Roots
I´m Estonian. The small nation in the corner of Northern-Eastern Europe. When I was a small child, I couldn´t imagine not to be an Estonian; ever since I´m abroad, I know, it´s the rearest possible and most influencial thing I could think of.
It´s different, the North, watching it from the South.
Slight smoky taste of food, slightly withdrawn glances from the streetcorners.
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The weather: ten months of unweather. The slush, sky blowing gray – gray that stifles all the other colors. Then, sudden clear winds, birds massively flying, a new Revelation - a warm summer, scenting meadows, humming skyhigh. For a couple of weeks people disappear to the cottages, homes of their ancestors; weeks, not to be touched; and return to the cities and watch TV:s all winter long.
At the homes of their grandparents: old ovens, remains of roots and coffee pots. Piles of junk at the attic, nothing important, and hurting if taken away. History, burdened with wars and diseases: silhuettes of men, young men, young sensitive men, a mark of death on their face.
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Photo: Joh.Pääsuke 1913
And nights illuminate the unknown, poetesses sit and write pages about the lilacs, lilacs outside of windows, the wind in the garden, poetesses sit and cannot sleep. The powermills wheel electricity and a nuclear reactor from Russia hisses in the air, swans cover the atmosphere and disappear beyond the horizon, straight towards the source of hissing.
White churches - bright white, not dark nor obscure as their cousins in the south.
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They´ve been constantly thrown as an unnecessary dowry from landlord to landlord, and their Anne Frank never wrote a page for rest of the world to see. Or, if it was written, she never became famous. There was no Schindler´s List, or, if it were, they´d have despised the film and left the cinemas run empty. The sorrow, sorrow of being small and forceless manifests itself only as an incurable wish to be held bigger than others.
This people is clever, they´re playful. The money they have they hold for themselves because it is always necessary to have money for tomorrow´s disaster. Because of the disaster every fifty years, they don´t have it anyway. Losses make them deconstructive, yet enormously cunning: they can make everything out of nothing, and when rich, nothing out of everything.
And then: no moments of being - strong, heavy storms, ascending without surrender; smoky pubs at the coasts, loud voices and wrinkled faces, ice and people, never to give away, neither in moarning, or in pain.
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Their music and their languages have influenced me more than I have been able to recognize. The lack of the future, long lines, fermatas, this odd rhythm on the stresses of uneven syllables. My character is too vivid for the Finns, and way too passive for the Germans. My music is too passive for the Finns, because in music they tend to be agressive, whereas the ability to see far without thinking towards the future, is something very admirable in Germans.
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Men appear to be strong, but weep secretly. Women: stiff, persevere, being able to run big industries and in constant need to spread the information of small things. However, when men are away, or drunk, or just unable in other ways, the women change in rapid shifts between head-manager and kitchen-maid, not clear which one goes to bed, which one wakes up. Men are happy when the women do the job, and constantly feeling unhappy. Women tend to sense more happiness. Their culture of politics reflects the same thing.
The billygoats running on the fields, green wheat as far as you can see.
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They came to the North, nobody knows when. Thousands of years ago. Where did they come from: even this is unclear, different researchers claim different places. There were not so many of them. Their language was different from the rest of Europian languages, with no articles, no future, no sexes. In those thousands of years they were spread all over the North-East - to Estonians, Finns, Livonians, Votes, Karelians, hardly able to understand one another. Livonians, once a powerful nation, now have couple of tens who speake the language. There are one million Estonians, in India that´d be called ´a dead nation´, and five million Finns, which is less than bicycles in Bejing.