This story would like, at least for a few moments, sweep away abstractions from the Earth, but is unable to do so if not for other reasons then for being made up of abstractions itself—of words.

MIGHTY FEELINGS can strike you no matter where you happen to be. I experienced I dare say bliss some years ago on the upper floor of a new department store in Tallinn. Wandering there without any explicit purpose, my eye was suddenly captured by a certain shade of colour—materialised in a woollen jacket—and before I was able to think anything, and even quite a while after a label American blue had already appeared onto the screen of my emotional memory, I was filled by an ecstatic sensation of crossing borders. The American blue is not of the same kind as the Parisian or Prussian blue, or the Naples yellow and so forth; it’s my own intimately personal concept and has no meaning for other people; it comes from beyond my proto-abstracting era.
The antecedents may be as follows. I was probably 5 to 7 years old as I got hold of a foreign magazine. We didn’t have foreign magazines at our home—in fact, we didn’t have anything foreign at all (very few folks had)––which meant that there were no man-made objects of pure, deep colours in sight. All the pictures in the magazines and all the colours of the cloths were (and, by and large, still are) either as if soaked in mud and then dried up after a rapid and careless rinsing in cold water, or shrill and shallow, as if executed in cheap paints meant for small children. And now I got this magazine—I assume it was about construction, for back then my father was intent on building us a house—and in the magazine there was THE picture (probably a commercial ad): the sea and sky at night, across two pages, in shades of greenish blue, that shook a Soviet kiddie, and on the sea-shore there stood a beautiful couple, wearing elegant, seemingly rigid evening dresses and equally rigid smiles on their faces—or perhaps not, maybe the couple comes from elsewhere, but the colours were there for sure.
Somehow the picture—studying it long and frequently (or intensively)—sucked me into something that differed totally from where I usually was. If I am to speak spontaneously, without caution, then I felt completely happy there would be my first utterance, followed by some more spectacular sentences (somewhere inside me, confronting my conscious will, they have been formulated already), that seemingly would define my being back then. But in this case my present ability of formulating sentences is not relevant. What is relevant is that I am not able to recall precisely, i.e. I do not have an access to the part of my memory that deals with what I actually did experience, for abstractions—hundreds of thousands of spectacular definitions in the history of human mind—have clogged up the approach.

SO, I CAN’T GET THROUGH the stiff coil of abstractions, for which I am incapable to invent a solvent, back to the shades of American blue. What I do have in reach, and what, unlike the shades of American blue (probably ‘American’ only for the reason that in Soviet Estonia for children of that age any foreign thing was ‘American’—much more likely it was a German magazine) is actually American, is the phenomenon of Barbie.
It’s not hard for me to imagine that if back then instead of that picture I had had a Barbie-doll, the effect could have been the same (for although I claim here that it was the colours of the picture that made the difference, not those rigid and beautiful models, it can be a lie of the destined memory of my educated and admonished mind that erases the models as ‘commercial’, ‘a kitsch’, and therefore rejectable). What I mean is that the feeling of happiness could have been equal. Could have been that my memory, satiated of –isms, would have “forgotten” the doll, but seeing for instance certain shades of pink, decades later, would have unleashed a similar sensation of liberation, blissful feeling of floating over expanse. I do not believe (a matter of faith) that the joy of a child grown up in the relatively poshy (I guess not only compared to the rest of the SU, but also to most places of the world back then) medieval centre of Tallinn in the late 50s and 60s would have been even close to it if she had made one herself from straw and cloth (no matter how highly this old national custom is praised), or if she had received one of the kind, although in favourable circumstances other delights might have concurred with it.

ONCE I SAW—from the Finnish TV as usual—a documentary about an Asian, probably a Chinese, young musician. In certain age he had discovered European composers (mostly German classics) and become greatly enthusiastic about them. The enthusiasm carried him away from Asia first to learn and further to play in an orchestra, I am not sure whether it was in Europe or America. To the journalist he replied from his seat in the orchestra, from behind his music stand. The journalist then asked something like well, what about it now, are you here at the spot in the middle of the issue still as enthusiastic about European music as you were. He said he was—in a simple and convincing manner, but added then, as if in a smaller print and in brackets, that the only thing that didn’t make sense to him was setting such a paramount value on the technical side of the play. And added: it kills the joy. And indeed: what would be the point of joyless playing—and listening to music played joylessly?
That sensation—the joy—what he talked about had to be a direct successor of the sensation that had driven him to deal with the European classics in the first place. In principle, it could have been even some Für Elise or Gute Nacht, Gute Nacht of an optional music box, which in the world of oriental sound might have had an effect of revelation. Or perhaps not that much Für Elise itself than the discovery that there were radically different things in the wide world, things that one hadn’t even dreamt about before. Now of course he performed Schönberg, Lutoslawski and any complicated composition of the day as well. But without that joy he wouldn’t have been there. If he hadn’t had it to start with, he wouldn’t have had a reason to set out. And if he had lost it on the way, he wouldn’t have had a reason to keep on moving—excluding the force of inertia.

RECENTLY, at two almost successive nights, I had a sensation in my dreams I had never experienced before, neither awake nor asleep, at least that I remember of. I do not know if that sensation has a name in a human language and if in the human world it is something familiar or rare. Let’s assume it’s a completely new quality. In such a case how on earth could we get to know it? Well, I may have been put wires on me and wait for the next time. But what if it wouldn’t repeat any more, or if it would recur no sooner than, say, after 30 years? I wouldn’t be going to live all that time with wires on me. Certainly I would have a temptation to describe the feeling by some analogy or metaphor, but the description would very likely fail to describe, for the object of the description wouldn’t be in reach, and as for the memory it’s unreliable, and so the words, concepts, idioms would take over and start to guide the idea by their own logic and laws—by the force of their history, which has carved huge polluting cities into our brains. They are at it right now too and that’s why this story can’t reach what I aim to, although, if I would make a heroic effort to keep them at bay, it shouldn’t necessarily be a complete failure.

Although embarrassing a fact, the story even has a MORAL, and it reads: perhaps we shouldn’t complain that much about books loosing their importance and young people not reading (the humanities) these days and the visual taking charge. Who is there to predict whether we are to loose more than to win?
 
 

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Winter of an Estonian Druidess

I found a drawing in my computer from the period I was testing the options of Paintbrush: arches standing for receding hills, on the remotest of them copses striped with short verticals of different blues, and in front of them, at the first arch, there was a short stocky tree, leaning to the distance. The background was left white, as it probably was the easiest way—obviously it meant that the picture was that of a winter landscape.
I remembered the tree and I remembered the feeling—lasting too long—that forced me to draw it. That tree lived (and hopefully continues living) near Välgi—which is a small place you will find when you drive from Tartu towards Jõhvi by one of the prettiest roads of Estonia—on a lot holding an old small cottage and a shed used as a garage which were, at least back then, in the possession of an American woman, who had a job at some embassy or office in Riga, and whose kids were studying, I suppose in order of some international exchange of students, at the University of Tartu.
The tree was just an ordinary old aged apple tree of a cultivated sort, it probably got memorized only for the reason that the background was so plain, so vast and winter-white—as if created for pointing it out.
I lived in the centre of Tartu, a small university town, in a rented apartment opposite the local paper (which wasn’t local any more, as all its main offices had moved away to Tallinn and only now and then it gave a small supplement about things in Tartu; and the paper itself had been sold to foreign magnates), and almost every day I went to see some cottages—expecting that I would like the lot and would be able to buy it. But none of the places I did like was for sale, at least for any conceivable money, and vice versa.
One may think that if a quiet native badly tortured by having to live next to noisy immigrants (in Estonia the torment is called the integration process), moves from Lasnamäe, the notorious Russian ghetto district in Tallinn, to Tartu to reside in Gildi Street, just a few feet from the main building of the old university, then it would be almost as good as a country retreat; at least she could find her peace again. But that was not the case, as the folks who reside nearby Gildi and Ülikooli were (and maybe still are) not allowed to sleep at nights due to the big SAB maintenance trucks. It is not that they would drive by a couple of times during the night, no, they would arrive after midnight and would run to and fro at high rotations till morning. It didn’t have much effect on lessening the snow on the streets, but it fed richly the desire to move away to a countryside, turning it into a veritable mania. If one lies in one’s bed deadly exhausted, without a possibility to sleep, and if one’s eyelids are not entirely but somewhat half closed (I made this discovery, actually deserving a patent, later), and if one is totally focused on something, pictures of unfamiliar beautiful colours, glowing from the inside, start to stream before one’s eyes. The pictures were, to put it conventionally, geometric. They can’t even be described, as none of them was recognizable, although one thing or another implied to things I had seen by thousands running by behind the windows of my car during the day: details of the landscapes. Just the planes, never the third dimension.
It was like a kind of orgy—with masochistic undertones—at nights, when I was desperate for rest but couldn’t sleep. During the daytime, with the sounds being routine and conventional I saw the old apple tree on the slope of the hill against the broad and open yet not monotonous background: I am not aware if the picture just came to me, or if I called it forth intentionally like a kind of totem or icon.

I had phoned to Riga to that American woman; she stated friendly and unambiguously that she didn’t have the slightest intention to sell the house and that she liked it there and that she was amazed that anybody around the place had thought otherwise.
When I happened to pass the area the next time—to be honest not exactly happened—the cottage had been put in order indeed and it looked rather self-conscious now. I thought to myself: I would give everything I had, all the goods and chattels, if only I had that apple tree with those slopes where she resided. I wouldn’t need anything extra at all: just that I could go and sit on the slope, in the unmown grass, with my back against the tree, amidst the hum of the insects, a weak gust rustling in the grass and leaves; a bird calling, another replying (but when thinking about that the snow was still on the ground, both there and in Gildi Street), and that I am appropriate, a part of it. What is it extra that a human person wants after all, this I do not understand—what can be more than that? If he is incapable to find delight in that, then all other, more refined joys would be wasted on him anyway. It would be the same as if an illiterate being would imagine himself reading some complicated lyrics.
One only has to have some meal, and has to know that the food would last for a few days on—but this was a lesson I hadn’t learnt yet.

My knowledge of the cottages potentially or actually available had already grown to beat that of professional brokers, but then unlike them I was in the business with my heart and soul, wasn’t I. Yet I had still much driving to do with my Zhiguli (called Lada by the manufacturers for some obscure reasons); the lots that were offered always located by a big road and at the same time were lonely and open, whereas a proper sweet home has to lie away from big roads and not to be quite alone, still as much as possible concealed from the eyes that are not to it. It looked like as if, in the course of a campaign, all the big trees had been cut down around the houses—or was it that they themselves all at once had had it, and had decided to move into a better world unknown to us forever. In the places they hadn’t been cut down they had grown criss-cross and become entangled among themselves and had started to rot from the in-cuts—it was obvious that negligence was the only reason why they hadn’t been taken down.
The Estonian essayist, theologian and poet Uku Masing has a saying in an essay of his: the last tree would be God. It made a strong impression on me already when I first read it—but in the poetic, not the dogmatic sense at the time. The more desperately I was driving around seeking for a home, the more—I suddenly realised—I looked at the trees and not the houses, and the more they came to haunt into my night-time psychedelic torments of lying awake. Or to put it more precisely: it was their crown tops—the details of the crown tops, the branches—straight lines forcing themselves upwards at sharp angles in case of lindens, jerky lines forcing themselves sidewards at right angles in case of oaks. The red crown tops of pines contain red arches; but in winter twilight the trunks of lindens are so black that they could be used as illustrative means to the topic of the absolute black.
For especially in places where there are no people left it would be trees that would manifest the soul, the life in the most understandable and effective language for our senses. Not that the phlox, woolly bear or dry rot are in any way less living or their life less valuable, it’s just that the stability of the way of existence of an old tree and her size fit best into our mental patterns: one still perceives her as a creature close to one’s own kind and at the same time as much bigger and nobler in its stability—which, in fact, is exactly what one needs, seeks: somebody bigger and better, so one could stand in awe of her, but at the same time see her as quite similar to oneself, so one could fabricate some understanding between the two, and that the tree—for she’s the bigger one—is going to protect the fabricator. It’s also important that the nature of the stability would resemble exactly that of a primeval tree: all the while in our sight, like an icon. The phlox too would appear every spring from under the ground for decades, displaying remarkable stability, but that kind of stability wouldn’t satisfy us—we would perceive it as fickle and therefore unreliable, which certainly is rubbish. But from the point of view of reality all the human conventional mental activity is rubbish.

So how did the story go on? Well, I’ve got more old apple trees and hill slopes now than I know what to do with—in one of the most unemployed Estonian counties by the way. But they are all too tight together, too close to each other, and the background lacks depth—or am I at the wrong end of the depth. And I can’t say they give many apples either.