i agree!
I left facebook too more than a month ago and i feel great! is like be a bird without cage!
No more social cages.
Cheers!

Regards,
Renan
The Royal Order of the TulangHabi
http://orderoftulanghabi.wordpress.com/
http://tulanghabi.wordpress.com/

You allude to a lot of salient things in your post, and that’s what makes this discussion interesting to me. But, to take an allusion (perhaps unintended) that I caught — compare, then, Irish culture to Latvian. National romantics would have revived the Irish language. Enthusiasts still strive to maintain it. But, for all practical purposes, Irish has one foot in the grave.

I certainly hope I don’t mistake language for communication (as Robert Kelly put it — is to turn pine trees into paper towels, for all those years birds danced in the up of their slow?), but to bring this back to reality, or your “modern reality”… the Song Celebration is not an event geared towards the outer world (the mute, as it were, in Russian), despite its origins. You don’t get it. You can’t get it. The words carry weight you haven’t even the slightest of the surface of. To put it more simply — you haven’t the palest idea of anything said.

Subversive? The Song Celebration was extremely subversive at its inception. It wasn’t a question of “traditional cultural myth” but of how that myth translates to… well, OK, “modern reality.” To the left, this soon became the conservation and illicit sale of pet herring — nationalism, which started here in a book of translations of poetry in the 1850s in order to prove that the peasant tongue could carry even the classical, became “bourgeois” in the 1880s.

“More progressive mythology of the collective”?!? That mythology had a huge following here (more than anywhere, actually), on the way to the collective tomb. Been there, done that.

So one returns to the whorish herring and potable myth?

But it doesn’t work that way — I’m certainly not challenging your personal battle with whatever myths bear down upon you in Oz. But I won’t stoop to “explaining” that Latvians are a lot more like Abos, either — neither approach would be true.

The Song Celebration is, in essence, a claim to nationhood by an indigenous people long oppressed. It very obviously resonates with most people in Latvia, whatever their politics.

My status as an Anglophone definitely informs my understanding and conception of what culture is (although I dispute the notion that imperialism naturally accompanies being an Anglophone).

As a person from an English-speaking nation, I contend that for me language is not the original source of culture. Certainly it informs it, but it is not central to it. Basic communication is indeed central to cultural relevance, but to mistake language for communication is to miss the forest for the trees. For a native English-speaker, especially an Australian (a country where everyone except the Aborigines originate from somewhere else), language is merely one string in the bow of communication. If it were central to Australian culture (whatever that elusive concept might entail) then there would be very little separating the cultures of any of the post-colonial English states.

Certainly myth-making is a collective experience, and a very invocational one at that, and you clearly make the point that to understand Latvia is to understand its relationship with Nature and the agrarian.

But again, I think our misunderstandings are inextricably bound to our very specific geographical origins (perhaps much like our respective cultures!). When I refer to Mardi Gras I refer not to that behemoth of American testosterone, but to the Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras, an event that celebrates the ‘sameness’ of its participants through the expression of their singularity. It is a political event, an historically very subversive event, one that actively challenged the traditional cultural myth of an Australian as a ‘heterosexual white male built on rugged individualism.’ The event used the irreverence of carnival to break through the myths that excluded and marginalized certain parties, and through challenging it, help to usher in a new more progressive mythology of the collective.

A friend of mine once made the mistake of saying “without myth — all you are is blood and shit.”

I found your post quite interesting because it’s an outside view — with all of the limitations that implies.

But, for instance — in re language, as above — you’re conflating the “modern” with the urban and the so-called “multi-cultural,” and I think that’s a (bad) mistake.

It’s also the common imperialistic mistake of an Anglophone, really. Of course your inability to understand excludes you — shouldn’t it? Cultural relevance is inseparably bound to basic communication.

The “unofficial Latgallian anthem” is a poem by Anna Rancāne — “Tik skaidra volūda /
Kai yudiņs olūtā” (language as clear as water from the spring). The poem is an extended naturalistic metaphor — the land speaks, the bird cries, the fatherland echoes this, in essence… but whatever allergy one might have towards the paradigm, the thing is that the language does reflect its environment. This isn’t Australia — it is a place where most people lived in harmony with nature for untold centuries. Nature is not “wild” — it is a landscape, a human environment.

Of course it excludes “certain parties.” Of course that is part of a myth. But the scape and scope of song is in language — if you identify with a Little Ringed Plover, you might get this.

I lived in New Orleans for a couple of years. It’s certainly singular. But most everybody there has a horror of Mardi Gras! How are a million drunken frat boys from all over, relishing singularity, singular?

I take your point that I may have ‘missed the boat’ and my lack of understanding of the Latvian language would certainly have been central to this. As an outsider with only a rudimentary understanding of the country’s history and culture I am limited in the conclusions I can draw when presented with a foreign cultural celebration.

I totally agree that “Choral singing can’t be about singularity, after all. Neither is it a “celebration of sameness,” though — it’s a festival of the collective, not a carnival.”

However it is this very yearning for the collective that I find anachronistic. The creation and representation of the collective through recourse to agrarian and traditional motifs itself smacks of falsehood.

I do not mean to get into a teleological argument implying that everything ‘modern’ is good and real and everything ‘traditional’ is somehow false or unreal. I can only speak from own experience in this.

My home country, Australia, also constructs its collective nationhood around associations with ‘The Bush’ and ‘The Outback.’ However in Australia the recourse to agrarian and rural motifs as the locus of nationhood is not reality, it is collective myth: a carefully constructed, oft-repeated and fatally anachronistic myth. Australia is one of the most highly urbanized nations in the world, with 88% of the population living in urban centers. It is perhaps my downfall that I assumed a similar level of urbanism from Latvia.

The reason I reacted to the traditional ‘folk’ representation of Latvian culture with such distaste was informed by my experience with these paradigms in Australia. The complimentary myths of The Bush and The Outback in Australia deny and stifle the modern reality of its citizenship and the dominant, often competing (mutli-)cultural influences within the country. The construction of the collective through recourse to a notion of an agrarian past (even while coexisting with an urban present) tends to exclude certain parties from participating in and expressing their nationalism.

The very fact that my inability to understand the language excluded me from participating in or comprehending the cultural relevance of the parade seems to imply the limitations of a ‘traditional’ or ‘agrarian’ paradigm in expressing a modern, urban, multi-cultural nationhood.

In Australia, the myth of the bush and the outback is generally accompanied by a mythic representation of an archetypal Australian far divorced from the reality of its ethnic make-up: a white, heterosexual male built on a foundation of rugged individualism. I wonder whether the carnivalesque celebration of singularity might not be a truer representation of Latvian nationhood than recourse to an agrarian regional collective?

Latvia wasn’t “bled dry of every individuality, every irreducible singularity it possesses that sets it apart from the rest of the world” — the language (which I assume you don’t understand) is central to our identity and survived.

I don’t see how traditional songs lose their relevance due to Prada handbags. Tickets to the Celebration sold out the morning they went on sale, so the events obviously have relevance to tens of thousands of people. Hundreds of thousands watched the concerts on TV (considering the total population — that’s a lot of people!).

As to how forced the enthusiasm might be — perhaps you turned in too early. You can watch videos of people riding the streetcars after midnight, still singing.

It’s not a celebration of individuality as Mardi Gras can be (though some of the events are, such as the work of composers featured in the symphonic concert). Choral singing can’t be about singularity, after all. Neither is it a “celebration of sameness,” though — it’s a festival of the collective, not a carnival.

Bear in mind that the dance ensembles and choirs don’t spring forth at the arena every three years; they sing and dance together in every corner of Latvia between celebrations.

An element you seem to have missed is the regional, including dialects. The folk costumes aren’t the same — they differ by civil parish. The greetings shouted the loudest during the procession often come from people with a connection to the place whence the passing choir. There is a lively competition between choirs.

There’s certainly a hefty share of kitsch, especially in the less traditional offerings. One can argue about how the agrarian culture that produced the dainas retains its relevance — but is it irrelevant? Not long before the Song Celebration, Latvians celebrated solstice, the primary holiday. The cities empty out. Most still have roots in the rural.

Cities have always been cosmopolitan and, especially in Latvia, “foreign.” The Song Celebration was originally meant to prove our existence and status as a Kulturvolk, in 1873 — coinciding with the urbanization of ethnic Latvians.

Teaching in Daugavpils, where many of the students are from the countryside, one of the great pleasures was hanging out with young people in the evenings — they’d sing for hours, knowing innumerable traditional songs by heart.

Naturally, not everybody is into it. Many people prefer schlagers, Russian technopop, etc. — but these aren’t mutually exclusive, just as having a Prada handbag doesn’t mean that one has to forget ancient songs or stay ensconced at Double Coffee on solstice. One might use the mobile in the bag to connect to the virtual cabinet of dainas, where one can search the texts of nearly 200 000 folk songs.

Another illustration of relevance — political protest in Latvia is often accompanied by traditional songs, be it a liberal demonstration or a a protest by the far right.

In the first video, taken during the “Umbrella Revolution” last year, the lyrics of the rock tune are an ironic take on tradition by Māris Melgalvs, a poem entitled “Almost a folk song” — the maiden made pure by tap water.

The Singing Revolution that led to the restoration of independence was exactly what the name for it says it was.

“Modern reality” doesn’t necessarily replace what came before and isn’t homogeneous; the neighbors at my dacha are “modern,” though they use a horse-drawn plough.

The previous President, who is probably still the single most popular political figure in the country, is also an expert in folklore. Radio Oira mixes authentic folk with contemporary takes. Young poets infuse post-modernism with ancient spells. There’s a counterculture, too, often drawing from these wells.