An Autobiographical Hindsight.  (22)

A Whirlpool Cloud.

© Eso A. B., 2012

I was born in a small country called Latvia. Though I hold dual citizenship, the other being that of the U.S., and lived there fifty-one years, I tend to identify with Latvia more than my adopted country. This is one of the reasons why at the age of sixty-two, several years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, I returned to Latvia and have lived here for more than sixteen years now.

I returned to Latvia in 1995. This coincided with a time when many Latvians begun to be seriously disillusioned with the economy of their country and were emigrating to other European countries. One man had already committed a demonstrative (against government corruption) suicide in front of the Freedom Monument in Riga in 1993. Many more were hanging themselves quietly in their apartments and country sheds. Soon after I arrived, a friend, a doctor, committed suicide  by swallowing barbiturates and downing them with alcohol.

A question often heard from my Latvian neighbors was: “What are you doing here?” The question was questioning, implicitly, my sanity.

A frank answer is: “I am here, because I am of retirement age. I have no family. I inherited some property in Latvia, which when sold, brought  me additional income. I also prefer a rural environment. I find cities (other than museums, theatres, and movie houses) stressful, and my resources of inheritance reinvested in the countryside could help create for me a rural haven. Until the recent economic and financial collapse, I could also afford to buy enough books to create for myself a small English language library. I also enjoy countryside people, especially if I can be of help to them, which is one way of making their acquaintance that is risky.  Hearing of the troubles and problems of people soon gave me an intimate insight of Latvian society—as it had become since I left it when eleven years old. I would not have gained such an insight living in the city.  Not least, as a result of the events that followed the Soviet occupation of Latvia and my experiences during WW2, I had become a sceptic of  modern society—in spite of the claims to the contrary.

My scepticism of society came to possess me, while I was still young, in the immediate aftermath of 1939, when I was only six. Not that I knew anything of politics at that age, however, through the disappearance and imprisonment of most of my close family and sitting and sleeping next to packed suitcases for a week or more, I came to see society with negative emotions and saw it as composed of forces that had little or no interest in communal bonds, which—as far as I could tell— were being replaced by money and guns, and angels had metal wings and dropped bombs.

Though the background of my family was oligarchic in nature and consisted of people who were sympathetic to same, I grew up rejecting liberal economics. Even if  up to the age of seven, I lived a sheltered life in upper bourgeois circumstances, I soon understood the inequality of this and never came to accept arguments which declared equality unnatural.

The bourgeois outlook began to influence my paternal family with the beginning of the 20^th century. This was largely based on my grandfather’s and step grandmother’s successful newspaper business (begun 1911). That was a time when Riga, Latvia’s capital city, was still dominated by Baltic Germans. It is probable, even if not with a 100% certainty,that ‘modern’ and ‘progressive’ is also traceable to the aftermath of the Great Northern War (ended 1710), when my forebears from my paternal side arrived in Latvia as Herrnhuters. Their mission was to morally rearm the war devastated Latvian peasantry. Not so many years ago, when I had my DNA analyzed, I was surprised to discover that my closest genetic relatives lived in Bosnia, Herzegovina, northern Italy, and Bulgaria, and that general area of Europe. In effect, my grandfather’s and greatgrandfather’s German orientation was to be traced to the times of the Habsburgs. My connection to “religion” was by way of the Herrnhuters, which explains how after Herrnhutists went out of fashion, my grandfather chose to became a school teacher and a choir conductor in the middle of a kind of no man’s land, the peasantry. Of course, in his days, the countryside contained most of the country’s people.  

From my mother’s side of the family came links to Russian nobility, the knazi Ral and Kugushov families with estates in the Tombova region. My mother was born in Ufa, a Russian city at the foot of the Ural mountains.

Shortly before I turned eight years old, the material circumstances that favored the oligarchic and bourgeois orientation radically collapsed. The Soviets took over the family’s  newspaper business and confiscated our home. Therefore, one day (1940), my father drove all of his family to a farm in Ergli. The farm belonged to the sister of his mother, my aunt Emma. Her family name was “Jurjan”, which I came to associate with Gorgan in Iran. While there is no certainty that my association is correct, I made it on the basis that many in the family had black hair with frizzy and curly sideburns. I also knew that the letter J, pronounced Y in Latvian, could elsewhere appear written as the letter G, as in Yuri and eorge. In any event, this began my acquaintance with life in the Latvian countryside, where the economic norm was not far from that of life in a subsistence economy—in spite of the fact that my aunt’s farm was by no means a small one.

In the space of the year left before the start of WW2, I learned to become a cowherd and shepherd (25 cows and 35 sheep). Within that same period, I also lost eight members of my extended family due to imprisonment by the Soviet government or deportations to Stalin’s gulags. Though three of said eight people survived the war and the gulags, I never  saw any of them again.

My separation from all those who had at one time been part of my “family” was due to my early decision not to commit myself to a “career”, which, again, was largely a result of having no financial back up (the residual wealth was stolen by a distant family member, less of the Latvian than the Habsburg Empire line of family descent) and suffering from war induced psychological trauma that I had to overcome on my own. After arriving in America (I was sixteen years old, which was old enough not to be able to forget the past), I found it difficult to adjust to American indifference to the events in the rest of the world. Indeed, I found this indifference indecent. Such inner haughtiness encouraged me to develop an interest in wanting to learn the causes of what had caused (and what continues to cause) violence.

At the time, the only way that I could imagine to learn all this was by gaining for myself a life of “freedom”, which would allow me uninhibited time to search by reading and study. I did not interpret ‘study’ at this time as academic. Rather, because of the family background in the newspaper business and home tutoring, I imagined that I would do this as a “writer”. I felt a distinct fear from becoming entangled in life through a career. Instead, I felt more comfortable being exposed to society as a  ‘jobber’, that is, if I earned my living by doing various kinds of “jobs”, be they what they may. The latter allowed me—as long as there was a job to be had--to pay my way, bypass a family and a professional career, and allowed me to devote my “freedom”, to try realize my ambition to become a “writer”, which writing, I did not identify with writing novels. In some ways, I was continuing the subsistence economic way of life and the relative freedom this monkish way provided.  This was in sharp contrast to my friends, all of who became more or less successful lawyers, engineers, doctors, chemists, corporation representatives in foreign lands, and so on.

Due to “winging it” and relying on my ability to discipline myself to hold to my idealistic course, I soon abandoned my formal studies at an Northeastern University in Boston. I was enrolled there to stury engineering on my mother’s advice, though I had no interest in engineering whatsoever. When ‘engineering’ became intolerable, because of its failure to hold my interest, I continued my “search” by joining (1953) the U.S. Marine Corps. This was during the time of the Korean War.

Having dropped out of the university (I had no idea what field of study would gain me the information I sought), little by little, I fluffed out my education by reading whatever books came my way and appeared interesting to me.

For many years, my life moved on in roughly five and ten year cycles. I eventually discovered that the greatest hindrance to my self-development was the pietistic orientation of “religion” (the only one I was familiar with from my Latvian background), which kept me for many years from reading books on religious matters that had not yet exhausted their social status and still held my interest. While I remain committed to a  “religious outlook” as opposed to a  “secular outlook”, I am grateful to the circumstances (my self-willed commitment to “learning” managing to stay with me—no doubt with thanks due to my Baltic German nannies in early childhood) that extracted me from the passive sentimentality of modern religious orthodoxy where today’s society continues to be mired.

By the age of sixty-two, I had exhausted my possibilities as a “free man” living out on the limb. By that time, I had discovered myself not to be much of a joiner of groups, rather one who preferred to explore and do things on his own. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990-91 offered me a chance to reconnect to a past that had been torn from me so many decades before.

My interest in becoming a “writer” had by this time morphed into a desire to become “knowledgeable” in the political forces that are or might be necessary to keep society united and not-violent at the same time. This interest led me, in turn, to become knowledgeable in the mythologies of earlier civilizations. As a result of my finding orthodox Christianity to be passive with regard to politics, I had turned to reading ancient mythologies, creation myths holding for me a special interest. My first guide was the English poet Robert Graves through his book “The White Goddess”, which for all of its name, was centred on the concept of  “the sacred king”. Grave’s orientation (the sacred king is a political figure) soon led me to a radically different interpretation of “Oedipus Rex”, the tragedy of Sophocles’, which was left stuck as much with the academia as with the Freudian Pop-cultural interpretation  of mother-son incest. My habit of reading many newspapers also led me to know something about capitalism and the Western markets system and political ideologies. I gained some direct knowledge of capitalist markets from a job as an ‘order clerk’ at a brokerage firm.

My unorthodox approach to living ‘a life’ led me to become a “contrarian thinker”, even as my mind distanced itself and became "free" of the “system’s” desire to direct and control my way of thinking. Such freedom enabled me to release myself from the relentless motor that characterizes the American way of life in our time as “driven”. Unfortunately, this period did not last long, because age and lack of success as a “writer” demanded their dues. The absence of a degree from an institution of “higher learning” presented itself as a great hindrance to credibility. What to do in the future became a pressing issue.

It was about this time that the computer and internet became the focus of my attention. I felt drawn to the internet, because it did not present one with academic barriers, even if it was a medium that seemed dedicated to insulting intelligence as a result of a lack of almost any restraints from stupidity and its propagation. A number of years went into practicing “writing” in this medium. The result was not that I could write better, but that I became habituated to it.

In the years that I had been absent from Latvia, the Soviet “occupation” had preserved something of the “subsistence” economy of an earlier peasantry. The relatively uncompetitive kolhoz and sovhoz systems of Soviet country life—though different from life in farming households of earlier times—retained elements of the subsistence economy nonetheless. Individual garden plots, for example, were common, and helped people to overcome some of the needs for variety not met by the state. Perhaps this was, because the agrarian way of life allows an individual, male or female, to practice an isolated, independent, and “free”, monkish way of life. The urban environment prohibits such ‘independence’.

While in the early years of the Soviet system the kolkhoz apparently were enterprises entered in voluntarily by farmers (still bound to the ways of thinking by “old” and “anarchistic” peasant communities in Russia), this anarchism was broken by the eventual coercion of peasants into a centralized government system of communism as conceived by Stalin. Surprising as it may sound, under Stalin’s communism became wedded to the idea of “money”. Money was the only way the state knew of how to remuneration the farm worker (even if there were few goods to buy with it). The “money” brought with  it great disruptions to the old way of life, especially in matters of individual independence. Money became meaningful as a commodity that would buy luxuries, which Western propaganda told the populace could buy in the West. This introduced a sense of dissatisfaction with the communist system.  In many ways, unbeknownst to itself, Stalinist and post-Stalinist coercion and habituation of the countryside people to money, caused the people to become eager for the Western way of life, where money could buy

As a result, after the collapse of the Soviet economic system and government, the West had no trouble persuading the people to accept and agree to a systematic “crashing” of not only the kolhoz, but of all traditions that had been preserved (granted, willy-nilly) among the country people from their once decentralized history.

The new governments of Eastern Europe (Latvia including) had no economic experts of sufficient learning and knowledge of the economic development of the West. This is one reasons why the governments of Eastern Europe could provide no guidance to their people how to deal with the economic ways of the West and its domineering  Pop culture.

To the contrary, the Latvian government collaborated with the West in “crashing” the economies of the country. It also crashedg the people’s monkish  culture and relative independence, which—in my opinion—is a superior way of individuation than allowed by the individualisms in an urban setting. Instead of fortifying the cultural life of the countryside, the Latvian Culture Ministry denied the countryside support, and, instead, built a glass mountain house to house a literary culture that has few if any Latvian writers left to take part in. Consequently, the American government is planning to set up its Information Agency, which will deprive the Latvians of their democratic traditions to an even greater extent.

This is not to say that there are few or no Latvians to support this process of culture crashing. The supporters this Culture Crashing try make the disasters acceptable  by blaming “backward Russia”. Such receive ample aid from Western scholars tied into a history that has been created by Western “religion” (Catholic), but is taken issue with by such Eastern scholars as Anatoly Fomenko.

With the negative results (outlined above) not personally experienced, I returned to Latvia with enthusiasm. Unfortunately, it did not take long, before I noted that the Latvian elite was a conceit with no substance other than access to vanity and a desire for money to buy itself into the “crashed” emptiness founded over an imported Pop culture.

 It was the gullibility of the local populace (paradoxically created by Stalinist communism) that caused my self-education program to toke a quantum jump in understanding. The jump was essential to persuade me that self-sacrifice is a religio-political tool; and that so-called liberal “democracy” is a political theory that soon become Parliamentary fascism.