Prologue

The ‘Russian book’ will soon become its physical self. Its title is

Mátushka, the Human Story of the Russian People

This with be Part I, the 17th-19th centuries. Quite a story in its own right (for me, a journey as hard as Krivda, and even more compelling on the ‘what-it-is-to-be-human’ front). Without that part of the Russian story, it is impossible to understand the Big One, or the Elephant in the Room - the Soviet people’s story, on which I am already working.

The opus is now in the hands of Steve and Krys Crimi, of Logosophia valor and fame in the making of beautiful books on an eclectic range of topics interrelated by very subtle threads. After her crazy journey, Mátushka is still adjusting to the wondrous fact of having such a lovely home.

Here is an appetizer, namely the Prologue

The (Russian) women sang an extraordinary song in many voices that moved like a river of many currents, pulling you into a time outside time, letting you hold on to nothing.

The eminent (western) ethnomusicologist was excited - this ancient, ungraspable song was worthy of meticulous analysis. He would proceed bit by bit, analytically, clinically, using his famous method that had cracked the code of every ethnic music tackled by him. He explained his expectation to the (Russian) singers.

The singers were dumbfounded by his demand, glanced at each other in embarrassment. ‘We can’t do that! You’re asking us to… to take a song apart. In little pieces, each voice separately. We can’t.’

The eminent ethnomusicologist insisted. The leader of the group tried to explain, hoping that he would desist. ‘A song is a living being, a wholeness of its own. Especially a song like this. You want to hear it one voice at a time. It’s not possible. This is not like western music where each voice has its own tune. We can’t do it.’

-‘I don’t see why not.’ The eminent (western) ethnomusicologist was less curious than irritated.

-‘Each voice is as if it were singing all the other voices. As long as they are all together. None of the voices can exist without all the others.’

-‘That doesn’t make sense. Each voice has its own melody line, not the melody lines of the others.’

The leader felt awful for the ethnomusicologist, so eminent yet so fixed in his ideas about the music of others. And she felt awful for the singers. And for the song.

-‘It’s a living being. We cannot dismember a living being… a being of soul…’, the leader murmured.

Implicitly she was objecting that the song, like so many other expressions of Russian folk culture, was far more than ‘just a song’.

Seeing the eminent ethnomusicologist’s sour face, the singers whispered amongst themselves and one of them volunteered to try her best to sing her ‘part’ even though, she said, this was actually impossible. The singers did not want to appear uncooperative. After all, the group had been given the rare honor of an invitation to Europe, for such a prestigious seminar of eminent experts.

The reluctant solo singer started to sing her ‘melody line’. It collapsed after just a few notes. It sounded like nothing at all. There was nothing she could do about it.

The ethnomusicologist looked blank. The women looked at him apologetically. They had not wanted him to lose face, had gently done all they could to avoid the embarrassment. But the song did not allow itself to be dismembered…

That scene occurred over thirty years ago.

In the same year, the USSR was beginning to be dismantled.

I did not, at the time, see the ‘dismemberment’ connection between the song and the geopolitics. But I never forgot that scene which made so palpable that a Russian song is a living soul-being, and manifested for a brief moment a reality beyond western rationalization.

To this day, I marvel at the improbable miracle: of old songs that survived the crushing tribulations of a mysteriously ancient Russian culture under centuries of tzarist and Soviet rule; of ancient grandmothers in obscure Russian villages who kept the ancient sounds alive, even in the late twentieth century; of a group of modern urban women with the obstinate devotion to spend all the time it would take to absorb from the elders not just songs, but the archaic sounds and cosmic memory of a vocal style un-sanitized by the dictates of classical singing.

Old sounds that opened the gates of the unseen, and could influence reality, at times to make barren women fertile, at others to call in clouds of life-giving rain. Old sounds that were never ‘composed’, arising out of nowhere to be birthed in human voices, on the waves of invisible ‘winds’.

Now that I realize how persistently the west has been possessed - and today more than ever - by an obsessive drive to dismember Russia, I am constantly reminded of that deeply symbolic scene of a failed attempt by a domineering western expert to have Russians dismember their soul-song for him.

Fate must have chosen me to witness that scene, thereby to drop an immaterial seed that the soil of my limited abilities must nurture into a story of a Russia that we all need to know if we are humans of soul.