Ieselsbrécken, Eddisoen, an ee Stéck vum Gléck.

“How shall I go in peace and without sorrow? Nay, not without a wound in the spirit shall I leave this city. Long were the days of pain I have spent within its walls, and long were the night of aloneness; and who can depart from his pain and aloneness without regret? Too many fragments of the spirit have I scattered in these streets, and too many are the children of my longing that walk naked among these hills, and I cannot withdraw from them without a burden and an ache.
It is not a garment I cast off this day, but a skin that I tear with my own hands. Nor is it a thought I leave behind me, but a heart made sweet with hunger and with thirst.
[…]
Shall the day of parting be the day of gathering? And shall it be said that my eve was in truth my dawn? And what shall I give unto him who has left his plough in midfurrow, or to him who has stopped the wheel of his winepress? Shall my heart become a tree heavy-laden with fruit that I may gather and give unto them? And shall my desires flow like a fountain that I may fill their cups? Am I a harp that the hand of the mighty may touch me, or a flute that his breath may pass through me? A seeker of silence am I, and what treasure have I found in silences that I may dispense with confidence?”
[…]
“You give much and know not that you give at all.”
(K. Gibran)

“Stay or leave
I want you not to go
But you should
It was good
As good goes
Stay or leave
I want you not to go
But you did
(…)
Making plans to change the world
While the world is changing us” (DMB)

I am not Almustafa. I don’t have any advice, poetic or pragmatic, to give to those I leave behind. I did not stay 12 years. My absence will be a lot less noticeable. I did, however, learn to love this place. I lost a bit of my heart here. I learnt the purity of its forms by heart. I had to do hard decisions. I still draw the shapes of its inhabitants, the lines on the ground, the crevasses in the buildings. I still carry the wind in my ears, I hear the steps of the horses, and I feel the sun set, and the rain shake the leaves. Four seasons have come and gone, in the middle of the fifth I am going away. I can theoretically envisage it, but do not comprehend it as yet. In the hope not to forget, I take with me a thousand mnemonic devices. Fieldwork as a multitude of moments that I refuse to synthesise and analyse yet. How can a time like this possibly fit into 5 neat chapters? It don’t and it won’t. Happiness, sadness, aches of various kinds, fury, elation, irony, exhaustion, desperation, peace, quietness, euphoria, and others were close friends in this year. Of course, along with the people I met, learnt to respect, to care for, and to love, and whose friendship I will hopefully honour. I am very grateful to them in the first place.
Thanks also to you, dear reader, for having been part of the journey.
This weblog ends here, the (PhD and other) journeys go on. There may be other weblogs in the future. Information forthcoming here...
Happy New Year!
Your seeker of the silences

Pig, noun

An omnivorous domesticated hoofed mammal with sparse bristly hair and a flat snout for rooting in the soil, kept for its meat. Here, pretty much every household has at least one pig, fattened with maize, wheat and general-leftover broth for about a year. Note that industrial fattening takes about 3 months now, and new orientations of taste with health concerns have definitely changed how pigs should be in other regions of Europe (and even in the big farms here, e.g. maximum of 12% fat), those bred in individual households should have a proportion of at least 40% fat. They should not lack ‘sunca’, the subcutaneous fat that will be turned into ‘untura’ (Lux: Schmalz – is there a special word in English?… I am tempted to say ‘blubber’ but I am sure that’s only for sea mammals’ fat…). Over a thousand pigs will be ‘cut’ from now until Christmas in the village. The black market in a neighbouring town is flourishing in this period of the year, unhampered by a smiling vet inspector (encountered in a different part of the official part of the market) who probably gets his own Christmas feast-pig from there. You can get pigs quite cheaply there (about €90 for a carcass with 120 kg meat, dead weight). There are all kinds of colourful pigs there, because people here have old breeds, not the ‘modern’ hybrids recommended/prescribed for industrial farming. I like colourful pigs. There was one black pig with a lot of hair on the market screaming as if it was being slaughtered already, because someone had tied it with its hind leg to the back of the truck, and it really did not like that, and wanted to escape. The vet inspector used to go and threaten with fines, in the summer, making the market dissociate at once in a cloudy moment of dust and noise, everyone getting their pigs in the car or horse-wagons and taking off. The man probably decided probably it was to no avail, given that every Sunday morning, the market was recreated under his nose.
Generally the issue is not (yet?) about whether raising a pig is profitable. It has become a lot more difficult lately to give your pig away, but it is still possible. Prices have hit rock bottom. If EU standards will be enforced, it will be more difficult to keep pigs in the backyard. For now, people know that no money is to be made in the pig business for small producers, but they are still holding on to their eating practices, and what it means to have a good household.
People here say that they should be killed on Ignatius day on the 20th December, but this is not respected in the region. The cutting of the pig is an important event, uniting families, neighbours, friends and attracting guests into the courtyards. I was told that from now on I would hear screaming pigs every morning. The pigs are slaughtered the traditional way. Even though people are vaguely aware of the (considered, and so-called Occidental) EU prescription to ‘anaesthetize’ pigs (through electroshock, shot…) before cutting their throat, they do not put this into practice. The pig is cut through an incision to the throat, which immobilises it immediately, but which kills very slowly. The pig is transported to a makeshift table, usually with a ladder. When it is dead, it is scorched black with a massive burner, removing the hair, and the outside of the hooves. The pig is washed, cleaned, and its head cut off. Then the actual cutting into pieces begins, and it takes some skill to do this properly. The times I have witness this event, a lot of discussion was going into various, and differing opinions of expertise on how to cut, where, when, and what. The carcass steams in the cold December air. Despite variations there is a rough prescribed order of cutting, and at this time, pieces of ‘sorici’, pig skin, are offered to guests and participants, along with salt and coffee. The cutting up proceeds from the outside to the inside, and the guts are dealt with lastly. The pig needs to be turned from being on its side first, to sitting on its belly. Every bit is used (apart from the gall bladder and the bladder), including the bones. After the cutting, more work awaits, because most people do not have freezers! Preservation methods include the ‘untura’ that I mentioned. Much of the meat is smoked, but not entire hindquarters, as is done in North-Western Europe. The meat is cut into manageable pieces and smoked with a slow woodchip fire in a small room. The organs and lower quality pieces are minced and made into ‘toba’ (a kind of pate) and ‘carnatoi’ (a kind of sausage). Pofta buna!

‘Stii ce mai face copilul tau?’ and Structural Violence

In Romania, the economic pressures ‘produce’ children that are without a lot of perspectives, especially in rural areas. Not only is there very little support to ensure that the children can finish secondary school, so that for some, 8 classes effectively mean the end of the possibility of schooling. Reasons: the secondary schools are further away, and the options of commuting or staying at a family are too expensive.
Children are also the big losers of the race for jobs abroad (4 million Romanians abroad is an estimation, total population 21 million). They are left to the care of family, grandparents, or older siblings, while their parents do slave labour in Italy or Spain. There are families who are getting on better, and who do white work abroad, who have been gone longer, but those who have gone more recently, who do black work are more precarious. Of course, the parents being stressed to make a living also affects the children, and I would like to suggest that the degree to which this is happens here is higher than in the UK, for instance, even though child poverty as far as I remember is highest in Scotland as far as Western Europe is concerned.
Juxtaposition: one of these mornings, I read in the newspaper (Gindul 22.10.07) that some NGOs with programmes aimed at children in need (protection of the child I think is the technical term) had ‘lost’ billions. The National Authority for the Protection of the Child works with two main NGOs (SERA, Pentru Copii Nostri), and they were supposed to finish building, until 2006, 16 day care centres for abandoned children. In August 2007, a report showed that 4 of these were functioning. The rest do not exist, are being constructed, or have the buildings finished but without utilities. One case in Ilfov: here sheltered housing was supposed to be created for children with special needs. The building is illegal (the land not being properly put into possession), 75% of the money has been spent, and the houses are no more than a few walls, and a foundation. The responsibilities are pushed from one authority to the other…
At the moment, on private TV channel has a campaign is on entitled ‘do you know how your child is getting on?’. It is I guess aimed at sensitising people that children suffer a lot: from abandonment generally, growing up in rural areas where there are two or three children left in a village, being under considerable psychological stress, and having their options effectively limited even more. When I see these children, I get really sad and angry. You can see that they are uncared for, neglected, possibly subjected to violence, their hands are like hands of adults, rough and overworked, they don’t go to school often because they are sent to work, helping with the sunflower harvest, for instance.
I met one girl (6) who was upset all the time. You could see her anger in her face and every move she made. She had stopped speaking to everyone, including her grandmother who she lived with her during her mother’s absence. Her mother had been in Italy for a long time, and then ended up coming home having spent most of the money earned there on living.
Another girl (5) told me that children are easy to make, but difficult to raise. She said, I go to bed very late, and I cannot fall asleep without the TV. Her parents have a combined income of 60 euros. This pays just about the electricity and the firewood.

1947-1957

Sorry for the suboptimal picture. The reason for the shrubbery in the foreground was a muddy quasi-vertical wall that was beyond my climbing powers (nu sunt capra!). Some people took me to this place in the forest where the last five people of the anti-communist were hiding until they were arrested. This resistance was powerful, but never managed to get international connections, and it mainly involved people hiding in the mountains in various places in Romania, lasting almost ten years, which is not a trifle, given the conditions. Four men and a woman were arrested on this spot, there was guns firing on that day, the militians were well-trained, and the resistors were mostly put into prison. The woman gave birth in prison. A lot of other people died, who were ‘innocent’ or not. Dej’s regime was more repressive than Ceausescu’s as far as number of arrests, deportations and the extent of torture were concerned. The narrative I was told was mixing historical events of the time of resistance, myth, and current events of a female lawyer having disappeared in September and being feared dead. The current twist on events is that she has been killed by her husband, some kind of rich guy with connections to mafia worlds. In this forest, I was told a story of how the resistance is remembered by some locals. You could not see the cave anymore where the people in the 1950s were hiding, because erosion has pretty much brought down part of the sandy stone, and like in so many areas in the valley, a kind of land slide has made history just a bit more silent. Back in the village, my attention is drawn to a cross in a walled garden, that has been put in memory of the resistance, and which was not received well in the village of origin of some of the last ‘partizani’. Some people there threatened to throw it in the lake, and so it was not put up in that village, but in the neighbouring ones.

The Fall. Reprise.

[caption on photo: Rumaenische Bauern vor ihrer Huette - postcard from the interwar period i would guess, maybe earlier]
In interviews I have recurrently encountered a certain kind of story about the ‘sat romanesc’, the Romanian village, as well as the Romanian peasant. It is a story remindful both of Christian mythology such as the Fall, where the taint of sin remains, and portrayals of the ‘noble savage’ where the subject in question oscillates back and forth between being pure, being fallen, and needing to be saved.
As in other mythical stories, this typological village is presented, despite numerous pieces of evidence to the contrary, like a unit that has existed since the beginning of time, where there have been no substantial changes since recently. Of course… Define recently. Define change. Define beginning of time.
But let us consider the grounding of the hypothesis for a moment. It is a story of innocence, corrupted, of eternity, interrupted, of paradise, lost, of angels, fallen. ‘Vesnicie s-a nascut in sat’ (eternity was born in the village). I dramatise to make the point, which is allowed. Example: ‘People have made cheese in this way for thousands of years’.
A presumed horizon of permanence is invaded with a sense of change, spiced up with loss, confusion and the shifting of boundaries and moralities. ‘Back in the days, we used to have ‘hore’, none of these discos, where no one is supervising’. ‘People have always made cheese like this and now they’re saying we’re not allowed anymore’. ‘… and now the eternity has been ended by us/them’.
One old guy tells me, well you know, this modern lifestyle isn’t very healthy, look at how many people are ill! There’s never been so many illnesses around. If this argument is made, it is often omitted that, actually, life as a peasant is pretty rough, because the state, the emperor, the landlord were never particularly forthcoming vis-à-vis this category of people. More cake for the peasants! More life span! More medication! (I just wrote a typo ‘meducation’, which screams for a post of its own… passons!)
When you look at nineteenth century sources (from Durandin 1995), despite agrarian reforms, people were not doing so well in the countryside. The rural idyll, in close-up, is lessened. Modernity plays in cities, not on the fields.
‘Les temps où l’on disait: “si vous voulez voir un type d’homme bien portant, allez dans les campagnes” sont passés. Sur toutes les physiognomies, enfants, vieillards, on ne lit que fatigue physique, langueur, chloroanémie, ils sont vieillis avant l’âge et one le moral très abattu. J’ai tâché de connaître la cause, et partout j’ai vu la misère. Tous ont tant de dettes qu’ils ne savent comment les payer’ (p.165).
A study of the ‘Economic and Social Situation of the Peasant in Romania’ (much like those published by the European Commission these days… ;-)) published in 1895 has a bit of statistics that tell ofs the physical state of the peasantry.
‘Reprenant les résultats des recencements des années 1869, 1874, et 1879, il indique qu’en 1869 un tiers des conscripts n’atteignent pas la taille de 1,57m requise pour le service; en 1879, un tiers se situent au-dessous de 1,54m. Il déplore aussi la multiplication des cas d’idiotisme [linked to lack of iodine, and thyroid dysfunction from birth] et de syphilis’ (p.165).
Agrarian revolts were never mentioned in the interviews, even though a lot of them happened in Romania in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and one particularly violent one in 1907. We are at the limits of narrative life-story methodology, because it does not go back far enough in time to appreciate, and so history books and historical sources are important supplements to go back further in time than 70 years at most. This spans, at best, a bit of time before communism was established. The horizon of reference of the interviews can be communism – post-communism. The nationalist, populist, and fascist politics of the turn of the century and anything earlier do not get an appreciation, also taking into account the way in which history education under communism had its own twist, legitimating the regime in place.
A few points emerge:
In Romania a complicated mythology exists around people’s historical origins, usually to be found in the countryside. Livelihoods: peasantry, agricultural work, commerce.
This mythology is both appropriated by the people left out by the recent changes in legislation due to European Union demands, and national policy, to affirm that the conservative, traditional elements have a value, and that they need to be protected, without, however, having much leverage power to put this into practice on their terms.
It is also appropriated not only by people representing the authorities, but also by people living in the countryside who are not peasants (who may consider themselves ‘intellectuals’ or city people who have worked in industry) that the people in question (‘peasants’) are inappropriate, that they need to modernise, to change, to adapt, in order to profit. They are considered backward, uncivilised, uneducated.
Funnily enough, the people who fall into the second category are also arguing for the salvation of the Romanian village, because it is the seat of the traditions, of popular music, poetry, architecture and dance. What exactly is there ‘to save’? So we save the traditions in a purified form and we discard the peasants? To me it sounds a bit like fission that removes the characteristics of the original substance and creates something else altogether. If, that is, substance is the right word to use here.
There is, it seems, nothing new under the sun. The French-educated historian Nicolae Iorga, who played a role in creating nationalist sentiments in pre-Balkanic-wars-Romania, directs, from 1903, the periodical ‘Samanatorul’, which promotes a socially and morally engaged national literature. In it, rural values are celebrated: the peasant is the vector of continuity, of collective memory and of respect of tradition. He is the figure of resistance against decadence, foreign pollution, and the anonymity and misery of the cities.
I am reminded of Justin Kenrick’s lectures and the idea of closure, that it had to be either idealist and pure, or materialist and wicked. I want an appreciation not centred on these opposites begetting opposites begetting opposites and not much light, though I understand that people want to make one argument, not the other. I have the anthropology illness, of not wanting to decide for one side… doesn’t make me a good interviewee as I recently found out… ;-)

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.

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?

LÈif Matbierger vun Lucilinburhuc,

Once upon a time in 963, one guy exchanged some properties in Germany for a small rocky place in the heart of Europe: Lucilinburhuc, the little castle. 1044 years later, we’ve come a long way…
On the occasion of a purely conventional Groussh‰erzogsgebuertsdag, your arguably most unpatriotic Lux representative, her Silliness Nutshell-in-exile, would like to say a few words. The upside is that my speech will not be delivered in Luxembourgish with a French accent, but in English with a Luxembourgish accent.
What do I miss about Luxembourg? Of course, all those dear persons that I call my friends and family - but this is hardly the place to reminisce about such personal matters. My J’accuse does not exclude me, for I am not free of influence of the place I have grown up in.
I miss its hills, the lake, and EislÈk more generally, the Belgian border at Colpach, its farm houses, its chapels along the road, its cleanliness, its city walls and high cliffs, its castles and secret passages. It is a place full of different languages, reservation and Muttergottesstatuen. My dreams about it are filled with winding roads and cow stables. It is a beautiful place, like a village with too much money, blown up out of proportion. It has suffocating elements that provoke migraines and bursts of anger in me. It rests on a conservative mentality that screams ‘mir wÎlle bleiwe…’ and on citizens who accusingly point fingers ‘quo vadis…’ in stylistically awful / rhetorically inane, often content-free Briefe and die Redaktion. Luxembourgers abroad tend to complain about running taps, soft mattresses, and food that is inadequate for their bowels. They miss their daily dose of obituaries (the country is so small all of those can be put on a few pages of newspaper) and work out the cause of death from the wording of the announcement. Marriage and birth announcements are studied in detail, with extensive excursions of kinship and place ‘oh look, isn’t this the nephew of Muller from Siewebueren, on the mother’s side, you know the one who worked at the Schmeltz for a while and then had this car accident with Wampach from Wecker, he has a child with the Eller widow’s daughter’. Our territory was made smaller in the mid nineteenth century, but we were transformed from being a Duchy to being a Grand-Duchy. That was our consolation, and has left us with a Fuerz am Kapp. We are marked by being occupied twice in the wars of the twentieth century. We are not German, we say, grinding our teeth, just before adding that we are not nationalist. We really took the post-war welfare state seriously. Steel industry was ours before Mittal’s time. The country’s post-industrial state of wealth is reflected in its prettier-than-fairytale urban spaces: impressive museums with a lot of marble, paved plazas, renovated mansions, flowers planted in subtle arrangements of to-the-millimetre exactitude, sanitised, every microbe removed. The property prices in the city do not add to the liveliness of the place, as your average person cannot afford to live here, not even in the smallest of cupboards. The Pafendall is the place I would choose to live in, had I unlimited funds and patience (natiirlich och wÈinst dem Numm). Architectural wonders of centuries of occupation: Vauban, the Spanish, the Austro-Hungarians and Pei (more recently) have left traces. I walk down Grand’-rue with ever changing upper crest boutiques that add to the flavour of wealth. Identities made and remade in a frenzy through consumption goods and luxury articles: cars, jewelry, upmarket restaurants, cosmetics, culture. I walk on and count the banks. Geld stÈnkt nit, they say. I walk on past William the Second of the Netherlands, the only Dutch ruler who bothered to visit his Luxembourgish colony. Full of gratefulness we made him a statue. I can smell the earth of the flowers of the market, as they watered them in the morning breeze. I buy some vegetables. Markets for city people, once a week. I walk down past our national fox, Renert, who sits, head bowed (?), listening to the chimes of the cathedral. The beautiful empty cathedral of ours: Maryland how I love thee. Note to self: buy a black party card one of these days, just for the hell of it. The boulevard Roosevelt, rich of symbols, and entrance to one set of the underground casemates that smell like urine and mould. I nod in direction of the public service canteen (another convent converted) and walk past Disneyland meets Hellege Geescht (crimes of an urbanist nature are also committed in the Grand-Duchy…). In hiding a view of the Gronn that is one of my favourites and that shows the converted male and female prisons where detainees used to glue bags (a detail that fascinated me as a child…), and a convent that is beautifully renovated and now hosts cultural events. I return to the boulevard and cross that bridge (having come to it) that spans across lush green depths of park valley where the Alzette and the PÈtrusse flow. God built his church on a rock and called it Luxembourg. The quartier Gare has a more lively mix of architecture, but you need to look up. Here, too, the same boring shops that you find in any European city now have taken over. The Fischer-mafia has sucked up most of the bakeries (but in Biekerich remains, without exaggeration, the best baker in the world… I would give a lot for one of his frangipanes now, too bad I have high cholesterol…), but Journal cafÈ has remained. There is little interaction in the city, people live far from each other, but not in distance. Nothing touches me is the curse, reversed, that I carry with myself: everything touches me. Every now and then you run into someone who is the opposite. The smallness makes that people consider that half an hour’s drive is far away. Everything is small: the train station, the airport, the Autobunnopfaarten, my village. My village, Redange-les-Bains (well, we have a river originating in the Ardennes…) has, among other things less remarkable, a Kropemann, a Cactus, a water reservoir that looks like a Roman villa, and a swimming pool that has much changed since I was a kid. I want to go back to the time I enjoyed playing in the local Harmonie, and when I helped organise scouts for kids on the weekends. I longed to leave even then. When or if I return I will remember how privileged the place is I grew up in, and fight against attitudes of pettiness, envy, delusions of grandeur, and nagging that sometimes take it over. Maryland mon amour – Smallville ma peine – vive de Grand-duc, vive d’Grand-duchesse... Et kinnt een hei theoretesch nach Leit derbeiflÈcken mat deene LÎtzebuerg sech bretzt: vive de Victor Hugo, vive de SchanKloot, vive de Robert Schumann, vive de Generol Patton, vive de Superjhemp, etc. mee et ass e wÈinich pÈnibel… allez, vive LÎtzebuerg!

june

O Lume Minunata

What comes to mind when you see this kitchen? What does it do to your imagination? How would it be a different experience if you had been in the kitchen, met the woman in the picture, smelled the food she was preparing and heard the rain coming down the mountains? How would it be the same? What features did you concentrate on and what memories did they recall for you? How would it feel if you had lived there all your adult life? What about childhood? The reconciliation of worlds, even if just for a moment, happens all the time. That is the most important lesson I learnt ever so recently.

Movements

Why is it that, now that I am leaving for a bit, I notice all these things I have not done, and yet, at the same time, my mind is already bouncing off Edward Wright building and walking up College Bounds. My vision of the present becomes more acute, I am perceiving people and things intensely emotionally, as if for the first time. Threat of absence makes impressions stronger. Yet I am already preparing my luggage in my mind, when I should be focusing on what is at stake here. When I am in one village, I think about all the people who might be home in the other one, and when I walk to the other one, I remember what I forgot to do at home. The issue is closely connected to my needing to remain flexible, because people resist being nailed down to an hour and a place, and so I need to learn differently, and ‘be like a running brook’ (K. Gibran) that seizes opportunities and passages, and forgets about those that cannot be. Insistence is vain because it does not work that way, time has a different quality, and there are a lot of routes through the mountains. Yet, it is hard not to lose one’s bearings at times, with all the noise, the randomness, the stories, another kind of importance stressed, the deferring of time and the insistence on things that I had neglected. Why all this tugging of my being to be with my family, who are in one place, with my friends, mainly in a second place, when I am in a third one. Why all this being longing. Why all this being fragmented. Why all this time spent thinking about the other, having the feeling that time rushes with all this occupation, and, also, waiting for movements coming together.
16.04.07

The Little Sunbeam

I had asked to interview his parents about their ‘traditional produce’ initiative. They led me into a chilly ‘best room’ and said, there is a problem with the other room, because their little son had a problem with his legs and this is why a teacher came everyday to give him lessons at home. He would have to have this plaster on both legs for about one and a half years, because there was a major problem with his bones. At the level of both his feet, the plaster was attached to a kind of wooden stick of about 70 cm. False diagnoses had caused that this had not been remedied when he was a toddler. I asked what he was doing with his time. They told me: watching TV, reading a bit, playing with his brother and with friends that come to visit. So later on it got too cold in the first room, and the teacher had finished for the day, so I got to meet this child. He was an energy bundle, very loveable, and apparently very happy. He asked to see the world map to determine where Britain was, and Luxie and thought it was very far away. He asked how I had come, with the plane or with the boat. His next question was whether I had read the paper in the plane. He was a bit disappointed to hear that I usually sleep in planes (yes, some kind of narcolepsy confined to pressure cabins, and, more generally, but less reliably so, public transport of various kinds). He wanted to know how many engines the plane had and whether I had paid for the petrol. He asked me what I was doing here anyway, and I attempted to explain. And then he made my heart melt, saying: ‘How do you say Alexandru in Luxembourgish?’

Poverty and Precariousness

Someone pointed out to me that poor people on the countryside fare better than people in the city. The comment precipitated a lot of thought on the matter, because part of me at first rejected it entirely (always fascinating to see how we react to certain engrained assumptions qualified). Then I conceded that I had been wrong about certain things in this regard.
Not only two or three people here get twenty-five (25) euro pension per month. Some households are constituted of three generations, sharing one salary, and one of the said pensions. I have been wondering about the difference between the poverty here, and the poverty in Western Europe. It may be not just a question of difference in degree, but also a question of difference in kind. I take into account that a difference exists between the kind of poverty found in cities and the one found (here) on the countryside. People here get credit at the local food shop to buy bread (one bread costs 0.7 RON = 0.2 EURO – the shopkeeper explained to me that they had to have a sign saying ‘no credit here’, but that it was not possible to stick to this in practice). The people that have a pension, no matter how minuscule, do not get social benefits, apart from one-off money for fire wood (only heating source around here with very few exceptions). From what I hear from the Lux context, people do get enough money to cover their basic needs. And, speaking about basic needs, I do not think there is anyone in Britain or Lux who does not have access to running water, a bathroom, and electricity. There are a lot of people here who do not have number one and two, and a few who do not have number three. The reason elderly people hold as many animals as they can work is because they cut food bills and enrich staple diets. You can also (at the moment of writing: still) somehow sell the cheese you make, the eggs your chickens lay, and the meat of the spring lamb that your ewe has had. This helps, to some degree. Of course, the facts that communism collapsed and left a whole generation on terribly small pensions (who is to blame that they did not pay contributions to a fund then?), and that incomes are up to ten times lower than in some Western European countries needs to be taken into account in any characterisation of the kind of poverty here.
On the other hand, the kind of misery in Western Europe I mean may resemble the urban kind. It can mean a combination of the following: high debts, forms of social exclusion that include lack of access to education, to secure and fairly-paid jobs, to a secure, healthy living environment, and so forth.
I think one of the most important differences is that in the countryside here, people live without major debts, but in the cities, people have debts because they have commodities, too. In the cities, people may make more plans for the future to face uncertainty, but here, uncertainty is levelled out by minimising the risk in the present, because they do not have the resources to act otherwise. I am not sure how it is with risk deferment: people commit to take out mortgages and pay in health and pension cover, but what kind of percentage can still commit to this kind of responsibility in societies rapidly increasing in inequality, say, in ten or fifteen years’ time? Furthermore, there may be more of temporary poverty because the job situation can change quickly. The welfare state being under siege from various internal and external forces, I am not sure anymore in how far we can and should still speak about it. So these are my embryonic thoughts on the matter, and I am sure a lot has been written about it. I just need to find time to read all that.

in the valley lies a bundle of villages...

these are some impressions from the village I am moving to at the end of january...