By Eric Le Roy
Here in Varna, Bulgaria, the city planners seem to have lost their minds…unless they have something up their sleeves that I don’t know about. Very possible, that. Fun fact: Bulgaria is losing population faster than any other country in Europe, and a 23% drop in population is predicted by 2050.
It’s for the usual reasons: declining birth rates that cannot keep up with the mortality numbers, and, of course, emigration. The grass always looks greener, I guess – you know how it is. The good news is that we don’t have a problem with immigration here. The freeloaders know they won’t receive a platter of cheeseburgers and a free doss house here. So they fuck off to Germany, France, etc. Besides, here, as in Romania, the gypsies already control the cheap housing industry. The common word is ‘shantytown’, although I am sure that the PCers have another name for it. Just as gypsies are now ‘Roma’. Whatever, they can build accommodation out of broken umbrellas and bicycles, and use the tyres for lawn chairs.
They say Bulgaria is a very poor country, but I live here, and my wife and I have driven around enough to see city and village alike; we haven’t noticed any really ugly poverty. If you want that, go to San Francisco or Chicago. Or wander around hillbilly country in Appalachia, close to where I grew up. São Paulo, London, Mexico City, you name it. Hungry, angry motherfuckers. On the contrary, here in Bulgaria, we see ancient men and women and houses built of rocks, so rocky that you could imagine someone being stoned to death on the street right outside where they stacked up the house. Inside, the lights are on, and the satellite dish is fastened to a makeshift smooth facade on the side of the hovel.
And, just as you are about to feel sorry for them, you notice that out back, behind the rude archaeological sites, often there is a spread of land full of roosters, hens, and chickens, and maybe even a goat or a horse. Tomatoes and cucumbers. Just as likely, this often extensive space is a veritable vineyard full of homegrown products used to make rakia, which is the local moonshine, or grappa, or самогон – depending on where you hail from. (Isn’t it funny how the world, for all its troubles, has always found a way to stay drunk?)
All this that I’ve told you makes it seem incongruous that in Varna, there is currently a stupendous amount of building going on. Outside our domicile, it’s like Lego. What used to be clear land leading seaward is now a gaggle of apartment edifices so close together that you need to pour a bottle of oily suntan lotion over your head and let it slide down your body just so you can slip through the cracks between the buildings.
Recently, they dug up the pathway where I used to walk the dogs – a gravelly dip between bedlams of weeds – which led to the now much diminished strip of woods where we could still enjoy some peace amid a cluster of freakish growing ‘things’ and look out across the Black Sea. But they slit the ground open to install an electric cable, leaving a massive pile of dirt and rocks. After they finished the job, instead of smoothing it all out again, the bulldozer just pushed the dirt up into a huge wall that blocked our way.
Eventually, I got a shovel and tunneled a gap that we could get through. The Great Escape. Trouble is, the weeds have grown up so much now on the other side – really sharp, sticky stuff – that you rip your clothes, veins, and arteries just trying to pass through to the old resting place. Robert Frost, the erstwhile poet of The Road Not Taken, would be fucking flummoxed here. In the Varna summer, a dearth of wind and rain being customary, the spring grass, virginal and sensuous, turns to brittle straw, and what with the ungovernable weeds, it’s just about the ugliest thing you could think of. Imagine the Earth as a woman whose face has undergone 20 rounds of plastic surgery…well, you get the idea.
So, long story short, I can’t imagine who they expect to move into these spanking new constructs, but they must have somebody in mind. Maybe they’ll even pave the beach-bound road beyond the gates with something firmer than mucous and phlegm and grey bubble gum.
The tourists are here, and since Bulgaria is EU now, we get them from everywhere, and that’s fine. But I mostly work on the computer and look out the window at the motionless sea, searing blue and sharp against the horizon. New buildings – like a staff of ticket-takers to the Grand Ball – block my sight of the scrambling fun-seekers on the beach, but the sea just goes on and on. It looks motionless and still, this insouciant expanse, made azure by the summer sky, of tumult.
Heat, I see, with its floating, hallucinatory dreaminess, can produce the same hypnotic effect as endless ice.
So it was a shock when suddenly the power went off yesterday evening at 8.30 while I was in the middle of a teaching lesson. (It happens from time to time on weekdays, but rarely at night.) My wife came in, explaining that a great wind had blown up, and it was true: the trees were shaking wildly, doing a dance that bordered on loss of control. If you saw people writhing like that, you’d wonder what evangelist they had been listening to, or if they were having sex with ghosts. My wife fetched some candles, and – since the lesson was terminated as cleanly as a successful political assassination – I ‘retired’ to the balcony to do a street review and watch several commercial planes come wobbling and lurching in, one after the other. Obviously, they made it because there were no balls of fire and smoke afterwards. I’m glad. Fear of flying, you know.
With nothing better to do, Liuba showed me a video taken early that evening in Omsk, the city in Siberia she comes from, and where her sister lives – and guess what? It was snowing. In July. And, of course, my mind had been absorbed with the tragic flooding in Texas that has cost so many lives. Again, I checked the calendar and asked myself: Where does a flood come from in hot, dry Texas in the middle of summer?
My friend Artem, if I asked him why, would immediately produce documentation regarding global warming, reams of it, and maybe he would even feel moved to compose another articulate, fact-saturated blog of how ecological doomsday lies at hand and can only be averted by a titanic sea change in humanity and a desert vision of prophets, Moses with staff in hand, leading and driving his minions through years and years of swirling sand and homicidal sun. To the Promised Land. In Artem’s mind, it is a question of acceptance of fact and determination to ‘save the planet’. And, even as I spout the cliche, I do so without sarcasm. For I know that Artem – and many others like him – are not only sincere, but enlightened.
I myself have learned to play hardball with all branches of ‘affirmative action’, and I don’t care much anymore about the ultimate fate of the human race. Nevertheless, a residual curiosity leaves me fascinated by the fact that everything we know and call reality stems from our unique perspective – one that appears to distance us from the other animals. I mean this: before the cognitive revolution of pre-history in which man found himself, so to speak, stood up, twiddled his thumbs and began more and more to take what we now understand to be a ‘human’ view of the world, how was life defined by the other creatures? What were the dinosaurs thinking about for 165,000,000 years? They must have had something on their minds. What was it?
Well, we call it ‘instinct’, which is yet another of those convenient words that people use when they are trying to describe the indescribable and therefore have no idea of what they mean but think that it should sound like something. So what is ‘instinct’? Is it that which keeps a boxer on his feet when he is in danger of getting knocked out? Is it what a mother feels for her child? Is it the craving humans have to discern some kind of order in chaos? Herd mentality? Fear of strangers? The periodic impulse that a good wank would relieve the stress of the day?
So, how did the world look and feel to the living things that experienced life for millions of years before we came along? Did they ever love anything? Did some kind of longing ever exceed the mere mating and survival instinct? Those fish beyond time and number that sailed the gelid oceans, those galaxies of birds that flocked and roamed the skies, and all the snorting, screeching, salivating beasts on land – what did they think of it all? Or should we resort to the self-flattery that is all too human, and say that the trees falling in the forest made no sound because we weren’t there to hear it?
That all eventfulness of billions of years occurred in a spiritless vacuum, or just a blur of cataclysm endured by the witless slitherers and quadrapeds, born in a seismic rapture of spider and mosquito-infested idiocy, then dying in dull moans or deafening cries? And was that the story of the world for all but the last couple hundred thousand years, when we, naked us, came like a virus in the air, a spitwad in the ocean, signifying a mere scrape of a fingernail when measured against the long and disembodied arm of time? Did it require human thought to create a working definition of earthly existence, or is it merely our conceit?
When the gale started blowing last night, a whirlwind between the grey gash of the sea and the crimson smear of evening’s farewell, seemingly of its own accord and oblivious to drowsy weather reports, I felt the shudder of a primeval force, igniting in me the singularity of a split second, perfect mixture of horror and exhilaration, desolation and serenity. Something out of my control. It felt good, such elemental power, reigning supreme over my insubstantial mind and frail carcass.
It wasn’t like the house was going to fall down, but it seemed the intimation of something wonderfully careless, blameless and potentially lethal lurking just beneath the styrofoam model of civilization wrapped in protective cellophane that we piss around in, our world of ‘doctors’ and ‘gurus’ and ‘masters’ and ‘experts.’ A little bit later, when I thought of writing about this unexpected inflow of emotion, I remembered something I had read that day, an excerpt from a poem by Catullus, who lived in the 1st century B.C.E.. In part, it goes like this:
“ Let us live and love, my Lesbia, and a farthing for all the talk of morose old sages! Suns may set and rise again; but we, when once our brief light has set, must sleep through a perpetual night.”
I felt the little light of my own eyes surrounded by a big darkness, and it was this display of power by the wind that drove me to that state of mind. The wind came from nowhere, and all at once, it was mighty, this convulsive force that I felt, humanly, so much ajar with the intergalactic suggestion at hand, this manifestation of the Beauty and Indifference of sheer blisslike fury and raw energy, and I knew how easily, even amid the proud Erector Sets and Lincoln Logs of human builders (and which were the toys of my childhood), my soul could be torn from my body and scattered across the universe like cremains from an urn.
The wind came like a sudden god, and the humanity in me asked, “But does it have a soul?” And part of me needed it to, and part of me didn’t. The same way as when a lover says goodbye and stomps off down the road. Should you follow, tramping down the well-known way in search of the familiar embrace? Or forget it? To cajole the departing shadow or rejoice on an empty moor? Swallowing the pain of goodbye like a magic pill, and yielding to the night, alone, broken, but free to traverse a weedy desolation devoid of roads or routes or ways?
It is like the answer I have always demanded and dreaded. Is there a God in a pick-up truck or driving a rattling old bus who sees me in the middle of nowhere with my thumb extended, and thinks of stopping to give me a lift? What wheels of judgment would compel the ignition of His mercy? What prayer could touch the military precision of His authority? Can I say: Yes, there is God because, from the cellars to the attics of my being, imagination insists on it, whether I would or no? Or should I decline the trap, sensing as I have long done, that He doesn’t care. He answers you with silences beyond the measures of time and distances, although the holy men say you aren’t listening hard enough. He is your friend in mythology. Dr. Parable. If that is true, then He dwells, not in scripture but in the wind.
Ahhhhh, the sadness! The former lover, now well down the road and out of sight, bound for other frolics. The endless night ahead. And maybe God is doing cartwheels at a county fair in another village in the universe, demanding only to be recognised as an effective clown? Here, like a child with untreatable madness, came the wind through the streets of Varna.
