Naturally enough

Man tends to regard the order he lives in as natural. The houses he passes on his way to work seem more like rocks rising out of the earth than like products of human hands. He considers the work he does in his office or factory as essential to the harmonious functioning of the world. The clothes he wears are exactly what they should be, and he laughs at the idea that he might equally well be wearing a Roman toga or medieval armor. <…> He is accustomed to satisfying those of his physiological needs which are considered private as discreetly as possible, without realizing that such a pattern of behavior is not common to all human societies.

Czeslaw Milosz The Captive Mind

 Everyone has his own past, fascinating stories of his own. However, in most cases we don’t consider our stories being something outstanding, something uncommon. I remember this one girl who I worked as a partner with in my creative writing class. The task was to get some story from your partner and to write it down in attractive form. When it was her turn to tell me the story, she shrugged and said: “I’m so sorry, I really would like to tell you something interesting, something thrilling, but… Nothing uncommon ever happened to me. I always had an average life: parents, school, college, friends…”

I was doing my best asking her millions of questions, jumping from one topic to another, trying to discover at least traces of interesting story. We ended up with her memories of her family trip to Sri Lanka, which was not super exciting but that was the best we found for those 15 minutes that we had for interview. And it wasn’t that she had such a boring and banal life that there was nothing to talk about. The point was that she didn’t see her life as being unusual, as unnatural, as being different from anyone else’s.

This thought from Czeslaw Milosz’s book The Captive Mind made me thinking of this human tendency – considering the order he lives as natural. However, the notion natural was created by the human being himself. Nobody knows what is natural, but everyone has his own definition of natural based on the way that the world around him (including himself) lives. When I was back in Russia 5-6 years ago and I was watching typical American movies showing typical American college life, this life order was unnatural for me, it was fascinating because it was different from the life around me. And those movies attracted me by being different from the natural (on my scale) life order. The same thing I noticed here just in the opposite direction: for American students movies or videos about life in Russia (especially, in Russian small towns and villages) seem incredibly interesting and exotic. Mostly, for only one, the same reason – it’s unnatural for them. It’s a little bit sad to realize that this curiosity about other cultures and other countries is based not on the longing to explore the world around, but mostly on this thrilling and arousing adrenaline idea of the dangerous, unexplored unnatural world somewhere overseas. Something new, something unusual sounds much more attractive than old and familiar.

Another sad part of this story is that pretty often we don’t find natural way of living exciting: it’s a routine, something that has always been that way and is not going to ever change. We regard it as inconceivable that the natural order we get used to may suddenly crash and we might be returned to a state of a primitive man. Or that this quiet and peaceful world around might suddenly become a nightmare where brothers are killing their father and each other. Or that this full of parks and national forests region might turn to a desert where we be happy to find a tiny oasis with drinkable water. But the thing is that for some people it is natural life now and they consider our life is unnatural.

It’s a deep philosophical question but what was important for me in this tendency was a writer’s role, a writer’s challenge. A writer should be the exceptional one, who doesn’t have a notion of naturalness, the one who sees everything around as unnatural and therefore attractive and thrilling. The biggest challenge for a writer is to find the way to persuade his readers that natural things are not boring, to find the words to show this unnaturalness of the world that a reader observes every day. It’s about showing the alternative way of looking at familiar things. And that is one of the hardest challenges for a writer. Because he is a human being and his life seems to be so natural and boring if he doesn’t travel a lot and doesn’t write about exceptional discoveries or cruel wars… 

To listen.

-        

-         -  So… only some of us can hear this music?

-        -   No, only some of us listen to it.

This dialogue was the most striking moment of the movie August Rush for me. It was not only about music or beauty of the world around us that we don’t notice so often. It was more than that. I suddenly realized how often I don’t listen, I don’t look, I don’t think. I prefer to say that I don’t hear, I don’t see, I don’t know. That I don’t notice.

When I was studying piano at music school a mandatory part of our program was ensemble. My teacher was really good in selecting partners for ensemble: students in her ensembles have never had the same temper; they always had different performance styles. I was a too tall for her age teenage-girl, a little bit clumsy and uneasy with guys. Well, at least that’s how I fell about myself. My partner was my best friend, a frail skinny girl with blond eye-lashes and tiny fingers. An image of a girl for me at that time.

I remember my frustration and envy because I always got the second voice on the piano in the kingdom of bass, accompaniment and pedal. I always sounded heavy and dull; I always had to play quieter to let the melody in the first voice reign in the air. At least that’s how I felt about my part. And my delicate friend in the first voice always performed this refined, beautiful melody with the tinkling notes of the upper octaves. Moreover, she always sat closer to the audience and I knew from personal experience that nobody noticed the second voice performer, everyone followed fingers of the first voice performer. I confess, I thought it was unfair that my teacher never gave me the first voice.

I graduated from music school after 9 years of studying with big doubts whether I should leave music or not. My friend dropped off after 3 years.  And it never crossed my mind that my teacher’s strategy of choosing partners and distributing voices in fact was supposed to flatter me. I never realized till now that the second voice in most of the ensembles is the hardest and the most important one. The accompaniment has to be deep and strong, full of feelings and thoughts; it has to be a true soul of the piece. While the first voice is just the front facade of the piece, the brilliant but meaningless decoration of the building, it’s the face, not the soul. Pretty often the first voice score is much easier to perform than the second one.

It wasn’t till couple of days ago that I noticed that if you cut off the first voice part from most of the pieces (even not ensembles) you will still hear the melody, you will still see the core of the piece. The true melody of the music is in the second hand’s score. This discovery made me thinking of the true core in different things, not just music. How often we notice only the bright facade, the “first-hand’s score” of the world around us choosing a good-looking person over the kind one to be friend with, buying a colorful, shallow magazine instead of modest-looking but profound book, watching the vacuous, super-hero movie with special effects instead of thoughtful, but “not-action” one. We are greeting famous sportsmen, musicians, scholars forgetting to notice their coaches, their teachers who are often the base of their success but always live in the shadow.

Everyone can see, everyone can hear, everyone can know. It’s just about making an effort to notice a small, unpretentious room with books behind the luxurious sparkling entrance. 

To wait (inspired by the Russian documentary about life in Siberia “Happy people”)

She gets used to wait. Once he told her this phrase and it stuck in her mind. Every time she feels worn-out and weak she just replays his words again and again in her mind. And it seems give her a strength to move on.

Our nature found a right place for everyone - animals, plants, birds, fish – but a man. We have to find our place and our calling ourselves. Those who found THEIR place on the Earth are happy people. That’s what he said. And it looks like he found it; he found the very spot and the very moment where he was destined to be. Otherwise how would he survive there, all alone with taiga for more than three months in a row?

Tatyana’s husband is not gabby at all – all hunters in taiga are more used to birds whistling and snow crunching than to human speech. But sometimes when he is a little moony or just can’t fall asleep at night after coming home from his hunting sector he talks. A wooden, firmly felled house seems to be too silent for him after last 90 nights in a tiny log cabin in the middle of a wild forest. He shares with her thoughts that passed through his mind during long days and nights with no one for hundreds of kilometers around. There are a lot of deep insights but there is never enough time to finish them. There is always something much more urgent to do – work, everyday survival in the cold, dogs, forest to take care of.

Hunters don’t carry with them all these fetishistic crap like photos, lockets, coins. Space in their luggage is very limited. He just remembers. He remembers the sound of his daughter’s laughing when he carried her on his back around the whole house. He remembers Tatyana’s warm breath on his callous hands when she helped him to unbutton his frosted coat.

Nobody ever asked him why he hunts, why he spends half of the year in taiga using every opportunity to get fish or precious arctic fox. Everyone knows the answer. A hunter has a family to take care of. So it was through hundreds of years.   

To wait isn’t the hardest thing to do. In fact, Tatyana never has time to torment herself over her husband when he is out of village, hunting somewhere in the impenetrable thickets of taiga. There is no energy left for it after the whole day of cooking, cleaning the snow, heating the house, taking care of kids and other millions of things to do in her big household.

However, painful moments are those skimpy conversations through the radio when she barely unscrambles a couple of words (all people in the village use the same radio line to talk to their relatives). He is ok, dogs are fine, and kisses to children. She waits for that call for weeks and it’s usually done in 2-3 minutes. If it works at all because the radio signal in taiga is mutable. And she is waiting again.

The hardest days are last three days before his comeback. Tatyana feels unable to settle down, her house fish pie gets overcooked and kids suddenly become naughty. She never knows when exactly he shows up because it depends on Yenisei River, on amount of snow, on weather, on his snowmobile and tons of other factors. It took her a while to get used to this uncertainty. She still winces every time she hears a drone of the motor from the street. Every minute she is ready to run out of the house to meet him.

But there are moments when she knows that they ARE those happy people he was talking about. When they sit side-by-side with all other villagers in the small, decorated concert room of their local school and look at their children singing and dancing in a circle around a New Year’s tree.  She hears their daughter’s joyous laughter and feels her husband’s protecting arm around her shoulders… It’s worth to wait.