot as yesterday, talking to a quartier neighbour, an old lady with white hair elaborately strung together in a bun, carrying many shabby plastic bags. I had an acute sense of loss on Calea Grivitei, walking past a curtained shop window that a billboard with the opening times in these kinds of stick-on plastic letters, and a basket with a stuffed white cat plus several kittens with scary stary eyes. Looking through the ruins of one once majestic corner building, I could see through the holes the twinkling sign of a hotel, newly risen into the sky. Another project of modernity, only the context, this time, being capitalism. This environment, momentarily an extension of my self, decaying just like my body, and would not remain until I return. A fragment ‘il y a longtemps que je t’aime jamais je ne t’oublierai’ rhythmed my heart. It rung in my head like the church bells in the village, with the characteristic tierce that render them so distinctive. ‘… each hung bell's [Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name’ (G.M.H.). It made me understand separation, time, and nostalgia. A moment of lucidity in a fog, rhyming, producing consonance, while working towards that project-of-little-importance. In the meantime has become the work I do, because that’s what I get up for in the morning. My dreams, however, were flying off with the ceiling, I found myself looking at the stars. I dreamed I am going to explode, and I held my arms in readiness. I was certain of the cause: a flower was growing in my stomach, and I sat down near the piano and waited. I think I was smiling.

Ahr yeh? (Scottish transcription)

Discovered one evening in Bucharest, as we were hanging out at Cartaresti (possibly the best bookshop in Romania’s beautiful capital), waiting for our reservation time at the restaurant to come around, this really became the question of the day. I did not find out for certain what the firm was trying to advertise, but I suspect it is all about… clothes. Three things I hope you will think about, even for just a minute, after you have laughed heartily at the funny woman and this (very modern, I admit and I am yellow of envy) T-shirt that is showing the shoes she may own (or covet?). What kind of expression is that supposed to be on her face? Can modernity be summoned, desired, beckoned, arrived at, or is the question of an altogether different order? How would you answer the question? Do you consider yourself ready? (photo: k ruskola)

Plums, prunes and tuica

Now for a lovely example about words expanding or compressing their meaning when introduced into a foreign language. Linguistically, the origins of the word ‘prune’ are to be found in the Middle English period, from Old French, via Latin from Greek prou(m)non. In Latin ‘pruna’ denotes the genus of the actual plum tree, but today, in English, prune merely denotes the plum ‘preserved by drying, having a black, wrinkled appearance’. Further, it has the secondary, metaphorical meaning of an ‘unpleasant or disagreeable person’. Plum, on the other hand, signifies the fruit, the tree, the colour, and, informally, as an adjective, ‘a highly desirable attainment, accomplishment, or acquisition, typically a job’. This word is recorded in the dictionary as coming from Old English plume (with a line on the u), from medieval Latin, pruna. So this word existed earlier in the English language. In Romanian, which is the Romance language that has kept the most Latin forms, the word is, unsurprisingly, pruna, plural prune. How about for a historically unverifiable (? I put my faith in you historians out there) question: since when have people made brandy and jams and what not? What was on a medieval food table – of the wealthy, let us say, to leave more scope? All answers, albeit speculative, welcome.
People here are picking plums at the moment. They go for days and days, because it is a year with a lot of plums. There are more than 100,000 plum trees in this valley, mostly planted during communism, and not a penny has been invested in the orchards since the revolution at least... Part of the neighbouring comuna’s territory was a state farm of fruit trees, mainly functioning by unpaid labour, recruiting students into so-called Praktika, and the army into agricultural labour. People were considered chiaburi if they owned a still, because they could apply the custom of asking for a tax amounting to a tenth of the production of people who would use the still in the village. The plums are delicious, and will be mostly end as the traditional brandy, tuica (pronounce: tzuica, because of the , below the t that I cannot reproduce on the internet). For this end, they are kept in wooden casks for a while until they have fermented. Then, through a distillation process, the alcohol is separated from the fruit, and the wash remains for fodder purposes. The first bit that seeps out of the still is very strong and I recommend waiting… (one coughing, cursing anthropologist-wimp will result otherwise, in my own experience). I am very curious whether and how the new EU regulations will be applied in this regard, and whether a new return to secret brandy making will happen, just like in communist times (for the Aberdonians: Illicit Stills will multiply in the village…). In the spring, when there was some distilling going on in the other valley, people were arguing that, in fact, the legislation of last year needed to be applied to these plums (and apples) because the harvest was from 2006. I feel this discourse is on the brink of changing (it don’t take no clairvoyant to predict this… ;-P). Noroc!

Contingency–Intimacy

The most interesting details about how people navigate their life-worlds, appreciate their social relationships, and evaluate how persons and self are and should be, during my fieldwork, have revealed themselves in very contingent ways. They have not magically arisen out of any formalised methodology, but they were in fact originated by the fact that I did engage, with all of my heart, with people I learnt to appreciate in their difference and similarity to my being. Just after David asked me about concepts of friendship, I got taught an important lesson. I thought the term for ‘friend’ (prieten) was somewhat more extended, but I do not think it is, and I had not considered it carefully. David said that in Polish there are only two or three people who would make the first category of friends, and then there were two other terms that designated people one could have drinks with. In Anglophone contexts, the category of friend, to me, is very flexible and large. It is a term easily used. One (semi-serious) example I think are the ‘friends’ on webpages like MySpace, for instance, where one click gets you an additional friend. In Luxembourgish, the term is almost absent, and is replaced by Kolleech (colleague), who is more of a buddy. It does exist more, I’d say, in the female version. In Lux, as in other Germanic languages, there is a certain amount of ambiguity because of the identity of boyfriend/girlfriend and friend, and it depends on the article used (possessive or indeterminate) to determine. In Romanian, this does not really work to differentiate (but to explicitly say ‘suntem doar amici’ – we are just friends), and some euphemisms exist, like in most languages, to talk about a romantic relationship (e.g. ‘they talk to each other’, ‘they are going out’, ‘they are dating’, ‘they go together’…).
But I divagate. Previously, I had gathered through an argument that I had with a friend that friends need to be respected, and this left me in a tricky situation later on. We went for a drink (juice) in a newly-built pension (foreign investment from Bucharest), and some of the people we went with were talking in ways about women that made me react in my stomach, even if I tried to stay calm. Now, given how I am, and my normative attitudes about politeness, I did not want to stop them there and then, but listened, waited for it to end, and, in due course, found myself getting very angry. Later on, I barked at the friend who I had taken me, and we started to discuss this. The argument went like this: I don’t like how these guys talk about women and you didn’t do anything to stop them. I didn’t say anything because they’re your friends, and I want to respect them like I can. They’re not my friends just because we go for drinks together. Why don’t you tell me what’s going on at least? Because I am polite, I am telling you now, not then.
All the assumptions you make about people’s relationships when you get to a village… man! Difficult to parse. At home, I would not take people for drinks if I was just living in the same place as them. You may take them if they work with you. The more I think about it, the more I believe that it is also something that splits among gender lines, and even along class lines. I would also argue it happens less in cities, where social networks are a lot more limited, because you can just avoid interacting with people who you may not share a lot of things, and this ‘sharing’ may be an important criterion for some. Even in my home village, it may happen more likely in situations of hanging out with people from a music ensemble (or two – but this is related to a common interest, music…) and so forth, it has never happened since I am away. I do admit, that as teenagers I used to hang out with people who were not particularly close, but maybe that is a different story, and shows of the lack of adult-social-life depth I have had in my native village. What do you think? Who is your friend?

Singularity

As I sit and wait for the thunderstorm to pass over my head and the village, in the absence of electricity, in the smell of the rain and the sounds of cars wheezing through puddles and the tapping on the corrugated iron roof, the most complete singularity wraps itself around me. It makes my stomach turn and my head spin. I long for detachment from this world, but I would not have it if it was thrust upon me. Being is full of contradictions that seek conclusion, choices that fuel the burning of old wounds and long-lost memories, and moments needed for waiting, healing, interiorising. The thunderstorm resembles a point d’orgue in music. A lot can happen during that time, when the rhythm fleetingly becomes suspended, and a solo breaks into the space, with moments of silence weighing down on the audience like love on a heart-in-waiting.

soft symmetry secure love

“try to catch the deluge in a paper cup” (crowded house)

the rains have come back and it smells like winter mid-august the summer ended
we have been walking in the dirt and your presence evened my frustration
romania is complicated every sentence requires too much application excavation
I think of scotland my lack of concentration is apparent in every skin cell
why scotland it is not that which I left – a mere figure in a set cast of cowardice
the returning question of why love-labours wax and wane
when I truly long for them to remain how can I align my desires with my past
I wish I could still believe human lives were made of permanence and stability
I drift tepid gazing faraway where does my work end and life begin
thoughts of other times and place weighing on this room this belly
lingering by my side you feel me as though you had known me all your life
you ask why I am not present
I want to be there fail and am nowhere with all my heart