Novel “Lenagaitis”. An attempt to think in a stream, not a scheme
Ingvilda Strautmane: Speaking of your novel “Lēngaitis”, I would like to know how you would define your angle, focus or conditionality of time and space, telling about Konstantin Raudiv and, of course, also about Zenta Mauriņš.
Andris Zeibots: Many people know about the phenomenon of voice associated with Raudivi – he heard voices from that world in the roar of various mechanical devices such as a radio show. But the question is not so much about it. A small derogation is required.
Just the author Ilmārs Šlāpins has reviewed my novel in the magazine “Ir”. He caught the same spirit in an extremely interesting way, asking who really speaks in the novel “Lēngaitis”. It seems to me that this is very much the answer to the question of who is speaking in Raudive’s voices.
Ieva Melgalve once gave me an interesting work by Timothy Morton in English – an object-oriented ontology.
There is a very strange worldview that makes us seem to flow into the world between the object and the way we perceive it.
Not that we look at it from a distance, but that we seem to live in it.
There was an art exhibition in which the artist Navarro dressed in a turtle costume. That is props, but it is not. The most interesting thing he did was try to get into the turtle’s psyche. What an animal’s psyche. Let’s say he meditated on that image.
Eventually, the artist came to a very interesting conclusion – during this performance, he did not enter the tortoise as an actor, but he had the feeling that on the contrary – the tortoise was trying to become a human. Here is where the scope of the flow of the object-oriented ontology is, the view here and there where the author is the image – then,
when I write a text about voices, about Raudivi, I am in some way in this image as an actor. At one point, I feel that this image, which I have already experienced, in which I have already entered such a prophetic psyche, is trying to get back to the author.
Why did you try to get into the image of Konstantin Raudive?
It seems to me that he is, to the greatest extent, the most alien figure in modern culture and ideological schemes. Raudive is so foreign in his understanding of the scheme of faith. Both in the sense of not attributing to him the views of the National Socialists there, and in the way he works as a parapsychologist.
He has defined himself as such a fatal scheme of man. My task was to understand how a scheme person becomes a flow person. Let’s say the novel has a huge emphasis on what is relativism, what is relative thinking. The scheme is always – whether ideological, worldview, or intuitively religious – drawn to an absolute that does not involve flow. It is intended to be a lighthouse to follow, it has no way back.
Do you allow Constantine Raudive to think in such categories?
There’s no such thing as no – he thought the opposite. To understand how the scheme works, I had to understand the means that are the tools of modern man, and those of my means are these “back and forth”. That is why there is already so much in this novel about relativism, about the fact that he is always opposed by opponents who have as much truth as the main characters. It is not the voice of the external author. This is the third thing that Slappin asked about – who is really talking.
And you can also talk to yourself, call whatever spirit you want. I can summon the spirit of Raudive and describe it in a novel, Raudive can summon the spirit of Goethe and communicate with him. These are the endless experiments that this novel is about.
Therefore, Raudive was able to be, to experience all that a normal person cannot experience – war, everything that has been taken away from him, everything that remains in his psyche. There is one of his opponents who enters the novel as a character who is not out of it 20 years after the war.
He has opponents from very different circles. We can sense that Zenta Mauriņa is also, if not skeptical, then cautious.
Yes, there is already the depth of our whole meaning that he does not stay in any scheme. Nowadays, everyone drives to some kind of scheme – only my thought, only my system is right. It’s all missed. Going in this direction of the scheme, one can get nowhere other than the same unfortunate sectarianism.
The attempt to think in a stream with this novel is an attempt to break out of the schematic thinking with which the modern world has long since ended in part and continues to do so.
All the negotiations that take place are like a dispute between two schemes.
Do you already have a lot of feedback on how people have read “Slow”?
A little bit. For me, this circle of acquaintances is not so huge. Rather, we get in touch in the form of a question – what have I thought of it and that. Well and then sometimes I have to explain long and broadly.
I am well aware that all that is in consciousness cannot be placed in a symbolic order. The symbolic arrangement is already a text, it is one of the ways in which we also create a scheme to a certain extent, we stop, we create an object that I talked about earlier.
These symbolic arrangements are no longer just language, there are also gestures, music, and so on. The way to build these signs, the system of these signs and all the symbolic arrangements from them… Well, here, and I have to explain it for a while. People want to translate it, to interpret it in their world, the way they have embraced it. Then we have a conversation. I think this is the most interesting.
Any other reader is already basically reading himself. We contact the object – in this case with the text, and try to transform it into ourselves, our own.
Photo: Publicity image
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Please have another comment on the book “Slow” cover.
On the cover – it’s slow motion, its smallness, abnormal survivor. He is able to live in insane cold and survive in volcanic heat. It is a slow essence. He is curled up in the center, surrounded by the orange radiance of heat and the icy, distant cosmos of space, close to absolute zero..
It is a slow-moving being who is trying to survive at this point, just as the author of the text, teasing around the text, is trying to express it not so that it turns into a stagnant scheme, but to allow movement back and forth.
I enter Raudive, Raudive returns to me.
Why did you focus on living in the 60s in Germany, in the small Badkrocingen?
When the previous novel “Krauklis” about Jānis Ziemeļnieks was written, a lot of material had been collected. One very large part was about the impact of war on the human psyche (after World War I). I realized that placing it in “Krauklis” would be too much. It is already over 600 pages there. If I wanted to put it in, another hundred pages would come. So I realized that this study of war psychic trauma and the material that goes with it needs to be put in a different piece.
This other piece is also “Lenagaitis”. It is not after the First World War, but after the Second World War, which has been even more brutal, to have knocked those people out of their ultimate classical thinking. Zenta Mauriņa, Konstantīns Raudive – they are representatives of classical thinking. But after the war what? Collapsed these schemes for the simple reason that they proved incapable of stopping the misfortune of war. Then came the time of the absurd, then the time of existentialism, then 1967, which is already a transition to postmodern thinking – it’s another time. Through the relativistic view, many things related to the same structuralism collapse, where the sign once occupied the absolute center of the scheme.
Schemes are not long-lasting. They need to change. To some extent, this is the law of the spiritual heritage of civilization. Newton’s physics is replaced by Einstein’s physics, the classical thinking of Zenta Mauriņa is replaced by postmodern thinking, etc.
That’s what this story is about in some way. Precisely because it is this period of transition in the 1960s, which has still not lost touch with wartime and at the same time is a wave of new thinking. It seems to me that right there is the greatest dramatic intensity, the greatest traction.
How do you think if Raudive had the technology available today, he could do more?
I don’t think it’s a matter of technology. It seems to me that the objects used are no longer felt. Let’s say a radio signal that goes through the air and we don’t feel in any way results in a radio where you hear my voice. But this sound is not self-aware, so it doesn’t matter at all. Here’s something like robot thinking – does the robot feel like a thinker? If we take a stone, we can get an idol from it. We can also get it from a painting and a snort.
The carrier itself is only a mediator in our constant flow from the object to the human spiritual world and back again. The whole trick is reciprocal.
Konstantin Raudive through the cinema
Ingvilda Strautmane: Can you highlight what the story is about Constantine Raudivi will you tell? What stage are you at the moment?
Bruno Aščuks: Like many others, we have been affected by the virus – there was a break. Last year, the last filming was very interesting. One of the most important events was related to Konstantin Raudive’s daughter in Sweden, who was known to be, but where exactly – not really. After all, she was also in Latvia, she met relatives. We filmed everything. It was very interesting and valuable for us.
Raudive’s daughter and I were also in her native Uppsala. She told and showed all the places where she had been, walked and talked to her father.
We still have one trip to Germany. We are waiting for this to be done. Of course, much more would have been needed. We had also thought about Spain, but it is unlikely to come out.
Valdis Muktupāvels has such a very interesting story that people from ancient times have been interested in crossing the boundaries between this world and their world – the afterlife. Also in folklore, in fairy tales we can read these stories that a person is dead or buried, a tree grows on his burial site. Another makes a pole and that pole speaks in a human voice, tells its destiny. This is in line with one of Raudive’s areas of activity.
But tell me, what is your Constantine Raudive? What will you focus on?
Bruno Aščuks: We try to find out who he was, how he manifested himself, and then let the viewer begin to judge for himself. We already have several filmmakers and maybe each has a bit of an attitude. What is very important to me is what Zenta Mauriņš said that no one knows the whole truth, but what is said is true. We try to find them with facts, some specifics [patiesības] and deal with them.
The film will be a documentary. Tell me, will you try to dispel any clichés as well?
Andis Mizišs: That is a good question. As for Raudivi, there are undoubtedly many clichés. If we try to unravel some documentary things, at least in the course of our life, to compare the available facts with those in, for example, letters, then we see that in a way he has created his biography as he would have seen it at that moment.
That is, when we talk about such factual things, documentary things, there are many different interpretations.
Of course, we are very interested in various documentary threads to lean on.
It is not for free that the film has been made for three years, because sometimes these threads come very hard, but when the thread is caught, then the ball fills up very quickly and completely.
But as Bruno said, this is an absolutely subjective view of the author with documentary threads.
It was very interesting for me to read the book “Lēngaitis”, which in a way has overtaken us, because the book is also the author’s subjective view and I like how the author captures the time in which Raudive lived.
Maybe Andris Zeibots has something else to add?
Andris Zeibots: The approach is very similar to my approach. I also collected materials and there are references to the reality of the time. Rather, it is a question of techniques, of what each of us is instrumentalizing, tools. Everything is focused on revealing the truth in one way or another.
Finally, tell me, how did a person, who came from a small place, from Latgale, study in Europe, did you become very famous? How could this happen?
Bruno Aščuks: I can’t answer that yet, but that was one of the reasons why I clung to this work at all. I also have roots in Latgale.
In 2018, another creative version of Konstantin Raudive’s personality was created – show “Raudives radio”, in which director Daiga Kažociņa, philosopher Ainārs Kamoliņš and several artists from various fields collaborated. In the role of Raudive himself – actor Gatis Gaga. More in the program “Above the Earth” prepared at that time.
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