Out of Bounds and Beneath Bridges or, Get Thee under a Bridge!
People, cities, and things have no constancy. They change. They are even inclined to change completely, to negate themselves, to slough off their old skin and reemerge anew. I like this aspect of things. It suits me. But, to be more exact, it’s not so much that these things change, but that I change my perspective while they are always multifarious. They present themselves with many faces, with myriad masks, reflections, and phantasmagoric appearances. This is most obvious with cities. The real (or merely different?) face of a city does not reveal itself in its central squares or main streets. Similarly, people’s true faces do not show themselves when they appear with suits and ties. When you enter a city by train – through the suburbs, from the edges and borders, from behind, so to speak – you are more likely to encounter its secret spaces, its underbelly: garages and warehouses, industrial zones reminiscent of areas ravaged by war or plague, community gardens, and buildings without clear purpose, maybe not even buildings at all but objects with odd architectural features. The perspectives here are endless and innumerable.
Even though I spent almost half my life in Vilnius, I struggled to tame it, domesticate it, and never felt like I could really trust it. There was always something alien about it. If it were a person, I wouldn’t go out on a recon mission with it; I wouldn’t want to sit with it by a bonfire – more or less the same things in my mind. I felt this way until I started paddling into it. The Vilnelė. The Neris. Floating in. From the water, it lets you into its confidence; it opens up – from the backside, from the inside, from within its body, its nervous system, from below and from the depths. The feeling is like entering the service entrance of a theater or some other such phantasmagoric institution. From the water, you see a different face. Unshaven. Unmannered. It has nowhere to hide. No phony poses. From this perspective, it seems defenseless, vulnerable, standing there naked, with its geography revealed, and you see it without tinted lenses.
It changes into something quite other – all of its extant images crumble. All of its postcard and photographic depictions suddenly lose their meaning – if they ever had any. One perspective negates another. However much I tried to grasp Vilnius from the heights – from Three Crosses or Bekes hills – I would see it as if through a fog, or a negative film. The city would pretend to be dead. The endless cascades of red roofs, the webs of streets and squares, the faded yellow twistings of its walls… The city seemed like an exhumed mass grave with scattered cerements, while the little dots scurrying about its open spaces were like the worms who gnaw the dead but hadn’t yet had their fill.
But now I know the way into Vilnius. It needs to be done repeatedly, periodically, like checking to see if the doors are locked. You beach your kayak in the Bernardine Gardens or under Mindaugas Bridge, shed your fins, tail and gills, take a drag off a spliff, a burning draught from a flask, and it’s as if you’ve been here for a thousand years…
So where does Vilnius open up the most? Where does it speak in a way you can understand, but rather raw, with no suit and tie? Under the bridges, no doubt. The underbridges (let’s call them that) are its throats, larynxes, and mouthpieces. Everything of utmost secrecy happens under there, everything that has to be hidden from prying eyes – all that is disgusting, gross, improper or, conversely, what is too astonishing, too beautiful, and shamelessly so. The beauty there can hurt your eyes, even blind you. Or, conversely, it can open them up, opening you to a palette of all possible colors and scents. The best and most blissful drinking bouts happen under bridges. You will never be alone there, especially if you believe the Chinese saying that if you look long enough at a river, sooner or later a corpse will appear… And the hottest kisses. I have, more than once, frightened couples with my paddles (usually around Užupis). They see me and take flight – like ducks, they make a circle, returning to the same spot, but quiet now, hugging each other all the more there under the arms of the bridge. Are they ashamed? You can only laugh, smile – you can almost see their nerve endings giving off sparks. They’re so naked in their clothes.
In the waters of a river, you become a bit more prescient. It’s as if you’re given, at least temporarily, the powers of Charon: he who is able to see more than one should, seeing things inside out, seeing what you want to keep hidden.
And then there’s this: why does the underbridge make you want to yell? For the echo? But it’s not much of an echo compared to when you howl into an empty well and the return of your voice is so loud that it can knock your teeth out. Here, under the bridge, the wind pulls the words out of you. Brutal crosswinds blow. A real windshear. The city’s fierce breath. It’s almost banal to say it, but all those streams, rivers, canals, sewers, and gutters are none other than the city’s arteries and veins, the circulatory web in which memory flows, the blood of your unknowing, and into which you can only step from the far shore of Acheron. The Neris was always Acheron to me, while the Sports Arena on the other side, with its wave-curling roof, is like a trampoline, a bridge to the sky that does not connect the banks but only shows the direction you must go. I always avoid walking there without any specific goal, unless it’s with my buddy V. (who seems to me more and more like some whacked-out Orpheus). We’d climb out of our collapsable Taimens and climb the banks with the skeletons of our kayaks on our backs and hit the beer bar to reflect on our achievements. Not surprisingly, after some time there, we’d lose all memory and sense of the laws that govern this side of the river.
There probably isn’t a city without its water: whether river, stream or lake. And if there is such, then it must be a city for the dead, or built by the dead. The dead don’t need a river because they have nowhere to go. By contrast, when you flow with a current, you can flirt with both banks, in other words, take part in life’s dramatic tension – flirting with both life and death. I don’t know why Kaunas and Vilnius avoid – even fear – their water: their Nemunas and Neris. The inhabitants of these banks avoid their rivers as if they were some cursed strip of road where, for reasons no one can understand, endless accidents occur. Maybe this is beyond logic. Maybe these cities are already full of the dead.
One of my fantasies is that you could cover a whole urban river’s flow with a huge reinforced concrete bridge, in other words, put it in a pipe, and then you’d have the biggest underbridge in the world, with the softest bedding of darkness, or the most secret sewer. From Valakampiai to Gariūnai, where in my student days I also climbed out on shore with paddles – we were kayaking at night, steering into darkness, into the intoxication of a shadow-world where the underbridges looked both frightening and mesmerizing. And like Noah’s arcs, they were full of life. Not like our rusty Riverbank Arch stretching from nowhere to nowhere which, to tell the truth, is my favorite arch in the city. An arch of triumph. No joke. It’s a triumph against Philistine messianism.
The riverbank needs living water. It needs perspective, illusion. The bank contains the illusion of the other side. Like a sedative. It sets up illusions without which we would all lose our minds – either from beauty or horror, which seem to me to be more and more the same thing. Banks, rivers, and the illusions they convey need to be tamed, tried on like shoes, broken in. Otherwise, they can press, rub, squeeze. No joke. We need to be connected to them like to a mammal’s breasts – otherwise, we turn into the lonely administrators of the bastions of the dead.
For that matter, when you float down a river, you don’t need any maps or memory. The current takes care of all that – unless you need to get out on shore, even if only to go to a bar. Going down under a bridge is the same as sneaking a look under a woman’s skirt. Whatever else it may be, it’s enchanting, alluring, dangerous – even the tip of your tongue can go numb. But the underbridge is most beautiful in winter. I’ve never seen a more wondrous gothic spread of icicles with cars above playing their droning fugues. So when it really freezes up, get thee under a bridge! – even if it’s just the one over the Vilnelė at the point where it flows into the Neris. You’ll witness a real army of stalactites marching down.
I’ve slept under bridges, got drunk, started bonfires, set off firecrackers, taken pictures, hidden myself away, listened secretly to lovers talking above, stood on the bank and watched myself swimming with the stream, growing distant, while reeds brandished their spears in the shallows and my reflection couldn’t climb out to any shore.
How I Kissed the Dead
The garden blooms, the flowers bloom, and the graves bloom as well…
— “Laimė” (“Happiness”) by Baltasis Kiras (White Seagull)
I’ll admit it straight up – I’ve never kissed a corpse. I’ve touched one, held one’s hand, but… There was once a tradition – to say goodbye to a loved one by giving them a kiss. You say goodbye to a loved one, but you kiss a corpse – already like two different things. But actually, it’s the dead who kiss us. Every day. The dead kiss us through memory. Especially in springtime when Bernardine Cemetery in Vilnius blooms with the blue kisses of scillae, which open up their little goblets brimming with the other side, with the promises of eternity, with nectar and intoxication. There you have it – a poetic pendant inclusion from the sleek and boggy November tar.
The truth is, we are full of fears, myths, and stereotypes related to death, especially because for some time our relationship to it, our understanding of it, and our funereal rites too, have been changing. From a broader temporal perspective, the change is quite intense. The intimate relationship with death depicted above would now probably be described – nay, condemned! – as necrophilia. Generally, our contemporary relationship with death is, if we can put it this way, quite cold. It’s like the hands in cemeteries in November trying to grasp a match in order to light a little string in a glass filled with paraffin. Death is being pushed back on all fronts: it’s not there; it is denied. However, looking at screens (and the screen of the streets), it can appear that the culture of death flows on like the jet stream (bodies, corpses, blood, murder, vampires, Goth culture, Halloween, etc.). But let’s be clear, this is death profaned, death turned into a commodity, an image, something that has little to do with reality, with death in reality. These different deaths pass each other by, and if they were to meet in some gateway, they’d probably antagonize each other like a cat meeting a dog, or a metalhead a meathead. At best, they would have nothing to say to each other.
You don’t really see the dead anymore in funeral homes (though I still remember when personal wakes were held in people’s apartments). Now, the dearly departed are shown in wakes for ever shorter periods. They’re given over to undertakers, to firms that embalm and anesthetize (it’s easier, more comfortable). This is neither good nor bad – it’s just the way it is. Death is thereby distanced: from ourselves, from our home, from our family. I think cremation is also connected to the fear of death and dead bodies. It becomes easier to say goodbye, to cope emotionally, but is it really psychologically healthier? That’s the question. Certainly, economics is not the least concern, given the price of a plot, not to mention the recent boom in ecological concerns. A human being is not, essentially, an ecological being. But that’s another subject.
For that matter, a coffin (having in mind its construction: lacquers, sealants, and so on) is an ecological bomb. A time bomb which, little by little, like some intravenous drip, pumps toxins into the earth’s arteries and veins. Studies were done in Poland about how much CO2 and other substances were released into the air when candles were burned during All Saints’ Day. Let the candlemakers and cemetery caretakers tell us how much paraffin is burned, and how much non-recyclable glass is thrown out. Even the air temperature above the graves heats up like it really means it.
The existence of this benighted climate change, so ruinous for the self-important species Homo sapiens (OK, OK, not just that species), is clear as can be during All Saints’ Day. Thirty years ago, it wasn’t so easy to stick a couple candles into the early November ground, and everyone already had their winter coats ready to go. Now, we’re all quite heated up. I don’t even plant hard-neck garlic at this time anymore – it’s just too warm.
Of course, when you see the traffic jams by cemeteries and the pedestrian crush within them during the November holiday you could come away with quite the opposite impression – the we have grown ever closer to our dead. Cemeteries, it seems, are one of the few remaining places where you can still satisfy your need for the sacred. Even if you visit them like you visit a museum. And so it is a museum, a museum of living history. There is nothing subtler and more full of life than a snail crawling across a headstone along an engraved name from the date of birth to the date of death. (I must confess to stealing this image from a poem by Dainius Dirgėla.) Of course, this function of the sacred can be performed by mountains, forests, swamps, artworks, and whatever else that alters, switches, and transforms our ordinary reality. I can already hear the objections: “Let’s worry about the living first and foremost, not the dead…” But if there are no dead, then there won’t be any living. The problem is that it’s getting harder and harder to tell them apart.
The dead do multiply. The internet is full of them. They are among us. Social media profiles have become gravestones. Unfortunately, only the gravestones know it. I have experienced several times now how the social network prompts a reminder that today is your “friend’s” birthday when that person has been hunting the fields of eternity for a year or more. Suddenly, said friend is flooded with heartfelt messages wishing health, happy times, unflagging energy, drive, success in the game of love and in life. And all of it with emoticons: hearts, candlelit cakes… The candles, of course, are needed, but not those candles. He could use some real ones on his grave cake instead. The personal life of the dead may be intimate, but the society of the dead isn’t exactly equal, just as with the living. This is perfectly illustrated by the numbers of candles, candelabras, and flowers, not to mention the amounts invested in marble. Power games continue even here. To paraphrase César Vallejo and George Orwell: everyone’s already dead, but some are deader, or more dead than others.
Despite all, All Saints’ Day is for me the most beautiful holiday. A real holiday. Of course, death is a matter of consensus. And this is the time when we have to come to some agreements about what death means to us and how to get along with this guest of ours. Whatever you do, don’t fail to go to the funeral of a friend or close relative. It’s happened to me that he gets buried, but I haven’t buried him yet. So I walk down the street and there he is. I’m saying hello before I know it – I recognize him after all. Probably I’ve been looking for him, can’t let go, still tied up. When we push death aside, we just multiply our phantoms and illusions.
When a relative died recently, I took my eleven-year-old son to the traditional wake and funeral. He had never seen a dead body. The most real of real bodies for him was number seven: Cristiano Ronaldo.
Why are this person’s fingers and skin like wax? Why doesn’t he look like himself? Why is he so cold? Well, he got cold – like a radiator when the heating season is done. That’s it. We live so that we learn how to die. All Saints’ Day is one of our training sessions, with push-ups on the headstones. If you can still push yourself up, then go and live your life, kiss your shadow, and be happy that you still cast one. A shadow is a holy thing. It’s like a beaver dam for a Lithuanian Charon – one day or another, we’re going to have to go across.
Gytis Norvilas. Požemių paukščiai (Birds of the Underground). Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla, 2024.
