arrival
  • place: en route Helsinki, Finland - Tallinn, Estonia - Riga, Latvia

18::March::2000 21:21 → permalink

reLab HQ, Riga, Latvia, March 2000

When the gaps in these notes are so large, there is a distinct lack of continuity between here and there. When the here’s have been so many, and the now’s are rapid and brimming with the negation of writing: life, empty space becomes the content. And the there’s are forgotten. Heading to new lands. New and old friends. Riga, after exactly twenty-four hours of travel. From Lapland to Riga. Flights, if you had good connections would take about five hours total. But connections never seem to be good here on the perimeter. Tornio was a short week of snowy brilliance, a couple hard workouts, running to the pool, not so far away, but enough to make me feel like I need to push body against the barriers that make it uncomfortable. Running to the pool, swimming hard for 30 – 40 minutes, running home. After taking the time for a sauna, of course. Yeah, in a train now, so time for a few reflections: No more short teaching gigs in the next year. Minimum of two weeks, with preference for four. The idea of doing six one-month workshops at different places seems very appealing. Then the balance of time in the southwest of the US? Can it really work? Time is passing so quickly that dreams run away. Only just now arrived. Twenty-four hours full on the road. Getting too old for this kind of action, but where will it cease? Movement was quite a bit easier than I had thought here at the border of the Evil Empire. But the atmosphere has that tinge, an edge of desolation somehow, a bit of wildness. Flatness. Arrested construction — the Soviet could not concentrate enough energy to bring the society to a point of self-sustained possibility for its members. So it goes. Riding the bus from Tallinn. The landscape is peaceful smooth, not so extreme as Finland, already enough south to get away from that edge feeling. Though Tornio seems always familiar despite the extremity. Mountains of snow lining all the streets. Impressions. The first moment in E-Lab here in Riga. I’m early, I caught an earlier bus leaving from the harbor in Tallinn. Rasa and Raitis are not here in the moment, so I wait and write instead. Overlooking the river. A dark gray-green monument to a struggle sits below on the bank of the river near the railroad bridge, two figures fighting something that is invisible, something over there, downstream.

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