In the post below I mentioned bush as a point of retreat, I prefer bush over forest. Bush is more decadent and it is more European and even more French in terms of outdoor sex. It is almost a common point in European mind set to have something hiding in the bush. Graf Oderland may elaborate more on the Habsburg tradition of Ausflugs in der Wald. Here I mean products of perverted Habsburg minds such as that of Marie Antoinette of France at Trianon castle where there was a lot of shrubbery to hide in. If anyone remembers the Swedish band Army of Lovers and their 1990 video "Crucified" (link) will know what I mean.
The mustached guy appears with an artificial shrub on his head in couple of scenes. But I could swear there was more shrubbery in the video before, this seems like and edited version.
German writer Ernst Junger wrote in the fifties (in Waldgang) of the retreat to the forest as way of maintaining the personal integrity in the time of great disruption. It was the ideal of a Junker aristocrate to maintain its status as an observer of the great change - der Waldgaenger). I propose here the retreat to the bush as a its decadent counterpart. Graf, please advise.
Der Buschgaenger
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I don't how we should work this - to "dialogue" through the comments or by putting up new posts in turn. Well, we'll figure it out along the way.
First of all, I wanted to thank you for returning Army of Lovers, and especially the bodacious breasts of the singer in that video, to the front of my mind after many years. What a salutary effect they had on my adolescent mind, if only for a brief instant. That's when I knew that Eurotrashy camp was undoubtedly good, moral majorities be damned. My moral fiber, shot right there.
To melt back into the bush: a powerful archetype, especially (I suppose) in cultures that find themselves under persistent threat from others whose power and influence is so much larger, disproportionately larger. And that is the eternal condition for some (need I even state that?)
You know I have a thing for the conjoined Lithuanian-Polish side of my ancestry (it's an odd fixation for some Americans like me), and so when we turn to literary crutches for our thoughts I think, for my part, about Tadeusz Konwicki's The Polish Complex, the story of a guy in 80s Warsaw waiting in an interminable and soul-crushingly tedious department store line on Christmas Eve; interspersed through this are two historical narratives of Lithuanian rebels, forest fighters, plotting and moving and getting done in, in the woods around Vilnius (Lithuanians are inveterate woodspeople, and never mind how Catholic on the outside, pagans! Animists!) Funny thing, in at least one narrative (as I remember), the young hero is fatally betrayed by his own. Of course.
By the way, I lent this book to our mutual Lithuanian friend, and I think she was well bored by it :)
Konwicki, like seemingly all Polish writers of note from Mickiewicz and Milosz on down - has Vilnius or Lithuanian connections. There are historical and social reasons for that which I somewhat grasp, but I'm not the authority to hold forth on them.
So back from my digression: when I was in Vilnius last year, I took a morning to check out the "Genocide Victims Museum" (we could say something about the semantic framing, couldn't we?). It's the old courthouse, I believe. The Czars built it in 1890something, then the Nazis took possession, then the Soviets took it back after WWII; there they interrogated and imprisoned loads of partisan fighters, people who took to the woods against the Soviets for the better part of 10 years.(!) You can go down in the basement and see the cells people were held and tortured in, into the early 80s. Also, the little cavernous part where many got shot. I found it damn chilling, which is the intended reaction.
Anyway, the partisan resistance isn't something I had any knowledge of, because while the farmers and youth of that time were impractically taking to the woods and resisting the freaking Red Army(!) (and fishing for Western help which, of course, would never come) the Lithuanian side of my family was growing potatoes on New York soil, as they already had been doing for 50 years. They had come over long, long before and so all that is not part of my history. At all. I'm not allowed to claim that forest. That said, I noticed pictures and names of resisters, martyrs - a couple - with the same (original, unamericanized) surname as my great-grandfathers. One who actually was born in Connecticut in 1921, and moved back to the old country. (THAT is a historical phenomenon that I imagine is sorely underreported/underexamined - those who came to the land of promise and plenty way back when...and for one reason or another moved back.)
It doesn't signify much in fact; it is, after all, a common surname, but I also understand there were branches of the family here and there around the northeast.
Where was I going with this? I don't know.
You know there are a lot of woods around here, and while I figure on moving back towards a population center, a big city, to work and live as soon as I can, sometimes I wonder if I'm not better off staying here in the bush, so to speak, as well. It's leisurely and there is something to be said for being able to relax and line up your artistic/academic/metaphorical shots. Then again, given where I am (compared to you), calling it "bush" is like putting up a tent in the backyard and calling it "camping." I can always go inside to make tea on the stove or use the toilet.
Of course, I don't have anything especially illuminating or new to say on the subject of partisans in the woods to anyone from your part of the world, do I? Without being flippant or awfully crass, not the book but the library was written there, or could have been(?)
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