The Month of the Flying Hemp Fibers

Spalis, in Lithuanian.  Means October.  And it's the same word as the word for the little filaments of hemp that float around (I'm told) when one makes rope.  Apparently, for whatever reason (the harvesting of plants presumably having something to do with it), autumn was the time when the ancient Balts sat down and made all their hemp into rope, in the course of which, a million tiny threads of the stuff were sent drifting into the air.  Such that later, when somebody thought to fix events in time and memory, when somebody asked when somebody's daughter was born, or when the bear got into so-and-so's hut and ate all his plums, the answer came, you know, when we were making the rope, when there was all that hemp dust in the air.  Spalis.  October.

Likewise Lapkritis, or November: the month when the leaves fall.  A little obvious, that one, but still.  And May: Gegužė, meaning cuckoo, the month when, between the lengthening days and the stupid freaking cuckoo birds who won't shut the bloody hell up, you're just going to start getting less sleep.

I don't know what it is, but something about this appeals to me, to an ancient element in me.  Lunch is pietus, which is the same as the word for South, lunch being the meal you eat when the sun is in the south.  Tomorrow is rytoj, the same root as the word for East; tomorrow is what will happen upon the new sunrise (and now I'm suddenly imagining Annie being done in Lithuanian...).  

This is basic stuff, not all that uncommon among world languages, and there are volumes upon volumes of theory out there on the handling of natural phenomena in different Indo-European tongues, but for some reason (probably only because Lithuanian is the language that's happening to me at the moment), through these linguistic quirks and underpinnings, I'm beginning to feel a unique connection to the deep, historical mind of Lithuania.  I feel like I get that medieval Lithuanian Mindaugas or Vytautas or whomever, sitting on his rock in his forest, roasting his pietus over a fire.  Watching the light change.  Watching the hemp fibers settle in the sun.

And what would Rachmaninov think?

On the off chance that anyone ever doubted how genuinely pretentious and insufferable I really am, I offer as evidence of my folly, well, the title of this post for one, but also a description and discussion of the events that occasioned it:

Recently, during lunch in the cafeteria at the Foreign Service Institute, surrounded by some hundred or so of the various students and instructors, the recently repatriated bureaucrats and grandees, the defense contractors, trophy wives, functionaries, do-gooders and sundry other wandering souls who daily populate the campus of this country's premier foreign affairs training center, I decided to listen to some Rachmaninov.  I don't know Rachmaninov's oeuvre especially well (of course, I don't know any composer's oeuvre especially well), and I only own one of his pieces, but it's a piece so surpassingly beautiful, so rich, so deft and fragile and desperate all at once, that I find I can go to it under almost any circumstance, in any kind of mood, for any reason, and find in it the holy uplift I seem eternally to need.  Nor was this instance in the FSI cafeteria an exception--immediately, upon hearing the introductory burst of complex harmonies in the first movement of the work (which I came to know as the Vespers, but which is apparently also referred to as the All-Night Vigil), I had the following thought: This work requires me to celebrate even those who would denigrate it.  Because of Rachmaninov, I must love those who do not love Rachmaninov.

I wrote those sentences down in a notebook, despite their clumsiness.  And then I had another thought: This is a uniquely Christian formulation of meaning and order and essence.

The question though: is this last true?  Was my thinking on the topic inescapably Christian?  Is the instinct in question an instinct that transcends spiritual practices, religious institutions, sacred doctrines and dogma, and so on?  Or is it possible that the idea of such enlightened magnanimity is the singular insight (I know some would say revelation) of Christianity, and one that has come definitively to shape our consciousnesses in the 21st Century western world?

Further, is this an empirical question?  Can comparative religion scholars tell us what certain texts, the dates of which are generally well-established, say on the matter and thereby determine for us who thought what first?  Will that get us past the slipperiness of all my quasi-mysticism and pseudo-neurology?

And what would Rachmaninov think?  Probably nothing.  Or, to put it better, probably this: