Читать книгу Cannot Stay - Kevin Oderman - Страница 12

WHITE AMBER

::

The sudden spring. Twilight at 11:00 p.m. and twilight at 2:00 a.m. A spring condensed in the far north, the bloom on, the different new greens, from near yellow through chartreuse to leaf green to pine. The beautiful woods, the silver birches in the road cut, behind them the red-barked small pines and a tree I don’t know, its trunk the color of old pewter and its new leaves ruddy, that other green, the blood of spring. This is the third week of May, this is the Baltic coast, the cold sea, gray or steel blue, just there. This bus driving through the rushing season. Two weeks ago the ground was rough with ice, they say. Now the birdhouses are loud with cheeping. Arriving in the bloom and not long for this place, it will always be spring here for me.

Forest and farmsteads. Around the farm buildings the brightest thing the stacks of new-cut firewood, silver and salmon, opened by the raw strokes of the axe. It won’t always be spring for the farmers, already wood-making for next winter, winter just past. The fields green, green, or a new-tilled brown, or absolute yellow, rape seed in flower, I think, not sure, not knowing much for sure, passing through.

This is the day earth promised in darkness. Now, the earth speaks glory. The little leaves like girls, boys, so small and frail, alive with the first impulse. I look through glass at all that, going by, my own face white with winter, reflected, still, in front of the rushing, renewed world. This is age, and to age earth speaks a different word.

::

Vilnius

Everything bent—in the old town, anyway, and this is what I’ve come for, to be reminded that the built world hasn’t always been so square. Streets plotted on a grid, structures obeying the rule, I get tired of it. I begin to desire that other thing, buildings bending with the arc of an alley, most every building connected with the building next door. And I find myself packing a bag, setting out, just to walk such streets. They must have seemed like good streets to walk for a long time, for millennia. If you take the long view, my desire can hardly be construed as eccentric. Yet we rarely do take the long view, and I too was surprised when years ago I visited ancient Akrotiri on Santorini. The old town there is very old, Minoan, buried in ash like Pompeii but some seventeen hundred years before catastrophe rained from the sky at the foot of Vesuvius. Ancient Akrotiri is an archaeological site now, and the eruption that buried it left ash so deep that you enter the town by walking down, into the ground. The archaeologists have had the site roofed, which is estranging, but in spite of that what startles at ancient Akrotiri is just how familiar, how old-towny, the place seems. I remember how arrested I felt, walking into the little triangular “square,” where the alleys meet in an irregular junction, registering the absolute rightness of that place, knowing it had been a place of chance meetings, of assignations, of talk, thirty-six hundred years ago. But ancient Akrotiri, while uniquely well preserved, was not the first such town. It would have been already the inheritor of a mature building tradition, originating who knows where or when but imagined out of the ground by people finding a way to live together.

In Vilnius, the imagining was not done all at once, either. But, I’d been hearing for years that the old towns of the Baltic capitals were largely intact, as if stilled in amber through the long centuries, and I’d come to have a look, to see if the towns would answer, would speak to my desire to find myself again walking the curved alleys of what feels like memory. My expectations were tempered, however; I knew no place is exempt from time, from history, and certainly not the capitals of Lithuania, or Latvia, or Estonia, where armies have marched, to and fro, for centuries.

In Vilnius, I’ve found a room off Bernardinu, in a quiet and irregular courtyard, where an old woman shuffles out in her slippers to arrange her laundry on a few yards of clothesline several times a day. I don’t forget her when I walk through the passageway out to Bernardinu, into streets dominated by people decidedly young. The old town in Vilnius is being restored. It has been undergoing a major restoration for years, another kind of springtime, I guess, but restoration displaces old people even as it renews the old buildings. The old town in Vilnius has only been partially restored, but the old people have long since retreated into ramshackle courtyards. They walk the expensive streets looking dispossessed, looking more out of place than the tourists.

On Bernardinu, I walk down. At first the sweep is right and then a long leftward curve, down to Pilies Gatve—Castle Street—the main artery of old Vilnius. Crossing under the arch over Benardinu onto Pilies, I step out of the quiet of a residential street into the commotion of a world public and commercial. Pilies has always had a commercial character, and here always is a long time. Many of the buildings still standing on the cobbled street date from the sixteenth century. But maybe not the cobbles themselves, which look too cleanly cut for old. The shape of the street itself, however, has the real old-feel, the way it tapers and widens, like something grown. I walk up it often, admiring the buildings. Pedestrians dominate the street, a few walking fast, going somewhere, but many more strolling. Their own paths up or down the sinuous street shift side to side as whim suggests. I wonder if Pilies Gatve has ever before in its long history looked so gay, so bright. Closely tended, the stucco facades of the buildings all are smooth, and the paint as delicious looking as the tubs in an ice cream shop, yellow and mint green, raspberry and sherbet orange, a blueberry purple, a vanilla white, and one blackish building, suggesting licorice.

Whether the buildings are Gothic or Baroque, they each have a share in the pastel paint that contributes so strongly to the feel of the street. The colors scroll by as you walk, striped by shadows and lit by the watery light of the far north angling in over the rooftops. Pilies must be the most fully renovated street in the old town, and it raises the question, of course, about what’s really old here, not the plaster, not the paint, not the paving stones; the surfaces are new, as are many of the businesses: trendy restaurants and shops, some shops dealing exclusively in amber. And yet, the old still informs these places, deeper than skin. The surfaces must have been renewed many times, after all, in five hundred years. But the shape of things, the deeper patterns, have persisted, and now are the very reason that the surfaces are renewed, for tourists who flock to see the place, for natives who feel that the identity of their city is bound up in the old irregularities of these streets. Still, the feeling that the newness of the surfaces impairs the authenticity of the old town is no doubt widespread. Here and there, I see places where the restorers have left neat cutouts in the new stucco to reveal the real old bricks or stones underneath, which tacitly acknowledges the difficulties.

Still, I like walking in color, the gold trapezoids of reflected light shimmering on the streets, on the walls. And later, standing in weather suddenly threatening, I can hardly credit how gorgeous the Baroque spires of St. Catherine’s look, picked out by the sun, pink and white against a blue-black sky. Then the rain does fall. Still, I feel lucky to have seen the big pink church in such a light. But the odds are good for such luck in Vilnius; the low skyline is thick with spires, towers, belfries, and domes. Strolling the ever-turning lanes of the old town, they loom up suddenly, and often, and drop from sight just as suddenly. An old-town layout makes small provision for broad vistas. Perhaps this is one of the attractions, the way the turning streets serve up a new prospect every few steps, and in Vilnius this impression is strengthened by the changing paint, the ribbon of ice cream colors unscrolling on either side of the street.

Back in my room, I look out into the half-light of what feels like it should be night but is not. The laundry is in. I’ve been out walking all day long. Several days. On the bent streets I now know my way, if not at every turn, at most. The maze is coming down. The heightened attention that a maze calls up, that itself brightens or darkens the world, would ease, and I would be a familiar of this place, if I were staying on. But I’m a traveler, and soon I’ll be exploring different streets, in Tallinn. I’ll be leaving with a little of the strangeness still on.

Strangeness is good, almost our only hope against the opacity of presumption, that thick lens. I’ve been wondering about why I’m here. I’ve been wondering about what this kind of travel is all about. I know my desire to walk the bent streets is a shared desire, that the place itself has been restored to call out to the likes of me, to tourists. Perhaps that’s troubling, in a way, the familiar irony: that the authenticity of the Baltic old towns is threatened by the people who come to see them, and by the people catering to those visitors, until the whole place becomes so ersatz you might as well be touring Las Vegas. But that’s just so, and the dynamics not so hard to understand. The desire that’s catered to, however, is harder to touch. I suppose that whipping boy Romanticism will have to take another turn at the post, that the hard but true realities of the industrial and now the postindustrial age will be seen to have called up yet again sentimental reconstructions of what was and has been lost. And likely there is something to that, but this argument is so dismissive it discourages thinking; indeed, it discourages making the trip. Still, we take these journeys. And for the most part the impulse to visit goes unexamined, travel in and of itself is seen as a sufficient reason to go, and this is perhaps the most obscuring presumption of all.

Okay, I admit to having a theory about the attraction. It takes for granted that life at home doesn’t entirely satisfy, that if it did we wouldn’t take to the roads. Of course, life lets us down in any number of ways, personal ways, but I’m thinking now about something bigger than that, something cultural, which is not to single out our ways as peculiarly deficient. The deficiency, according to my theory, must be universal. As far back as I can remember, it has seemed self-evident to me that people are fundamentally the same now as they ever were, that a baby transported across the millennia into this now would grow up just as modern as the rest of us. And, to turn it around, send a baby back five or ten thousand years, perhaps even thirty thousand years, and that baby would find its way into the culture there, would grow to be an adult of that time. Rather than a Paiute trailing a travois through the alkaline dust of the Great Basin, a man signing for a box on his front porch, making small talk with the guy from UPS. Rather than a man twisting the top off a bottle of seltzer, a man carrying a water jug through a low door in Harappa, in the Indus valley, five thousand years ago. Sitting down with a cheap paperback in front of the gas logs, or a monk isolating himself in the rock hills over the Egyptian desert. Driving I-68 over the mountains and on toward D.C., or navigating the Australian outback by the songlines. Writing, or way back, spraying pigment through a straw at my splayed hand to leave a print on a wall in a cave in what we now call France. The accident of our birth, we say, meaning the when and the where and the to whom. And perhaps I don’t mean much more than that, just to acknowledge that whatever, whoever we are when our head crowns into this world, who and what we become is wildly dependent on that when and where. Soon enough the culture and the life-ways so fuse with that baby born into the world under prairie stars, or in a mud house in a Moroccan oasis, or in an American hospital, that all those other ways of being human, the great panoply of possible lives that newborn could have lived, get lost. I was a baby brought home to a white ranch house in a blue blanket in 1950, in Portland, Oregon; that was my accident. Out of the ways of being human, this way.

In saying yes to one way of living we say no to the myriad. No to a life of herding or hunting, no to seafaring, no to the raven people set flying by their shaman. No to the outcast, to the Untouchable, to life before the wheel. People we could have been, were, in fact, ready to be when we entered this world.

Was that sea of potential exhausted in making the one fish? Is the oblivion absolute? Or do we walk in a crowd of ghosts, our unrealized lives, their whispering a murmur just out of hearing? Not ghosts, maybe, but I think there is sometimes a responsiveness that has more to do with our unrealized potentials than with who we’ve become. Mostly the voices are the quiet voices of muted yearning, but occasionally they clamor, and one voice rises up to shout, Yes, yes; I didn’t realize such worlds existed when I said no to this.

We hear these voices most when traveling, away from the circumstances that half make us who we are; and, traveling alone, we hear them louder, no one there to remind us of our confining self. So travel attracts us, attracts me, by appealing to potentials that have gone unexpressed. Of course, we travel through space, time no more than the duration of the trip. It’s right now everywhere, sure. Time travel remains impossible. But that now is not simple; the life-ways of times long gone in one place are still practiced in another. In that sense, time is uneven. You don’t have to travel long to find fields worked with white bullocks, to watch the seeds of the coming harvest broadcast from human hands, to see offerings of rice and fruit, wicks burning in butter, rather than a tray going round fluttering with rumpled dollars. This is a reason for travel.

And life as it was lived leaves a mark, sometimes a distinct mark, in old buildings, old neighborhoods built to answer the needs of those other ways, a tradition and aesthetic ours no more. Walking such streets doesn’t always have to do with the past, but, responding, we sense something unused in us now, almost lost in the life we are living. This is good to know, even if, returning home, we seem to be restored to our former selves.

In Vilnius, the impulse to restore has called up, it seems almost at once, the impulse to vandalize. If Pilies Gatve keeps its paint refreshed, most of the old town alleys have been defaced by graffiti. It’s easy to imagine the sound of spray cans being shaken while the painters with rollers and brushes are still in sight, carrying their ladders away.

::

Tallinn

I arrive in Tallinn under the weather, with a headache. Migrainous, if not migraine. My inner weather mixes with the skies of Tallinn like soap and water shaken in a jar, gas fumes rising off a puddle, heat waves off a tarred road. A cloud rippling like a flag in the mind. Sick, too sick to see straight. In a less nauseous moment, I somehow manage to get to my room on Uus. By midnight, though I still hurt, the world has separated from me and looks stable out there, if ghostly, in the peculiar pallor of Tallinn’s white nights. It is the weekend, the few revelers who pass by sound loud enough for giants, big voiced and rudely made.

In the morning, the drinkers have given way to small herds of folk trailing behind tour guides, each with a number held aloft on a stick. I think of birds in flocks, the way they turn, of the bellwether, ant highways, ways of moving together. I let them walk on by and then pick my way through two-hearted Tallinn like an invalid. Tallinn has two old towns—Toompea, the administrative town, on the high ground, and, below and toward the harbor, the much larger mercantile town. On a map, the towns look like a cell about to divide. Walking, the difference is altitude. Toompea looks out over its city walls, the lower town does not. And after a quick circuit of Toompea, I head back down, preferring the alley called the “short leg” not only for its name (the alternative route is the “long leg,” after all), but because it’s steep and crooked. In spite of the reputed attractiveness of big views, it’s the lower town in Tallinn that gets the crowds.

From outside, it’s hard to get a comprehensive look at the Holy Spirit Church. Air transport would be required. From street level, if the structure stands out, it’s only because it’s painted a severe white. Tourists with cameras generally settle for a photo of the clock face that overlooks the small and triangular Great Guild Square, or they stand and shoot up, taking a picture of the corby-step gable and the spire. In spite of that spire, the white church has a squat look, as if it had hunched down among its neighbors and held on, for almost seven hundred years. But inside, the massive limestone walls and pillars are rendered almost weightless. I’m not sure how. The groined ceiling vaults have the feel of nine tents pitched in the open, in a field maybe, so distant do the adjoining buildings seem. In Tallinn, I visited the Holy Spirit Church many times. I studied it, I submitted to it. I watched the light shift with time and weather. I listened to a concert, a boy’s choir, the timbre of the little boys’ voices the very quiver of innocent flesh. I made friends with the cat that sometimes prowled there, scratching its belly as it sat next to me in a pew. I stood at the back, listening to a sermon.

I want to praise the Church of the Holy Spirit, but the terms elude me. Perhaps it’s not so hard to describe. The plank floors, all the finish gone except tight against the pews, where it shows dark brown. The simple, blackened oak of the pews themselves. The still light. I want to use the word sober as a term of praise. And serious. And quiet. A place for the small, honest voices to be heard, of conscience, of simple recognition, and of welcome. Nothing for show, no reaching, not even for heaven. There is room here for sorrow, that good sadness we can’t resist and really live.

In the tradition of almshouse churches, the Church of the Holy Spirit has a main and a side aisle. The main aisle is centered on the choir, in which stands the fifteenth century altar, the work of Bernt Notke and his workshop in Lubeck. The altar is a triptych with double, folding wings. Fully open, the way I see it, the altar reveals carved and polychrome figures. The central panel depicts the Pentecost, the apostles clustered around Mary, who looks up to receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. The mood expectant, the scene hushed. The altar, the only thing in the church that could be called splendid, stands back in the choir, at a considerable remove from the main hall. Close, it might be too much. But although Mary looks beautiful against her gold robe and the gilt plaque of her halo, there is something of the puppet in the apostles, something naïve. And this naïve quality sits well with the church hall, where the primary decorations are the simple, painted illustrations of biblical stories.

When I walk down the aisles, the church goes in motion, the pillars on either side move in front of the walls, in front of the barrel vaults in the walls. The pillars support the shallow raised choirs that run the length of the church and connect visually with the organ loft at the back. A great rail runs in front of the choirs and the loft, on three sides, and it is this rail that is divided into the painted panels, the biblical illustrations—Noah preparing for the flood, the rainbow sign, an Annunciation, Christ baptized, Christ walking on water under a brown sky—over sixty in all. The illustrations on the rail and the railing itself are painted in a restricted palette, somewhat like the Baltic woods would look in full summer. Ivy green and olive; burnt sienna; brown; a little muted red; a dark, watery blue, dense enough to float an ark, for a man to stroll on. Supported by the brown pillars, the whole suggests a forest canopy, as if in the hall you stood in a meadow, under peaked pavilions, and looked out at surrounding trees. This would be the church for me, if only.

I stand for a moment in the doorway, in the thin light of evening. Then I am walking, and walking I remember a line of poetry, written about the time the church was built, by Charles d’Orleans, a prisoner then, in England. “My ghostly fader, I me confesse.” That word, ghostly, for holy, that is what calls up the old poet. A presence felt but not seen, or if seen, just glimpsed. Something apparitional, just fading from sight. A white reflection before the glass goes clear. The ground under your feet, sinking away. Or to wake in the night reaching out for a disappearing world. So much of what we sense, what we want, won’t hold still for our embrace. And we are left to live in the tangible world, a world that at least persists in seeming to be there.

Here, too, the ice cream colors, even sorbets, orange and raspberry sorbet, the colors too intense to admit an admixture of cream. The alleys bending, curvaceous, the old buildings again made smooth. Everything beautiful in the long evening. Another day I visit the church of St. Nicholas, now a museum. Not all the old churches have been reconsecrated after the half-century of communism. I take my time. Here, too, there are altarpieces with double wings—or as they are also called, shutters. And I notice how one, from the workshop of Adriane Issenbraut, painted around 1515, features a crucifixion in the foreground, and a panorama of Jerusalem behind, blued by distance, a walled Jerusalem that looks suspiciously like Tallinn. I don’t hurry, I walk on, and after a while I find myself in a crowd of school children, just as I am sitting down in front of another work by Bernt Notke, his justly praised Dance of Death. The children’s teacher stands in front of us, lecturing, pointing first at the lively dead dressed in their winding sheets, then at one or another of the living, the Cardinal, the Emperor, the Empress, the Pope, or the King. I am amused that in the painting it is the living who look the stiffs, while the dead rock on. The children, in their matching uniforms, try to attend, to follow what their teacher is saying, but wide-eyed, the hum of their own lives is just too much for them; they can’t listen for long. Then the teacher calls the kids to order and marches them away, leaving me alone with the high-stepping, dancing dead. I consider them. The world the living in the painting knew has gone with them. And Bernt Notke’s warning looks to go unheeded at St. Nicholas. The museumgoers walk the length of the twenty-five-foot panel, not afraid. Not one of them seems to heed the warning, looks as nervous as the Cardinal or the King, nor raises a hand overhead to dance a step or two with the dead, who are perhaps too dead, too long dead, to have the force of poor Yorick for Hamlet, who “knew him.” I think I see the tourists in the picture, though, in the background, in the two oblivious strollers out walking their scampering dogs. Still, our eyes often bear false witness. It’s more than likely that at least some of the old, and perhaps even some of the young, walk in front of that Dance with a dead friend.

::

Riga

Here, the trolleys are still running. The time of trolleys is still now, and I ride them daily, thinking it was a good time and a time not so distant that I can’t remember trolleys in Portland, where I grew up, raining sparks down from the wires strung overhead. They’ve brought light rail back to Portland, in a very limited way, but in Riga the trolleys never left. Screech and clangor, forty cents for any ride, which is good, as my ride out to Mezaparks, where I’m staying, takes me clear to the end of the line.

In Riga, too, the old town is the big attraction, the alleys and squares set with tables and chairs for the trade. But there are not so many old buildings here, and I know why. I’ve seen the photos, the old town bombed out and looking a sad ruin by the end of WWII. What remains is the plat of the streets, a few old buildings, and a lot of infill, some of it attractive, without a doubt. But perhaps even the plat is not as interesting as in the other Baltic capitals. It is less sinuous, less bent, and the whole of the old town smaller and enclosed by something a lot like a rectangle. What’s left has been made to accommodate itself to a modern grid. Which is not to say Riga isn’t an attractive city, it is; there is a great deal more to Riga than the old town, and the old town is pleasant enough. I enjoy walking there.

Still, the signature building in old Riga is the House of the Blackheads, a guild building originally constructed in the fourteenth century, but rebuilt from the ground up very recently, the job called done in 1999. The House of the Blackheads stands on Town Square, and it looks both old and new. It must be camera friendly, as it is by far the most photographed building I have seen in the Baltic States. Someone, it seems, is always taking its picture, and at times the square is circumscribed by a great arc of tourists turning their cameras on its fantastic façade. Or façades, as it has two, an artifact of an addition to the original Gothic structure in the nineteenth century that more or less mimicked the medieval building. Each has elaborate stepped gables in stone and matching stone window and door surrounds, which show brightly against the red brick of the buildings proper. But honestly, the brick is too new to be called red; it’s still bright orange. And bells and whistles! The blue and gilt clock face, the small forest of decorative crosses and spires climbing up the gables, the statues. It’s not modern, but part of what the House of the Blackheads is is new. Rebuilt for the eight-hundredth anniversary of the founding of the city, the building clearly makes a claim for history, or against history, depending on how you want to look at it.

I step down off the trolley on Brivibis and walk toward Gertrudes Street, ready to have a look at some of the most renowned of Riga’s Art Nouveau buildings. And the buildings are there, on Elizabetes Street and Alberta, far and wide, really, great blocks of buildings not shy about decoration. Most of these buildings are large apartments, built to accommodate Riga’s burgeoning population in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The timing proved fortunate. The buildings are attractive still, decked out in a wild array of motifs, classical, Gothic, Egyptian, and more. Artful low-relief work and freestanding statues, glazed tiles, and, especially, beautiful doors. The streets are wide, the buildings low. The population is dense enough to support sidewalks busy with pedestrians, the best thing about a modern city, I often think. Somehow, on busy sidewalks the energy of the crowd becomes your energy, and you feel as if you can keep going longer, farther. And I don’t think that feeling is an illusion.

But the energy is frenetic, and finally, I have to admit, I’d rather go less far but quietly, and less in the company of cars. On Alberta Iela, I get my wish, the street silent, almost deserted. I linger with the pair of sphinxes guarding the entry to the apartment at #2, watching leaf shadows play over their black faces. I look first to my left, and then right, the street straight end to end, and I miss already the bent streets of the old towns. I’ve lived my life on straight streets; whatever they have to say—about geometry or the strict line perhaps—I’ve heard enough of it. I like the decorative facades of Art Nouveau; they make me look around, forget for a while the linear prospects. The beautiful details, the great, vertical slashes of red tiles in the façade at #2. “God is in the details,” as Mies van der Rohe, famously, if oddly, remarked, since the buildings he and his fellow moderns designed came so perilously close to not having any.

So I gravitate back to Riga’s old town, where, after all, a fair amount of the infill is Art Nouveau. I don’t fail to notice the low-relief peacock on Smilsu or, just down the street, over a door, the gorgeous, sleepy face of a woman, her eyes closed, her ears hidden each under an elaborately carved curl, her mouth pursed as if she were tasting a melancholy truth. Weary, I long for her beauty, to rest in it. I decide to sit down for coffee, in a small square; I take a table inside, hoping for a break from all the bustle. Nodding in front of my espresso, I drift toward reverie, one of the attractions of traveling alone, a luxury, to court the imagination, to indulge a reverie that is sometimes abetted by weariness. But not this time. The door swings wide and in they strut, the louts. I’ve heard of their kind, bands of bucks who fly to the Baltics just to drink and make rowdy. English, this crowd, and they hardly look real. Somehow, they’ve been inflated into something outsize. Steroids, maybe. But big, all of them, and for sure rowdy. They’ve come in for the bathroom and crowd into the tiny cubicle several at a time, brushing off the protests of the wait staff. Then they swagger out, still buckling up, a couple exposing themselves for fun or maybe just failing to notice. They bully everyone. They talk loud, loud as shouting, but it is just talk. They sit down at tables with people they don’t know, tickle the chins of little girls and babies. No one dares confront them, the louts in the orange T-shirts. They have a leader, smaller, smarter. They do what he says, their Mephisto. Dressed in white overalls and pink gym shoes, he wears a green wig and has powdered his face, painted his eyebrows white. His jibes are witty and malicious, way more witty than what the locals are going to be able to appreciate in English. He is the only one of them who doesn’t project a wild, pulsing energy. He seems at ease in a relaxed malevolence. Is it the orange shirts that make me think of Clockwork Orange, or just their sociopathic glee? They dare you to admit you want them to leave. They draw out their exit beyond what is bearable until, like every bully you have ever known, they stomp out and are gone.

If, in walking the streets of the old town, I sometimes feel the ghostly presence of a me who might have lived in such a place, long ago, I have to acknowledge that the opposite is also true, that the people who walked here then, when the old streets were new, already carried in them the unfulfilled potential to live a life much like mine. And I too must carry in me potential ways of living that some future, had I been born into it, would have called into being. And perhaps this future self is the ghostliest self of all, the most unknowable. Still, imagining futures has its attractions, as it must have for Anthony Burgess and Stanley Kubrick, when they conjured up the Clockwork Orange, and occasionally the supposers do turn out to have gotten it right. But I don’t think about the future very much, a time in which I, of necessity, will have no better part than one of Bert Notke’s dancing dead. And somehow I need the artifacts, especially the architecture, to call to the ghosts within.

After the louts, I ride the trolley back out to Mezaparks, weary enough of the present. I walk there, too, in the green suburb, a place very like the one where I grew up, if grander. Mezaparks was one of the first garden suburbs ever built, so was itself a harbinger of the future most of my contemporaries were born into. It has a home feel to me that is very different than the ghostly reality of the old towns, a home feel based on simple memory. This is a suburban neighborhood, meant to be green, quiet, and safe, although only two months ago there was a brothel in a house on the next street, and not at all long ago many of these houses were inhabited by ten or twenty families apiece, like the urban warrens described by Dostoyevsky and Dickens. And a half-timbered place a few hundred yards from where I’m staying was notorious during Riga’s Russian years when it served as the interrogation house for the KGB. And if you know where to look, I’m told, you can still see the remains of the rail line that served a small concentration camp built in Mezaparks during the Nazi occupation. Architecture won’t save us from history.

So how do we choose where we travel? How do I choose? I often think of the poet H.D. in this regard, remembering these lines from her Trilogy:

I go where I love and where I am loved,

…

I go to the things I love

with no thought of duty or pity;

I go where I belong, inexorably…

Ah, how I admire these lines, how I envy their certainty! I think they are as good a formulation of what I intend by traveling as any I’ve seen (in spite of the fact that H.D. is writing about travel here obliquely, if at all). Still, H.D.’s lines suggest the eros of traveling, that the activity is bound up deep down with love, and they insist on the implacable seriousness of going, on the seriousness of life, however much comedy there is to endure. Comedy is not the same thing as frivolousness, after all. And yet, I don’t know what I’ll find until I get there, and often enough traveling I don’t find “the things I love.” Too often my ghostly selves, which might help me escape, a little, being time-bound, and to such a time, simply fail to materialize, and I find myself walking down dusty roads at world’s end trying to reconstruct just how I got there.

In Riga, I go shopping for a souvenir, for something small to attach a memory to, for a gift. In the Baltics, such a thing is likely to be amber. I look, I ask questions. The colors of amber, honey, cognac, green, black, and white. The salesgirls point out the occlusions, bits of fern or the wing of a small insect, things caught out of time. In a gemstone occlusions count as a fault, but in amber they add value. They seem to suspend time, and for this the traveler is expected to pay. But I find the equation a little too easy, and we never make anything our own by a simple purchase. The world is a harder, more exacting place than that. So I ask questions, try to know something. Anything I’m at all interested in I touch, getting a feel for amber. Although I like the black amber and the pieces with a dark, reddish hue, it’s the white amber that speaks to me with the most gravity. White amber is oldest, the salesgirls tell me, very primly, not old themselves at all. Although they can’t explain it, the years in the end press the clarity out of amber, and then what you have is white amber, opaque, not white so much as a marbled yellow, a little honey or bitter lemon stirred into milk. And any moss or moth that might be in it stays hidden, as if behind fog. This appeals to me as the better, the truer story, the way clarity is lost with age, in history, in our own lives. The whiteness. Already I can feel the page going blank under my hand.

In H.D.’s Trilogy, birds are the great travelers, and want to be time travelers, too. But like the rest of us, however clearly lost worlds speak to them, the birds must fly the atmospheres of their own time. H.D. imagines her migrants,

who still (they say) hover

over the lost island, Atlantis,

seeking what we once knew…

Is it an island under the waves we seek? And if so, what is there to hope? H.D.’s birds “seek but find no rest/ till they drop,” in freefall, from the sky.

[W]hat if the islands are lost? what if the waters

cover the Hesperides? they would rather remember—

remember the golden apple-trees;

O, do not pity them, as you watch them drop one by one,

for they fall exhausted, numb, blind

but in certain ecstasy,

for theirs is the hunger

for Paradise.

(2007)