I am not confusing concepts. I know that psychology speaks of the superego; nevertheless, I insist on my freshly coined term – that is, I shall speak of the substitute self, of Paulius Normantas. Of that Lithuanian – until recently still young – man who
lives the life of the WANDERER on our behalf,
goes to our Siberian relatives on our behalf,
ventures cautiously, with his large rucksack, into the lands of historical Tibet on our behalf,
appears – and risks his life – on our behalf, in the crosshairs of the weapons of 8,000-metre peaks and just as many – or far more – Russian, Chinese, Afghan, and other border-guard soldiers.
He went, on your behalf and on mine as well, to see the Kuril Islands, so that I should have nothing more to do than lean back in one of the very comfortable chairs of the photo museum and leaf through the photographs he had taken.
He grew tired instead of me,
went hungry instead of me,
grew cold instead of me,
saw and photographed instead of me,
and if all this is true, then the title stands: he is the substitute self.
Normantas, the Exotic Man
Paulius Normantas is, from every point of view, an exotic, exceptional man. Exotic both here, from where he repeatedly sets off, and there, where he repeatedly arrives. Here he is the ever-departing, restless wanderer who can never sit still; there he is the stranger from afar, who will be moving on again tomorrow – while we have been here for a thousand years already.
Where is he not exotic?
On the road. ON THE ROAD, on a mountain pass between two eight-thousand-metre peaks, with all his possessions on his back, in snowfall, in cutting winds, at minus twenty degrees, where everyone can rely only on themselves – there people are the same. At the foot of Dhaulagiri, it matters little, whatever anyone may say about Paulius Normantas, whether he is Lithuanian or Hungarian, whether he is a Lithuanian living in Hungary, or something else entirely. He is one human being in our place – someone who either meets these extraordinary challenges and is thus able to make and bring home photographs like these on our behalf, or who fails to meet the trials… and then it no longer matters; there is nothing left to discuss, and his memory is settled with a slab of artificial marble.
Angkor and Mustang. Cambodia and Nepal. The distance between them is vast – measured in kilometres, and in time as well – yet the photographs taken there hang side by side on the exhibition screens, and follow one another in the pages of Paulius Normantas’s photo albums. One is a city that remains awe-inspiring even in death, even in ruin; the other is a living kingdom, where ten thousand Tibetans inhabit an area of 1,200 square kilometres. Its king – the thirty-eighth, or according to others the fifty-sixth – can in fact be seen in one of Normantas’s photographs.
One might be tempted to assume that he is a king in disguise. We Hungarians have strong traditions of such figures – our King Matthias once played similar tricks – but no: the Mustang king’s attire is his everyday clothing, not a costume. He does not occasionally mingle with his people; he lives among them. (He, too, might serve as a substitute for certain rulers closer to home – but that is a parenthetical aside, not belonging here.)
Paulius, My Friend
Paulius Normantas has been my friend for quite some time now. And if that is so, then no one can forbid me from being shamelessly biased in his favour. Let it be known: I am not an ungrateful type. Over the years I have learned so much from him – and things of such importance – that praising him now is the very least I can do.
To this end I borrow a sentence from Béla Hamvas’s Karnevál (lit. Carnival). In a context that had nothing to do with Paulius, he once asked whether one should not go on walking until one finally finds oneself. Yes – that, at least for me, is where the crux of the matter lies.
As I have said, I have known Paulius for more than two decades. We have spent countless hours talking about his journeys – about Mustang, Tibet, the Uyghurs, and the other peoples who live there – but above all I have tried to find an answer to what drives this man onto ever new roads. Why does he not rest on his laurels? Why does he go on for as long as he is able to go – and what will come after that?
I already know many things, yet I truly understand nothing. Perhaps because I am, by nature, a rather obtuse person – or perhaps for other reasons. Maybe I am not a wanderer; maybe I am not a Buddhist, like this Lithuanian–Hungarian wayfarer. Who knows? But even if I do not understand him, I accept him without reservation, and beyond the formulaic phrases prescribed by protocol – indeed, in defiance of them – I am genuinely glad to call him my friend.
When he is at home, everything crackles around him: hurry and look at the photographs, hurry and open the exhibition, hurry and print the book – and then hastily take leave of the artist, for he is already setting off again.
Where to? To Mount Everest – or, if one prefers, to Chomolungma. Where else? There is no higher mountain on this earth – and what is a sixty-five-year-old man to wait for? He should set out. And then return – on our behalf as well.
Normantas, the Wanderer of Inner Journeys
His homeland is Lithuania, to which he returns again and again; his place of residence is Hungary, which he periodically leaves behind. Yet where he is truly at home is the Himalayas and their wider region. He does not even need to close his eyes – whether he is in Vilnius, Nyíregyháza, at the Oktogon in Budapest, or anywhere else – to see the immense mountains before him. He cannot utter a single sentence, whatever the subject, without some sensation, thought, memory, or desire emerging from that distant world which we, in all likelihood, can now come to know only through Paulius himself and through his hundreds of thousands of photographs – a world in which he is at home to a degree that none of us can claim.
While preparing this essay, I read everything that has been published about him in the Hungarian press since 1985. Everyone described him as an interesting, eccentric, extravagant personality – someone perpetually on the move, nurturing fantastic plans, carrying with him striking images and stories. So what? It is not for these reasons that this globe-trotting Paulius interests me. What concerns me – and what made him my friend – has no other explanation than this: through him I see, know, and live the fact that freedom is not only something one may long for, dream about, and complain about when it is lacking, but something that can in fact be lived. In a human way.
And this does not require great wealth, nor the ability to reach any exotic point on the globe by virtue of it. Very much the contrary. Such people are not free, whatever they may believe about themselves; they are just as much slaves there as they are here. True freedom begins within and ends there as well – Paulius teaches this with every sentence and every act, with the patience of Buddhism and the fervour learned from shamans. His life is nothing less than an example of a free, independent human being’s search for a path within a world that is neither free nor independent.
For there are many kinds of travel: luxury and budget, group and individual, official and tourist, honeymoon and mourning journeys – and so on and so forth. These, evidently, do not interest us. After all, we are not standing here at the opening of the Utazás 2013 (Travel 2013) exhibition. What concerns me about travel is exclusively its direction – though not in terms of the cardinal points, not whether one goes East or West, South or North. Rather: does one travel outward, or inward?
Does someone travel in order to flee from themselves, from the problems that dominate their everyday life – choosing flight again and again instead of solutions – and thus inevitably returning from anywhere back to the same place? Or, on the contrary, does one travel in order to draw closer to oneself, to gain the necessary perspective on one’s daily troubles, and thereby to resolve them? It will come as no great surprise, then, that only the latter interest me now: those who, the farther they go, the closer they come to themselves. And those who have a chance that, once – somewhere, sometime, towards the end of their wandering – they will encounter the person with whom they have lived their entire lives, yet about whom they knew almost nothing for most of that time.
Having married into Hungary as a Lithuanian – who at that time was still a Soviet citizen, a fact that should not be overlooked – he set out to photograph our Finno-Ugric extended family. He showed us our Khanty (Ostyak), Udmurt, Mordvin, Veps, and Nganasan relatives, and later our Samoyedic kin – the Enets and the Nenets – those poor relations whom we have largely looked down upon for centuries. He followed the route of Móric Benyovszky to Kamchatka, retraced that of Sándor Kőrösi Csoma from Peshawar to Darjeeling, was curious to discover where Aurel Stein had travelled, sought out the dike of the rice field where Robert Capa blew himself up, and even found the now elderly Vietnamese man who, nearly sixty years earlier, had planted that fateful mine.
He also travelled in Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Bhutan, Tibet, Nepal, Pakistan, China, India, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Laos, Indonesia, and South Korea, as well as in countless federal republics of the former Soviet Union – and in a thousand other places besides. Everywhere he photographed – for himself, and for us.
He has published twelve books and received innumerable awards and distinctions, Hungarian and Lithuanian alike; the number of his exhibitions at home and abroad has long since exceeded two hundred. He met the Dalai Lama three times; he looked down upon the world from nearly six thousand metres, a height he reached on his own two feet – he was not carried up there, no, certainly not. Adventures, friendships, and encounters bind him to the most remote corners of the globe, yet I do not envy him for any of this. If I envy him for anything, it is for his faith, his self-assured sense of purpose, his independence, and the exceptional knowledge granted by the spirit world with which he is in constant dialogue – knowledge through which he found his own inner path.
It may be that everyone must walk the many tens of thousands of kilometres traversed by Paulius in order to travel their own inner road as well. The things acquired along those measurable kilometres – adventures, mortal dangers, joys and sorrows, improbable silences, companionships and solitudes – were all necessary for this man to come closer to himself. To sense something of the essence. To distinguish between what is truly important and what merely appears so. He needed much time to learn to value Time – the kind that has nothing to do with the hands endlessly circling a clock face, or the numbers flashing on digital displays. He went high in order to perceive depth.
A photographer who quite literally walked half the world – for the sole purpose of finding himself.
He photographed the ever-changing in order to fix the permanent. His photographs matter; they are singular documents, and in our world – increasingly unstable, increasingly groundless, and ever more rapidly transforming – their value will only grow with time. But please pay close attention to the man who saw all this and shaped it into images as well. While you still can. While he is still among us, before he withdraws into solitude, into a small house on some Himalayan slope, to rest at the end of his outer and inner wanderings. Because that is what he plans – I know it.
I suggest that you look at his photographs with these thoughts in mind, and read the haikus and tales he has written.
Well – we have arrived. Here we are at the end of the essay. That is my friend Paulius.
That is all I wanted to say.