MOVIE ASSOCIATIONS. Don’t Come Knocking. While I’ve never been there, the town of Butte as a type is a familiar character in my life: a once booming mining town now mostly abandoned. A former hotbed of activity heading for Ghost Town status.
The quintessential Ghost Town of my childhood was Cripple Creek. As far back as I can remember, I always felt a powerful attraction to such places. They seemed tremendously familiar to me, as if I’d lived in such spaces and times before. They shone with a Golden Light for me. Of course, their current, abandoned state was deeply sad for me. I was always hoping that something would revive them back into prosperity.
Mining ghost towns are such an interesting parallel with Latvia Lost. Just as Baby Doe held onto the Matchless Mine in Leadville for miserable decades, living and dying in lonely squalor, so, too, did my parents put life on hold in many ways, hanging onto their Matchless Memories of a Golden Latvia of the 1930’s. I’ve never before put together this parallel.
A giving up of life in the Present for a Dream of the Past. Most definitely there is no dream of the Future, other than returning to the Past. There is no present, no Future, there is just the Past. Perhaps that is where I learned the pattern of not particularly planning for the Future. It has always been difficult for me to seriously and concretely engage in planning for my future, which has frustrated and baffled F.
I think there are several trajectories that get me to the attitude of Not Planning. One is the knowing that flourishing cities, even countries, really can collapse. Now you see them, now you don’t. Nothing lasts, so why bother planning for an all-too-dicey future?
I was taught at home to value the Past above all else. For them, Latvia had no Future to speak of, but it also had no Present. For me, Latvia consisted only of a Past, but not even of my own. Rather, it was my Parents‘ past. They had no sense, as far as I could tell, of Latvia as a current reality. Zaiga had absolutely no connection to post-1944 Latvia. She read nothing, listened to nothing produced in Soviet Latvia. And she had no vision of what to do for a future Latvia, other than terrorize her sons into being Exile Latvians.
Zaiga in particular, but Armīns too, never had a Big Picture of what their Exile meant, other than it was a Deep Pain of Loss they’d suffered. It was as if all they could hold onto was: Raise the kids as Latvians! No matter what, make sure they are Latvians! They MUST be Latvians! Anything else is of no significance!
For them, the only thing of value was the Gold of Latvianism. „We will brutalize the entire scape, we will brutalize any and all people along the way, in order to get our ounce of idealized Gold!“ Like the mining towns that ravaged and exploited entire geographies and countless people for metallic gold, so too Z&A ravaged and savaged to obtain their idealistic gold.
In their case, they never even bothered to have the ore they were totally focused on getting assayed for its content and worth. Did they ever consider that what they were digging for was Fools‘ Gold? Never, I think. Just hang onto the Matchless! Keep working the claim! It’s bound to produce gold, because it MUST! No assays allowed, no questions broached.
I’m a Ghost child, raised in a Ghost country. That is, I WAS. Now, I’m an adult. Ghostly? Not like Shepard’s actor, Howard the Coward, but ongoingly struggling for substance, to feel substantial.
I ponder F’s anger with what he perceives my stories to be. The Past cannot be unwritten. What can change is my udnerstanding of the Past and what it means to my Present and my future. I can’t unwrite my Ghost Town childhood, but I can write a Present where I’m not ghostly, where I’m real, where I consider a Future. end
D & I talked yesterday about our reticence regarding Shelf Life Blues‘ Eula Mae segment, that we never seem to get around to working on it. It does, for me, come down to a Fear about a free-form unscripted radio activity. Fear of loss of Control. Fear of being a Buffoon. Or, worse yet, an Incompetent. D really pushed the idea that we need to Think Big about it, trust our gifts and talents and simply DO it. Stop dithering about it, and DO it. She’s right. We must use ISAMI as a stage upon which to Practice going for greatness. Because, in the doing, there’s nothing to lose. The only loss would come from not trying.
Thinking Big. This is a theme that’s up for me with piano playing, too. Whether to be Big and Real, or a Ghost.