Under What Sky I Hold You in Awe

An official from the administration visits the boarding school and offers paper: would the children like to write to their parents, to their brothers and sisters left behind? None of them has ever written a letter. A few sit down, then give up, not knowing what to say. They have heard that soldiers’ letters are always in stanzas, and wonder if theirs must be too. To help one of the little girls, the official dictates a few lines—a model, “meant to be instructive for the rest of us as well,” says the narrator: something to teach the others at the same time. It is the Tuvan writer Galsan Tschinag who recounts the scene, in the nomadic world of his childhood, deep in the High Altai.

English

Under the many-colored blue sky live an infinite number of people I revere. Whom, of all these people, do I revere as much as I revere you, my dear Father? On the many-colored gray earth walk an infinite number of people to whom I feel obliged. To whom do I feel as obliged as to you, my dear Mother?

English

Beneath the thousand-colored blue Sky dwell countless beings I hold in awe. Among them all, which do I revere as I revere you, my dear Father? Upon the thousand-colored gray Earth walk countless beings to whom I am bound. To whom am I bound as I am to you, my dear Mother?

It is only a child’s letter, dictated in haste. Yet see how it first situates, before uttering a word of affection. It does not open with “I am well” or “I miss you”: it opens with a sky and an earth, placing all else between them. Beneath the sky, those we revere; upon the earth, those to whom we owe. Two verbs for two directions—gaze raised, step planted—and beneath each, a multitude without number from which one must still choose: among all these beings, which one, my Father? to whom, my Mother? Reverence and obligation do not drift in the abstract; they have an above and a below, an orientation, a place.

The origin of this sentence lies in the very kinship of sky and earth. For Tschinag, one does not invoke “the sky” and “the earth” as mere scenery: one calls them “Sky-Father and Earth-Mother.” The letter draws the exact consequence. Since the sky is a father, the reverence due to one’s own father is spoken beneath it, in its axis; since the earth is a mother, the obligation owed to one’s mother is walked upon her. The child who writes finally places herself within this frame, and does so with the precision of a surveyor of the heart: “your thimble-small daughter behind the three rivers and thirty-three mountains”—your daughter no bigger than a thimble, beyond the three rivers and thirty-three mountains. Not “at home,” not a postal address: a position in a world that has a vault, a ground, and distances counted in rivers.

It is the same blue Sky that one may, elsewhere in the book, pray to, accuse, or hear grow old until it turns deaf. Here it does not speak, nor does it fall silent: it shelters. It is the first coordinate of whom I revere—above the crowd of worthy beings, it stretches the plane beneath which a father stands out. The one addressed and the canopy that orders reverence are a single sky, bound in the same kinship as the living. A sky of which one is the son, and beneath which one learns to whom one owes being a son.

Hence the distance from our own usage. Our letters, too, seek whom to greet and whom to thank—but we do not begin by lifting our heads. The sky, for us, does not classify anyone; it is neither above our reverences nor beneath our debts, it is elsewhere, outside, beyond reckoning. The little girl of the Altai, however, cannot name her father without first naming the sky that towers over him, nor her mother without the earth she treads. Her tenderness needs an entire world to express itself—and this world, before it is a landscape, is the order in which those we love reside.

The question remains, posed by the letter without intending to, to us who write beneath a sky that reveres and obliges no one. When we, in turn, seek whom to thank first—under what sky do we do so? A ceiling of air indifferent to our debts, or a vault old enough, kin enough, for revering someone to still have an above and a below?