Aunque pongan en tu puerta
Cañones de artillería,
Tengo que pasar por esto
Aunque me cueste la vida.
Camarón de la Isla
A year ago, at this time of the year, I was mildly depressed. I have a wonderful, caring husband and a sweet, spirited son. We had just moved from a house we shared with others for many years to a beautiful, cozy, sunny flat with a breathtaking view over the sea and the forest. I felt lucky and thankful for many gifts, for my beautiful life in a beautiful city among many friends – and yet December hit me with the whole weight of its dark, wet, cold body.
We went to Portugal for Christmas. We stayed in a friends’ flat outside Lisbon. Under the pretext of needing to work (which I did do for the whole two hours that day), I sent my boys to town and stayed back. I cleaned the flat, arranged and rearranged things to shape it in our family’s shape. All this while, I had Enrique Morente’s El Vaporcito on repeat. I didn’t know yet that it is a song por siguiriyas, and that siguiriyas is the darkest, most tragic of all flamenco palos or styles, that it is the embodiment in voice, music and dance of utter, relentless depression. I had no clue about that, but instinctively I longed for, was famished for this style, which, paradoxically, was restoring and rebuilding what was incomplete in me. My dance teacher had already introduced me to siguiriyas briefly, but I had no idea that this particular song was por siguiriyas. Now I can usually recognise a siguiriya from the first chord, but then I was unfamiliar with the rhythm and the distinctive guitar and voice techniques which come with it. I discovered it only a month or so later, in the car, on an Indian motorway, when through fairly complicated mathematical calculations and a lot of googling about flamenco compás (time measure) I figured out that the videos my teacher was uploading from class in Sweden and the song I was listening to obsessively were one and the same.
I didn’t know a lot of things. It is truly amusing to look back at the bends and twists of our lives’ roads and see how what was shrouded in complete mystery and confusion grows clear and meaningful. Do we create this clarity and meaningfulness ex post? Are they the product of the stories we tell ourselves?
I didn’t know that in a month from that lonely Lisbon siguiriya exploration I would receive a (very typical for him) one-line email from a researcher I had worked with for some years, saying ‘Just making sure that you are aware that…’. That I would reply ‘Thanks, I am thinking of applying, although challenging as I am still in India’. That the deadline for the application would be the day of my wedding anniversary and the same day as we would be in the air between Asia and Europe. That I would be spending many hours slouching on sofas and beds in my parents-in-law’s house in Delhi, writing the application. That my husband would drop nonchalantly in passing, ‘Why don’t you write on the topic of your Master’s thesis?’, and instead of saying (typically for me), ‘What a stupid idea, for who cares about that stupid topic?’, I would reply instead, ‘Sure… why not’. That I would write a proposal about something I deeply care about and love and don’t mind spending a lifetime researching. That I would twist and turn my Master’s research topic and extend it in the most natural, logical way. That, by pressing ‘Apply’, I would set off a mechanism of cogs and wheels that would result in, months later, getting an email from ‘my’ department, inviting me for an interview, after I had already forgotten long back that I had applied.
Not only that siguiriya December, but for many years before I was living in a state of wondering. What would it feel like, to do something I love, every day? To be surrounded by like-minded eccentrics (I’m talking of researchers as a tribe)? To do something I am good at and be recognised for it? All the platitudes of the type ‘Find something you love and you’ll never have to work a single day of your life’ and so on landed very, very flatly for me. Because what was that thing? I didn’t know. I thought I didn’t know. I had had a plan which I had given up on, shut the door on and said a resounding ‘no’ to. And just like that, at the hint of a single line, that buried plan became a reality. Not when I wanted it most, but when I was ready for it? Yeah, if I want to narrate it that way.
I cannot run away from myself. All the fears, insecurities and doubts come along. They get on the same train. They jump out of the same window when I try to escape. Now that I am officially a ‘researcher’ with a nice yellow signature at the bottom of my email, I am haunted by the same impostor syndrome which I experience, say, when I look at my deficiencies in the mirror of my dance studio. I am that same little figure in black, clinging desperately to air for some balance.
But I love it. I haven’t worked for an hour since I started. There is so much love and intellectual adventure that has poured into my life, a connection to people who I admire and value, a humble hope that I will be able to follow in their footsteps, that I am walking on air. Not very grounded, perhaps, and therefore in class my dance teacher says: TATIANA, du svänger för mycket (You are swaying too much), and points at a chair. Which means I have to pick up the heavy, huge square chair, lift it over my head with my arms stretched up, and do the footwork until she says, TACK! Nu kan du sätta ner den (Thanks, now you can put it down). By which time my whole body aches, as if someone had been hammering nails into me, and my feet weigh ten kilos each – which is exactly the point of the ‘grounding’ exercise. Very heavy, muy flamenco. Very effective against lightness in the head due to intellectual intoxication.
One day my other ‘maestra’, the professor who introduced me to and ‘socialised’ me, as she would perhaps herself say, into the world of social science research, met me in town. When we sat down, she ordered two classes of champagne. As she was lifting her glass, I suddenly saw, in a flash of insight, that she was exactly like that glass of champagne: forever young, beautiful, effervescent, full of humour and tartness. In that moment I was suddenly able to fully understand and celebrate her presence in my life.
I am celebrating it every day this December, listening to El Vaporcito, followed by Barrio de Santa María by the legendary Camarón. The latter is por alegrías, one of the most joyful flamenco styles; but I feel that the joy is only the other side of the sadness which is also present in each alegría, concealed under the rippled surface of major chords, as a reminder of the bends and twists of the road, the swaying bodies and doors, and the impermanence of our hearts.
Written by Tatiana Sokolova
Week 50, December ’20
Tatiana Sokolova is a collector and classifier of ways of knowing and expression – the very things which often defy classification. She is a researcher, a little bit a photographer, a little bit a writer of short stories, and wholeheartedly una aficionada - a lover of flamenco song, guitar, clapping and dance. She lives in Stockholm with her intercultural family.
