Culture of Death Watch
Icon in Tallinn: The 2007 Trialogos Festival
by Lawrence J.
Dickson
The Wall
A city wall is an excellent
thing. I have never seen one that did not succeed in protecting at least some
beauty, and lifting the hearts of the people who shelter behind it. The Tallinn
historian Ott Sandrak gestured at their towering wall, as he led us about Old
Town on Tuesday evening of the Trialogos Festival. It was never taken, even by
artillery, he said, and this Hanseatic city of Reval prospered behind it while
others were devastated by war. The wall is huge (visibly 30 feet high and very
thick) and made of tenacious limestone. Behind it a magnificent cobblestoned
Old Town, properly shabby and peeling with centuries of use, permits more than
beauty. It permits mind.
The alarm buzzes
in our hotel room to announce a jet-lagged Tallinn morning. Soon we rush out
onto the cobblestones, and find Pikk Street (everything is done on foot here).
Long and slightly curved, it leads us past shop, dwelling and embassy to a
large tavern labeled (in English) “Hell Hunt, the First Estonian Pub.” Just
beyond that, at Pikk 41, the metal doors of a cellar have been opened, and a
Trialogos poster hangs upon one of them. Candles lead us down rough steps, and
we find a tiny monastery altar, before which two huge psalm books are mounted
upon stands made of tree branches tied together with rope. There Lauds are sung
each morning by two monks at 7:00 A.M., and we join in the antiphonal
responses.
The effect is
extraordinary. Surely this is one of the four pillars of the universe of which
R. A. Lafferty writes: obscure work which upholds the entire world. Inside the
wall is Old Town, and inside Old Town is Pikk 41, where the monks sing, but not
for centuries — only recently. It is like a shower which washes off, not the
day’s dirt, but the post-Christian day’s ugliness and yammer and frenzy. And
then we go and face it again. Tallinn is not some Lothlorien, immune from the
ravages of time.
A mighty lord
of the Resistance
My wife Jeanne
and I returned by bus to Tallinn after Culture Wars’ excursion to St.
Petersburg. The next day, before we left, we had to thank our hosts for
everything they had done for us, including helping with laundry. So we made our
way to the wonderful creaky-floored house of Taivo Niitvaagi (“more than two
hundred years older than our country!” according to fellow attendee James Gay).
There Taivo stood, short, dressed all in black, with short white hair and a
round cross medallion around his neck. He was smiling and bowing, as if we were
doing him the favor. It flashed me back instantly to a similar scene 27 years
ago.
The tall young
Afghan epidemiologist, Faizullah Kakar, invited us to dinner and treated us
just the same way after we published his article on his country’s doomed (as it
seemed then) struggle against the Soviet invader. I still carry the impeller
blade he gave me from a rocket the Soviets shot at him. This wild courtesy of
heroes, giving what they deserve, seems to permeate their whole nations. Shy
and polite is how I would characterize the Estonians and the Afghans I have
met.
The monuments of
beauty and Christendom which abound in Tallinn are mostly younger than my
children, and they did not just happen. Taivo and friends, following Jesus’
injunction to be as wise as serpents (as well as harmless as doves), clearly
took advantage of the fluid state of things after the Soviet fall to seize
control of whole city blocks of the Old Town. (The Soviets had helped by
treating the whole place as a junk site.) So now there are big Catholic
schools, artists’ colonies like Katariina Gild, music, poetry, hospitality,
churches, and old monastic grounds used for conferences to overturn
secularization. Taivo, a lay oblate, also leads Lauds at Pikk 41 along with
Monk Seraphim, who is well known in these pages.
Some of the
names of the entities set up by these people, listed in the Trialogos program,
are: Latin Quarter Society, NGO Michael Association, St. Michael Guild,
THEATRUM, (foundation) Board of St. Michael, (cultural center) HEREDITAS, St.
Catherine Gallery, Ukrainian Cultural Centre, School of Monastic Arts LABORA,
and Collegium Educationis Revaliae. That is nothing like a complete list.
Estonia is a tiny country of only a million and a half people, who have taken
off at a gallop, all since the chilly grip of the Soviets fell away around
1990.
But death stalks
their country. Their birth rate stands at the ruinous non-reproductive level
typical of Europe, East and West. Varro Vooglaid, our English-fluent guide, is
doing what needs doing everywhere, starting a pro-life movement. He said that
the Estonian abortion rate is 11,000 a year, one of the highest (per capita) in
the world. (To translate Estonian numbers to approximate U.S. equivalents,
multiply by 1,000 and divide by 4. This would therefore correspond to almost
3,000,000 abortions a year in the U.S., far worse than the actual U.S. rate.)
Thus there is an
urgency about their Festival, conferring with Christians from Russia, Ireland,
Poland, Finland, Australia, the U.S., with this year’s topic being “In Search
of Europe’s Cultural Identity.” Tenacity seems part of Estonian national
character, whether resisting sieges or rejecting Russian pipelines, and the
festival leaders have resisted intense Left/Right pressure and kept this
conference on a third way. They are correct. There is no hope in Left or Right.
Neither Left nor Right offers human beings any reason to rejoice. It is find a
third way, or cease to exist.
The
presentations — science and politics
Though all classed as
“Science” in the Festival program, the presentations of morning and afternoon
Monday through Friday (September 24 through 28), fell roughly into three
classes: science (in the modern sense), politics (with history), and Logos
(including culture, philosophy, and theology). These are in increasing order,
both in emphasis and success. They all group themselves around what appeared to
me to be the central presentation of the entire Festival, the talk on icon and
glamour by Russian composer Vladimir Martynov. The artistic performances of the
evening also connect to Martynov’s theme.
I will follow
the same order in discussing them, and I will include some digressions (my own
presentation, as it were) that illuminate the route to the success of the
project. After all, it is urgent that it should succeed. It is a lovely
country, and nobody who has been there could fail to wish them happiness.
Science was
presented by Research Fellow Oskari Juurikkala (Finland), economist, and Dr.
Robert Sungenis (USA), geocentrist. (Prof. Jerzy Przystawa (Poland), quantum
theoretician, did not present a science topic.) Young MSc Juurikkala’s
presentation struggled laudably to restore Europe’s birthrates by removing
welfare-state disincentives. He proposed a kind of game of chicken, where
falling government pensions would stimulate childbirth and extended families.
E. Michael Jones criticized him for historical omissions and narrowness of
scope. The beating down of workers’ wages, and the economic fear induced by
unfunded liabilities, surely exert much pressure on people to pull the
anti-natal trigger.
The prize for
most controversial presentation went to Robert Sungenis for his exposition of
the case for geocentrism. I have expressed my objections to Sungenis’s
geocentrism in letters to Culture Wars, but the Estonians in the
audience were introduced to them through simultaneous translation and a
computer graphic of the sun, bouncing up and down in the outline of a slinky to
explain the seasons. Worse, the presentation of dueling popes in 1616, 1835,
and 1992 could not help but bring the very idea of religious truth (so
carefully established by Father Harrison) into disrepute, in spite of the fact
that the quotes demonstrated the action of the Holy Spirit (the early
condemnation was so narrowly posed as not to intersect Newtonian science).
Jerzy Przystawa
walked out in disgust, but I felt I had to try to fight it. So did many others,
especially Estonians, to such a degree that it pushed the other presentations
out of the question periods. And we learned a sobering lesson: even the wall of
mathematics, in defense of scientific truth, has been breached. As Thrasymachus
said, “truth is the opinion of the powerful,” in this case whoever controls the
computer graphics. Scientific modeling is hard to explain clearly and therefore
can at best achieve parity with the man at the podium, which means no certainty
can be found, no conclusion can be reached, so why not go with the flow and
focus on funding? (For me it was deja vu! I was recently told to invent science
to generate a curve that would satisfy the “chi square test” in a psychology
paper. When I refused, I was removed from the project.)
As far as
controversy goes, this was not the scenario planned by the conference’s
opponents. When Mikhail Lotman realized that he could not control the flow of
discourse during the 2006 conference (in spite of repeatedly interrupting
speakers and interjecting fallacious and disruptive comments) he resigned from
the Trialogos board. During the spring and summer of 2007 he collaborated with
the president of the University of Tallinn in doing whatever was within their
power to disrupt the 2007 conference by circulating letters to key conference
organizers and their backers in Tallinn. Their attack took on predictable form.
After claiming that Mike Jones’s talk on Margaret Mead had damaged the students
who heard him lecture at the university, the president and Professor Lotman
resurrected the claims of the Jewish forum in Prague, accusing both Jones and
John Rao of being anti-Semites and neonazis.
The genesis of
these claims is worth pondering as a lesson in the mission creep that flows
from character assassination and thought control. This story began when Mike
Jones gave a talk in Prague in September 2004 on the topic, “Is the Gospel of
John Anti-Semitic?” The Jewish forum of Prague responded weeks later with the
claim that “Jones claimed that Jews were the children of Satan” and that there were
neonazis in the audience. The “children of Satan” claim had some basis in
reality; but to be accurate the quote should have read, “Jones cited the Gospel
of St. John, in which Jesus tells the Jews ‘Your father is Satan.’” The claim
that some members of the audience looked like neo-Nazis had no basis in
reality. Two years later, Cardinal Vlk accepted the false report of the Jewish
forum and added his own embellishments. Now John Rao was included in the cabal
with E. Michael Jones even though he had never written on the topic of the Jews
and was in fact scheduled to speak on the papal condemnation of Americanism.
Cardinal Vlk also added for good measure that Jones and Rao were
“anti-American,” a charge which Lotman declined to include in his attack on the
Trialogos conference, probably because the only thing more absurd than a Czech
bishop calling Americans un-American would be an Estonian professor leveling
the same charge. By the time the
same charges got resurrected in Tallinn in the summer of 2007, both Rao and
Jones, and not the people in the audience at Jones’s speech in 2004, were the
neo-Nazis. It was a striking example of mission creep, as applied to character
assassination. In September 2006 Jones complained to Bishop Phillippe Jourdan,
ordinary of the diocese of Tallinn, that Cardinal Vlk had damaged his
reputation by publishing a false report. During the same meeting Bishop Jourdan
told Jones to write to Cardinal Vlk and assured him that a talk on the Gospel
of St. John could not be construed as anti-Semitism.
Bishop Jourdan
had spoken at the 2006 conference and was scheduled to speak again in 2007, but
he withdrew a month before the beginning of the conference. Lotman, who had
been claiming all along that the conference speakers could not be considered
Catholic, (As some indication of his grasp of Catholic doctrine, during the
2006 conference, Lotman claimed that the Catholic Church had never opposed
suicide.) was quick to claim that the bishop’s action had vindicated his
position, but this again was more disinformation. The bishop had read John
Rao’s article “The Worst Papacy in History” on the internet and feared that it
would cause conference participants to question the Church and join the local
branch of the Society of St. Pius X, which had set up a literature table at the
conference.
Given the forces
arrayed against a conference already weakened by the withdrawal of economic
support which its opponents orchestrated, it was a minor miracle that anyone
came, but the crowds increased as the week went on, largely because the
favorable word of mouth overcame the slanders of the conference foes. The
appearance of a number of Estonian politicians at the conference probably
helped overcome the disinformation campaign as well. The political presenters
were Marko Mihkelson (Estonia), legislator, Mrs. Laine Janes (Estonia),
Minister of Culture, Prof. Jeffrey Langan (USA), historian, and Prof.
Przystawa. Mihkelson focused on the competition with Russia (Russians form a
strong minority within Estonia), while Mrs. Janes, speaking of feminine and
masculine foundations, lauded the Christian command to love one another. That
the two political figures, presenting earliest on Monday and Tuesday
respectively, spoke in generalities was less important than the encouragement
they gave by their presence. One hopes the Festival was a benefit to them,
because they will now be struggling against the guilt-by-association attacks
that, according to Varro, have already begun.
Langan led us through
the intellectual response to the French Revolution, with critiques of John
Adams and Immanuel Kant, and an appreciation of Pope Pius VI. Przystawa showed
us constitutional government as developed by Poland and Lithuania, hundreds of
years before the USA, and the trajectory of struggle and, now, discouragement
that followed its fall. Both did what historians do best: showed us significant
facts that altered our commonly held views.
John Adams’
long-running dispute with Jefferson over the French Revolution led to moral
exhaustion. Kant was, surprisingly, intellectually complicit in the
Revolution’s crimes. And Pius VI’s resistance led straight to the scenario
surrounding the very important Regensburg address of Pope Benedict XVI.
Langan’s “play within a play” (horrible totalitarianism or terrorism, within
sweet indifference) pointed to the reality described by Przystawa.
Poland’s
constitutional republic was destroyed by egoism: the “Liberum Veto.” A
brilliant resistance against tyranny (the inner play) is now dissolving in the
“sweet lies” of political correctness after Communism’s fall. The most dogged
resisters, poets and unionists, got no credit. Solidarity’s leadership was
revised by fraud.
But it is hard
to believe favor would have made much difference. The story, in Poland and
everywhere, reminds me of Aesop’s fable of the sun and the wind. They tried to
make the man remove his coat. The storm wind failed; the man clutched his coat
tighter. In the sun, coats are now being cast aside left and right. And misery,
loneliness, despair, and death follow. The Logocentric part of the conference
needed to try to point a way where politics fails.
Logos
Logocentric
speakers included Dr. Mart Laar (Estonia), former prime minister; Fathers
Tadeusz Guz (Poland), university dean, Ivo Ounpuu (Estonia), theologian, and
Brian Harrison (Australia), apologist; Dr. E. Michael Jones (USA), Culture
Wars editor/publisher, and Prof. John Rao (USA), historian.
Laar laid a
foundation for European identity when he surprisingly focused on Christianity,
the basis of which, he said, has been “thrown out mercilessly” from the Draft
Constitution, using Moslems as an excuse. He admitted how reluctantly Estonians
of the late Middle Ages converted to Christianity when they’d rather “burn
churches and grab maidens” (but they must have been beautiful maidens!).
Christianity is now our identity, without which we would still be “in the
caves.” We cannot “shut up” out of tolerance. “At some point every civilization
has to defend itself, otherwise this beautiful colorful puzzle of the world
cannot show all its colors any more.”
Father Guz
focused on Jesus, who is Logos, but was swiftly swept into conflict with modern
thought. Dostoyevski, however, makes us sensitive to the authority of Jesus. Real
creativity is in the heart of Logos as love. But modern, German-based thought
is founded on the self-contradiction of Luther. When I asked whether this left
any way out, he burst out passionately that “every man and every woman are
chosen by the Creator for eternal life.” This got a round of applause.
Father Ounpuu,
apparently one of only three Estonian priests, said “God created man according
to his own face.” He detailed natural law and the denials of it by moderns.
Like Przystawa, he gave a gloomy prognosis; he could not offer hope to our
newlyweds, but bade us wait for Arab or Chinese converts.
Father Harrison,
by contrast, recalled to us the story of Saints Cyril and Methodius, a giant
feat of creation of an alphabet, a sacred language, and a culture from scratch.
(They just did it. Can’t we just reach out and recover computer-addled
moderns?) Then he introduced us to the marriage of logic and religion by
describing his own journey to Logos. Both Protestantism and Orthodoxy presented
insuperable logical problems with knowable revelation, the one the
self-contradiction of Sola Scriptura and the other a specious criterion
for Ecumenical Council validity. And so he turned to Catholicism.
Mike Jones
returned, as did several presenters, to the Pope’s Regensburg address. He
roughly identified Logos (Jesus Christ and Greek philosophy) with Catholicism,
alogos (divine voluntarism, conflating good and evil) with Islam, and
anti-Logos (subversion) with Judaism. There are problems with this
identification, as Afghan heroism and Dr. Laura demonstrate. The worst,
perhaps, is that it gives the impression that if only Jews and Muslims can be
defeated, everything will be fine. (What about the powers who hire the Jews?)
To be sure,
Jones is deeply concerned with the salvation of individual Jews. Since Amos is
out of touch, and Jeremiah isn’t responding to his pager, every synagogue and
yeshiva could hardly do better than to make Jones required reading, with no
evasions allowed. Of course the Jews are too timid to react this way, and are
trying to shut him up. Thus, the Estonians get a superb opportunity to show
their tenacity by continuing to invite Mike Jones.
Jones made
cultural observations that led into Martynov’s synthesis. The iPod is cutting
yourself off from other human beings, while folk music is good: “Anything worth
doing is worth doing badly” (Chesterton). In later presentations, Jones
critiqued Wagnerian and modern music, and one strand of post-modern
architecture, as driven by self-justifying adultery and other transgressions.
He marshaled quotes that were surprisingly straightforward in their cry for
Logos. If the masters are thus open despite themselves, how much more so their
students? This is opportunity.
John Rao, the
Festival’s king of satire, slapped us all upside the head to put Logos where we
live. He contrasted Sophist success orientation with Socratic love of Logos.
According to one friend of his, the opposition has power, prestige, and wealth,
while we Catholics have... notebooks, hauled from conference to conference.
(This got my attention as I scribbled away on page 43 of my notebook.) On the
other hand, the Sophists’ success is a downward spiral, dumbed down endlessly
with no means of getting out.
Greek (and
Chinese) seeds of Logos were validated by the Incarnation. The huge
counter-move waited till the late Middle Ages (he ought to read Regine Pernoud
on legal foundations of this), and then used black legends and shortsighted
rhetoric to restore Success to its throne. Disillusioned by apathy, Catholic
thinkers bent this way to vitalism; a counter-move toward Catholic identity
(Syllabus of Errors) now appears to have been swamped by Sarumanism (“deploring
maybe evils done by the way, but approving the high and ultimate purpose...”).
How much money do you make? Rao finished with a “conversation” in which all
considerations of principle are dismissed as a nuisance, and whoever raises
them as a pro-Soviet, al-Qaeda subversive. Now go to work and be exhausted!
Rao’s last talk,
pointedly titled “American Pluralism: Smiling as Christian Europe Dies,”
lampooned the USA as the “big drink that tastes good ... as long as they don’t
say abortion is murder.” Then the Church has no future, and Europe has no
future (salt has no savor). But he couldn’t end without hints of hope: “Thank
you to Tallinn for the best days of my life [and] immense numbers of the most
beautiful women I’ve ever seen in my life.” No, that is not irrelevant.
By the end of
the week, it was clear that Lotman had failed in his attempt to stop the
conference. Not only had the crowds increased as the week went on, Trialogos,
by going ahead as planned, had created a record of what they actually did say,
as opposed to Lotman’s account of what they were going to say, which could be
handed (either in video or print form) to the curious, who could then make up
their own minds on the matter. Discourse in the service of the truth now has a
beachhead in Europe at the intersection of three cultures, and from Estonia it
can expand into Protestant Scandanavia, Orthodox Russia, and Catholic Europe.
The sine qua non of success here was solidarity. If any of the organizers had
cracked under pressure and caved in to the demands of those who wanted to wreck
the conference there would have been no coherent explanation of the roots of
European identity, no record of what actually got said to counter the lies of
the slanderers, and no future for discourse. At the final dinner, a visibly
relieved Varro Vooglaid rose to thank the participants. In response Mike Jones
rose and invoked The Lord of the Rings, claiming that the only thing
that hobbits had was each other, but as long as they remained true to each
other, there was hope. That was followed by a toast to Father Robert, the
American hermit living in Norway who is Trialogos’ spiritual advisor.
Icon
Beauty is of God
alone. All the powers that are currently beating the stuffings out of us cannot
make beauty, nor do they even pretend to, not with all their billions. When I
had to leave Tallinn and come back here to computer ad flash box world, I could
have howled with mental pain.
According to
Vladimir Martynov (Russia), composer, a thoughtful act may be a channel whereby
visual events change people “secretly.” Verbality loses power over people’s
minds, where greater power is visuality. The latter takes two forms. Glamour is
absolute surface, gloss, no sense, absence of any depth (magazines, TV), and
it’s crawled into all parts of life. It’s image without primal pre-image,
referring to nothing. Elements of hairstyle and clothes outweigh the person.
This contrasts to Icon, which ascends.
The Western
church lost its grip on Icon when it rejected the teachings of St. Gregory
Palamas on uncreated light in the 14th century. Frescoes and mosaics of
Constantinople are the swan song of iconography, from which Renaissance
Italians began to diverge. (Both Mike Jones and I thought this was gilding the
lily of 8th century decisions against iconoclasm. To me, uncreated light sounds
like the Holy Spirit by any other name, while Mike wondered where it left
8th-13th century iconography. But either way, Martynov’s insight brilliantly
illuminates the modern state of things.)
We suffer a
division between Church and Culture, where speaking of God is indecent. The
Eastern Church tends to retreat from culture altogether, while the Western
tends to surrender to the glamour sphere. Exceptions: Music only (Avro Paert,
Taverner and others), not visual art. We need culture that makes people want to
come to the temple; we need miraculous opportunity of contacts and particular
meetings to begin to interact for this. “I have a debt of gratitude to Estonia
and to this Festival because I think this Festival is such an event.”
Yes indeed.
Martynov put words to what we were immersed in, every morning at Lauds and
every evening. Saturday (September 22) and Sunday, the Latvija choir and
Estonian Hortus Musicus; Monday and Tuesday, the Russian Sirin singers; also
theater, and poetry of many nations, and Irish piping, and yes, visual arts,
much of which I missed on Saturday (September 29). And Katherine Guild? Perhaps
this slipped beneath Martynov’s radar screen as too humble, calling itself
artisanship?
Taivo Niitvaagi,
friend of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, went to Ireland around 1988 and met poets and
pipers. Is this miraculous opportunity? There was a visual icon almost too big
to see, Old Town itself. Walls next to cobblestoned streets, all those arches,
leading in and down to intricacy filled with voices and deep silence. Old Town
is an icon of the human mind. Cling tight to the memory, all you festivalgoers,
as you are submerged once again in the shriek of computerized imagery.
St.
Petersburg and back
The man or
woman, “image of God” in Genesis, is not image in Martynov’s negative sense,
but — given sanctifying grace — truly icon. A Mexican grandmother shares her
joy in this by hanging up paper ribbons to celebrate her grandchild’s baptism.
Despite the brawling cars and ads, there is icon in Tijuana when women passing
in the street admire one another’s babies. I did not see this in Tallinn.
The Culture
Wars group entered Russia, the country of Vladimir Martynov, to the sounds
of Mike Jones’ mandolin. We went through the dispirited countryside to
monument-heavy St. Petersburg, where they seemed rather anxious for our approval.
Heaven knows our approval hardly tilts the scale! But their humility does them
credit; I wish the U.S. could match it.
The Russians,
bless their hearts, appear to be getting over the depressing solemnity of
empire. The beautiful Peterhof gardens are open to xylophone bands, small
children, and girls who plait fallen leaves into autumn crowns. In the
Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul, resting place of czars, the chapel of St.
Catherine the Martyr houses the bones not only of the last czar and his family
but of the servants who were murdered with them. As we venerated the icon in
the Church of Our Lady of Kazan, we turned around and there came a wedding,
sung in the ancient liturgy of SS Cyril and Methodius: “Gospodi pomilui,”
I heard, “Lord have mercy.” When I asked Mike Jones what he thought the future
of Russia was, he said: “That wedding.”
We visited the
Museum of Dostoyevski and rejoiced in a great artist who loved his family. After
learning from Mike Jones how Rousseau dumped his children to die at an
orphanage, like puppies at the pound, and from Robert Sungenis how Einstein
carried on mother and daughter adulteries, we hear from Dostoyevski that “the
greatest happiness of the world is children.” They even had notes that his kids
shoved under his door when he was asleep after working nights. I think his
blessings, as well as his descendants, still inhabit St. Petersburg, alive with
children chattering in cheerful Russian.
The prize for
cluelessness, however, went to the Leningrad Museum, which had dusty displays
of the successes of Communism in the ‘20s and ‘30s but no sense that they
somehow led up to the catastrophe of 1941. This is not to say that the 900 day
siege of Leningrad is not part of that museum. The section dedicated to the
siege of Leningrad is the most moving exhibit in the entire museum. The woman
who acts as a guard for the first room hands Jeff Langan an English language
script, and, following the narrative he reads to us, we move deeper and deeper
into the horror of those days. The rooms get literally and progressively darker
as we move finally into a recreation of what an apartment in St. Petersburg
looked like at the time. Mike Jones, who has been trying to converse with the
guards in the Russian he has learned from his grandchildren, asks the woman to
turn on the lights, but that is precisely the point. We are meant to experience
the absence of light in that cold apartment. During the siege, the windows were
covered to keep what little light there was inside and away from German
artillery spotters. The same blankets served to keep the bitter cold out. This
cold was the Russians biggest ally in the war because it froze German machinery
and stalled the German offensive in the trenches just outside the town.
Goebbels’ cry, “Wollt Ihr den totalen Krieg?” was no match for the
Russian winter. When the siege of Leningrad started, the Russians had enough
food for a month. The siege lasted for almost three years, during some of the
most bitterly cold winters on record. How the Russians survived this is
anyone’s guess, but the record is there in the museum, and you get to piece the
story together from things like the weapons that got left behind, the orders
from the German high command to exterminate everyone in the city once the city
was captured, and a square meter of soil and the amount of shrapnel in
it--springs, propellers, shards of metal--which gives some indication of the
amount of ordinance both sides used to kill each other. Then there are the
pictures of people pulling sleds over the snow covered streets. The big bundles
on the sleds are corpses. There are also dioramas, including one of Nevsky
Prospect in front of the Merchant’s Yard, the city’s big department store.
Walking up and down Nevsky Prospect as often as we had, noticing the crowds of
people, the bistros and the shops was no preparation for how Nevsky Prospect
looked then, at the height of the siege. The shops had been reduced to
windowless hulks; in the middle of the street a huge bomb crater has become,
upon closer inspection, an improvised well into which people are lowering
buckets, which they will then take on their sleds back to their darkened
apartments.
If the
organizers of this museum had a better grasp of history, they might have called
their museum the Failure of the Enlightenment Museum, because in Berlin and St.
Petersburg, and in their founders Frederick the Great and Peter the Great, the
Enlightenment had its great flowering in central and eastern Europe. The
culmination of that flowering happened during the 1940s. In 1941 Berlin marched
on Leningrad and did its best to destroy Russia’s monument to the
Enlightenment. In 1945, having withstood the siege, Leningrad marched on Berlin
and returned the favor, wreaking even more destruction on Germany than Germany
had wrought on Russia. That is how history works, and it is not pretty. The
fact that time can heal wounds like this is evident in the sparkling golden
domes and fountains of Peterhof, which was a bombed-out hulk just like the
Merchant’s Yard in 1945. The fact that people don’t learn from their mistakes
is evident enough in Berlin now that it has become the capital of the
neo-Enlightenment known as the European union and the home of ugly Jewish
architecture and the Dionysian festival known as the Love Parade.
Returning
afterward to Tallinn, we saw a tableau at one Estonian bus station. A sad-faced
young woman, with lines running down from the corners of her mouth, was met by
a man coming off the bus. He embraced her for a while, then she drew back and
walked away, head down. He stood looking after her.
We had no way of
knowing what went on in those people’s minds, but it flashed me back to a scene
of my youth, in a nearby European country, and there I knew very well why the
girl was sad. Modern women have been locked away from the news that they are
not alone. The image of God is crushed. This is why I pleaded with Varro that
they should not abandon the University, even if they have been barred from
there. Can they leave their young people, the future of their country, to be
poisoned?
The fighting
American, John Rao, said his fierce wife was the only non-family visitor of a
female anti-abortion protestor, imprisoned in New York for two years without
trial. Every nightmare was real: lesbian guards, strip-searches by men, even a
fellow prisoner giving birth on the floor, aided only by the visitor. Violence
undergirds the sweet indifference of Jeff Langan’s outer play.
But in this
secret war against our children, whose effectiveness depends on the pretense
that there is peace, we have strange allies. John admitted the Greens had
supported his anti-abortion-clinic moves in Italy, on account of pollution by
medical waste, and Varro said they are sympathetic on the issue of
contraception. According to Colin Mason (PRI Review, Sep-Oct 2007), “These
drugs and devices work by secreting massive doses — up to four hundred times
the natural level — of female hormones into a woman’s bloodstream.” Just hammering
the poor little hormone system of a woman who is trying to be agreeable, never
knowing the man may wish her happiness. My nephew Steve Cook, a soldier in
Iraq, calls for chivalry on his MySpace.
We need to learn
what the Jews do best: support each other, not push the struggling Logos-lover
away from the lifeboat with our oars. Oskari Juurikkala, possibly due to his
youth, was on the right track. Remember the sponsors of Trialogos, on the back
cover of the program; they must have our support as they come under attack. Our
aim must be to save everything, even the little businesses and the countryside,
because each door is an icon of love.
On our final
night, we ate dinner at Kuldse Notsu Koorts, the Estonian restaurant in
the basement of Tallinn’s St. Petersbourg Hotel (a Festival sponsor). I
scratched my head at the first dessert on their list, Tuuliku Kama,
mysteriously described as grain and pea flour in clabbered milk. But what is
the point of going to a local ethnic restaurant in a foreign country and not
trying their food? Actually it was very tasty. When we told the waitress that,
her face lit up with a smile, and she happily announced that it was always her
favorite when she was little.
This
article appeared in the December 2007 issue of
Culture Wars.
Share |
| Home | Books | DVDs/CDs | Subscribe | Write Letter to Editor | Events | Donate |
Culture Wars • 206 Marquette Avenue
• South Bend, IN 46617 • Tel: (574) 289-9786 • Fax: (574) 289-1461
Copyright