To live a life...
with one single
travel bag.
The sun...
It always shines.
Now for those at one edge of the earth.
A few hours later – for those at the other.
For me – always!
Even when I do not observe it
or feel it on my skin.
My mother, praise be to her,
cut off for me in childhood such a piece of it
that I myself can radiate light, phosphoresce.
And give warmth.
If it, the sun, should suddenly decide to rest a little.
The moon.
I feel it always and everywhere.
When the moon is full and when it is new.
When it gathers strength and when it loses it.
It shows me the unerring way
and pours light onto the path.
Perhaps that is why to my path
women always come running.
In crowds.
As to a watering place.
Just as all the living population of Africa does
when a drought begins.
To tell the truth, at times there are so many of them
that I myself begin to dry out
and grow heavy
from oversaturation, an excess of Yin energy.
With my last strength I try to hide in the mountains.
I walk a long way, to climb high.
Very high.
The higher, the better.
To where I can reach the stars,
breathe deep,
Mingle with the ether,
my favourite material and quality.
Do not worry.
I shall soon be back,
charged and recharged,
in a word, just the way
you love me,
and I shall nourish you again.
He is my friend, and I am his friend.
Otherwise he would not have visited me so often.
Though we, it seems, never once
confessed this to each other.
And why should we. When everything is clear as it is.
He was seriously strong.
Gigantic in everything.
Gestures, bearing, gait.
Breadth of thinking.
And depth of soul.
In merriment. He knew how to savour life.
Perhaps in this he was great.
The absence of desires...
The world clothed in flesh was alien to him.
He grew up without a single drop of milk,
never knowing the taste of mother’s milk,
or of any other.
His mother,
when she carried him under her heart,
went to Siberia,
hoping for a meeting with her husband,
his father, who had held a high post before
he was arrested on a denunciation.
She wanted one thing – to ask
whether the husband of her whole life considered himself guilty.
She spent long months on this in bitter frost.
She hardly ate.
But her will,
her sense of responsibility,
her womanly fidelity
and her sense of her husband’s rightness
did not allow her to act otherwise,
to step even a pace away from the camp gates.
These feelings fed and grew the child.
The absence of milk later showed itself
in the absence of dependence.
That very bonded tie, that servitude
which makes people and their descendants
fatally slug-like.
The absence of dependences. Bondage to attachment...
Everyone errs – that is the human lot.
And he was no exception,
only he never erred to another person’s harm.
Why, even when he was drunk,
no evil words ever fell from his lips.
No one understood him.
Because he embraced everything.
All existing extension.
In his space there were no obstacles.
Virgin land, firm ground, where there are no obstacles...
Where thought flies freely and lightly,
without the burden of the creaturely world...
He is one of those very few
in whom I should like to manifest myself.
He could have helped me in this
had he not gone, –
he was called earlier...
A little earlier than I managed to dig myself out:
here is my mirror, it is almost cut out.
This story was told to me in outline by a younger friend, and he in his turn overheard it in a remote mountain village, known in the surrounding district for a rather large sanatorium for the mentally ill. One of its residents – a “quiet patient” – was a man who carried water in an ordinary milk churn to the village labourers in the fields, the pastures, the logging sites.
Every day and throughout his whole life.
The story of one human life. From birth to death. Of one among many people. As simple as it is whole. Not burdened by the heap of bustle and delirium that cling to us, stick to us, divert our attention and strength from something very important that is present in all of us but far more rarely comes out as practical action. Only when we come face to face with such a phenomenon and stop to think do we feel a kind of emptiness and gap in our own life. As if we had missed something essential, perhaps more important than what occupied us all our lives. Then, having mulled over our own reallife, having smacked our lips and sighed a few times, we humans usually sit down and write a handsome legend. A conjecture about a fine lad who devoted his life to his fellow villagers. A kind, nice invention. Only who needs this tittle-tattle? Apart from ourselves? Him, our main hero? No! That much is certain. A lone Mohican, he is led through life by something other than what leads all of us... And his life began with a churn, an ordinary milk churn, only to end with it, the churn... He lived and acted without thinking, or rather, without deliberating. By duty alone. Obligation drove him, making him forget the notions of “what for” and “why”, switching off countability altogether. Here it is, the forest path trodden by his feet. A path he knew perfectly, covering it every day on foot, in two directions:
there and back.
What drove him ceaselessly? For he had no time to come to know anything: neither love, nor a woman, nor a family, nor the other goods that the rest of “normal” humanity possesses.
All his wealth lay in the churn. But even this churn did not belong to him by right of ownership; it was only entrusted to him. One could say that all his wealth lay in a feeling. The feeling of duty.
This can be compared with the responsibility of parents for their small children, not yet able to get food for themselves. Or with the anxiety of a father called up to the war who suffers every day because his family has been left without a breadwinner. But from whom did he inherit this feeling? How could it awaken, be born in him? That remains a question. But only for us. He asked himself no questions, and he did not need to answer them. Every day, falling asleep, he knew exactly the schedule for tomorrow. He did not suffer from the monotony of his labour and did not dream of a pay rise. He did not lay in food in advance, making do only with what others shared with him.
A child of nature. Almost... A lucky man.
To live by one and only today’s piece of bread. To wear one single pair of shoes, without a spare in the wardrobe. To rejoice in today’s sun. To fall asleep every day only from physical fatigue. To look everyone straight in the eye. To have no enemies: neither outer nor inner. One hot summer day the shepherds waited for him in vain. They knew there could be no reason for it. Except one... Everyone’s throat went dry. This time not from thirst. The water they had been drinking for many years was of a special quality, and now, from this moment on, it, like the unclouded thoughts of our “quiet” hero, was needed by another, larger part of humankind.
The first ray of the morning sun peeped in at the window, glancing as a sunbeam off the milk churn standing on the wardrobe, into the eyes of a boy who had just woken. This object was unbearably familiar. In the night he had seen a wondrous dream... Green fields... Flowers. A mountain stream. Clean cold water that even now makes his teeth ache. And... some metal vessel. So familiar. Painfully familiar.
I met many acquaintances
from the people’s earthly life,
among whom there were relatives too.
That was the name for those
whose material shell came
from one and the same man and woman.
Among them were some very close in spirit,
but also some utterly alien and indifferent.
For instance, those who sought my friendship
in order to ask for a loan.
Or, on the contrary, were ashamed of being related to me
because of my calling.
They believed
that art and wanderings
may be pursued solely
in the time left free from one’s main occupation.
Hence people divided life
into various very narrow specialisations.
It seemed to people
that the main part of the time allotted to them
should be devoted to business,
to subordinating life to one great task – making money.
And the more dough you rake in, the more respected you are.
Then, accordingly,
the more money you squander, the better.
Further, the more money you put aside,
the more is left for your own funeral,
for your children, grandchildren.
What was amusing, too, was that people of this sort
were forgotten sooner than others after the funeral.
They did not want to understand
that human life is not divided
into work, leisure, sleep, holidays, meals, hobbies.
Life for me was one,
whole and many-faceted –
without priorities or trifles –
a single act
that has no borders,
nor any divisions, disjunctions, distillations.
Birth and death gave the same drive.
Day and night, winter and summer,
mountains and sea aroused the same delight.
In the course of my life
I failed to learn only a few things:
eating meat,
living in reinforced-concrete buildings,
polluting the environment,
producing new lives
without a deep love for a woman,
dividing knowledge into separate subjects,
defining age by the age of the body.
Once I met my elder brother by blood,
to whom I was bound by higher ties as well.
It must be said, a rare phenomenon
in family relations.
There were also meetings with my mother, my father –
these people dear to my heart
who gave me the joy of many discoveries.
My brother was incredibly glad of the meeting,
gave me a book – a treatise on Buddhism,
an original and singular view of life,
the most truthful and safe of all
known to man,
distinguished, moreover,
by a sufficient breadth of vision of the world.
Mother at first worried
that I was without a hat,
while the temperature
was below 20 degrees Celsius
(here people still paid attention to various trifles whose origin was connected with the primacy of matter over spirit), and would by no means believe
that colds are unknown to me,
when through wrong eating,
that is, combinations of foods,
and also an untrained spirit
the human organism becomes polluted and grows ill.
In a moment she did calm down,
took my hands in hers
and looked into my eyes for a long time with a penetrating gaze.
At last she asked:
– Are you happy?
– Of course, Mother, – I answered.
It is as natural as the fact that I am.
That I live!
Can one live without happiness?
Are earthlings really so exceptional and brave
that they can live without happiness?
Mother shed a little tear
and in a refreshed voice
unexpectedly exclaimed:
– Then ask me to dance,
I so love dancing with tall men.
Just like my father was – your grandfather.
And we whirled away in a merry dance
to an evergreen melody
sung in the enchanting voice of a once very popular singer
over whom all women swooned.
My father, on meeting me, first of all
enquired about my health,
the health of my children,
my material security
and calmed down only
when I explained
that I spend no more than I earn,
borrow money from no one
and have no debts (my dear father had no idea that for a very long time I had not held
money in my hands, having quite forgotten it exists).
Then Father gently reproached me because,
in his opinion,
I squander myself on many women,
and advised me to limit myself to a few.
Father was incredibly surprised
that all the women consider me their teacher
and do not set themselves the goal
of securing their place beside me for ever,
preferring only to learn the rules of symbiosis with men.
– My God, son,
you have no idea how lucky you are.
For all my women
after the very first night spent with me
wished to become my wives.
Perhaps I would have agreed,
but I alone could not have fed them all.
I, as you know, was not born a shah,
but always earned my living by hard work.
Then unexpectedly Father invited me to the steam room:
to take a steam and watch an erotic show on the water over a cup of fragrant
strong coffee with a Cuban cigar.
This always put him in a splendid mood.
– I am old now,
but the forms of the female body,
their ceaseless contemplation
do not let me die,
reminding me of the multitude of universes,
of eternity.
I am glad I have known many women,
though the only true one was your mother, – he said in farewell, warmly squeezing
my palm.
Quite unexpected was the meeting with my daughter,
who was now on the threshold of her earthly seventeenth year.
She ran after me, trying to catch up, and shouted:
– Daddy, wait!
I wanted to ask you something.
The boy I like
and would like to go out with,
when I asked whether he would agree to have ten children
and not only fair-skinned ones among them,
answered that the number was no problem,
but he would not want to have dark-skinned children of his own,
because society treats such children badly,
and although to him it makes no difference at all,
he does not want the rest of his children
to suffer because of it.
– And what do you mean to do?
– I think I’ll let him go to the four winds.
We are not going the same way, – she came out with
in an already cheerful voice,
glad, probably,
to have found the right answer to a hard question that had been tormenting her.
Having kissed her,
I went on,
into the mountains,
away from people...
And although I loved people,
watching earthly life from above,
from the height of mountain peaks, appealed to me more...
Damn, how am I going to justify myself at my next meeting with Arthur? –
There is but one inborn error – the conviction that we are born for happiness. (Arthur Schopenhauer).
Suddenly
I felt myself…
two.
The splitting came suddenly,
without warning.
These two
intimised with each other
now in complete accord,
now not.
Then quite strange things began.
One of them began to step out of me
and dance a round with the other one
who was inside.
It was somewhat unexpected,
or perhaps simply unusual – I could not
say for certain.
Most unusual of all was testing
the touch, from outside, upon myself of the one
who had stepped out.
At first the touches seemed alien,
there was nothing in them of my previous experience.
I tried to tune myself,
to suppress the outward signs of fear,
but instantly lost my balance
and very nearly crashed to the ground, –
that was a sure sign!
Here one had to act by quite different methods,
as yet unknown to anyone.
My second self followed me in thought,
intently and long,
like a lion its prey,
at full speed switching my actions on or cutting off their current,
according to rules known only there, beyond the Earth,
which reach earthlings
in disordered fragments, half-spoken hints...
Oh, these two...
I often see in my dreams great clocks
whose three hands all synchronise
with the tolling of an alarm bell.
It is also, in parallel, a certain explosion of the cosmos.
The cosmos explodes
and flies apart into countless particles:
planets, comets, stars.
Which then shower down,
fall onto the enormous dial.
The ponderous hands group them.
The countdown from zero begins.
A new era...
The leaves are falling...
Their playful whirling in a light breath of breeze.
The road uphill,
a view from the hill,
yellow-rust, red forests...
Autumn.
Sorrow and joy. Side by side. Ear to ear.
Sorrow – from wisdom.
Joy – from creation inspired
by an autumnal-November frustration.
The leaves are falling.
Whirling playfully.
A breath of breeze.
I stand, catching leaves.
Caught one!
Here it is, the joyful-sorrowful quality...
A new chisel.
And the clock again.
Now the second hand hurries,
drawing cosmic dust to itself.
From the hand,
each time it jumps forward,
one star flies off.
The minute hand elegantly groups them into constellations.
Only the hour hand has lingered.
But it too moves on.
True, even for me, who am far too slow,
unhurriedly.
Just as well I am in no hurry to go anywhere...
I dissolve, I crumble onto the dial.
Ouch, damn, that hurts.
I did not manage to unplug my body
and got a kick right in the backside from the second hand.
It seems to spare no one,
grinding everyone and everything into a uniform mush.
My brow equals... the universe.
Imposing, shapely, valiant and, above all, pedigreed.
The brow rises above everything and is called
to govern...
Pedigree needs no checking,
Being written entirely and wholly on my brow.
I decide the destinies of the world calmly, judiciously,
without needless haste or bustle,
knowing the exact worth of the surrounding reality
which has absorbed millennia,
millennia of the history of my people.
Thoughts flow from it evenly
and fill the volume of the Planet to its whole depth.
Here history is decided,
all of it,
of the whole World...
Peace is replaced by war,
laying down a little wrinkle on this, it would seem,
bottomless receptacle.
This circumstance does not trouble me.
Having lived through just once the great war of my people,
multiplied by the wars of other peoples,
I no longer feel the former heaviness,
knowing precisely
the fundamental principle that governs the world.
I merely soften the pain, the torment of humankind
that ceaselessly rams
with excessive leadenness into my brow,
I help to avert the great collapse
capable of sweeping away the planet,
of tearing it from its orbit by the force of evil.
I read in millennia,
stepping over continents and time zones with ease.
I am at once a son of my people
and a cosmopolitan.
A chronicle that is not short at all
unerringly prompts
this little wisdom.
How else to survive freely?
I am a master.
The master of my destiny.
I know no one
who could become even one iota
my helper in this matter.
The matter of building my destiny.
I do not take the air from people.
I do not feed from their fields.
I do not sleep in the dwellings they have furnished
and do not recognise their borders.
I wish everyone well
and bear responsibility.
Responsibility for my own destiny,
as well as for the destiny of all humankind.
I measured
in thousands...
One act of love – in a thousand thrusts, strokes.
Strokes of my own two balls
against the buttocks of my chosen one.
The ultimate goal was
knowledge...
Knowledge and
rebirth...
Knowledge of the body,
of every hidden cell.
And rebirth of the spirit.
The renewal of thought.
The opening of thought...
And only then replenishment...
Replenishment of the kind.
The kind of the good and the strong.
I write...
To tell of my love for you,
to leave a little wisdom
to our children, yours and mine...
I paint...
On my enormous canvas – the firmament...
My brush – the wind...
And the sun – my heart.
Look!
Its warmth has flooded the whole world...
And will warm you too...
We shall wait together until night comes.
The moon will rise...
Our mutual yearning for each other...
Morning. I sing...
This song will be heard by children
not yet born into the world
of your love and mine.
I wanted nothing
by which in the least degree I might
disturb people,
make them stop and think,
worry or empathise,
suffer or rejoice.
I pondered
how to nudge them
so that through me
they might glance somewhere,
hear something,
sense a certain something.
I aimed only
to poke –
to bring their ears and eyes together at one point.
At that very
invisible point
from which, or out of which, there suddenly begins
movement,
then fermentation
and, at last, explosion.
An explosion
that at once lays waste and creates.
It destroys
the old,
the deadened,
the evil.
It creates
the new,
the life-giving,
the good.
The task was to the highest degree multi-layered and complex, so much so that no one whom humankind remembers even slightly has yet coped with it. None of the arts could lead people to this
principal point,
the point of the highest ecstasy,
the starting point of the next, non-stencilled world…
It was a dream.
As clear as reality.
At once pleasant and full of suffering.
I dreamed it in childhood.
I would wake
and want the most terrifying scenes to repeat.
That fall...
The bridge splits into two halves.
Exactly at the most crucial spot,
under the soles of my shoes,
so that there is no holding on now,
no stepping back or leaping forward.
A last glance,
a teeny square of the bridge still under my heel.
The bridge,
its last support
Slips away
from under my feet..................
.................. ........... .......................................
......... ... .......................
............................. and there is nothing..............
............
...................................................................
..............................
.............................................................
.............................
..................................
......
only flight...
The body thins into a cluster of vapour,
a weightless balloon.
Some violet channel
draws inside you
a line from the sole to the nape.
The flight does not stop.
It is boundless.
The water is very close now.
I come to know the absence of a body,
if only eventually, for a short while.
It is an instant.
No. Eternity!
The Instant and Eternity.
Hollow-bodiedness. Fullness.
Emptiness and chargedness at once.
The absence of matter!
Underfoot – everywhere.
Only a kind of volume
and the elusive contours of one’s own body.
Empty and light.
What a pity
that only at night…
I burrowed between her legs,
right under the mound, into the haven of delight.
So warm, it rustled pleasantly
against my brow, nose and lips.
I play-acted.
I played with it as with a favourite toy in childhood,
forgetting about time.
Alone with it, alone with the sub-universe...
I saw nothing, heard nothing, understood nothing.
The outer world was securely fenced off
by supple velvet thighs.
The ambergris teased,
opening ever new horizons
and drawing me ever further into the whirlpool of the unknown.
I pierced it
to the full possible depth of universes
and fell through...
I forgot everything I had been taught.
Here was the true epicentre of the world.
Of my world.
A world I am able to hold,
A world where I am one of many
and at the same time the only one...
I did not stop,
sensing in a pre-dawn droplet of dew
that
the centre of the universe and I had merged into one...
I recognised myself in some earthlings
whom I met on my way.
My splashes were everywhere.
These unusual particles
could be felt not only in the cosmos
but also in the surrounding nature of the planet:
in plants,
trees,
mountain rivers and lakes,
mist,
clouds
and the ether.
It was especially interesting
to observe the women
whom I had met quite recently,
some couple of earthly millennia ago.
Many of them had become
merrier, kinder and wiser,
were raising a new generation,
having once been charged with my material
and given this special seed
growth
and a new quality.
I went on searching for my splashes,
which, to tell the truth,
was no simple task at all.
It required
no ordinary intuition
and knowledge – like sand in the sea.
For the overwhelming majority
were cut from a different cloth,
alien.
I simply could not close the circuit,
get connected with them.
To understand the course of their thoughts
was impossible.
They considered the starting point of the world
to be their physical “I”,
and also something
that they defined by the word “fate”.
I tried to decipher
this concept – “fate”.
If fate is taken to be that
which governs the whole world
and each person in particular,
then why does a person pray for life,
why fight for it, for life,
why, in the end, conceive it?
And I understood that my mission was not yet over.
Of good-quality,
important particles
there were still few on the planet.
Too few
to begin
a new reckoning of time.
Sometimes I am one.
Sometimes there are many of me.
Sometimes in the morning I am black,
at lunchtime – yellow,
and in the evening – white.
It happens
that I look at myself in the mirror,
and it happens that from the mirror I am looking at me.
So who am I really?
And how many of them, that is, of me, are there,
contained in me, in my body,
in all of space,
at once divided and multiplied
in the brief instant of millennial history?
And though I do not take up much room,
that is, I take none of it away from others,
I constantly feel a lack of space –
so boldly and confidently
do I take possession of it…
I have a large soul.
Very large.
Able to hold the whole world
and every creature in particular.
I feel extremely ill at ease,
often wondering
why I was given the body of an earthling
with the task of living here.
I possess none of the qualities
that make it possible to occupy oneself with something specific,
to be hired and do work on someone’s assignment.
I am never bored,
but always alone.
The volumes of my soul,
the force of my energies
find no application in a space
loaded not so much with people
as with their strange thoughts.
Most people are wary of me.
Some consider me an eccentric,
others – unapproachable,
still others – arrogant.
It is beyond them what I want,
whereas I want nothing.
Being in their company, I
am at once close to them and very far,
not having learned to hold my attention,
even for a tiny little while,
on the cares
that interest them.
I often observe
the female half of the population.
There are many girls and women here
whom I like
and with whom I would not refuse to spend time.
They also glance at me,
sensing my unearthly ease,
good energy,
a simple friendly smile
behind which there hides
no evil intent or self-interest.
I, however,
do not bestow my attention on most of them,
inviting only the very-very…,
that is, those close to my idea of the ideal.
They fill me with a special energy
that spreads pleasantly through the whole body.
I ask nothing of them, but receive everything.
Everything they have,
but which other men have not discovered.
They themselves are surprised at themselves,
never having suspected their hidden abilities before.
Not infrequently they too find on me
undiscovered points of the body.
In such minutes I rejoice, as once I did,
being a full-blooded earthling
in my earthly childhood.
I seek out new stars,
which is like the sensation
that recalls the tickling
of my mother’s hands in my early childhood.
That the sensations of childhood are able to come alive,
that is, were imprinted so deeply in memory,
is a complete surprise even to me.
And suddenly I began to sing, no, more likely, to howl.
My voice trembles,
ready for the last song, in which there is no room
for the lie —
the foremost habit
and the greatest power
that has overrun the Earth.
Once, having breathed in some fresh fragrance
coming from a woman passing by,
I discovered new horizons.
And grouping
sounds-and-colours
in certain combinations,
I noticed that
people are transformed
into merry, attractive beings,
their work goes well,
even animals and plants – they too rejoice.
And so I conceived my life’s work –
a colour-symphony-mystery…
I wanted to become a perfect artist, a carver,
subjugating to myself for the sake of the goal I had set
all the kinds of art and the phenomena of nature.
And I decided to begin with a long fast:
the cleansing of brain and body from the city’s filth and stresses
that gnaw into the human body,
into its every corner, like bloodsuckers.
It was not a very difficult task.
At my disposal was a full set
of objective and subjective factors:
mountain air, clean springs
and, in the end, my own will.
I thought
that I would check the process of cleansing the organism
by the whites of my eyes,
whose reflection I saw every day
several times
in the mirror of my favourite spring
when I drew water with my mouth straight from the surface.
At first I did not love myself, or rather, my face.
It was not easy to look calmly into my own eyes.
After the first two weeks it turned out
that the red veins, so familiar,
had begun to disappear.
And a week later the yellowness began to fade too.
Gradually the sense of colour returned,
true, not distorted by the city.
My skin cleared too,
my joints became supple, as in distant childhood.
I easily walked fifteen to twenty kilometres uphill
and as many down.
The body grew lighter, and with it the brain.
Thoughts became calmer, more confident
and, above all, subtler.
Most wondrous of all was sleep.
I fell asleep instantly
and woke up just as instantly
exactly half an hour before sunrise.
My biorhythms, destroyed by urbanisation,
now synchronised more and more
with the surrounding nature and the cosmos.
My dreams became clean, like the spring I drank from.
There was in them
neither fear, nor pain, nor morning heaviness.
And above all, I began to have dreams
directly connected with my dream.
These were frames of various length
in which there mingled what I had formerly called
the real and the unreal,
taking, like everyone,
this senseless demarcation at face value.
I rejoiced that I had not only understood
but felt the whole of this dotage
of the narrowness of human thinking.
Gradually I came to understand
the necessity of using everything –
from the phenomena of nature to the works created by the spirit.
By the spirit –
the only building material
known to me
that contains nothing
and embraces everything at once.
Time and space.
These concepts which “wise” humankind uses
to designate who knows what
look eloquent
in the clever books of philosophers and politicians...
Yet these are only objects, forms of my soul,
and it depends on me alone,
on my thoughts,
how many of them to fit in daily
from sunrise to sunset.
The most difficult
and as yet unresolved question remained:
how to convey this to people?
Here, at a height of many thousands of metres,
I turned the lever and
switched off time.
I could allow myself this,
being under the reliable protection of the stars
and far enough from people.
The world set a clear rhythm,
the stars – the tuning,
the soul commanded all the pauses.
Behind lay only
the theme.
It was prompted by women,
or rather, by their alternation.
Fortunately, there was no shortage of women.
I suddenly felt clearly
that my pulse is different,
beats, resonates quite otherwise than before.
Imperiously and meaningfully.
Binding body and thought.
The universal concert had begun.
I hung in a space
that separated and at the same time united
earthly life and the cosmos.
I saw equally well every ant
bustling in the city park,
the bee gathering nectar,
and the intergalactic dust
that showered me with a new quality.
I turned my gaze to the Earth.
From here the whole world
floated by as one enormous cloud.
Thickening at times into rain,
exploding with thunder,
lit up by lightning
and showering down as stars...
The world divided into sound and light
so as to unite at once into LightSound...
Music flared up in the bright flame of life.
A wise sorrow raised my own rhythm
to an unfathomable height.
A desperate cry
cut through the space and filled it with trembling,
shattering self-imagination into the fragments of universes,
to let them burn in the last fire,
leaving all the rubbish there,
in the glowing ash, behind, in the past.
And soon, as millions of years ago,
to return as fresh seed pollen
on the wings of an innocent butterfly, of butterflies...
There were many of them.
Right above our heads,
in slowed flight-and-swimming.
From contact with an electricity of origin unknown to us
they sparkled,
lulling us to sleep
and insidiously sucking the tone out of us.
We woke up befuddled to singing,
or rather, a monotonous howling.
Unexpectedly something lifted us up.
All of us at once.
A world opened up
where the Moon and the Sun shone at the same time.
Hell and Paradise had mingled.
Some invisible fine hand
adjusted us along their watershed.
We turned over, obeying the current,
diving deep and surfacing just as easily,
crashing with a roar against the coastal rocks,
which, however, caused no pain at all.
And suddenly there opened up that
which each of us had awaited all
our life,
had guessed that it exists.
Somewhere here, very close.
All together we turned into fools –
the most joyful of prostrations,
inaccessible to the greater part of humankind, –
hanging in open space
and observing everything as it is.
We greeted the stars,
the comets gave us lifts.
The wind blew
in both directions at once.
Everything whirled in a circle,
fell apart into spirals
and gathered again into rings…
It was in everything here, on the shore of a mountain lake… Cascades of blue mountains lay down on the smooth water and, having shuddered barely perceptibly in the mirror from the feet of a carefree duck that had alighted on the water just here, had all but quietened, so as to float towards me in the light ripple of a breeze.
An unrestrained little fish smeared itself against my cheek and rushed off with my nose along the mountain watershed, but, painfully striking a cloud, deserted.
In a fit of temper, offended at the simple-hearted little fish, I spat on the water and at once regretted it. For I ripped open an already unstable thundercloud, which did not take long to pour down on me and finally destroyed the masterpiece that, as it seemed to me, I had been building myself.
I spat a second time, with reckless irritation, but the little fish, having returned, apparently took it as a gift for supper and joyfully ground up the spittle, waving a fin at me in a friendly way.
Having pulled the centre of the Universe
with a tender whisper,
I felt a beyond-the-heavens relief.
An unbearable burden,
like a damned discord
that had pressed on me since childhood,
vanished in an instant,
dispersed like smoke in a strong wind.
I tamed
anger,
resentment,
fear.
And – the long-awaited consonance appeared.
Between the external and the internal...
Which no longer swallowed energy
for the lure of everything outward...
People stopped paying attention to me,
which was especially pleasant, –
they no longer sensed a rival in me
in the everyday sense of the word.
I did not jostle in the queue for a better piece of meat,
getting on a tram, I did not hurry to be first to take a seat,
did not wear expensive jewellery
capable of arousing envy.
Men, former rivals,
no longer eyed my women
as they used to.
The beauty of my new women friends and lovers
transformed into a kind of
harmony of the outer and the inner,
no longer devouring the former energy
to keep up its tinsel gilding.
My new chosen ones
deftly managed my creative tone,
having become equal participants in discussions,
in the practice of art
and, of course, in hours-long amorous contortions...
I stopped falling ill.
My will nipped illnesses in the bud,
as well as anything that might hinder
the fulfilment of secret and noble designs.
I worked calmly round the clock,
having learned in the morning
to restore the material accumulated in sleep.
Tasks that seemed impossible by day
were solved in sleep by themselves,
without any particular effort on my part.
I liked to move
something
that no one yet
had managed to touch with their hands…
It was a young moon.
In the preceding days I had lost a great deal of strength,
and my stores of energy were melting.
In the morning I woke already quite weakened.
To continue the work
I had to restore my strength as quickly as possible...
I had mastered quite a few special techniques,
techniques of drawing out,
sucking energy out of music,
clinging to it, drinking it in,
closing the circuit on it...
The air was magnetised to red,
allowing me to charge
like fast-acting batteries.
I gradually increased,
while trying to keep the balance,
the current and the voltage within me.
It was harder with the frequency –
the centuries-long influence
of plague-ridden urbanisation made itself felt.
I tried to relax my shoulders to the extreme,
setting my feet wide apart
and nesting in the very centre of the quadro zone.
At last I managed to reach the point.
A special point. The point of connection.
Over the past years I had already learned
to produce a short circuit
so as to connect myself to another world
which helps one come to know
the highest science —
Love...
This special point helped to soothe even pain.
Step by step, accumulating experience,
I learned to move it.
This was, perhaps, the hardest of all.
In the course of these exercise-games
with the transformation and transfer of energies
I managed to find a completely new use
for the pads of the fingers,
the tips of the hair, the eyelashes, the nose, the penis, and also the lips...
I saw music.
This was discovered by chance,
on the eve of my eighteenth birthday.
At first this ability manifested itself
when I closed my eyes,
later – also when I opened them, later still – round the clock.
Most delightful of all was music
whose vibrations coincided with my vibrations.
Then I could unite
my space and the spaces of the creator
and performer of the music.
I saw two worlds at once...
One that everyone saw together with me,
and another that only I saw.
I directed both worlds with ease.
It resembled the work
of a highly professional
television director
who has mastered the technique
of superimposing frame upon frame,
multiplication, shifting, dissolve, blurring,
control of brightness, of colour,
repetition, replication –
in a word, everything that present-day
and future millennia’s
television equipment can and will be proud of, only
with multidimensional projection
onto the whole space of the firmaments...
This was that highest stage
when the vibration of my thought coincided with the vibration of the body.
Of the body, which was losing
weight,
density,
flowing apart and gathering together, like thought,
in unison.
No additional effort was needed for this any more.
Currents of vibration flowed freely,
without obstacles, to my hands, to my fingers holding
the director’s baton...
My face did not strain,
my eyes did not follow strings, keys, the actors’ performance,
changes of scenery, control desks, stage machinery,
nor my ears – the rapid changes of keys, volumes, frequencies.
Simply, I myself no longer desired anything –
at this moment and quite organically
the world for ever lost for me
the dividing footlights —
this unfathomable cretinism, this faeces, this coarse belch of humankind,
which people created and set up who knows why,
for no visible reason.
With some instinct quite new to me,
just now made manifest, I caught
how millions of hearts are already joining firmly
into one single LightSound... the quiet ray of my soul…
For many years it did not dawn on me
why since my youth I had been drawn to polar explorers, to polar research.
Swallowing book after book,
I was always there, among them,
as if one of the members of the expedition,
again and again reliving
my past lives through their memories.
Here, in the adored North, everything was painfully dear:
the dogs, the harnesses, my friends, the beloved taste of snow,
the grinding of enormous ice blocks,
and also the burning cold, the headwind,
the frostbitten face —
everything that makes up the life of a polar explorer.
Or calligraphy...
Beautiful unusual typefaces.
Hieroglyphs.
I loved writing in hieroglyphs
without knowing their linguistic meaning,
giving every free minute to the work.
One more hieroglyph, and another...
How close they are, these signs,
it is simply impossible to shake off the feeling
that all this was recently,
perhaps yesterday.
I fell to thinking, trying to recall
the place of my earlier calligraphy practice,
but it stubbornly would not appear.
Then I began to leaf through in memory
all the possible places
where such work is usually done.
Some holy place, a monastery...
No, there were no associations
with an enclosed space.
But in my thoughts before me
again and again there arose nature,
vast airy spaces,
great trees untouched by disease...
A youth. In the shade...
Beneath a wondrously beautiful crown,
who meets and sees off the sun every day.
Long manuscripts,
slender columns of hieroglyphs
whose character changes imperceptibly
as the position changes
of the sun, the moon through the day.
A shepherdess. Where do I know her from?
So familiar...
And here is one still quite unfamiliar,
who nonetheless always adds a light chaos to my life,
quickly replaced, true, by harmony...
With every year
my brush grows lighter and more confident.
It seems to repeat
the movements of my
heart,
soul,
subtlest thoughts...
The scratch of the pen...
The ink spreads freely,
turning into coloured spaces
and the finest haze...
Or music.
The creation of music, its performance, the conducting of a great symphony orchestra and
choir.
I had quite forgotten the usual musical notation,
the ways of drawing sound from instruments,
the conductor’s gestures.
Yet the music I created or arranged,
just as the orchestra I conducted,
were absolutely obedient.
I placed the orchestra on a dais,
behind it, in a semicircle – an enormous choir,
and the symphony flowed through unfathomable spaces,
stunning humankind with the unprecedented audacity of innovative thought.
It resembled
a universal meditation of the human race,
an awakening from sleep,
its gradual enlightenment…
The whole world, end to end – a mirror,
and now
without meaning
I live here,
having gained complete freedom…
I dissolve still-waterly...
The substrate leaves me easily, feeling itself already
an unnecessary, outlived unit of measurement that has served its time and is dying away.
An endless number of particles fly apart,
turning into ether.
I go on further,
into windows not yet mastered by anyone.
So as, at last,
to burst as a small air bubble
on the smooth water of a mountain lake
to the sharp call of a bird…
I looked for a long time into the great mirror that stood before me,
reflecting life as it is.
In unerring volumes.
In strictly observed proportions.
In true colours.
Without the slightest distortion.
Something was wrong.
For a long time I could not understand what.
Until I sensed
the absence... of myself...
Yes, I was not here.
My sight only trawled some actions
in the vast volume of the surrounding space
but did not pass them on.
Is there really no place for me here?
Strange!
In the mirror there clearly showed
bustling black dots,
the whole plant and animal world,
unspoilt and unbroken nature...
In fact, my body could have fitted anywhere,
occupying a square metre, metres, without any particular obstacle...
Damn! How good, how splendid!
Void! In my head nothing but thoughtlessness.
And the ether wanders. Outside and inside. Everywhere. A total draught.
...Here, by the river,
I turned a flat stone over in my hands for a long time
and, of course, could with a simple effort have smashed the mirror to smithereens.
But instead I resolutely skimmed it across the surface of the water.
The stone, leaping from wave to wave,
swiftly crossed the river
and sank softly to the bottom by the opposite bank.
I quickly dived after it and, having returned to the bank, invigorated,
sat down...
to write.
Alas, I could no longer do anything else…
I joined the line of the horizon
and, having dissolved it,
slipped
further,
into another space,
another world.
I loved to be here…
(see the section “Suitability” at the beginning of the book). The reader may skip this afterword and return to the “Stage finale”
Intuition. I am prepared to assert that the world around us originates from sound and colour, including people as an inseparable part of this world.
Basic principle. The first spacecraft was invented in 1915. To this day it remains the most perfect means for travelling in space. The name of this craft is Kazimir Malevich’s “Black Square”.
Practical aspect. I proceed from the premise that the “Black Square” is a stage, the stage space of our life, a kind of canvas-scenario that we ourselves write and perform (many call this by the word “fate”). It is as though I unpack the wondrous colourful world that is inside this marvellous square. It lives the most intense life, glows, plays in rainbow colours, sounds; this is the cosmos, this is that very place (space, abyss) from which we once came and to which one day we shall go. This is that celebration most necessary to a human being. One need only learn how to handle it, grow used to communing with it constantly.
Philosophical aspect. The “Black Square” can also be regarded as the dividing line between the objective and the non-objective, between the material and the immaterial worlds, between the living and the dead. I have been painting on it all my life. But now, it seems, it is time. The time has come. The time is here. Time at last to open it like a window and fly out into a world where
there is no horizon and no gravity.
P. S. Dear reader, I am not sure I shall return... I beg your pardon in advance. And I hope – very many will be amused by this.
Incoming: 2020.
Applicant: widely known in very narrow circles that are of no interest to the Academy.
Nationality: not established.
Permanent place of residence: none.
Party affiliation: not established.
Religion: by guessed-at signs – an atheist of a certain, not entirely comprehensible type.
Conclusion of the Institute of Physics: possible very narrow application in spectacle optics for detecting possible distortions of vision.
Conclusion of the Academy of Arts: in view of the fact that Wassily Kandinsky is in no way divisible by Alexander Scriabin, Kazimir Malevich is in no way multipliable by Lev Termen, and László Moholy-Nagy was left with no partner at all, – postpone for 30 years. In 30 years, pass on for preliminary testing to applicants to art colleges.
Conclusion of the Institute of Psychiatry: offer the applicant permanent registration in one of the “yellow houses” on account of his lacking any permanent registration (one can hardly leave him homeless).
Conclusion of the Institute of Psychology: of no interest. The Department “For Healthy Family Relations” to check thoroughly the reference to position No. 65 of the treatise “Kama Sutra”, for which purpose the entire 75+ academic council is to be sent on assignment to the Alps. Report on the results in closed session.
Conclusion of the Institute of Philosophy: of no interest. As an exception, offer the applicant enrolment without entrance examinations in the first year of the faculty of philosophy of one of the universities.
Conclusion of the Academy of Music: request from the applicant his scores of the symphonies of silence and pauses; upon receipt, continue the research.