Notes From Siberia - 1 & 2

[Preface: none of the photos were taken in Siberia. Lisbon, Saturday 21st July].
I have grown accustomed to referring to Vila Franca de Xira as Siberia over the past few months. I utter this as easily to my friends and acquaintances in the town as I do to people anywhere beyond its boundaries, or beyond the frontiers of this country. It is no secret; and it is no joke.

 

The people here invariably make the wrong association, not so surprisingly. But it confuses them, until I explain. They are at least much more adapted, if not totally, to this place than I could ever be. So when they hear "Siberia" and no doubt think: "But it's not cold here. There's no tundra here. What's he talking about, the crazy foreigner?", I quickly elucidate.
Only I can see it this way, because only I am suffering from its effects. Mind you, many of the locals suffer from them too, but they are blissfully, mercifully ignorant of their suffering. They have no, or very few, other experiences to compare, and there's no place like home, is there? Not all of them, but a great many. They are inured or blind or deaf to it, to everything that the place does not give them because it doesn't possess such things.
Or are denied them by an indolent, self-serving local politics that abuses the bulk of the population and its votes with lies, circuses, inverted priorities and plain, backward, pseudo-democratic, crypto-fascistic, lazy inaction and negligence.

 

The people may be inured by their ignorance, their pettiness, their passivity and their clinging to 'tradition', which was handed down to them by the Dictator 75 years ago, but they are not immune to the town's infectious, pernicious diseases. A small town is its people; the locals ARE the small town. There are many obvious cases of sickness, and clear evidence of insanity in this small town - both among its individuals and throughout its society. Mental deficiency - as normal - in many forms that you would hardly believe. As my Dad used to say: "There are more out than in".
VFX = Siberia.
No, there is no perma-frost here [that, by the way, global warming is at this very moment melting away, far to the east of Moscow. And as it does so, it is bringing to the surface its own unique domino effect in the cause-effect chain - the release of billions of tons of highly toxic gases into the air that will speed up many of the greenhouse processes, destroying life to the little that is north of Siberia, but much worse to the vast lands that are south of it across Asia]. Only brain-cells lie buried, dormant or extinct, beneath the surface of these wretched inhabitants of this corner of the Ribatejop region. This is a mere 30 kilometres from Lisbon, the capital of the Portuguese Republic that sits on its 7 hills at the mouth of the wide Tejo estuary, staring wistfully out at the Atlantic and with its back eternally, defiantly turned to Spain.
Lisbon, dressed in its array of wondrous, many-coloured but ancient, fading jewellery, like the slightly senile, misguided, falsely proud old lady she is, lost in her nostalgic dreams of what seems like a glorious, distant past that sparked its delusions of grandeur and global power 500 years ago. Lisbon, an old lady who confuses her own identity by punctuating her appearance with increasing brush strokes of contradictory, riotous brush strokes of ultra-modernity, as if she were an architectural teenage fashion victim; like some desperate attempt to make sure the train of life does not depart without her.
I should never appear this spiteful towards the Old Lady. After all, she more than just accommodated me and my particular madnesses during 10 magical winters and summers. I am not at all spiteful towards her . On the contrary, she holds me love, my respect, my admiration, my deep gratitude, essa velha Senhora Lisboa. She became my dreams come true that I didn't even know I had had, my last sanctuary, my springboard, my mother, my lover. Now, I am truly bitter for her loss, eaten by grieving, but I will not blame her.
I had to leave my decadent, unpredictable old lady to discover finally what the unique Portuguese word 'saudade' means. No, I must correct myself; not what it means, but how it feels, to actually fully experience it.
'Ter saudades'. This does not accurately translate into English or any other language. If people tell you that it just means 'to miss something or someone deeply, please simply smile back knowingly and remember the following.
Saudade is an integral, intrinsic element of the Portuguese soul. It is a nostalgia that burns with longing, yearning; it can be a warm, almost joyful missing that is comfortable, and not just an impassioned sadness at great, irrevocable loss.
Saudade is a normal, everyday fact of life in the Portuguese psyche. Without it, Portugal's very own musical genre, fado, could never have existed.
The Spanish neighbours may have flamenco; Brazil may be incomparably rich anddiverse in its musical culture; Portugal's other ex-colonies turned-little-sisters in Africa, Goa and Macão may have their own distinctive representations in song and rhythm. But nowhere else, not anywhere in the world will you come across fado (except in Portuguese emigrant community restaurants and gatherings), its singers (fadistas) and its principal instrument, the guitarra portuguesa. Combined, they produce sounds to tug the heart and tempt out the tears, even if you cannot understand the words.
Fado is the voice and words of saudade.
And I have fallen victim to saudade - even more than I foresaw that I would as the time to leave counted down from 18 months ago - by burying myself away in this Siberia.

 

The Siberia that I evince and allude to, finally, is not about frozen nature, at least not literally.
The Siberia that I feel stronger with every day is the creation of Ivan the Terrible and perfected by Stalin, who realised its full potential for breaking dissenters, purging his view of earthly paradise of its 'pessimists' (dictators' euphemism for those who resist).
You see now? I am talking of the Siberia of the gulags; Siberia the world's largest-ever concentration camp, with its innumerable, remote penal villages, towns cities, and their industries feeding a vast, endless, inescapable, successful economy of hard labour, punishment and torture only relieved by death.
The breaking of body, mind and spirit; of the defencless, unadapted individual. The elimination of stimulation, diversity, creativity, dynamism. The robbery of beauty and colour and nature; the rape of the intellect and the urge to enquiry; the murder of my soul.
For make no mistake, fado this is not. Death this is.
Of course, as with anything, it is relative and subjective. Only I can see this and feel it to such an extreme, but only I can be me and am me. It is Siberia because there is no more than a 1% chance of escape. TINA, which stands for: There Is No Alternative.

 

'Gaivota' means 'seagull'. Besides what my photos have shown as to my feelings for gaivotas, it is also the title of one of the most beautiful fados. Maybe I should have alternatively put here my picture of the street-sign, Rua das Gaivotas, Lisbon's Seagulls Street.........but the boat out of water is as symbolic as the other pictures suggesting liberty that appear here.

Notes from Siberia - 2

Yesterday, in amongst the the monotous agony of circular anxiety and rising mental fragmentation that my head, being so wholly vulnerable, has become as it is worn down and weakened, I had 2 cogent thoughts:
(1) The sudden realisation that everything around me that is offensive to by being only affects me because for everyone else, this is normality. They mostly live like they are on permanaent holiday.
(2) I must find a way to convey this Siberia graphically, using my camera, to the "free world" beyond.
It isn't enough for me to write about how I feel and what I see. I must try to back that up with visual evidence. As with everywhere else I've ever set foot - from Ilford to Istanbul, from Stepney to Sarajevo, from Atlanta to Akko - I have observed and analysed this place. I have come up with theories that I have never heard expressed as to why Vila Franca de Xira is much like a microcosmmic Siberia of the mind.
So, that is my project for a diary entry in the near-future.