Heroes
Urmas Vadi
In the Soviet times people imagined heroes to be people who came from the war and had not only survived but also had come back as winners! Maybe there were slight traces of dust or wear and tear on their shoulders, maybe they had some slight injury which will heal soon. But the most important thing is that their chests were full of medals! And those war veterans remain heroes till the end of their lives, they are ever at the battle front in their thoughts: when the ordinary citizens queued for hours to buy bologna sausage or frankfurters, they marched with their medals straight to the counter and got what they wanted, for as ABBA says – the winner takes it all. Those veterans seemed unpleasant and arrogant to many simple people, they never apologized when the last piece of sausage disappeared into their mesh bag, their bearing rather told those in queue: you can’t imagine what I had to go through to survive, to let you to stand here and wait for sausage, when we ate moldy bread in the trenches.
At the moment it seems to me that the notion of a hero should be redefined. We need heroes apparently, great people whom we could take as models in order to try to be better people, but it wouldn’t be very wise to be publicly visible, as in that case one might become a target and in that case maybe not be alive soon. One should not pick quarrels, not speak in a loud voice, not move in the public space like in a bus or a shopping center, but when doing so, one should remain as unnoticed as possible, not wearing colorful or flamboyant clothes, but something quite genderless and colorless, brown or grayish beige which in a city landscape would become camouflage, would melt together with the paving blocks and the concrete. Communication with other people should be minimal, contact should only be made when necessary and even then it should be formal and curt exchange of information, not an emotional outpouring waving hands and feet, raising one’s voice and attracting attention. It would be best if such a hero did not move about in daytime, but would deal with his or her necessary business after sunset.
When someone feels, however, that a visit to theater, cafe or an art exhibition is his or her civil right where you can, however, betray your existence to others, one should also do it more discreetly, not to go into an open air cafe in the town center, but to the fast food booth or a gas station somewhere at the outskirts; it is still better to buy a sandwich or a bun in a shop or warm food in a box and eat it somewhere on a bench, in a churchyard and a nook in the park, wearing a hooded jacket. Who feels a necessity to go to the theater, should certainly not go to the Berlin opera house or even to our local Estonia – the days of school theater would suffice where you can melt into the crowd of other adults so that everybody will take you to be a parent of a pupil on the stage. There are actually very good school theaters. One should also end going to art galleries and look at reproductions or even the sky; imagination is a thing everybody should have. All actions should be minimized: for example washing yourself is held too important nowadays, wasting too much energy, water, soap, shampoo, time, drying, towels, powder, lotions, deodorants. What’s more, we know that in a few months after stopping washing, the human body starts to clean itself and one should simply endure those months. It is a kind of trial period in which you will learn who your real friends are who will stay with you in hardship, trouble and destitution. It is in this non-sanitary state that you will scare away all possibly harmful and hostile people, it will become like armor for you or a shield; other people will not enter your personal space so easily! We should view the people who have started that heroic journey with another eye, for now they are derogatorily called either dossers, tweakers, or asocials, but this is what the aim is: to make yourself invisible and repulsive. It is easy to be pleasant and clean and loved by others, but the art of survival means quite the contrary!
The final aim is to move from the earth under the earth. Say what they may about humans, we are still very intelligent animals, we would adapt, and mutate, would start to see in the dark, grow stronger talons, would take over the best qualities of the muskrats and the bats who are capable of economizing energy, who sleep mainly and only go out at night to prowl the prey if necessary: living underground doesn’t take much. It is an art to take the minimum from life! A hero or a survivor is a human able to take shelter, to get along alone and dig very quickly!
True, from a hero a lot is expected and they can do a lot, otherwise they wouldn’t be heroes. Ideally, we should also start diminishing, for there is no endless room underground. Therefore it is very important at the present moment to inspect our measures. People are really made very strangely. At first, when we are born and are babies, we are so small, half a meter, a couple of kilograms, we need so little, mainly sleep and food, but when we grow we start needing more and more energy and at the same time we give more. The things are wrong with the old people who cannot stand on their own feet any more, but are still somehow too big and still spend quite a lot. Thus it would be natural if people started to diminish when getting old. Depends how your life is, but at the age of fifty on the average, one should lose ten percent of one’s growth and weight, at the age of sixty thirty-five percent, and those who become seventy should be about a meter of height, they should have their own villages and at the age of eighty people should be like gnomes, living in children’s houses, sitting on small chairs and bring candy into the socks at Christmas; they could also be useful as pick-pockets and in shopping centers they would unnoticeably be the first in the queue, even ahead of the veterans. And they would be ready to go underground first, not even needing to dig new trenches or burrows, being able to take over those of the moles. But those who would manage to live until ninety, would be no bigger than a big horsefly or a bumblebee and wouldn’t be like humans any more: this would be the highest level of mutating, surviving and taking shelter. And when the last hour comes, the best of them would be so small, almost transparent, that upon their last breath only a fleck of dust remains of them, if even that. For survival is a great art, but sometimes dying decorously is also an art, for the greatest hero is a person able to fade away completely.
Translated by Kersti Unt
Sunday, May 12th, at 16:30 Urmas Vadi “Chronicle of Disappointed People” at the Tõravere Observatory