EAT A PUD’ OF SALT WITH ME
If I look you in the eye, do we have a clear channel? I have never forgotten the incident when a cameraman, after a week of filming interviews with me, with Roma near Moscow, declared with confidence that he could see their criminal minds, just by “looking into their eyes.” During that week, he barely spoke to any of us. I suppose that it is easiest to maintain illusions of intuition about others by limiting channels. Interesting then, that the channel through which he evaluated Romani character was also that sensory channel so often judged enchanting, mesmerically threatening. When one attends to the eyes of others: does one look for luster or track the direction of gaze? Which ray to follow? Without putting in the time, we may never find out. Time to eat salt, sweat salt, shed salty tears.
One summer Moscow friends visited me in Michigan. We had already toured Great Lakes industrial and Virgin Islands plantation ruins and taken photos in abandoned Soviet grain silos and restored Orthodox churches. We had each seen the wrecks and triumphs of the others’ states. We compared notes on our infrastructures: there and here always falling apart or needing repair, surviving Michigan after a storm blackout, Moscow when the hot water is turned off. We had yet to visit my parents, so we set out west on a genuine American road trip, sampling AM talk shows and satellite radio, switching from a London pet psychic, to Moscow evening news, to French electronic music. By sunset we sailed through the windmills fanning western Iowa, into the night that fell just before Omaha. West past Lincoln, off I-80, down a state road another good piece, we arrived deep in dark Nebraska, miles from the nearest light, where astronomers and stargazers meet under the thickest stars. I took a wrong turn, and we rolled in pitch black over gravel, corn leaves scraping the car doors, until the road ended in a stand of stalks. Improvising, I stopped, shut off the headlights for full effect: on cue, my friend, playing 007, voiced the character of Cold War suspicion: “So … this is where you have brought us.” That moment barely ranks among the silliest we have made together; this is merely one of the few examples that translates quickly into terms familiar to most readers. But let it stand as a moment of alignment that built contact out of attempts to divide.
FIGURE A.1. Radio dish at the exhibit for radio technologies at the All-Russian Exhibition Center in Moscow. The overgrowth reminds me of the disarray in an exhibit at the museum for Strategic Air Command in Nebraska of Cold War–era missile communications equipment piled in a corner. Author’s photo, 2012.
Back on the right road, we turned some minutes later up the drive, where my mother’s husband stood in red suspenders, waving us past small tractors lined up for parts. Later still, on a scrubby slope between the steel-framed ranch house and the barn, we put a sheet over the clover to lie on our backs and contemplate the dense Milky Way. On the slope, we spoke of childhood longings to know the stars, to hear from life on other planets. Then we became suddenly alarmed—a gde zhe luna? Where was the moon? We returned indoors for my mother to school us, pulling out the almanac: a good dozen times a year the moon completes its rising and setting all during daylight. City people! That is, people raised under light pollution (I did not grow up on the farm: our mother brought us from Tampa to Lincoln in the late 60s. She always wanted to live in the country, like her fathers’ people still did in the southernmost Appalachian ridges). “The things one has to visit America in order to learn!” quipped my friend.
Moments like this one united us in our ignorance, lost together in the dark. Our urban disregard for the orbits of the moon aligned us across the rifts of opposing superpower states—and because of them. We who can afford to travel across oceans share infrastructural, linguistic, and media channels closed to many of our co-citizens. Sometimes our crossings help us to see how those closings came about, sometimes they strike us blind. By the summer in which we lost the moon, we had traveled together in other countries, watched many films together, and read many of the same books. We enjoyed triangulating perspectives or pointing out respective filters or gaps in the media that threaded our landscapes. We enjoyed comparing the surreal angles afforded by our respective states’ imperial positions, and sometimes it was the puzzles that multiple angles posed, the knots at their intersections, that always best infused the sense of contact, connection, and communication.
In Moscow in 2011 one of these same friends and I went together to visit to a free, introductory Sunday class offering telepathy and distance viewing lessons, held in a sports club tucked between the locker rooms and training areas built into Dinamo Stadium. Not far from home, it was a little place decorated in bamboo, combining dojo with café. We waited for almost an hour with about a dozen other adults, in fashionable hoodies and skinny jeans, who alternately played with their smartphones and dragged bits of string along the ground to entice a tortoiseshell kitten. Finally, the instructors arrived. They screened a video explaining the teachings of Soviet-era psychologist and brain expert Bekhterova. “Everyone can develop these powers,” they said. They led us through a few exercises to sensitize us to feeling subtle energies, not at all unlike the drills at GITIS (or the drills a sensei in Chicago had taught me long before to warm up before sparring): rub the hands together, then move them apart to sense the heat emanating between them. My friend and I later confessed to being alternately bewildered and bored by the video and the Q&A after. Not so the other attendees, who eagerly asked about precise ranges of various energy fields. Said my friend on the way home, “They obviously managed to prepare ahead of time, to to think through reasons to learn to see colors through a blindfold. What would you do with that?” Wiser than I always, she blamed not the topic, but our own lack of effort.
We often found the incommensurable together, around the block, and in the sky. We located some puzzles in our respective places, in Moscow or in Nebraska—but in puzzling them out, we never thought to pit two nations’ so-called “patterns of thought” against each other. That tactic, so familiar in many of the encounters and stories of encounters that I have in turn recounted in this book, falls away. For one thing, Over the years we have eaten too much salt together to reduce the situations and events that matter to each other to our respective Russian or American cultures, ontologies, or identities: as contact makes channel, we learn the many reasons for the other’s trajectories, the rays of actions, if you will, shining out from kin spheres and friend circles, bending through ripples made by all the events that reverberate in the present. I fail and fail to remember this, and fall back too often on shorthand labels for American readers (“Russophone,” “many in Moscow,” etc.) who may lack access to perspectives drawn by people elsewhere.
For another thing, while states can saw at kin ties or friendship channels by censoring the mail or turning off the electricity, people keep tuning in, keep clearing paths. Ours moreover, is not the only enduring relationship formed despite and because of Soviet or Russian territorial borders—many friendships, scientific and professional partnerships, marriages, and artistic networks have coalesced precisely along superpower lines of conflict. For decades Ann Arbor, Michigan, housed a center for Russian language tamizdat (“published over there”) to be printed and smuggled back into the USSR or read aloud over Radio Liberty. Russo-Anglophone scholars, increasingly over the last twenty years, have reviewed each others’ research and argued at conferences in Kazan’ and Washington, St. Petersburg and New York. And still other bonds have multiplied since 1991; more and more Russo-American families travel between New York and Atlanta and Moscow, on planes served by bilingual stewardesses and stewards.
Many who live or work along Russo-Anglophone channels see a world long entangled by contacts. Still, unless we are among the most wealthy traders in oil or land, or travel with the diplomats or the arms merchants, we usually live and work in one country, where other forces police against outside influence and limit channels from elsewhere. For scholars and others to work across national, linguistic, and media barriers can mean renouncing willful blindness to tangled connections and to the debts to people dispossessed by contracts forged during and after the Cold War, in proxy wars and corporate networks.1 Building stages or jail cells, many instead put scientific labor and artistic energy into illusory technologies for intuiting (and mis-intuiting) that were invented during warfare in the first place.
FIGURE A.2. “Love is telepathic” (Manhattan, 2014). Author’s photo.
To me, many people in Russia seem more inclined to seek other perspectives than we are in the US, more wiling to tilt the usual geopolitical maps to define different gaps and connections. Those maps are not always so malleable, of course: the day before classes began at GITIS, in the office for foreign students, I explained my research plans to the official handling foreign students and interns. She determined that I should join the first-year directing cohort and phoned someone upstairs about me. In a few minutes the master instructor of that cohort appeared. I gave him my university calling card, stuttering that, not unlike directors, I too wished to understand human interaction. He nodded. The next day began with students in a semicircle facing a line of seated instructors, in chairs and on the floor, in sweatpants and athletic tights (one of the female directing students and I stood out, overdressed in heeled sandals and skirts, standard feminine uniform in summer Moscow, but not in this place). The master introduced each expert on his pedagogical team, including credentials and specializations. Then he said: “We also have a visitor, from the USA, tell us who you are.” From my spot in the students’ circle I repeated the very same phrase that had elicited his nod the day before, but for this audience, he interjected: “Be careful, she works for the CIA!” Catching the wave of laughter, he retook the floor. That evening, visiting my friends on the way to the GITIS dormitory, I told them dejectedly about the day, but they laughed: “You should have retorted, ‘No! Just FBI!’ ”
I never did try to joke with him across rank in that way—but neither did his words prevent new channels among me and the students. In any case, he was not the only one to stress suspicion. Americans like to warn about false friends “over there,” and similar warnings were repeated within Russia.Amid shortages and the collapse of the ruble, feeling dollar wealthy, I did sometimes worry that people would befriend me to exchange currency or arrange a visa. Two conversations in the 1990s shook me out of those anxieties. First, one of my mentors, the late Sharon Stephens, suggested that making friends according to, say, similar topical interests, is a luxury, a first world privilege. “Maybe,” she suggested, “people in hard conditions become friends because they do things for each other, not the other way around.” I have since then had opportunities to feel the truth of this principle during illnesses and disasters, both here and there. The second conversation took place in Moscow, in a local telephone call with one of our rock band’s guitarists, a fellow insomniac. He wanted to know what was the deal with those American films in which, “Some character says to his best friend, ‘You were just using me!’ Hilarious! Who else would you want to use you, if not your friends?” What are friends for?
Time and motion reveal the moon to move in circles around this planet, seeming magically to disappear to those who have not paid attention for more than one cycle. Farm people learn to read the moon by attending to tempo over time, never resting with intuitions trained to a single instant, a single sense. Technologies for intuition that actually seem to work, to achieve some kind of mutual tuning, animate multiple channels, and to animate them over and over again, over time. We can work with similar attention if we listen over time, to track both turns of the spiral and flights of thought when, say, years later, friends “in the field” volunteer a shift in perspective on “what we did back then,” or when someone moves from championing dissidence to advocating nationalism, or when someone argues against both of their past minds on a matter. If I hold that thoughts shift, circle and come back through other channels, then Is love telepathic? Or is it what emerges instead, after having “eaten a pud (36 pounds!) of salt?” What holds is less a sense of finally intuiting the thoughts of others, or, finally learning to read through a mask or to see through a skull, and more a willingness to think alongwith others. Do thoughts start from one point, like a ray (as if light and sound were not also waves, that ripple spheres of broadcast)? Or do thoughts form and congeal in willingness to eat a lot of salt, willingness to channel together, with bodies and along many threads, not only within the lonely head? Salt is, after all, a crystal.