Shakirov I.A. Anamnesis. 3rd edition, revised and supplemented. – Ufa, 2025. – 577 p.
Linguistics is akin to medicine: for both of them there is nothing too terrible or forbidden, and the more severe the illness: social or physical, the more in demand is the analysis, diagnosis, description of symptoms, even if there is no hope for healing. After all, the correct diagnosis is already therapy.
Intuitive understanding, also known as “hidden wisdom,” allows us to recognize the traps of existence. Some of them, like life itself, are insurmountable: the most we can do is reframe them in a new context. By gaining insight, we begin to learn how to avoid these traps . This is the main function of philosophy and art.
The intertextual project "Anamnesis " claims the status of critical theory. The text of the novel can also be used as a fortune-telling book. The first edition was published in 2009 by the Ufa publishing house "Vagant".
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter 1. Prologue 6
Chapter 2. Poetic Method 15
Chapter 3. Stream of Consciousness 20
Chapter 4. Deconstruction method 25
Chapter 5. The Hypertext Method 38
Chapter 6. The Postmodern Method 55
Chapter 7. Fragmentary Method 66
Chapter 8. Thread 71
Chapter 9. The World of People 73
Chapter 10. Human Nature 84
Chapter 11. Camp 99
Chapter 12. Money and the Class Approach 103
Chapter 13. Si vis pacem, para bellum.
(If you want peace, prepare for war) 110
Chapter 14. Empire and Colonies 113
Chapter 15. The Riddle of Russia 137
Chapter 16. The Problem of the Gods 143
Chapter 17. Once Again About Evolution 176
Chapter 18. The onset of attacks 189
Chapter 19. On Art 195
Chapter 20. Monotony of Days 197
Chapter 21. Under the Power of Depression 207
Chapter 22. In vino veritas 224
Chapter 23. The Beginnings of Escapism 227
Chapter 24. Loneliness 236
Chapter 25. The Perfect Monologue 240
Chapter 26. The Philosopher in the City 251
Chapter 27. The Decision to Stay 260
Chapter 28. The Eternal Secret 270
Chapter 29. Reflections on the Purposes of Human Existence 279
Chapter 30. Dasein and the Problem of Reality 289
Chapter 31. Return to Childhood 301
Chapter 32. The Possibility of Error 304
Chapter 33. Packaging Dreams 310
Chapter 34. From a Clean Slate 315
Chapter 35. Palindromy 318
Chapter 36. The Alienated Man 323
Chapter 37. Cardiac Inadequacy 330
Chapter 38. Suicide 332
Chapter 39. Uncertain Presence 344
Chapter 40. The Story with the Girl 352
Chapter 41. Introduction 362
Chapter 42. Marriage 381
Chapter 43. Enchantment 385
Chapter 44. The Female Element 386
Chapter 45. Of Men and Women 394
Chapter 46. Love 421
Chapter 47. Impossibility of Dissuasion 433
Chapter 48. Several Letters 445
Chapter 49. Death and Immortality 452
Chapter 50. Treatment 456
Chapter 51. Pause 467
Chapter 52. Waiting for Winter 471
Chapter 53. Tea with a Boy 476
Chapter 54. Pacta sunt servanda. (Treaties must be kept) 516
Chapter 55. Cowardice and Pain 525
Chapter 56. The Vanishing Game 533
Chapter 57. Pushkin 539
Chapter 58. Being Late 543
Chapter 59. Guesses 545
Chapter 60. The Blue Dress 550
Chapter 61. Little Animals 552
Chapter 62. The Fact of Death 557
Chapter 63. The Time of Consequences 564
Chapter 64. Epilogue 572
Chapter 1. Prologue
Each story has its own illness. To prevent irritation, I will immediately inform you that this is a very long story. The title, despite its truth, is only a disguise. The real title lies at the very bottom of this long text, it will become clear only after reading, and will no longer be able to confuse the minds of chaste readers.
Anamnesis (gr. anamnesis = recollection) is a set of medical information obtained by a doctor from a patient or his relatives during a survey about life and history of the disease; the results of such a survey are collected for the purpose of using them for diagnosis, prognosis, treatment, prevention. Anamnesis can be allergic, disease, life, hereditary, professional, psychiatric, family, social, etc.
An obligatory component of medical records is the epicrisis. Depending on the characteristics of the course and outcome of the disease, the epicrisis may include an opinion on the patient's prognosis, a conclusion on the need for further observation, and medical and occupational recommendations. The discharge epicrisis contains a conclusion on the outcome of the disease in one of the following formulations: recovery, incomplete recovery, unchanged condition, transition of the disease from acute to chronic, deterioration of the condition. In case of a fatal outcome, a posthumous epicrisis is filled in the medical history indicating the cause of death. The clinical and anatomical epicrisis explains the causes and mechanisms of the disease and its outcome, taking into account the background against which they arose and led to death. Thus, the clinical and anatomical epicrisis should reflect pathogenesis in a broad sense, that is, the etiology of the pathogenetic process, the causes and conditions of disease development, treatment and diagnostic procedures, diseases presumably caused by them, and thanatogenesis. The contents of the epicrisis are available only to health workers and are subject to the rules of professional secrecy.
Meanwhile, nemesis is the personification of retribution, revenge, retribution, and also debt collection in the most general sense of the word.
It is assumed that the word doctor comes from the word vrati – to charm. Such a relationship implies that the word played a significant role in the treatment process. The word as such, whatever it meant. Due to the limited range of medicines, the role of the word in the Middle Ages was more significant than it is now. And it was necessary to speak quite a lot.
But all this, in medical terms, is only symptomatology and anamnesis – that is, external manifestations of the phenomenon being studied and its subjective self-description, as it is seen "from the inside". Since psychoanalytic therapy is primarily not about getting rid of symptoms, but about reconstructing the unconscious meaning of apparent irrationality, that is, about the meaning and history of symptoms and personality traits...
Etiology – please do not confuse it with ethology – is a medical term, a study of the causes of disease. Causes and origins are most often either completely excluded from the equation, or are the subject of speculative reasoning of a more philosophical nature. As was written in traditional Soviet anamneses, the patient is inaccessible. And his world is really inaccessible to us. We can only look at him from different sides, as if feeling him.
A priori – knowledge that precedes experience and is independent of it. A priori is a view whose correctness cannot be proven or refuted by experience. The main thesis of Plato’s epistemology is that knowledge is recollection. Hence the emphasis on intuition. But the latter is provided by the art of dialectics as “a certain ability to ask questions to resolve the corresponding problem.”
Plato believed that intuition serves as a tool for the soul to gather information about another world. This term is found in three of Plato's programmatic works. In the Meno, Socrates discusses the universal affinity of objects to each other, thanks to which one can literally remember and find everything. Plato's concept, put into the mouth of Socrates, is that the mechanism of recollection (anamnes, anamnesis) opens access to judgments about causes. In the Phaedo, the dogma is repeated that knowledge is in fact recollection. In the Phaedrus, Plato postulates reminiscence (recollection) as initiation into the mysteries and approach to spiritual perfection. I want to say that the author is most likely not a sensualist, that Locke's definition does not apply to him. Not only do ideas not come to him through feeling, but, on the contrary, in their development, feelings play a secondary role for him. Most often he receives them as ready sprouts, not as seeds. But when they fall on excellent soil, they take root well, turn green, and bear fruit. And at the appointed hour he reaps a bountiful harvest.
This situation is similar to what Freudianism calls "complexes". The complex never speaks about itself, it hides, tries to escape direct analysis, and it takes the most complex psychoanalytic practice for a person to remember that in infancy he was frightened, for example, by a rattle or a cat, and this turned out to be his main life problem. For example, the patient seems to have neuralgia of the facial nerve, which in fact is the result of repression of a slap he once received. Doctors Freud and Fromm write in their anamnesis that it was from this moment that the boy developed an attraction to...
"During our sleep, in our dreams, we go through the whole current of thought of early mankind. I mean that man reasons in his dreams in the same way as he has done in his waking state for many thousands of years. The dream carries us back to the early stages of human culture and gives us the means for understanding it better." After Waitz's exhaustive discussion of the unity of the human race, there can be no doubt that the psychic characteristics of man are basically the same all over the world. Bastian was forced to note the astonishing uniformity of the fundamental ideas of mankind all over the globe.
Rejecting postmodernism as a “repetition,” Lyotard advocates a postmodernism worthy of respect. A possible form of it could be anamnesis, the meaning of which is close to what M. Heidegger puts into the concepts of “recollection,” “overcoming,” “thinking through,” “comprehension,” etc.
The anamnesis partly resembles a psychoanalytic therapy session, when the patient, during self-analysis, freely associates seemingly insignificant facts from the present with events of the past, revealing the hidden meaning of his life (i.e. the end and beginning of the "disease"-life) and his behavior. The result of the anamnesis will be the conclusion that its main content is liberation, progress, humanism, revolution, etc.
Consciousness resists psychoanalysis, and the text resists philological analysis to the point of denying its fundamental possibility. The text can be likened to consciousness, and its meaning to the unconscious. The author himself does not know what he wanted to say by this; having written the text, he encrypts a certain message in it. Speech also disguises thought. The question arises, why encrypt, why not say it directly? It is impossible to say it directly, because artistic creativity is based on a traumatic situation, which the text wants to hide, just as the patient's consciousness tries in every way to hide the memory of a traumatic situation stored in the unconscious. If we proceed from this assumption, then the analogy between psychoanalysis and philological analysis ceases to be a metaphor.
Since any mental illness is a kind of narrative, the meaning of the text is a hidden trauma experienced by the author. The more complex the text, the deeper the trauma, the more serious it is. The trauma is always one – the most universal birth trauma inherent in every human being. Indeed, the fetus in the mother's womb experiences an ambivalent desire, on the one hand, to break out of it (the life instinct), and on the other – to remain in it (secondarily – in the form of neurosis – to return to it) (death drive). This generally corresponds to Freud's teaching on sublimation.
To the question "What do you mean by this?" you can answer anything. Because in the unconscious everything is the same, everything is connected to everything and everything is hooked onto everything. In analysis, it is not the result that is important, but the process. It is clear that just as psychoanalysis cures only the simplest cases, so only simple forms of texts – folklore and popular art – are subject to "final" philological analysis. Analyses of complex cases in psychoanalysis and poetics, as a rule, enrich only the theoretical basis of these disciplines. But these are, as a rule, unsuccessful analyses in the "clinical" sense.
Since society is a mass connected by language, philosophy loosens language, melts the meanings and significance of words. As a result, social chains weaken, the power of politicians is weakened. If you do not loosen the binding ties of language, you cannot free your already-consciousness. And without already-consciousness, people are social puppets. If language strengthens social ties, then consciousness loosens them, revealing the precariousness of human existence. Philosophy melts meanings in a hopeless attempt to extract a new meaning, which complicates the transformation of man into a puppet.
In psychiatry, there is a rule – to collect an objective anamnesis. That is, to ask relatives: what happened, what was the behavior, why was he brought to the hospital? This is necessary because not every person will openly talk about their experiences, many prefer to hide mental disorders. This is a normal process, a kind of defensive behavior. Psychiatrists know about this. Talking with relatives helps to identify hidden pathology.
I remember they brought a woman. She was depressed. Somehow I managed to gain her trust, get her to talk. She told me that she had started feeling worse about three months ago: melancholy, apathy, loss of sleep and appetite. She forced herself to do household chores. Anxiety and a feeling of hopelessness arose. She even wanted to commit suicide. She hinted to her loved ones that she would soon leave them. Her husband only asked: "When will you come back?" And her mother-in-law scolded her, saying that she could not come back. Tears appeared in the woman's eyes. She said that she loved her husband, that they were raising a wonderful daughter. Then she worried about her husband, that he had lost a lot of weight recently, was he sick? That her daughter had moved away at school... She was probably a bad mother and wife. But she no longer had the strength to be good...
As she left the office, she looked at me intently and said as a parting word: “Your psychiatry is a complete fog and confusion. Although you know this without me, right?”
Before her words, which I remember as if they were yesterday, I had never admitted this to myself so frankly. Usually, it is the psychiatrist who works to help the patient accept what is stubbornly denied and rejected, but patient A. switched our roles. As psychiatrists say, "you have to talk to each person in the format of his delirium," that is, in his language. The one who put on the robe first is the doctor.
Generally speaking, if a person is delirious, it means that he is solving some important life problem, and he should be really helped in this, not hindered. When businessman Benjamin Horne goes bankrupt in Lynch's Twin Peaks, he goes crazy and starts delirious that he is General Lee, fighting the North. When his loved ones help him defeat General Grant and the South wins, Ben Horne comes to his senses. Any narrative must be told. Any delusion must come to an end. Then you can think about what to do next.
However, Paul Rosen, writing his book The Freud Legend, aptly noted that "any thinker whose errors take so long to correct is... a fairly significant figure in intellectual history."
...He stood as if he were the measure of things, and one could check oneself next to him. He managed, it seemed, to do the incredible: to affirm and build a word on its impossibility once again... Anamnesis is not a counterfeit of Heidegger, but a study so profound that every thinking Russian sought to strengthen his worldview by reading it. But, I admit, this is too strong a wine for today. In "The Golden Head" the ideas are given a dramatic shade. This work demands mental work from the reader. Meanwhile, people, like children, would like to pick flowers on a flat meadow. But one must be merciless to carefree idleness. I will not tell you what this means, because the same Deleuze wrote that a philosophical book should be like a detective novel. So I will not spoil the reader's pleasure.
In terms of genre, The Endless Dead End is still closest to a classic confession, but this confession is special – postmodern, because it is not the author who confesses, but his alter ego Odinokov. Usually confessions are not always truthful, since the author himself vouches for them with his name; Odinokov's confession is certainly truthful and sincere, because it is the confession of a fictional character, although it is also clear that the real author fully shares all the statements of his hero.
If the book is successful, if it produces the impression the author intended, it can also produce another effect: it all depends on how many times you reread it and under what conditions you do so. The structure of "The Endless Dead End" is quite complex. Most of the "notes" are comments on other "notes", that is, they are "notes on notes", "notes on notes of notes", etc. It is potentially infinite, like the famous book by J. L. Borges. It can only look actual the way it looks. From the point of view of infinity, there is almost nothing in it (it is not an ontology and not even an anthology), but at the same time it has everything for the reader to continue (or start?) the creative course set in it and to support the symbols of Faith declared in the book with an existential effort. That is why this book is dedicated to: everyone.
All writers are thieves. They steal stories from friends, from other writers (according to the theatre expert Georges Polti, there are only thirty-six dramatic situations). They eavesdrop on conversations of passers-by and spy on random people they meet. They even steal secrets from their own lives, putting them on public display. But the main thing they steal from themselves is time. While others communicate, have fun, travel, the writer sits at his desk and listens to the voices in his head. Yes, it sounds like a medical diagnosis, but you either accept the rules of the game or you don’t.
But he soon perceived that the battles which Sir Miles and the others had waged against armed knights to win a kingdom were not half so fierce as those which he was now waging against his own tongue to win immortality. Anyone who has even a passing acquaintance with the tortures of composition may be spared the details of his writing and satisfaction, his reading and disgust; his editing and tearing up, his erasing and inserting; his ecstasy and despair; his rest on his laurels at night, and his start in the morning; his grasp of an idea, and its loss; his vision of a book before him, and its sudden disappearance; his acting out of his characters at meals, and his shouting them out as he went; his sudden weeping, his sudden laughing; he rushed from one style to another: sometimes he chose the heroic, magnificent, sometimes the poor, simple, sometimes the valleys of Tempe, sometimes the fields of Kent and Cornwall – and he could not decide whether he was the most divine genius or the most terrible fool in the whole wide world.
He fell ill with colon cancer. The prognosis was grim. For the next few years, Becker was bedridden with little hope of survival. So he decided to write a book: a book about death. Becker died in 1974. His book, The Denial of Death, later won the Pulitzer Prize and became one of the most influential intellectual works of the 20th century. It created a sensation in philosophy and anthropology, and in the process expressed profound and still influential philosophical ideas. The book explains why the limit of consciousness is not the body, but subjectivity.
This is, in essence, a kind of thirst for immortality. It would seem, where from? Why? But the thirst for immortality is as inexplicable as life is inexplicable and death is inexplicable. It will be a kind of open grave, a reminder that I existed. I will die knowing that I have managed to defeat death to some extent. My book is a fight against the power of oblivion to which I am doomed. And if many years after I am gone, there is at least one person on earth who reads these lines, it will mean that I have not lived my difficult and sad life in vain. Meaning is, in a certain sense, always the death of the previous meaning. This is approximately what Jesus meant, as it seems to me, in the Gospel of John, when he said that the grain must die in order to bear much fruit.
Only naive and inexperienced people believe that a poet's life on earth ends with the onset of death or with Dantes' bullet: in reality, it ends only when his poetic discourse, having exhausted all its hidden possibilities, brings the poet to a tragic end. And that is why A. Blok is not entirely accurate: Pushkin was not killed by the lack of air, he was killed by the "language" he created. And he, feeling that his time was coming to an end, managed to tell us as he left: "It is time, my friend, it is time for the heart to ask for peace..." For the same reason, statements about how far a particular writer could have advanced in his work if not for an early (usually violent) death seem extremely naive. Our critics made especially many useless guesses after Lermontov's death. However, if we look at the problem from the point of view of language, we will see that the rebellious poet's work is a complete and majestic picture, in which, like in a classical musical composition, there is an introduction, a main part and a solemn coda. Was it not he who, saying goodbye to us, with sadness uttered his last wish: "Above me, so that the dark oak bends and rustles forever green." The discourse of language is too complex and harmonious a structure, and nothing (nobody) can prevent its goal from being embodied in history...
Gasoline is yours , ideas are ours. (Researchers associate the origin of the word gasoline with the Arabic "luban-jawi". This is how they once designated "Javanese incense". Then the Latins borrowed the word from the Arabs and called it, but in their own version, the aroma of a rose – "benzoe". Chemists say that the smell of this flower is the vapors of volatile "benzoic" oil. It is not at all difficult to trace the subsequent path of this word: first the French "benzene", then the Russian "gasoline").
I have always expected that the true healer – the philosopher who will find a radical remedy for all peoples, times, races, for all mankind – will have enough courage to expose my suspicion to all and dare to proclaim this proposition: in all philosophical systems at the present time it is not a question of “truth”, but of something entirely different, for example, of health, future, growth, strength, life... Only great pain, that lingering pain during which we burn as at the stake, forces us philosophers to descend to the very depths and to distance ourselves from all trust, all good nature, to remove every veil, to renounce all indulgence, everything in between. I doubt that such pain makes a man better than he was before; – but I know that it makes him deeper. Will we learn to oppose to it our pride, our mockery, all the strength of our will, and will we be like the Indian who, in the most terrible torment, responds to his tormentor with malicious antics; or will we, in the face of this suffering, turn to that non-existence of the East – nirvana – to that mute, motionless, deaf submission, self-forgetfulness, self-dissolution... This is where trust in life lies, that life itself has become a problem.
Our method is growing into a system. We claim that the social field is directly traversed by desire. We have invented a new cosmogony of literature. This will be a new Bible – the Last Book of books. Everyone who has something to say will say their word here – anonymously. We will milk our century like a cow. After us there will be no new books, at least for a whole generation. Until now we have been rummaging in the dark and moving instinctively. Now we will have a vessel into which we will pour life-giving moisture; a bomb that will explode the world when we throw it. We will cram enough stuffing into it to make all the plots, dramas, poems, myths and fantasies for all future writers. They will feed on it for a thousand years. There is colossal potential in this idea. The very thought of it shakes us. If Confucius, La Rochefoucauld, or some other composer of wise thoughts engraved on marble has not said it somewhere, then I am the one making the discovery now. The claim has been made by professors, economists, educators, writers, and other "intellectuals." It has been put on the front page as evidence of the current state of culture.
Give me time – I will prove to you who of us is right. Someday I will spin your creaky lazy ellipsoid so much that your rivers will flow backwards, you will forget your false books and newspapers, you will be sick of your own voices, names and titles. An angry draft will blow away the names of your streets and alleys and boring signs. You will want the truth. A lice-ridden cockroach tribe, we reproach our readers, a brainless Panurgian herd, covered in flies and bedbugs.
We will lift all the coffin lids, examine not only the Big Bony, but also its prequel – Life – and its sequel – the fragrant Afterlife. We will get to the root causes.
"What I predicted twenty-two years ago, what I firmly believed in long before, what I promised my friends in the very title of this book, a title I gave it when I was not yet sure of my discovery, what I urged people to seek sixteen years ago, what I devoted the best time of my life to... I have finally discovered it and am convinced of its truth beyond all expectations... And now, after eighteen months of darkness, three months of daylight, and a few days ago the Sun of amazing discovery itself shone brightly, nothing holds me back: I will give myself up to sacred fury; I will astound humanity with a sincere confession that I stole the golden vases from the Egyptians in order to erect from them a tabernacle to my God far beyond the borders of Egypt. If you forgive me, I will rejoice; if you are angry, I will endure; the die is cast, the book is written, and I don’t care whether it will be read now or later; it can wait for its reader a hundred years, if the Lord Himself waited six thousand years for man to be able to comprehend His works.”
"The staff of the website "Continuous Suicide" reminds you that the purpose of the publication is still to report news that is happening in the land of words. We are hysterically happy to inform you that the ceremonial resumption of cultural-terrorist activity is scheduled for the very near future, and will presumably be timed to coincide with the imminent End of the World. Watch the position of the stars, the lunar cycles and the rustling in the telephone receiver: we will notify you in the most cruel and sudden way."
The first type of novel arose as a string of short stories. With the development of this form, simple stringing is replaced by a refined hierarchy. The second type of novel in world culture grows as one swollen short story and represents a single plot. Anamnesis is not the absence of a system, but, on the contrary, an extremely complex system, one might say, a metasystem. Therefore, it can be considered an extremely unique, but still a novel. Until now, I have not heard a single competent opinion about myself.
I consider this short preface sufficient for the reader, or rather the viewer, who can call up pictures on the screen of his frontal bone that excite meanings. Another thing is that in our time it is easier to find a sponsor for the publication of a book about destruction than about rebirth, perhaps that is why such a subtitle was chosen.
The text of the novel can be used as a fortune-telling book. In the life of the spirit there are moments when the mechanism of writing begins to act as an autonomous first principle and becomes fate. And it is at this moment that both the power of the word and its impotence are fully revealed in philosophical speculations and in literary creativity. Neither the character nor the situations in which he finds himself can be endlessly complicated. We know everything about them, or at least guess at much.
“God knows what you mumble to yourself while looking for your pince-nez or you keys...”
Vl. Khodasevich
"God knows what you mumble to yourself while looking for your pince-nez or keys..."
Vl. Khodasevich
Let me advise in the meantime the future, or the present reader, if he is subject to melancholy, not to look for signs or omens in what is said below, lest he be disturbed, and more evil than good come of it, if he applies it to himself... as most melancholics do.
R. Burton. Anatomy of Melancholy. Oxford , 1621.
Chapter 2. Poetic Method
It happens that a work stands above a man, above his understanding. But however insignificant this superiority may be, and however innocent the deception of the impression, this phenomenon always produces a humiliating effect. It excites contempt to a greater degree than the writings of the most hideous mediocrity, quite adequate to the brains that created them. A great poet is always above his creation: his desires are too broad and cannot be realized, his ideas about love are so wonderful that they deprive him of the possibility of ever meeting it in life. Perhaps they are right in placing love in books. Perhaps there is only place for it. Therefore, this book of love and liberation makes me think with bitterness about the miserable lot not only of modern man, but probably also of the man of future times.
Language is an endless labyrinth of meanings. People use it unconsciously. If it were not so, poetry would be meaningless. We always want to say something that is not quite what we really want to say. Because in fact we do not always know what we want to say.
You will not find, and probably will not look for, hidden texts, phenomenal codes in this “book of little nonsense” that has elevated itself into a system. Why do you need these stupid rows of incomprehensible signs? These columns, lines, dots, inventions of the Greeks. You can live without them, laughing. The meaning, good or bad, will never be known, it will not be able to become the only answer. Three dots on the right, three dots on the left, and between them – whatever you want ... You may think: is this nothing? But you put a squiggle in the right place and everything gets better – life, like a poem, acquires a certain meaninglessness or at least completeness, which is the same thing. It arises from one point (cf. the etymological relationship of the words “point” and “precise” – the point must be in a certain place, precisely, “pedantically” fixed (cf. the expression “to hit the nail on the head” (!); also from the German punkt (point) the word punctual developed. I dedicate the following poem to your ruined life.
Rhythm does not depend on the grammatical structure of the phrase. Here the stress is placed not where it is supposed to be according to the meaning of the speech, but where it is required by the sonority of the verse. The rhythm of prose depends on its grammatical structure: here the stress is placed not according to the sound, but according to the meaning. And since the sound and meaning of speech coincide very rarely, prose sacrifices sonority, and poetry sacrifices logical meaning. Here is the difference between verse and prose in short words, and that's enough for now.
It is interesting that perinatal complexes are characteristic of poetry. In a general sense, one can say that the poetic rhythm “reminds” the poetic subject of the smooth rocking of the fetus in the womb.
We are only probable spaces, between them, between points, corrosive to nothingness. We evaporate. They smoke. They are the darkness of impartial casting, the exhaustion of hopelessness, routine. He looked around at all the laughing cattle and said: belonging is their goal. In the end, isn't life thick: a drawn-out sound, thinned out toward the end? The further you go, the higher the art, but the more it suits the heart of depth. There have been so many classifications of art on various grounds that their number is comparable only to the boredom they cause. Therefore, I will use the simplest one, apparently first used at the beginning of the 19th century by Wilhelm Traugott Krug.
If you remove from human activities everything related to profit-making, only art remains. The main thing is to decide: is art like life, or is life like art. The nature of versification was successfully explained by the English poet Winnie the Pooh: you have to let the words stand where they want, and they will find the right place for themselves. "What is a poet for? – To save the city, of course."
We will not continue this list. Let each parallel we notice become a small personal discovery for both readers and future researchers. And if the sum of these discoveries helps us hear the movement of mysterious currents along the trunk of the single tree of poetry, we will be able to say words of gratitude to someone who hardly needs them.
Why this was necessary, no one really knew, least of all Pushkin, who better than others sensed the need to translate the life around him into poetry. He acted like a wild Tungus, who sang without thinking about a tree he met, about all sorts of things that caught his eye, comparing the passing landscape with the length of the song. In his texts lives the primeval joy of simply naming a thing, turning it into poetry with just one magical call.
But Pushkin deliberately wrote a novel of nothing. In "Eugene Onegin" he thinks only of how to shirk his duties as a narrator. The novel is formed of excuses that divert our attention to the margins of the poetic page and hinder the development of the plot chosen by the writer. The action barely holds together on two letters with two monologues of a love quid pro quo , from which absolutely nothing happens, on a worthless person elevated to a hero, and every phrase drowns in secondary, distracting material. Here they celebrate a ball at least three times, and, taking advantage of the resulting turmoil, the author loses the thread of the narrative, wanders, tramples, drags out rubber and sits in the bushes, in the backyards of his own conscience. The quarrel between Onegin and Lensky, for example, which plays the first violin in the collision, almost fell apart, erased by birthday pies. You literally fight your way through Babylons of delays to get to it, starting with the crush in the hallway – "the barking of dogs, the smacking of girls, noise, laughter, a crush at the threshold" – arranged to divert attention from the center to the periphery of events, where, like a tarantass into a ditch, the narrative slips.
For all cases he had excuses, consisting in the agreement of what was said with the circumstances. Any whim in his mouth acquired legal sanction already because it was appropriate and timely. He always managed to hit the mark.
Poetry, in Pushkin's view, is based on the recollection of sounds once heard and dreams seen before, which later, in the course of work, are freed from under the depths of barbaric records, the temporary husk, revealing the picture of genius. That picture exists in advance, before any creativity, apart from the artist, whose job it is to find it, recalling the forgotten, and cleanse it. So he spins, wrinkles his forehead, stretches out his arms to his beloved: "Your heavenly features..." – to his beloved? And not, more accurately, to that infant candle-bulb that shines before us in the fog, like some inaccessible distance?
We haven’t started talking about poetry yet, although almost the last page of a book that has not yet established itself in either inhalation or exhalation has been turned.
The body's memory is imperfect and fragmentary, the handwriting of a dream is trembling and unclear. In the squiggles one can guess: even without philological tapping and listening it is clear that "signs" are no longer exchanged for "the signified", they are closed in on themselves. They haunt you relentlessly and are completely irrelevant to the matter.
Outside of him are the deoxyribonucleic spirals of the word, the silver of photographs, blackening in stone, bracelet and fish made of foil. Poetry is not a declaration of love, language and beloved, but an inquiry: how do they arise in you – changing you... into a message? into a fruit?
And tries to convince that it does not exist. And what does exist? The best means of interrogation is the following. We can take advantage of the pause in our story and make several statements. In the life of every poet... there is a moment... when his future poetry suddenly sends him a signal... This moment is inexplicable and tremulous, like conception... After it, everything that follows is only the development and bearing of the fruit...
If you trust the language, you understand that the world is reaching out to you from all sides and wants to talk, but you pay for resisting this trust with your biography, that is, you leave no traces on the earth, and perhaps even higher. Usually such material accumulates in the writer's notebooks. All this will be explained further .
A poet can always find a way out, in words, of a dead end. After all, that is his calling. And I am not here to talk about the difficulties of a poet who, if you look at it, is never a victim of circumstances. I am here to talk about the lot of the audience, about your, so to speak, fate.
It is safe to say that nature, or, in other words, the totality of all things, is composed, arranged in such a way as to produce a poetic effect. The poem seems to say to the reader: "Be like me." The poet is perfectly aware of why he must do this and not otherwise, for he spares no time for reflection and research... However, some writers of poetry in such cases immerse themselves in silence, or fence themselves off from the world with obscure devices.
In French, montage simply means assembly, that is, editing a film. All films are based on this – on gluing together individual frames, but, as a rule, the frames themselves are shot in order to be glued together, and they are glued together according to rules that camouflage spatial and temporal jumps and smooth out graphic contrast. Film editing is, by definition, the art of combination and therefore, as a rule, not pasticcio.
The conclusion is that there is no contradiction between the method by which the poet writes, the method by which the actor who embodies him acts within himself, the method by which the same actor performs actions within the frame, and the method by which his actions, his actions, as well as the actions of his surroundings and environment (and in general the entire material of the film) sparkle, shimmer and shimmer in the hands of the director through the means of montage presentation and the construction of the film as a whole. For equally at the basis of all of them lie the same life-giving human traits and prerequisites that are inherent in every person, as well as in every human and vital art.
And man, too, each time defining the monotony of his misfortune differently, justifies himself before his reason only by passionately searching for a new adjective.
Every Alexandrian verse starts out from the need to air out the words, from the need to compensate for their fading with a lively refinement, but it all ends in fatigue, in which the mind and the word blur and disintegrate. Having endowed it with malice and tenacity – our predominant qualities – we have done everything in our power to make it as alive as possible: we have spent all our strength to create its image, to make it dexterous, fickle, clever, ironic and, most importantly, petty.
Let us lift the veil: does the shell of these words correspond to their content? Is it possible for the same meaning to live and die in the verbal branches of a single trunk of indefiniteness?
By deliberately killing in himself all the immediacy of simple and living perceptions, he transformed himself from a poet into a real virtuoso. He loved words for their possible meaning more than for their real meaning. From these words he created a mosaic, the sophistication of which had its own simplicity. It was rightly said of him that he was as difficult as the Persian, as Martial. Like Andersen's man who wove invisible threads, Mallarm; collected precious stones that glowed with the reflection of his fantasy, not always in the horizon of our vision. But it would be absurd to suppose that Mallarm; is incomprehensible. Of course, to quote one poem, obscure in its isolation from others, is not loyal, but it must be said that when his poetry is good, it remains so even in its individual fragments.
But there is also tonality. I am afraid your tonality will be “noble,” “consoling,” seasoned with common sense, a sense of proportion, or elegance. One must realize that a book should not contain civic pathos and spiritual bonds, that it should indulge our oddities, our fundamental dishonesty, and that a “humane” writer who blindly follows conventional ideas thereby signs his own literary death certificate.
Here's how Wilson illustrates this point. He suggests that we view Columbus's 1492 expedition as a work of art. What, then, is the point of this art? Just a few decades ago, the point was something like this: Columbus was a brave man who, despite unfavorable circumstances, undertook a risky expedition that resulted in the discovery of America, the New World, and thereby brought culture and civilization to a rather primitive and backward people.
Today, many tend to give it a different meaning – that Columbus was a sexist, imperialist, lying and cowardly bastard who went to America to plunder and pillage and, during his expedition, spread syphilis and other plagues to the peace-loving peoples he encountered everywhere.
"A fairy tale," Novalis insisted, "is, as it were, a canon of poetry. Everything poetic must be fairy tale... A fairy tale is like a dream, it is incoherent... Nothing can be more contrary to the spirit of a fairy tale than moral fate, a natural connection. In a fairy tale, genuine natural anarchy reigns."
Chapter 3. Stream of Consciousness
Subtle underground approaches to the upcoming quote and a smooth distancing from it at the end.
I touch, fertilize lines (italics, of course, mine), mold, words (Latin just begs to come to the tongue), plasticine, magician's phrases, refusing to obey (I'll round it off later), a collage of quotations – a chaotic, tangled delirium – I select them like cartridges, spend them, catch them on words, there are more of them than you'll meet passers-by on the street, language has created a new species from primates, it reminds me of a kraal (I'm copying from a dictionary): an image of the indescribable, I'll copy it so naively – that – double delirium – write as you breathe, as you live <illegible> – in general, the sounds on stage are not only words, but ordinary, purely auxiliary, it would seem ... I play as I want. Soft, shaggy ... they will suddenly be filled with meaning, a number will enchant them and appear over a smile of words.
Not a figure of speech, but speech. Mirrors and the copulation of letters are not so disgusting as they are amusing! "This is not a theater – this is a factory." Culture is powerless here. In 1812, when, out of fear that Napoleon might take the capital and, following a habit that had become a good tradition even among the Romans, send Falconet's statue to Paris, Alexander the First decided to take it down and transport it to some distant province... The machinery of sleep is the machinery of the poetic function: a deep-sea funicular. What the instigator of psychoanalysis, speaking of the relationship of dream elements to each other, calls condensation, approximation (hint), symbolism, the relationship of a part to a whole, etc., is the essence, the c/tropes. Metaphor, inversion, metonymy, synecdoche, ellipsis.
We encounter the fascinating and self-sufficient dialectic of pure being and nothingness – as presence – only in poetry. And this presence – slips away. Just as the mystery of the void slips away in the paintings and scrolls of the Sung masters: when they “wrote”, they thought not so much about the brush and ink, but about the absence of the brush and ink. Gaps and spaces – in them, every lyrical statement worthy of itself (pure poetry) and every self-respecting speculative thought appear. Both types of speech belong to each other like two sides of the same coin, like dream and reality, like: E. Husserl’s reduction and J. Derrida’s transgression. They are connected by the blood corpuscles (corpuscles?) of the aorta and veins. Aorist? Imperfect? Present? Lacan’s lacuna. Poetry, said Francis Bacon, is like the dream of a certain doctrine. Is there a doctrine of water, of sand? Is there a doctrine of doctrine? Grammarians do with the text what the priest does with the victim.
Not only do we never write what we “really” think – just as we are almost never present in the present; but are busy with the opposite: holding on to the past or anticipating the future. – But I also suspect that we never read what is written “in black and white”. It is the volume of years (“as the ocean embraces the globe, earthly life is surrounded by dreams”). And, paradoxically, it is the source, the intravenous. We are bankrupts and princes (of blue blood) at the same time. Too provocative, too provocative... There are things that are achieved by non-achievement, with which there is no other way. And then, as you have already noticed, water has a habit of emerging, as it emerges onto dry land, out of the ordinary. And the moon? The moon’s regulations, cycles. The cycles of the ebb and flow of sleep. Of dreams. Are we related to one or the other, or do we relate to both together, which arrow flies further, will the handle of the knight's armor catch up with Achilles. Who are we, princes or countesses?
The key was inside and outside at the same time, the key was pliable, soft: the key was locked on the key, like a Mobius strip. I don’t know now, just as I didn’t know then (and “then”), what to do with this grace of syntax, with its lightning-fast zigzag, with this eternal return of the equal, the rotation of the same. It leaves me far behind, to the side, above, 666 strict poses of an inveterate scribe, a Pharisee, a wanderer. And it doesn’t give in. And, I see, it will never give in now.
Well, Mallarm; was a Baudelairean only in the sense of filiation of generations. Be that as it may, I understood how difficult it is to choose words, to put them together into phrases so that the resulting whole does not collapse under the weight of its own incoherence and drown in tedium.
We have seen how the urge to detect key features and to make sense of them is always active in our sight and hearing, as well as in our fears and desires. The relentless urge to understand what is happening, as well as the language that describes it, are undoubtedly developments of this original urge for intellectual control. The same sense of intellectual discomfort that prompts our eyes to imagine the things we see as clear and coherent, causes our concepts to develop in the course of their formation from obscure to clear, incoherent to coherent.
A funny phrase needs to be cherished, pampered, gently stroking the subject. You need to be able to twist a rope out of the phrase. And walk along it, like a tightrope. In the air. Without holding on to anything. Outside the body. Without form. Like a pure spirit.
How pleasant (and how scary), taking a deep breath and not really knowing where to begin, to dive into a phrase that is scorching at the first strokes, which opens and closes behind you like water, and has nothing to do with you until you enter it completely and, feeling sudden help flowing in from outside, from this speech into which you have carelessly jumped, you trust your common current with it, the channel with the risk of choking and never swimming out, which, having taken pity and quietly taking you in its arms, already seems to be pushing you towards the subject about which you undertook to write, if you had not suddenly noticed that it is no longer the same, and it is getting on towards evening, and you have to swim without being capricious, silently obeying your mother who still agrees with you and fusses, and whether you want to or not, keep your habits to yourself, and dive to the very bottom, where, almost losing consciousness of that, what are you talking about, to finally say something identical to this force, which, having pushed you to the surface, testifies to its kindness, but not to the experience of a swimmer. You come out of the phrase a little ashamed and dumbfounded by what was said.
Laing's texts are not quite ordinary. They are a combination of fragments of scientific and philosophical analysis, fiction, dialogues, case studies and excerpts from poetry and prose by various authors. To convey his understanding of the world of madness, he turns to logic, intuition, aesthetic sense and the heart, that is, to the whole person.
Playing chess presupposes a developed intellect (we are not against the concept of "intellect"). But the enumeration of possible moves and combinations (chess is an excellent example of multiverse thinking) is not an action of consciousness, but of thinking (and we are not against the concept of "thinking") and occurs unconsciously. In great chess players, the enumeration of options occurs in the shortest possible time, almost instantly (and this is only possible unconsciously). A declaration of love is the result of a tense emotional state (and we are not against the concept of "emotion"). But when a person says "I love you" to a woman, consciousness does not play any role here. Tolstoy showed this very well: how falsely Pierre Bezukhov declares his love to the bride Helen Kuragina, who was forced upon him, and how sincerely and incoherently Konstantin Levin tries to woo Kitty Shcherbatskaya (in Tolstoy, incoherence and slurred speech are always a sign of its authenticity).
Most things and facts are perceived by a person unconsciously. These impressions are stored in memory in the form of narrative chains. In terms of Chomsky's generative grammar, unconscious narrations are the material for constructing ordinary narrations. In general, everything unconscious is more fundamental than everything conscious (if we make a concession to traditional psychology and admit that the conscious exists in some sense). Unconscious narration is potentially psychotic, so it is mainly incoherent and nominative. Thus, the unconscious narration of my walk along the street on the way from home to the metro can be reconstructed approximately as follows: "steps – entrance – cigarette butts – announcement – respected residents – raindrops – two women in gray coats – hairdresser's "Gatyanin Den" – two drunks – no, I don't smoke – cars – houses – metro".
...And they do not even represent a consistent chain of thoughts – the style of free associations. Therefore, there is no point in striving to maintain consistency in our story. The art of storytelling largely rests on the gradual entry into particulars and details. The speech should be slow, thoughtful, cut by pauses into subject-weighty segments. The speech should also be fragrant or radiant. So that you want to return to it again and again. So that the phrase breathes with secret delight, excitement. So that, while reading, you want to play with it again. In general, the disposition is clear, so let's move on to the story.
"Oil" – I wrote down – "is a certain promised person, a distant memory, escaping from the answer and form, in order to erase the beginning, as Ulugbek was killed by order of his son." The form of fire is free. And since it is free, everyone decides with their heart what they will see in it. You feel calm – it means that the calmness living in you is simply reflected in the fire.
The screen will flash with tension – a frame of knowledge today. Why should I build up the world, which is like a city , when I only need a small house? Not to go through the thicket, but why go through? Who knows why we do what we do.
I write in a chaotic and scattered manner. The further I go, the stronger the hypnosis. Hypnotizing with text is quite creative, because when you read it, you want to continue writing right where you read. Keep writing, maybe something will become clearer towards the end. Okay...
Where are your words leading or what are they hinting at? I don't understand anything at all. Explain yourself more satisfactorily. Directions of thought in which thought is absent... In my opinion, they are just a set of words. Maybe these are some kind of spells? Don't smear it, just say it straight. Any meaning can be given to the incomprehensible.
Conceptual thinking always strives for clarity and precision of what is said. In artistic thinking, there may be cases of deliberate, or, as they say, genre vagueness and obscurity of a literary text. Literary scholars sometimes call it "incoherent speech." In general, vagueness and obscurity are unpleasant, although often inevitable companions of communication using language. It is desirable to get rid of them as much as possible. But genre vagueness and obscurity, sometimes characteristic of an artistic image, have every right to appear at the right time on a convenient stage. I want to say that if something is not structured, this does not mean that it is meaningless. Nothing is meaningless at all. Strictly speaking, meaning can only have an opposite meaning, that is, not the absence of meaning, but precisely the opposite meaning. Thus, "non-meaning" is always something literally "opposite to meaning", "counter-meaning", "zero degree" of meaning does not exist – except in the hopes of the author, that is, only as an unreliable deferment of meaning.
I will add on my own (although this was thought up long ago by the founders of psychoanalysis): if some word by chance association leads to another word (see also about this – parasemantics), one should not brush off the second word – it can help to better understand the meaning of the first word.
We have yet to master what Bakhtin called “metalinguistics” – an analysis not of the objective meanings of words and not of the logical meaning of sentences, but of the dialogical meaning of statements, always addressed to other statements – questioning, answering, complementing, objecting.
"And there is no one to reproach the scoundrel for his delirium." But has anyone condemned the ancient armies that dragged whole herds of bleating mistresses in their supply trains? Has anyone pitied the fruits of such campaigns – the crying Silenus babies abandoned on the roadsides of victory? It's a good thing some were adopted by compassionate myths.
But the Hermetic tradition itself does not lend itself to interpretation. Hence the alchemical proverb that those authors who obscure, write in a complex and unclear way, write the truth, and if it seems to you that you understand something, there is something wrong, some kind of fake.
Chapter 4. Deconstruction method
A book that moves forward and backwards, advances and retreats, sometimes moving close to the reader, sometimes running away from him and flowing like a river, washing new countries, so that when we float along it, our heads begin to spin from the excess of impressions, which, for all that, flow slowly enough, giving a calm opportunity to survey them and follow them with the eyes. A book with many plots on one trunk, which grows like a tree, embracing space with a solid mass of foliage and air – as the lungs represent the inverted form of a tree – capable of breathing, expanding in width almost to infinity and then contracting to a point, the meaning of which is incomprehensible, like the soul in its last grain.
This is the structural impossibility of closing... the network, of fixing its weaving, of outlining it with a boundary that would not be a mark. The text-letter is a novel without a novel, poetry without a poem, essay writing without an essay, writing without style, production without a product, structuring without a structure.
The rhizome as an organizational model finds its concretization in postmodern textual criticism, in particular, in the figure of the “construction” of the concept of artistic creativity, within which the ideal of an original author’s work is replaced by the ideal of construction as a stereophonic flow of explicit and hidden quotations, each of which refers to various and diverse spheres of cultural meanings, each of which is expressed in its own language, requiring a special procedure of “recognition,” and each of which can enter into a dialogue or parody with any other, forming new quasi-texts and quasi-quotes within the text. This makes any critical analysis impossible, because once the latter arises, it will simply merge with this text.
The culture of the rhizome symbolizes the birth of a new type of reading: the main thing for the reader will not be to understand the content of the book, but to use it as a mechanism, to experiment with it. To read means to desire the work, to thirst to become it, to refuse the attempt to duplicate the work in any other language, except the language of the work itself.
Parodic hybrid-quotational bilingualism fuses the past with the present, the high with the low, the elite with the mass, promotes the decanonization of the canonized, liberates the reader's consciousness, who is not taught anything, but is drawn into a reading-game that has a beginning, but does not imply an end. In contrast to the construction of a book as a circle, when the work appears as a closed, closed, complete world.
For what I have written does not pretend to be new in detail, and I do not cite any sources because it is completely indifferent to me whether anyone else has thought before me about what I have thought. Books that have been read a hundred times by others are always useful to read, for although the object remains the same, the subject changes.
The fragments of literary tradition that have entered very deeply into the writer's soul have given him a method of finding his own voice, combining the voices of others. The strange thing about his poetry is that whenever one reads it, one constantly hears echoes and whispers of other works. All this is beneath the surface of the poetry, but it certainly gives it power. They are his words and yet not his, but other people's words, and this strange echo-like quality makes the poems unforgettable.
His poetics and poetry are on the same global, international level. This was expressed in passing in some manual or collection; but I do not remember where exactly in the bibliography cited above the author of this opinion is hidden. One critic noted that T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" "was published in Chinese translation in the 20s, and in Russian translation in the 70s. And the reason for this is not only Soviet censorship. Who prevented some emigrant in Berlin or Harbin from translating the same Eliot? Form looms before his gaze as an object; whatever you do with it, it causes a scandal: if the form is brilliant, it seems outdated, if anarchic, it becomes antisocial, if unusual for its time and its contemporaries, it turns into the embodiment of loneliness.
After all, what is there so wrong with this biographical style that we begin a letter with "The Right Reverend Sir" and end with "Yours sincerely"; we cannot despise phrases which, like Roman roads, are laid over the swamps of our lives and, like civilized people, make us hurry after the measured tread of a policeman, while at the same time muttering any nonsense under our breath – "Evening bell, evening moan", "A distant land from which there is no return", "My soul is dark, quick, singer, quick", and so on, to your heart's content.
Finally, the association of computer-generated lines with poetry is supported by semantics. Neural networks do not always cope with the generation of grammatical and easily interpretable lines in terms of meaning. At the same time, 20th-century poetry is also rich in experimental texts that reduce grammatical rules and conventions of semantic coherence. A lay view of poetry in general (not necessarily modern times) also suggests that poems do not have to be “meaningful,” and poetry “should be a bit silly.”
In these first systems, two main principles were already identified, one of which was necessarily followed by developers when creating computer poems before neural networks came onto the scene. The first involved recombining words or phrases from an existing text or dictionary of quotations. The second was a random selection of words, the arrangement of which in the resulting text was subject to linguistic and/or poetic restrictions set by the programmer. Thus, the central category of this process became the category of randomness, which was recognized by the pioneers of computer poetry as a key aesthetic factor. One of the artists of that era, Mark Adrian, speaks directly about this: “The neutrality of the machine is very important to me. It allows the reader to find their own meanings associated with the words much easier, since their choice, size and composition are set randomly.”
Linking this idea to the philosophy of structuralism, Abraham Mole conceptualized it as “permutational art,” one that “decomposes the world into ‘ atoms’ from which it then constructs arbitrary structures.” He also declared that “permutational art is not only a game – it is a method of aesthetic research, since it opens a concrete path to the analysis and synthesis of a work of art.”
Perhaps neural network texts that reproduce style can tell us something important about the original texts, the ones they were trained on. If neural networks produce for us a small extract, a squeeze, a concentrated, style-rich fragment, then we can read it slowly, and through slow reading actually perform distant reading, that is, see something more in the small.
Conceptualists put the reconstruction of typical structures of thinking and stereotypes of mass consciousness in the foreground. "In general, all conceptualist production can be considered as a continuous experiment in formalizing, reconstructing and constructing a huge number of all kinds of opinions, assessments, states, naming, comparing, clarifying, cataloging, etc." Naturally, in connection with such an attitude, the use of all kinds of linguistic cliches, automatically reproducible signs – colloquial, political, clerical, literary. But they are extracted from the context assigned to them, presented in a parodic form, forming "bricks" from which a certain absurdist reality is built. Quotational writing combined with symptomatic reading. It is no coincidence that the most popular toy for children at the end of the 20th century was the transformer. In this system of values, a modern person is "everything", but at the same time "nothing". In this case, the personality disintegrates: it doubles, triples, becomes multiple and in this state ceases to be a personality.
The thing is, Kubrick was not satisfied with man as such. Our very nature contains an irreparable defect, an original sin. What destroys us, Kubrick believed, is what distinguishes us from machines: the deepest depths of the subconscious. Therefore, the future belongs to intelligent machines, to which we ourselves will give reason, replacing instincts. As for man, he, deprived of a chance to survive in the struggle with himself, is doomed to wander in the twilight, confusing reality with sleep, delirium with reality, life with nightmare.
This is the displacement of a verb, that is, movement, action, by a participle, adverbial participle, noun (especially a verbal one!), and therefore stagnation, immobility. And of all the verb forms, a predilection for the infinitive. This is a pile-up of nouns in oblique cases, most often long chains of nouns in the same case – the genitive, so that it is no longer possible to understand what refers to what and what is being discussed. This is an abundance of foreign words where they can be easily replaced by Russian words. This is the displacement of active phrases by passive ones, almost always heavier, cumbersome. This is a heavy, confused sentence structure, unintelligibility. Countless subordinate clauses, doubly ponderous and unnatural in colloquial speech. This is dullness, monotony, weariness, clich;. A wretched, meager vocabulary: both the author and the characters speak the same dry, official language. Always, without any reason or need, they prefer a long word to a short one, an official or bookish one to a colloquial one, a complex one to a simple one, a cliche to a living image. In short, officialese is dead stuff. It penetrates both fiction and everyday life, into oral speech. Even into children's speech. From official materials, from newspapers, from radio and television, officialese passes into everyday practice. For many years, lectures were given this way, textbooks and even primers were written this way. Fed on linguistic swans and chaff, teachers in their turn feed new generations of innocent children with the same dryness of stale and dead words.
This is the disintegration of art into elementary particles. This is coherence, organized by the alternation of the incoherent. Alternation as the formative basis of style, as the basis of construction, as the driving force. This vacuum, consisting of a kaleidoscope of incoherent alternations, at the same time destroying any internal coherence, sequence, duration. "Bergot, in my opinion, is a flutist... His work is not muscular, his works do not have, so to speak, a backbone."
In the Surrealist Manifesto, Andr; Breton gave a complete definition of surrealism: “Pure psychic automatism, which aims to express, either orally or in writing or in any other way, the real functioning of thought. The dictation of thought beyond any control by reason, beyond any aesthetic or moral considerations... Surrealism is based on the belief in the supreme reality of certain associative forms that had been neglected before, on the belief in the omnipotence of dreams, in the disinterested play of thought. It seeks to irrevocably destroy all other psychic mechanisms and to take their place in solving the main problems of life.” The method is more important than the result here. Bakhtin generally proposed not to understand experiences, but to use them as a way of aestheticizing the phenomena of life. For example, as a way to experience love. After all, to experience love means to kill it, not to understand it.
The texts rather recreated pictures of various dreams, dream visions. In this way, the surrealists hoped to return the authentic mystical outline of the world, with the help of which it was necessary to throw off those stereotypes of perception that had formed as a result of the intensive exploitation of the mind. Individual phenomena, like objects of the external world, entered into some kind of fantastic connection that collapsed logic. But these "breaks" were assessed not as dreams, but as some kind of inspirations, sudden insights.
Bataille continues by pointing out that the “questioning of everything” is opposed to the human need to violently organize everything within a suitable totality and a self-satisfied universality: “With an extreme terror that imperiously passes into a need for universality, driven to the point of dizziness by the movement that constitutes it, the being as such, who imagines himself universal, is only a challenge to the vague immensity that escapes his accidental violence, a tragic denial of everything that is not the chance of his own bewildered ghost. However, as a man, this being falls into the convolutions of the knowledge of his fellows, who absorb his substance in order to reduce it to a component of what goes beyond the dangerous madness of his autonomy in the total darkness of the ages.”
It is not that Bataille himself lacked a system, but simply that the system is slipping away. "Bataille's trouble is in his reasoning: of course, he reasons like someone who has a fly on his nose, which puts him closer to the dead than to the living, but he still reasons. He tries, with the help of a tiny internal mechanism that has not yet completely broken down, to share his obsessions: this very fact proves that he cannot claim (whatever he says) to be in opposition to any system, like a dumb animal."
Beyond that, it’s all turtles, up and down, Wilber notes. What deconstruction challenges is the desire to find a final resting place, whether wholeness, partiality, or somewhere in between. Whenever someone finds a final interpretation of a text or a work of art (or life, or history, or the cosmos), deconstruction is quick to point out that there is no final context, because it too is infinitely and forever part of another context. According to Fuller, a final context of any kind is unattainable in principle or practice. Meaning is limited by context, but context is limitless.
"The fox knows much, the hedgehog knows only one thing, but the most important," says Archilochus (fragment 201). If the sage is the hedgehog, then the thinker is the fox, who constantly seeks out a variety of meanings to which thought responds, without reducing them to one large concept, to one all-encompassing system. The thinker arranges a cycle of concepts and is drawn into it himself, pushing away from himself any stable point of support.
Perhaps other poets have or have had a simpler style, a more creative imagination, a more subtle observation, a more vivid fantasy, and a greater talent for conveying the music of human speech. So be it! But with all the timidity and poverty of his language, with the naivety of his childish dramatic conceptions – with all these shortcomings and many others – Maurice Maeterlinck created a whole series of books that are undoubtedly original, undoubtedly new. These books will long continue to confuse the pitiful crowd of haters of every innovation, the mob that is ready to forgive audacity if there are already precedents entered into the protocols of history, but which looks with distrust on a genius who is one continuous audacity of thought.
With the death of the avant-garde and the triumph of irony, it seems there is nothing sincere to say about art. Narcissism and nihilism are fighting for the main stage, on which, in their opinion, there is essentially nothing. Kitsch and hackwork are crawling over each other in a struggle for representation, which no longer means anything anyway.
"Orlando" is extremely difficult to understand. The impressionistic manner of the novel was at odds with the "logic of fact" that was familiar to the European reader, and which is still defended by supporters of traditional literary forms.
Indeed, the combination of biographical and impressionistic prose techniques, the alternation of languages from different literary eras, create the feeling that the novel simply lacks unity, that it is anarchic. Deep vision is replaced here by a brilliant literary game in the spirit of J. Joyce or early T.S. Eliot – a game that could not fail to bring pleasure to the writer. This is partly due to the fact that the novel was conceived as a kind of “declaration of love” to Vita Sackville-West, an aristocrat belonging to a very old family. It was Vita who served as the prototype of Orlando, and this amazing novel was dedicated to her.
How should a novel be read? What problems did Virginia Woolf try to solve in Orlando? We will try to answer these questions.
She criticizes the principle of the third-party view, which assumes that the story is told on behalf of an omniscient author who "objectively" evaluates what is happening. A distance arises between the author (and therefore the reader) and the reality depicted, which also includes the hero with his inner world.
From Virginia Woolf's point of view, a character in novels where an outsider's view rules appears as a set of predetermined properties that the reader is able to comprehend rationally, but is unable to feel or experience. The hero's life is reduced to his biography, and it becomes the basis of the plot. But life is not only the events that happen to a person. It is broader and absorbs thoughts, experiences, imperfect actions, unrealized and unattested opportunities.
Alas! The reader loves books with a plot. They are somehow more familiar. And let's not build illusions. When reading any 19th century novel, we are primarily captivated by the plot collisions and irritably skip paragraphs, turn the pages where the inner world of the hero is revealed. We are impatient to find out what will happen next, and the rest is naturally pushed into the background. Thus, a person is reduced to an abstract plot scheme.
That is why Virginia Woolf accused realist writers of insufficient realism. Life in its primordiality, unpredictability and changeability is banished from their works. It seems measured, calculated, logically verified. Instead of a truthful depiction of reality and man, realists offered the reader, in her opinion, some pseudo-objective, abstract schemes. The world of a realistic novel seemed to her absolutely implausible or, as is now fashionable to say, virtual.
In her works, Virginia Woolf rejects the method of external description. She makes the reader see the world through the eyes of her character. Events, facts, and phenomena of reality speak not so much about themselves as about the one who perceives them. They become the content of impressions, contradictory and constantly changing. Thus, reality appears subjectively colored, individual, and life turns out to be not static, as in realists, but changeable, unstable, moving. This method enhances the realism of artistic reality. The illusion of virtuality and improbability disappears. We are inside the depicted world, not outside it.
Virginia Woolf acts as the novel's interpreter, and her interpretation is included in the work itself. The narrator (not to be confused with the writer herself) pauses his story every minute, as if catching his breath. He is not averse to chatting with the reader, like an inveterate critic, and explaining to him the rules by which he works. Woolf dissects her text, showing us how it is made.
I feel "the need for an escapade" before embarking on "a very serious, mystical, poetic work."
"The Waves" is the most unusual novel by the English writer Virginia Woolf in its artistic structure. Throughout her creative life, Woolf strove for a radical renewal of traditional narrative models, believing that the time of the "novel of environment and characters" with its typical socio-psychological conflicts, carefully written background of the action and unhurried development of intrigue had passed. The new "point of view" in literature meant the desire and ability to convey the life of the soul in its spontaneity and confusion, at the same time achieving the internal integrity of both the characters and the entire picture of the world, which is captured "without retouching", as the heroes see and perceive it.
There are six of them in the novel, and their lives are traced from childhood, when they were all neighbors in a house on the seashore, to old age. However, this reconstruction is made exclusively through the internal monologues of each of the characters, and the monologues are brought together by associative links, recurring metaphors, echoes of often the same events, but each time perceived in their own way. A continuous internal action arises, and six human destinies pass before the reader, and this arises not due to external authenticity, but through a polyphonic construction, when the most important goal is not so much the depiction of reality as the recreation of heterogeneous, capricious, often unpredictable reactions to what is happening of each of the characters. Like waves, these reactions collide, flow – most often barely noticeably – into one another, and the movement of time is indicated by pages or paragraphs in italics: they also outline the atmosphere in which the dramatic plot unfolds.
"...a poetic idea; the idea of a kind of constant flow; not only human thought flows, but everything flows – the night, the ship, and everything flows together, and the flow grows when bright butterflies fly in. A man and a woman are talking at the table. Or are they silent? It will be a love story."
"I love anything that flows, even the menstrual flow that carries away unfertilized eggs..." Miller says in his song to desire. Pockets of water and kidney stones; flows of hair, flows of saliva, flows of sperm, shit or urine.
"... I want to saturate, to saturate every atom. That is, to drive out all vanity, deadness, everything superfluous. To show the moment in all its fullness, no matter what it is filled with. Vanity and deadness come from this terrible realistic narrative: a sequential presentation of events from lunch to dinner. This is falsehood, conventionality. Why admit into literature everything that is not poetry? Isn't this why I am annoyed with novelists, because they do not bother themselves with selection? Poets usually select so that they leave almost nothing. I want to contain everything; but to saturate, to saturate. That is what I want to do.
"It is a masterpiece," said L., coming in to see me. "And the best of your books." But he also said that the first hundred pages were very difficult and it was not clear whether the average reader would be able to handle them."
She made it clear more than once that any attempt to scientifically analyze a work of art, to “measure” it, to break it down into its components is tantamount to killing it. The science of literature can rationally explain everything in a work except the most important thing, which is beyond the power of reason. After all, it is an organism. It has a spirit, light, some unspoken secret, which is precisely what makes it aesthetically significant. In most of her essays, Virginia Woolf tried to convey her sense of this secret, each time unique, and to make the reader involved in it. Her attention was always concentrated not on the artistic matter (as with the author of these lines), but on the elusive intonation of the artist she analyzed, on some external insignificant details that the reader might not notice.
The technique used by Virginia Woolf required extreme mental and physical exertion, which ultimately brought the writer, who was initially prone to depression, to the brink of insanity and became the cause of her suicide.
Language surrounds the entire sphere of literature in much the same way as the line where heaven and earth meet outlines the boundaries of the world familiar to man. Language is not so much a store of material as a horizon, that is, simultaneously a territory and its boundaries, in a word, the space of a linguistic fiefdom where one can feel confident. The writer literally draws nothing from language; rather, language for him is like a line, the crossing of which will perhaps reveal the supernatural properties of the word; language is a platform prepared in advance for action, a limitation and at the same time an opening of a range of possibilities. Language is not a sphere in which man assumes social obligations, it is only a reflex that knows no choice, the inseparable property of all people, and not only of writers; it does not participate in the ritual act of Literature; it is a social object by its nature, and not as a result of human choice. No writer can bring his freedom unhindered into this impenetrable language, for all of History, continuous and unitary like nature, rests on it. That is why language for the writer is only a human horizon, where in the distance the possibility of intimacy looms, defined in a completely negative way: to say that Camus and Queneau speak the same language is only to recall, through an operation of distinction, all the languages of the past or future that they do not speak: occupying an intermediate position between forms that have already disappeared and are still unknown, the language of the writer is not so much a ground as an extreme limit; it is a geometrical boundary beyond which he can say nothing without losing, like Orpheus turning around, the stable meaning of his speech act and the main sign of his belonging to society.
In reality, the same text can be read from both sides – the front and the back. However, in the annals of postmodernist perception of the world – the back is the essence. And this can easily be used for political purposes. Just as pessimism and optimism are two opposite readings of a single text, read either by a philosopher named So-Worse or by his colleague So-Better – in the same way, everything turns out to be good or bad depending on the approach and way of interpreting the book of life. For this, an elusive rearrangement is enough: strictly speaking, it does not reveal a secret writing hidden under the visible text, as in palimpsests, it does not reveal an unknown mysterious message written in sympathetic ink – but it completely changes the meaning of life.
Things must be doubled anyway, and contrary to the opinion of the nominalists, they are constantly doubled. Jean Parvulesco says that "everything that approaches its essence is doubled." Both stories are constructed as first-person narratives within the author's narrative. In both stories, the image of the superman is created in order to destroy it.
The meaning of words is not in them, but between them, and language is only a system of differences referred by all elements to each other. The main thing that allows us to consider an object ideal is its infinite repeatability, regardless of the context. This possibility is provided by writing, through which, in the absence of an empirical subject, we are able to reproduce the original meaning, repeat it an unlimited number of times, delving into it ever more deeply and impartially. Text is not an object, but a map. Information is a recipe . It is produced from other texts, in relation to other texts, which, in turn, are also relations. The meaning of a text lies not in this or that of its “interpretations”, but in the diagrammatic totality of its readings, in their multiple system. It extends to the entire world, because it is perceived, experienced as a system of differences in the sense of constant references to something else. It is not Shakespeare that is important, but my notes to him. Personality is a text that interprets itself all the time. And as Borges wittily noted, anyone who repeats a line of Shakespeare thereby becomes Shakespeare.
And it's not even about Erwin Rudolf Schr;dinger himself with his black cat in a black room. His importance and authority are beyond any suspicion. Nevertheless, creating a satisfactory verbal image of quantum paradoxicality was beyond even his powers.
Why? This question is partly answered by another creator of new physics, Richard Feynman. In his work “QED – The Strange Theory of Light and Matter,” he admits that we are doomed to “use ordinary words in unusual meanings.”
B. Bova writes: “evolution has not prepared us sufficiently to understand such things as quantum physics, the curvature of the space-time continuum, even the age of the Earth is difficult to comprehend, not to mention the age of the universe... Metaphors help, but they are nothing more than a crutch and in most cases they only emphasize the limitations of our imagination.”
Quantum biochemist A. Szent-Gy;rgyi goes further than Feynman and Bova. He almost gets to the heart of the matter, noting that “apparently, our current way of thinking is missing something very important, a whole dimension, without which it is impossible to find an approach to these problems.”
What is the matter? What "whole dimension" is Szent-Gy;rgyi talking about? We probably have an answer to this question. The point is that trying to describe quantum phenomena with words, terms, and images is like sculpting with... mercury.
It is impossible to label the most subtle phenomena with the words that are suitable for fairy tales about "Little Red Riding Hood", for poems or prescriptions.
Our language may not be bad. It provides, for better or worse, interpersonal communication and all sorts of nice nonsense, like literature. But it is not capable of more.
To explain another physical world with its help is as impossible as to give a technical characteristic of a Boeing using only the mooing and grunting of paranthropes, or to retell the Iliad using only two letters of the alphabet.
Those words that are relatively suitable for describing the macro world are completely meaningless in quantum reality and cease to mean anything at all. By adapting our extremely crude formulations to super-subtle and little-understood phenomena, we firmly block the meaning of these phenomena from ourselves and distort their essence.
Yes, we have no other words or images. Of course, we can grasp at the straw of complex terminology, but as experience shows, even that is not able to help out.
We must gather our courage and admit that human language is woefully poor and underdeveloped. We have no one to complain to – we have wasted three thousand years, entertaining ourselves with prostrations, poems and self-praise.
It is precisely the poverty and underdevelopment of language that will become the main problem of science in the near future, which will significantly limit its development.
The point is that it is language that sets the boundaries of understanding. That which has no verbal designation has no place in thinking.
(This is especially unfortunate given that quantum theories are likely to provide super-deep and super-precise interpretations of almost all physical phenomena except gravity.)
Of course, you can try. But you need to be prepared in advance for the fact that most of the meanings will perish and the result will be as absurd as "Schr;dinger's cat".
In physics, there is a theory by academician M.A. Markov, according to which "due to a large gravitational mass defect, the total mass of a closed Universe is zero." The mass defect is formed by gravitational interactions within the Universe, the forces of attraction and repulsion that expand the Universe from within and simultaneously reduce its total mass to zero for an outside observer. Our Universe, if it is closed, is, as a whole, nothing, and if it is semi-closed, it has the size of an elementary particle (and vice versa, the elementary particles known to us can represent entire universes within themselves, with clusters of galaxies, stars, black holes, etc.).
If we try to determine the semantic weight of language as a whole, it may turn out to be zero, since the entire system of signs is internally held together by the force of mutual negations, "differentiations". In language, according to F. de Saussure, there is nothing but differences, mutual repulsions – both in the phonetic and lexical systems. There are concepts of "give" and "take", "high" and "low", "big" and "small", "earth" and "sky" ... But all these verbal meanings, added to each other, subtract each other and in total lead to zero. As a result, language never says anything. It has nothing to say – only speech, composed of individual words of the language, speaks. But taken together, all speeches, "for" and "against", form zero.
It is said that there is no weightlessness, and death is like the weightlessness of life. But this is not important, but that the most scandalous, provocative poets-poets, when approaching the theme of love, sooner or later blurt out that the oldest (basic!) words and the newest (just discovered!), in the end, mean the same thing. Art consists in making the same thing look more attractive (repulsive) than in other authors. The language of birds consists of dialects.
One prisoner wrote letters to a correspondence student, and since he did not understand grammar and had nothing to write about, he usually – he himself said – would write more meaningless words and cross them out thickly, and almost the entire letter would be composed in this way – on crossing out alone. So she would look at these dark places in the light, and soak them in milk, and it all seemed to her – the most important thing was said there, and she kept asking him to reproduce those crossed out words again in the letter. They were the sweetest thing to her. From this we see how important the law of poetic understatement is.
It seems to me that if you read it point-blank, the ends do not meet, and there is neither a harmoniously unified structure of speech, nor a positive certainty of view... Of course, there are brilliant lines... (And what is surprising about this? The artist paints Jesus Christ and the dirt on the sole of a legionnaire with the same colors. I said that the words of lies and truth are the same, the same). But a more attentive reading will, I hope, not retain anything from this first impression.
The method of the so-called boustrophedon. The first line was read from left to right, the next from right to left, and so on. The scribe seemed to be copying the movement of a plow when plowing a field.
The dissimilarity to a poem begins with the absence of narrative coherence – this does not refer to what he called the logic of design. It refers to the logic of imagination. It is based on the confusion of thought that will become clear to us when we analyze the “phantasms” of scientific imagination, so similar, at first glance, to the products of aesthetic creativity. (More ambiguous, his detractors will say; but ambiguity is wealth.)
The artist deliberately leaves a certain free space in his work, leaving it to each person to fill it in his own way with his own imagination. But imagination is uncontrolled thought. It may be asked, is it good to have a strong imagination? It is good to be strong oneself. If a person has the power of the mind, then the imagination is strong, and the thought is strong, and the person himself is strong. But a strong imagination means a power emanating from the person, extending without his control. Therefore a strong imagination is not always promising; it is the power of thought that is desirable. But what is thought? Thought is self-directed and controlled imagination.
Let's put it this way: the sensations of an orgasm (an orgasm is incredible in that it's like a new one every time; and it's also like a dream, it doesn't get boring or stale) are ontologically different from the everydayness of other sensations in the rest of life much less than inspiration. That's it, and that's it... (Some women, when they experience an orgasm, hum like freight trains).
You can find out what he wanted to say with this using other examples.
From a purely physiological point of view, a man's orgasm is always accompanied by a momentary clouding of the mind. A kind of mental vacuum. A moment of truth, during which one can see God. Gurus who practice meditation could achieve this state without sex and often described nirvana as an endless spiritual orgasm.
Considering the delirious nature of the following... On the one hand, everyone knows from childhood that there will be no benefit from such ranting: forbidden means forbidden. But on the other hand, in the house of the hanged man there is silence about the rope. It is unethical to chat in vain. Everything is clear without talking. Everyone understands everything.
Now, having corrected him and at the same time thrown out of his head various nonsense that cluttered his attention and led his thoughts to what kind of person she was and what kind of relationships she had with people, he shows how chaotically his thoughts were circling.
Here, I think, we may be objected to by those of our readers who have not yet expressed disagreement with us. They may ask whether all the above considerations will not get bogged down in the swamp of mystifications – just as the concept of history in the philosophical jargon of not so ancient times was endowed with an independent material existence?
And believe it or not, dear reader, but it is precisely this kind of ranting, which is usually of little use, that brings us straight to the heart of our story. Although he says that the demon helped him both in his scientific work and in everyday circumstances, he tells us only meaningless phrases from him.
Chapter 5. The Hypertext Method
The surrounding reality gradually disappeared, losing its outlines, like a fading movie screen. It can be as scary as an eye patch, but if you flip through the page, you will see a bottomless sky where your naked gaze will drown.
I was left alone and plunged into the world hidden between the pages. I love this feeling more than anything in the world. It becomes quiet and cozy in my head, like a hot winter evening in a room. Slowly, very slowly, the outline of the entire story emerges... Carefully and slowly, like the water rising in an aquarium when you fill it through a thin rubber hose, trying not to scare the fish. If you haven't heard these words, you haven't lived... <...> Oblomov turned around like a bear in a den and sighed loudly enough for the whole room to hear. Then the old woman from her bed, very loudly: "Turn on the overhead light!!! What are you writing in the dark?!"
I am like a photographic film: I imprint everything on myself with some alien, foreign, meaningless precision. (It is written in a leafy manner, pathological memory). It is all true... I am not trying to touch you... no artistic effects... I have the feeling that I am collecting many scattered pages into one book. Empirical life is meaningless, just as scraps of pages torn out of a book are incoherent. We do not remember what actually happened. Memory is a set of chemical compounds. Any changes that the laws of chemistry allow can occur with them.
A blank sheet of paper, moments of idleness, an accidental typo, a reading error, a pen that is pleasant to hold in your hand , to squeak on paper . In many of the poems included in the book, I tried to convey the rituals into which we are drawn in one way or another every day. The ritual opens and closes our eyes at the same time as the text, but these beginnings and ends in a special way disappear into oblivion, are forgotten, depriving the entire course of consequences, which we take for independent events, of causality. The “flight of the story” has support in itself. Literary entertainment of this kind is explained by the desire to understand everything. But resolving a question is not the same as talking about it.
He wants to write the simplest book. It will be a book about a refined and strange boy suffering from a split personality, about a student who cannot reconcile himself with the surrounding reality. An anarchist by nature, he protests against everything and in the end concludes that there is nothing-nothing-nothing in the world except the wind. The author sympathizes with his hero. All good books are similar in one thing: when you finish reading it, it seems to you that all this happened to you, and it will remain with you forever.
But it is made of discarded thoughts and unfinished phrases... Thus, I am fighting against the discursive form of philosophizing, defending philosophy outside of discourse. The underlying goal of the book is the complete destruction of discourse through the stream of consciousness. Otherwise, what is it for? To catch "life by surprise", to grasp that deep and ghostly which cannot be expressed by speech, image or gesture – the elusive and ephemeral, lost at the threshold of consciousness. Yielding to it in significance, we surpass it in sensitivity. However, the philosopher "corrects": "The main feature inherent in a work of art should be considered the infinity of unconsciousness (the synthesis of nature and freedom)", this allows us to refuse to imitate nature and disdain "lawfulness".
You are as awkward as Hercules in the living room. You are afraid to move. Even the most cautious touch to the world is covered with an avalanche of thoughts and carried away by a flood of feelings. The naive happiness of an act, a simple, understandable gesture is inaccessible to you. You linger, endlessly savoring, tenaciously watching how the spectrum of sensations rises from sweet to bitter and again degrades to sweetness.
This is how it is: it is known that there are thoughts that seem not to be thought through, but rather influence the heart directly, but even the heart (not to mention the mind) does not give an account of this; and vague impulses result, and sometimes not so vague ones, which result in a novel, while it seems to you that you are describing in the novel not your own thoughts, but those of others...
"Remember me," says the dust. And there is a hint here that if we learn about ourselves from time, perhaps time in turn can learn something from us. What could that be? And there will be no more dust in the corners, and no dogs will break through the dust to ask themselves uncertainly if it will finally become clear... the grandeur of dawns from cautious beds, but even greater are the masters of regret... Thick dust, like the fat of emptiness, because no one has ever lived in it.
There is no rule behind the selection you will find here that is stricter than my taste, my pleasure, my sadness, or some other feeling whose strength I will probably find hard to justify. I quote these lines because I like them, because I recognize myself in them and, for that matter, any living organism that will be erased from the existing surface... There is more life in these absurdities, composed more than a thousand years ago, than in all the countless multitude of faceless people bustling about the station. Everyone is interested "about themselves", because no one really knows anything about themselves. Why is this?
This is an anthology of existences, a collection of countless short lives in a few lines, in a handful of words. Single lives, transformed by some unknown accident into strange poems – that's what I wanted to collect in a herbarium. That's what I dream about this sad day. Do you remember, you asked me where I got all this from? Well, here it is. I dreamed all this while I was collecting you all on these pages. My future, present and past, existing at one point, here and now, embodied in a hundred at first glance unrelated fragments and characters. Names and images, scenes from the past and predictive dreams, memories of what never happened. All of them united in me, my confusion, my ecstasy come from them... But how can I imagine the lives of other people, if even my own life barely fits into my mind?
As for the anthology itself, it is far from perfect (which is natural when the first attempt to collect and comprehend some phenomenon of Russian culture is undertaken in California), there is something to laugh at, but for that you have to pick it up, which Mr. Verbitsky certainly did not do.
What follows is only an attempt – right in the course of thought and text – to spontaneously clarify for myself that which has been sporadically but constantly worrying me for a long time, but was not understood, that is, formulated, that is, again, understood; therefore, it is more or less interesting only to those who have thought about the same thing – and it is addressed to them for agreement or disagreement. Frankly speaking, I have no idea whether anyone has already written about this and in the same vein – most likely, someone has: someone has already written about everything, and “in the same vein”; but still, if something torments a person, he is doomed to see this “something” and write about it in his own way. Ultimately, this book is only an attempt to understand what makes our life more joyful and worth living. It was not written for professional psychologists, but for everyone who wants to fill their life with meaning. That is, for you.
The repetitions that arise in the text seem to me to be the turns of thought, trying to feel and identify the object of this very thought from different sides ; therefore I have kept them. May the potential reader not complain about me.
It is not necessary to have a subtlety of mentality and sensitivity of the erogenous zones of the imagination to see. Sometimes a spark of doubt is enough to make it clear. Once seen, it is almost impossible to survive.
Ellipses do not reflect the essence. They give up, not appreciating the subtlety of what was said. The audience crawls under their chairs in horror, pretending to tie their shoelaces. But then they will tell their friends that they saw so-o-o-othing!!!
A paragraph that seems to have no right to exist: so far the plot is simple, isn't it? Nevertheless, they say that the text needs to be rethought, without "cheapening". Of course, the author can introduce a moment imagined by the imaginary consumer: sweaty sticky associations, which swarm... The prompters shrug their shoulders in embarrassment. They have nothing and nothing to prompt with. In essence, they are all the fruit of someone's sick imagination.
Anonymous: stop! Where is that notorious dialogue between the author and himself?! After all, everything is written for the sake of this dialogue! After all, this is hypertext, it cannot change like that! I protest! Where is the solo of the resuscitation machine, where is this whole bunch of prompters, where is the editor, the broken typewriter? Note: the lines are not marked. The actors and the director should determine who says what themselves, based on the logic of what is happening.
Speaking honestly and roughly – it is with language that I want to unlock the prison in which life languishes – that is what I am talking about. But do not confuse – not with the language that the Russian German defined as a fleshy projectile in the mouth (the trick of science is to clarify the initial conditions in time: in whose mouth?). Any language is fascist, since it forces one to speak. For example, the Russian linguist-emigrant A.V. Isachenko once wrote a work dedicated to what the Russian language would be like if Novgorod, and not Moscow, had won the political struggle between Moscow and Novgorod. Here we can also recall the theophany of the earth (which will lead to the idea of Moscow as the “third Rome” – after Constantinople... and also, as some commentators claim, to the Third International). Indirect speech is in fact the most direct.
This is a theory according to which reality does not determine the language in which it is spoken, but rather, our language each time divides reality in a new way. Reality is mediated by language.
This view was first expressed in general terms by Sapir: “People live not only in the objective world of things and not only in the world of social activity, as is commonly believed; they are largely influenced by the particular language which is the medium of communication for a given society.
It would be a mistake to suppose that we can fully comprehend reality without the aid of language, or that language is a secondary means of resolving certain particular problems of communication and thought. In fact, the "real world" is largely unconsciously constructed on the basis of the linguistic norms of a given group... We see, hear, and perceive certain phenomena in one way or another mainly because the linguistic norms of our society presuppose a given form of expression.
Whorf was a passionate admirer of the culture and languages of the American Indians. Comparing their languages with the average standard European languages, he formulated the basic provisions of the hypothesis of linguistic relativity. The form, culture, customs, ethical and religious ideas reflected in the language of the American Indians were extremely unique and differed sharply from everything that scientists had encountered in these areas of culture before becoming acquainted with them. This circumstance suggested the idea of a direct connection between the forms of language, culture and thought.
I would like to go to those lands where in the shadow of existence life is dramatic and interesting, where texts are terrible and beautiful in their animal pressure – I urge even the squeamish to accept their beauty, who are disgusted by lemmings walking in a solid moving carpet – realize the grandeur of their goal – the ocean in which they will perish; or cockroaches migrating from a cold house to a warm bathhouse right on the snow – the red road connects warmth and cold, antennae bristle like French bayonets, eggs stick out of the oviducts of meanings and fall out – all this is one organism and it is absolutely rational in its madness. There is nothing sweeter than to let two streams meet, so that there is battle and devouring, a gigantic bloody palindrome emptying before the eyes of the astonished creator, annihilation of theses and antitheses, and finally, a white desert strewn with tendrils and legs, and the sun sets, blushing with satisfaction. But you want to harm me, you want something completely different – so that, bending over the table, I wince and scratch with a pen, inhaling fumes poisoned by logic, so that at the end of the page, looking at what I have done, I vomit right onto the paper – is that what you want? Didn't I populate these pages for you – until recently quadrangular white deserts. Without me, would all those whom I lead along the narrow paths of the lines have seen you?
The author takes on the role of a collector of biographies, passions, obsessions and fears, laying them out in a fascinating mosaic. Characters who are undoubtedly despicable, or a mixture of gloomy stubbornness and treachery of those lives whose fury we feel under the smooth, stone-like words. When I happen to meet these insignificant lives, turned to dust in those very few phrases that crushed them. For the fleetingness of the narrative and the density of the events that are discussed in these texts...
Plot? The plot is when everything expires. And with us everything flows and flows.
More tender and soft – but assertively enough; so that particularly sensitive readers (if they even got to these lines) shuddered with delight flashing in their eyes, with a barely audible cry.
Throughout the entire further and longest path there will be many inhalations and exhalations, entrances and exits, introductions and deductions – and so on until the very end of the text. Let him (the reader) consider, however, that such a long book is both longer to read and more difficult to buy.
I don't understand your complaints. There are all the conditions for forgetting, and not looking for a way out where we found it – and at the moment when, it seemed, it was walled up. To those who conduct their exhausting observation of this animal, studying its habits and reactions to external stimuli, tracking the Brownian movements of its thought (and it, if you have noticed, is tearing itself away from hands like a sullen cat, scratching these very hands – but I assure you that, having walked enough, it will return and ask to go itself), – I want to tell them the following.
When I start writing, I don’t aim to meet myself and the eternal child in me, or to find my true essence with all its shadow sides and other such nonsense – I want to change, to leave behind the old me, the old, the outdated, the uninteresting, I want to grow together with the book. So why do we write? To wall ourselves up or to free ourselves? To disappear or to emerge? To take possession of the earth or to wash it away and move on, feeling for the branching, elusive affinity?
Hypertext is a hyperspace for various transformations. I do not change, I change the space around me. The unyielding matter resists, clings to the bars of its cage, putting forward various emissaries to fight me: evil enemies, debilitating illnesses, betrayals and other life circumstances. But then, submitting to violence, it lets me into its very core with a quiet howl and wearily envelops itself, taking the form of my soul.
Let's try to clarify the unique choreography of these leaps of thought. For example, you don't write, you just insert words (any) into a form that is given, excuse me, from above.
If there is a connection between physiological rhythm and the writer's manner, then there is even more so between his time-conditioned world and his style. Why would a classicist writer, who lived in a linear and limited time, beyond which he never went, write in a jerky and disharmonious style? Classical writing was undoubtedly class writing. He handled words with care, lived in them constantly. And these words reflected for him the eternal present, a certain time of perfection, which was his time. But a modern writer, not rooted in time, has to love a convulsive, epileptic style.
Thoughts do not come into the head from nowhere: they come into the head from a cultural background, and no matter how far a person goes beyond this background, he could never develop thinking at all. The isolated cases of “Mowglis” – people raised by wild animals – show that the human brain, left without culture, does not itself generate linguistic thinking. In short, individual thoughts exist only against a vast background of cultural practices, languages, meanings, and contexts, without which it would be virtually impossible for a person to formulate a single individual thought. But culture itself is not incorporeal, floating in an idealistic space between heaven and earth. It has material components, just as individual thoughts have material brain components. All cultural events also have social correlates.
After all, it still needs to be proven that Adam and Eve were people, not animals. If they were people, they would not have had instinct. And without instinct, they would not have been able to survive. Adam and Eve, expelled from paradise, would have simply drowned in the first lake. Because they did not know how to swim. After all, swimming is an art that must be learned. And there was no one to teach them. The first people. To satisfy their hunger, they would certainly have eaten something nasty. They would have been poisoned and died. But they were not poisoned. And they did not drown. So, they had instinct. And they were animals.
If Adam and Eve were animals, then why didn't we inherit their instincts? That means we lost them at some point. For example, a child. Why does he scream when he is born? After all, the scream reveals his presence. And that is dangerous. Enemies are all around. One must be born quietly. Unnoticed. Without noise. Man appeared in the world unnoticed. Like an animal. Why do children scream when they are born now? Kant does not accept references to physiology. References to the structure of the lungs, to air, and so on – all this is for the gullible.
Culture is collective by its very nature, and each cultural era is a continuous process of interaction of creative efforts of its great and small figures, a process of migration of ideas, poetic themes and images, borrowings and rethinkings, assimilation and rejection. There are bearers of culture, and there are carriers.
The existence of a canonical corpus of texts – i.e. Eliot’s principle of “objective correlative”, according to which “existing monuments of art stand in relation to one another in a certain ideal order, which is modified by the appearance of a new <...> work” – places the writer in a situation that is not only ambiguous, but almost hopeless. One can develop one’s erudition to certain limits, which will allow one not only to achieve a certain sophistication in combinatorics, but also to forget for a while about the very existence of the canon. But high complexity (like everything else in the world – unheard-of simplicity, beautiful clarity and a beautiful era) sooner or later comes to an end. Simply because the number of units of meaning can be extremely large, but not limitless. The number of viable combinations, therefore, is even smaller. Sooner or later, all this turns into incurable literary masturbation, that is, boredom. A nasty, anecdotal question starts scratching in your head: "Why?" The master of the glass bead game suddenly realizes himself in the position of a man juggling reinforced concrete blocks. You can do everything, but you can't say everything. Here we read: "Passerby. Sooner or later – you yourself understand... So – you yourself understand..."
I want to say that they chose phrases from approximately the same cultural layer, linguistic pool, known or expected by them almost equally, according to accumulated experience. The body of reading is reflected in the maneuverability of the internal search tension, as well as in the formation of the reader's appearance, because all our facial muscles, of which there are about thirty, imperceptibly transmit emotional reactions from the encounter with the text.
Shakespeares, Tolstoys, Stendhals, as well as countless "little princes", Spartans and little red riding hoods were boiled and boiled in Tolkien's literary "cauldron". In essence, everything you need to know about homo culture is very compactly placed in the epic about stupid gnomes.
Understood in a metaphorical or generalized sense of the word, in the postmodern era, palimpsest has gradually become a synonym for culture in general. In the most general sense, late literature, music, painting, and even the architecture of civilization consists of gradually accumulating time layers, old artifacts are not erased, literally everything can be used, new achievements very quickly turn into tradition, and the process of creation occurs in parallel and simultaneously with the process of destruction. As if summing up two dozen centuries of cultural development in the present time, they can be expressed extremely briefly, in the words of the writer: “We all write from someone else’s manuscript, and everything we print is a palimpsest.”
Fashion is never contemporary. It plays on the repetition of once found and then dead forms, preserving them as signs in some timeless reserve. From year to year, fashion fabricates the “already past” with the greatest combinatorial freedom. Fashion always uses the “retro” style, but always at the cost of canceling the past as such: forms die and are resurrected as ghosts. This is its specific relevance – not a demonstrative reference to the present, the current time or event. Fashion is a total and instant reutilization of the past. It always assumes the fading of forms, which are abstracted and become timeless effective signs. And these signs, due to some curvature of time, can reappear in the present, infecting it with their untimeliness, the charms of a ghostly return. Fashion is not the length of a skirt.
Barthes' follower L. Jenny notes: "The property of intertextuality is the introduction of a new way of reading that explodes the linearity of the text. Each intertextual reference is a place of alternative: either to continue reading, seeing in it only a fragment, no different from the others, or to return to the source text, resorting to a kind of intellectual anamnesis in which the intertextual reference appears as a displaced element."
First, to imitate something is to refer to it, willy-nilly. Imitation in the broad sense of the word is the basis of all learning, that is, of behavior, communication, and knowledge. The poetics of intertextuality can be built on the most varied quotations: “one can play with any form from which life has departed.” The notion that art somehow imitates life is a cornerstone of Western aesthetics, but this is not the imitation that is at issue here. Pastiche is always an imitation of an imitation. Perhaps, if we think this way, the regress is infinite, and we never reach the point at which imitation is an imitation of life – it is always, inevitably, an imitation of art. This dizzying prospect can be somewhat alleviated by using a formulation that assumes that there is such a thing as reality, something beyond imitation, but recognizes that it is never expressed, and perhaps not even grasped in its immediacy, except through the forms of imitation that we have at our disposal to know it.
The dramaturgy is arbitrary, the events do not blackmail each other with mutual necessity. It simulates storytelling. We will say – poetry, but unlike a poem, which can be read again on the page, the time of the show is irreversible, and there is no imperative forcing us to keep in mind the necessary connection between the subsequent and the previous.
It is executed in the manner of Morse code. The lines are telegraphically dried out. In the style of a logbook, everything is scrupulously recorded as a diagnosis ( many subtle nuances are hidden). Here, every word is experienced deeply, intimately; there are words that are simply bleeding. The pulse of life in the finest string of the word – and also with the most ordinary, wildly old-fashioned touchingness, right up to tears. Most others have one thing. Artistic contrasts, their purely linguistic oversaturation, perceived as emotional oversaturation, by the "thickness" of the writing, by the density of the imagery, by the dynamics of the phrase... The poet is extremely material. Meanwhile, he requires a much deeper, and I would even say, meditative reading, for he is a writer endowed with an exceptionally deep existential experience, which, unlike the external literary devices he uses, will never become the property of the majority and will never lose its novelty. He is a writer of the "posthuman" era, that is, of the posthumanist era, in many ways a writer of the future, at least of the "future in the past".
His reader is a socially inscribed type, who has achieved leisure in life to read intricate texts that question rational skills and the blissful automatism that protects a busy person in a world of complex technologies. Among such imaginary readers there are also skeptical intellectuals with experience of rejecting the generally accepted, for whom the cathartic is outside the language of communication, in the inexpressible. Animals that have undergone the sacrament of domestication also become signs of the inexpressible, and those who know how to watch them forget about logic and rely on intuition and the subconscious. Cats walk the border of knowledge and magic, and I have often come across the opinion that bibliophiles, archivists and sorcerers tend to be ailurophiles (cat lovers).
It is no coincidence that the idea of an internally balanced, well-balanced personality did not originate in a corporate environment or in a society of specialists, but was the fruit of deeply personal friendly ties between the aristocracy of the 18th and 19th centuries and the writers of that era.
- Yes, if you look, you can probably find some mistakes... – It's an artistic device. It's the one that can be used to convey the state in which the heroine, without explaining her own feelings... – What? To hell with them and their devices! I'm a simple person and I want everything to be clear. I don't need their complexity, okay? – There are several ways to construct artistic reality, and here we have just...
Building a fantasy-compressed non-documentary travel diary as a pretext for play, reflection, exploration of morals and self-analysis, he sails on the waves of the ocean, skirting or, not without adventures, visiting islands of genuine happiness... great in... naked women... of diminished genius... sent to...
There are those who do not rape every line with the mania of civilization or an ideal, universal, political, existential, I don’t know what else. In general, if people are vile, that’s what we deserve. We should have paid more attention to them. The educator Fonvizin laughed at Mitrofanushka, who did not want to study, but wanted to get married. We have moved away from narrow rationalism, educational arrogance, hypertrophy of cognitive activity, the repressiveness of European culture in general and the dictate of reason in particular. We have also moved away from a dismissive attitude towards vulgarity. We can evaluate Mitrofanushka’s point of view as an alternative life project.
But then I convinced myself that it was a lie. I asked myself a lot of questions "why" and "why" (a favorite method of metaphysical disassembly). And I know that it is meaningless (and meaningful, as you can easily guess, is only that which leads to non-Death and/or Meaning). I decided that since it can be destroyed, then it means that it is possible to live without it, and since it is possible to live without it, then it is honest to live without it. And it is incredible, but I destroyed inspiration in myself. Living from inspiration to inspiration is easy and simple. Having destroyed it, I received much more boredom in life, but became closer to what it is. Death requires as much education as life.
The problems of reception of artistic texts and thanatological motifs in them were considered on the basis of the ideas of representatives of receptive aesthetics – V. Iser, H. Jauss, and others.
There are no clear answers, only metaphors, to which, naturally, it is risky to ask a question, hoping for a definite response. Metaphor lives outside of such logical operations.
Cut and thrown like a dice, combined and recombined, our body is a base of images. It desperately needs images to know itself, to measure itself, to trust itself, to stimulate attention, to feed memory channels, to map the beautiful, to recognize cracks in gravity, to mark age and to light up the gaze... The image is a genetic machine, recombining, gluing, mixing, connecting.
So, you can steal, and where there is a kidnapping, there is a movie. For example, the hero opens the refrigerator, and the cameraman is already freezing there and is filming the face from the point of view of the products. A woman gets out of a car, but first we see her shoes.
In erotic and pornographic films, patent leather pumps are usually the only thing that is not removed. This means that shoes are a symbolic double of a woman, an inalienable element of her body. At the same time, the function of shoes is not limited to orthopedic, strengthening, as in the case of the same men's shoes, useful when they do not pinch, comfortable for confident walking, fast running, kicks and punches. In advertising narratives, shoes, for example, are presented as a means of making legs slimmer, a figure more spectacular, the whole image more irresistible, but this is not the most important thing. A woman's shoe is rather a springboard that lifts above the soil of everyday life, a launch pad for a new status and self-awareness.
In fact, experienced fashion designers and designers say the same thing, one of whom, Michelle Perry, interprets the mystery of women's shoes this way: "It's all very simple. The shape of the shoe last is decisive, and not even the height of the heel. The secret is in the bend of the shoe last, and with it the foot. The foot controls the silhouette of a woman almost like a lever. As soon as the foot goes from a flat, normal state to a tilted state, the center of gravity shifts – the calf muscles tense up, the buttocks are pulled in and rounded, the back straightens out of the usual hunched hook, the chest straightens and bends forward, the position of the head changes, and most importantly – the gait. This is where sexuality lies."
It turned out that somewhere in my waiting field there were vacant heroes who were just waiting for a reason to interact and unite in a simple plot. Dreams, private life and the epic of fact are just different voices preceding the choice of a hero. And the forces for the decision are collected bit by bit. ... The first thing she did was to single out a positive hero (although, if you think about it, the concept of a "negative hero" is as meaningless as the concept of a "positive minus").
Let's say we go to the cinema and watch a film with Belmondo. For an hour and a half, while the film lasts, we seem to have forgotten ourselves, we live the life of Belmondo's hero, we feel lucky, we are filled with a sense of humor, we succeed in everything, etc. And this kind of training does not go in vain. When we leave the cinema, our behavior changes, at least a little, at least for a short time. This is the educational function of art.
Why did I like the movie? If imagination is a side effect of evolution, the answer is simple: because I like funny things, and the movie was funny. I laughed a lot, and laughter makes you feel good. Also, like everyone else, I am curious and hungry for gossip, and a movie like this gives me a glimpse into someone else's extreme life.
Sandel argues that the subject cannot be described independently of the specific life goals and value orientations that have a constitutive effect on it. It is always "situated," and in the most radical way, and therefore the problem is not the subject's distance from goals, desires, and inclinations, but its burden with these goals, desires, and inclinations. Consequently, it is necessary to understand the limits of the self, to distinguish the subject from the situation, and thereby to shape its identity.
In "Hidden Magic," by the way, it says: "Why are we troubled by Don Quixote becoming a reader of Don Quixote, and Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet? I think I have found the reason: such shifts suggest to us that if fictional characters can be readers or spectators, then we, in relation to them as readers and spectators, are perhaps fictional too."
When his mother first began to read him a story, he interrupted her with the question: "Who is speaking?" And indeed, readers filled everything. More precisely, a certain Reader and a certain Readeress. What was read and what was experienced became so intertwined that it was no longer possible to separate one from the other.
One should not forget about the assertiveness of visual perception, which senses sexism even in margarine advertising.
For example, the idea, common among critics, that the details of a work should be similar to the details of someone's life, the soul of a character to the soul of the author, etc. is a very definite ideology. For example, psychoanalysis imagines the relationship between a work and an author in the exact opposite way, namely as mutual negation.
It is sometimes said that the artist creates only half of the work, the other half is created by the viewer, interpreting the work. There is much that is appealing in such a judgment – first of all, the idea of creativity as a dialogue. However, the next question is: what is a dialogue – the composition of two fragments into a single whole or the clash of complete judgments?
And then, your characters lack the convexity of... How can I put it? Life. They are omnipresent mannequins. We know nothing about them and you do not encourage us to find out anything about them. What is needed is someone who would like to take a walk, stroll along quiet green alleys, have a good chat... If this means that we must talk to ourselves, so much the better: not for us, but perhaps for literature. This also applies to monologues, for a monologue is an argument with oneself; take, for example, "To be or not to be..." In the end, it is clearly not a desire for dialogue, but just the opposite, if only because the two voices themselves mean little. Merging, they set in motion something that, for lack of a better word, can simply be called "life." That is why everything ends with a dash and not a period.
He captivated me with his base imagination. His heroes were all in bowler hats and talked about selling their pianos for ten. In his landscapes a tram screeched; a factory smoked poisonously. He was haunted by godforsaken towns, by back streets where drunk women lie naked on mats on Christmas Day. His words fell from the loophole onto the water and churned it up like a fountain. He found one word, one and only one – for the moon.
"Who are we, who is each of us, if not a combination of experience, information, reading and fiction? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, a register of objects, a collection of games that are continually being mixed and arranged in arbitrary combinations."
Is every word spoken today your own? And vice versa – what if there are already so many absolutely precise verbal carriers-expressors of the mind’s cold observations and the heart’s sorrowful notes in brilliantly precise verbal formulas that they are enough for all possible states of mind and heart, that with a combination of other people’s words much more accurately than with your own home-grown word, you can and should express your most personal feeling or thought? These are no longer other people’s words, this is already terminology that can and should be used, especially since artistic terminology, mobile and pliable, allows you to play with it as you like. Can this be? And why not. Of course it can. What if your own soul is inexhaustible, and your own words are redundant? If we are in a blockade of other people’s words, which express our soul much better than our own? What if a person who has come close to himself has seen that all his feelings have already been described, his thoughts have been spoken, and that it is best to express himself by wielding someone else's, but combining it in his own way? As in chess – well, no, there is no opening except someone else's openings, no defense except the Philidor Defense or the Old Indian Defense. And his own is only someone else's defense played in his own way, someone else's interpreted in his own way. And there is nothing new under the sun.
My father was thoughtful and domineering, modest and decisive, sober and distrustful, lonely and arrogant, mysterious. He loved to play chess. Secrecy, I am now sure, was inherent in his nature, allowed him to think freely and live in his own way.
He had another peculiarity, unusual for a man who was not considered a so-called intellectual. My father was strangely careful, almost superstitious, about words, even colloquial, everyday ones. He himself carefully chose his words, weighed each one, as if he were thinking over a chess move, and demanded the same from us. Sometimes a careless word (the most ordinary, generally accepted) suddenly sent my father into a cold, frightening rage (it was impossible to predict which one and why); it seemed as if an unhealed wound had been touched in his soul and he was raging from the burning pain. A clot of secrets, an echo of a distant storm. A trace left by past shocks, defying interpretation. My father interrupted our thoughtless chatter: “Don’t chatter in vain! You won’t even notice how you’ll lose yourself.”
The question arises: why do we need this? The artist calmly explains: "For knowledge. You know your birthday, your house number, your bank account number. How could you not know?" Knowledge, like money, "does not smell." Logic is invincible, but also truly inexpressible, it contains its own internal law, which the creator and artist rely on. And where there is knowledge, there is control and power.
Barthes, who famously considered himself a leftist, spoke out against power as such – not political power, but power that “nests in the most subtle mechanisms of social exchange,” and whose obligatory expression is language. “Language is a means of classification, and classification is a means of suppression.” Language, Barthes writes, is a fascist, for it commands us to speak in one way and not another. The solution? “To cheat with language, to fool language.” That is literature.
"Bring me five red bricks!" Language is not needed for this. As the early Wittgenstein said: "Language disguises thoughts. And in such a way that from the external form of this clothing one cannot conclude about the form of the disguised thought, for the external form of clothing is not formed at all in order to reveal the form of the body."
But why guess and multiply entities beyond what is necessary? You can't jump higher than yourself. Put yourself on a strong logical axis – at least for a short time, lean with all your might on the lever – and, like an ancient slave, turn the millstones of syllogisms... Words get tired and wear out, just as people get tired and wear out. If necessary, a replacement may be necessary.
The fact is that the lifespan of any word in any language is limited – sooner or later the word will have to disappear, giving way to another (which is, in principle, no better or worse than its predecessor). It happens that this new word is taken from another language – usually the language of a neighboring people or simply a widely spoken (in that era) language; such words are called borrowings.
“Life defiles,” Henri de Regnier noted; no, life wears out first of all: of course, there are people who manage to preserve in themselves an undefiled kernel, a kernel of being; but what is this miserable residue compared to the wear and tear of the body.
People have few words to understand each other. They have no forms to express feelings. The words they have are too worn out and pale. They say little. They do not draw anything. Ah, it is a great misfortune that feelings develop first and then language. We are left behind by language with our feelings, we cannot express ourselves, and that is why no one understands anyone else. We need new words, many words; we should always have a few extra words in reserve, because feelings are often fleeting, momentary, and we have nothing to formulate them with. Ah, in many ways we are still beggars, and that is why we so often rob each other. You know that words, any words, are only a bad translation from the original. Everything happens in a language that does not exist.
— I think it’s difficult to make a novel out of this.
- Why?
— A novel is a movement of feelings, speaking in the most general terms. And here there is none. There is only one thought, not very new, as you know, and devoid of emotional coloring, without which a novel can seem unconvincing.
The technique is naive, the composition is erroneous and banal, the decadent aesthetics of the last century with a certain intemperance of language, excused, however, perhaps, by youth.
I don't like to explain obvious things at length – it irritates me and disrupts my train of thought. I don't consider myself obliged to read newspapers, and I barely have time to look around at what is happening around me. How nice it is to live somewhere in Paris or London – they say that up to sixty newspapers a day are published there... These cities are beautiful, the clocks go everywhere. I could spend my whole life walking around a new city every day. Whereas we are "neither an Eastern nor a Western people", but simply nonsense – nonsense with art.
I don’t feel able to read pretentious and newspaper-topical, where the author and characters speak in a way that no one speaks or thinks in life – some kind of ragged and at the same time pompous, compound with ellipses and commas, I can’t, and supposedly in the spirit of the times, and all with an eye on someone else’s perception, no strength, and always a woman, and always rats, demoralizing syllogisms, poison, you’d think Greene didn’t exist, what are you trying to achieve, throw everything in a heap, there’s an abyss of words in the noosphere to eavesdrop on, a superlanguage of simulacra, reducing art texts to protocols, as opposed to university pedantry, a place for loafers (shaking their foreheads), experiencing Gadamer’s torment of a lack of language – isn’t the same torment experienced by an interpreter of painting and poetry, worldview and faith? Nothing more than an illogical pile of logically connected elements. Strindberg himself spoke of his play as an attempt to imitate fragmentary, but necessarily logically connected dreams. Chewing gum for the mind, an algorithm that has no goal-setting and consciousness, a neural network, a GPT chat brought up on Russian classics. There are so many of these arguments, and they are all so interesting, smart and provocative, that the reader simply drowns in them. Language deeply irrationalizes thinking.
In my case, the garbage of one thousand hours of life as a concept, ugh, terrible eloquence, a book full of sentimental snot and verbose explanations. Comparisons are inorganic, moves are stilted, no strength, I can start with any word, I can do it for kilometers. Don't be shy. There is no need to be shy about us – we can do it too. In general, it is clear that the matter is dark.
I tried to read it. What a style. The simplest things are spoken about in such a vague style, with such dizzying pretentiousness and mannerisms, that it seems that a little more and you will be sick. The author himself is both clever and subtle, and by no means empty, but at the same time he evokes unspeakable disgust. Their [texts'] shortcoming is that they cannot be adapted to improving and changing people's lives in the present (the book is made "of discarded thoughts and unfinished phrases"). But it is even sadder to destroy something without offering anything in return. A product of dead-end psychology.
Chapter 6. The Postmodern Method
The concept takes into account the primitive meaning of life, changing the usual reality. It can be assumed that the conflict, neglecting details, categorically fills the ontological intellect. Philosophy decomposes the principle of perception into elements. Contemplation facilitates postmodernism. Love is the world, based on the accepted opinion. Modern criticism is frank, and convergence transposes the tragic class of equivalence.
Avoiding, however, complicated interpretations, I am forced to begin with the assertion that in the text presented to our judgment by a young (youthful, mature, elderly, senile, decrepit) prose writer (poet, playwright, essayist, feuilletonist, parodist) a pseudo-form-generating deconstruction of the universe is successfully carried out, with all its explosiveness trying to tame the elements of discourse, moreover, touching tangentially the infrastructure of mentality, forcing the blood vessels of meanings to ooze lymph. Which, simply put, means an existential condensation that gives rise to the emanation of a future, possibly dehumanized, but inevitable reconstruction of the backbone of categories, albeit already marked by the erosion of relativism. However, the fact that the author neglects the obligatory ingredients of the semi-pseudo-deconstructed quasi-reality sometimes inclines him (her) to the intention of pedaling the perceptual locus transcendental to the visible to the detriment of archetypal invariants. As a result, the diachronic alogism vibrating in the axils of the text turns out to be suspended between the gradually degenerating episteme flickering in its (of course, the text's) abysses and the insufficiently articulated existence, regressing to the prologism due to its inferiority. This inevitably intuitive reverberation cannot but lead to the multiplication of integral simulacra. Nevertheless, let us give credit to the author that he (she) unwaveringly remains in the mental space of his (her) ambivalent tolerance, which confirms his (her) text as an unlikely variant of irrational Cartesianism. The spontaneous modulation of the connotative subtext contaminates the pseudo-empirical asystemicity with overtones of, I dare say, a semiotic imperative. And yet I am forced to state that the infernal nature of the author’s charismatic superego is non-congruent with the polyvalence of “ontological counterpoints.”
On the individuation of the Other in the participation of the Multifaceted Self during the reduction of dialogue (preliminary explication). The innovativeness of the simulacrum to noesis and noema is manifested in its isomorphism to the paradigm of cognitive resonance of intelligible discourse in the dialogue-educational dilemma of the alternative subject-object transcendental horizon of the systemic analysis of the linguistic ingredients of the complex construct of the other pseudo-identity of bisexual autism of the information and communication slogan of an Internet site programmed for the anomie of the principle of anthropicity, manifested in the labyrinth of the bifurcation alogism of the sociomatrix of surplus regression, meditating in the field of free associations of postmodernism through the condensation of the symbolic interactionism of synergetics, undertaken both in the maieutics of social distancing of Richard Rorty's ironic solidarity, with one exclusive explication of holism, and in the deviant revelation of the narcissistic thought activity of Georges Bataille, aimed at the annihilation of the semiotic fallibilism of the Jungian archetype of Jacques Derrida's grammatological dialogue, reinforced by the anti-Lacanian gene-cultural evolution of gender, hermetically localized (but not in the vital impulse of Duhem-Quine's thesis, but in the ontic participation of the solipsistic problematization of providentialism, falsified by the hypostatization of the dispositif of the Other in Mamardashvili's phonocentric charisma) by the narrative reductionism of Reicho-Skinner's connotation of the pluralism of the absurd, expressed in the concept of cultural lag and as a result of the bad infinity of the causal logistics of Ralph Dahrendorf's intersubjectivity, excluding the verifiability of Nothingness due to the mediation of introverted incest in its existential simultaneity, disposed by technophobia to the representative fictions.
Russian regionalists are so funny. They think that if the hypercentrism of Moscow is turned into the polycentrism of regional principates, then happiness will come and lilies will bloom. And for some reason they think that Switzerland has polycentrism. I inform you: Switzerland does not have centrism as such, the whole country is a network of subsidiary communes, each of which has full power. Moving from commune to commune is practically moving to a new country, which resets, for example, all the terms of calculating the time for obtaining a permanent residence permit and citizenship. At the same time, the sovereignty of any level of a communal institution is partial. Even a canton with its own legal system has partial subsidiary sovereignty. But most likely, not a single authority in Switzerland has full sovereignty in the Hobbesian sense. Of course, all-Swiss referendums are endowed with signs of full sovereignty, but the boundaries of interpretation of their decisions are so flexible at all levels that it is extremely difficult to talk about some kind of sovereign decision-making center. Even the state of exception during the war was interpreted differently in different cantons. The addition of the word network to the centralized system of thought changes little in the essence of the approach to the distribution of power. Switzerland is, above all, a culture of dialogue, a calm and unhurried search for a collective solution to any problem. Sometimes it seems that decisions are made unbearably slowly. But in emergency situations – for example, a jam in the transport system – decisions in Switzerland are made many times faster than in neighboring France and Germany. That is, the system of collective subsidiary search for solutions is more effective here than any system of centralized decision-making. By the way, this is the key meaning of the word bourgeoisie: the bourgeoisie is the totality of inhabitants of a place (a burg in a very broad sense), empowered to make collective decisions about their life activity. In such a world there is no chora or contado. This is a different logic. In this logic, power has no subject. This is simply a non-subjective type of political thought. It is closer to the type of logic described by Levinas and Marion. But, of course, Foucault's governamentality with his paresis as a governamentality of oneself works in the same system of thought, the subject of late Foucault is the subject of attribution, and not the subject of hanging predicates. Dig's geophilosophy, developing the thesis of rhizomaticity, probably tries to assemble philosophy itself, proceeding from such a local assembly of elements – apparently, in polemics with the thesis of the Socratic fall of philosophy into the power of the idea, as Heidegger believes, calling back to pre-Socratic sophos. one way or another, to think outside the naturalness of the stat as a machine of sovereignty, a mechanical god, is not easy, I do not argue. but otherwise the most anarchist essence of regionalism – a society without a state and against the state-stat – cannot be raised. and Switzerland demonstrates that the model of a society against the stat is quite workable. however, the American model is now proving the same, clearly demonstrating to us how little it depends on presidential power. regional governmentality is not a question of multiple centers. it is still an urban model, through the opposition of the city and the chora-contado. the region itself as a unit of territorial spacialization is a deeply reactionary construction of the imperial view of territory. here it is worth thinking about a completely different type of assembly of territorializations – from the bottom up, from the communes and the commonwealth. this is exactly how the anarchists posed the question
The factorial is interpreted as the number of permutations (orderings) without repetition of a set of elements. The factorial is an extremely fast-growing function. It grows faster than any exponential function or any power function, and faster than any sum of products of these functions. I'm sure this is much larger than reality allows, but so be it.
This is perhaps the only drawback. Everything else is great. Recommended for a wide readership.
Poor command of language – and a random, uncontrolled impulse – is what brings an element of freshness to a text (understood broadly). This phenomenon is completely alien and even hostile to professionalism. It is a typical case of unclear thinking, leading to a confusion of everything with everything. That “broadly understood freshness” that equates a graphomaniac with a good writer pertains to the sphere of perception. For any text there will be a reader who will consider this text a world masterpiece. This approach leads not even to the receptive aesthetics of Jauss, but straight to the sociology of reading. And there is nothing terrible in this, if you do not absolutize it. And in order not to absolutize – you need to understand that with a certain view of things, the quality of the text is generally indifferent: a suitably prepared and tuned reader will get a thrill from any text, “reading” into it an arbitrary set of interpretations and associations. This is very good, but in a conversation about literature this option has to be left out (the alternative is to state “the end of literature,” or, in fact, “the end of art,” and get on with other things, leaving the dead to bury their dead; Ms. Friedman does not do this, preferring invectives).
Hope must be sought elsewhere: in the ability to structure the mad flow of information. I myself have always hated this mediocre, mannered pseudo-poet, clumsily imitating Joyce, but lacking even the drive that sometimes allows the crazy Irishman to break through verbal blockages. Postmodernism conjures, like Kashpirovsky, calling this flow upon our heads, conjuring it to sweep away everything in its path. These are not suicidal aspirations at all: vulgar postmodernism does not care about culture. Therefore, there is no “postmodernism” as a special reality and cannot be, and the notorious postmodernists are no more real than little green men.
As if not noticing the whole comical nature of the procedure of dividing philosophers into "chtoyniki", "ktoyniki" and "kakists", our postmodernist waved his baton and this entire polyphonic "philosophical" choir began to sing: "chtoyniki" – "zachtokali", "ktoyniki" – "zaktokali"; guess for yourself what "ontological procedure" the "kakists" were forced to perform.
Plato finds it obvious that poets talk about subjects they themselves do not understand. Ion similarly rejects the conventional wisdom that poets are sages and teachers of men. Plato compares the magical gift of poets to the mindless power of a magnet. They create their beautiful poems not through skill, but in a state of inspiration and obsession. This happens not through skill, but through divine inspiration. Poets truly do not know what they do.
However disgusted the personality of Andr; Breton himself was, however stupid the name was – a pathetic oxymoron, testifying, firstly, to a slight softening of the brain, and secondly, to the advertising flair that distinguished surrealism and to which it ultimately boiled down – the fact remains: in this case, this cretin wrote very beautiful poetry. However, I was not the only one who did not treat the action with particular enthusiasm: two days later, passing by the same poster, I saw that it was adorned with graffiti: “Instead of burdening us with your fucking poetry, it would be better to put more trains on during rush hour!”
In its own way, it's even beautiful... I emphasize: in its own way... Meanwhile, the author, whoever he/she may be, simply needs to be alone! He/she has become rusty from the letters that he/she remembers by heart, knows by heart – but they already touch him/her like peas touching a wall, like water touching a duck's back, like a fish touching ice!
In essence, it is delightfully precise, you just have to dive into it and force yourself to open your eyes to its transparent depths, beneath the chaotic surface. There is not a single missing line, not a single guessing reading.
He always tried to be sincere and, even if sad, cheerful. And if his texts contain many appeals, then this is not a conceptual device, but a friendly wink. A way to say hello. To please a person. "Notations" are made up of speech garbage, just as his previous books were made up of rehashed words and quotes. Of course, for a debut book it would be a failure. Perebrod's intonations alone would be branded as weak imitation, closing this file forever. Inaccurate rhymes and rhythmic failures, continuous "huyo-mayo", like, you don't even have to try: the result will still be the same. The same. None. Such are the times. None.
My senior comrades taught me this. The principle is called "in order to do what". It's easy to use. As soon as you want to do something, ask yourself: "I'm doing this in order to do what?" I guarantee that in half the cases it will turn out that either the action doesn't make sense or it can be done better.
The sum of knowledge does not suit me. In my opinion, the thesis "one personality – one person" smacks of minimalism. I do not call for replacing the state with a library or a psychoanalyst's couch – although this thought has visited me more than once. It is not philosophy that expresses the being of the people, but the people express philosophical Being, if such a happy great moment (on a historical scale – an era) happens to them. To make it more clear, I will say that if I had my way, I would spend no less on philosophical education than on defense. I would put all prisoners in solitary confinement and force them to read 50 philosophical primary sources a year, and I would spend the entire stabilization fund on translations and publications of philosophical books, which would be sold in every kiosk like vodka. And so on. What would this give? I don't know about the social, economic and political aspects, but I know that this effort would have produced, perhaps, several great philosophers in a few years, and these philosophers would have changed the face of the Earth and history, would have created a world in which, perhaps, there would no longer be a place for social, economics or politics. And such a feat, such a turn is the best thing that can happen in the fate of a people. Since all nations are mortal, then death with glory is better than death from gluttony on hamburgers, especially since even this does not threaten us, rather – death from hunger, cold, labor, military hardships, soft and hard genocide, assimilation by other passionaries.
We have seen that art and philosophy alike demonstrate the retroactive effect of the limit: the artist immediately seizes and depicts the unusual originality of the ordinary, without waiting, like other people, for the present to become the past in order to retrospectively appreciate its irrevocable charm; philosophy, in turn, makes us feel the strangeness of life, without waiting for death, which will reveal this strangeness in all its aspects, but then, when it is too late. This is perhaps what Seneca meant when he suggested that we consider every hour of our life as if it were our last.
Modern philosophy is forced to be literature in order to melt, to melt the crust of notions and concepts that have formed in it over two and a half thousand years. This cooled lava presses and crushes everything that is alive in philosophy. The history of philosophy is ruining philosophy. Philosophy needs to deprive itself of double opacity, to throw off the skin of metaphysics and to touch man, to touch him, to touch him. Philosophy should please and sadden, to amuse and to upset. Its texts should not be cumbersome, they should be compact, clear. Natural language should dominate in them, and not the terminological waste of the philosophical work of many generations.
As the back-cover reviews explain, it is “a rare piece of genuinely political postmodern fiction”; “its author has managed the impossible – he seems both kind and furious.” He is furious in the first half, with a somewhat blunt fervor denouncing the neoliberal Thatcherite England of the 1980s, where the interests of the many are sacrificed to the profits of the few.
He also wrote that any discussion depresses him, that truth for him is not born in a dispute, because he likes to talk about everything in an affirmative manner, and does not like to build his own arguments into a coherent system, nor listen to the arguments of others. "I was created to deliver harsh monologues."
Once, while proofreading one of his works, he noted that the thoughts there were not clearly expressed. "Clarity of thought, alas, is not my case. I have always been a bit of a muddle." Well, this is again not so much about concepts as about character traits.
Vagueness and instability of terminology, a disdainful attitude toward systematic philosophical construction in the presence of sometimes skillful dialectical constructions of individual proofs, an unintentional but persistent desire to influence the aesthetic suggestibility of the reader, the substitution of a decisive argument with a vivid image, comparison or false analogy – these are the usual defects of the skeptic-mystic. When setting out a system, follow the system.
This is how one must write, so that a person, no matter what he is, rises from the pages of the story about him with that force of physical tangibility of his being, with that conviction of his semi-fantastic reality, with which I see and sense him. That is the matter for me, that is the secret of the matter...
He also educated me on the topic of how I understand him superficially, how his inner world is unknowable and he himself is elusive.
- I want to give you my little book – here. To understand me, you need to read it.
...He works in a manner that is difficult to discuss. There are no obvious reasons to claim that one combination of words is better than another; that it can act as a vivid and convincing proof of the fact that human life is full not only of the most severe inner tragedy, but also of the joy of hope as our only real wealth. Unfortunately or fortunately, this question is not resolved on a logical level and always remains in the intuitive realm of taste. His prose is a game precisely on the linguistic field. Its rules are such that, on occasion, the author can feel free from the need to accurately reflect reality. His arguments, presented in a dispute with the elements of everyday life, lie in the realm of the unprovable.
And the flaw in this scheme is the obvious lack of dynamics. It has two dimensions – length and width, but no third – depth. Yes-no philosophy. It seems that it never occurs to the critic (critic) that one and the same image can have different semantics, that the subject of analysis (as well as the subject of creativity) can be precisely the dynamics of images within the poem, the relationship of changing meanings, and not the search for some monumental conclusion. And who the hell said that a text should have one and only, once and for all, meaning? Medieval interpreters were wrong in perceiving the world as an unambiguous text; modern interpreters are wrong in approaching the text as an infinite world.
Incidentally, the often deliberately given character of a “collage” (or even conscious, demonstrative plagiarism) to the works of the latter is not at all connected with the arbitrariness and capricious whim of the authors, but precisely with the huge information capacity of objects intuitively felt by them, with which modern man deals more and more often and which, for example, already at the level of quantum microparticles can also “behave” simultaneously as waves and as corpuscles. ( A corpuscle differs from a wave in that it casts a sharp shadow.)
There are no characters, only circumstances. The same individual, depending on the situation, will either humiliate or be humiliated. What is called "character" is simply a status gradient that is relevant at the given moment. It is no accident that the character gene has never been discovered.
Space is stopped time. But where is the beginning of unidirectional time, if it is the receptacle of everything? Two observers living relative to each other, for a short time, and not for the length of days. Time stops twitching. Thanks to memory, death turns into destruction.
Postmodernism in Russian literature has managed to lose the effect of novelty, but for many it still remains a rather strange stranger. Its language is incomprehensible, its aesthetic tastes are irritating... There is indeed much that is unusual, shocking, even "schizoid" in postmodernism – and he is also an erudite, a polyglot, partly a philosopher and cultural scientist. Distinguishing features: deprived of the traditional "I" – his "I" is multiple, impersonal, indefinite, unstable, reveals itself through a combination of quotations; adores the state of creative chaos, gets intoxicated by the process of pure becoming; coded, even twice; combines the incompatible, is elitist and egalitarian at the same time; is drawn to the marginal, likes to wander "along the edges"; erases the line between independent spheres of spiritual culture, de-hierarchizes hierarchies, softens oppositions; distances himself from everything linear, unambiguous; always finds a way to escape from any form of totality; relativist; prefers the production of desire, pleasure, play to all forms of production; does not impose himself on anyone, rather is able to captivate, to seduce. Character: independent, skeptical, ironic, secretly sentimental, tolerant; at the same time, has a thorough complex, strives to get rid of complexes. Favorite activities: traveling (in the space of culture), playing (with cultural signs, codes, etc.), designing/reconstructing (intellectual combinatorics), modeling (of possible worlds). Convinced that no artistic position can ultimately take a dominant position in comparison with another position; the rules themselves are created together with the work, as a result of which each work becomes an event.
Paul Feyerabend mixed up all the cards in his book Against Method, proclaiming that the best theory is eclectic, anarchically not subject to any strict rules. Thus, postmodernism, a soft version of schizophrenic postsemiotic ideology, came to philosophy. This was truly the end of traditional semiotics and philosophical paranoia, since the search for truth became unfashionable, the main tasks began to consist of the problem of writing, essentially, reflection on the impossibility of semiotics.
Postmodernism is a method that promises no goal; it is a question the answer to which would be fatal; it is a feast of the Apocalypse that is always with you; it is a way to stay alive when the Truth is unbearable. Postmodernism is a search for salvation in a situation when there is no longer any faith or hope, when grace has been taken away. Postmodernism is a spontaneous self-sacrifice of philosophy; it is the crucifixion of modern culture and its descent into hell. It is super-apophaticism, when even the word "God" is not pronounced. And simulacra are ghosts, spirits, demons with whom an invisible battle is waged. They must be recognized and their claims to authenticity exposed, so as not to mistake non-existence for existence. Postmodernism is more attentive to the nuance that can be great; to the particulars in which a miracle is hidden; to the reflections in which there is a particle of the Tabor Light; to the smallest movements of the soul that determine the final choice. Postmodernism is listening to the meaningless muttering of the void; it is the silent cry of an unhappy consciousness; it is weeping and gnashing of teeth; it is questioning the meaning of the absurd; it is a call into the void in which there is no one; it is silence in an incessant conversation with nothing. When it is impossible to speak, two paths remain: to be a hesychast or a postmodernist. Simple at first glance, hesychasm is as incomprehensible, mysterious and incomprehensible as postmodernism. Hesychasm calls to where it is impossible to be; it conveys an experience that is impossible to take. Only he who has something to say can remain silent.
Both thinking and intellect are what Marvin Minsky called “suitcase words,” words into which we pack many meanings so that we can talk about complex issues without going into detail. The lie uttered by postmodernism is thought. It is the postmodernist who can half-jokingly say what “serious” philosophers do not dare. He can accidentally blurt out the Great Secret. Heaven cannot be taken by storm, as classical philosophy tried to do; the centuries-long siege of the Logos fortress proved futile. It is now clear that Truth cannot be bought; a pact can only be made with the underworld. No moral merit can guarantee salvation. Knowledge only brings man to the last line; reason, powerless, stops before the Mystery.
Postmodernism is a defiant gesture towards Heaven; it is a refusal of guarantees with faith in love; it is an insolence that borders on humility; it is good pretending to be evil; it is a lamb in wolf's clothing; it is loud laughter hiding sobs; it is cynicism masking modesty; it is an insult to sacred things with the secret desire that someone will defend them; it is a provocation, an attempt to lure the deity out of its hiding place; it is a betrayal of God with the faith that there will be no executioners; it is a crime in the hope of punishment and that the terrible Judge will reveal himself.
The postmodernist plays with the Sky with childish naivety; flirts with God with feminine coquetry. Truth is revealed only in the incomprehensible. A miracle happens only unexpectedly. An event occurs only if you do the impossible. Therefore, the postmodernist is like a person in love – he forgets himself; like a drunkard – he drinks himself to the point of unconsciousness out of grief; like a beggar – he rejoices over a copper penny; like a miser – he collects all sorts of rubbish; like a spendthrift – he squanders an inheritance in one night; like a prostitute waiting for true love – he is ready to follow anyone who calls; like a swindler – who has only one chance to deceive; like a thief – he wants to steal a priceless treasure; like a criminal – he dares to commit the irreparable; like a suicide – he cuts himself with a razor; like a madman – he throws himself into the abyss. On November 4, 1995, Gilles Deleuze died. He committed suicide – he threw himself out of the window. For me, this date signifies the symbolic death of postmodernism in the West.
Postmodernism is a philosophy that despises all philosophy; it is the unbridled pursuit of interpretations in the hope of exhausting them completely.
Postmodernism is a senseless bustle in anticipation of the Guest, in anticipation of the Meeting. It is an attempt to make a scandal in a house where no one is alive. It is a carnival funeral of an old man, it is the painful contractions before the birth of a new man. It is a mock wedding on the eve of the great Wedding. And the Bridegroom is already at the door. Only a few thousand miles and a few centuries separate us from his matchmakers.
Postmodernism is elusive because it is demonstratively visual, glides along the surface, blinds with a firework of meanings, deceives with endless reflections and mirages. Postmodernism, like a dream, hints, reminds us of what we do not admit to ourselves; like a hallucination, it bursts into consciousness and explodes it from within.
H;bert never began a single issue of his P;re Duch;ne without some kind of curse word, like “damn it” or something even worse. These strong words meant nothing, but they served as a sign of recognition. A sign of what? Of the entire revolutionary situation that existed at the time. It is not revolution that destroys culture, but the absence of revolution. One must choose between defending the old society, which is incompatible with cultural tradition, and defending the cultural tradition, which is incompatible with the old society. The unwillingness to do anything imposed by “culture” paradoxically serves the development of genuine fundamental culture. Otherwise, if you do not paint a white pole, it will turn black.
Let us turn to the classics, to Gorgias' "Praise of Helen". The word, being a sound, is endowed with the gift of giving existence to that which does not exist. Sound, "the most imperceptible of bodies", is also the most demiurgic principle in discourse, that which truly has an effect, effectiveness, the ability to create fiction, fiction, its function is to free from the present, giving existence to the object of desire instead. Gorgias' "Praise" helps us understand that logos is not something that must mean physis, and that words should not primarily express the inner world of the speaking subject, sophistry is not a kind of psychology, the secret of this medicine is connected with the pleasure of speech, with the pleasure of speaking. From the point of view of modern rhetoric, sophistry exploits the property immanent in the word: its communicative nature. The more closely we examine a word, the more detailed it is revealed to us – this experience has long been known to professional linguists, but remained alien to the interests of official “users” of political language. Otherwise, it remains unclear how they can hope and, accordingly, in their time, could hope that words themselves will suggest their meanings, as if the word itself takes care to convey its meaning differently depending on the party affiliation and, accordingly, the ideology of the “user” of political language. This is by no means a linguistic surprise.
The exit from postmodernism is long and painful, and in some sense it is impossible, since in a certain sense postmodernism is a universal and atemporal type of artistic, scientific and philosophical thinking (as well as everyday and speech behavior). In this sense, the New Testament can be called postmodern, all built on allusions and reminiscences, where there are no direct statements, everything is encrypted either in parables or statements that are perceived as direct only at the profane level. At the same time, there are many places in the New Testament that can be understood only emotionally: they produce a certain emotional impact, different on different people or even on one person at different moments of his life.
Many people think that the main thing in postmodernism is a departure from the standard of rigid rationality, that you just need to stir the cocktail properly and flavor it with a solid dose of exoticism. It is worth, they say, without further ado, crossing libido and economics, the digital method and cynicism, adding a bit of Aquarius and the Apocalypse, and the postmodern hit is ready. But this hodgepodge of all sorts of things generates only indifference, and this pseudo-postmodernism has nothing in common with postmodernism.
Chapter 7. Fragmentary Method
There is only one thing worse than boredom – the fear of boredom. This is the fear I experience every time I open a novel. I am not interested in the hero’s life, I do not get involved in its twists and turns, and I do not believe in it. The novel has exhausted its substance and no longer has a subject to depict. The character dies, and the intrigue dies with him. Is it not significant that the only novels worthy of interest today are those in which the external world is abolished and where nothing happens? In them, even the author seems absent; only the “ghost of the author” can appear in the text as one of the voices-characters. The novel is not suited to describing indifference or emptiness; some other model should be invented, more even, more laconic, more dismal.
- So who are you? Not half and not whole. Just... a fragment...
- And this is the best. It excites the imagination. Such women are loved forever. Complete women quickly become boring. Perfect ones too, but "fragments" – never.
The concept of "interest" comes from the Latin "inter esse", which literally means "to be between, in the interval". And indeed, what is interesting is what is in the interval between two extremes. As soon as one thing takes over, pushes the other aside, the interest immediately disappears, replaced by dry respect or sluggish indifference.
It is not the truth itself that constitutes the meaning of knowledge, but the depth of truth. Knowledge is profound insofar as it opens up the realm of the unknown in the known, finds strangeness, conventionality, unprovability or refutability even in obvious truths. Deep knowledge rather sets than resolves it. The same applies to action. Not the implementation of a project or idea, but rather the problematization of reality itself is a measure of the profound attitude to the world.
What is curiosity? It is an invincible need to follow the chain of phenomena to their root cause.
The specificity of a text is revealed based on the "internal reserves" of the text. The text does not always correlate with the author, much less with the reader. For example, literary criticism has always seemed strange to me. Why, one wonders, bother digging into what exactly the author wanted to say with a particular text? The author said what he wanted, and those who need to will understand, and those who do not, will understand in their own way. Isn't this an attempt by a literary scholar, or rather, the society that this literary scholar serves, to subordinate the reader's opinion along with the literary work itself to his own opinion?
And why should we even ask the artist what he really meant? Just as you and I are not always the best interpreters of our own actions (as our friends will attest), so artists are not always the best interpreters of their own works.
The result of the analysis of a literary text is not the recovery of the text (in a certain sense, the text can no longer be helped in any way), but the recovery of the analyst himself. This is the positivity of culture – not to simply declare that the meaning is incomprehensible, but to arrive at this through the most complex logical (and in fact, psychoanalytic in essence) procedures. Poetry is the highest achievement of language, and to analyze it is only to blur the focus.
Hypertext is a text that is structured in such a way that it becomes a system, a hierarchy of texts, simultaneously constituting a unity and a multitude of texts. The simplest example of hypertext is any dictionary or encyclopedia, where each article has references to other articles of the same dictionary. As a result, such a text can be read in different ways: from one article to another, as needed, ignoring hypertext references; reading articles in a row, coping with references; finally, embarking on a hypertext voyage, that is, moving from one reference to another. A real dictionary is emphatically hypertextual, that is, it is structured in such a way as to constantly provoke precisely the third way of reading.
The second example is from everyday life. When a person has already chosen his profession, he has thereby chosen a certain hypertext of his life – certain language games, a certain circle of friends, certain books, a certain way of thinking. And then suddenly he gets tired of all this. He wants to break out of the world that has become hateful to him. He wants to give it all up, go somewhere completely into another space, to completely different people and different problems. But those buttons that he learned to press in his old life, those speech acts and language games that he was taught to play in his old life, those springs that he got used to pressing, and those psychological attitudes and – motivations that he got used to being guided by – all this remains with him. And he is pulled back. If this is a very strong and determined person, he will be able to overcome his old hypertext, but the question is whether it was worth doing. This is Leo Tolstoy's problem – he wanted to leave Yasnaya Polyana for almost 30 years – as if everything was already alien – and he couldn't – after all, everything was native. Hypertext is something like fate: a person is walking down the street, thinking about something good, anticipating a joyful meeting, but suddenly some button is pressed (let's not ask the useless question of who presses this button and why), and his life turns upside down. He begins to live a completely different life, as if he leaves the house and does not return. But then someone presses the button again, and it again returns him to the same problems, to the same street, to the same good thoughts. This is, in essence, the story of Job. A person feels that he has made some kind of mistake, and he himself does not understand how this happened, it is as if the devil has confused him, the new life that seemed so necessary, so creative, now seems like just a trap. And then he can either go crazy, or really try to return to that street and those thoughts. But it will be harder for him than before – the new buttons he learned to press in his new life will hinder him in the old one.
Of course, space here is pragmatic, and time is serial, you can go up to the future and down to the past like an escalator. That is, strictly speaking, there is no time in hypertext at all.
Let's take our dictionary. Chronologically, it is fixed at the "mark" of the 20th century. But inside this mark there is no time – we jump from the Viennese culture of the beginning of the century to Moscow at the end of the century, and from there to Berlin in 1943. Time here becomes a kind of space. This is a myth where everything is repeated, and this is neo-mythologism taken to the last line: every word is a quotation, every sentence is a mythologem. We live in an era when all the words have already been said. Therefore, every word, even every letter in culture is a quotation. And of course, such consciousness cannot be considered immutable – we ourselves have changed it. This is a kind of schizotechnics, a kind of cultural psychosis, and we press buttons unconsciously, so this has a direct relationship to the unconscious (to parasemantics), and this has a relationship to the Oedipus complex, for who do we want to outwit if not ourselves and our monstrous unconscious aspirations, and this is certainly an individual language, because no one but us will understand it, and this is analytical philosophy, because we are always analyzing the meanings of the words we use, and this is the theory of speech acts, because hypertext travel is a very complex type of speech act, and if so, then it belongs to the field of pragmatics and, therefore, to semiotics, since pragmatics is one third of semiotics. And this, of course, is the semiotics of intertext. I hope that it was difficult to explain more clearly and convincingly what Hypertext is.
Developed postmodernism is a stage in the evolution of postmodernism when it ceases to rely on previous cultural formations and develops exclusively on its own basis. Your generation no longer knows classical cultural codes. The Iliad, the Odyssey – all this is forgotten. The era of quotes from TV shows and films has arrived, that is, the subject of quotation is the previous borrowings and quotes, which are torn from the original source and worn out to absolute anonymity.
I work with associations. It's too easy to throw out quotes because there are so many great writers in the world and they've said so many smart things that it's not worth the effort.
A quote becomes a guarantee of the self-expansion of the meaning of the text. "A quote," wrote Osip Mandelstam, "is not an extract. A quote is a cicada – it is incessantly incessant." And then something terrible happened. I lost the source. There is a quote – there it is, copied using the "Copy" command, but I don't remember where it came from. The source is silent. This is something. It doesn't want to be described. That's why it is silent. The source, which is usually so generous with quotes. But don't ask, ask how I live. No good. Delete? Ok.
Delightfully illegible, with neither beginning nor end, they could easily end on any page or stretch on for tens of thousands of pages. In this connection, the question occurs to me: is it possible to repeat the same experiment ad infinitum? To write one novel without a subject is not bad, but why write ten, twenty such novels? Having come to the conclusion about the necessity of a vacuum, why multiply this vacuum and pretend that it is pleasant? The implicit concept of a work of this kind contrasts the wear and tear of existence with the inexhaustible reality of non-existence. Untenable from the point of view of logic, this concept is nevertheless true on the level of emotions. (To speak of non-being except in emotional terms is a waste of time.) It implies a search without external reference points, an experiment within an inexhaustible vacuum, within a kind of emptiness perceived and thought through sensation, and it also implies a paradoxically motionless, frozen dialectic, a dynamic of monotony and impersonality. A movement in a circle, isn’t it? The lust for insignificance is the most dead-end of dead ends. To use the sensation of melancholy not to turn absence into mystery, but to turn mystery into absence. A worthless mystery, suspended in itself, without a background and incapable of captivating the one who perceives it beyond the revelations of nonsense.
Subsequently, right up until “The Solitary One,” he did not understand at all what was happening to him, where such leaps, devoid of any logic, came from, where the constant “renegacy,” the eluding of “final definitions” came from. And only in his later works, although Rozanov did not understand, he intuitively felt that some kind of program was unfolding within him, beyond his will and desire, and that all his hesitation and transformations were the realization of some kind of plan.
“The fragment is in my blood,” he once said. “I prefer chaotic liveliness to obvious unity... the richness of meaning to its clarity. I am doomed to be only half realized. And this truncation is in everything: in the way I live, in the way I write.” A man of fragments. A man of the frontier, broken by an insatiable passion in search of the ultimate limits of any experience and thought, he chose the fragmentariness of verbal expression by his own will as much as he was doomed to it. Turning the famous formula around, I would say that a fragment is a kind of prose whose center is nowhere and whose circumference is everywhere. The form of a “centrifugal” utterance, a fragment exists as a paradoxical tension without concentration, as if by a constant effort of dispersion, a pull from the center to an ever newer edge. At first glance, and erroneously, the author, on the contrary, refutes himself again and again by repeating himself, endlessly multiplying the microscopic differences that are the whole point here. The “convulsive,” “convulsive” writing – a unique combination of impulse and numbness – moves elusively like a snake and, despite all its mosaicism, lives somehow strangely. Moving from vocable to vocable, from gap to gap with the smallest muscular contractions, the word-thought hypnotizes, rivets the reader: it is always located exactly at the point where our enchanted gaze has stopped. It is time for the fragments to finally line up in a catalog.
For him, the abrupt style is “the principle... of knowledge: any thought worth anything is doomed to immediately suffer defeat from another thought that it itself secretly gave birth to.”
Events are presented as if they were quotations taken from different sources and put together. The technique of fragmentation enhances the element of presence. Perhaps this is what A. Tarkovsky was trying to achieve when he told extras that they should always act as if they were the main characters, so that space, being a receptacle for actions and events, turns into something mental, into an inner space of the mind and thought.
God made me simple-minded, stupid and naive. I have always been more susceptible to immediate impressions than to suggestions coming from the essence of things. This is the source of the superficiality of my views, my ridiculous pliability and my disconcerting ability to deceive myself. I hasten to admit this, lest any discerning reader who might come across this work should catch me out. I can just picture him, indignant, throwing the book into a corner in anger and exclaiming: "The author is simply a fool!" As soon as such a picture arises in my mind, a shudder runs down to my very heels. No, it is much better to be sincere and speak without beating around the bush.
We do not trust scoundrels, swindlers and jokers, and yet they are not responsible for the great convulsions of history. Believing in nothing, they do not, however, meddle in your soul or try to disturb the course of your secret thoughts. They simply leave you alone with your carelessness, your worthlessness or your despair. However, it is to them that humanity owes its rare moments of prosperity: they are the ones who save the nations that are tortured by fanatics and destroyed by "idealists".
And how could we endure laws, codes, and paragraphs of the heart, imposed on cunning and vain vices in favor of inertia and decency, if it were not for these cheerful beings, whose refinement places them at once at the top of society and outside it?
Frivolity does not come easy. It is a privilege and a special art; it is the search for the superficial by those who, having understood that nothing can be certain, have come to hate all certainty; it is a flight away from the abysses which, being naturally bottomless, can lead nowhere. True, there remains the outer shell – so why not elevate it to the level of style? However, true art is not what looks good, but what changes us.
Chapter 8. Thread
I know in what sense you used the word " canvas", but I would like to seize upon this canva and rethink it: "fabric". As is known, the word "text" has the same root as the word "textile", both from the Latin verb "texere" – to weave. In some sense, we all weave the material or text of our lives on the loom of fate. – An archaic image, dating back to ancient ideas about fate-spinner, spinning the thread of each person's life.
Until recently, Latvians had knotted writing. Songs, tales, and the most important home dates and events were written on a thread and gradually wound into a ball. This is how the K- book was created. Here it is – the web of a spinning wheel, spinning the thread of fate and, at the same time, the canvas of literature.
In order to "outsmart" fate and avoid troubles in the future, people tried to play a good-natured joke, without any serious consequences, by sending someone "to April." Most often, children were protected from possible misfortunes in this way, sending them on humorous errands, for example, to find special scissors for cutting bull's tails among the tools or to buy a jar of mosquito fat at the pharmacy.
Let us ponder the characteristics of the subject who utters the key words: "not fate". Or: "you know, not fate". We can say: " you can't escape fate" – the thing is, however, that it is extremely difficult to even reach fate. Let us even assume that the moirae really do spin the threads of fate – but at the same time they doze under the buzz of their spindle. In a slumber, in a half-sleep, a certain sequence of events arises, but there is no personal history in it yet. Only the tension and break of the thread awaken the spinner, forcing her to tie a knot, a knot for memory. Based on the number of knots, one can perhaps also draw up a scale with gradations of gradual transitions: karma, fate, destiny – and then an abrupt break, when the tenacious fingers of the spinner did not reach and were unable to tie the ends together. Then we have before us the case of a nomad leaving the orbit of predetermination at the third nomadic speed. In this case, the unity of the name is not preserved – but not yet, but already. The Lord, the man of fate, knows no fear of punishment, in particular, all legal arguments for him are a clanging cymbal. The personified Law, addressing him, exclaims: "Have you understood your guilt, have you understood what you have transgressed and against whom you have raised your hand?" The hero, answering rather to himself, says: "bad luck", "bad fate". He pronounces this irrevocable sentence with parched lips, with his last strength (attempts at action have been exhausted) – and does not strive to preserve himself, does not enter into bargaining. Speculative reflection is alien to the one who has taken a swing at fate and therefore has been honored with it.
He always seemed to see all the threads and follow their interweaving, never losing sight of the overall design of his gigantic tapestry. He left us his fabric unwoven. "And, having pricked himself on the sewing with the needle still in place..." he wove meaning, intertwining the threads of the permitted and the prohibited, and his view of modernity was as nonlinear as modernity itself. Reflecting, he would sometimes side with the "common", and then return to his "native" position as an individual. Thus, in a shuttle manner, the Ode was constructed. And its meaning is apparently two-sided, as befits a true meaning.
...And for a long time I could not fall asleep from hatred and the awareness of helplessness that everyone feels when confronted with the stubbornness of an ignoramus. A moth that has flown to the light is not curious, but is attracted by a certain tropism. Catching the words that have been released is also difficult, but not every attempt is in vain.
Those who weave a web of subtle conversations to catch ignorant insects with a rampet of words. In all likelihood, they would hardly bother to pretend to be a stream of consciousness, since they are more interested in its steam.
When studying time, its needles gently glide in matter that does not need integrity. Which is falsely perceived as insights. Let's try to connect (such is the passion of endlessly meaningless "why?"): insights are in fact the smallest holes (someone says: revelations, but I can't hear well). Then the figure of the draftsman appears, and his lips confidently whisper the word "thread" (it is possible: different threads). "Thread" and "time" are unusually often confused by the critic in his puppetry. In general, a good draftsman is hard to find. First of all, you need to have a very beautiful handwriting, similar to a typographic font, but more flexible, and also be able to evaluate and calculate everything at a glance, in order to fit precisely within the framework of the bubble, without running into the edges, this is already difficult, especially at the beginning.
The author calmly weaves (we are talking about the style called weaving words) a life, the thought moves heavily and evenly, finally he comes to the place where he needs to speak about the unspeakable, to implant it as a model in the heart of the reader. The text begins to swell, marks time – and suddenly breaks into ingots of the matrix.
Then the figure of the artist disappears. The word "thread" remains in the air. We will take it in our fingers. Let us be careful and beware of weightless and accidental, like dreams of love, cuts. A card will fall out of the deck, a note from the envelope : "The sweater is knitted from one thread, at least such is the ideology of the sweater. Its holes are topological nuances of hallucination, a deviation of the straight line, not interrupted – but catching up and crossing itself. In winter, the holes begin to warm." Hence the search for a map – that is, logic.
Chapter 9. The World of People
The quietest sky has not started a conversation. At first it seems that there is almost nothing to talk about... Every spoken word requires some kind of continuation, because only by looking back can one catch one's breath. Perhaps this happens and goes best in reading – we understand that the entire range of attempts to point out such a word is folded into chests, just like feathers, bird skeletons, grandmother's bottles, banners of fate – we were not deceived, and that's to say! Where else.
But, "My God", why is it so sad when you watch a certain figure moving away into the cold fog, over the hills, along the clay roads. How long will your vision hold it? No one will tell you. This "nobody" is, of course, her.
The child has an initial conviction that adults live in some sense conscientiously; they do not tell the child much because “it is still too early for him,” and penetrating into adults’ secrets is one of the most exciting activities of childhood; but how can he suppose that there are many things that are completely excluded from the sphere of discussion, that there is a language in which one is silent?
She is silent in response, does not want to say anything, such is their law. (At night even the grove is silent, does not want to listen, folded its leaves, does not want to listen.) In general, one can only remain silent about this. And if you talk, then it turns out to be some kind of nonsense. As soon as you try to outwit him, "such a thing will appear that if someone decides to cover it, he will be covered by it." It cannot be passed on to anyone and cannot be exchanged with anyone. What should not be spoken about speaks for itself.
"All my knowledge is breakfast, the breakfast of an Englishwoman with a cold." I do not speak words. I do not pay attention to them, absorbing by ear not the words themselves, but their melancholy: I know: they are a signboard, and it is difficult to read. For words obey only when you express the unnecessary, or come to the rescue when it is not needed. So each attack is a new beginning, a raid on the inexpressible with worthless means that run out ... as if choosing words with sugar tongs. It is true, his look – a wild, dancing, desperate look – expresses something inaccessible to our understanding. In both of them there is a clarity, a certainty that I admire, although, alas, it is not about me. What is this word that everyone knows? I do not believe in any words. It is not the word that matters, but why the word is said (for example, one can recall the stimulating or, on the contrary, calming, opiate effect of some words). The word "blade" calms, and the word "cat" makes you feel warm. Life does not give a reason for fixation. Silence is the future of days.
The woman hanging on my arm was pregnant, and in six or seven years the thing she carried inside her would be able to read the writing in the sky, and he, or she, or it, would know it was a cigarette and would later start smoking, perhaps a pack a day. In the womb there would be a nail on each finger, on the fingers and on the toes, and you could get stuck on that, on a toe nail, the tiniest nail you could imagine, and you could break your head trying to figure it out. At one end of the bar were books written by man, containing such a tangle of wisdom and nonsense, truth and lies, that you could live as long as Methuselah and still not get enough of the stew; at the other end of the crossbar are things like toenails, hair, teeth, blood, ovaries, if you like, innumerable, written in different ink, different handwriting, incomprehensible, illegible handwriting.
A story that has no equal in the passion of the melancholy expressed in it, written as if from some distant and lofty place, almost a dream; for despite all the apparent concreteness of the details, everything here is, in essence, abstract, conditional.
This position cannot be called either stoic – because it is dictated, first of all, by considerations of an aesthetic-linguistic nature, or existentialist – because it is precisely the denial of reality that constitutes its content. The manuscript has a “smell”, how many dark, snaking meanings there are here...
He read these lines and slowly sank down onto the sofa, as if someone had shoved him in the chest. Someday this text will end too. The last line is always right.
So the last moment can change everything! So much the worse for impatient people who do not want to listen until the last minute! For the solution to the mystery may be contained in the last word... Do not leave until the end under any circumstances!
“From the way he suddenly stops and looks at his comrades, it is clear that he wants to say something very important, but, apparently realizing that they will not listen to him or will not understand him, he impatiently shakes his head and continues to walk. But soon the desire to speak takes precedence over all considerations, and he gives himself free rein and speaks ardently and passionately. His speech is disordered, feverish, like delirium, impetuous and not always understandable, but in it, both in the words and in the voice, one can hear something extremely good. When he speaks, you recognize in him a madman and a man. It is difficult to convey his insane speech. He speaks of human meanness, of violence trampling on the truth, of the beautiful life that will eventually be on earth, of window bars that remind him every minute of the stupidity and cruelty of rapists. The result is a disorderly, awkward potpourri of old, but not yet finished songs.” (Chekhov A.P. Ward No. 6)
...And so on in the same vein. I couldn't write down even half of what he said. He was rambling incoherently, like a madman, spitting saliva every other word. It seems to me that the disease was already eating away at his brain, because years later he died in delirium.
It is known, for example, that school textbooks do not so much comment as create and format history – an object of collective consciousness. Control over the past and symbolic appropriation of the future is the main goal of ideology, which lays its paw on all forms of collective ideas and desires.
The very existence of time, that is, of that inescapable thing which makes men old, sick, and dead, speaks of human impotence. If human history were embodied not in time but in some other substance, then one could still imagine that it is really made by men. But since it is time that is the dimension of history, and it is this dimension which makes man helpless, the role of private life and the role of a strong will are reduced to short remarks on the proscenium. The play itself is performed without our permission; and it is not we who raise the curtain, and, what is worse, it is not we who will lower it.
The Chinese called all this by one easy word – "vicissitudes". Each "vicissitude" occurs at one or another moment in historical time and, having begun, inevitably ends, being replaced by another "vicissitude". This sense of discreteness (discontinuity) of time helps to record and understand the course of historical events, their interrelation and sequence. (The very origin of the Russian word "time", cognate with the words "to twist" and "spindle", is connected with the idea of the cyclical nature of time).
...At some point, you realize that everything you did and lived for was not serious, and this feeling can drive you to despair until you remember that the whole of world history is not very serious. Historians leaf through pages that have been turned over a hundred times to clarify the years of life of some sultan or to reconsider the role of the monetary system in the decline of Venice. So much has happened in history that there are facts to support any theory. World history is essentially the noise around the latest news. Everything was worse before. Roughly speaking, throughout 99% of world history, 99% of people were poor, hungry, dirty, scared, stupid, sick and ugly.
The world is a model of Noah's Ark: a handful of people and an abyss of cattle. This view of history is based on the following principle: the history of mankind is a regression, a descent, a belittling of being, its weathering, which entails a deterioration in the spiritual quality of life, an increase in cataclysms, a retreat from sacred norms, a fall into disorder and chaos. The ever-accelerating progress must be paid for by nothing other than an ever-increasing human regression, an impoverishment of the humane principle.
One of the unpleasant features of our time is that those who are confident are stupid, and those who have at least some imagination and understanding are full of doubts and indecision. There is a proverb: "Fools have luck." It should be noted that it is unfair. Everyone is equally lucky, but since there are more fools, most of the lucky ones turn out to be fools. The smart adapt to the world, fools try to adapt the world to themselves, so fools change the world and make history.
Mr. Cole's axiom is: "The sum total of intelligence on the planet remains constant, but the population continues to grow." If you put six people together, there will immediately be two exploiters, two exploited, one scapegoat, and a loner. This is our "species curse."
The world used to be ruled by the smart. It was cruel. The smart forced the dumb to study. It was hard for the dumb. Now the world is ruled by the dumb. It's fair, because there are many more dumb. Now the smart learn to speak in a way that the dumb can understand. If the dumb doesn't understand something, it's the smart's problem. The dumb used to suffer. Now the smart suffer. There is less suffering, because there are fewer and fewer smart people.
A war with fools is impossible – because it would be a war with humanity. And yet, who among the smart ones has not at least once dreamed of arranging a St. Bartholomew's Day massacre for fools?! This dream warms, gives strength to tolerate fools further.
You may feel like you need to keep up with everything that’s going on in the world. The media focuses on conflict, so too much news can give you the false impression that there’s more violence in the world than love. This perception can leave you feeling stressed, anxious, and in a bad mood. Being caught up in the world’s problems every day that you can’t solve isn’t going to make anyone feel better. You spend a lot of time and energy trying to process your experiences, recuperate, and gain a clear head, all of which can be easily lost when you see pictures of people suffering on the news. And as a result, you end up feeling guilty about your own inaction while you’re still worried.
Above us, advertising splashes out of place – a sign of short-lived vanity. A monotonous background, humming like a steamboat. Listen: do you hear the hum of the crowd, heavy thoughts, ordinary news? The background noise probably creates the illusion of a life full of meaning, events. Or is it a way to speak to the emptiness gnawing from within, like a disease, of a person in trouble?
The reader wants to be entertained. A news site is a substitute for his ancient, deep-seated desire to hear tribal news. In a city where the people are disunited and there is no tribe as such, the storytellers are television and websites. They create the illusion that something important is happening nearby and directly concerns you. More often than not, it does not.
The natives set the tone here, merry idle fools, a herd, brainless cattle, a bitch tribe, dressed in caftans, they march through the streets every evening. Their lives are so similar to each other, so meager and traceless. Nowadays, it seems, you can’t even say anything to anyone. The instincts of modern man are vile, I tell you.
Strabo and Herodotus mention the "phthyrophagi": "a numerous nomadic tribe... they shave their beards and eat lice when one is caught...". The veneration of water and rivers only favored this tradition. How can one interpret phthyrophagy? Let me remind you that insects in mythology had different semantic meanings. For example, a ladybug (Heaven), a butterfly (a receptacle of the soul), a grasshopper (God's horse), a spider (the architect of the Universe). Lice are also associated with the underworld. For archaic self-awareness, the highest prestige is that which is sacred, and sacred is that which is cosmological. According to Ibn Fadlan, "each of them cuts out a piece of wood the size of a phallus and hangs it on himself."
Civilization follows culture, writes Spengler, “as becoming follows becoming, as death follows life, as immobility follows development, as mental old age and the petrified world city follow the village and intimate childhood.”
In such meditations (or whatever you call them) he spent months and years of his life. It would not be an exaggeration to say that he sometimes left home after breakfast at thirty and returned to dinner at fifty. Some weeks aged him a hundred years, others did not add three seconds to his age. In general, we do not undertake to discuss the duration of human life (it is better to remain silent here about the period allotted to animals), because it is worth stating that life is infinitely long, and then we are reminded that a flash of it is more instantaneous than the falling of a rose petal. Of the two forces that alternately and, what is especially strange, both at once command our wretched reason – brevity and length – he fell now under the power of a heavy elephant-like deity, now of a light-winged fly. Life seemed endless to him. And yet it flashed by like a moment. But even when it stretched especially far, and the seconds swelled especially, and he seemed to wander alone through the endless deserts of eternity, he still did not have time to smooth out and decipher the looped, tight parchment lines that thirty years of habitation with men and women had woven into a tight scroll in his brain and heart. He had not yet finished thinking about Love (the oak had managed to turn green and shake off its leaves many times during this period), and Ambition had already pushed it out of the field and replaced it with Friendship and Literature. And since the first question – what is Love? – was not answered, it burst in on every occasion and without reason, rubbing aside Books, and Metaphors, and What is the meaning of our life? – to the edge of the field, where they waited until they could rush into the game again. The process of decision was further complicated and swelled by the fact that it was lavishly illustrated, and not only with pictures – old Queen Elizabeth, in pink brocade, on a tapestry sofa, an ivory snuffbox in her hand, the golden hilt of a dagger nearby – but also with smells – how she was perfumed! – and sounds: how the deer trumpeted in Richmond Park that winter day... And the thought of love merged, fused with winter and snow, with the heat of the fireplace; with Russian princesses, golden daggers, the calls of the deer; with the slobbering babble of old King James, and with fireworks, and with the sacks of treasure in the holds of Elizabeth's ships. Each part, as soon as he tried to move it from its place, bumped into another, just as bones, dragonflies, and coins, and the curls of drowned women grow into a piece of glass that has lain on the seabed for a year.
Have you ever thought that age is just the number of revolutions you have made around the Sun? I opened the day. I really like these thoughtful, silent beginnings of days. Today was a bad day. On days like these, you feel the shaky line of phenomena, the shaky border between reality and illusion. On a bright sunny day, we are surrounded by the illusion that we are surrounded by true reality. On such a bad day, reality seems somehow unreal. The cooler the days, the shorter they are. I turned off the light, and the day ended. Having blocked everything for me... Life is many days. And this day ended , as all days did.
(Let's say: "Park. September.") He says: "I'll be at the Dog tomorrow. Are you with me?" While he waits for an answer, she looks at her glassy shadow and clearly says: "Today was an unnecessary day."
Life unfolded before me as an endless chain of hostility and cruelty, as a continuous, dirty struggle for the possession of trifles. I still sit at the oars of this damned boat, that is, I remain and toil in the senseless penal servitude of everyday life. But with the years, I am more and more careful in pouring from empty to empty. The days still twist ropes out of time, forcing me to earn bread by the sweat of my brow, and there are 52 Sundays in a year. I always wonder why birds stay in one place if they can fly anywhere. And then I ask myself the same question.
Not a wisp of a cloud in the sky, where I was hired from midday to guard this undead, to live, to rattle and to dazzle, and – not to grieve. Sophia, don’t cry, I saw through the window: your double was floating across the sky.
The telescopic predictability of the future drives you crazy. Everyday life does not immediately tighten the noose. You could say that this lady did not bend us at all. The automatism of repetition melts in the light of an ordinary day. In this part, the world is a collection of facts. This is the beginning of a large, raw world. Sometimes it is a piece of holey happiness, the basis of dreams. Despite the uselessness of the data, the eye continues to collect them. Answers: this is not regret at all, just a careful, just like in school, arrangement of indisputable facts. An excuse not to do what is worth doing in this life. The ability of the mind to think is, in a certain sense, the ability of a person to go crazy. The world is divided by a person, and multiplied by the rest. You see, it would least of all occur to a square to say that all four of its corners are equal: it simply does not see this anymore – it is so familiar to it, every day. Probably, fish do not know what water is, because they have nothing to compare it with. And when they get into the air, they don't have time to use the comparison of air to water. This is a series of observations. You see, I live a rather absurd life.
All things were once one thing. All facts were one fact. But it was not interesting. That is why we observe the illusion of an infinite variety of things and facts. It is interesting. But it is an illusion. When we talk about one thing, we almost always talk about something else. The reason for this is that all things and facts at the level of the unconscious are one thing and all the same to everything.
That is all a man is good for – to make a grimace, which takes him his whole life, and sometimes his life is not enough to bring it to an end: this grimace is so incredibly complex and requires so much strength that it can only be made by giving it his whole true soul without a trace.
The direct threat of naked steel has always seemed to me insignificant compared to the hidden horror of everyday life. It is from this that people have long hidden in books the best they managed to get from the meager quarries of their souls; they have collected for their food all the great and remarkable things that have ever been and still are in the world.
Dear Commendatore, please sit down, my friend has told me a lot about you. A most worthy example, your whole life devoted to public service without hesitation. And a hidden poetic streak, I guessed, didn't I?
But in vain does the crowd fool you with its joy, you give up your freedom for a grain of warmth, for a bitter sip of compassion, for a black biscuit of understanding. You give your hair to the hairdresser, you give your eyes to shameful spectacles, your nose to foul smells, your mouth to bad food, you give up your childhood to the guardianship of idiots, the best hours of adolescence to the dirty barracks of a school, you give up your youth to arguing with a bunch of microcephals, and love – noble love – to a woman dreaming of the next, you give up your maturity to service – this gray monster with dull eyes and a mechanically closing mouth – and your eyes fade, your hair turns gray, your sophisticated nose takes the form of a dozing cabby, your mouth grows coarse, and you plunge your soul (sad soul) into the abyss of everyday life...
The days and weeks that fly by make my ears whistle. The world spins gracefully, accompanied by a slight hum. A string of ceremonies, collections of facts, funny little misfortunes. I live in countless images, a string of seasons and years, images of life, in a bizarre lace of outlines and colors and gestures and words, in the beauty of surprises and in the usual ugliness, in the fresh clarity of thoughts and desires, I live in poverty and melancholy, I do not succumb to them, despite, I live in a muffled river, a transparent and gloomy river of pupils, in an anthill of a lonely man, in a stuffy forest and in my newfound brothers, I live in hunger and in abundance at the same time, in the confusion of days and the black order of nights, am I responsible for?.. And even plush toys are not dear to me. As the Finnish psychoanalyst V. Tehke astutely noted, acute schizophrenic psychosis is, first of all, a complete loss of good objects.
It taught me to feel the unconsciousness of being, as a tree frog probably feels it when it has found a comfortable place on a green leaf.
"Pass the..." I say. "Milk..." she says, or "Mary will be here soon..." the simplest words for those who have inherited the spoils of all generations, but not so simple when spoken in the prime of life, feeling complete, full, every day at breakfast. Muscles, nerves, intestines, blood vessels – everything that winds up the spring of our being, under the unconscious roar of the motor, while our tongue trembles and flappes, works without fail. Contraction, relaxation; relaxation, contraction; we eat, we sleep; sometimes we speak – the whole mechanism unwinds and contracts, like the mainspring of a watch.
Everyone feels the need for new sonorous verbal rattles to hang them around life and thus, ennobling the everyday absurdity, give it something noisy and festive. Due to birth, place of residence, upbringing, fatherland, accidents, as well as the importunity of other people, their existence, their life is an incessant obscene farce. It is sad about our hectic, empty and touching life. It is said: look around – at all our troubles and wretchedness...
He was no longer interested in the heavy confusion of life. The figures passing by, going about their trivial business, fussily preoccupied with their common comedy, with how to seize the last portion of information... People who talk a lot about trivial matters are dissatisfied with something deep down inside. But in order to seem ambitious and hide their dissatisfaction, they repeat the same thing over and over again.
There is undoubtedly an infinite number of characteristics by which people can be assessed. However, most of them are of no interest.
So, virtue is acceptable if it arises from thoughts, not from feelings. And also if it arises every time anew and every time is the first beginning, not the second. Or the third. "Every time anew" goodness arises so that a habit does not develop. So that traditions do not work. Custom. After all, if you rely on traditions, then virtue will be born of custom, not you. And this means that it shifts you from the center. Makes you subjectless. Not you are the starting point, but it. Tradition. And then it makes itself in you.
Man is governed by the law of desire – “I want”. But man is also governed by the law of duty – “I must”. The axiological modality is connected with the pleasure principle, and therefore it is more fundamental than the deontic modality, connected with the reality principle. In addition, duty is directed at inanimate things. “I must finish the work I started”. Desire is always a desire for something organic: “I want to live”, “I want to eat”, “I want a woman”.
But there is such a word "must", as in the fairy tale: "Go there, I don't know where, bring that, I don't know what". If you go left, you'll come to the right. The Cretan newspapers, all this sinister idiocy, take it and put it down. You can't drag it all! Do this and do that, make the bed... Lie down in bed, like a compass in a drawing set. Futile, useless, penny-pinching fuss. Well, what, you hurry-up, where are you going to hurry now? Peas are jumping on the hearth, they know no rest, they jump and dart. Oh, you persistent one, why are you fussing? But I only did it so that I could have dealings with you in the future, and not for the sake of any self-interest or vain feeling. Vanity of vanities and three times more vanity. All this fever of life is sheer naivety.
Let not a single petty feeling remain in the heart, not a gram of dust. When the grain becomes moldy, do not sort the grains, change the barn. Truly human vanity, life is a shadow and a sleep. For in vain does every earthly being worry, as the Scripture says: when we have gained the world and go to the grave, then will the kings and the poor together... What was, is – until now and then... Only this will be remembered: if life is a disease, then death is its symptom. And the rest is revenge. This is the meaning of what is.
Do not reproach the unfortunate when, crawling in the dust, they dream of joy. They should be forgiven even when they turn to evil. You might as well watch lobsters crawling over each other in an aquarium (for which you only need to go to a fish restaurant). Although it is better if it is nonsense that sets you in motion – for then there is less disappointment. A minimum of fuss. So there is a world charmed against change. There are places where nothing changes. A lousy world, wherever you look. Where shall we gallop, winged horse? Everywhere is a moron or a spy or a talented piece of trash.
My brother, how many people are there on this planet? And I don’t want to meet anyone’s gaze. People’s faces are genuinely evil. But is it really, God, that only fools give birth? Is a sigh (when you kiss her ear) from another man’s wife worth someone’s life? Yet too often they are unjustifiably evil. And such are the majority, if there is any consolation in that. Amazing people, exclamation mark, question mark. People are coming who will no longer be afraid of themselves, for he is not afraid of who is not afraid of himself . He who is not afraid of people, people are not afraid of him. I think the original source of evil is in man’s unbearability for himself. If I am unbearable to myself, I will destroy everything around me one way or another. And yet, according to the natural course of things... And even a smile is a primordial grin, a defensive reaction, frightening and baring fangs.
What kind of world is this, where not only friendship crosses out enmity, but enmity crosses out friendship, and the grave and the urn cross out everything. And sick stomachs, and suspicious hearts, and hard streets, and clashes of ideas, all of humanity burns with hatred and ashes. There is enough time to die in ignorance, but since we live, what are we to celebrate, what are we to say? What to do? And we all just fight to the death – Why? In fact, why am I fighting myself?
Why else would we live if not to discuss (at least) the nightmare and horror of this whole life. God, how we grow old, and some of us go mad, and everything changes viciously – it is this vicious change that hurts, because as soon as something becomes clear and complete, it immediately falls apart and burns.
The world has not surprised me for a long time. I think that there is only one law in it – the multiplication of evil. Apparently, time is destined for the same thing.
A philosopher is a thinker, that is, following Descartes, he will say that it is all about good and evil, that good is substantial, and evil is functional. That is, good can exist without evil, but evil cannot exist without good. And this means that it is impossible to draw a clear line between good and evil. And, throwing out evil, we have to throw out good along with it. It is this good that man yearns for.
But Kant did not pay attention to the phenomenon of counterfeit good. It was noticed by V. Solovyov and described. Firstly, principles can be different. Good and bad. And there are no principles for selecting principles. There is morality. And it must precede taste. Secondly, on the basis of principle it is possible to establish mass production of counterfeit good, i.e. evil. Which Kant did not allow. Thirdly, principles are possible even for the unscrupulous. This very possibility forces us to recognize conscience as something that precedes all principles.
"The choice of the place of theft by criminals is determined primarily by the availability of the objects of the criminal attack, as well as the ability to steal them quickly and unnoticed. The carelessness of the victims themselves plays a certain role here (leaving the key under the mat near the front door, inviting casual acquaintances into the house, leaving things unattended, etc.)."
Chapter 10. Human Nature
Hundreds of miles of deserted, monotonous, burnt-out steppe cannot induce such despondency as one person, when he sits, talks and it is not known when he will leave.
The point about your stupidity. Here we can and should talk for a long time, because your stupidity is boundless and immense, like the Universe. I do not ignore you – you are simply insignificant. Worse than a scoundrel, because a scoundrel at least sometimes rests, and a fool never. A journey to the land of unafraid idiots. It's high time to scare.
We are, first of all, what the world makes of us, and the main properties of our soul are imprinted on it by the environment. This is not surprising, because to live means to become accustomed to the world. The general spirit with which it meets us is transmitted to our life.
Many people are like sausages: whatever they are stuffed with, that is what they are (carry inside themselves). There is no tragedy or encroachment on the individual in all this. After all, if a person's worldview is formed by television, it means that he never had one. The judgments of a more experienced person will seem to others not at all groundless. The mind of such a person can be likened to a tree with many roots. And at the same time, we often meet people whose mental abilities resemble a stick stuck in the ground. No one is happy with their condition, but everyone is happy with their mind.
Dynamic worker – always hanging out somewhere. Possess presentation skills – am a great liar. Sociable – chat a lot on the phone. Sociable – supports every drinking bout. Think quickly – always have excuses ready. Possess balanced judgments – do not make decisions. Pay attention to details – slowpoke. Have leadership skills – yell louder than everyone else at meetings. Have a sense of humor – know a lot of dirty jokes. Focused on career advancement – ready to do any dirty trick for the sake of my career. Loyal to the interests of the company – such a donkey that he cannot find a job anywhere else. Strive for promotion – treat employees to beer. Calm character – sleep at work.
Freedom is simply emptiness, space.
— The yard is empty, anyone can move in. It is not occupied, it is free.
- This apartment is empty, it is free.
- This woman is free. She doesn't have a husband, and you can court her.
- This man is free. He has no position.
- I'm free, not busy.
Everyone runs from "freedom": a worker – to employment, a person – to a position, a woman – to a husband. Everyone – to something. Everything is better than freedom, "something" is better than freedom, there is nothing worse than "freedom" at all, and it is needed by a hooligan, a loafer and a pimp.
They didn't like him, and he didn't like them. They just grumbled, complained to no one. Pay attention to their complaints and their petty squabbles and brand them with offensive expressions. Get rid of, and thereby eliminate from life, an animal that could bite. They didn't poison him. They didn't harm him intentionally, but simply because some people were pursuing their own interests. They simply tried to achieve the best in everything: so that there would always be food on the table – and whatever that food turned out to be, to divide it into slices.
There is no direct evil in them – only pettiness, like in any of us. Being good – it wears a person out so much. The diversity of their goals and tasks. The whole world vibrates with intersecting hidden interests. If you help a friend in trouble, he will surely remember you when he is in trouble again.
And now I'll have to pretend to be God knows what all evening... If I have to pretend to be cordial, I can easily blurt out something outrageous. It's impossible to live with people knowing their ulterior motives. People's actions are the best translators of their thoughts.
He was constantly given to understand that he was eating bread for nothing. People have nothing better to do than to harm you, asshole. And if they harm you, then that's what you deserve, asshole. Don't touch what doesn't concern you. Give yourself the right to establish in time: it's not surprising that those who constantly mumble something of their own. You take the side of the persecutor to make sure that there is no persecutor here.
A handful of broken glass, – she made grimace after grimace... Pick up a twig from the ground and draw a circle in the sand. Draw not with chalk, but with love, of what will be, drawings. There is no reason to be offended. It is all one circle. Life always strives to fulfill our desires, no matter how strange they may be. No desire is given to you separately from the power that allows it to be fulfilled. Play while the game is in progress. Games are very serious. This does not necessarily mean that they play in order to win. You can make a move out of the pleasure of its invention. The end of the game is the beginning of the game. It is not good for people to have their desires fulfilled. Not all games allow you to save.
It is precisely infinity that seems to be the <meaning> that man seeks, for what <meaning> is there in the infinite? Its incomprehensibility? But then the highest meaning is in misunderstanding, and admiration is the most pleasant form of misunderstanding. Then our meaningless tautologies are suddenly filled with meaning, since for the finite the only possibility of creating infinity is to close the circle of being. “Finity,” as Nancy rightly wrote, is not in principle a denial of “infinity”: “Finity is not so much that we are not infinite – corporeal, mortal, etc. – but that we are infinitely finite.” Although, of course, corporeality, visibility, mortality and being-with-others are the “infinitely finite.”
And she picked at the sand with a stick. Always unexpectedly. It begins and leads to the realization that the action is insignificant, but always means something. The unaddressed eyes. A fight without witnesses. Very quiet. The pigs are sleeping. But the blind are always wary. Ladders, days, touches, years. I think, if I try. I am sad. Who is he, who needs this? Let him come out of the darkness. And on the ladder is darkness, bosom darkness. I will wait for you. You will not climb up on your own.
It looks like this: a person notices that, judging by the clock, quite a lot of time has passed (several hours, for example), but he does not understand where this time has gone, and cannot remember what he was doing all this time. Such time lapses are a rather alarming symptom that needs to be paid attention to.
They say you can pick at the ground with your finger and smell it to find out where, what country you've ended up in; I pick at existence, and it smells of nothing. Where am I? What is "the world"?
Psychogenic fugue ("flight": a person, for reasons unknown to him, moves somewhere far from home, completely forgetting who he is and how he got to the place where he was found; such a fugue should be distinguished from a similar phenomenon caused by organic brain disorders).
Petrarch says: "Where the days are dark and short, a race is born that does not feel pain when it dies." She belonged to a race that scrubs its wares at night and lays them out on the counter, waiting for a better buyer.
A healthy, energetic, self-satisfied person, a person with a great and clearly conscious vitality; greedy for life, or, better to say, not so much a desire for life as a desire to "enjoy" himself, coupled with a complete absence of the idea of death. Yes, yes, they are strong, they have such serious faces. They are not sensitive when it comes to other people, and rarely delve into their situation, unless they want to figure them out for their own purposes. They do not respect rights, unless they respect the one who has them, and this happens rarely.
It is obvious that in a store, even a major specialist in the field of civil law rarely thinks about which article of the Civil Code he is implementing in his relationship with the seller (unless, of course, these relations acquire the character of a conflict). Any objectification reveals itself only as alienation, hostility and strangeness. Although the freedom of another cannot be alienated, conflict is the basis of people's relations with each other.
So, for object relations to be mature, there must be at least two objects with certain polar relations between them. That is, a father is needed. When a father appears, then a choice appears – one can be relied upon, the other can be pushed off. After all, reality consists of binary oppositions, the so-called modalities: good – bad, possible – impossible. The first pair is called an axiological modality, and it is the most fundamental in early infancy. The feeling of good and bad appears first: good is satiety and warmth, bad is hunger and cold.
And it turns out that the members of the opposition "bad – good" are distributed in such a way that the mother turns out to be good, and the child, his Self, turns out to be bad (in depression, the Self is always thought of as bad, which, due to its badness, is punished by this depression), as a result of which, as the child thinks, the mother sometimes leaves him. And there is no one else, no one else to rely on, so this also threatens psychosis – manic-depressive.
The number one is not yet a number, because if there is only one thing, it means that there is nothing to compare it with; two is also not a number, because it is simply two times one. The first number is three, because here the fundamental concept of inequality arises: two is more than one. That is why the appearance of the third character – the father, forms mature object relations and adds another important operator to the axiological modal operator – the deontic one: must – can – can’t. Why can the inequality relation form mature object relations? Because there is something to choose from: you can remain faithful to your mother and oppose yourself to your father, you can join your father and form a coalition with him against your mother.
An adult accumulates many such object triangles, for example, he may have a mother and a wife, and he usually builds an alliance with his wife against his mother or vice versa. He has a boss, subordinates and colleagues, and again he must and has the opportunity to choose who to join and against whom, who to love and who to hate, who to command and who to obey.
One could object to this, why is it necessary to enter into a conflict with someone, why can't all three live in harmony? Apparently, this is a universal socio-psychological law. For example, in politics, in order for democracy to be possible, at least two parties are needed that enter into conflict with each other, in the struggle for the voter and for power – because conflict is development. There may not be a big difference between Republicans and Democrats, but the living space is arranged in such a way that they must conflict in the struggle for the voter. And so two parties are an analogue of a father and mother, and the voter is an analogue of our little subject. He votes all the time, and he needs to make a choice, because life is arranged that way. The voter cannot vote for both the Democrats and the Republicans. In the same way, a child cannot love his father and mother equally, he must make a choice. This is the lesser evil that this democracy of object relations gives. But if there is only one party, this leads to totalitarianism, the analogue of which is dyadic object relations. When there is no one to choose from, there will be no democracy. Thus, a totalitarian regime is an analogue of psychosis (it is not for nothing that almost all totalitarian leaders were psychotic or near-psychotic), and a democratic regime is an analogue of neurosis: everything is not smooth here, but you can still live.
We invite a business partner to lunch at a restaurant to discuss an important issue in an informal setting. When friends or a loved one come to visit, we always treat them. Why is that? Why do we treat them to food and not, for example, sit them on the toilet? Have you ever thought about it? It's simple. There is a deep animal instinct living in us that dictates the rule of existence: "You can only share food with your own." Only members of your own pack have access to prey in the animal world. The rest are driven away. Because food is the basis of survival. Therefore, in order to establish a trusting relationship, we arrange a joint meal. We use the instinct that lives in us. The same is true with alcohol. Or with the Indian peace pipe. The cruel law of the jungle, written deep in our brain, says: "You can only relax among your own." Because if you relax among strangers, they will tear you apart. The same is true with fire.
Not physical violence, not beatings, but the lack of my own hole – the lack of a place to escape their love. Life outside of them – that's where my problem suddenly appeared. Outside of these stupid, stupid, traumatized and poor people, whose love I absorbed and consumed as naturally, imperceptibly, as one absorbs and consumes colorless oxygen, breathing air. I lived with these people every day. Cruelty is everywhere, their entire families, hammered into them from childhood ... And this city was built for them. Should I be the one who kills, or the one who is killed? Either: someone will say about me that I'm from there. Or: will they talk about me there? No matter what disgusting nastiness you do, there will be someone who will like you. This is not love, not a soulmate. You are just freaks ... 90 percent of everything is complete shit.
There is the madness of pride and there is the frenzy of insignificance. Insignificances are dangerous because they are cunning and unceremonious. Their eyes are emphatically ordinary. Their souls are cruel as a rake, their life is cruel as a gunshot. Counting money has accelerated their thoughts. A pair of ears has been attached to listen to the chant of traders. Toadies. This kind of people is quiet and shapeless, like jelly, very many of them are coming into the world these days. Their hearts are like sad swamp toads. We are hollow people, we are scarecrows, not people. We bow together – dust in our heads, we mumble together quietly and dryly, without feeling and essence, like the wind in dry grass or rats in a pile of glass and tin. Forget it, they are animals, a digestive type ... Organics are 99 percent of all humanity. They are pushing at us with their crude – wordless delirium. I hate the little details of their private lives. But I stand rooted to the spot and listen.
People are like lice – they get under your skin and stay there. You scratch and scratch until you bleed, but you can never get rid of these lice. Wherever I go, there are people making a mess of their lives. Life without real collapse, without mysterious or suspicious failures, is of little value to us. Ask whether a hurricane that sweeps away everything in its path is good? Ask whether an express train that deafens patriarchal villages with its whistle is good? I am as confused in words as others are in deeds. I thirst for new accidents, new stunning disasters and monstrous failures.
A person will feel dizzy at a height for which he was not created. You cannot talk about the ocean to a frog living in a well. You cannot talk about snow to a summer insect – a creature of one season... A small toad hiding in a snowdrift has large eyes and a tender throat. But you cannot love it. And not because it has crooked legs. It just sees the world completely differently. Frogs must be caught at night, when they are absorbed in their croaking. A frog must be eaten whole, having torn off the skin and first fried over a fire or boiled. Newts and salamanders can be caught under rotten logs or under stones in bodies of water. (My stomach gets cold, as if I swallowed a toad.)
Following Kant, any person becomes a nanny of his random properties. Kant's pragmatic anthropology is not anthropology, but psychology. A textbook for those who are busy with self-digging, studying their own characteristics. And at the same time, it is a betrayal of the universal. Philosophy.
There are people in the world who care about you... These are people who hate you... If only I knew what their secret is and where they get so much moisture in their dry, like blotting paper, lives. Of course, I envy you. Success is the only unforgivable sin in relation to your loved one. Oh, how they live, trembling in anticipation of the coming day or night, how wonderfully suspicious they are, how they can distinguish intonations a little more poisonous and looks a little more askance. They can hear the voices of those standing under a tree in the noise of the leaves, decipher them to their disadvantage and, offended, run away in tears or yell, aiming their splayed fingers at surprised eyes. To take revenge and be capricious. The ability to quickly guess people's weaknesses. So that they do not waste hatred on trifles.
All are crammed full of secret calculations. The exquisite vocabulary of their targeted evil. The insignificance of the results does not atone for the maliciousness of their actions. Nothing to lose! You can ignore their two or three intellectuals, impressionists, confused with directions, sometimes mumbling something to the left, sometimes to the right, in the depths of their fucking souls, all the furious conservatives, hung with prejudices like keychains, dripping subtle subtleties, all the boredom of their hypocrisy. Thought is the most imperceptible form of aggression.
What will please people lost in the flashing of weeks, in the inconspicuous years of the blind? Take something that moves sad people. Their coarse hearts , their stealthy evil and vile and in its own way talented cruelty drove the old soldier into a trance. Who can remain indifferent in their presence? Contact with them is never useless. In the diverse psychological landscape, each of them is a special case. What do people hide, except nastiness? Tactics teaches that it is better not to show the advantage achieved. Even when you have to resign yourself for a time, it is not at all necessary to publicly admit your defeat, because too quick a retreat is suspicious.
She begins to sway slightly, as if she is offended.
We can turn around as much as we like, as we do in suspicious places. And I have known for a long time, since my early youth, that "the goat power has millions of goats". I have also known for a long time the bitter and merciless Chekhov quote that "it is not a matter of pessimism or optimism, but that ninety-nine out of a hundred have no brains". Public opinion is a deliberately false opinion, since most people are complete idiots. And the government is only interested in its constant reproduction, regular tax collection and self-promotion. This has always been the case and in all countries and continents, by the way. Optimism in the current times is ordinary cowardice.
When something too good happens to me, I feel like I'm being screwed. When I meet a suspicious look on the street, I, against my will, respond in kind. People with heavy looks always recognize other heavy looks. If someone insults a person to whom I should be grateful in front of me, I suddenly feel good... At such moments, I don't notice the suspicious looks and humbly hang my head... But as soon as I walk away from the offender, I turn around and look at him with disdain. He responds in kind.
Children are not cruel, not evil-natured – they are primitive. Cruelty belongs to the most ancient festive mood of mankind. In order to be happy, you need to have a good stomach, an evil heart and no conscience at all.
The influence of this period is also indicated by the numbers: the so-called "prehistoric" period is at least 200 thousand generations, and the so-called "historical" period is only 200. Note that biology teaches us that each organism is a fluctuating sum of the properties of all its predecessors. Everything that fixed history (200 generations from Sumer) presents to us is a trifle. By the time writing arose, homo had finally formed and was only realizing its characteristics.
Like in the fairy tales about sons of clay, whom childless parents mold to their own destruction, and they eat all their food, then all the cattle, then them, and then half the village. A figure in a field can grow and absorb everything that is there, except for it.
Cruelty, so desperately senseless, like poetry. Because people there, in their endless lives, wander carelessly, what they messed up yesterday, they fix today. But I was not thinking about them – about the fragrant honey that they all collected together today. Unlike the bee, we are not able to extract honey from the bitter flowers of life. Therefore, for many of us, work seems like hard labor, it becomes a curse.
A bee is a great example for us. Every minute while it is collecting honey, it finds sweetness in weeds and even in poisonous flowers, that is, where it would never even occur to us to look for something pleasant. ( "If you only knew from what rubbish poetry grows...")
The forest falls silent when we pass through it; we are the apex predators, and life is only an appendage to the right to kill. Caudwell, alone of all of them, dared to recall the primitive and, as might be expected, aestheticized the life of primitive people: being collectivists, they were also poets. "We call poetry that elevated speech of primitive people, which remained the privilege of celebrations, we see that, evolving, it became prosaic and ramified, finding application in theology, history, philosophy, drama. (Respect for the personality of Caudwell, who died in Spain as part of the International Brigade, should not prevent us from seeing his mistakes.)
Heeling (she swayed like a boat in the waves) and squinting (her gaze lingered on nothing, slid off everything, shied away from the malicious, hostile world: she was a bit of a fool, she knew it herself), squeezing the railings, dragging herself up, swaying from room to room, she sang. Rubbing the tall mirror, squinting at her own wobbly reflection and humming something that probably thundered from the stage twenty years ago and, catchy, made many dance, but now in the toothless mouth of a day laborer had finally parted with meaning and was – foolishness itself, and cheerfulness, and patience, patience that defies everything; and when she, leaning over, rubbed, washed, scraped, she told us that life was given to us to suffer grief, to always get up at dawn and flop into bed at night, to always toss and turn and tidy up this and that... It wasn't such a good world, she had already become convinced of it after seventy years. She was all bent over with fatigue. How much longer, she asked, groaning, fidgeting on her knees under the bed, wiping the boards – how much longer would it last? But again she rose to her feet, straightened up, strained herself, and with that evasive look of hers, as if escaping from her own face, from her own anguish, she stood before the mirror, and, smiling at something, again began to shake out the rugs, wipe and put the porcelain back in place, and looked sideways into the mirror, as if she finally had something to console herself with, and an incorrigible, even indecent hope was woven into her plaintive litany.
In a moment, without warning, Mrs. Ramsay was a twenty-year-old girl possessed with joy. A wild night owl. Yes, yes, let them come, of course, let them come, she cried and laughed; and running up the last two or three steps she turned to one, then to the other, and laughed, and wrapped her scarf round her shoulders, and said she should dreadfully like to go, and they would probably be dreadfully late. Had they a watch?
Remember, looking at people, their recent birth, childhood or imminent death – and you will love them: such weakness! I did not wish them trouble or punishment from above – neither their beautiful books, nor their families, nor them personally, I did not wish anything bad, but I wanted to trample and kick their names. (Your mongrel texts. Like a clean meadow, a lawn with flowers. How not to trample.) In the words of one Englishman, people “not improved by reading”.
If it weren't for the mosquitoes, I wouldn't give a damn about Paris! I'll find it and let you know – oops, another one – that means I'll find it and let you know, a-au, how it all is. All this old stuff... with lots of eyelashes and boobs!.. To the glorious workers and lonely passers-by – Hurray! Okay, let them scurry about... and I'm slipping away!.. The gate... the door... op!.. I'm running in zigzags... it's already evening... faster!.. faster!.. I can only think at home... I can't do anything on the street... only at home!.. I'll be back soon... I'll be back... definitely! Yes! We'll catch the provocateur! We won't let the bitch get away! I don't want to live unless I hang the slacker!
Where is the hero running? What is his goal? He seems not to know. Here, an analysis of dream symbols will help us. The motive of riding a horse, like any rhythmic movement, dancing, climbing stairs and a mountain, symbolizes sexual intercourse. Anyone who knows the old Swabian expression "to take a horse out of the stable" will not doubt the correctness of this interpretation.
The dream lives inside me, gradually taking away my strength... They worry, that's how they feel useful. – How do you know? – You'll figure it out while you're alive... Darling, anyone can say anything. Anyone knows everything. And if they don't know, they'll find out... But they're not here anyway... I want you to send everything to hell... – Darling, how many times do I have to tell you – you've dialed the wrong number. You're mistaking me for the wrong person... And who are you anyway? "All your thoughts about happiness in the immemorial past or future are nothing more than nonsense. Cure yourself of nostalgia and stop believing in children's tales about the beginning and end of time. Eternity is just a dead duration that only morons are interested in. Eternity belongs to the gods, and its moments belong to us. Give free rein to the moment, let it absorb your fantasies."
Fifty-nine seconds out of every minute – not now. We must not waste our days. We must sacrifice them so that they exist! In the beginning and in the end – there is only the word. And now it exists, you bastard, and we believe in it and hope, will it really fail? But still, bitch, you couldn’t resist... It’s obvious that you’ve had little happiness in your life. Of course! Happiness should be normal, and not just the pleasure of being able to breathe air. There are more serious things, – she shouted from the bed through the open door.
He speaks, chewing his toast – pardon: his toasted tartines – making a disgusting sound, like a mouse gnawing at the rafters. He takes a long sip of milky tea, wipes his mouth slowly, and says to me, looking me straight in the eye, man to man, “Okay. Let’s lay our cards on the table.”
I grabbed my shoes and started putting them on. Then my jacket. I muttered that it was time for me to go. That's when he started to whip me with his slow, booming voice: You're so sublime, aren't you? Are you waiting for an epiphany in some palm-tree hell with your hothouse, half-baked friends? Well, I'll tell you what. I like my job in this city, I like sitting in my office from morning until night, and I like the battle of wits, and the fight for money and prestigious things, and you can call me a complete psycho. I like what I do for one reason: I only do what I like. He continued to aim and fire: Go to hell. You and your downward gaze. We're all lap dogs, it just so happens that I know who's petting me. But keep in mind – the more people like you drop out of the game, the easier it is for people like me to win. Then, out of the blue, he asked if I knew how I was going to die.
Bastards wear suits, bitches wear stockings , and walk with a wobbly gait . Everyone wants to remain anonymous. People carry sacks of goods; the dogs at the barns are vicious! And such dogs in suits walk along the corridors that you have to growl all the time yourself, so as not to be eaten by mistake. – "Eh... listen: take the dog away." This reality of concentration camps, this coordinated movement around the circle of torturers and tortured, this loss of human appearance foreshadow future possibilities that threaten the destruction of everything... Of course, I am talking now about the world of big cities, about the world of men and women from whom the time machine has squeezed every last drop of juice; I am talking about the victims of modern progress, about that pile of bones and tie links that the artist has such a hard time covering with flesh.
Stop fighting with the world at least once a day. It is bad to feel hostility towards other people, regardless of whether you have serious reasons for it or whether they irritate you just by looking at you. And, of course, you cannot allow such feelings to persist after the reason has disappeared. The tension in your nervous system will cost you too much.
Be merciful, he said in a simple, quiet, human voice. But, my God, is it not madness to hope for pity here! It cannot be otherwise, such is the time when mercy turns into cruelty, and only in cruelty is there true mercy. The law is merciless, but wise. No one should be beaten in vain... they beat for the sake of order. No one wants to be evil consciously. People, as a rule, are not evil, unless they are angered. The world is good – only one thing is not good: us.
There are no bad times, there are only bad people. Here we are, people, out of fear of each other, building states, surrounding ourselves with policemen, soldiers, public opinion, this collective pharaoh. How many different people on earth rule... and frighten each other with all sorts of fears... Most start screaming about justice only when it concerns them personally. If the state is big and strong enough to give you everything you want, it is big enough to take everything you have. I hate cynicism for its universal accessibility. Ehe-he, gentlemen, gentlemen... For the first time in so many years – an absurd desire to cry. These tears welling up in my eyes for no reason came from afar.
Fearful waiting and greedy use of the moment awaken all the cowardly and egotistical inclinations of the soul. Whereas real need is capable of improving and warming people. An interesting tendency: the more of us there are, the more alien we are to each other. Or maybe we have simply become more honest? Do we not close our eyes to what has existed at all times? True, cowards are always curious. It is still amazing how disgusting we are with the people we are about to ask for a favor!
Man is lonely. And antisocial. If he were a social animal, then agreement would precede disagreement. And Aristotle would be right. For one cannot be a social being without agreement with others. But Aristotle paid for "agreement" by giving up the idea of progress. The very possibility of it. Kant is a man of progressive views. A theorist of the Age of Enlightenment. That is why he opposed Aristotle. After all, if agreement precedes disagreement, then there is no possibility for progressive change. Man has nothing to change into. He has no room for expansion. And he must trust nature. And this means that man ceases to be a work of man. Something that still needs to be done. A substance – a subject. Under these circumstances, people could only degrade. As in Plato.
I see there are many Indians here, but no leaders. And you say – people, here it is just who sat astride whom. And so shameless. One will offend you, another will deceive, and a third will simply laugh at you. For people are cruel, as much as they are paid for it, careless, corrupt, lazy, etc. The sullen venality of everything and everyone. Disgusting and disgusting. Do you really think that any act is possible that would not be judged crookedly? Dodgy papers, dodgy people and deceptive things ... And we waste our lives in line for the truth. As soon as I talk to a person for half an hour – and I will write an unprincipled summary about him. Do not sympathize with anyone, but love yourself infinitely. Meet those who despise you with contempt. Anyone who has done evil – will repay in kind.
Consider cuckoos. For what seems like millions of years, they lay their eggs in the nests of smaller songbirds, who then sit on the eggs and feed and raise the chicks. A clear behavioral error, but evolution has not yet exterminated these songbirds, perhaps because the error is not serious enough. A second, parallel explanation for why mental errors can be so persistent emerged in the late 1990s: our brains are designed to survive and reproduce, not to seek truth. In other words, we need to think primarily in order to persuade others. Those who can do this secure power, influence, and access to the greatest number of resources. And this, in turn, turns out to be a decisive advantage when mating and raising offspring. The fact that we are not necessarily searching for truth when we think is well illustrated by the book market. Novels are bought much more often than business literature, although the latter contains immeasurably more truth about life.
We think we engage in conversation to gain information about other people; in reality, we prefer to talk rather than listen. If we did everything we could to form an idea of how the world really is, we would never consciously disagree, but in real life we contradict each other all the time.
Observe what happens during human communication. Why does a person open his mouth? – The main idea that a person tries to convey to others is that he has access to much more prestigious consumption than they might think. At the same time, he tries to explain to others that their type of consumption is much less prestigious than they were naive to think. All social maneuvers are subordinated to this. Moreover, only these questions cause persistent emotions in people. Only the specific type of consumption that will be discussed will change. This can be the consumption of things, impressions, cultural objects, books, concepts, states of mind, and so on... My mother told me that a person needs very little money to live. He needs everything else only for bragging.
It is known that small children almost reflexively reach out to any object that catches their eye. They are also initially unable to refuse any "mischief" that brings pleasure if there is an irritant that encourages it. One small boy who was forbidden to pick his nose answered his mother: "I don't want to, but my hand wants to, and I can't stop it.")
During life, this fear of losing his property is similar to the fear of children who, having filled their laps with pebbles, imagine themselves to be the owners of wealth and tremble over them. If you take one of these pebbles from a child, he begins to cry, if you give it back, he begins to rejoice. Since children have not yet formed knowledge about the state of things, it is easy to make them laugh and cry. According to the observations of many psychologists, this phenomenon is associated with the phase of infantile (and actually childish) modeling of the world. For a child, this is a rudimentary way of mastering the outside world – arrangement, classification, manipulation. What you can’t get always seems better than what you have. So the fool, considering himself the eternal owner of earthly, transient wealth, trems over it like a child! Such is man: he truly values only what has been taken from him. People simply do not understand how happy they are. Until this happiness is taken away. This is the romance and idiocy of human life.
But here the mice will gnaw your party and all your slogans and all your attempts to reach an agreement are nothing. Here you are asked in bewilderment: "Who did you reach an agreement with?" Just like parents ask a five-year-old who has exchanged his bicycle for a pebble: "What? What did you say to that boy? What oath? Let's go to his parents!" And it turns out that your words are worthless , and your agreements are worthless, and you only scare yourself, and the more you frown, the more people think that you are just trying to fart. And at first you feel sorry for yourself, and then you are not even interested.
If you want to be freed from any illusions about human nature, there is only one thing you have to do: make a large sum of money quickly; you will immediately see a flock of hypocritical vultures descending on you. But to be freed from the scales, it is important to make that sum: the really rich – those who are rich from birth and have lived their whole lives in luxury – seem to be immune to such things. They seem to have inherited with their wealth a kind of unconscious, innate cynicism, an innate knowledge that almost everyone with whom they have to deal will have one aim – to shake their money out of them by hook or by crook; so they behave cautiously and, as a rule, keep their capital intact. But for those who were born poor, such a situation is much more dangerous; after all, I myself am enough of a scoundrel and a cynic to know what is wanted of me, and more often than not I have managed to wriggle out of the traps laid; but of course I have no friends left.
Let's remember how many action films there are with the following story: old friends go on a job together (a big robbery, a scam, a treasure hunt, etc.), but the resulting jackpot quickly makes them enemies. Someone appropriates the result of their joint efforts, the heroes set up, pursue and kill "each other", in a word, the relationship of comradeship and pangs of conscience are cancelled out by just one circumstance – such wealth must be possessed alone.
Society as a system is objectively interested in each person performing socially significant functions, i.e. contributing to social progress. Based on Aristotle's understanding of the value of community, MacIntyre examines the conditions of personal self-identification and comes to the conclusion that an individual life is experienced as successful only if it can be presented as a narrative. The narrative form of organizing human life requires depicting the search for "good", in which individual episodes can be understood as suffering, temptations, dangers and deviations. The inability to tell about one's life in certain ideological schemes is usually associated with a painful experience of existential meaninglessness, which can intensify to the point of suicide.
Human life is a storytelling process, beginning with the story of a baby sucking at its mother's breast. However, Melanie Klein's and Wilfred Bion's discussions of what a baby is, despite their importance for psychoanalytic theory and practice, are extremely naive from the point of view of reconstructing mythological thinking. A baby cannot have ideas about a "bad breast" or a "good breast".
Firstly, a person very rarely asks himself: "What do I want?", preferring not to know it. Just in case, there is a standard list of moral and material goods, some random enumeration. But if you seriously think about each of the listed values, be it a separate apartment, a woman's love, a rare stamp for a collection; if you ask yourself: do I want exactly this or do I want something else with this – then, perhaps, the answer will not be found right away, and it is unknown whether it will be found at all.
Oblivion – (according to Martin Heidegger) a type of human existence consisting of constant attempts to escape the burden of responsibility for existence by immersing oneself in everyday affairs, trying to console oneself with the help of these affairs, to distance oneself from oneself. Thus, the everydayness of existence consists of concern (caution), common care (care shared with others) and oblivion.
Those who believe in their own rightness – and only they remain in the memory of mankind – adhere to the most undogmatic creature in the world: the public whore. Detached from everything and open to everything; adapting to the mood and thoughts of the client; changing her manner of speech and facial expression every time; ready to seem sad or cheerful, remaining indifferent; squandering venal sighs; responding to the pranks of her upstairs neighbor with an enlightened-false look, she offers the mind a model of behavior that can compete with the model of behavior of the sages. To live without convictions in relation to men and to oneself – such is the great lesson of prostitution, a wandering academy of sobriety of mind, as marginal in relation to society as philosophy. "Everything I know I learned in the school of whores," should exclaim the thinker who accepts everything and refuses everything, who, following their example, has become an expert in the tired smile, because people are only clients for him, and the sidewalks of the world are a marketplace where he sells his bitterness, just as his comrades sell their bodies. If prostitution had not had a healthy basis, the world would not be sick with it.
It is not for nothing that they say that the best abbesses of women's monasteries are former prostitutes. They, leading a dissolute, depraved way of life, compensate by accumulating in themselves the potential that allows them to willingly engage in the moral education of youth.
The smart one understands how everything works in the world, and the wise one knows how to act in spite of it. Faith in God is like musical ear, it is given by chance and has nothing to do with morality. People of great morality are almost always people of damaged minds. In essence, only one thing depends on a person: his own face.
I have found as much evil in myself as in all men, but I hate action, the mother of all vices, and have therefore caused no one pain. Not being aggressive, not greedy, not energetic and impudent enough to oppose others, I leave this world to be as it was before me. Revenge presupposes a momentary vigilance and discipline of consciousness – a costly constancy, while the indifference of forgiveness and contempt makes the pastime pleasant and empty. Meanwhile, hatred is equivalent to a reproach that we dare not express to ourselves, equivalent to intolerance towards our ideal embodied in another person. Any morality is a danger to kindness; only carelessness saves the latter. Having chosen the phlegmatic nature of an idiot and the apathy of an angel, I have withdrawn from action, and since kindness is incompatible with life, I have decomposed myself in order to become kind.
Many children express or at least feign protest, but I didn't care. I was a philosophizer from the time I was a toddler. I set myself against life on principle. On what principle? On the principle of futility. Everyone around me was fighting. I never even tried. And if I created such an appearance, it was only to please someone, but deep down I never thought of struggling. If you explain to me why, I will reject your explanations, because I was born stubborn, and this is inevitable.
If I had never been engaged in unraveling the irreparable... We can tremble without much effort, but the ability to control our own trembling is already an art, as the history of all rebellions confirms. And they do not want to admit the most ordinary truism, according to which all our troubles begin precisely when we suddenly discover an opportunity to improve something. All varieties of talent, as a rule, are associated with a certain lack of ceremony. However, with all this, there is nothing more fruitful than a kept secret. It torments us, gnaws at us, threatens us.
The phone call interrupts my thoughts, which I would not have completed anyway.
Chapter 11. Camp
A camp school is a rather funny phenomenon. According to Soviet laws, secondary education is mandatory, and those prisoners who do not have it, regardless of age, are forced to study in their free time. The means of coercion are the usual ones – a punishment cell, deprivation of a parcel or a visit. Of course, studying in such a school is more of a convention, the fulfillment of a duty, than the acquisition of knowledge. Especially for older people who, tired of work, simply doze off during classes.
Young guys go to school to have fun, to look at the teachers – mostly women. They masturbate right in class, sitting at their desks, practically in front of the teacher. You won't see any other women in the camp, and everyone dreams of starting an affair with the teachers, most often the officers' wives. It can't get to cohabitation, according to camp conditions, but the lucky ones get all the pleasures at once. The amorous officers' wives will secretly bring tea, and vodka, and will always send a letter. They are also bored in the cramped officers' settlement, usually located near the camp, far from large settlements. There is no entertainment, not even a movie. The same circle of acquaintances – the husband's colleagues, whom they don't even want to visit, they are sick of each other to death. The only hope is to start an affair in the camp, with a younger prisoner. Of course, the chosen one is envied by the entire camp, and he struts around – the first guy in the village. And husbands, without hiding it, are jealous, cruelly persecute their “rivals”, rot them in solitary confinement, and do not even disdain physical violence.
But then the foreman finds you somewhere under warm heating pipes, and both of you, swearing hoarsely, hating each other and something else in common, drag yourself to your shop. With frozen fingers you twist some nuts, adjust the damned machine, and everything goes wrong, everything falls out of your hands. An hour passes, then another. The monotonous hum of the motor, rhythmic monotonous movements – the usual dexterity returns to your fingers, the pile of finished parts grows and grows.
- Hey, you'll get tired! – your neighbor shouts to you through the noise of the workshop. – Let's go have a smoke!
- Wait, I'll finish now. There's not much left.
And suddenly, with disgust, you notice satisfaction from your dexterity, a job well done, and the desire to finish it without fail. This is probably how a raped woman feels – she screams, beats, scratches, then calms down and suddenly, with disgust and shame, feels physiological pleasure.
It all started when they first whispered to me that the camp commander, having returned from hunting, refused to let me go, was going to consult with someone, call somewhere and wait for an order, and wanted to appeal the decision of the mobile court. Then they posted lists of those whom the court had released and who were leaving in a few days to work on designated construction sites. I was not there. And then three groups left almost one after another, and it became clear that I had been firmly stopped, that my term would be measured out in years, and not in days, as I had begun to hope after the trial. The despair and melancholy that possessed me were somehow strangely familiar, and it was funny that the efforts to remember where I remembered this acute feeling of hopelessness from, these efforts dispelled me and made me feel better. However, I could not remember. There was no such acute combination of injustice, defeat, crushed hopes (how they flared up, the bastards), impotence to think of anything or do anything in my life. There was none. Because after the arrest there was a different feeling: captured! As if in captivity. And that's it. As if I expected it in advance. No, there was nothing like that before.
However, it did happen. Just much later. And I couldn’t remember it at all, because it turned out to be connected not with the realities of my life, but with a dream in a prison cell. This dream was filled to the brim with spring air and spring light. In this air and light of early but sunny April, three or four people came out of my apartment with me (everything was colorful, clear, sounding – complete reality) – investigators and a convoy, who recently brought me home from prison for some reason (and in the dream I even understood that it was necessary) to conduct another search. And we are all standing, immersed in this spring bliss, and a meter away from me my little son is launching a boat made of a matchbox in a babbling brook. And I see him, in excitement and fervor (“my blood” – I think with tenderness and love) splashing in his shoes right through the stream, already wet almost to the knees, and splashed much higher. I stretch out my hand to him, say something educational, check if he is too sweaty, stroke his soft hair, and when I raise my head – my convoy is gone. No investigators, no escort, and their car has already disappeared around the corner of the street. And then this feeling of air and light was suddenly intertwined with such a sense of freedom that I could not help but choke from the happiness that surged up in my throat and woke up at this peak of sleep and joy. In a very dirty, because very overcrowded, in a very stuffy prison cell. And here they came to me, that despair and melancholy that seemed familiar today.
What were you dreaming about, my friend, my soul? Maybe you were dreaming of another deserted city, maybe smoke and the smell of wet wool and sour kumiss. Maybe a lop-eared puppy with wet-black eyes was rubbing against your knee. You often look into them when the night sky is covered with stupid clouds, and you see reflections of star thorns there. The puppy's nose is wet, like steamed earth, and rough to the touch. You simply have nothing to compare this feeling with, because you are only five years old. The puppy is barely older than you, if we compare your ages proportionally. At night you sleep hugging each other, and you are warmed by the warmth of his boundless, sparkling love, which knows no words. You often have dreams where he expresses his feelings with an unrestrained ringing bark, a deafening bark that flows like a sparkling stream straight from his depths and overflows with radiant energy. He jumps around you, tangling in your legs, trying to lick your face, playfully biting your hand. When he grows up, he will happily ride you on his back, covered with thick wavy fur, and a little later, when you gain strength, and he has time to become an adult and experienced, he will patiently teach you to hunt and herd herds. You will walk many roads. Without taking your eyes off the dance of tongues of flame licking the sated night air, watching the sparks flying into the sky, you will sit by the fire, resting after a hard day. He will be, as usual, nearby: full of sedate strength, with fur whitened by time and wisdom. His head rests on your hands, his eyelids are closed, which makes it seem as if he is constantly dozing. And when the sky is covered with heavy autumn clouds, in his devoted bottomless eyes, covered with a veil of approaching blindness, you will, as before, see the sharp points of stars, which have become closer and warmer...
Of course, you can take a whole society hostage: you don't even have to spin the globe for examples. The Bolsheviks began doing this from their first days, and they succeeded. Now it's even easier: society has become atomized, and military technology has improved and become a state monopoly. The newest version (it is present on all continents) does without an army; all you need is a junta and a well-fed guard of unemployed provincial guys.
It is no coincidence that the end of the episode takes place to the music of Pergolesi's "Stabat mater dolorosa" ("The grieving mother stood"). The demons in this case are Stalin and other representatives of the empire of evil, the Bolshevik hell (the episode ends with Lisa, grimacing, saying: "Having gone through half of my earthly life, I found myself in a dark forest" (the beginning of Dante's "Hell"). The cult of power turned into a total death ritual.
The questioning sky shone over Voshchev with the tormenting power of the stars, but the lights in the city had already been extinguished, and whoever had the opportunity was asleep, having eaten his fill of supper. Voshchev climbed down the crumbs of earth into the ravine and lay down there, belly down, to fall asleep and part with himself. But for sleep he needed peace of mind, his trust in life, forgiveness of the grief he had lived through, and Voshchev lay in the dry tension of consciousness and did not know whether he was useful in the world or whether everything would get along well without him. A wind blew from an unknown place, and a suburban dog made his service known with a weak voice of doubt. “It’s boring for a dog; it lives thanks to one birth, just like me.” Voshchev’s body turned pale from fatigue, he felt the cold on his eyelids and closed his warm eyes with them.
And my usefulness to society led me into the dreary icy spaces; here, while they remembered me, they forgot completely that there I was alone, in the void: and as I went into the void, rising above the privates, even above the non-commissioned officers, all party prejudices gradually fell from me, all categories, as you would say: I have one category from the Yakutsk region, you know. And do you know which one? "
- "Which?"
— “Ice category…”
— “What do you mean?”
— The category of ice is the ice of the Yakut province; you know, I carry them in my heart, they separate me from everyone; I carry ice with me in my heart.
So, – Nikolai Apollonovich joked, – “the physical plain of a not so remote province has turned into a metaphysical plain of the soul.”
He decided to move permanently to the Soviet Union. Wittgenstein was politically quite left-wing. He approved of the communist regime, praised Stalin for "giving people work." He also spoke quite positively about Lenin, saying that, despite the fact that Lenin's philosophical works were nonsense, "he still wanted to do something." In Moscow, he really liked the Mausoleum – as a professional, he praised the architecture of this building. Wittgenstein's "Russian project" was as follows. He was going to contact the Institute of the Peoples of the North in Leningrad and go on an expedition to these peoples in the manner of Miklouho-Maclay.
Wittgenstein felt unwell throughout 1937. He made a mistake that is quite typical for most people suffering from depressive disorders. This mistake consists in translating the psychological plane into an ethical one. Wittgenstein suffered from this to varying degrees practically all his life. However, it is possible that this is precisely what creolized in his very unique philosophical work, in particular, in the idea that ethics is inexpressible.
Chapter 12. Money and the Class Approach
What the new French philosophers and the elderly young men of Moscow circles called "postmodernism" was invented solely to ensure that revolutions would never happen again, that no idea or intention would take hold of man seriously, that passion and pathos would no longer disturb society. Western society wanted to prolong as long as possible, and preferably forever, the blissful state of peace and guaranteed rest, and for this purpose the movement "postmodernism" was born.
Well, how is your study going? Are you making progress in your truly humane art? – I’m dragging myself along, my studies are weighing on my shoulders.
And so, having screwed up your ambitious plans, you acted according to what your tongue said – you endured and worked. The matter took place within the limits from A to Z and from there to here.
He's like a machine that throws out millions of newspapers every day, newspapers whose headlines scream of disasters, revolutions, murders, explosions and accidents. But he doesn't feel anything anymore. Unless someone turns off the engine, he'll never know what death is – you can't die if your body is stolen. Someone has to reach into the machine and adjust it, so that the gears fall into place. Someone who will do it without expecting a reward.
Price list, sorted by decreasing meaning. If you have no money in your pocket, no one will say "Hello!" – teased poverty (hoot-hoot). "A hungry hedgehog walks through the forest, does not pick flowers, does not sing songs." The early bird gets up – lives far from work.
To live means to create wealth. Yes, wealth. And for a time they were quite happy – in their own special way: they did not abandon the animal self-confidence that money instills in people. But if this does not work out, poverty is even more merciless to them, since they do not know the possibilities of a culture that allows you to live in poverty and hide it. To be poor is simply a scandal, so poverty is carefully hidden. It is not known what is worse – to admit to poverty or to hide it, to receive assistance from the state or to continue to suffer hardships. The numbers are here, in front of us. But it is not known where the people hiding behind them are. Traces remain. A disconnected phone. An unexpected exit from a club. The other side is the transformation of external causes into internal guilt, into a systemic problem of personal failure. Many of these problems are not brought into the family by the people themselves, although they often think so, and they reproach themselves for this.
After all, we all understand that if there are poor, then there must be rich. And the rich must share with the poor, for the wealth of some is, as Marx said, the objectified suffering of others. A lie that permeates bourgeois circles involved in the sin of exploiting man by man and turning human energy into money as an irrational, alienated end in itself. Such are the grimaces of bourgeois democracy, madam. Money is the "oil" that remains from people, the form in which their life force invested in labor exists after death. The achievements of Tversky and Kahneman are usually assessed at least with an approving nod of the head or in footnotes. However, an economist working within the mainstream continues his research as if this new theory never existed.
The materialized man puts on display the proof of an intimate connection with the goods. Koschei, pining over gold, accumulates goods indulgences – a glorious sign of his real presence among his loyal supporters, an indicator of a real man, that he fights for his place in the pack, and does not whine with his tail between his legs.
There is no person on earth who has never held money in their hands, damn it. However, the rustle of banknotes can only be appreciated by those who remember that tomorrow, at best, the day after tomorrow, it will all end. During the day – profit, on Saturdays you throw money around. Life has been reduced to a constant struggle for money. In any era, most people are busy earning their daily bread, which is eaten, and not the lofty topics that historians write about. Despite all the statements to the contrary, the vast majority of people, above all, want to improve their material well-being. As one of the ancient texts says, "where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." They want more good food, better houses and clothes and a thousand other pleasures. They strive for abundance and health. It does not matter what you are told – you are not being told the whole truth. It does not matter what they talk about – it is always about money. He who speaks the language of money will be understood in any country. The greatest future belongs to money.
But what 's wrong with being rich? It's a virtue, it's attractive. Rich people are nicer, they're less nervous. Nowhere does it let go like on vacation, it's like a vacation from sins. Nowhere else do you want to sin like on vacation. Every semi-finished product is obliged to go somewhere far away once a year to lie on a hot frying pan of the beach for five days on its back, five on its stomach, and fry properly, acquiring the color of victories. In ten days the cheburek is ready.
Standing on the shore or walking along the shore, one can see the figure of a guard, protecting the border of the elements, or a violator, planning to overcome it. On the beach, on the contrary, everything is subordinated to the horizontal, here one does not stand, but lies, surrendering to the scattered peace. If the shore puts between the elements the all-separating "either – or", then the beach is the all-combining "and ... and".
"My American colleagues explained to me that the low level of general culture and school education in their country is a deliberate achievement for the sake of economic goals. The fact is that, having read a lot of books, an educated person becomes a worse buyer: he buys fewer washing machines and cars, and begins to prefer Mozart or Van Gogh, Shakespeare or theorems. The economy of the consumer society suffers from this, and, above all, the incomes of the masters of life – so they strive to prevent culture and education (which, in addition, prevent them from manipulating the population like a herd deprived of intelligence)."
In his work, every person is in some sense a bureaucrat. Work is what is done in the "office". The era of distinct socio-cultural conflict has arrived. We all exist within a vast bureaucratic network, and those who do not fit into its communicative environment become second-class citizens.
After all, it is noticeable that the modern formalization of labor activity turns it in most cases into a simple imitation of a pose of attention or obedience: smiles, speech cliches, etc. Then why not connect a number of modern professions with sadomasochistic, fetishistic, homosexual and other perversions? At least in some literal sense, hired work can be identified with prostitution: here and there you sell your body, time of life, attention, politeness at a set rate. In the most ordinary institution or office (as in the typical fantasy of erotic films) sex really does happen right in the workplace: the boss has his subordinates, “lowers” them morally and physically, gets “additional pleasure” from the very fact of domination, disposing of other people's bodies.
Work becomes a duty, a disciplinary regulation, a way of wasting a significant part of personal time and psychological energy. Working in an office from bell to bell under the strictest supervision of the administration is little different from the forced labor of a prisoner. Work without desire, without creative self-affirmation, without freedom and risk, without meaning and imagination degrades to primitive slavery. Labor in such conditions truly becomes a curse of human existence.
In the spirit of various sinister dystopias, one can imagine such a perspective as a harsh symbiosis of archaism and futuristic technologies, where the territory of the inner world of man itself becomes a zone of disciplinary labor concentration camp. In such a case, human fantasy itself will be enslaved and exploited by external forces, acting under the guise of economic or political rationality.
The exceptional and, in essence, rare phenomenon that some people are concerned not with life itself, but with obtaining the means to live, enters into the very soul of civilization, and it becomes a completely crazy sport of obtaining the means to live – for what, the devil knows. Simply put, in obtaining the means to live, the purpose of life is forgotten, and this is programmed at the level of social structure. If the same word denoting "to feed" confuses feeding and ruling in meaning, and a table is a throne, then the historian has reason to think that language leads him to the trail.
At first they had the formula "money conquers evil", and then they said: "yes, money conquers evil, but crap conquers money". But – what happiness! – to live so that the leashes do not rub and the collar does not press. (Diplomacy consists of stroking the dog until the muzzle is ready.) Why reduce everything to commercialism, is it really impossible to write about feelings, the fundamental line of which is not banknotes? – And that! All this "How to Marry a Millionaire" is complete crap. Crap! Russian ladies need more than just money! They have toujours, lamour, mother of them – the soul opens up, and then does not coagulate for a long time, like blood.
(Freud emphasized that in its function as a gift, feces in culture personify money; it is not for nothing that a burglar leaves a “pile” near the robbed safe as an equivalent of what was stolen).
The Soviet Constitution of 1936 created the best property legislation in the world. Personal property is recognized, but in a form that does not allow exploitation. The bourgeois vein in my head and the pursuit of money will spoil me? Let all the thoughts in the stream of your consciousness and all the illusory material objects around you bring only joy to living beings and protect them from evil!
"A Jew hanged himself for money" is a funny saying. Grotesque, you have to understand. Because no fool would hang himself for money. Because money is inside life. It is needed to make life sweeter. An idea is another matter. An idea is broader than life. And for more you can always give up less (life, for example).
And again the evening, an unexpectedly empty, cold, mechanical evening in which there is no peace, no refuge, no closeness. Immeasurable, chilly loneliness in a thousand-legged crowd, the cold, futile fire of electric advertising, the overwhelming worthlessness of feminine perfection when perfection has crossed the gender line and turned into a minus sign, harming itself, like electricity, like the indifferent energy of males, like planets that cannot be seen, like peaceful programs, like love on the radio. To have money in one's pocket in the midst of a white, indifferent energy, to wander aimlessly, to loiter fruitlessly in the radiance of whitewashed streets, to reason aloud in utter solitude on the verge of madness, to be in a city, a great city, to be for the last time in the greatest city in the world and not to feel a single part of it, means to become a city oneself, a world of dead stone, of vain light, of inarticulate movement, of the elusive and incalculable, the secret perfection of everything that is minus. To walk with money in the crowd at night, to be protected by money, soothed by money, stupefied by money, the crowd itself is money, the breath of money, there is not a single object that is not money, money, money everywhere and that is not enough, and then there is no money or little money, or less money, or more money – but money, always money, and whether you have money or have no money – only money counts, and money makes money. But what makes money make money?
Money is the main regulator of all the main life activities of people in modern society, the equivalent of labor, the main incentive for them, the goal, passion, care and controller. In the conditions of modern civilization, money has objectively become a necessary condition, means and form of life of an individual (money is objectively everything for a person in modern conditions, if the main value is the comfort of life and being, material well-being). Since the significance of money, its existential status for a modern person is exactly this, then the main goal of his activity, his whole life, in its many manifestations, is, of course, money. If the goal, which is money, is truly the Main goal, some truly highest ideal (there is nothing higher) in the consciousness of a modern person, then, accordingly, such a goal justifies many means for its achievement... As, for example, the joint commission on crime of the New York legislature rightly admits, "organized crime is a logical continuation of the free enterprise system."
I don't like people and relationships in America. I don't like the need for constant, continuous, almost manic concern for tomorrow. It's elevated to a religion there. If you don't take care of tomorrow today, tomorrow will punish you for it... There are a huge number of conventions that the middle class has come up with for itself. Mandatory change of car with change of job. Whether you want it or not, but on Friday you have to dress more frivolously than on ordinary days. You have to smile in any situation, regardless of your mood. There are so many of these conventions, and they are so petty... but when they add up to a system, it becomes very difficult to live. Private enterprise has been reduced to consumption and destruction of the environment, titanism gives birth to tyranny.
So what to do? If we had some money, we would go for a walk. We need money for a walk. For taking us for a walk. We were silent for a while, thinking. Meanwhile, the cracked asphalt in front of the house was darkening before our eyes – a light rain was falling. Soon it turned into a downpour, and I was glad. I couldn’t go to bed so early. Quickening my pace, I turned the corner and went back. Suddenly a woman came up to me and asked what time it was. I told her that I didn’t have a watch. And then she blurted out: “My dear sir, do you by any chance speak Russian?” I nodded. The rain was already pouring down in full force. "Would you be so kind as to come into a caf; with me? It's raining and I have no money. And forgive me, for God's sake, but you have such a kind face... Having said all this, she smiles a strange, half-mad smile. "I am alone in the world... Perhaps you can give me some advice... My God, it is so terrible not to have money..." How good, however, it is sometimes to be rich and to receive such completely new impressions, I thought.
I even went into a labor office and immediately left, like a Dostoevsky character. When you're young, you work because you think you need money; when you're old, you already know that you don't need anything except death, so why work? And besides, "work" always means working for someone else, pushing a container for another person, wondering why he doesn't push his own container?
And he wants to write a book, but this damn job takes up all his time. He wants to occupy his mind with something. It's sucking me dry, this fucking job. I want to write about my life, about what I think... I want to shake all the shit out of my insides. "Tell those sons of bitches what you want... Tell them I'm dying..." But he's morbidly afraid of dying before he's solved the theory of types and before he's written his entire work so that it will sound intelligible to the world and be of some use to the science of Logic.
Gerasim wants to marry the laundress Tatyana, but he is deaf, he lacks a bodily function, which prevents him from being a full-fledged person, and therefore the Authority, represented by the lady, refuses him. Then he gets a dog, which becomes something like an orthopedic device, an intermediary between the half-beast Gerasim and the world of people. With this "crutch" Gerasim tries to penetrate into the life of people for the second time, but the Authority again pushes him away. Then Gerasim drowns his "prosthesis" and goes to the village; now he has completely become a beast and the Authority, represented by the lady, is not afraid of him.
The masters are gloomy, the slaves are sad. They discuss the masters. The masters discuss slavery. Every man seeks power over himself. The rich man's pleasures are bought with the tears of the poor, for it is unheard of that the masters were embarrassed by the death of their slave. In a word, if such a "round table" takes place, then only we will be round there – round idiots...
"When Adam plowed and Eve spun, who was the gentleman?" What the burdened and weary with necessity will say is always out of place. Simple joys of the poor. It is not shameful to ask a slave.
When a slave, dissatisfied with his position, takes his master by the elbow as if in jest, he makes him feel the power that his rebellion can have. Hatred without protest, unconditional. There are things that can only be accomplished by violence. Rebellious slaves burn their masters.
Noticing how many broken shop windows, broken elevators, torn telephones, broken carriages, overturned urns, scratched walls, broken monuments and statues, desecrated cemeteries and churches there are in different countries, I immediately get an idea of how big the "bottom" is in society and how well the people who have found themselves there feel. After all, for an ethologist, acts of vandalism are the same as a rooster pecking at the ground – redirected aggression. Demagogues know very well how easy it is to direct the aggression of the bottom into a riot, destructive and bloody. It is much more difficult to help such people feel like full-fledged beings again. It has long been known that the most effective medicine is a sense of personal freedom and satisfaction of the instinctive needs to have one's own piece of land, one's own home, one's own family. In the ability to hold inside or release, depending on one's desire and external circumstances, the products of the body's vital activity, the autonomous or, more precisely, free will of a child is first realized. That is, a will that presupposes the possibility of a real, conscious choice. But the ability to choose and make a decision is not only manifested in what concerns the potty. This is a very delicate situation, and in it, as perhaps in no other, much depends on how much the child has formed basic trust in the world, autonomy and initiative at previous stages of development, and how relationships in the family are built in general.
Chapter 13. Si vis pacem, para bellum
(If you want peace, prepare for war)
A reminder of war seems to them as inappropriate as a reminder of death (which is, in fact, akin to it), and the one who reminds them ends up in the role of a trouble-fete, someone who spoils the party.
You can repeat Lenin's theses about the "redivision of spheres of influence" as much as you like, but the First World War is exactly the case when economics does not explain anything. The Second World War was a turn, a return, a return, a reincarnation, an advertisement, if you like, for the First World War. Of course, Schicklgruber wanted to take revenge and for a while he succeeded. In hindsight, everything takes on prerequisites and meaning, but such global self-destruction was not predicted by anyone. And if you consider that, according to many, there was no Second World War, but one big thirty-year war – this mass madness cannot be explained by anything at all. A la guerre comme ; la guerre – this is how this phrase is written in French. In Russian it should be transcribed as "a la guerre comme a la guerre". The translation of the expression is "at war as at war".
He expressed his thoughts on the state of humanity in a grim parable about an army in enemy territory that has no idea what the purpose of the war is, so that each soldier is forced to make his own peace. And there is no turning back for anyone .
Soldiers from all armies have gathered. It is a world war. In war, everyone dreams of peace, but no one has the courage to lay down their arms and say, "Enough! I have had enough!", and I realize what a worthless soldier I would be if I stupidly ended up at the front. But how can you force a man to go into battle if he has no desire to fight? There are cowards who cannot be made heroes, even if you scare them to death. It is possible that they have an overdeveloped imagination. There are people who do not live in the present, their thoughts either lag behind or run ahead. My thoughts are constantly focused on the peace treaty. Today, the task of humanity is reduced not so much to "wishing for the best" as to "preventing the worst" – considering, again, how many nuclear weapons have been accumulated in the world.
He is like that hero who came back from the war, a miserable, crippled half-idiot who saw his dream come true. When he sits down, the chair falls apart under him; when he enters a room, it is empty; when he puts something in his mouth, a nasty taste remains in his mouth. Everything is as before, nothing has changed, all the elements are the same, and the dream is no different from reality. Don Quixote taught his squire: "Soldiers have some elusive superiority over scientists."
You can exaggerate yourself by having a crest rising above your head. This technique is used by everyone, from fish to birds. Chieftains and warriors also use it, putting on high hats and helmets, often topped with crests, cones, feathers, which are, in fact, inconvenient in battle. And now officers resort to any tricks to make their caps with a higher crown. The program works automatically. After all, the mind knows perfectly well where the top of a soldier's cap is, but still the person seems taller and more significant than he really is.
The greatest evils come from wars and preparations for them. But if it were not for the threat of war, Kant says, people would have no freedom at all, because this threat is the only factor that makes rulers respect humanity and the creative capacity that freedom alone provides. In the present state of culture, Kant believes, eternal peace is unattainable. At this stage, war, not peace, accelerates the movement of humanity. The ox needs grass, and man needs freedom, and therefore war, the state, and evil must exist.
To transform a civil war into an imperialist war is not only the greedy desire of a small community of those in power. It is an objectively necessary process for civilization, comparable to the transformation of handicraft production into industrial production. War is an extremely responsible production process. War is no less than peace, a state necessary for society; the development of society is impossible without it. Some part of the population, say, women and the elderly, finds war less convenient, but a significant part: entrepreneurs, speculators, politicians, military leaders, presidents – finds war more convenient. Peace is more convenient for some sector of the economy, but war is no less convenient for a smaller one. War performs many practical functions – from establishing production and providing jobs to social stabilization and regulating demography. If people die during a war, then the peak of demographic growth occurs at the moment of its end. War is, in a sense, a process of rejuvenation: the old society, like a snake, changes its skin, and if thousands and millions of dead remain in the old skin, these are simply cells that the body sacrifices for rejuvenation. To a greater extent than the enemy state, the object of war is one's own state. War is a method of governance. War is the most reliable means of strengthening law and order. Most emperors and presidents started wars to avoid embarrassment and complications in their own homeland. This is what Agamemnon did, leaving his own house in complete disarray with Aegisthus, Clytemnestra and nervous children in order to become famous in foreign countries. In addition, war is a catalyst for ethical resources. Of course, firefighters show courage at a fire, a businessman shows will by selling defective goods, housewives demonstrate self-sacrifice by forgiving their husbands for cheating. But this is a rather low percentage of the use of the heroism inherent in humanity. It is rare for a middle manager to think of giving his life for a top manager, but giving his life for a commander is a common occurrence in war. Heroes become examples for the nation, and standards of behavior become higher. It can be expected that the massacre of civilians will add to the pantheon of heroes: the sculptural ensembles of Greek temples are impossible without the Trojan War.
She died in my arms, saying, "I don't want to die." That's what death is. It doesn't matter what uniform the soldiers are wearing. It doesn't matter if their weapons are modern. I thought, if everyone saw what I saw, we would never fight again.
They beg me to write about the war, but everyone needs a beautiful and heroic war, and the one we were in, with dirt, lice, and scoundrel commissars – no one needs it, and I cannot lie about the war, because the longer you lie about the past war, the closer the future war becomes.
— Did you distinguish yourself in the war?
The patient repeated “at war?” with a questioning intonation.
It gives words a special meaning. To record: a very important symptom.
People dying on the battlefield "move like shrimps." "A man should give his blood as a woman gives her milk."
- In the war? – asked the patient. World War. A fight of boys with gunpowder. Did he distinguish himself or not? He simply forgot. He served badly in the war.
The logic of tyranny can be traced back to antiquity. Our fathers, the Greeks, invented everything that can be invented, not counting modern technology. Including they invented tyranny, which did not exist before. They also theoretically described it, including the logic of the gradual development of tyranny. Plato directly writes that, starting from a certain point, a tyrant needs war, because it gives what begins to slip out of his hands: solidarity through mobilization. In addition, war easily allows the blame for all troubles to be transferred to the enemy.
According to Girard's theory, if a society cannot achieve peace through law and justice, it sets in motion the ancient mechanism of sacrifice, understood as collective participation in an act of violence. Historical societies moved from human sacrifice to animal sacrifice, and then from a real victim to a symbolic one. What happens in a secular society, where religious rites mean less and less, but the judicial system remains underdeveloped? In such a society, one can expect an uncontrolled growth of violence and its symbolic substitutes. Or perhaps the novel itself is a mechanism for replacing sacrifice? Here, it is not people who die for the sake of the collective, but their representations. Along with drama and opera, where similar mechanisms worked, in the 19th century the novel was one of the means of sacrifice. In the following century, this role was transferred to cinema. Of course, not every novel ends with a corpse, but there are many such novels. And a corpse always has a gender.
The relationships between the characters are modeled on the Book of Genesis. The Man of Culture, a descendant of the sinful Adam, competes with the Man of the People for power over the Russian Eve, a classless but national object of desire. The gender structure intersects with the class structure, and both are contained within the national space symbolized by the Russian Beauty. Sometimes she is passive, but more often she is given the right to choose between male rivals. The gender and class of the victim are historical variables, key elements in the development of the plot.
Chapter 14. Empire and Colonies
"- Newly found sons and daughters of Russia! We cordially welcome you under our reliable wing and promise protection and parental patronage! In return, we expect obedience and zeal, unparalleled diligence, fearless service to the new fatherland! And whoever does not agree – let him go back right now! The rotten in heart and weak in hands are of no use in the Russian state!.."
If the biographies of the first three are standard (hired, salary determined), then this cannot be said about the last two. Due to this, we will pay a little more attention to them.
The Tatars were scattered here and there in their thoughts and did not know: to agree to this or not? They thought and thought, as if they were digging for gold, but, apparently, they were afraid of something. The negotiations reached a dead end. Then, at the most tense moment, Bepenya Trupierdin suggested to the clerk: "Order wine and drink from the camp from myself, I want to get drunk with my close people, so that I can wash down the angry words and not remember them in the future."
From Tatishcheva, on September 29, 1773, Pugachev went to Chernorechenskaya. In this fortress, several old soldiers remained with Captain Nechayev, who had taken the place of the commandant, Major Kruse, who had disappeared to Orenburg. They surrendered without resistance. Pugachev hanged the captain on the complaint of his serf girl. Then they brought the brigadier. Pugachev, without saying a word to him, ordered him to be hanged too. But the captured soldiers began to plead for him.
- Think about it, – he says, – what kind of person am I? – I, – he says, – was created by God himself in the same year as the emperor and am his peer.
"Do not rejoice for my sake, my enemy! Though I have fallen, I will rise again; though I am in darkness, the Lord is my light." "They dragged me to the gallows. "Don't be afraid, don't be afraid," my destroyers repeated to me, perhaps really wanting to encourage me." Incidentally, according to his views, it is, first of all, "the disposition of the soul to the most lively acceptance of impressions." Disposition – to acceptance. Friendliness, pleasantness. Disposition to the first comer. To everything that the Lord will send. He will send disposition – favor – peace – and the hospitality of all this silence – inspiration ... "If he was kind to you," said the impostor, "then I forgive him too."
It is assumed that it is very difficult to exert irrational effective influence on people among whom one grew up. All this is much easier for a person who came from the outside to people whom he intends to influence in some special way.
Is Salavat-batyr still alive? – It's unknown... Thirty years have passed, a considerable period. But in general he was young when he fought with Pugach against Tsarina Katerina – he could have survived in exile.
— No, sir, I want to go home... I felt sad. Especially in the evenings, or even when the weather is fine during the day, hot, the camp is quiet, all the Tatars fall into their tents from the heat and sleep, and I raise the shelf near my tent and look at the steppes... in one direction and in the other – all the same... The view is sultry, cruel; space – there is no edge; a riot of grass; feather grass white, fluffy, like a silver sea, waves, and the breeze carries a scent: it smells of sheep, and the sun pours down, burns, and the steppes, like a burdensome life, have no end in sight, and here the depth of melancholy has no bottom... You look you don’t know where, and suddenly before you out of nowhere a monastery or a temple appears, and you remember the baptized land and cry.
By isolating Bashkiria from its southern nomadic neighbors, the Orenburg expedition saved the region from Kazakh raids and deprived them of the opportunity to unite with the Bashkirs against Russia's further advance. The construction of numerous fortresses in the region stabilized the domestic political situation to a certain extent and marked the beginning of the active settlement of the Southern Urals by Russians, which continued at a very high rate until the 1880s .
Having colonized numerous lands, Russia applied colonial regimes of indirect rule – coercive, communitarian, and exoticizing – to its own populations. “Rich in violence and poor in capital,” the empire developed and defended these vast lands, acquired long ago or recently for reasons remembered – or forgotten? – only by historians.
Pushkin has created a triangular structure in The Captain's Daughter: the rebellious Cossack Pugachev is a Man of the People, the young officer of the imperial army Grinev is a Man of Culture, and Mashenka is a Russian Beauty. The people contain terrifying depths, secret strength, and ineffable wisdom; the state has only bad discipline and alien rationality. An Old Believer Cossack and a romantic rebel, Pugachev frightens and enchants everyone, even Grinev, who is otherwise loyal to the empire. The story is played out in the great imperial space between St. Petersburg and Orenburg, the capital on the periphery and a distant province at the geographic center of the empire.
"Most august sovereign, most wise and invincible empress! The most precious to us and our descendants invaluable word, this pleasant and for the later generation of nobility incense, this voice of joy, our eternal glory and our eternal joy, in the highest your imperial majesty's goodwill to us, hearing, who of us would not receive rapture in his soul, whose heart would not play about such well-being? Enlighten us in our sorrow and grief the light of your mercy! And therefore, if any of us now did not rejoice, he would truly have shown even worse zeal for the fatherland and your imperial majesty, by giving some part of his property to form our corps. And our sacrifice was pleasing before you; this is our happiness, this is the delight of our souls!" With the deepest respect and complete devotion, I have the honor to be, gracious lady, your most zealous and most humble servant.
The speech of the proud and once free Chingizid, delivered on August 3, 1738, deserves quotation: "...Her Imperial Majesty, the most gracious sovereign empress and autocrat of all Russia, as the only sun in the sky surpasses all other luminaries in the world, whose splendor and mercy I feel in you, mister privy councilor, as in the moon, receiving a ray of radiance from her majesty, although I do not see it with my eyes due to the distance. Falling down, I expressed my most humble submission, filial love and slavish obedience, and I congratulate you on great victories over the enemy, on great defeats, by which I wish to prevail. I submit myself, with my entire family and my hordes, to the most high mercy and protection of Her Imperial Majesty, as under the wing of a great eagle, and I remain and will remain eternally faithful and obedient..."
"Great Sovereign, our Tsar and Tsar above the Tsar, autocratic ruler, worthy Emperor. As He commands that which should be, so it must be immutably and not at all fixed to the right or to the left. As God rules the whole world, so the Tsar has power in his own domain." The maintainer of the Russian army, the liberator and merciful of all, the lesser and greater, the executioner of opponents, the admirer of the great, the admirer of the lesser, the enricher of the meager, and so on and so forth... The soldiers cackle during the truce.
This is her honor and glory, and her husband's praise. And so that the servants of the empress would never wake up, and the empress would wake up the servants. Thus, the earthly ruler from the living God, a relative or descendant of the gods, turned into his viceroy, representative and executor of God's will in earthly affairs. God rules everything – he is the pantocrator. The emperor manages earthly affairs – he is the cosmocrator. (It is clear that the ancients are more revered than the new ones).
Again they tormented me with hatred for this damned country, where there are eight months of snowstorms and four months of rain. Such an absurd, clumsy country, this Russia of ours. Everything here is so wild, closed, colorless and hopeless. By the standards of provincial Russia, it is quite a decent town, but what a dull, awkward town, without the slightest spark of joy and inspiration... everything is done so clumsily that you feel the mood of the builders: just to get it over with as soon as possible.
His incomparable, overseas sensational, famous parent, martyr, stubborn, crazy, wild, idolized, with eternally majestic and disastrous pranks that can never be foreseen! The people who, through courage and bravery, have gained dominion over a sixth part of the world. The Russian man does nothing but tempt the Lord with some rationalization proposal. He offers one option, then another regarding the structure of the world. God is troubled with the Russian man.
"The old-timer of Russia has long noticed a sharp peculiarity of our existence: no matter how vile the current regime may seem, the one that follows it will be such that it will make us remember the previous one with languid nostalgia. And nostalgia is good to indulge in with vodka, snacks and everything that can be found in between." But this, as O.M. Freidenberg liked to say, is only by the way. "There was whoredom with hope, now – hopeless whoredom," the late Yurochka used to say. Life is disgusting, cruel and short. The pleasure of life comes down to the fact that the lives of others can be made even shorter, poorer, fiercer and more disgusting. Hyenas are not original. The "glue" of their sociality is mainly made of lust, anger and fear. But mutual hatred is also an important factor. There is nothing surprising in this: the more conflictual the animals are, the greater their need to live together. After all, scandalousness needs constant implementation. Here the collective is irreplaceable. Only it gives the opportunity to fully and regularly hate one's own kind. Sometimes you regret that there is an alphabet that too many half-educated people know. And there is no Hercules in this state to clean everything up. It seems that there won't be any. And let them.
Moscow, dreaming of becoming America. This is an unhappy city, a lousy town. I will leave here while the trains are still running. For some reason, people always flee Russia in the spring. "Either for their own to the West, or for ours to the East." I know little and do not understand Russia. It seems to me that this is a country of people who are of no use to anyone and of no use to themselves. I do not want to fight for Russia, let Russia die for me.
However, what does ignorance of one's place and one's work lead to? K. P. Pobedonostsev calls chronic discontent and irritation "against one's fate, against the government, against social order, against other people, against everyone and everything except oneself" one of the main "diseases of our time." Pobedonostsev explains this mass negativism by the fact that people are deceived in their expectations: "people grow up with excessive expectations, arising from excessive vanity and excessive, artificially formed needs." The author, dwelling on the causality of such phenomena, points out that "previously there were more contented and calm people, because people did not expect so much from life as they were content with a small, average measure, were in no hurry to expand their fate and its horizons. They were held back by their place, their work and the consciousness of duty, combined with place and work." As a result, people who believe that they are responsible for everything and for everyone are not responsible for anything and for anyone.
Russia is accused of isolating itself and remaining silent in the face of facts that are inconsistent with either law or justice. They say that Russia is angry. Russia is not angry, Russia is concentrating.
"The history of old Russia consisted, among other things, in the fact that it was continually beaten for backwardness. The Mongol khans beat it. The Turkish beys beat it. The Swedish feudal lords beat it. The Polish-Lithuanian lords beat it. The Anglo-French capitalists beat it. The Japanese barons beat it. Everyone beat it – for backwardness. For military backwardness, for cultural backwardness, for state backwardness, for industrial backwardness, for agricultural backwardness. They beat it because it was profitable and went unpunished..."
All the nations of the earth will rush from their places in these days; there will be a great battle, a battle unprecedented in the world: the yellow hordes of Asians, moving from their settled places, will stain the European fields with oceans of blood; there will be, there will be – Tsushima! There will be – a new Kalka!.. Kulikovo Field, I await you! On that day the last Sun will shine over my native land. If, Sun, you do not rise, then, oh Sun, under the heavy Mongolian heel the European shores will sink, and foam will curl over these shores; earthly creatures will again sink to the bottom of the oceans – into the primordial, long-forgotten chaoses... Rise, oh Sun!
Empires have always had a passion for maps, which served as a model for future conquests as well as images of already conquered territories. Check the map of the country. As is the past, so is the present. And the same is the future. What a test for my youthful arrogance! "How can one be a Russian?" was a question, the answer to which concealed humiliation for me every second. Hating my brothers, my own country, its peasants, existing outside of time, in love with their own inertia and as if shining with stupidity, I was ashamed of being descended from them, I renounced them, rejected their inferior eternity, their immutable truths, as if they were petrified larvae, their geological dreaminess.
It is usually said that this or that country acquires nuclear weapons, but it can also be considered that nuclear weapons acquire their own country. The Russian world is a rotating and expanding zero. Space devours and devastates the country from within. Whatever a person does, this country will reduce everything to nothing. This country is not theirs for anyone, including those who rule it. They take everything from the regions, and the regions in response do not want to work for the Moscow bosses, who bury their treasures somewhere far away, in foreign lands.
The numbness of the boundless space is conveyed by V. Klyuchevsky: “There is no housing visible in the vast spaces, no sound is heard around – and the observer is overcome by an eerie feeling of unperturbed peace, deep sleep and emptiness, loneliness, which disposes to aimless, dreary contemplation without a clear, distinct thought.” The very vastness of this world gives birth to a nagging emptiness in the heart.
That is why this land is so unhappy, it is torn apart by its vastness and possessed by the spirit of emptiness, which cannot stand any life-organization in a certain place. As Hegel would say, the abstract idea of infinity destroys any concreteness of life. Drunkenness, theft, corruption, laziness, lies, violence – these are just various forms of desolation and distraction from the concrete work of life: there is no firm concept of property, reality, truth, freedom, individuality, civic duty, human dignity. The taste of emptiness – depopulation – is felt throughout the entire space of Russia. Its population is the most sparse in Europe, and in the world in terms of density it is in 223 place out of 241. And Siberia, i.e. three quarters of Russia, is in the very last place in the world: 3 people per square kilometer (less than in Western Sahara and Mongolia). The emptiness here can be scooped up with your hands and kneaded with your feet.
While filling many pages with praise for Europeans, he wrote about Russians with aristocratic indifference, without going into details: “The stupidity and extreme recklessness of our vile people were all too familiar to us.”
In Moscow in 1927, Walter Benjamin was surprised to discover that Russia had no romantic image of the Orient. “Everything in the world has found a home here,” his Moscow friends told him, both East and West; “for us there is nothing exotic.” Moreover, these Marxists claimed that “exoticism is the counterrevolutionary ideology of a colonial country.” But having done away with the idea of the Orient, Moscow intellectuals brought it back to life, giving it a Soviet scope. “The most interesting subject” for the new Moscow films were Russian peasants, who seemed to their makers very different from themselves: “In terms of perception, the peasant differs sharply from the urban masses.” When a peasant watches a film, his Moscow friends told Benjamin, he is unable to follow the development of “two narrative threads simultaneously, as happens in cinema. Only one series of images is accessible to his perception, which must be shown in chronological order.” Since peasants cannot understand themes and genres “taken from bourgeois life,” they need a completely new art. To create such an art is “one of the most grandiose experiments in mass psychology that are being conducted in the gigantic laboratory that Russia has become,” wrote Benjamin. Despite his sympathies for the new art and the new Russia, Benjamin was not deceived by their success: “The colonization of Russia through cinema has misfired.”
In order to truly understand what a particular country or place is, you have to go there in winter, of course. Because in winter life is more real, more dictated by necessity. In winter the contours of someone else's life are more distinct. For a traveler, this is a bonus. Nigeria in the snow.
Olaf Magnus. "History of the Northern Peoples", 1555:
- the cold burns the animals' eyes and covers their fur with ice;
- the cold makes animals grow thick skin;
- the cold makes animals voracious;
- the cold forces wild animals to seek human habitation to satisfy their hunger;
- the cold makes wolves hard;
- the cold kills the fish by suffocation if it does not have the strength to break through the ice;
- cold changes the color of hares, foxes and ermines;
- the cold crumbles copper, glass and clay jugs;
- the cold is an opportunity to play wonderful games on ice;
- the cold pulls nails out of walls, doors and locks;
- the cold tears apart the stones in the field;
- the cold squeezes the shoes;
- cold is the cause of cough and cold;
Writer Ivan Turgenev, 1852: "These are hard times. Take a mental look around you: bribery is flourishing, serfdom stands like a rock, barracks are in the foreground, there is no court, rumors are flying about the closing of the university... Traveling abroad is becoming impossible, it is impossible to order a sensible book. Some kind of dark cloud hangs over everything, and then there are denunciations hissing and spreading, there is no common connection or common interests among the youth, fear and humiliation in everyone, you can't help but wave your hand."
True, in such a conversation one can slide into the "nonsense" that the wit G.G. Shpet spoke about. But the "womanishness" and sugariness of Russian philosophy and literature is an extreme version of the same groundlessness, that extraneousness from which Russian culture has always suffered.
What is culture for the common people? A song, a joke, a ditty. "Put me down, God, like a stone, lift me up like a roll" (Platon Karatayev). Something like that. – "I love you." – "And how many people have you told this to?" – "You first and last." – "He's lying, of course, but it's still nice."
We have to admit that we are still far from Europe. Recently I was in France at the invitation of my collector, I watched the gendarmerie parade. What faces! Dignity, style. You won’t find such people here. Degeneration, degeneration! Every person is a color, at worst a shade, defeating the colorlessness to which we have already become accustomed, my dear friend... Even better – white, a color that does not exist, but which contains within itself... We must find a way to convince this people.
Absolutely everything that modern Russian life is woven from is of strictly Western origin. And nothing else. Everything is secondary and borrowed, without exception. Including, by the way, culture. Both "Eugene Onegin" and "Anna Karenina" are "licensed" products, made using those Western literary technologies that Europe developed over several centuries.
Russia had no idea even of the existence of rhymes. Europe honed the forms of poems, novels and symphonies, and it also set their style and design. So there is no more "Russian" in "Eugene Onegin" than in a "Ford Focus" assembled in Vsevolozhsk. (It would be funny to look at this work, executed in the Old Orthodox style of "Chetyi Minei" or "Oktoechos".)
Everything else was created using European technologies. Let us recall that even the Kremlin and its cathedrals were built by Italians. And the national symbol "matryoshka" is not even Europe, but a simple plagiarism from the Japanese toy of the plump god Fukurokoju, who had many entities that could be extracted from each other.
The complacency with which the West watches our gardener remains a mystery. Note that the dust has not even been blown off the snuffbox.
However, this indulgence has its explanation. An antidote to the poison of today's Russia has long been developed. It is not dangerous to the world. Its composition is known: despotism, priests, the cult of war, theft, stupefaction, etc. When trying to export, all these traditional values are easily identified and neutralized. But locked within the state borders of the Russian Federation, they will finally poison the country. Russia's problem will resolve itself, and the world will breathe a sigh of relief.
For the West, we are constantly “pulling chestnuts out of the fire” with our own hands... In 1882, the French historian Ernest Renan defined “nation” through the shared experience of suffering and sacrifice. “Common suffering unites more strongly than joy... A nation is a great solidarity based on the feeling of sacrifice.” Renan was referring to wars and revolutions, but in the fictional life that culture creates, these sacrificial narratives are played out without the shedding of real blood.
If today's successes have become very modest, then the so-called "history" comes into play. Drawing majestic pictures of the past and the recent past, it, contrary to any obviousness, helps the individual to feel part of a strong and aggressive community that is experiencing only temporary difficulties. This is the magical power and attraction of history, as well as its main function. The fact is that the respectful passion for the past has no other rational explanation. Moreover, from the point of view of common sense, respect for the past can only be characterized as a strange perversion. Let us explain. Remembering Napoleon or Suvorov, we can, of course, be touched by the shine of the buttons on their uniforms. But at the same time, we should not forget that we are talking about creatures at a much lower level of human evolution. After all, "man" is only what he knows. And these characters were still unaware of too much of what has become commonplace today. Accordingly, their perception of the world, their reflection and behavior were significantly more primitive than ours.
The thing is that the concept of "homeland" is so abstract and illusory that it can easily be transformed into any political matter. A funny construct is formed in which illusion and reality are merged without any visible seams or transitions. It is almost impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. Of course, 99.9% of this construct consists of pure regime. However, the role of illusion should not be underestimated. It has an important narcotic function that allows the authorities to cut both the living and the dead, doing any savagery "in the name of the fatherland". Almost every regime easily makes this substitution. Of course, this is pure fraud, but the people are eager to be fooled. They want a homeland. To deny them this is even greater cruelty than to rot in camps and shoot.
Strictly speaking, the beautiful concept of "homeland" is a pure swindle. No "homeland" has ever existed for anyone. There was only a succession of regimes that managed the population for their own benefit. In order to "live long and happily", the regimes wove the mythology they needed and soaked it with the poison of patriotic romanticism. Generation after generation was enveloped in this web.
Of course, sometimes such webs are woven masterfully, although more often there are simpler examples. The best raw material for their manufacture are tales about the exploits of ancestors. As is known, such tales can be generated in unlimited quantities. Within the limits of its own language and culture, any nation is in no way limited in these fantasies. The illusion of a "homeland" made from such ingredients ensures excellent obedience and the necessary energy of the fooled.
This situation can be illustrated by many examples, but the most recent is the so-called "Immortal Regiment", whose march can sometimes be observed in Russia. The essence of the event is that citizens of the Russian Federation, marching in large organized columns, carry portraits of relatives who died in the war on sticks. This symbolizes the unification of the people in grief and a silent but menacing challenge to the enemy, through whose fault the people depicted in the portraits died. But!
It is extremely likely that about a third of the portraits depict those who were destroyed solely through the fault of the Soviet command itself: those killed by the barrage battalions, thrown into senseless attacks, starved to death by frontline or rear famine, frozen, "cooked" in cauldrons, and shot by drunken SMERSH men. Soldier meat has always been exceptionally cheap in Russia and, as a rule, was spent by generals with spectacular extravagance. But none of the participants in the procession would think of blaming the butcher-generals of the USSR for the death of their father or great-grandfather, who were the real culprits of the death of their loved ones. Thus, the procession of the "Immortal Regiment" turns into an indulgence for the authorities, into an offer to them to continue to spend lives without any embarrassment.
Freud wrote after the First World War that if suffering is not remembered, it will be repeated. “If the dead are not mourned, they will haunt the living like ghosts. If loss is not acknowledged, it threatens to return in strange forms; this particular combination of the old and the strange is the uncanny.” Looking at the post-traumatic landscape of contemporary Russian politics and culture, we see that very phenomenon of the uncanny, “post-Soviet hauntology,” a parade of ghosts, from children in NKVD uniforms standing guard at the new Dzerzhinsky monument in Tyumen to Cheka veterans holding “courage lessons” in schools and opening “museums of the history of the guard” on the site of the former Gulag Museum in the Perm-36 camp. Neo-Stalinists and "historical reenactors" create pirate republics in the "Novorossiya" invented by political strategists, where they rule the law and shoot deserters and looters based on Stalin's orders from the Great Patriotic War. Stalin's ghost appears in films, on posters, T-shirts, school notebook covers and iPhone "bumpers", columns of Stalinists, young and old, like zombies, wander to the grave of their idol on the day of his death on March 5. This can be dismissed as a delusion and an obsession, but a zombie bite can also be fatal.
"I even think that mental dangers are much more terrible than epidemics and earthquakes. Medieval epidemics of bubonic plague or smallpox did not take as many lives as, for example, differences in views on the structure of the world in 1914 or the struggle for political ideals in Russia."
"Muscovy, and after it Russia, inherited the great Mongol dream of uniting Eurasia from ocean to ocean." The warriors of Genghis Khan could shoot an arrow at a distance of 400 paces (even the famous English longbow could only hit at 300). With this bow they walked from the Pacific Ocean to the shores of the Atlantic. The nomadic Horde, from which the Russian state was formed, still wanders in its blood and resists the values of a settled civilization. Pyotr Chaadayev noted: "In our homes we seem to be assigned to billeting; in families we look like strangers; in cities we look like nomads, we are worse than the nomads grazing their flocks in our steppes, for they are more attached to their deserts than we are to our cities."
Russia's great misfortune is that it united not from itself, but by external force and the coercion of the Horde. In order to overthrow the Horde, it absorbed it, united, and imperceptibly became the Horde itself, took the form of a different, eastern-despotic world order and was imbued with the same spirit of nomadism. Instead of organizing its own lands, it took on others' – and now Russia alone is wandering across Eurasia, and everyone sees it from afar, but it does not see itself. What is the use of acquiring everything, but losing itself?
I sense Kuchum, I sense urine, dust rises above the horde like a mushroom-shaped simum. People, wake up from your beloved youth, I sense Kuchum!
Actually, Kuchum, or rather Genghis Khan, never left. He transformed into the king of the oprichniks, then into the leader of the proletariat, and then he moved into a lieutenant colonel of the Cheka.
A European guest of the 16th century formulated a dilemma that Russian and Russian studies still address today: “It is difficult to understand whether the people, because of their rudeness, need a tyrant sovereign, or whether the people themselves become so rude, insensitive and cruel because of the sovereign’s tyranny.” What does the Russian government count on: the people’s trust or their meanness? It is difficult to understand, but the main questions of political action – “who is to blame?” and “what is to be done?” – critically depend on this understanding.
Can there be anything new in a tyrannical regime of government? The formula of tyranny is the same. Evil in general is a boring banality; it is not capable of development. But the environment it feeds on is changeable; and this creates the illusion of the “historicity” of evil. Thus, in the changed world, a truly new version of tyranny has appeared – totalitarianism. So unprecedented that it has not been truly understood even now. Literature has perhaps succeeded in this, but political thought, with its old thesaurus of the 18th-19th centuries, has stalled. As for today's Russia, we are dealing with a trivial junta that is trying to try on this or that historical decor, but cannot hide its vulgar bandit nature. Therefore, there is no point in helping it or looking for something deep or new in it.
Tyranny is a forced alliance between a leader and people, which abolishes the formal political institutions of a republic because of their supposed or actual impotence. Since tyranny is an ineffective format, it must compensate for its weakness with violence, war, and, as a rule, mental expansion. If it demoralizes the world, paralyzes its will (as parasitic insects sometimes do to their victims), it will significantly extend its lifespan. The Bolsheviks succeeded in this. And since we are constantly disturbing the shadows of the ancient Greeks, let us recall the strategy of Philip of Macedon: he managed to demoralize and corrupt the city-state democracy, after which it was easy for his eccentric son to complete the plot.
An amateur orientalist and talented administrator, Count S.S. Uvarov followed the idea of “nationality,” popular in Europe after the Napoleonic Wars, and creatively translated it as “nationality.” Russia is both an empire and a colony. The late Slavophile follower Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote in 1860 that there is no other country as misunderstood as Russia. Even the Moon is better understood, he asserted with authority: he had just returned from Siberian penal servitude.
Thus, the fight against capital is simultaneously a fight against the empire. In the family, the husband "by nature" rules over the wife and children, and the monarchy stands on the same basis: "The monarch is like a father, and the subjects are respected as children, no matter what order it is established in." Even the official historiographer of the Russian Empire, N.M. Karamzin, supported the idea that the Slavs, with the help of Rurik, created autocracy in order to pacify themselves.
Slaves gained their freedom as a result of a bloody war, serfs – in the course of peaceful reforms, and therefore the results of liberation in both countries were different. That is why – not because of excessive, but because of insufficient violence – “there are many more traces of slavery left on the Russians than on the Negroes,” Lenin believed.
"Like the Englishman who became a Yankee, the Russian became a Siberian." As soon as the philosophers of the Enlightenment and critics of colonialism discovered Russia, they began to compare the class system with the colonial one, the bearded Russian peasant with the inferior and exploited races, and the masters of the Russian land with visiting foreigners. In "The History of the Two Indies," Abb; Raynal wrote about Russia: "Civil slavery is the condition of every ignoble subject of this empire: they are all at the disposal of their masters, like cattle in other countries. Among these slaves, no one is treated so barbarously as those who cultivate the soil... Political slavery is the lot of the whole country, since foreigners have established despotic power in it."
Sociology offers a suspiciously easy answer to our question about the origin of the hysterical submission of Russians to their superiors. Indeed, according to VTsIOM, after many years of tossing and turning and passions, in 2015 Russian society froze in familiar figures: 85% submissive and 15% disobedient. Let us recall that for a very long time, this was approximately the ratio of serfs to free citizens in Tsarist Russia.
I recall how funny it seemed to a young advocate of the rigorous use of scientific methods when one of my teachers, the Nestor of Polish sociology, Kazimierz Dobrowolski, quoted conversations he had with taxi drivers and based on which he made sociological assumptions. Now I understand how correct this approach was.
So. What is the reason for this epidemic of malice called "patriotic upsurge"? At first glance, everything is very simple. There is a clear connection: the lower the level of intelligence of an individual, the higher its need to feel its belonging to a strong and numerous pack.
The Russian army used the latest in artillery, such as the "secret howitzers" just invented by Count Pyotr Shuvalov. They had an unusual horizontal oval muzzle and fired grapeshot in a fan shape over the heads of their soldiers. The death penalty was incurred for revealing their secret, but then Frederick captured these howitzers, found nothing of value in them, and put them on display in Berlin as a laughing stock. The Russian army still relied on light cavalry and ethnic units. To the Russians themselves, this eastern cavalry seemed wild and frightening. The Russian army officer Andrei Bolotov was astonished to see how these "strange", "half-naked", accustomed to "eating horse carrion" warriors slaughtered the population of German villages for the glory of the Russian crown. Kalmyks were allowed to plunder old Prussian arsenals. Armed with medieval sabres, in armor and helmets, they must have looked ridiculous; but few laughed at this war. For the Kalmyks, these were the last years of their Russian service: in 1771, they left the Volga steppes and began their exodus to China.
The Russian general, entering Prussia, was extremely surprised to see the destruction, arson and robbery committed by the Cossacks everywhere, and was forced to witness with annoyance all the cruelties and barbarities committed by our Cossacks and Kalmyks against all military rules... In all those places nothing was visible except fire and smoke; the greatest tyranny and insults were committed against the female sex. Such actions of our Cossacks and Kalmyks truly brought us little honor, for all European nations, having heard of such barbarities, began to think of our entire army as the same. Centuries later, Hitler, in besieged Berlin, often spoke of Friedrich and hoped for a new "miracle of the House of Brandenburg" – a miraculous salvation from the Soviet troops.
The colonization of K;nigsberg met with the silent resistance of its inhabitants. Convinced of the superiority of their culture, they submitted to the Russian occupiers, but despised them in their own quiet way. This is another example of negative hegemony: Russian rule over East Prussia was a typical colonial situation in which rulers resort to coercion after failing to convince the native population of their right to rule, or even of their ability to govern. The townspeople responded with an early nationalist movement that had enormous consequences for European thought, and after the departure of the colonizers, they indulged in unprecedented reflections on power, reason, and humanity. Like an intellectual explosion whose effects reverberate for centuries, this brief episode of colonial history became the entry point into global modernity.
The city lived in fear and trembling all the time. Violent crowds of conscripted soldiers wandered around the city, robbed passers-by and smashed up government wine shops, they said: "Let them put us on trial – we're going to die anyway." The panic, Bolotov believes, was caused by the coal "warmers" that the "wealthy residents" of K;nigsberg brought with them to church and placed on the floor under their skirts. Bolotov also remembers the concern of his fellow officers about the Russian gunpowder arsenal in the basement of the Castle Church, which is why the panic spread to the Russians.
Two eternally Russian questions: “Who is to blame?” and “What is to be done?” – now receive, at the judgment of the entire people, unexpected, but the only possible answers: “You yourself are to blame” and “There is nothing to be done.”
Never separate people who are fighting – they are probably like-minded... And what if it is an enemy? Therefore, a long war with him lies ahead. In raga, he is as cynical as he is cunning. It is necessary to destroy not only enemies, but also "enemies" and "enemies' children". Pick up the defeated enemy and kiss him. Kiss the enemy until he disappears. Whoever is guilty, if you sit on the river bank for a long time, you can see the corpse of your enemy floating by. An enemy is someone whose story you are not obliged to listen to.
Only defeat makes you stop, and think, and look closely, only defeat sharpens sensuality and deepens vision, and makes intuition more acute. What can a winner want when he captures a city, except destruction, except other people's property and women? But the defeated, who retreated and left his wife, children and home in the city, he begins to suffer, wish and hope, and something new is revealed to him about this world, which he had not previously guessed when he himself entered other people's cities. And it is strange, but defeats, if you still manage to recover from them, ultimately raise you higher than victories, and only through defeat can you, paradoxically, truly come to a great victory and appreciate its taste. However, this may be one of those dangerous illusions for which we have already paid so much. Let's not even remember the words of Bismarck that "the winner leaves the defeated only eyes, so that there is something to cry with." This is not at all necessary, i.e., recollections of Bismarck.
In the era of general revolutions, it is impossible to sit on the edge of the hut; we even drink tea from a saucer, playing into someone's hands. As our experience has shown, the element of revolutionary forms of struggle under the slogan of the liberation of the working class leads to the fact that the working class with its interests is not only essentially forgotten, but also begins to be subjected to much greater exploitation than before the revolution. Pushkin is right, of course: "The best and most lasting changes are those that occur gradually, from the improvement of morals, without any violent upheavals."
Meanwhile, it is worth remembering that Pushkin himself was always eager to go abroad. From his exile in Kishinev, he wanted to escape to Greece; in Odessa, he tried to bargain with smugglers; in Mikhailovskoye, he ordered a wig so that he could secretly leave for Germany through Poland under the guise of a friend’s servant. He went to the Caucasus to find out if it was possible to move from there to Turkey. Pushkin almost didn’t care where, to the West or to the East, as long as he could escape the embrace of his homeland, but all his requests were refused.
Prince N. N. , one of the prominent figures of the zemstvo, prefaced his memoirs, written in the late 1930s, with the following remark: “Without undue modesty, I can say that I have the right to consider myself a person who is quite suitable to be the author of historical memoirs. Firstly, I have lived a long life and seen a lot, secondly, thanks to chance circumstances, I was familiar with the life and everyday life of the most diverse strata of the population of Russia, its upper and lower classes, its capitals and provinces, which was available to very few, and thirdly, without playing any major role in historical events, I was often in their very thick and was acquainted with almost all the major political and public figures of my era. The main actors of historical dramas and tragedies are inevitably tendentious in their memoirs. My memoirs, with all their subjectivity, cannot be tendentious simply because, having not accomplished great things, I do not need to justify myself before history." Historians write from the past to the present, but think from the present to the past. However, details are important. It's all about the details, that's the main thing.
Another feeling came that this abyss of wood, the log-like nature of Ancient Rus, correlates with the spirit of the people and the character of our history in color and touch – a combination of angularity and roundness, a corporeal materiality, warm, but not very durable, exfoliating, burning out to the ground, to an empty field, and growing again, like grass, compared to the stone of the European Middle Ages. Our wooden antiquity is closer to the living gut, more shapeless and unreliable, little has survived, did not care about accumulation, gaps, unidentified design, each time anew, albeit in the same place, vague features, only here and there in the ocean logs are pushed in like stone islands cathedrals, Ivan the Terrible, Nil Sorsky, in the midst of indistinct songs, a rather amorphous, indefinite face, ready to accept the first image that comes along, clumsy and tender at the same time, dreamy and dull, lacking clarity, let us recall the Caucasus, metal stamping, the outline of mountains and highlanders, a hawk's nose, the point of a mustache and eyebrows, hot spices, pepper, and our wooden food – porridge that you can't spoil, it will perceive everything, assimilate, Finns, Greeks, Tatars, Varangians, French jargon, Petersburg, as butter, dissolve in porridge, do not lose shapelessness, do not chase after the purity of blood, digesting any good, and a potato nose, cheekbones crooked, maybe Socrates in bast shoes will do, a sage under a simpleton, and in beauty the wooden wear, your flowing, spreading under the gaze face, like a landscape, a grayish tree, against the background of a withered sky, in wood heaviness and lightness, airiness of lines, fibers, soulfulness, inconstancy, not like stone, and this urban nest, woven from logs with manure, which covered the courtyards, Petersburg is our own Europe, it poisons our life with the waste of European civilization, raking, with maternal rags, you will cover yourself with your head, and softly, warmly on that pavement.
...climatic conditions (four months against eight in the West), it was even shorter because of serfdom: it is necessary to count at least 56 days for corvee and 30 days for haymaking. In 1861, the law abolished corvee, but it returned due to the fact that peasants were given not one, but several plots, and the result was a strip farming. Landowners quickly understood how profitable it was to demand that peasants work instead of the right of passage or passage across their lands to scattered peasant plots. Lack of time to cultivate their own plots, a shortage of fertilizers and horses continued to maintain significant psychological stress and required, in turn, great physical effort, individual and collective. But such forces were wasted: in most cases, harvests were insignificant compared to the labor invested, which caused a pessimistic attitude to the matter, the vitality of magic and pagan rituals and, consequently, failures in agricultural production. Peasant wisdom approved above all of such calculations that could ensure a minimum standard of living. Any adventure could be expensive. Production for the market was one of such adventures, and it was no less frightening than nature: was it worth increasing the production of goods for sale if the possibilities for selling them were not obvious, and the market was too fickle? Thus, for centuries, the traditional way of running the economy doomed the majority of the population to survival in hungry conditions.
J. Richmond writes that Russians are characterized by communicative pessimism. He notes that it is common for Russians to greet others with the expression "How are you?" and to answer "Nothing bad," which means "nothing bad happened" (not too bad). It is rare to meet a Russian who will answer "good" or "excellent." Even if someone is really doing well, he will not say anything more exciting than nothing or normal. Only from further conversation can you understand that he is really doing well.
"Russia is a series of voids... An empty society. Deserted, airy. Like an old oak tree: bark, branches – but inside – emptiness. In these voids, in people, evil easily makes nests, they are filled with television. Sometimes aliens get into these voids; even foreigners get in. It is not the strength of their onslaught that matters, but the fact that there is no resistance to them." For example, Russia is divided into many regions, which for some reason are called subjects, although they have no subjectivity, because subjectivity refers to the generative cause, and they have not generated anything. "Elephants made of flies. The Russia that we defended, which we loved, for the sake of which we "fought the West" – all that remains for it is to die"; "The Russia that is destined to live – we will not love this Russia. We cannot wish it any good in this "flight"; we will wish it all kinds of "evil."
One of the most famous Russian fairy tales is called "Go there – I don't know where, bring that – I don't know what." And so all of Russia, like its fairy tale hero, is in search of non-existence.
Modern political and philosophical language lacks the concept of ontocide (from ancient Greek on, ontos – being + cide, murder) – total destruction of all that exists, war with being as such. Genocide, zoocide, ecocide – are only partial manifestations of ontocide. Hostility to being as such underlies a number of religious and political movements, such as Gnosticism, partly Old Believers, Eurasianism, fascism, racism... The world lies in evil or is captured by Satan – and therefore is subject to destruction.
Hatred or suspicion of being as such is a common Russian mentality. Non-being is jealous of everything towards being. Let's say something appears in the world – a certain form of being, a sprout, a blade of grass. A European will see this something – and will want to look at it from different angles. To delve into its cause. To grow something bigger out of it, to build something on its basis... But in Russia this something, as a new fact of being, will be looked at with suspicion. What does it need? What right does it have to be here? There was nothing – and suddenly hello-please. Who needs you? He will start muddying the waters here. Claiming rights. Just in case something happens. Better without him. As there was nothing, so let there be nothing. – And they will start pressing this something into the ground, trampling it, so that nothing remains of it as soon as possible. “Nothing is needed” is the inner pathos of Russian civilization, its melancholy, its longing – as for an unrealizable happiness.
Nothing ever happens in Russia because it doesn't have time to develop, it is forgotten, swept away and somehow disappears by itself. And it is precisely when a connection between separate events does appear that everything collapses. Non-existence is both a starting point and a point of arrival. Now all Russianists are also involuntarily nothing-scientists, specialists in nothing.
An empire is the ability of one nation to give orders to another nation. The ability to spread its order among strangers and call it all enlightenment.
Rome, as we know, fell from the invasion of barbarians. It did not understand the approaching barbarism from the outside, and therefore perished. But does this threat also apply to the Third Rome? Only barbarism approached it not from the outside, but from within, and in the same way it foretells death. If barbarians are very much awaited, but they do not come, because the country is surrounded by peaceful peoples, then they are born in it. Even more destructive, because they are our own, from our own flesh and blood, knowing us from the inside, and at the same time – scary, like the madness of a loved one. In the end, according to the logic of history, it turns out that a hundred years ago they overthrew the tsar in order to put a gopnik in his place. It rarely happens that a president rules for eight years and does not bother anyone. Politicians are like diapers, they need to be changed often and for the same reason.
The Mesopotamian butchers gave their god of war two heads. Why? Because he was supposed to devour not only foreign enemies, but also disobedient Mesopotamians. According to the Sumerians, this had to be done with two different mouths. Foreigners had to be torn apart and quickly swallowed, and local troublemakers had to be chewed with reluctance. (The Motherland loves it when “their own hurt more.”)
But! Two mouths did not fit well on the small head of the war god. Having become multi-mouthed, the splayed dwarf Ninurtu could have become a laughing stock of the mob, and not a terror of enemies and troublemakers. But a solution was found. The Mesopotamians showed ingenuity, attached another head to the god and the problem of two mouths was solved. However, this did not add respectability to Ninurtu. Therefore, the two-headed freak was covered with feathers. They replaced crooked arms with wings, and thick-lipped mouths with beaks. And a miracle of design happened. The two-mouthed one first became just a bird, and over time it finally became an eagle. The brand turned out to be so successful that it remained at the top of symbols of omnipotence for almost 5,000 years.
Before its last registration (in the coat of arms of the Russian Federation), the Sumerian deity had been passed from hand to hand for a long time. It was stuck on banners by all lovers of chopping off, ripping open, burning and capturing. The penultimate (before the Russian Federation) user of the mutant bird was the "Union of Fascist Crumbs". And before the "crumbs", old man Ninurtu served the SS, Turks, Hindus, Hittites, Albanians, Romans and the Mongol Horde. Dying, the kind Horde bequeathed it to Muscovy.
In other words, the double-headed eagle is good in every way, except for some hackneyedness and dubious origin. To put it mildly, it is an eagle of common use. The Smilodon in the coat of arms of Russia would look fresher. It is more exclusive. Its potential for intimidation is higher. And it symbolizes both greatness itself and its consequences better than the eagle.
Let us recall that the handsome Smilodon lived in the Pleistocene and became famous for its fangs of incredible size. The saber-toothed creature inspired horror in all living things. Its purring made mammoths go grey and platypuses piss themselves. Generations of Smilodons stubbornly sacrificed everything for the sake of their teeth. Their bodies were declining, but their fangs were becoming more and more impressive. Over time, problems began. First, their vision went bad. The thing is that the teeth were not only growing downwards. Their roots also grew larger and longer, taking up more and more space in the skull. And then came the moment when the roots almost reached the eye sockets. Then the tail was lost and the paws became smaller. The fur was split. But the fangs grew and grew. Evolution waved its hand at the idiotic cat and did not fix anything. Of course, it ended in embarrassment. The fangs became so large that our hero's mouth could not close at all. Flies and mice started to live in it. The blinded sabre-toothed animal could no longer growl, eat or purr. And then it completely lost the ability to raise its head. The sloths put an end to the tragedy. These toothless leaf-eaters were unhappy in their personal lives. Accordingly, they raped everything that could not crawl away from them. And the blind and immobilized fang-bearer was an ideal object. Sexual intercourse performed by the sloth was excruciatingly boring. It could last for weeks, and eventually killed the victim. Probably, the last of the smilodons died under the sloth. It is possible that Russia will suffer a similar fate. They will have to pay for the fangs of imperial greatness. It is not yet clear who will play the role of the sloth, but there will certainly be those willing.
You can lie down under a pine tree and howl a little, or dig the earth out of boredom... In Russia, you could always kill a person and wipe your hands on the earth, grass and birch. In Russia, people are pitied in the same way a tram pities the person it ran over. Whatever a person does in Russia, you always feel sorry for him... "It is better to die of homesickness than of anger in your native lands."
And there's no point in shouting. No one will hear. In Russia, it was always easy and free to go and bum a cigarette before going crazy. "Russian nature is not sad, but is illuminated by a vague melancholy, and wherever my grave may be, let it breathe with this feeling."
I walked the streets in search of unexpected joy and bored myself to such a high degree that I wanted to fall face down in the tall grass and cry and curse. Only there is no grass in the city, except for lawns. It is afraid to raise its eyes to the stars again, because they whisper the same thing: this is your homeland.
He saw, as if from the outside, how something bad and evil was born in him and filled his entire being. He himself defined this unclear beginning as hatred, but he could not say: towards whom, towards what this hatred. Towards the regime? But there was none. Towards the country? He did not know other countries, and it seemed strange to him to hate the only place he could call his own. Towards some people? But towards which people specifically, he could not answer.
I look at the apple in the basket on the table and think about Captain Cook, who ordered his sailors to eat a lot of local fruits when they stopped at ports to avoid getting the grim disease scurvy. And that's why the whole world speaks English now, because of this.
Size is not so important. There are small empires. The Athenian empire at its greatest peak was noticeably smaller than modern Greece in both territory and population.
- Give me a map of Portugal! – the leader shouted. – A large-scale one, with seas, with straits!
— There's an ocean there.
— So let's do it with the oceans, damn it! Find some Portugal experts! Quickly, run! I was told the other day that Portugal and Russia are similar. The climate is rainy, the songs are mournful. The Arab yoke there, the Tatar yoke here – and both yokes lasted exactly two hundred years. It all fits together. A rare coincidence – and no one, absolutely no one, says a word about it. A conspiracy of silence! Put the headline in large print: "The Two Poles of Europe." Smaller: "Moscow is following Lisbon's path: from the yoke to democracy."
And when it came to Armenia, one recent Minister of Foreign Affairs said: "We (Russia) need Armenia, but we don't need Armenians at all." This is in a businesslike, strict manner. At the end of a millennium of Russia's existence. That is, not as an exclamation, anger, but (for the Minister) almost as a program... But this means: "I would drive out and wipe off the face of the earth the Armenians, all these old people and children, schoolboys and schoolgirls, if it were not indecent and did not seem uncultured."
- Oh, you won't believe it! Russians have an inferiority complex towards Jews, and they compensate for it with bestial, zoological anti-Semitism. Even Solomon Moiseevich Richter, who in principle didn't like anything the young people wrote, fell under the spell of these lines. A personality! What can one say? You can only rise in your chair and applaud.
It is quite clear that the Jews are in an unfortunate place. When the state of Israel was created, they thought of Palestine, of course, but not only that, Texas and Uganda were also suggested: they are also a little dangerous, but not to such an extent; in short, the rabbi concluded good-naturedly, there is no point in getting too hung up on geographical aspects. God is omnipresent, he declared, the whole universe is filled with His presence.
This is anger, fury: but that is why they live and cannot and do not want to die, because they are hot. And be hot, Jew. Oh, like Rozanov – and do not fall asleep, and do not grow cold forever. If you doze off – the world will die. The world is alive and not even sleepy, while the Jew “keeps one eye on the world.” – “And how much are oats these days?” – And trade, Jew, trade – just do not offend the Russians. Oh, do not offend, my dear. You are talented, even a genius in trade (a connection of centuries, a connection with Phoenicia).
And so I think – the Jews are right in everything. They are right against Europe, civilization and civilizations. European civilization has spread too far along the periphery, has become filled with emptiness within, has become truly “empty” and is perishing from this. Who needs it? Who does it warm? Its very prayers are empty, these “Protestant prayers”, these “Catholic prayers”, these “Orthodox prayers”. It is too vast. And where it is vast, it is cold. “Where can such a temple be heated?”
— I’ll tell you, but you won’t understand. I’m Russian, and I’m going to live in Russia. And I’m not connected, like you, to these Richters who are here today and there tomorrow. I don’t have another homeland, and I never will. And I don’t have another life, and I never will. I can’t try on one life, then another, like you do — I don’t have any extra ones in reserve. I want to live my life, and I think that’s a lot.
— Life in Russia is very hard, — said the journalist, — isn't it? But there is a lot of talk about the meaning of life. One is connected to the other, what do you think?
“That’s probably why,” Oscar remarked caustically, “Lenin put all the philosophers on a steamship and sent them away from Russia. So that there would be less talk about the meaning of life.”
The etymology of some words is amazing! Take, for example, the word "izba". Do you know what an izba is, Herr Klauke?
- This is a small wooden Russian house.
- Yes, but it has a German name! German builders pointed to the building and explained to the Russian peasant: das ist Bau! This is a house! That is where the Russian hut came from. The peasant, of course, could not repeat it and changed it in his own way.
— German is a very difficult language for the Slavs. Russian is quite rich. But it has its shortcomings, and one of them is hissing sound combinations: -âøè, -âøà, -âøó... âøè êðûøü â õîìû...
- I haven't said the main thing, Herr Klauke. Do you know that the Russian language has never had the word "love"? It only came from the German Liebe!
- What did they say before?
— They said: I regret. Instead of “I love” they said “I regret.”
— Or, for example, the word "herbarium". There is a version that it comes from the Latin "herba", that is, "grass". In fact, the root is "Herr Barin", this is how serf girls addressed the landowner, most often a German, who drove them out to mow the hay.
"We've had enough of gossip and nepotism." Honestly, we'll be better off under the Germans. The Germans will bring order to us, "like in Riga." They'll set up a police force, departments. Let's agree that this has always been nasty and stupid with us. They'll set up a ministry. They won't take bribes, finally... and what have we been howling about, starting with Sumarokov, and howling all the way to Shchedrin... "Because there's no order." To hell with them, the blockheads. And also: finally, finally the Germans will teach us Russian patriotism, as their excellent Vigel and Dahl did. But there were only two of them, and what could they do?
We will take possession of their souls as devotedly and ardently as we did of Vigel, Dahl, Vetenek (Vostokov) and Hilferding. After all, not a single Russian has ever transformed himself into a German in soul, because they are truly blockheads and almost soulless. That is why they are so capable of "governing". The conquest of Russia by Germany will in fact be, both internally and spiritually, the conquest of Germany by Russia. We will finally make of them, of the best of them, something resembling a man, and not a equerry. Because behind the "equerrys" and "chamberlains" they have lost their human face.
Let's expand the field of reasoning. For example, if you aesthetically love Kandinsky, Malevich and Rothko, then you must aesthetically love Lenin as well. Why? Because Lenin in politics is Kandinsky in painting. And you, for some political reasons, want to cut out Lenin because he is bad, and leave Kandinsky because he is good. But they are all abstractionists. You can't do that. If you understand one, then understand the other. Lenin does in politics what the artists did in painting. Similar things happen in music. Which decent person likes Schnittke? Well, I don't like him. I like Gavrilin, for example. Or Sviridov. But they tell me that as musicians they did not bring anything new to music. They are too melodic. And Schnittke brought something new. Perhaps this is all true. But I like Gavrilin. And he is not liked at all in Europe, but is loved in Russia.
It should be noted that Berdyaev sympathizes more with Italian fascism than with Russian communism. What unites fascism and communism? An appeal to the people.
In 1945, after the capture of Berlin, I met a German physicist my age and got into a conversation with him. He believed that the Slavs had seized the original German land, to which I objected that this was an ancient Slavic land, and Brandenburg was the Branny Bor of the Lutici, conquered by the Germans. He cried out: "Sie waren primitiw!" and stuck to his opinion. If he had been more well-read, he would have mentioned that the Lutici drove the Germanic Rugi from the banks of the Elbe in the 5th century, but is that the point? All peoples came from somewhere at some point; someone defeated someone else – such is the dialectical law of the negation of negation, to which it is unjustifiable to mix personal likes and dislikes. Constant variability in time and space is a natural law. Therefore, it must be studied as we study cyclonic activity or earthquakes, regardless of whether we like them or not.
Many millions of years ago, the country now called Spain was still rising on the yeast of creation. Epochs passed; vegetation appeared; where there is vegetation, by the law of nature there must also be rabbits; where there are rabbits, by the will of Providence there must appear dogs. Here everything is clear and not subject to discussion. But if we further ask ourselves why the dogs that caught rabbits were called spaniels, doubts and difficulties immediately arise. Some scholars maintain that when the Carthaginians landed in Spain, the soldiers cried out in chorus: "Span, span!" – for rabbits were scurrying from under every bush. The country swarmed with rabbits. And "span" in the Carthaginian language means "rabbit". And the country was named Spain, that is, the country of rabbits, and the dogs that did not hesitate to jump out of the bushes in pursuit of the rabbits were immediately dubbed spaniels, that is, rabbit dogs.
Chapter 15. The Riddle of Russia
On the first Saturday of February, his mother saw a bumblebee in the window and said, standing in the doorway: Let's call him Pasha or Sasha. Do you see a bumblebee flying in the middle of the whiteness? It's a good sign. If we don't come back by spring, go to the department store for flour. And when we come back, I'll teach him to read, I'll lie with him on the shore, I'll give him a pencil, a notebook, what else can I do, Valera?.. ... That was a lifetime ago. The country where it snows at night, the country where it snows in the morning, stayed afloat well.
The country is covered in snow, but I live. I haven't even had time to get tired of it, I'm still counting: forty-six. And around there is rubber darkness, "Perekrestok", long houses, sparks illuminating the early morning – a sharp electric train glides to Shatura or Ryazan, and the alphabet flashes in the windows.
Dear friends! Young men and women! Schoolboys and schoolgirls! Entrepreneurs! Pensioners! Public sector employees! Security officials! Temporarily employed and temporarily unemployed! Guardians of sovereign democracy and builders of the vertical of power! Human rights defenders and offenders! Registered and newcomers! Agreeable and vocal! Ours and "ours"! Gentlemen and comrades! Hairdressers of philosophical affairs and philosophers. In society, the ball is ruled by a simple majority. The majority is power, but not always the truth, which leads to misunderstandings, ambitions, litigation, and ultimately to the weakening of the unity of the community. The minority becomes a hostage to the majority. While people organize their community at the process level, they have the opportunity to actively interfere in their creativity. But as soon as this creativity takes on objectified forms, it gains relative autonomy, independence from those who created it, because in its development it is already subject to its own laws, and not to the will of its creators. Why should a voter from the majority go to the polls? He is from the majority, his will will be realized anyway. And why should a voter from the minority go to the polls? He is from the minority, his will will not be taken into account anyway.
In the words of Albert Camus, "the protest, which lasted too long and therefore froze, became an artificial formation, leading to another kind of sterility. The theme of the damned poet, born in bourgeois society, resulted in a prejudice that eventually dictated the following principle: one cannot become a great artist without protesting against one's era, whatever it may be.
And finally, freedom has many manifestations, but not all of them are assessed adequately. Most often, this perception is at the level of "this is how it should be." As for freedom as a result of overcoming one of the forms of alienation of a person from property, power and culture, this freedom can be appreciated only by someone who has gone the way from a slave to a freedman, having overcome the path of a hostage of someone else's will. You need to be seriously ill to understand and properly assess the state of a healthy person.
But I like it. To work and be useful to the country where my people live, who gave this state its mysterious name. I like that the people of our idiot state have such empty and bulging eyes. This instills in me a feeling of legitimate pride. One can imagine what the eyes are like there. Where everything is bought and sold: deeply hidden, lurking, predatory and frightened eyes. They look from under their brows with unceasing concern and torment – these are the eyes in the world of Chistogan ... The Bolsheviks exterminated the cream of the nation, clearing the field for Jewish burdocks and boorish pigweed. Now it has given birth, mother pigweed! It is difficult to pull it out by the roots! But my people have such eyes! They are constantly bulging, but – no tension in them. A complete lack of any meaning – but what spiritual power! These eyes will not sell. They will not sell anything and will not buy anything. In days of doubt, in days of painful reflection... the fatherland will not run short of idiots. – And where have you seen normal people? There are maybe a hundred of them left in the country, and the FSB keeps an eye on them all. All over the face of the native land, where great things are done for the sake of pitiful results. However, as we say – "every cloud has a silver lining". I was unlucky enough to be born in Russia with intelligence and talent. An insignificant servant of my fatherland. "The essence is simply in the peasant who plows his own bread, in the priest who serves himself at mass, and in the soldier who "follows his superiors with his eyes" (and defends the fatherland; a soldier is a fine fellow). In fact, many people initially act virtuously out of fear of their superiors, and only later, having become accustomed to living virtuously and realizing the superiority of such a life, "stick" to virtue for its own sake. The current post-Soviet totalgia is mainly converted into Brezhnev-style stagnation, or “zasrai” (“stagnant paradise”).
In general, we can say that our state has gone through all three stages of full-blown schizophrenic delirium. The first period, Lenin's, is paranoid. Lenin is paranoid, but without persecution delirium. His strong point is the idea of relationship – everything has a relation to him, he is interested in everything, he pokes his nose into everything, he is responsible for everything, but without depression. With some expansion, but feeblemindedness appears only at the end of life, when a person at the paranoid stage takes up the matter, he, so to speak, picks up the baton in time. Stalin is a paranoid stage – with hallucinations and extraction, with all the drama inherent in that period, with its heroism and cruelty. Brezhnev is the third, paraphrenic stage – feeblemindedness and delusions of grandeur – “Azerbaijan marches forth” – a chest strewn with medals and gold stars, a virtual conquest of half the world and a country falling apart before our eyes along with a powerless and feebleminded leader.
Time to avoid hugs with autism and introversion, work clears the head, how many automatisms – here are our eternal enslavers, every movement is textual, we are in the text, and the exit... the exit is really only death; why did you choose my flesh as a testing ground for your whims, the main thing is not to follow the lead, ego is our love, written in heaven, intimately applied, our black and white union, tear the dress of the first virtues, order me to destroy the excesses in relation to your secret.
Moscow. Winter. Snow. A boy is playing football. Suddenly there is the sound of breaking glass. A janitor runs out, a stern Russian janitor with a broom and chases the boy. The boy runs and thinks: "Why, why all this?! Why this whole image of a street urchin, all this football, all these friends?! Why? I've already done all my homework, why am I not sitting at home on the couch and reading books by my favorite writer Ernest Hemingway?" Havana. Ernest Hemingway is finishing another novel and thinks: "Why, why all this?! How tired I am of it all, all this Cuba, these bananas, this cane, this heat, these Cubans! Why am I not in Paris, sitting with my friend Andre Maurois in the company of beautiful courtesans, sipping my morning aperitif and talking about the meaning of life?" Paris. Andre Maurois, stroking the thigh of a beautiful courtesan and sipping his morning aperitif, thinks: "Why, why all this?! How tired I am of this Paris, these rude French, dirty Moroccans, stupid courtesans, this Eiffel Tower from which they spit on your head! Why am I not in Russia, not in Moscow, where it is cold and snowy, sitting with my best friend Andrei Platonov and drinking tea by the stove?" Moscow. Cold. Snow. Andrei Platonov. In a fur hat. With a broom. Chasing a boy and thinking: "I'll catch up with you – I'll kill you!!!"
Leningrad always made a strange impression on me: the scenery of the imperial capital did not fit with the life of a provincial Soviet city, I think the Leningraders themselves felt this gap tragically. The gloom and lack of freedom, generally inherent in Soviet society, were felt especially oppressively in Leningrad. In the spring of 1968, one Leningrader told me in Moscow: "It feels like I've ended up in a free city." VSKhSON could never have emerged in Moscow – it is a typical brainchild of a tragic semi-capital. When I walked along Nevsky Prospect, I couldn’t shake the feeling that all this was a mirage, that as soon as you turn off the avenue, the city would end, dissolve in the fog, in the evaporation of the swamps, and there would be only mosses, lichens and endless treeless, watery, sucking spaces – Petersburg culture is some kind of new Atlantis, but not one that collapsed into the sea in a sudden catastrophe, but one that is gradually sucked into a swampy quagmire, from which the tops of houses still stick out, hands stick out and sometimes a muffled cry is heard – Akhmatova’s.
The cool wind that had been blowing all day suddenly died down, the air became heavier and hotter; it was the end of May, the chestnuts were green. The sky flew high and slowly above the trees, a white cloud covered the end of its distant semicircle. He looked up. In Russia there were other clouds – not like those here – just like the sun setting behind the vast expanse of fields and forests. What mysterious thing, what terrible, incomprehensible force had spread out in the seas and rivers, pulled the oaks and pines out of the earth – and where was the beginning and meaning of this irreversible movement, this air saturated with anxiety, and this dull pull inside, a little below the heart?
He imagined the road, fields, rivers, cities, endless Russian spaces, swamps, forests, highways, and all that same anxious feeling, as if birds were flying away.
You feel like you're in a cage. In Russia, there are rivers ten miles wide, you can ride in a carriage in a tandem and not meet a soul for the whole of God's day.
"Everything will end in death," said Orlando, sitting down on the ice. But Sasha, who had not a drop of English blood in her veins and was born in Russia, where sunsets linger, where dawn does not startle you with its suddenness and where a sentence often remains unfinished because of the speaker's doubts about how best to round it off, Sasha looked at him with all her eyes, laughed at him because he probably seemed like a child to her, and said nothing.
"Paris Soir!" shouted a newsboy next to him; he looked at him without understanding. The leading papers were terrible – mendacious, bloodthirsty, arrogant. The whole world outside Germany was depicted as degenerate, stupid, treacherous. It seemed that the world had no choice but to be conquered by Germany... Both papers I had bought had once been respected publications with a good reputation. Now it was not only the content that had changed. The style had changed too. It had become completely impossible. Yes, I had to leave.
Why was I so gloomy walking from the metro today? What was I thinking about, looking at the light rain and the cars that drove past one after another and smelled pleasantly of gasoline? In the rain and wind, gasoline smells of home, a warm driver's cabin and the road. And I stood there, wondering where I should go alone. I had three rubles in my pocket, and I was young, and I wanted to get drunk so much in this gloomy weather that my face changed. And not to get drunk alone, watching the bottle empty, but with you, watching how you smile and how your eyes brighten. I can write about this for a long time and beautifully, but I will not – I have no money, and all this is a song and a dream. Why torture your imagination? Gentlemen and ladies! I must tell you that I am completely fed up with this life. Should I get married? There is no more beautiful sight than human happiness. It is true. "Where the family begins, nihilism ends." And in a month I will be in Altai, it will be evening, cold, completely wild and clean air, smelling, say, of edelweiss, and such an extraordinary boredom will spread around that I will shoot my horse, burn down the camp, and then drown myself in a mountain river, in icy water. And then September, spent in a bent position at the table, and again the days will be disgustingly sweet, like mornings in the metro. Will everything really be like this invariably? Why tear a person away from his plate? Why smile in the corridors? I always told myself that there are more serious things and that I am possessed by local grief and all this raspberry for boys who are tormented by wet streets, and lanterns, and strange women. All this is true, but sometimes I am powerless in gloomy weather.
Now, when she is undoubtedly dreaming of dead friends, and trees, and flowers, and her escape somewhere one fine day – an escape like mine, to some big city, where many, many men will look at her with the same adoration with which I now look at her.
Your veins were trained and your approach was not literal. You will not remember her captivity instead, wandering to the stations. You are free to go and this is again the torment of seeing the beginning. It smells of sperm and sawdust in freight trains. Setting off on a journey, turn the locks and tear off the bolts, let the flashes of anger burn the pathfinders at the threshold. Isn't the road the goal of finding the means. The wind of time spins you and puts you across the stream.
I don’t remember the hour, it was already dark – I heard a rumble and a grinding sound, tanks were moving along the street. I turned on the radio. Auditory fears are the strongest. The clanking on the asphalt scared her so much that she suddenly jerked her hand. There were huge excavators digging a deep hole. I had never seen anything like it. These excavators looked like rusty tanks with cannon barrels replaced by buckets. But in general, everything here was like in old photographs of my grandfather.
Once upon a time, the last train rumbled over the river. The man who left in it never loved the city given to him. He even tried to describe his dislike, but it turned out that the city knew how to defend itself. It was very possible, he thought, looking out the train window, very possible that the world was meaningless.
Become a rustle in the malicious laughter of the streets, and emptiness in the dense row of shop windows. The captivity of the city... is reliable. I am in it. I am with it. I am cautious. To imagine myself as a mask, a white bone: in thirteen it will be, they say, thirty-seven. There are cities where people come to visit. There are cities where they flee forever. Yours is from some third. It is ridiculous and lazy to go for consolation, and there is no need to search for another fate. To be a target of inspiration's arrows – if only, if not for the helplessness of t;te-;-t;te – it does not work out closer. It is a pity that it is easy to inspire, but someone, somewhere... A bird flies from hand to hand, but into the distance. There are cities from which no one writes. Soon I will wake up, come, see you. There are cities where mice are not afraid to quietly enter, where a flute plays a waltz. And a mouse will appear. Slowly, without haste, he would come out into the middle of the field, small as a soul in relation to the flesh, and, raising his maddened little face, he would say, "I don't recognize you." My friends would throw their adjustable wrenches on the floor and guffaw. I would tremble like an onion peel in a slight breeze.
But where does this love for everything forgotten and abandoned come from, for these ruins among the thickets, for the rusty nails of the gray fences, where does this weariness come from in the recently created, seemingly young ram with strong horns, in the warrior whose quiver is full of arrows, and whose head is carved from a single piece of excellent bone, why do we so want old warm clothes and peace, why are the ships at the bottom of the sea and the cities at the bottom of time so enticing?..
I will go wherever my eyes lead me, rolling in my pocket the pleasantly round fact that no one is waiting for the wanderer and the chunk of time allotted to him no longer needs to be divided into transparent slices. From now on he is free – what a cool word! – free to kick the layers of wet leaves with his spreading boots, wander through the long city, rest on park benches, flirting with fearless squirrels, and in the evening to remember all the charm of the long journey down, along the tram rails – until the damp lights of the station square open up around the corner.
Lost in the midst of this bustle (put in brackets) is the longing for someone who was never met in these tons of bodies that passed by, who would have known – and in addition, this disgusting habit of going in circles. Its roots are so deep that they still drink the water of those ancient rains, when it was impossible to find solitude either in diaries or in letters. You won’t understand this, Mom, where I live now... there they hug in front of everyone!
Chapter 16. The Problem of the Gods
As I look back on my memories, I see how much there was that was extraordinary, significant, and far beyond the modest dimensions of my personality.
Have they really taken possession of your heart so much that there is no longer any room in it, not even the smallest corner, for those you have mercilessly forgotten?
And what does the Scripture say about patience? In patience, it says, acquire your souls! But to cry and despair is a sin! And what is God in heaven for! Not to cry, but to submit and trust in a Christian way. Modesty adorns a person. What is appointed is destined. (If you get into a flock, bark or not, but wag your tail.) And it is not necessary to flaunt everything you know... people do not like it at all when someone is smarter than them. Only he who meekly submitted to his fate is truly wise . A person, in the end, turns out to be free only in God. Like the Experience of Good Dying, in which through humility one finds lightness. Humble yourself, proud man, God resists the proud. One person can and should be proud in front of another person, but not in front of God. Proud people themselves feed their own evil sorrows. Shame and remorse are like upsetting a pot of water. If a person corrects his mistakes, people will soon forget about them. These words echo the corresponding passage from the First Epistle of John: "No one has ever seen God: if we love one another, God abides in us..."
And so that, it would seem, we could live quietly and slowly, everyone would sit quietly, peacefully and peacefully, good boys, then we would want to light a candle for God, so that everyone would be happy and comforted. You will get angry, get angry, and then you will soften, you will forgive! As the quietest angel will have time to enter after you... How wonderful it would be by that time to have time to tidy up the inner altar! If you are asked: what does well-being consist of? – answer: to be in harmony with yourself. If everything is in order inside you, then everything outside will fall into place. He who is happy himself does not wish harm to others. Joy is an invincible force, while despondency and denial will ruin everything you undertake.
How could it be better, and more affectionate, so that everyone would feel good and cozy, without need and without grief... Birds live peacefully in their nests. And here God huddles. In the nest. Because the nest is so sacred, which God himself seeks. I do not argue: there is a God of the Universe. But I somehow like the "God of the Nest" better. And a servant of God, and a subject of the Tsar. (God also sets the prices for bread, he has a lot of everything). For one repentant unbeliever, two believers are given. Fate loves the obedient and secretly indulges them, and it is so easy on the souls of those who remember this. And he spoke for a long time and unconvincingly, as if he were talking about the friendship of peoples.
First of all, to perceive life not as a given, but as a gift, essentially undeserved, since no one can make themselves alive. Moreover, the gift is constantly renewed, and therefore evokes surprise and gratitude.
- Excuse me, but you judge by your weak mind, and as a person who is used to condemning. You need to be tolerant of other people's delusions, even if you are sure of your own.
In I. Ilf’s “Notebooks” there was a story about a certain old maid who was afraid to go out into the street because there were men there.
- So what, they are dressed?
To which she invariably replies:
- Yes, but under their clothes they are naked. The servant of God is covered in skin . You will not confuse me... An old maid, overcome by erotic visions, attributes them to other people.
You still bring in your necessary minus, which is important to me now as a plus... Well, yes. I'll take it. This is the engine of questions. Tact is an unwritten agreement not to notice other people's mistakes and not to correct them. That is, a miserable compromise. Any categoricalness is a sign of narrow-mindedness. Understand the simple truth that you are trying to remake in your own way people who have gone through the harsh school of life and who, I will tell you frankly, laugh at you and at the nonsense that you preach, laugh and... In general, one thing can be safely stated: if criticism comes from people you do not want to be like, then you can ignore it.
— Excuse me, but if I am talking nonsense, and everyone laughs at this nonsense, then why are you so... alarmed? After all, I hope you, too, have gone through the harsh school of life? The beauty of your philosophical curves is exquisite and indisputable. I treat you as a person ennobled by education. Of course, I could not have received such a brilliant and excellent education, which, so to speak, is evident in your every movement, even if I, a person whose mind has been touched by the education of Europe... I, perhaps, understand life more than you... And not "maybe", but definitely... A worthy man at my age belongs not to society, but to God and family. The Vatican is not the editorial board of a third-rate Marxist newspaper. This boy, like any other boy, understands no less than you. Without other people, you are nothing.
The paper contained a selected verse from the Old or New Testament, and our task was to find the verse and tell the class or the teacher, orally or in writing, what it was about and what its moral was. I loved this exercise and was so good at it that I was often the best "scholar of Scripture." It was my introduction to critical analysis. I read all the chapters that came before the assigned verse and all the chapters that came after it in order to get the "meaning" right. I can still do this, much to the dismay of some of my opponents, and I still have respect for those whose style is disparaged as "merely" Talmudic, Koranic, or "fundamentalist." Such exercises are good for the intellect and for literary skills.
In general, the lack of convincing argumentation on the part of our critics seems to stem from the fact that their position is based not on rational reasoning but on inner conviction. Therefore, their ideas are easy to refute but difficult to overcome.
By the end of this three-year period, Muhammad's initial upsurge and enthusiasm had given way to severe depression. Oppressive melancholy and hopeless despair, doubts about his chosenness and prophetic mission tormented him. Prayers and fasts, religious reflections and contemplation, support from the devoted Khadija and numerous like-minded people who believed in him as the messenger of God did not help, the depressed state did not pass, on the contrary, the depression became deeper and more unbearable, Muhammad returned to the thought of suicide more and more often and persistently. Did the fullness of faith leave Muhammad during this period? The fullness of faith is incompatible with despair, which is why the sin of despondency is considered one of the most serious sins in all religions, sincere faith in principle excludes such a state of mind when life seems unbearable and hopeless. Apparently, in moments of despair, Muhammad lost not only faith in his connection with God, but in the depths of his subconscious, faith in God himself and in the afterlife, in which eternal torment in hell is prepared for infidels and suicides, began to waver.
His frivolity comes from his aestheticism, he is an aesthetic madman. I think it is simply from ignorance of life. Such people act on the useless side of life and play their role very plausibly. In life they are extremely isolated, and if we go back to their past, we will find in them a feeling of inferiority, which has led to the development of a superiority complex. The patient, the more grandeur he displays, the more deplorable, as a rule, is his objective state.
Christians have a custom of burying suicides on highways, not in cemeteries, in anticipation of a future life – on the question of the meaningful horizons of retribution in the afterlife. – Nihilists. There are no funeral services for nihilists. They limit themselves to: "To hell with him. His life was damned, and his death was damned." Yes, yes, death is cruel to a sinner... in the afterlife, the smell of sewage is everywhere. "Do not defile your heart, I say to you, for the Eternal Being dwells therein." Remember death, but forget the dead. God killed people (because God did not know how to communicate with the living).
(Usually people are afraid not so much of their own death as of the death of their loved ones. Especially children. Death, oddly enough, is also a language game, that is, it does not have a true-meaningful dimension. Probably, truly religious people not only do not fear their own death, but also the death of their loved ones. After all, in the Christian language game, it is not death that is scary, but what will happen after it. We should be afraid of something else: that children are not bad people, that God does not punish them in the next world.)
- I know that very well, Mother. If you start to lecture me, the only thing I can do is hang myself. Why are religious people so intolerant? Cynics have the easiest character, idealists have the most unbearable. Doesn't this make you think that true morality mocks morality? And cynicism is laughter that has broken out of the bounds of culture? Hypocrisy is also a desire to please God more than others.
Philosophy, as a rule, thinks differently, challenges the dominant systems of thought. The history of thought is the history of its struggle with its own rigidification and meaninglessness in the forms of various ideologies and mythologies, theological and metaphysical dogmas.
What do you want to say about God? That it is easier to live with Him? Why should it be easier to live? You should not live easily. But productively.
Here is what Jung writes about Christ, comparing his divine essence with the archetypal destiny: "Along with the love for humanity, a certain anger is noticeable in the character of Christ and, as is often the case with emotional natures, a lack of self-reflection. There is no evidence that Christ ever marveled at himself. Obviously, he did not have to confront himself.
You, as can be seen from your faces, have brought with you the usual set of dismal reproaches. And something else didactic and creaky. Moral didactics, a reasoning moralizing tone, preachy turns of thought. But what is this most necessary matter to which I owe the pleasure of your visit? Life is already vile, disgusting and nasty, and here you are with your insults...
"Well, my almost half-honorable Ivan Severyanich! How are you?" "Thank you, my most-insignificant one, that you had character and did not give me money for revenge." In general, Vasily Vasilyevich said somewhere that a candle is dearer to him than God. God is somewhere out there, in general, and the candle is here, you lit it and it came to life. This is "visible", you can believe in it.
Meanwhile, according to the testimony of the historian of Russian culture P. Milyukov, literate people appeared in Russia at the beginning of the 17th century. The Russian people have long had a tradition of mistrust of education and books in general. Milyukov cited the opinions of European travelers about the attitude of ordinary people to education. In response to questions about whether it is worth reading books and studying, they were told: “Do not read many books, such and such a person has gone crazy from books, and another has gone crazy in books, and a third has fallen into heresy.” And further: “Do not be arrogant, brothers, but remain in humility ... If someone asks you: do you know philosophy? – you answer him: I have not run Hellenic insolence, nor have I read rhetorical astronomy, nor have I been in conversation with wise philosophers – I study the books of the blessed law, if only it were possible to cleanse my sinful soul from sins.” According to French observers of the early 17th century, the Russian people knew neither schools nor universities; only priests taught reading and writing, but few did. In Moscow, “free knowledge” (i.e. Greek and Latin authors) seemed suspicious.
And what about Orthodoxy? What kind of economic ethics does it have? Orthodoxy, according to Weber, is too irrational. It has a lot of magic, that is, icons, candles and relics. Orthodox ethics are created more for peasants than for city dwellers, who are least dependent on the rhythms of nature. There is no place to talk about this here, but it is also worth noting that Russia borrowed Christianity not from the dynamic and developing young Western civilization, but from the ossified and gradually dying Byzantium, and this circumstance could not help but leave a deep mark on subsequent Russian history.
"If not in spite of, but because of great curiosity I ask – for what interest does that man/maiden (?) disturb the peace of a sick old man, tormented by illnesses and melancholy? Will he/she enlighten the darkness of our ignorance and truly reveal his/her true face, hidden in the secret of our ignorance? Blessed is he who knows the answers, may what is due be accomplished in spite of, and what is destined to be, and what is predestined will not change. In great humility we remain and in a quick response to our modest word, we strive in trembling hope ... " Together with the strings, artistically struck together one with the others, the gusli produces a song and the gusli player rejoices, for the sake of honey sweetness.
“...as the Most High God on earth tolerates all faiths, languages and confessions, then Her Majesty, in accordance with His Holy Will, deigns to act in this way, desiring only that love and harmony always reign among Her Majesty’s subjects...”
It is strange, but it still means – for Him too. In this matter He has relied and hopes for us. He does not need anyone or anything, He is the only one who is self-sufficient in the exact sense of the word – and yet He needs us; I will timidly, timidly dare to say that He – depends on us, as all lovers depend on their loved ones. He – loves us...
Pascal believed that no matter how incredible the existence of God may seem, the loss in the case of a "wrong answer" is too great. It is more profitable to believe in God, because if he exists, you get eternal bliss, and if he does not, then you lose nothing. On the other hand, if you do not believe in God, and it turns out that he exists, you are damned for eternity; if you are right and he does not exist, then nothing changes for you.
As he was dying, the old Jew said to his wife:
- Sarah, put the Bible, the Koran and the Torah in my coffin!
The wife is shocked and says:
- Yakov, the Torah is understandable, but why do you need the Bible and the Koran?
- Just in case, Sarah, just in case!
Moral: for what is the highest good given? Perhaps for feeding the birds when he himself was hungry. And then he himself did not remember when he fed them. However, we will omit the moral.
God bless him completely! God the Lord! Well, come on, God. Come on, come on. I do not contradict God's will in anything and I blindly submit to the temptations that he sends down upon me. I praise the good, I am drawn to the bad. If there were no inclination to evil, a person would not be virtuous. After all, evil is what we want to avoid. No public confession can disgrace a person: all people are equal among themselves, all are equally subject to temptations. There is no crime that someone else could not commit.
"Without a sinner, man cannot live, and without a saint, he will live too long." This is the most, most important part of Christianity. "The predicate" is food, drink, intercourse. Jesus said about all this that it is "sinful" and that "the works of the flesh tempt you." But if they "did not tempt" – man and humanity would die. But since "thank God – they tempt", then – also "thank God" – humanity continues to live.
Excuse me: what is this "glory to God"? How could he say: "I am the way and the life"? Nothing of the sort. Nothing even close. "Circumstantial words."
Historically, this state of mind is also known under the name of quietism. The phrase in which Maeterlinck depicts God smiling at our gravest mistakes, as one smiles at dogs playing on the carpet, is undoubtedly a quietist phrase. It is serious and seems fair, especially when one thinks of how little significance our actions have, how these actions are committed, with what force we are carried away by the endless chain of causes and effects, and how little our actions depend on us, even the most decisive of them, the most justified. Such morality, leaving the miserable human laws to do their fruitless work, tears the essence from life and transfers it to other, higher realms. Only there, in a sphere protected from all accidents, humiliating accidents of a social nature, can life bear its best fruits. Mystical morality does not recognize anything that is not marked by the double seal of humanity and divinity. That is why it has always inspired fear in the clergy and the judiciary, for by denying the external hierarchy it denies, even if passively, the social order: the mystic can agree to any kind of slavery, but will never stoop to the servile duty of being a citizen. Maeterlinck already foresees the time when the souls of all people will merge into one, as they now merge with God in their mystical moods. But is this possible? Will people ever become true people, beings so free and proud that they will base their judgments only on God.
There is no point in angering God, I live happily, and things are unimportant. However, I do not lose heart and have not lost my cheerful disposition. Do not worry, I will not mope. If I am bored, I will look out the window. Things are not so bad for me. I amuse myself in my own way, occasionally call on the phone and do not lose heart – everything will be fine, and although life is closer to the end than the beginning, we will still have time to shine, to act eccentrically, to show our teeth and menacing profile, and then with a roar, in smoke and flame, fly out forever into the gaping abyss ...
— What I am grateful to God for is that I have never killed anyone in my entire life. And how many cases there have been!.. I believe that the true religion is a Kind Heart.
Let us remember that all religions are competitors. Every nation (or even person) must necessarily develop their own religion, and not wear rags swarming with other people's lice – all diseases come from them... Nations that are on the rise in our time – India, China and so on – import only technology and capital, and their religions are locally produced. Any member of these societies can be sure that they pray to their own cockroaches, and not to later insertions, copyist errors or translation inaccuracies.
Even today, when US presidents take the oath of office, they place their hand on the Bible. Also, in many countries around the world, including the US and UK, witnesses in courts, when they swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but it, place their hand on the Bible. It is ironic that they swear to tell the truth on a book that is full of fictions, myths and errors.
The average Christian most often believes in a monotheistic single God, a dualistic devil, polytheistic saints, and animistic ghosts. Religious scholars call the coexistence of contradictory and even mutually exclusive ideas, the combination of rituals and practices from different cultures syncretism. Perhaps syncretism is the world's only and greatest religion.
The conviction of the real existence of God overtakes a person (of course, appropriately educated and disposed) not in hours of feverish and intense work of the mind, but in moments of free reflection, even some absent-mindedness and contemplation. The enlightenment, in fact, consists in the fact that a person suddenly, that is, completely unexpectedly for himself, suddenly, it would seem, without any reason or external impetus, with his whole being begins to feel the living presence of God in the world and in himself. From such a feeling, the world immediately acquires fullness and completeness, the harmony that was previously absent from it, it becomes beautiful, sometimes unbearably beautiful. From the harmony and beauty of the world, a person is overcome by a keen sense of joy and happiness of being and at the same time an unshakable confidence in his personal spiritual immortality. At such moments the critical voice of reason falls silent and it seems to a person that he not only senses the existence of God as a physical reality, but also understands quite clearly that it cannot be otherwise, that a world without God is the height of absurdity and logical nonsense, that without God the world would not exist for even a moment.
None of us would like to take away the magic or the consolation of humanity. At the age of forty-two, for the first time, religion becomes important to you. You may have fooled around with religion once in a while before, but now for the first time it becomes important – because religion is deeply connected with death. And every god is a god of death. Now death is approaching, and for the first time the desire for religion arises. Jung wrote that he had observed all his life that people who came to him at the age of forty always needed religion. If they had gone mad, if they had neuroses or psychoses, they could not be helped unless they had become deeply rooted in religion. And if the society is irreligious and you have never been taught religion, the greatest difficulty comes when you are about forty-two – because the society does not give you any further space, any door, any dimension.
Criticism is the service of understanding, the service of clarity. But as soon as man subjects God to moral evaluation, he kills God in himself. As always, in the question of evaluation, everything depends on the evaluator. But on what then is morality based? God is denied in the name of justice, but can the idea of justice be understood outside the idea of God? Do we not then find ourselves in an absurd situation? This is the absurdity that Nietzsche encountered. In order to overcome it more surely, he takes it to the limit: morality is the last hypostasis of God; it must be destroyed in order to be built anew. God then no longer exists, and he is no longer the guarantor of our existence; man must decide to act in order to be. (All these idols are generated by the same “Mongolism,” the belief in eternal ideas. “Nothing – that is what I built my business on.”)
General history before the birth of Christ is nothing more than a centuries-long attempt to idealize reality. This effort is expressed in the ideas and rituals of purification characteristic of the ancients. With the coming of Jesus the goal is achieved and another effort arises, directed, on the contrary, toward the realization of the ideal. Purification is followed by a passion for incarnations, which increasingly devastates the world as socialism, the heir of Christ, expands its power. General history is nothing other than a centuries-long assault on the unique principle that is the Self, the living, concrete, all-conquering principle, which they sought to subjugate under the yoke of such successive abstractions as God, the state, society, humanity.
Sin is something that is punishable in life. But how can you punish me if the arrows of all suffering have gathered in me? They say that in all of us are embedded the seeds of what we will do someday in life.
"We must wait a little," he muttered. And he tried to convince them that only death was irreparable. A chilly fearlessness, simply, stunningly simple. Consider death a consolation? Perhaps. More likely, however, they would consider it the final insult, the final irreparable theft of their freedom. A blind principle, and not an abyss. God is not the one who is constantly occupied with himself, like an eternal sybarite, but he is transensus, that is, going beyond himself.
"The road is in the hands of boys, boys are always trying something, because they are the most desperate people." – These are the daring intellectuals of a drunken seminarian, a decadent student of a cool life . Having admitted that the meaning of life does not exist, they find meaning in explaining it to others.
You have been pasturing with senseless cattle, you damned one!.. Stop your rotten demagogy! Such heretics that God himself would be sick! You will end badly! You are doing a nasty thing, little one! Look, child: isn’t it dangerous to be intellectual – to swear at life? Philosophy is the pride of reason, idle curiosity. Yes, all this will not end well. Calm down, boy. “A man of double thoughts is unstable in all his ways.” Figure it out. Be that as it may, life is a gift. Have fun, innocent ones. But it is precisely helplessness that is the godmother of such statements. “Dust you are and to dust you will return.” The exploration of space is an abominable thing.
And I absolutely cannot explain to you what the sense of his undertaking was: probably an ordinary desire to do mischief – nothing more. “Why bite the nurse’s breasts just because the teeth are coming in?” But here he could not restrain himself, so it must have gotten to him. Hysterics rarely really happen because of what they are thrown about. In essence, he is a deeply unhappy person, which he did not suspect, since he suspected everyone else. It is always the result of an accident, and in itself already a misfortune. Sacrilege is expressed in actions, blasphemy in words. He believed in words more than in reality, which, in essence, is only a tangible shadow of words, since from a simple syllogism it is quite clear that if thought does not exist without words, then matter does not exist without thought either.
Yakov Vilimovich Bruce is a famous sorcerer and warlock who lost his wealth due to the Russian Revolution of 1917. He was a great bookworm and had a very broad understanding of life, his speech was permeated with experience and knowledge of the world. So, as the Count wrote: “A child born at this time is angry, vain, fearful, fickle like a woman. He is capable of secretly lying and is distinguished by shameful unrighteousness. His heart is full of poison, but devoid of deceit. He does not spare the life of others, he is stingy with his own. In addition, this shaker of the foundations will tempt many and will not fear God.”
Blyad' – the word comes from the Old Russian verb áëåÿòè, meaning "to deceive, to talk empty talk". It is believed that this Russian word is related to the English word áàddåã – "bubble" and "chatterbox", as well as the famous American bla-bla-bla – "empty chatter". The modern meaning of the word is most likely the result of semantic confusion with the word "blud", which comes from the Old Russian áëåóäè – "to wander".
The critic G. was right when he said that they don't know yet how harmful you are – corrupt them with hope and abandon them. And so, I abandon them, leave them waving their handkerchiefs on the shore and sail away, I don't know where. Look, the day before yesterday a letter arrived: "Through you the evil one speaks to immature minds, under the guise of a story." And you know, your courage is a soporific for teenagers, because bliss is the first infinity, like the smell of earth in a hairdo. Every book, just like every girl, can turn into a witch, then her spirit comes out and destroys and torments everyone nearby.
"Extremely passionate, and what they desire, they are inclined to seek most fiercely; anxious, even very restless, distrustful and timid, envious, malicious, sometimes extravagant, sometimes thrifty, but mostly greedy, grumbling, effeminate, dissatisfied and always complaining, discontented, capricious, vindictive, easily disturbed and reveling in their fantasies, unkind to speech or inclined to rude speech, but strict, boring, sad, severe, self-willed, very persistent and, as melancholy is depicted in the form of a sad woman leaning her hand on open books, neglecting custom and therefore possessed by pride, soft, drinking; and also – deep comprehension, excellent understanding, wisdom and wit."
“The corruption is so dangerous, so active, that the purpose of publishing their monstrous philosophical system becomes only one thing – to spread beyond their lives all the crimes they have committed; they themselves can no longer do this, but their damned writings can, and this sweet thought consoles them in the renunciation of everything that exists, to which death forces them.”
A most vile man at every period of his life. If it is possible to be such, a real offspring of every abomination, so that it is more fitting to suppress him, as one suppresses, extinguishes a fire, and would it not be better to leave them in the same state, so that these lives would be at the same time dark and unfortunate. It is the same as raping a girl. "It is impossible that temptations should not come, but woe to him through whom they come! It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were thrown into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones ..." (Luke 17:1,2). This would, moreover, be a bad example: a whole generation, which Barres taught to live an active life, would be deceived. The absurdity of violence amuses me, but among all this servants I am a patron and a tyrant.
But from the moment when, through weakness of character, the criminal resorts to the help of philosophical doctrine, from the moment when crime justifies itself, it, using all sorts of syllogisms, grows as much as thought itself. Previously, the crime was lonely, like a cry, but now it is as universal as science. Yesterday, prosecuted by the court, today the crime has become law.
He taught his partner to smoke and sit on her friends’ laps so that she could later report which of her friends was behaving with her and how.
It's easy to yell when you're a greenhorn and don't have a family to feed! You yap like a communist and an anarchist. There's nothing sacred to you, just a tin throat and fists. You don't believe in anything, not in God, not in the devil, not in your homeland, not in your family – in nothing! You're a little beast. And a malicious one at that! You've stuffed your head with books, but you're bad at them. There's nothing more harmful. Since you've been here, you've been slacking off and inciting others. Do you think I haven't seen it? You haven't earned a penny yet, you don't even pay for your own upkeep, you parasite, that's what you are! A lazy bum! A tramp!
His head is not a head, but a cesspool: not a single thought can pass through it without being saturated with impure fumes.
"Down with those who howl all their lives," wrote Beecher, "and yet are considered birds of paradise!" Who are these "social lemon squeezers"? These are the people who predict all sorts of misfortunes, who kill hope and see only the bad side of everything – "people whose very appearance curdles milk and spoils nerves."
Some philosophers argue that forgiving someone who has harmed you is a sign of weakness, of inability to defend your right to a fair resolution to a problem in the relationship. Forgiveness means that we do not hold others accountable for our own actions; in other words, we do not consider them capable of following moral principles and believe that there is no point in wasting time and energy on them. Forgiveness means that it is over.
But you know what, my new acquaintance, put aside for a while the gloomy thoughts that your bilious temperament inspires in you! Looking at you, flies die. Listen. I know life better, I have lived longer and betrayed more and seen more people who were betrayed by someone else.
It seems to me, forgive me, that you are sitting on an ice floe and floating away somewhere. Or your ice floe is being carried away by the current, which is more likely. Return to the shore. Come to our seminars. You don’t have to speak, just listen. Young people today are very informed.
Is there a God? This question worries many people. And of course, it is equally unprovable that he exists, and the opposite. I will answer this way: everyone decides for themselves. Much more important in real life is that Jesus' way works. In fact, Jesus X. is a pretty good brand.
Half a paragraph was spoken by Christ through the mouth of the priest. From this half a paragraph it became clear to me that he loved the girl.
Are you crying? – the nun asked anxiously. No! – he answered sharply. – I never cry. – And don’t, my dear. It is we women who can cry, but you cannot. If you cry, who will then answer to God? Much will be forgiven you, because you have loved much... So, my dear son, I hope you will live as your grandfathers did, with kind eyes and without sorrow...
And you are still despondent! Oh-oh... What is it? What is the sadness on your sour face? Are we offended? Why don't you smile, what do you lack? Where is the understanding of things and philosophical indifference? Away with the wrinkle that has crept across your forehead and the stern gloom of your face!
Listen, – she sighs, – why are you so sad? Why are you silent and why are you always so gloomy? You answer all questions with "uh-huh". Tell me, why do you live so boringly, so dull? This is not good, my friend. I don't want this to happen to me! Please smile now and be done with it! (You forgot that your face should be friendly, and your actions cautious and respectful).
It only takes 13 muscles to smile and 112 to frown. Those who are already far away should not see us gloomy. You yourself said that evening that you would teach me not to be bored. Be smart and take care of yourself.
When we feel bad, our lips move down, when we feel happy – up, and our whole face distorts and jumps – vibrates. Isn’t this a way of balancing, a search for calm, from which we were led and to which we return, after a minute or two of twitching, swaying from side to side, like a tightrope walker restoring his balance? And don’t the grimaces of crying, the grimaces of laughter, so similar to each other, serve as a protective measure or pantomime of the organism, which prefers to imitate mortal convulsions rather than actually experience them? Following the gymnastics of the facial muscles and the preventive shaking of the body, relief comes. With the play of the physical cover we have calmed the trembling of the soul, with an external shake we have prevented an internal explosion...
- You remember, the evening was passionate with huge languid, wide eyes.
- What a pity, after all, that you don't have a daughter somewhere! A dreamer like you would certainly have a good girl, but a good boy is unlikely...
And so the little girl left her parents' home and went out into the big world. And the more she learned about herself, the more she learned about her father. And then she did the only thing left for her to do.
- You are a fish. A fish splashing in an ocean of impressions. Your world is paved with aquarium glitter. You breed variously finned humans behind thick glass. You buy them food at the human market when you have money.
He is rapidly losing weight – this is a good sign. She is still cheerful, although more and more often she starts talking about something languid, as if it is hard for them to live now.
A touching Akathist to the Lord Jesus Christ, our most righteous judge and rewarder, in memory of the General Resurrection and the Last Judgment. He will call and they will hear him.
Lord, save and have mercy, take me out of here! Forgive me, Lord, teach me what to do! Guide me. I live – so roll up my sleeves, Lord, and give me a staff for the right path. You who do not give us any promises, still point your flashlight there, God.
To whom shall I cry, O Heavenly King, Master, Almighty?! And to those visible in this and invisible, Creator! What shall I do, look! To whom shall I run in my sorrow, if not to you, Mother Queen of Heaven? Who will accept my cry and my sigh, if not you, Most Immaculate One. Who will protect me in adversity more than you? Hear my lamentation, and incline your ear to me... and do not disdain me, who require your help. Strengthen my poor soul. I believe... With the icon "Assuage my sorrows", my Patient, zealous intercessor, my hope. I am at the limit. Continue!
"Our Father, cheer up the souls of those who were previously oppressed to the end by the storms of life. Our Father, may they forget all sorrows and earthly sighs. Our Father, comfort them in Your bosom, as a mother comforts her children."
And he prayed. Lord, preserve and have mercy on our native dialect, for we speak no other. Preserve and have mercy on us, his restless moths, feebly hovering around the world and flickering among other languages and peoples. From Uppsala to Buenos Aires. Us, sullen and grey, carrying on our wings the dust of his chronicles and alphabets, the ashes of the apocrypha, the soot of lamps and candles. Us and those who seek a way out of their humiliating circumstances in order to soar after us. And those who do not seek. And those who will not soar. Look upon us and upon them. Speak to us in Your lofty Esperanto. Give us a sign. Strengthen. Instruct. Confirm that I Am and that this is no longer a dream, but reality. And the dream – awaken and reveal yourself. Only to me, a small moth. To me, mbli. To me, dust and ashes. Whisper in my ear. Rustle a fallen leaf – a leaf of a manuscript – a bamboo grove; for what?
"Lord, whether I want or not, save me, for I, like a lover of filth, desire the filth of sin, but You, being good and all-powerful, can forbid me. For if You have mercy on the righteous, it is nothing great, if You save the pure, it is nothing marvelous, for they are worthy of Your mercy. But on me, O Master, the wretched, sinful and impure, show Your mercy, show Your compassion, for You have abandoned seven beggars, I have become impoverished in all good deeds. Lord, save me, for the sake of Your mercy, for You are blessed forever, amen." "A monster, huge, with a hundred mouths and barking."
No evil shall come to you, and no wound shall come near your body; with long life I will fill him and show him... Preserve you in all your ways. I am with him in sorrow, let me weep for my sins! Most Holy Child, good angel of confidence ! Drive away this darkness with your pure hands. Let this cup pass me by. God, the only one... please, I ask, I so rarely ask for anything, I beg, please. Lord, I know no more words for you, my soul is exhausted, Lord! My cry to you is weakening...
Fall prostrate on the pavement! – “I am sick, deaf, burdened... Calm me down, teacher, cover me...” And hear in response:
— “Get up...” “Go...” “Sin not...”
Humility, the symbol of which is a small figure of a child. And is there anything sadder and more disturbing than tiny children's footprints left on a dusty road? Crafty devils confuse their path. The distance wakes up in scattered sun. God is not guilty of either life or death. He who has not accepted torment will never be saved... Mister Satan, what about those babies who laugh at night and splash warm milk right in your eyes, where are their ashes? I would collect them... "The son of man will send his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all temptations and those who practice lawlessness, and will cast them into the fiery furnace; there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth." "And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away."
And on the forearm one could read the inscription, once tattooed in black, now faded ink: "There is no God." Uneven and stretched, it looked like a clumsily scribbled line in a first-grader's notebook. On the skin around the inscription there were many red, raised scars. The man was sitting in his wheelchair directly opposite and looking at me with wide-open eyes. I looked away, and when a minute later I looked up again, he was still staring at me motionless...
Human emotions often take on the character of a plea or request. Everyone knows how difficult it can be to ask, difficult because it acknowledges the power of another, the power of "his arbitrary rule over me." Humility, nurtured by the deeply rooted conviction that the punishment is always more severe than the crime. Therefore, the pursuit of power is a manifestation of the human desire to be the only subject in a world of objects. And they bowed their heads to the ground and repeated: "Do such a divine favor, do not destroy us."
I must warn you from the start – I am not complaining about anything. But this is like a madhouse where you are allowed to masturbate for the rest of your days. It seems to me that my own existence has already ended, but where exactly, I cannot determine.
Leaden melancholy and entreaty, all conceivable promises to "improve", disgust towards oneself and the fury of not understanding how the world can roll the waves of its existence "without me". A general feeling of monstrous injustice, and a frantic childish belief that it is still possible to come to an agreement so that they give one more chance. And then a piercing regret, but still in one's doom, to the one who should be envied – the one remaining, the indifferent. Everyone, I think, is able to add their own nuance.
They gutturally resent the petty, touching injustices and demand the benefits that were promised, not knowing that the final justice has already been given to them. Do not knock – it will not open – for it has long been unlocked and it was said: "Enter!" and behind your knocking you do not hear the invitation. Do not ask – for everything you need has already been given and no one can take it away, the rest is dust and there is no need to ask for it. And do not seek – for this you need to become not having, you have everything, just open your eyes.
In Him, everyone will discover themselves, think about their own, see a reflection... At a certain stage of their development, a person comes to the conviction that God is only their mirror image. Here, precisely here, a person imitates God, revealing their true face in an infinite number of situations. I have always said that God is my ideological comrade-in-arms. And this is an absolute proof that all the Sahaba received powerful knowledge and faiz ilmi-hal, while the generation of Tabi'een, compared to the Sahaba, in this matter were like a lamp against the sun. Muftis make statements calling on Muslims not to join such organizations, emphasizing that Muslims are already members of the "party of Allah" by birth. "God is the Lamp of Lamps and the Archangel." Allah is pleased with them, and they are pleased with Allah. This is a great profit.
Schopenhauer wrote that just as the light of a lamp turns scratches on a table into concentric circles, the fire of our egoism draws all random events around a single center.
“Imam Ash-Shafi’i was asked: “How can one recognize the followers of truth during times of turmoil?” He replied: “Follow the arrows of the enemies, they will lead you to them.”
Many verses emphasize that no person will remain on earth forever, that people came to this world for testing, that attempts to avoid death will not yield results. In addition, it is reported that everyone will be returned to Allah, and is called to reflect on the benefits that Allah has bestowed upon man. This is the formula of the confession of Islam, declaring how great is the greatness of the One God and how honorable is slavery to Him...
And so I testify that you are a prophet and the seal of the prophets! From this moment on you are dearer to me than my father and mother. If there were other gods in which I believed before, they would help us – but there are no other gods except Allah! I testify that our defeat is from God, and your victory is from God, and from this moment on there is no doubt in my soul! Allah is closer to us than the jugular artery.
Unlike Mukrim Khalil (Inanch), who spent his entire life talking in the Esafil-i Shark coffee shop and left behind almost nothing worthy of his knowledge, the teacher generously shared information from his archive, the records of which could not be read by anyone except himself.
In this language there are seven genders, that is, in addition to masculine, feminine and neuter, there is also a gender for eunuchs, for asexual women (whose gender was stolen by the Arab shaitan), for those who change gender, whether men who prefer to be considered women or vice versa, and also for lepers, who, along with their illness, also acquire a new feature of speech, which immediately reveals their illness to anyone who enters into conversation with them.
But is it possible to assume that the deity is playful and allows much? What can I compare it to... have you ever cut glass with scissors in water? – with some practice, it comes out pretty well; it's like measuring the depth of a hole in a live electrical outlet with a lady's hairpin.
But I had no more need of God than He had of me. The highest in you tried to imitate me. "The eye with which I look at God is the same eye with which He looks at me." God, the King of Heaven, has less influence than, for example, a centurion or a policeman. "Charlie" was the vanguard of all those who are not obliged and never will "respect" the evil fables of "faith" that have been flooding Europe with blood and pus for 2,000 years.
The Lord made me an atheist. Who are you to dispute His wisdom?! In Russia, atheism and secularism are often confused, although there is no identity or even a strict connection between these concepts. Atheism is a lack of belief in God, a denial of his existence. Atheism is the opposite of theism, and in a broad sense – of religion as such. Secularism presupposes the separation of church and state, the affirmation of freedom of conscience and the independent value of education, culture, morality, and politics. Secularism is the opposite of fundamentalism and clericalism. This position in Western society is often called “secular humanism” and presupposes respect for the human personality, a combination of social and spiritual freedom with moral responsibility – without appealing to supernatural sources of life and spirit.
Believers think that when the true state of affairs is revealed, they look stupid with their candles, the cult of dried corpses and turbans. Having some religious experience, they know for sure that nothing will happen as a result of blasphemy, and they undertake to do their god's "work". The situation is heated up by priests. When the fact of the absence of god can no longer be veiled by ordinary means, new articles of the Criminal Code are composed, fires are lit, and believers are given some "special feelings" that other people do not have. And, of course, arousing anger is the direct responsibility of this organization. There is pride in excessive humility. There is vanity in excessive faith. Gello has the vanity of faith and the pride of humility.
Since moderation is always a virtue, mild disgust toward child prostitution seems more appropriate than passionate condemnation. And since action presupposes a very specific set of decisions, this version of culture is more contemplative than committed.
Let's say Judge Schreber writes in his memoirs that he would sometimes like to turn into a woman ready for copulation, for intercourse with God. This delirium only seems more or less understandable. In fact, it is completely incomprehensible. The category of transformation is generally characteristic of delirium. Here is Kafka's hero who turned into an insect. How can one imagine this? Sometimes I tried to imagine that I turned into my cat. I immediately became afraid that I was completely enclosed in his small cranium.
The famous Leo Allatius in his work (unpublished? how much can we trust Fabricius?) De Praeputio Domini Nostri Jesu Christi Diatriba (Discourse on the foreskin of our Lord Jesus Christ) claimed that the foreskin ascended to heaven at the same time as Christ, and thus the rings of Saturn were formed, which were just then seen by astronomers through a telescope.
The only excuse for God is that he does not exist. The one who is guilty is the one who is obedient. People who believe in gods scare me, because they forgive them everything. Christianity is Platonism for the herd. Socialism is degenerate Christianity. Death brings you closer to God, Because now you too are gone.
What a restless demon has possessed you! Oh, boy, you've gotten confused, lost in the nooks and crannies of life. Try to convince me that a man can't step into the same river again.
- You will end up in a dead end.
- You are mistaken. I started with him. And therefore I feel that, at least on that side, I will not run into a wall and that I am completely free.
Being is a "circle", therefore all knowledge proceeds as a movement in a circle. But he treated the hermeneutic circle differently than his predecessors: he believed that the real problem is to enter the circle, not to leave it. Leaving the circle is not required at all.
A person enters a door, and the door enters a person. How can this be? Well, for example, in a Russian fairy tale Ivan the Fool was told to guard the door, and he carries it around with him on his back everywhere. But this is not quite an accurate example. I want to say something like this. When I opened the door and entered it, it simultaneously entered me, as if sneaking up from behind, because the door is both a simple door and a magical Door-Archetype. Not only do I influence the door, but the door also influences me. As in Carroll's Alice, the pie says, "Eat me," so the door says, "Open me!" To decipher a closed door, you have to open it. To decipher a chair, you have to sit on it.
When you don't know what you want, you can't avoid trouble. I'll find a place to put myself... I know, I know where the exit is. Most often, the exit is where the entrance was. But does a labyrinth have a door? And on that door is there a lock that at least someone could unlock with a key? After all, the desire to open, to open once and for all... the exit from it is probably only in madness. Come quickly, or better yet, as quickly as possible, because I will soon disappear. A live dog is better than a dead lion. A man who came to talk about money. That's why we have no desire to live. However, now he, having decided to "return the ticket", did not care. In my opinion, the law of nature is beautiful, which determined for us only one entrance to life and left many exits from it. If you do not care where you are, then you are not lost. Exchanging fate for a fleeting whim – and because of a trifle, consider that from boredom. Your nerves gave out, that's understandable. Rebellion is often a reaction to a fiasco. And here, simple-hearted friends will shrug their shoulders. What kind of stupid talk is this! Are you a man or a slob? Aren't you ashamed? A clear rebellion of a creature.
This is the dying laughter of a sarcastic hanged man, the last heartfelt cry. All Russian humor is a wink before execution. What do you think a hanged man experiences in his last moment of life? It is well known – a sexual orgasm. That is why there are so many jokes about sex and death – both scare us to the point of trembling in our knees. Is the fatal moment the maximum? It is believed that it is associated with the highest degree of pain or with the highest intensity of evil: pain, for example, becomes fatal if it exceeds a certain maximum that can be expressed numerically. Unlike "silent" death, pain can be verbose. Perhaps the fear of pain is partly associated with the fear of being out of communication, face to face with nothing. Here I will be objected that this is natural: convulsions are a common occurrence when an organism dies. There is little original here – no death is original, and it is not original that some took the convulsions of agony for labor pains, death – for the birth of a new life. This is also understandable: it is typical for a dying person to pass off his condition as life in the superlative degree, a life that even a healthy person would not dream of; in general, the most developed feeling of a dying person is jealousy of life.
For those who believe in a personal God who cares about good and bad are hallucinating, no doubt, even though the Lord blesses them, He still unconsciously blesses the unconscious. We are all possessed by the Lord. Man certainly wants to worship someone. It is not about God, Nietzsche convinces us, but people are such that for another millennium they will have caves in which the shadow of God is shown. These caves are churches. Jesus suffered too much. Man can be raped by kindness. A few thousand years ago, an unknown psychologist wrote a mysterious phrase in the Bible: "If someone hits you on one cheek, turn the other." Why? Apparently, so that they don't hit you again.
This old man is so radiant that sometimes his very clothes turn white before the eyes of his interlocutor. He has a lump on his forehead, a fistula on his shoulder – from incessant prayers. He makes the sign of the cross over his anus in the toilet when he sits down. In a word, he is mired in Christianity. Having exchanged an idea for a muscle, they ruined their lives in the name of religious chimeras. Sticks, umbrellas, daggers, spears, sabers, water taps, pencils, everything elongated and convex is a symbol of the phallus. Mines, caves, bottles, suitcases, boxes, cases, snuffboxes, cabinets, stoves, rooms are a symbol of female genitalia. Horseback riding, going up or down stairs are a symbol of sexual intercourse. A latent homosexual, having deprived himself of the joys of love in the name of a misunderstood social contract, languishes in the fumes of carnal lust. Religious beliefs are tantamount to some kind of irrational prejudice.
A congress of internationalist warriors, the establishment of a charity fund, a gathering of Cossack robbers and a major sporting event cannot take place without a priest. For the most part, these servants of God are mysteriously silent, not interfering in what is happening, but giving it a shade of higher meaning and grace with their presence. It is precisely the sitting-meeting itself that becomes a significant matter and a new sacrament for these clergymen, since they do not have the words and information to deal with the affairs of economists or filmmakers. They simply sit, already as sanctifiers of the very rite of the meeting.
However, there was always one strict taboo: never and under no circumstances could the patriarch be naked. Especially he could not parade around in such a form in search of minor resort pleasures. And it is not at all about the old man's "sagging body", and not about the fun of family "panties", but about the fact that the patriarch, like any other actor of the historical theater, is exactly 100% "made" of his costume, makeup and role. "For brocade is his skin, and paraman is his body." The patriarch should not be exposed, because even in the Russian language the word "to expose" has a distinct double meaning, including an extremely unpleasant one for the one being exposed. Deprived of attire and accessories, dressed in a simple "body", any patriarch is deprived of his role magic, "desacralized" and turns into an ordinary old man, whose place is in the line for beer.
And, of course, a person should not interfere in anyone else's life – this is part of freedom. Then everyone could be at ease with themselves. If you are able to put your own life in order, then no one around you will even think of doing it. As a result, you can manage your own life and no one will interfere, telling you what you should do and what you shouldn't. No one should interfere in anyone else's life. But in the past, everyone stuck their nose into everyone else's business. Those who do not have their own life always interfere in someone else's. The idea of God is the idea of a nosy Tom who does not leave you alone even in the bathroom, who keeps peeping through the keyhole, watching: what are you doing there? It is ugly! All the religions of the world say that God is constantly watching you – it is ugly, what kind of God is this? Does He have nothing better to do than peeping at everyone, stalking everyone? It seems like the ultimate detective story! Will we then have anything left to do? Is it not because some theological systems place God outside of time that an omniscient and omnipotent being would have nothing to fill his days with?
It is enough to look at a woman (in a dream), and you are finished. If we translate all this into more familiar language, we can say that Jesus Christ gave people the unconscious. The Old Testament commandment is simple and clear. Christ's commandment is extremely complex. How can you accurately determine whether you are looking at a woman with lust or not? And in order not to do this, you need a lot of internal work, emotional training. It is interesting that Christ's commandment is given not as an explicit commandment, but rather as a counterfactual judgment. It does not say: do not do this, but rather: if you do this, then this will happen. What is the difference? The difference, it seems, is that a person is given a choice. An explicit commandment says: do not do this (or else it will be bad). Christ's indirect commandment says something else. A person may not break the law outwardly, but at the same time he will break it inwardly. This is very difficult to fulfill. Here a man is walking down the street, and a beautiful girl is walking towards him. He thinks: "What a beautiful girl. If only..." And now Christ's commandment has been broken. What should this man do, who tends to look at beautiful girls? If he is a sincere Christian, he must, apparently, somehow isolate himself from such situations. Well, what should he do? Not go outside at all? But he can sit at home and think about this girl he met on the street, and again the commandment will be broken. The street and the house are the same Mobius strip.
The unconscious makes itself known through vague ideas. No one should play with vague ideas. Because they will play a cruel joke on you. For example, sexual love. This is a vague idea. For playing with it, we pay with 10 years of vice. From 15 to 25. At 15, we are already ripe for sexual love. But we cannot yet start a family. At 25, the material opportunity to start a family appears. And Kant calls this gap 10 years of vice. Puberty does not wait for social maturation.
Or a funeral. Here you ask to be buried in the garden, under a tree, so that there is a shadow over you. This is also a game of vague representation. For shadows exist for the living. Playing with sensory visibility is only permissible in painting.
And what did the most widely read country in the world read 10-15 years ago in its most majestic metro in the world? There were few detective stories. Each issue of "Foreign Detective" became an event, they were hard to get. Strictly speaking, there was no Soviet detective story at all, since in Soviet reality there was no institute of private investigation and no idea of searching for truth as a private initiative, and without this there is no real detective story.
But why should a person not violate the privacy of others for the sake of achieving a greater public good? In our private behavior, each of us sometimes chooses to endure pain or make a sacrifice for the sake of a greater benefit or to avoid greater harm: we go to the dentist so that we do not get too ill later; we do unpleasant work because we want the result; some go on a diet for the sake of health or beauty; some save money for old age. In each case, some expenditure is incurred for the sake of a greater total good. Is it okay to kill someone if you immediately replace him (give birth to a child or, as in science fiction, create an adult) who will be as happy for the rest of his life as the person you killed would have been happy for the rest of his life? After all, there is no net reduction in total utility, and its distribution function is not even changed. Do we prohibit murder simply to prevent anxiety in potential victims? (And how does a utilitarian explain what they worry about, and should he base practical measures on what he must regard as irrational fears?) Shouldn't we introduce some idea of a full existence that is not a second-class existence? Would it be permissible to use genetic engineering to produce a breed of natural-born slaves, content with their lot? What about natural-born slaves among animals? Wasn't that what domestication of animals was all about?
Some theological doctrines claim that God is allowed to sacrifice people for His own purposes. We can also imagine a meeting between people and beings from another planet who pass through all the "stages" of moral development that our developmental psychologists can identify in childhood. These beings claim that they then pass through fourteen more successive stages, each of which is necessary for the transition to the next. However, they cannot explain to us (primitive beings) the content and methods of thinking of the higher stages. These beings claim that we can be sacrificed for their well-being, or at least for the preservation of their higher faculties. They say that they understood this truth only after reaching moral maturity, but did not understand it in childhood, when they were at the highest level of moral development accessible to us. (Perhaps such stories will remind us that a sequence of developmental stages, each stage being a condition for the transition to the next, may at some point become not progress but degradation. To reach senile dementia, one must first pass through all the other stages, which does not make senile dementia the highest stage of development.) Do our moral views permit us to sacrifice ourselves for the sake of enhancing the abilities, including moral ones, of these alien beings? The resolution of these questions is very closely intertwined with the epistemological effects of thinking about the existence of moral authorities who are different from us, if we also recognize that, being fallible, we can make mistakes.
This follows from Locke's ideas, according to which every citizen who appeals to the highest state authority finds himself in a state of nature in relation to it, because there is no one else to appeal to. Accordingly, he also finds himself in a state of nature in relation to the state as a whole. In addition, citizens "are free to appeal to heaven, if they think the occasion sufficiently serious. And, therefore, although the people cannot be the judge, possessing by the constitution of this society the supreme power to determine and pass an effective sentence in this case, yet they retain, by a law preceding and surpassing all positive laws of men, that final determination which all mankind have in cases where there is no one to appeal to on earth, namely, the right to judge whether they have sufficient cause to appeal to heaven. And this judgment the people cannot lose..."
What is faith? – Only the unwillingness to die. Okay... Then why do you want all this? Wouldn't it be better to just live in peace and quiet? – When I live in peace and quiet, I don't even know if I exist... I get confused in well-intentioned cliches, but I was born a man. And I need blood. Then every second I will feel that I exist, that I breathe, that my blood boils, that I am stronger than you. I hate a quiet life, there is a lie in it... After all, if there is suffering in principle, then I must do it to see what it is... Otherwise, why do I live?
— I will remind you of one of the eternal questions. — Why does the Lord allow what happens in the world — crimes, murders, wars? Why? Because the ways of the Lord are inscrutable and with our weak human mind we cannot comprehend His divine wisdom? But if this is so, then we cannot understand the rest, and, by the way, the Lord, perhaps, does not demand understanding from us, knowing that it is beyond our powers?
One of the most demoralizing things we see is the habit of self-blame. Some people do it constantly. They seem to revel in telling us how little they are doing and how insignificant they are compared with others. Sadly, ironically, the church is largely responsible for our self-abasement. We often hear in prayer meetings a constant vilification of ourselves. People call themselves wretched sinners, wretched worms crawling in the dust, instead of kings and queens, men and women created by God. The priests in the pulpit and the people in the prayer meetings tell the Lord God how little they are. Instead of boldly asserting their birthright of nobility, of royalty, manhood and womanhood, they whine, beg forgiveness, and grovel. Human beings were created with an erect posture, that they might stand up, lift up their eyes, and face the world without embarrassment. The Bible teaches that we are to claim our birthright. We should not play Uriah Heep before our Creator; it brings contempt and corrupts. The habit of self-abasement undermines self-confidence, destroys independence, and crushes the will. What would a father think of a child who came to him with a request couched in a shameful spirit of self-abasement? Some people seem to have a gift for keeping a low profile. They sidle along, always trying to be in the back row or out of sight. “No man,” says Emerson, “can be cheated out of success in life who does not cheat himself.” An offensively low self-esteem should not be your companion in life. A high estimate of life and of yourself is a powerful character builder. You won't be able to fool yourself until you stop believing in yourself. And you probably won't fool others either.
The scion of a rabbinical family, Karl Marx, wrote the following in his article “Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”: “Religious wretchedness is at one and the same time an expression of real wretchedness and a protest against this real wretchedness. Religion is the sigh of an oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of soulless orders. Religion is the opium of the people.” As another classic said, spirituality is a gas that priests emit from various bearded orifices. And this is very accurately said, especially today.
Thus, the most moderate argument against religion is at the same time the most radical and the most disarming: religion is a human invention. Its inventors cannot even agree on what their saviors, prophets, and gurus actually said or did. And even less can they explain to us the “meaning” of later discoveries that were initially inhibited or damned by their religions. But listen to modern believers: they still know! And not just know, they know everything. They not only know that God exists, that he created and controls everything, but they know what “he” wants from us, including our diet, rituals, and views on sex.
The dispute with religion is the source and basis of all disputes, because it is the beginning (but not the end) of philosophy, science, history and the knowledge of human nature. It is also the beginning (but by no means the end) of all polemics about virtue and justice. Religion is ineradicable precisely because our evolution continues. Religion will not die out until we stop being afraid of death, darkness, the unknown and each other. Therefore, I would not forbid it even if I could. What generosity, you will say. But think: will the faithful be so indulgent towards me? Religion, alas, is not capable of such kindness. Religion poisons everything it touches.
I won't say that I envy this belief (in my opinion, it is too similar to a longing for an eternal dictatorship), but I am tormented by genuine curiosity. Why does this faith not bring happiness to those who profess it? Don't they consider themselves to be the possessors of a wonderful secret, to which, like a saving straw, one can cling even in the most difficult moment?
The nature of religion forces it to interfere in the lives of unbelievers, heretics, and followers of other faiths. It may talk about bliss in the next world, but it wants power in this world.
The lower classes of the urban population were also inclined to seek in religion and religious practice a means of escape from the poverty and misery of life, to find refuge in ecstatic states induced by mystical practices, drugs, music, dancing, snake charming, the veneration of charismatic figures, etc., all under the guidance of saints. Countless multitudes find their only consolation in religious teachings, and are able to endure the hardships of life only through their help. While the wealthy bourgeoisie turned to the interpretation of sacred texts, hoping to find in them a justification for the existing social order and their way of life within it. The two most popular theories of religion regard it as opium and as a charter, and the one is not entirely compatible with the other. The prosperous need a charter, the unfortunate a drug. The strength of the government rests on the ignorance of the people, and it knows this and will therefore always fight against education. It's time for us to understand this.
A poor man, making his way late at night, remembers what he was once told about God, who became a man, lived as a beggar among the beggars, and was executed for the goodness and divine boldness of his words. He came to save the world, but the world's malice proved stronger than His word, stronger than His death, stronger than His resurrection. But if people twenty centuries after His coming are as cruel as they were at His first appearance on earth, then perhaps the hour of His new incarnation has struck, and He will descend in the form of a Parisian beggar, as He once appeared in the form of a Galilean beggar? And He does indeed descend.
Even the relatively secure symmetry of the solar system, with all its obvious instability and entropy, troubled Isaac Newton and led him to suggest that God occasionally adjusted the orbits of the planets. For this, Newton drew the ridicule of Leibniz, who asked why God had not set everything up just right from the start. It is precisely the terrible emptiness of the rest of the cosmos that makes us so impressed by the unique, beautiful conditions that have made intelligent life possible on our planet. Given our vanity, how can we not be impressed by them? Vanity allows us to close our eyes to the inexorable fact that all other heavenly bodies, even within our own system, are either too cold or too hot for any known forms of life. Moreover, this is true of our blue planet as well. Heat and cold turn vast tracts of Earth into barren deserts, and experience has taught us that we live on the edge of a climatic knife. As for the sun, sooner or later it will swell and swallow its planetary charges, like a jealous leader or tribal god.
As always, once you strip away the superfluous assumptions, wondering who made us creators becomes as sterile and meaningless as asking who made our creator. Aristotle, whose speculations on the prime mover and the first cause started this debate, concluded that logic required forty-seven or forty-five gods.
We all understand that a person can forgive the wrong done to him personally. You step on my foot, and I forgive you; you steal my money, and I forgive you. But how are we to understand a person who has never been robbed or trampled on, yet who declares that he has forgiven you for trampling on other people’s feet and stealing other people’s money? Bullshit is the mildest description for such statements. But that is what Jesus said. He told people their sins were forgiven without consulting those who suffered from their transgressions. He acted without a shadow of a doubt as if all their transgressions were primarily transgressions against Him.
A relic is roughly the same as a religion [Latin relictum – remainder] – an organism, object or phenomenon preserved as a survival from ancient times. The Hungarian researcher Ignaz Goldziher, whose words are quoted in Reza Aslan’s recent work, was one of the first to show that many hadith are nothing more than “verses from the Torah and the Gospels, fragments of rabbinical sayings, ancient Persian aphorisms, passages from Greek philosophers, Indian proverbs and even the Lord’s Prayer reproduced almost word for word.” In the hadith, one can find huge chunks of more or less direct quotations from the Bible, including the parable of the workers hired at the last minute and the words “let not thy left hand know what thy right hand is doing.”
(Muhammad was a fervent believer not only in the existence of the devil, but also in “jinn” – minor demons of the desert.) Even some of the Prophet’s wives noticed his ability to receive appropriate “revelations” as needed and sometimes teased him about it.
However, Muhammad had to be literally alone with himself often – from the age of nine or ten he was considered old enough to graze cattle not only in the immediate vicinity of Mecca, but also in pastures far from the city. There he often spent several days in complete solitude, looking after camels, sheep and goats, and, apparently, the loneliness did not weigh heavily on him. It is difficult to say how beneficial this was for his spiritual development, but Muhammad himself, who later said that "all the prophets tended flocks in childhood", obviously saw some connection between the duties of a shepherd and the gift of prophecy. If Muhammad was a rather withdrawn teenager, he could not be called gloomy. Very quickly he won the sympathy of Abu Talib, who, like Abd al-Muttalib once, fell in love with him.
One or two defeats, and we would never have become hostages to the village squabbles that raged in Judea and Arabia before the first serious chronicles appeared. We could have become adherents of a completely different faith, but even then we would have been told that the truth of our faith is not so important, as long as it helps teach children to distinguish good from evil. In other words, faith in God is one sign of a readiness to believe in everything. Disbelief in God, on the contrary, does not mean disbelief in anything.
It has never been so difficult to understand that religion breeds hatred and conflict, and that it is based on ignorance and superstition. This does not change the ancient question of Epicurus: "If he wishes to prevent evil, but cannot, he is powerless. If he can, but does not wish, he is malicious. If he can and wishes, where does evil come from?
Let us imagine that there is only one being in the world. Would love then be possible? Benedict Spinoza claimed that since everything is God and there is nothing but God, God loves himself with infinite love. These are the theses from the fifth part of Spinoza's Ethics, which proclaims pantheism, that is, the philosophy of omniscience. Of course, if we admit that God is everything, what else can he love if not himself? But isn't love, in its essence, a relationship to the Other? Logically, one can accept the thesis that everything exists only in God, but the ethical conclusion of pantheism, that God loves only himself, is deeply questionable. All-being is one thing, and self-love is another. It is surprising that it is ethics that reveals the flaw in ontology. Reason can admit the all-encompassing being of God, but the heart cannot admit that God loves only himself, because it has the experience of love. And it knows that love presupposes the otherness of the beloved. Of course, one can and even should love oneself, but this love makes sense as an example and prerequisite for love for another. The essence of love presupposes the difference between the lover and the beloved, so that they can then be united by that same love that initially distinguishes them, gives them separate persons.
Didn't Jesus love harlots and publicans more than scribes and Pharisees? Pride, jealousy, and vindictiveness are human qualities. If man has these qualities, why can't a deity have them? Does this argument explain the existence of evil in the world? Why can't we conclude that God is an evil being, the only one we can worship with impunity without becoming disgusted with ourselves? Like a caring mother: she may miss something, but she will always feel that something is wrong. So I was wrong to ask for forgiveness.
The nihilist must finally ask himself: "Is not the lie something divine... does not the value of all things rest on the fact that they are false? Is not despair the consequence of the belief in the divinity of truth... are not precisely the determination of meaning, value, meaning, purpose a lie and a falsification (counterfeit), must we not believe in God not because he is true, but because he is false?"
The first thing to do is to free the category of utopia itself from ideological labels. The utopian is “a gesture that changes the coordinates of the possible… it is a question of the deepest necessity, something that we make a question of survival when it is no longer possible to live within the framework of the ‘possible’.” Positivism is undoubtedly Christianity turned inside out: what one belief places at the beginning, another places at the end. Whether the earthly paradise was the first stage in the life of humanity or will be its last stage is a purely external question. Irreverent people relegate it to the history of popular superstitions. They point out that belief in an original earthly paradise has always existed and is still widespread throughout the globe. Then they refer with no less satisfaction to the fact that belief in a future earthly paradise, if we discard millenarianism and some other utopias, first appeared at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Accurate research easily establishes a date that roughly coincides with the time of the fantastic writings of the Abbot of Saint-Pierre, a man gifted with the genius of bizarre ideas. Encouraged by the observations of Darwin and the German evolutionary philosophy, as well as by the powerful illusion of modern material progress, the idea of a future earthly paradise became the basis of socialism. Now all European nations are convinced that the possibility of complete social well-being has received a scientific basis. Thus, at the top of life, developed minds believe in the coming of an age of justice, kindness, love, enlightenment, and below, simple souls await tangible, real, physical happiness.
Augustine in his treatise "The City of God", book 18, chapter 39, writes that Mercury Trismegistus, although older than the Greek sages, is younger than Moses. Augustine recognizes Trismegistus as a prophet of the coming of Christianity, but unlike Lactantius, he does not see any merit in this, since Trismegistus received knowledge of the future from the demons he served. In the 15th-16th centuries, Trismegistus enjoyed unquestioned authority as the most ancient philosopher and magician. It is significant that Ficino postponed the translation of Plato's dialogues in order to first translate the treatises from the Hermetic corpus that fell into his hands.
I don't understand Christians. They shake the tree of life, not letting it bear fruit, and scatter its fragrant blossoms to the wind. This woman goes to mass in front of her whole family. A three-year-old child sits on her chest, as if on a chair.
Oh, Lord, how disgusting to me are the vile works of your hands and these sickening monsters who burn incense to you and who are truly created in your image and likeness! (When the priest tells us that man is created in the image and likeness of God, the hunchback rises and asks: "But what about me?" The resourceful priest replies: "As a hunchback, you are absolute perfection.")
Hating you, I fled from your candy kingdom and from the tales of your puppets. (But the puppet does not feel its own emptiness, refuses it, allows it to disappear...)
You are the quencher of our impulses and the pacifier of our rebellions, the fireman of our flames, the agent of our imbecility. Even before I imprisoned you in the formula, I trampled on your alchemy, despised your tricks and all the tricks that make up your attire of the Inexplicable. How generously you have endowed me with the gall that your mercy allowed you to save on your slaves. Since there is no better rest than under the shadow of your worthlessness, to save some creature it is enough to rely on you or on your counterfeits. And I do not know who deserves more sympathy: your minions or I; we all go back in a direct line to your incompetence, to the way you created, tinkered, manufactured your homemade products with mush and confusion in your head. Deus otiosus – literally a god on vacation, unemployed, slacker, superfluous and unnecessary. But, no matter how you look at it, you have to admit that he is, in general, a poor student.
Of all that has been pulled out of nothingness, is there anything more insignificant than this world or the idea that preceded its birth? Wherever something breathes, there is one more mutilation: there is no heartbeat that does not confirm the inferiority of the living being. The flesh horrifies me: these men, these women, are offal, grunting with spasms. I do not want to acknowledge my kinship with this planet, because every moment is a ballot thrown into the urn of my despair. Decidedly, I hate my former masters less and less.
Whether your creation will disappear or will exist for a long time – it does not matter! Your subordinates will still not be able to worthily complete what you began to build, having no talent. However, they will certainly throw off the veil of blindness that you have thrown over their eyes. But will they have enough strength to avenge themselves, and you – to defend yourself? This biological species is rotten to the core, but you are even more rotten. Turning to your Enemy, I await the day when he steals your sun and hangs it in another universe.
The goddesses have abandoned me, and the demons too. You know I don't believe in God, and I have no one but you. If you believe in God, you will become an artist. If you don't believe in God, you will become an artist. You will have eternal salvation. The meaning, the meaning of life, where is it? – Darkness, mystery, it's impossible. I will not accept God until I go crazy, and it's boring to spin around to return to the same place again. No one is late to visit God. After the resurrection, human bodies will take on a spherical shape.
If anyone seriously believes in solipsism, they keep it to themselves. Thoughts about God are inexhaustible and vast, like the sea.
- What is your name? – Pavlik asks in a thin voice.
- And me, Alexander. I am Kozlov Alexander, Dedin'kin's cook, and in serfdom they called me Maikov. That's what they still call me. And you, Pavlinka?
It will become so good that it doesn’t need to be better.
“Have you ever been to Moscow, Alexander?” asks Pavel, sitting down in a businesslike manner on the hay.
“No, I haven’t been there, and why would I need Moscow anyway?..” Alexander’s pipe goes out, and he tries for a long time to fan its fading ashes, then takes out a box of matches and, choosing a worse match from there, reverently and carefully blows on the flame.
But yesterday in the forest a man was crushed by a log, and God, although "all-kind", did not help; "almighty", did not look. Something is also strange... And one peasant, like a dog, took the trail of the killer and followed the smell until he found him.
And the Gospel also says: "Say to the mountain and the mountain will go." Pavlik stopped many times – where is there a mountain? – just in front of a stone on the road.
- Move! It doesn't move. But if you kick it, it flies.
Moses was a powerful shaman: he sent the Ten Plagues of Egypt upon the Egyptians, he parted the waters of the Black Sea with his staff, he threw a leaf into the bitter waters of Marah, and they became sweet (Pseudo-Philo claims that this leaf was a leaf from the Tree of Life) – and now he has once again proven his power.
“I’ll explain,” said Fiorgal. “I began by raising one finger, which meant: God is one. To which this most learned man rightly remarked, raising two fingers, that besides God the Father we also remember two others: the Son and the Holy Spirit. Then, thinking that I had cleverly caught him, I raised three fingers, which was supposed to mean: ‘But don’t you have three gods?’ But your great doctor was quick to respond: he immediately clenched his fist, answering that God is one in three persons. I ate a ripe cherry, saying that life is sweet, but the great sage replied, swallowing a green gooseberry, that life is not sweet at all, but that it is all the better for it being sour. I took out an apple, saying that, as the Bible teaches us, the first gift of nature to man was fruit. But the learned man corrected me by showing the bread and thereby declaring that man had to earn it by the sweat of his brow.
Lord, let me know about You. Confirm that You hear me. I am not asking for a miracle – at least some barely noticeable signal. Well, let, for example, a beetle fly out of a bush. It will fly out now. A beetle – it is quite natural. No one will suspect. And it is enough for me, I will already guess that You hear me and let me know about it. Just say: yes or no? Am I right or wrong? And if I am right, let the locomotive from behind the forest blow its whistle four times. It is so easy – to blow its whistle four times. And I will already know. And if this happens, with all my soul, with all my pierced heart, I will believe that the Lord will forgive me – as I forgive Him. After all, He “loves certainty” ? The spirit blows where it happens. Sometimes He will catch some frog on His way and inflate it to an inordinate size. He does all this for His own amusement, for life is boring. G ou di. In gad you trust! Yum-yum, crunch-crunch, my good God, knock-knock, fart-fart.
Amr bin As was one of the most prominent politicians of his time. When he was dying, he took something out in confusion and said, "Put this under my tongue." When asked, "What is this?" he replied, "This is a blessed hair from the Prophet's beard." He believed that it would make it easier for him to account for his actions.
A descendant of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, the African ruler Menelik II firmly believed in the power of the Bible, and when he felt ill, he would cut off pages of the Holy Scripture and eat them (they say that during his life the emperor ate the Book of Kings).
But the believer is humble. The pure ashes of the palm touched his forehead as a symbolic sign. He needs real dust, the dust of paths soaked with sweat, the dust of slabs on which kneeling women have left the smell of their bodies. There is a kind of hysterical worship of ashes, of cemetery remains and anatomical parts of the body. The kneecap has power, the shoulder blade has its own will. The humble bows before the kneecap, and the believer crosses himself before the shoulder blade. He wants to show humility even before old bones. He wants to become so faithful as to believe in the power of the immobile, to believe in the will of death.
Kalmyks in the steppes make the wind turn mills, the insides of which are stuffed with papers with prayers. The more times the mill turns, the closer the Kalmyk is to God. The most independent country is Mongolia – nothing depends on it. Long-suffering and most merciful, who loves the righteous and has mercy on sinners! – And yet some eight centuries ago...
The stranger looked at him and thought, "Ugh, Tatarism is disgusting." – "Excuse me, Lippanchenko: are you not a Mongol?" – "Why such a strange question?.." – "It just seemed to me... All Russians have Mongol blood in them..."
I generally despise all words ending in "ery", the very sound of "y" contains some kind of Tatarism, Mongolianism, or something like the East. Listen to it: "y". No cultured language knows "y": something stupid, cynical, slimy."
Here the stranger with the black moustache remembered the face of one person who irritated him; and it reminded him of the letter "ery".
- Look, what does Mongolia have to do with this? We are part of the civilized family of Christian countries. We are talking about the renewal of Orthodoxy, about ecumenical paths, so what does dark Mongolia, which believes in God knows what, have to do with this? And kumys is not at all familiar to Russians.
The Zen sect does not rely on the words of Buddha, that is a fact – but it greatly values the black snot of its own bonzes, smeared on paper. Words and scriptures occupy the same place in the Zen sect as sexual intercourse did in Victorian England: everyone carefully pretends that such things do not exist, but knows very well what life really revolves around.
It should be especially noted that by default it is customary to spare the feelings of representatives of the "little knowledge" and to call things by their proper names as rarely as possible. Moreover, no one would think of laughing out loud at their glossy folios, at their collections of bones and stones and fantasy interpretations of these artifacts. This most important question was given over to a set of "shady old men" unknown to anyone outside the circle of interested parties. For 150 years, these average people have been copying from each other conjectures about an animal that somehow magically progressed to mortgages and condoms.
I don't know if I believe in God. I prayed to Him passionately when I was being brought here, when I thought I would soon die (I hear C.V. say: here's proof that you don't believe). When you pray, it becomes easier. Some bits and pieces come out. I can't concentrate. I've been thinking about so many things for so long that now I can't stop at just one thing. But it makes my soul calmer. Even if it's just an illusion. Like when you count how much money you've spent and how much is left.
He doesn't believe in God. That's why I don't want to believe either.
Chapter 17. Once again about evolution
We must come to terms with the fact that evolution is not only smarter than we are, but also infinitely more cold, cruel, and capricious. Studies of fossil animals and the data of molecular biology indicate that about 98% of all species that have ever lived on Earth have ceased to exist. Throughout history, periods of life’s flourishing have always been followed by great “extinctions.” To survive on a cooling planet, life first had to appear in fantastic abundance. We see the same thing in miniature in our own little human lives: men produce immeasurably more semen than is needed to start a family, and are tormented – not without some pleasure – by the urgent need to somehow dispose of it or get rid of it. (Religion has needlessly aggravated the torment by declaring as sinful the various simple ways of relieving this itch, which we presumably have from the “creator.”) This is an ancient instinct for the preference for fresh blood (sexual curiosity), which serves to overcome genetic monotony. The riotous, overflowing abundance of insects, sparrows, salmon or cod is a titanic waste of life, ensuring, and even then not always, the survival of a sufficient number of individuals.
Of course, there are more impressive examples of the omnipotence of the "sexual question". Let's remember the aphid. Its females are born already pregnant. Moreover, those they are to give birth to are also already pregnant with pregnant aphids. But evolution is no longer able to repeat such a trick. The period of its daring experiments ended before the appearance of homo.
Modern humans retain many physical features that make them related to brachiators – flexible shoulder joints, fingers well suited for grasping objects. It is believed that brachiation developed from arboreal quadrupedalism – that is, from the movement of animals in trees using four limbs. In the process of evolution, gibbons, having completely mastered movement using brachiation, changed their behavior style relative to other primate species. They carry their children not on their backs, but ventrally – the cubs cling to the fur on their stomach. There are several views on why gibbons leaned towards a narrow specialization in brachiation. According to one theory, gibbons, by means of their ability to cling to even thin branches and actively move among tree crowns, can reach the very top fruits growing at the ends of thin branches, while large monkeys are not capable of this due to their weight, and small primates are not able to hold on to branches with both hands for a long time and actively jump from branch to branch at a great height, determining the trajectory of safe movement on the move. This approach allows them to get food even during periods of drought and crop failure. According to another version, brachiation was chosen as a quieter way of moving, in contrast to jumping and vertical climbing on trees.
It is worth considering that in terms of efficiency, brachiation is advantageous – it allows you to transform potential energy into kinetic energy with minimal losses, and also preserves it during movement, due to their pendulum principle. But this type of movement is more difficult to control, unlike walking or running. At high speed, a primate moving with the help of brachiation increases the risk of not grasping a particular branch in time and falling, getting injured. As a result, primates often do not move quickly, although it is energetically more advantageous, but prefer to move slowly with less risk, using continuous contact in brachiation.
According to ethologists, dreams associated with flying are one of the manifestations of the most ancient genetic programs recorded in the memory of mankind. About 25 million years ago, our common ape-like ancestors with gibbons had brachiation – the ability to swing from branch to branch. Everyone knows that a small child, completely unconsciously, clings, for example, to an outstretched hand so that he can easily be lifted above the ground and carried to another place. Most likely, from the distant past came to our children a love of swinging and, of course, swings, carousels and trampolines. All children's amusement parks consist of attractions that in one form or another use a fragment of flight, rotation, flip or a moment of weightlessness. You can ride puppies, foals or baby sheep on a carousel as much as you like – it will cause nothing but horror in them. That’s where the well-known nightmare comes from – falling from a height.
Bread, for example, began with an unnamed ancient blockhead vomiting up chewed grain. He probably overdosed it out of greed. A merciless gag reflex immediately turned him inside out. The blockhead left, but the vomit remained. A day later, it dried up and was found and eaten by another Neolithic character. This was the birthday of bread. This scene had to be repeated dozens of times until one of the eaters realized that it was possible to chew, regurgitate and dry the grain crumbs himself. For a couple of millennia, the consumer of this product chewed and prepared it for himself. Over time, he got sick of it, and young slave girls with fresh teeth were brought in to chew. A little later, an improvement was made. The mouths of the slave girls were replaced with stones, which are also capable of crushing grain. Then it turned out that stones can not only crush, but also grind. Crumbs were replaced by flour. All these wonderful discoveries lasted for thousands of years, until they ended with croissants.
Being attractive to men is one of the biological functions of a woman. Therefore, women tend to decorate themselves and show off their bodies, emphasizing those signs that indicate youth, health, and readiness for conception. Showing off the body, of course, is not the only method. There are also a lot of provocative behavioral elements. Here are “shooting eyes,” and words, and intonations, and facial expressions, and gestures, and smells, and makeup, and tattoos, and much more. Therefore, even if your legal wife tells you that she puts on makeup and makes herself beautiful “exclusively for herself,” she really does it for herself, just with an “eye” on other men, besides you.
As soon as a male attached to a specific female was killed or suppressed by opposing males, the female, in order to survive, had to quickly forget him, erase him from her life, and submit to the new male – the winner and conqueror. Adopt all his views, believe in his gods, his rituals, rules and customs. And, of course, bring offspring from him.
Let us explain. The thing is that the new lifestyle required constant demonstration of genitals. But! This is only possible with a straightened body. All other animals have their mating organs “hidden” under the body and are only shown at the decisive moment. And the human male is the only creature in nature that moves its genitals forward. Moreover, they are always slightly ahead of the homo himself. It turned out very impressive, but the gender balance suffered. Flat-bottomed and hairy ladies became despondent. Compared to males, their vulva was hidden God knows where. Its demonstration required special poses, and yoga had not yet been invented.
Animals have sex only in spring and autumn, and the rest of the time they eat, eat, eat... Adult animals usually avoid close contact with other adult animals – they maintain a certain distance between themselves, the violation of which is unpleasant for the individual, causing fear and an attack of aggression.
Paired mating gradually reduces the distance, allowing close contact. The very varied and graceful lekking behavior, as ethologists have established, is based on the clash of two motivations: the desire for a partner and the fear of encountering resistance. During the mating, the male depicts either approaching or moving away, either showing all his decorations or hiding them, or adopting a threatening pose or a submissive pose. Everyone is afraid of closeness – another matter is whether you realize it or not. Closeness means: to show yourself completely to a stranger – and we are all strangers; no one knows anyone. We are strangers even to ourselves, because we do not know who we are.
Freud in his theory of libido also follows a certain hydraulic scheme. Libido increases – tension intensifies – dissatisfaction spreads; sexual intercourse provides a release, relieves tension until it begins to intensify and grow again.
In general, eroticism is a "revolutionary element" in relation to the "picture of the world" that is created by civilization, the routine of life, the conventions of social etiquette. It is no coincidence that "anarchic" desires most often flare up in especially ceremonial and formal settings – in a library, at a production meeting, at a ceremonial anniversary, or even during a funeral ceremony. Where structures are more rigid, their violation, even purely imaginary, becomes more eventful.
Lust is the accumulation of pleasures, their absorption, nourishment by enjoyment. Debauchery is the squandering and emptying of oneself. For a libertine, it is unbearable to carry even one drop of semen in his scrotum – he is looking for a way to spill it. So for a spendthrift, it is unbearable to carry a kopeck in his pocket – he is looking for a way to lose it, but for this he needs acute circumstances of loss, a ritual of loss: not just to drop, but to throw his kopeck on green cloth or into someone else’s pocket, to throw it as sweepingly, dashingly, along a curved trajectory, as semen is thrown out – to experience the painful pleasure of the departure of this last kopeck (a gambling house, gilding, beautiful ladies, etc.). The libertine lives at the limit of his strength, in exhaustion and strain, like one exhausted by hard work. His exhaustion makes him transparent, almost “holy.”
The thing is that all the realities of human society arose from very primitive inclinations of homo. To pull out the entire history of a phenomenon, you just need to pull it harder by those hairy ears that stick out somewhere. We pull it out. Look. From a simple need to shove a penis into the corresponding hole of a female, a grandiose (by human standards) and very influential phenomenon was born, called "love". Yes, it was wrapped in myths and dressed in rituals. Love was splashed with the ink of novelists and the blood of males in lace and armor. The phenomenon became a cult and was painted with hundreds of high meanings. Century after century, these meanings are updated and become more complex. But with all this, it remained the same need to "shove". If this simple detail is removed from the grandiose romantic construction of "love", then the construction itself will immediately collapse. Only a pile of meaningless props will remain. And trillions of words that have lost all meaning.
But... So that's where "our passions" come from!!?? These are truly "protuberances of the sun" (torches, eruptions from the body of the sun). And isn't the sun in "passions"? Truly, "even the sun has spots." Christ alone is spotless. But our little sun has a "sin", it burns and warms, burns and warms; it burns – and then "in the spring", when there is "more of it", when it not only warms, but also begins to heat: then all animals become pregnant. The power of the sun, the "sin" of the sun – passes into animals. Everything – gets fat, the bellies of everything – grow. The earth itself – asks for grain... And here is Demeter, here is Gaia, and again – the "Exciting field", which "lifts up its chest to prayer."
Language and disorder are incompatible. The pleasure of disorder follows as a derivative of the desire for the excessive, which is inherent in man. Erotic behavior is akin to wastefulness, a ruinous squandering. Eroticism is a celebration of the waste of energy, bringing it closer to death, i.e. the cessation of pulsation.
Tenderness, according to J. Bataille, does not change anything in the mechanism that connects eroticism with death. Eroticism, however, is not a direct line connecting desire (pleasure) and death, the question is about pulsation, i.e. the portioned release or absorption of energy. The protective ability of consciousness forces desire to choose roundabout ways. Consciousness obeys the principle of economy, it strives to immediately receive a benefit, acting calculatively. Consciousness spends energy usefully, calling it efficiency. The unconscious acts according to a different strategy: neither of its parts – neither pleasure nor death – is spent without a remainder. This means that there is enough energy in the deferred to return.
According to the same Bataille, "eroticism is unknown to her (the monkey) precisely because she lacks the knowledge of death. Animals do not try to absorb as much pleasure as possible in the short period of life. And on the contrary, because we are people, because we live in anxious anticipation of death, we know the fierce, desperate, wild violence of eroticism. Man, on the contrary, "is in a hurry to live and in a hurry to feel." Eroticism differs from animal sexual impulsiveness in that it is, in principle, just like work, a conscious pursuit of a goal. Language is the first instrument of desire, it forms the matrices of sexual images and relationships. Every speaker presents himself as a certain value, i.e. seduces, claims the status of a sexual object. Erotica is an intense experience, repeatedly strengthened by the will and consciousness, of what spontaneously happens in sex. Erotica comes from the feeling of one's mortal "I", which tries to prolong pleasure, to surpass the service function of copulation, to close in on itself what belongs to the race. Coitus no longer serves the instinct of reproduction, but multiplies itself, prolongs itself for itself.
In conditions of conformity of human instincts to the conditions of habitation, strong adjustment of instincts was not required. Therefore, religion initially had the character of fairy tales and legends, performing more of a cognitive and educational function. But on occasion it was used as a horror story to influence the hierarchical instinct and other programs through fear. Well, like a modern mother says to a naughty child: "If you misbehave, a bogeyman will come and carry you away." It is not clear who a bogeyman is, but it is already scary, and the child calms down. And if a shaman of a wild tribe puts on a skin, hangs himself with amulets, eats toadstools and explains, bulging his eyes, twitching in ecstasy and howling, that a bogeyman is an evil spirit who lives in a hollow tree by the river and controls thunderstorms, then adult members of the tribe become scared. So in a human tribe, in addition to the leader, a virtual superdominant arose – a deity. And with the help of the image of this deity, well supported by the instinct of self-preservation and the hierarchical instinct of people, it became possible to solve the evolutionary problems of the emerging Humanity.
For example, women of the tribe, obeying the animal female instinct of the primitive herd level, strive to form a couple with a high-ranking one and give birth to children from the leader. And they want to lead low-ranking ones by the nose and additionally receive gifts from them. But monogamous marriage is beneficial to society. And not only high-ranking, but also mid-ranking men are not enough for all the women. Therefore, many women are forced to form marriages with low-ranking ones. However, their female animal instinct immediately comes into strong conflict with reality. They want sex and children with a high-ranking one, and the husband is low-ranking. Here, in order to avoid chaos and stabbing on sexual grounds in the tribe, a certain appendage to the low-ranking man was needed – the patronage of a superdominant with the highest rank – a god or spirits. "A husband is from God" – this formula, familiar to everyone, served to reconcile the animal instinct of a woman with the low rank of her man in the hierarchy. Part of the super-high rank of God in the human hierarchy, part of the divinity, was transferred to the man.
Thanks to the fear of the all-seeing and powerful superdominant, it was possible to introduce an effective system of taboos – prohibitions on any actions that contradict the needs of society. You can do something nasty secretly from the leader. But you cannot hide from the all-seeing eye of the deity. And punishment will inevitably overtake the criminal. This fear of the supernatural inevitability of punishment made it possible to introduce artificial morality into the everyday life of society. What was needed was not a simple mortal leader who could be easily killed or deceived, but some invulnerable immortal all-seeing and omnipotent super-leader. And this super-leader appeared. And he took the highest place in the hierarchy of society – right above the mortal leader. Culture, in principle, is a system of norms and prohibitions, restrictions and permissions. The norm consists of three concepts – must, prohibited and permitted.
Thus was born the greatest compensation mechanism, designed to neutralize the animal instincts of people – religion and cultural tradition. It was thanks to religion that it was possible to use the benefits and advantages of material culture, but at the same time neutralize its costs. It was thanks to religion that humanity received the opportunity for lightning-fast social and technical progress by biological standards.
By the way, unlike ancient people, Neanderthals, who did not have imagination and therefore were unable to create a religion as a system for suppressing their herd instincts, were stuck in an evolutionary dead end. Therefore, despite the fact that they appeared in Europe a good hundred thousand years earlier, they remained at the level of a small herd until they were displaced by people. From the evolutionary cauldron of the Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic, newly balanced societies emerged. A new part of the evolution of our species began. The History of Humanity.
The effectiveness of religious technologies is much higher than faith in communism and a bright future. This is due to the fact that a person is offered to reduce the energy expenditure of the brain through a simple set of universal forms of behavior. At the same time, no one bears even theoretical responsibility for the failures of their application.
In this situation, there is nothing left but to recognize speech and thinking (i.e., inner speech) as accidental epiphenomena of the brain's work. What is an "epiphenomena"? It is a kind of secondary, minor phenomenon that may accompany the main phenomena... or may not. Depending on the circumstances. Factuality is merciless. In all likelihood, the brain is not designed for thinking at all, but only to provide complex physiological functions of a complex organism. It can be used for thinking. Or it may not be, as is proven by those millions of years when homo was content with the modest role of a pack animal, spending its life in search of carrion. Thus, evolution does not fix those properties that man considers his main differences from other animals. Moreover, evolution shows amazing disdain for speech, thinking and intellect. They seem to it to be less important factors than the shape of a mole's paws or the color of a bear's fur. Alas, but the genetic unfixability of speech and thinking is a very clear "black mark". It directly points to the insignificant significance of these phenomena not only in the system of the Universe, but even on Earth. Nothing surprising. The myth of the brain is just another afterthought of the "Almagest". The opinion that the human brain is "something that surpasses in complexity and significance everything we know in the Universe" should probably be considered sweet nonsense and left to the lady psychologists. Unfortunately, Dawkins falls into the category of these ladies.
But the artists worked not for the intellect, but against it, making the lie about man juicier and more attractive. Without any harm to the development of mankind, any of the "cultural values" can be removed from its history. Nothing will change. Whether there was "Baroque" or not, whether Rembrandt was born or not – does not matter. These are all decorative trinkets that do not affect anything.
Man is the most highly developed creature on earth, whose consciousness can absorb knowledge without limit, the only living creature that is born without any guarantee that its consciousness will be preserved. Consciousness is the last and most recent stage of the organism's development, and therefore its most unadapted and most powerless property. From our consciousness come countless mistakes that lead to a person or an animal going to the bottom before there was any need for it, before "fate demands it," as Homer says. You are undoubtedly aware that an accurate shot to the head solves all problems. This is possible only because the brain is located in the head. – Let's not deny the obvious! The head is very attractive, like a target, and the forehead is just made for a bullet.
Someday physicists in collaboration with psychologists will finally prove that consciousness is a fiction. The first step was made by M.B. Mensky in his book "Consciousness and Quantum Physics". Unfortunately, he died early and was unable to develop his theory, according to which we live in parallel worlds and consciousness prevents us from understanding this. He wrote in his book that in a dream, when consciousness is almost switched off, a person chooses the best options for life scenarios. But the idea that a person can choose something contradicts the principle of predetermination. Everything has already been chosen once and for all. We go with the flow. It seems to us that we can invent something, some philosophical ideas, about time and space... But these are just words.
We see that in childhood the struggle for self-esteem is the least hidden. Children are not ashamed to show what they need and what they want. The entire child's organism screams out the demands of natural narcissism. And this demand can turn childhood into a real hell for the surrounding adults. Especially if several children compete for the right to unlimited self-expression, for what can be called "cosmic significance." This is a very serious concept, since this is exactly the direction of our conversation. We like to talk lightly about "childhood jealousy" as some kind of by-product of growing up, as the rivalry and egotism of spoiled children who have not yet reached the age of a developed member of society. However, this jealousy requires too much energy and does not weaken for a minute to be a deviation from the norm. It expresses the quintessence of the being: the desire to stand out, to be the only one in the world around us. If you combine natural narcissism with a basic sense of self-esteem, you get a being who feels himself to be an object of primary value, the most important in the universe, a reflection of life as a whole. This is the reason for the daily and usually painful struggle with children. A child cannot afford to be second or devalued, let alone abandoned. "But you gave him more candy than me! And you gave him more juice!" – "Here, take some more." – "And now she has more than me!" "You let her light the fireplace, but not me!" – "Here, light this piece of paper." – "But it is smaller than the one she lit!" And so on and so forth... A being with a symbolic sense of self-importance is forced to compare himself with everyone around him every minute, to make sure that he has not suddenly become second. Childhood jealousy is an important problem, reflecting the basic human condition. Children are not mean, selfish or arrogant, they are simply very openly expressing the tragic fate of man: he desperately needs to justify himself as an object of the highest universal value. He needs to stand out, to be a hero, to make the greatest possible contribution to the life of the whole world, to show that he is worth more than others. When we fully realize how natural it is for man to strive for heroism, how deeply it is embedded in his organism by evolution, how openly he demonstrates it as a child, then it becomes even more interesting.
Becker's philosophy, as it manifests in The Denial of Death and Escape from Evil, is a braid woven from four strands:
First Strand. The world is terrifying. To put it mildly, Becker's assessment of nature has little in common with Walt Disney. Mother Nature is a cruel bitch who, with bloody teeth and claws, destroys what she creates. We live, he says, in a universe in which the daily activities of organisms consist of the following:
"To tear others to pieces with teeth of all types – to bite, to grind flesh, plant stems, bones between the molars, to greedily and with pleasure push the pulp down the gullet, incorporating their essence into one's own constitution, and then to excrete the remains with stench and gases."
The Second Strand: The fundamental motivation for human behavior is our biological need to control our basic anxiety, to deny the terror of death. Humans are anxious because we are ultimately helpless and thrown into a world where we are destined to die. “That is the real terror: to emerge from nothing, to have a name, a self-consciousness, deep inner feelings, a painful inner longing to live and express ourselves through them, to die.” And, together, Elisabeth K;bler-Ross and Ernst Becker were strange allies in fomenting a cultural revolution that brought the question of death and dying into the light. While K;bler-Ross allowed us to practice the art of dying gracefully, Becker taught us that awe, fear, and ontological anxiety are natural companions to our contemplation of the fact of death.
The third strand. Since the conditions and circumstances of death are inaccessible to reflection (death is fundamentally unimaginable), what is important is not what a person thinks about the event of death itself, but what significance it may have for the "fullness" of life, for a person's understanding of his or her existential possibilities. A person is not free from death as an actual real event, but is free to understand his or her possibility to be or not to be (the authentic mode of existence), and is also free not to understand it as a possibility (the inauthentic mode). The horror of death overwhelms us so much that we strive to keep it unconscious. "The vital lie for the preservation of personality" is the first line of defense that protects us from painful awareness.
The subconscious does not believe in death. Unconsciously, instinctively, we live as if death did not exist; and at the same time, consciousness, thought knows about the existence of death, but the subconscious seems to pay no attention to it. At the same time, a person cannot live without making any distinction between life and death, completely equating them. Here, the depth of negative experience and poor understanding of it are mixed, despair grows due to the feeling of impossibility of receiving the desired emotional experience, even if it is brought under the impeccable basis of a rational explanation of immortality. As a result, an attempt to protect oneself, to hide under a thick shell, appears. But the desired dense shell is impenetrable to light, while the deadly emptiness lets this light through. This contradiction can be somewhat softened: after all, light as such is not visible in emptiness, the color of emptiness is black. In order to be realized, to survive, the light must linger on some solid or at least somewhat dense body.
Understanding your mortality is important because it frees you from all the empty, shaky, and superficial values in life. Most people spend their days chasing that extra dollar, that extra bit of fame or attention, or that extra bit of certainty that they are right and loved. But death poses a far more poignant and important question: What will you leave behind on Earth? Will you make the world any different, any better? What imprint will you leave? What impact will you have? They say a butterfly flapping its wings in Africa can cause a hurricane in Florida. What hurricanes will you leave behind? Becker is right: it is perhaps the only important question in life. Yet we don’t want to think about it. First, it is difficult. Second, it is frightening. Third, we have no idea what we are doing. But when we avoid this question, we allow empty and pernicious values to take over our minds, to control our desires and ambitions. When we avoid the omnipresent gaze of death, the superficial seems important and the important seems superficial. And yet death is the only thing that is known with certainty. And as such, it should be the compass that orients all other values and decisions. It is the right answer to all the questions we should ask but never ask. There is only one way to come to terms with death: to understand and see yourself as part of something greater than yourself; to give up serving yourself and to focus on values that are simple, immediate, controllable, and tolerant of the chaotic world around you. This is the root of all happiness. Listen to Aristotle, to the Harvard psychologists, to Jesus Christ, to the notorious Beatles: they will all tell you that happiness has only one source – caring for something greater than yourself; the belief that you are doing something important for people and that your life is just a part of some great and incomprehensible process. It is this feeling that calls people to church, pushes them to war, helps them raise families, save for pensions, build bridges and invent cell phones: a fleeting sense of belonging to something greater and more unknown than themselves. Egocentrism deprives us of this. It draws all attention to the “I”, to our inner world. We begin to feel that we are at the center of all the problems of the universe, that we are the greatest sufferers, that we are more deserving of greatness than others. There is something seductive in this approach. But egocentrism isolates us. Instead of curiosity and joy about the world, we begin to be interested only in ourselves and project our prejudices and complexes onto every person and every event. It is tempting, attractive and profitable and provides spiritual comfort for a while, but spiritually it is poison. This is the plague of modern society. We are financially secure, but our psyche is corroded by base and superficial passions. People absolve themselves of responsibility and demand that society take care of their subtle feelings. People are absolutely certain of something and impose their views on others, often cruelly, in the name of fictitious righteous ideals. People revel in the illusion of their own superiority, but they themselves do not want to lift a finger out of inertia, lethargy and fear of failure.
For example, Mr. Dumont, an average bourgeois, goes to the theater once a month. This event is like a daydream for him, a dream that compensates for the inadequacy of his existence. Mr. Dumont, married to an elderly woman, knows very well that he will never find himself on a desert island in the company of a charming and naive girl. This is the adventure that the theater offers him. The "Beautiful Life" on the screen is needed by the average person to distract himself from the disturbing reality, sorrows and shocks. Exciting adventures, plots of just retribution, revenge and reprisal switch psychic energy from real experiences, accumulated irritation, pain, annoyance to imaginary ones.
Where does the willingness to worship the chosen one and satisfy their needs with low-level products come from? From the action of some objective laws of the psyche. The fact is that the human psyche has the ability to change its state. If the human psyche did not have such an adaptation mechanism, it simply would not withstand the enormous load. However, when psychological stress reaches its peak, the psyche can switch its energy to another channel. This is how the sublimation mechanism manifests itself, allowing one to cope, for example, with a crisis situation, switch the psyche to another “channel”.
We have said that the rational reason for animal conservatism is clear: a weak or inexperienced intellect is better off looking for connections and coincidences in events rather than cause-and-effect relationships. Such instinctive logic leads both animals and humans to develop omens, taboos, and rituals. Among them, the "correct" ones are mixed with the false and erroneous.
Man differs from animals in that he has a reverse side. A second plane of consciousness. And this plane does not coincide with the first. Kant believes that man has principles. And therefore he does not rush here and there, like a cloud of mosquitoes. Depending on each case. That is, man has a character. And animals do not. But what to do if the principles fade and the character weakens?
Take, for example, the sensational success of the so-called soap operas. (We are talking primarily about radio serials that told about love affairs, crime stories, and everyday dramas.) What is the secret of their success? The fact is that an American woman, having seen her husband off to the office, is usually left alone. She needs a sublimation effect. And so psychoanalysts suggested to radio magnates: during these hours, you can broadcast plays, preferably serial ones, in which touching life situations will be played out. Let's say this one. A poor but virtuous girl works in a store. One day, a millionaire's son accidentally comes in to buy cufflinks. The young people fell in love with each other, but how many obstacles arose on the path of this magnificent, all-pervasive feeling! The effect exceeded all expectations. Radio listeners not only followed the fate of radio heroes. They imitated them. If a touching heroine casually let it slip that she washes with soap from a certain company, then the demand for this soap would grow unheard of. (Hence the name of the phenomenon – “soap operas.”)
Adorno showed that the spiritual life of man is largely determined by the tyranny of the unconscious. Man does not seek eternal truths in television, not a reason to develop analytical abilities, not the possibility of deep artistic impressions. He is drawn to television under the influence of psychological inclinations. In this fact, according to Adorno, lies the secret of the duality of consciousness inherent in man. Thus, rejecting violence as a thinking subject, the average viewer finds in screen crimes an attractive spectacle, a redemptive liberation from everyday experiences. Psychologists claim that when detective and criminal performances are shown on the flickering squares, the number of crimes decreases.
Monotonous, exhausting everyday life constantly gives rise to a feeling of dissatisfaction in a person. Many aspirations and expectations do not come true and therefore are pushed into the sphere of the unconscious.
People need fantasy as a universal "painkiller". However, not every person is able to take responsibility for their own fantasies, i.e. to recognize the corresponding desires as their own. And here art comes to the rescue with its illusion of "disinterested contemplation". The point is not only that it offers a person a rich assortment of typical, finely honed fantasies of all sorts of colors, cut and finish; more importantly, by putting a person in the position of a spectator, it allows him to live out his complexes, while avoiding the author's torments and personal responsibility associated with authorship. "Irresponsibility of contemplation is the golden key with which the so-called average person unlocks the door to modern "mass art", overflowing with blood, sex and sophisticated sadism.
In my opinion, the term "god" is primarily a product of the human thirst for perfection and completion. The idea of a deity is caused by our emotional desire for stability, constancy. It expresses our sense of eternity, our desire to overcome chaos, danger, inconstancy and misfortune. God is man's hope for an ideal world in which there is no vale of suffering. In creating the image of the Supreme Being, we seek someone outside our world who will lead us safely through a sea of misfortunes, a being who, having created the whole world, will save us from non-existence and death. The hierarchical authority of God as an ethological superdominant.
In his short treatise, The Future of an Illusion, the father of psychoanalysis and the mother of the unconscious, Sigmund Freud, identified the fear of death as one of the main reasons that compels people to create and defend myths about gods and religion in general. Since we are helpless in the face of death, our unconscious invents the figure of the Father in Heaven to help us cope. The Father in Heaven also easily and simply rewards good behavior, and therefore, Freud argues, we have a compelling reason to resist our most antisocial instincts, such as incest, cannibalism, murder, and the like. More importantly, however, the figure of the supreme Father in Heaven alleviates our fear of death by promising eternal life to those who heed society's demands.
It is impossible to live with the truth. Man needs illusions to live, not only external illusions such as art, religion, philosophy, science and love, but also internal illusions that condition external ones. The more a person can accept reality for truth, appearance for essence, the more stable, adjusted and happy he is. The moment we begin to search for the truth, we destroy reality and our relationship with it. “Thoughts are a hindrance (hindrance to what?), – said one of my patients. – I don’t want them.” People endowed with thinking cannot help but torment each other, this happens against their will. Thought itself, from its very appearance, is a tormenting and harassing thought. Why would a person think if everything was fine with him? Perhaps truth is just an illusion that is formed by power. We simply tell each other stories that we pass off as true or false. A real, “normal” person lives with illusions. Death, apparently, is also an illusion.
Perhaps each of us has a secret attraction to death or something similar. At the turn of 1999 and 2000, at the transition to the 21st century , many educated people spoke and published utter nonsense about the coming upheavals and dramas. These conversations were no better than primitive numerology.
Religion not only wants a monopoly on the upbringing of children at the beginning of life, but also considers itself entitled to dispose of its end. The cult of death and the persistent search for harbingers of the end are, without a doubt, the fruits of a hidden desire to see this end and to get rid of the worries and doubts that always undermine faith.
Chapter 18. The onset of attacks
Every time I walk this way at lunchtime I feel a fever of anticipation. The complete impersonality of the crowd coats you with a resin of warm human delirium that makes you run forward like a blind pony, your ears twitching with fever. Everyone finally and irrevocably ceases to be themselves and therefore automatically becomes the personification of the entire human race, shaking thousands of hands, chatting in a thousand different languages, cursing, applauding, whistling, humming under your breath, talking to yourself, orating, gesticulating, urinating, impregnating, fawning, flattering, whining, haggling, pandering, howling like a cat, and so on and so forth. You are all the people who ever lived according to Moses, and you are also a woman buying a hat, a bird cage, or a simple mousetrap. You can lie in a shop window like a fourteen-carat gold ring, or you can crawl along the wall of a house like a humanoid fly – nothing will stop the procession, not even the lightning of artillery preparation, not even a line of walruses marching to the oyster beds.
When the lights go out in the offices and people go to their lairs... Strangers, unfamiliar houses, worried faces. Where had she disappeared to? It was already quite late. The hour was coming when they feel thrown off track, because life around them slows down. This is the time of half-confessions. There is no more beautiful repetition on earth than the light that remains on in the house. Ah, smile in the abandoned houses where you live among a pile of papers. How good it is in abandoned houses to love others and find others, from rooms infinitely dear. But, as always, before sleep everything is simplified, and from a myriad of details only one manages to insist on itself.
Towards the end of the day, towards the evening, towards the night, a person wants to give free rein to pitiful feelings. He wants to reproach himself. The soul is dry. The soul is rough. And the events of the day are too small, stingily mundane, not enough and not enough to scratch. To distract myself, I download mail. It is almost hopeless, because the whole country is sleeping – on the left still falling asleep, on the right just waking up – and no one writes to me.
Here is a man whining. But will whining make you feel better?
A strange night... Somewhere now they are shooting, somewhere people are being persecuted, thrown into prison, tortured, killed, somewhere a piece of peaceful life is being trampled, and you are sitting here, knowing about everything and unable to do anything... Life is in full swing in the brightly lit cafes, and no one cares about anything.
He walked up the stairs slowly, like an old man. He said quietly: "Today is... a bad... day..." For each word there was one step. "The choir of grasshoppers... sleeps...": three more steps. And once again the same lines – for the next six steps. I did not remember what came next and for a change I tried to read the poem in reverse order: "...the choir... of grasshoppers... sleeps", but I discovered that it could only be read that way if you were going down.
From where I was, I could shout anything I wanted at the people. I tried. They made me sick. I didn't have the heart to throw it in their faces during the day, but from above, where I had no risk, I shouted, "Help! Help!" – just to see if my call would have any effect on them. No, it didn't. They pushed life in front of them like a wheelbarrow all day and night. Life obscures everything from them. Their own noise prevents them from hearing. They don't give a damn. The bigger and higher the city, the less they give a damn. They built it for the glory of their idiots. I'm telling you: I tried. You can expose yourself completely, shamelessly, right down to your rectum – no one will notice.
I'm really tired of the pain I hear and feel... I'm tired of always going somewhere, alone, abandoned by everyone. I've never had a friend to keep me company, to tell me where we're going and why. I'm tired of people who hate each other so much. Their thoughts cut me like shards of glass. I'm tired of often wanting to help and not being able to. I'm tired of the darkness that surrounds me. But most of all, I'm tired of the pain. There's too much of it.
And even if it was too cloying, even if he had guessed wrong, the dog left to guard such memorable roofs wanted to whine, quietly howl and rub his muzzle with his paws. All this was pointless. I could argue pros and cons all night long. And the same problem: who was that one "he"? Tears came, suddenly, as had often happened to him lately. Finally, he sat down and cried.
Something like despair began to come over him. I wanted only one thing – to curl up into a ball and disappear forever from all planes of existence and non-existence, but it was impossible precisely because of the pain, which was becoming stronger with each passing second. I noticed that I was screaming and tried to shut up. This did not work out completely – I switched to mooing.
Oh, friend of my shining years, unfortunate namesake, – you wanted to save me then, why didn’t you save me! – the roar grows louder, lightning will pour down now, – acrid smell, my chestnut hand... I kill painfully, but quickly. Pain has nourished the tree of pride, and it will crush it.
So it happened completely out of the blue, when I howled towards night. Like foam against glass . Howling means loneliness. Camp bitch. Banging your head against the wall, looking for some kind of your own, separate outcome. This attack was swift, causeless. I screamed and screamed, and when I exhausted myself in howling and screaming, I felt better. I believe in screaming. Howling is never insincere. "We exist as long as we still feel pain," you repeated in the strange language of silence. I wanted to lose consciousness.
One night, when I was walking down the street in a fit of particularly painful melancholy and loneliness, some things became clear to me with extraordinary clarity. It was a gray twilight, it was deserted and cold. It was morning, the streets were empty, the asphalt was wet and black, the automatic traffic lights blinked lonely and uselessly at the intersections. The sky was such that you wanted to look up. But in the city they didn’t notice the sky and never wanted to look up. The sky was deserted and indifferent to them. Here, even the sun was somehow dim.
Over the sinful world float at night – the Avenue of Hope, the Boulevard of Sorrow. Over the grey lump of frozen buildings – the quarter of smiles, the ring of dates.
Light clouds floated quietly, rounding their breasts. They flew around residential areas and stole sheets that thrifty people had hung out to dry. Airy panties hung like squirrel skins ... I wonder why clouds need sheets? Whereas in relation to people this question is as relevant as, say, what length of spoon would we need if the clouds were made of vanilla ice cream. Teddy bear clouds.
The integral is one of the most important concepts of mathematical analysis, which arises when solving problems of finding the area under a curve, the distance traveled during non-uniform motion, the mass of an inhomogeneous body, and the like, as well as in the problem of restoring a function from its derivative.
Few people know that to take one step, a person needs to use 26 bones, 7 muscles and 7 joints of the foot. Ideally, this entire biomechanical system should work like clockwork. But in practice, few can boast of an ideal gait. And shoes play an important role in this. More precisely, their inner liner – the insole.
But a shoe. Is it capable, like everything else, of being lost in thought, in the dew? Yes. But – in general – no. Agree, the insole has nothing to do with it?
A textbook of logic will tell you that it is absurd to say that yellow is a cylinder and gratitude is heavier than air; but in the mixture of absurdities that makes up the human ego, yellow may well be a horse and cart and gratitude the middle of next week. However, absurdity is not the same as meaninglessness. At midday, cats look under benches to see if the shadows are black.
Like a stone I stand among stones, asking for only one thing: "Don't come near, don't touch me with your hands and don't make any strange inscriptions on me." Here, in our sweet remoteness. Ignorance helps to concentrate, although, here everyone has quite a tolerable education. For while away the too-deaf nights, although, at night here, in general, there is nothing to do.
A peek at someone's business. How stupidly everything in the world is arranged. How funny people are, aren't they? How soporific life is...
As I walked towards home, I sinned to give myself up to the current of life and not make the slightest attempt to fight fate, in whatever guise it might come to me. All that had happened to me so far had not been enough to destroy me; nothing had perished in me, only illusions. I remained unharmed.
Between yours secrets , between narrow holes on yours faces , gentlemen , (from time to time, my sweet, my dear, I left your heaven), sometimes . "We can't believe," they say, and you can bet that the carpenter will break the lock, but will find no one inside.
Let us add that if in times when people were few, it was advantageous for a person to become famous, now, when he has become completely devalued, the situation is completely different. Whose respect is worth seeking on our planet cluttered with bodies, where the thought of one's neighbor has lost all content? It is no longer possible to love humanity either wholesale or retail, and the desire to simply stand out from it is already a symptom of spiritual death. The horror of glory comes from the horror of people: having become interchangeable, they justify by their number the disgust they inspire. The time is not far off when one will have to be in a very good mood, if not to love, for this is impossible, then at least to endure them. In times when plague epidemics sent by providence devastated cities, each survivor rightly inspired some respect: he was still a living person. Now there are no more of these, but only a swarm of agonizing creatures, stricken with longevity, especially disgusting because they stage their agony so beautifully.
What is depression? It is the denial of desire and duty. Whereas hysteria is the denial of duty in the name of desire, and obsession is the denial of desire in the name of duty. In this, as in every other sense, depression is a more archaic state. A state without modalities is a lifeless state. Depression is temporary death. But the depressive is still formally alive, although he may lie motionless and not relieve himself for a week. But he must relieve himself. This hysterical beginning in the depressive – the ability to relieve himself – is the beginning of desire. He cannot help but do it, otherwise he will perish. He cannot help but breathe. Does he want to breathe? He cannot help but breathe.
One should not think that the world of the depressive is complete disorganization, complete denial and destruction. Give a depressive his Desire, and he will become the happiest of mortals. Give him his Duty, and he will become the most diligent anancast. So, depression is frustration, deprivation of the fundamental modal properties of human life – Desire and Duty. The world of fulfilling everyday needs is a miserable fragment of these modalities. If a depressive forces himself to brush his teeth – this is already a great achievement in terms of deontics. But it would be inaccurate to say that in the modal or, rather, amodal world of the depressive there is no axiological modality at all. It is present, but not entirely, there is only the operator "bad" and "indifferent", but there is no operator "good", valuable". The whole world is painted in gray tones, everything in the world is bad. But this will not be entirely accurate. Good is in potentia. Good is a lost object of desire. It can be lost in reality, in the form of a dead mother or wife, or virtually, when something is lost but is not recognized as such; perhaps it is the joys of creativity or professional skills that are lost. What is missing is the neurotic play of good and bad, which forms the structure of desire – modal dialectic. For example, in hysteria, in which the axiological scale is actualized, the dialectic of desire is present in a very strongly expressed form. This is the dialectic of “I want” and “I don’t want”. The hysteric wants one thing and then another. Sometimes one thing is good for him, but when it comes to action, it is bad. This is an X-ray of depression.
Whatever his merits, the healthy man always disappoints. It is impossible to have the slightest confidence in what he says, or to find in his speeches anything but tricks and verbal quirks. Only the experience of the terrible gives some weight to our arguments, and the healthy man has none of this, just as he is incapable of imagining the misfortune without which no one can communicate with those isolated beings who are sick; although if he had the imagination for this (not finding a pulse in his arm), he would no longer be a completely healthy man. Not being charged with negative experience, neutral to the point of self-denial, he flounders in health, in a state of impersonal perfection, insensibility to death and everything else, inattention to himself and the world. As long as he remains in this state, he is like objects; as soon as he falls out of it, he becomes open to everything and at once knows the omniscience of fear.
I have the pleasure and blessed consolation of seeing you in good health. Mavlana said this in one of his bayts: "Just as beautiful people look for clean and transparent mirrors, so generous people want to see weak and helpless people. Beautiful people become prisoners of mirrors, admiring their beauty and stature. Even passing by darkened glass, they look into them to see themselves. Generosity of soul, which is true beauty, sees itself in the mirror of the souls of poor, unhappy and helpless people."
Chapter 19. On Art
Now we can answer the question: what does it mean to study a work of art? Two extremes that await art criticism are the complete isolation of a work of art from the world and its complete dissolution in the world. In the first case, knowledge can only be intuitive or even impossible. (“Beauty is ecstasy: it is as simple as hunger. You can’t really say anything about it. It is like the scent of a rose: you can smell it, and that’s it... All a critic can say about... a painting is to advise you to go and look at it. Everything else he says will be either history, or biography, or something else.”)
For example, one of the poems by the American poet Emily Dickinson speaks of the flight of a hummingbird as a "path of disappearance." In this case, due to the properties of poetic language, which represent a "linguistic fantasy," there was an overlap of two perspectives: the perception of the bird's flight and the idea of the ephemerality of life.
If poetry has a deep penetration into the very essence of things, then those imaginary attributes that it ascribes to the phenomena of the real world, the facts of real perception, as if begin to “shine through” those properties that this perception records. Thus, the poetic object is built on the border of two “worlds” of consciousness: fantasy and real perception. The poetic object exists “as if” it were a mirror reflection of what we call the real world, although in reality it is not. Following the example of that very art that constantly warns of its ingenuity and artificiality.
Art already has an extremely suspicious attitude towards life. It is precisely non-animality, in the view of the refined intellectual, that is the root cause of spirituality. Art, for example, arises precisely from the inability to live a natural, simple natural life. Let us recall the well-known Freudian example. In nature, a canary sings to lure a female. After she appears, all songs stop – there is no time for that. It is necessary to build a nest and hatch chicks. But if a canary is locked in a cage, it will sing without any tangible biological result and sooner or later will find pleasure in the process of singing itself, singing ever more refined roulades. The same is with people. Few people have not written poetry during the period of reaching puberty. And only those who have not been taken by a thrifty lady of the heart continue to improve their poetic skills until old age. If S. Freud had succeeded in making all of humanity his patient, as he planned, all art would have come to an end. It is impossible to cure an artist of neurosis. The artist is the neurosis. Or, to put it more precisely, the neurosis is his muse, periodically bringing the artist out of a healthy animal state. The point is not that someone fell in love with a charming woman, but that this emotion opened up vistas for him that were in no way connected with the enchantress. Besides, if we are talking about art, then a dispute concerning such a small group of humanity is of no interest, as are any kind of groundless abstract questions.
Poetry is an immersion in what others do not notice and, not seeing, pass by. The poet's gaze is always directed at hidden values, hidden treasures, found among the rubbish of the everyday. And at the same time, art shows all this in its originality and mystery and thus leaves it untouched. A work of art teaches indirectly, showing life. So does life itself. But there are things that a person can learn to understand only with the help of art. This concerns him first of all.
Perhaps grains of art, like salt, are sprinkled into life. It is left to the artist to discover them, evaporate them and collect them in their pure form. When fate turns especially surprisingly, we say: "as in a novel" (fate is only as a plot that requires entertainment). This reveals the recognition of the obvious dissimilarity between the insipid everyday life and that which by its nature is rare, surprising, "beautiful, like a picture." From past times, if they deserve it, there remain mainly works of art. Is this not why the past so often seems more colorful to us than the present? This example helps us to see that art in general and in the universal sense provides existence with an increase in clarity. However, sincerity in art is difficult to distinguish from unconscious deception, to which even the purest and most selfless artists are prone. The greatest talent very often degenerates into mastery. And, in general, one must take the artist at his word, one must believe his work.
Disease is inherent in man internally. Man cannot help but get sick by his very nature. The world around man is full of dangers to his health, aggressive towards man, hostile to him and the only way to survive in it is to create artificial protection. Disease occurs as a result of man's violation of some natural laws. Harmonization of life with the laws of nature has as a consequence man's health. At this time, the child is symbiotic with nature, he and it are one whole. Not a woman, but all of nature is pregnant with this child. A woman is only an instrument, an intermediary. And we have no right to dictate our terms. We can only be good intermediaries. Birth is an act of a kind of "rejection", a loss of symbiosis. And this in itself is a trauma. But nature gives man intelligence to come to harmony in relationships, and reason to come back to the lost symbiosis.
Genius is not something subjectively personal, opposing the world as something objectively impersonal. The strength and power of genius is the strength and power of the world itself. Thus, Kant considered genius to be the innate inclinations of the soul, through which nature gives the rule to art. Hegel saw the sign of genius inspiration in the desire to become completely filled with a thing, to be completely present in things. The ability to see the world with genius is precisely the ability to imagine forms that are spheres of identity of the ideal-subjective and real-objective aspects of being. Such forms, in essence, are real ideality or ideal reality.
Some gifted people simply live, openly enjoying themselves and mocking others, and at the same time, without any visible effort, create immortal works. Other talents spend their entire lives solving their most primitive problems and die without having figured out a single one. Sometimes a person’s desire for a certain occupation cannot be explained in a rational way. Then it is assumed that genius is close to madness. Art itself is undoubtedly just a game, based, philosophically speaking, on deception. That is why it is useful to smile. This is explained very easily. For a non-artist, art is always immoral.
No one would voluntarily limit their choice or strive to have no choice at all, considering that nothing that deeply touches us is desirable. We can, of course, invent various torments for ourselves; mostly this is a pose and an appearance; real torments are those that arise in us against our will. Only those that are inevitable and depend on our ailments and our trials, in a word, on our inadequacy, are of importance.
Chapter 20. Monotony of Days
I woke up at five in the morning, shortly before dawn, and energetically got myself ready, finishing my toilet with an ice-cold shower; I had an inexplicable – and, as it turned out, deceptive – feeling that a decisive day lay ahead.
He sat as if he were an orphan in this life. So rich and so sad. And a drunken dawn began, and an orange drum of the sun rolled out. A man swayed in the window frame. Stubbornly and questioningly. He looked sadly out the dusty window, saw the sunset dying. Nothing could replace that piercing feeling of sadness that arose at that hour. That strange numbness set in... enveloping him... trying to shake it off, he looked out the window and tried to drive away the gloomy thoughts.
Listen, everything has its own logic, but step aside, look at everything impartially – a madhouse... What else is there to think about? If nothing can be done anyway, there is no point in driving yourself crazy. It was touching, heroic, funny... and useless. Why try to build something if everything will inevitably collapse soon?
He had almost nothing left. He lived, and that was enough. He saw how he himself and his life, how the whole world was controlled, ordered and meaningful. He found that everything was essentially very simple and that one could live easily and comfortably. Finally, he came to his senses and tore his gaze away from the window, but for a long time the feeling of meaninglessness did not leave him...
And melancholy cleanses. Rest, soul. The inner spit hits you, and the outer will cause a violent collective response – the vomit of fate. Carrying out the work assigned by fate... – For me to be interested in a cat?! Yes, I am not happy with my soul. And I thought that he is always wrong about people, thinking too well of them.
I sit down next to an everyday cat... Scratching. An hour passes, maybe two... Lie down in bed. Don't think, don't remember. What should I remember? A place where flowers grow? The sea or maybe a Riga cafe and women on the streets? No, that's not it either, I've never been anywhere and I don't remember anything. I've sat at a table from Finland my whole life and wrote down different and not very cheerful things.
He was silent, looking at the ceiling with his eyebrows raised. Boredom lay down on the shabby sofa like a bitch, I came up and lay down next to him and spit at the ceiling. I'll lie down why, I'll lie down and think about why. Lying in bed, collecting my thoughts, I'll smoke 2 cigarettes and at the same time think whether the past night is worthy of being included in my adolescent notes. If it is worthy, I'll smoke a third cigarette. Then get out of bed and blow the setting sun a kiss, wait for a reciprocal expression of feelings and, if none follows, smoke a fourth cigarette. When I can't lie down anymore, I sit up in bed and turn on the TV, no longer to watch, but because of the soft light it emits.
You can lie on a bridge and watch the water flow. Or run, or wander through the swamp in red boots, or curl up and listen to the rain pounding the roof. It's very easy to be happy.
One day, when I was lying on the massage table in a dark, quiet room, waiting for the session scheduled for me to begin, I was overcome by a wave of... melancholy. And it took me by the heart, took me and squeezed me with pincers, and I felt so unbearably melancholy that it was difficult to pronounce a word.
Fucking boredom, which is essentially what it was created for, is completely independent of circumstances... And it rolls on you like a steamroller. Now I know how it's done: a person is taken and dealt with like a nut. Boredom plays with us – it lets go of its tight embrace for a minute and then embraces you again. Do you know how it happens? First you stop looking for answers. Then – asking questions.
My life is spent as a village girl, a boring child of the gloomy autumn days of the north. She passes by without bowing, like an angry neighbor. They prefer more quiet entertainment: cinema – wine – dominoes. I am bored, as everyone is bored... This guy has a problem: he considers boredom to be an Art. People sometimes even vomit from boredom. After all, boredom is the most common feature of existence. After all, the day is longer than the night. Let's take some example; let's take a young girl, say. The girl looks at her watch, or, better yet, let her ask the time and say every time: – Twenty to one? Thank you very much. She looks at the white painted windowsill, something is written on it in pencil, she thinks – maybe I should write something too? Oh, how funny people are! In order not to look for problems for themselves, they quietly live out their destinies – somehow, and with someone.
There was one moment when it seemed that she was about to understand everything, and she recoiled from the window to jump off the windowsill and leave, but everything got confused again and she stayed.
All day I was looking for solitude to listen to you. I lay with my eyes closed. I remembered you for an awfully long time. I remembered the same thing. You appeared in my dreams for some reason. You hum in me like an organ in a high church. Maybe I am suffering in vain. We look for repetitions, but find differences, and when we look for differences, we find only repetitions.
(The man stands up, pours a pile of Colorado beetles onto the ground, carefully crushes them with his feet and continues collecting.)
The day has begun without meaning, the meaning of the actions I perform is not very clear, and I don't know why I get up. The rest of the time I am painfully absent.
Good God! How unspeakably disgusting life is! What vile tricks it plays; one minute you are free; the next minute – would you like a bite. And here we sit again among these scraps and dirty napkins. Fat is congealing on the knife. Fat is a word derived from the same root as life. Disorder, filth and dirt surround us. We have stuffed dead birds into our mouths. And with these greasy scraps, dirty napkins and little corpses – we are welcome to live on. Always the same; the enemy is before me again; eyes pierce our eyes; fingers tug at our fingers; and it is so painfully difficult to strain myself. To call the waiter. To pay the bill. I must force myself to get up from these chairs. I must find my coats. I must go. I must, I must, I must – the hateful word. Here I thought I was protected, I said: “Finally I’ve dealt with all this,” but again I feel how a wave has overturned me, dragged me, scattered all my possessions, and now I have to search, collect, rake, and call upon all my strength, rise up and – meet the enemy face to face.
Boredom lowers the spirit, makes it superficial, incoherent, undermines it from within and upsets it. Once it has taken hold of you, it will accompany you everywhere, as it has accompanied me since I can remember. I cannot remember a moment when it was not there, when it was not all around me, when it was not in the air, when it was not present in my speeches and in the speeches of others, on my face and on all other faces. It is both a mask and a substance, an appearance and a reality. I cannot imagine myself bored, alive or dead. It has turned me into a talker ashamed of his speeches, a theoretician for the senile and the adolescent, for empty women, for metaphysical menopauses, a clown, an obsessed person. It devours the miserable slice of existence that has fallen to my lot, leaving me with crumbs, and that only because it needs some matter to work. Nothingness in action, it does great damage to the brain, reducing it to a pile of disparate concepts. There are no ideas that it would not prevent from connecting with each other, that it would not isolate and fragment to such an extent that consciousness is ultimately reduced to a series of incoherent moments. Concepts, feelings, sensations torn to shreds – such is the result of its action. It turns a saint into a dilettante, Hercules into a degraded vagabond. This is an evil that extends beyond the limits of space. You must run away from it as far as possible, because otherwise you can only expect from you crazy projects, like those that are born in me when boredom completely takes hold of me. I then begin to cherish some caustic thought capable of creeping into things, disorganizing them, piercing them through and through, I begin to think of a book whose syllables would destroy paper, would destroy literature and readers, of a book transformed into a carnival and an apocalypse of literature, into an ultimatum to the verbal plague.
Life loses its content and interest when the highest stake, life itself, is excluded from the struggle for life. In fact, at this point boredom arises as the flip side of the happy ignorance of death. Life has meaning only if it constantly asserts itself, while death makes every moment valuable, since in its close presence life can end at any minute. Boredom thus appears when time is devalued, and time loses its value when life becomes predictable. This predictability, in turn, is the result of the fact that man has lost the sense of death. Death gives life completion, but if consciousness loses this final point, the entire system collapses, life loses its meaning.
We need to compensate ourselves for this impoverishment of life, and so we turn to the world of the imaginary, to literature, to the theater. On the stage we find people who still know how to die, and besides, only others can die. Here we satisfy our desire to see life itself, which has become a significant stake in life, and not for us, but for someone else. Man seeks meaning in other people's lives, through television, books, magazines. He tries to become involved in these lives, dying each time with one of the heroes today, and with the next tomorrow. Through the experience of these fictional images, he, firstly, finds the meaning of his own life, and, secondly, is convinced of his own immortality, "resurrecting" before a new film, a play. However, after some time, the predictability of this process of dying-resurrection makes life even more boring, and the presence of death even more abstract.
In these conditions, a person has no choice but to go in search of death himself. The popularity of extreme sports clearly illustrates this situation: the illusion of existence "on the edge", in conditions of "constant danger", with an excess of adrenaline in the blood allows one to feel the presence of death nearby for some time. However, constant risk is incompatible with the everyday life of an ordinary person and a temporary release does not remove the general crisis, but only emphasizes it.
Thus, modern culture, having lost the real sense of death, begins to feel bored, having lost the meaning of life along with this sense. Running away from death, it has forgotten how to interact with it, so every encounter with it becomes critical. As a result, a person strives to get further and further away from reality, which, being deprived of the sense of present danger, becomes boring.
Everyone has to have worries. Sewer pipes stretch their tentacles into our apartments. Oklahoma has tasty straw. The best way to ride down the hallway is on a bed or a pool table... Exhausted by the terrible uncertainty of the day, I fell asleep fully dressed on the bed.
The tree gives its scent to the wind. A butterfly that flew into a room where it cannot survive. A peach pit thrown into the snow where nothing will grow from it. Words to the wind. Everything has its place. Sisyphus, who in the evening rolls the weight of meaning – the stone of his hope – on his shoulders for life’s sleep (there the day does not decline – it climbs!), in order to start all over again early in the morning. It seems like a river flows idly, but could turn turbines. And there is only one thing: the fatigue of a digger on the slope of days, when the crimson sun sets, and the mountain bristles with a clearing. I will follow him, that’s all, and nothing more needs to be asked or said... The sun is on the other side of the earth, fall asleep again, the sun is on the other side of the earth... This is how fatigue embraces. “In every person there is a seduction of his own life, and therefore every day for him is the creation of the world. This is how people hold on.”
To tell the truth, there is no more thought in this than in a soap bubble and, therefore, it is as unnecessary and useless as a hard sign in the alphabet of the deaf. Thus, some people can move their ears, although this ability does not give any practical effect to a person, and for animals it is one of the factors that contribute to a better perception of sounds, which is important in the struggle for existence. As in fairy tales: the eldest son inherited wealth, the middle one, say, a donkey, and the youngest a cat or a rat – some completely unnecessary, at first glance, creature.
After all, all this is like an umbrella for a fish. Just like shielding yourself with your hands and shouting it at the bullet: you can still hear your funny "no need", but the bullet has already burned through, and you are already writhing on the floor. And all his monotonous "no need"s were shattered by her no less monotonous "need".
The word "meaning" in all its meanings is not so simple. How little meaning there is in sincere words and feelings spread out are ridiculous. Any undertaking, I'm afraid, is judged by its results. Unopened by the view of the comb, fragrant slices of meaning, the blade of thought. And the infection of meaninglessness spreads, burning the brain and putting a checkmate. And now it's all over, and he doesn't know and will never know. "Never," he mentally pronounces, syllable by syllable, to make sure that such a word exists and has meaning.
Have you ever felt like you were about to wake up and everything would start all over again? It was like a memory, but a memory of what? It seemed like you were remembering something that never happened. And now, I went to the window, there were thousands and thousands of lights on the street, cars were driving, people were walking. And it seemed to me that all of this had already happened, everything had died, these people were dead, as if I was seeing something that had ended, but I didn’t see what was happening now, when I was standing and looking, but I knew that it had all ended.
A series of sluggish, ugly days dragged on, one after another drowning in the grey, gaping abyss of time. Day after day passed, one like the other, without any change. A vast series of sunrises and sunsets. Days alternated with days with that depressing monotony with which our life is so rich and so similar to a drip in spring – drip, drip, drip... Tomorrow comes – all the same, another tomorrow comes – all the same, a tiresome repetition of "Always the Same". Indeed, there is nothing more terrifying than annoying wallpaper, the pattern of which attracts attention to itself. The delirious dreams of our childhood can tell us about this.
So, faster and faster on the black disk (record), feeling the needle above you, and catching your breath between changing the needle or disk. You swing your head: this barrel organ again.
Unsatisfied, cold, abnormal, having survived a hundred abortions, a nymphomaniac, a lesbian – I was everything, even an underground mother. They offered to cure me of frigidity, to satisfy my vampire appetites, promised me revelations in dirty language, but all this in the name of truth, beauty, goodness, health and even poetry, which I unworthily trampled upon. I understand that it is boring to leave inscriptions on the walls of toilets, and I do not condemn the sexual maniacs who sent me their fabrications.
I hate sitting at home all day and waiting for someone to call. When I'm alone, it feels like my body is rotting little by little. Everything will rot, decompose, and in the end, only a muddy green puddle will remain and be absorbed into the ground. Only clothes will remain. I feel like this when I sit alone all day. I masturbate five times a day to feed the rot inside me. You lost, I'm just a soft goose foot, and only under your stimulation can I rave. I'm dead inside, but we'll have a masquerade. Baby, it's all terribly simple... (He who simplifies, wants to understand everything.) Well, those, all those who were with me at least once, want me again. It's just that at the end you start thinking about the beginning. I will always remember this, because it was all so simple.
— Oh, not at all! I work from home. I take the tablets to fill in... Yes, they're called tablets, they're sheets of paper with drawings... I bring them to my place and I work quietly, at my own pace, I warm up something for myself when I'm hungry, I take breaks when my eyes hurt, I talk to my cats, I take Sasha out to do his business... I'm my own mistress, that's it... Well , anyway, you see, showing up at the office at the same time every morning, alarm clock, metro, no thank you, that's too easy, I couldn't do it. I've been through this before, you know. I couldn't stand it. Once I had what they call a good place. Only I was suffocating, I was going crazy. Freedom is the most important thing to me. I can't do anything about it, that's just the way I was born. If they lock me up, I die. And then I couldn't stand my colleagues, my bosses, the daily routine, the gatherings to splash out on someone's promotion, retirement, this one's birthday, that one's baby's birth, that one's new car... No, no, I couldn't take it anymore! Forgive me: they are too boring... You think I have too many demands, don't you?
They are all the same, you could cry, and everything is so grey – winter, summer, it doesn’t matter. Why is everything so similar? If these are people, then why are they always grey, like a pie with nothing? Why do they speak in the same words? Why do they listen to the same music, and who writes it, so identical to the point of nausea? Why can you only see the colour of your own eyes in the mirror? I don’t understand it, like a child. Why do they lie to each other, why? Only enemies sometimes tell each other the truth. Friends and lovers, entangled in a web of mutual debt, lie endlessly... The feeling of lies around is a purely physical sensation. I didn’t know this before. As if some cold and sticky stream flows into your mouth with your breath. I feel not only its stickiness, but also a special smell, incomparable to anything. But it’s not scary, because no one listens to each other anyway... Loneliness is the best friend. Silence is the best interlocutor. I don't like upsetting people so much that I prefer not to get involved with them at all. No, I'm not mentally ill... Rather, I'm spiritually empty... I wouldn't tell anyone else this – they'd take it as a complaint, they'd think I'm unhappy with life. I feel like a living being who cries a lot, a being who even has to cry, because happiness seems to have to be suffered, through hard work and patience... The problem with honest people is that they expect honesty from everyone else. If everything is as it was, I'm unlikely to come here.
And everything around became grey, dull and deplorable, everything had already happened, and had happened many times, and will happen many more times, and there was no salvation in sight from this grey, dull, deplorable boredom.
The mirror refused to confirm that he was looking at a man on the brink of the grave. His body was young and firm from his daily jogging, not an ounce of fat. There were just a few unnoticeable wrinkles around his eyes and mouth. Not many – his father had never had them before he died. Green eyes. Julius had always been proud of them – calm, honest eyes. Eyes that inspired trust, capable of withstanding any gaze. Very young – exactly the same as Julius had once had when he was sixteen. The terminally ill old man and the sixteen-year-old boy stared at each other, and between them lay a gulf of decades.
And yet, as he tried to picture his name among the dead, he thought that a modest ceremony would perhaps not be out of place. True, he immediately hastened to disown this idea, because it was too much at odds with the contempt he had all his life for ritual games of any kind. He had always been irritated by the set of means by which religions deceive their followers: all those magnificent robes, incense, holy books, soporific Gregorian chants, prayer wheels, prayer rugs, kerchiefs and skullcaps, bishop's mitres and crosiers, that bread and wine, the unctions, heads nodding like dummies, bodies swaying to mournful tunes – all this he considered part of one great and protracted game, started only to allow some to boss around and others to grovel.
A confluence of glances in someone's day. A fading lily of the valley by the window. I must be feeling really bad. Sometimes I lie down and cry – I feel sorry for my life, why it went by; how sadly and needlessly it was lived, how short and senseless... And I sobbed madly, in desperate, unbearable torment, as only people can sob over a lost life, over something great, lost forever. No need. Just tell me... – She hesitated, choosing her words. – Maybe you know what to do... when... – When what?
And then – admit it! – you certainly often have this elusive mood, not even “elusive” – but... “unspeakable”... no, not “unspeakable”... well, to hell with it; in a word – admit it, you often declare that you have... hm... a mood that cannot find, so to speak, verbal expression... either a sad uncertainty, or an undefined sadness.
— Yes. Lately, everything has been different. Sometimes I feel like everything I’ve done so far has been wrong, and I’m scared. It’s like it’s nighttime, I’m having a vivid dream, and I suddenly wake up and for a while I can’t figure out where reality is. — You know what? — What? — I’m completely empty. — Really? — Exactly. She presses the back of her head against the window frame, and he sees that she’s biting her lip, holding back tears. She closed her eyes, and the tears began to flow. They kept flowing down her cheeks. Her body trembled softly. He put his arms around her and held her tightly. But the tears didn’t stop. — Honestly, nothing at all, — she said hoarsely later. — Pure emptiness. — I understand. — Really? — I know a little about this. — What should I do? — Sleep soundly. You'll wake up and everything will be fine.
Sleep covers her with a huge soft wave, and the tears subside on their own. It is getting lighter outside. A cheerful ray creeps through the crack in the blinds. The old times are giving in, retreating to where they never return. Many people, out of habit, still speak in yesterday's words. But the meaning of these words changes in the rays of the new sun, demanding new definitions. And let these new words live only until the evening – without them we cannot move forward in time or take a single step.
Evening, watching silent films in the windows of the opposite house – windows windows and in each one I want to live. Why do semicircular windows with illuminated curtains always look as if happy people live behind them, peacefully, comfortably? ...to share the same dream, from which the stains of boredom have been removed, but life is too short, and films are too long.
I am comforted by the thought that all these years, difficult, senseless and terribly long, are only the beginning. Many people think: this is their whole life, and this is the beginning, and everything will still be completely different. I thought: who had a happier start? The best people have a sad youth in the past, and youth, while it lasts, seems endless. And by its initial disappointments and troubles we judge life so far ahead that, of course, there is no desire to live in such a pigsty. Fortunately, everything is not so. And we are so small, and life is so big, and it does not care what we think about it. I could talk for a long time about life in general, but it is boring. Let's move on to details. Here is my life, full of struggle and continuous fire, serves as a manual for younger schoolchildren who, falling asleep, think about the summer holidays.
There is “harmful advice” and there are “harmful questions” – these are questions that creep into your head out of spite, even when you know for sure that you shouldn’t ask them to yourself or others. Because if you look at life from a certain angle, you can’t help but come to the conclusion that it hasn’t changed all that much; you can go further from there. Pale light of early morning, I was rereading Saint-Simon and found a passage that was of interest to you. “We must give ourselves an account of our existence; therefore, we also want to become the true helmsmen of this existence and not allow our existence to be tantamount to a senseless accident. In relation to life, we must allow ourselves some daring and risk, especially since in the worst case, as in the best, we will lose it anyway. And the more accidental – the more certain.” The problem is that by risking nothing, you risk even more.”
Every day time flows from the walls. Whose white hair did I find in the fortune-telling book?.. And how did she fall ill? Yes, it is known: all tears, tears, melancholy... Do you know what I did today? I lived. I lived again. I breathed again. I found myself on the earth again. I have hands again. And eyes, and lips...
She was frank, thoughtless and without embarrassment, said everything she felt, next to her he seemed pitiful and dry. She looked for what to buy him and what to bring, and what to wear herself, to look happier. She smiled, and the whole world became kinder.
Then word by word, then the voices are divided into male and female. Two voices were speaking in the darkness. Hers, close, attentive, sensitive, with light notes of special fear, which is always the voice of a woman in the dark.
Let's imagine a conversation between two people. Each of them secretly thinks the other is crazy. That's why they are afraid of each other, extremely tense, and try to be as polite as possible in conversation. Almost all normal adults treat each other in approximately the same way. Even when they tell "the truth" (people who tend to think they know what the truth is are deeply mistaken), they lie to each other. Each sees the other as, if not an enemy, then at least an opponent.
The interaction of crabs on the seashore, first blindly groping for their opponent and then grappling with each other in mortal combat, is deliberately complemented by another image – that of night lighthouses, whose rays struggle to reach each other, to finally merge into one bright radiance. Every lover, whether friend or lover, knows that love is not only a flash of passion, but also a long and painful struggle in the darkness for recognition and final reconciliation.
Moving in this ruined world by touch and in the dark, I never know how to behave with the people my hands have found. Leave them alone? Or try to get to know them further, touching their faces with my fingers? Perhaps I should touch. In the end, a person, if he does not want to, will always make it clear himself. Let it be his choice. It is the same as your own voice. Whatever it is, you put up with it and speak as best you can, because you have no choice. We are pieces of clay, on which the fingerprints of the one who touches us always remain.
For some reason, once every few months it happens to me that I barely survive until the morning, my brain is still askew, something is wrong with me, help me, help me, someone, when will I finally die, my poor beloved, you love me, but you can’t help me, no one can help me, far away in a high-rise building one window is burning, my dear, I need to get drunk, I need to get drunk; getting drunk is always welcome, you and me.
If he walked through that door now, I would throw my arms around his neck. I would want him to hold my hand for a long time – for weeks. I want to say that now I think I could love him differently, the way he wants to be loved.
Chapter 21. Under the Power of Depression
Translator of dark German ballads, full of disbelief in the salvation of the struggle with the surrounding world. But what is there to scold! It is necessary to point to some way out. You are a self-propelled book of complaints without suggestions. All her life she has been arranging something, killing herself over something, but life is empty-empty.
Damn it, the story is not funny. He played an unenviable role... The fatal passions of the characters...
Savoring life is a ridiculous nonsense. Everything I have learned up to this point has no meaning. No inner sense. Nothing needs to be sown, grown, boiled over the fire of thoughts, doubts and melancholy. What a person thinks means nothing. The world is a dwelling for a person, tailored to the standards of the human need for meaning. Without meaning, without content, without purpose.
I have long since cooled towards good and evil, I do not want to be a cathode and an anode . A sort of detached observer, living, "listening to good and evil with indifference." It is somehow easier to live, as if you feel that you are not obligated to anyone. How far I am from the eternal "it must be so", "you must", "you must not" ... innate obligations. In those moments when I am truly me, everyone is close to me, everything is clear and dear to me. I understand the heights, I have ascended them, I understand the low, I have fallen low, I also understand what is beyond the high and the low. Everyone can be understood if there is desire and time.
Doing good is not an easy art. The girl, to my question: "Why is good better than evil?" answered: "Because it is better." Everything real is reasonable, but if you start asking "why?", you better leave... You are not at home if you do not know where you are. What is culture for the common people? A song, a joke, a ditty. "Put me down, God, like a pebble, lift me up like a curl." Goodness without good people is the content of culture.
— How will you manage without our wasteland? Where will you walk? — I’ll find a place, — the boy began to speak jokingly, but suddenly became agitated, suddenly he was overcome by melancholy, incomprehensible to him, a heart-wrenching melancholy for happiness. He clearly understood that he would never get away from this wasteland and that there would be no happiness in his life. This was all the more strange because he had no idea of happiness; he had never kissed a girl, had never walked under the moon, had never drunk wine, had never done anything that would correspond to the adult knowledge of happiness — but suddenly he felt unbearably melancholy: he felt that he would never be happy in this wasteland, he felt how his life was passing, how it was leaving him every second, how senselessly the sultry summer days flowed. He looked around, and his breath caught in his throat from helplessness. He felt that grief was living in his chest, but he could not express it — neither in words, nor even in clear thoughts. It was not about history or the world spirit, but about life itself, which was slipping away, and he suddenly felt it. And it was impossible to share such grief.
And at the end of the summer, I started to get really depressed. I thought I knew what depression was. But then everything lost its meaning so much that it was physically painful. People came and tried to cheer me up. They said and did everything right, and I sat, listened, thanked them ("thank you for coming"), faked a smile and lied that I was already feeling better. But inside, I felt nothing.
For months, I dreamed about Josh. I dreamed about having long conversations with him: about life and death and random little things. Up until then, I had been a typical middle-class dork: irresponsible, lazy, insecure, and socially anxious. I looked up to Josh in many ways: he was older, more confident, more experienced. He was more open to the world and more accepting of it. I remember having a dream where we were in a hot tub (yes, that’s weird) and I said, “I’m really sad that you died.” And he laughed. I can’t remember the exact words, but it was something like, “Why are you worried that I died when you’re afraid to live?”
Death frightens us. And because it frightens us, we try not to talk about it or think about it, even if it is a loved one who dies. But, strangely enough, in hindsight it becomes clear: death is the light that allows us to appreciate and measure the shadow of every meaning in life. Without death, everything would be insignificant and random. All values and criteria would be empty.
For some reason, our culture tends to focus on negative memories. Ninety people out of a hundred will tell you in detail where, when, and under what circumstances they were especially unhappy. Everyone can remember in detail what was happening around them when they were fired from work or when they were getting divorced from their wife. And people who have lived together for a long time often save up and carefully store negativity as a kind of currency, so that they can then throw accusations at each other: “Do you remember?”
Of course, such behavior has its reasons, which lie not so much in psychology as in human physiology. After all, when we laugh or experience positive emotions, endorphins are produced in the brain (they are also called "pleasure hormones"). They relax all organs, including the brain, so the ability to remember is sharply reduced. On the contrary, experienced stress leads to brain activity, and the event that caused it is remembered for a long time. This is one of the defense mechanisms: stress is a certain threat to life, it can be repeated, and the body remembers the situation as dangerous. Of course, it remembers only in order to avoid similar situations in the future.
Let us, by the way, pay attention to how rich is schizophrenic literature and how poor is depressive literature. Depression in the history of Russian pessimism occupies one of the first places along with the causes predisposing... It places a person in the face of the breakdown of his "autobiographical attraction", the ontological destruction of the personality.
Such a depression has crept into the soul that much in the world has been crossed out. A pulse depressant in the soft paws of joy. Everyone sits in their own shell, no one wants to be funny or unhappy.
2,300 years ago, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle came to the conclusion that what man desires most in the world is happiness. We strive for happiness alone for its own sake, and any other goal – health, wealth, beauty, or power – is important to us only to the extent that we expect that they will make us happy. Much has changed since then. And yet, when it comes to happiness, little has changed since then. We know no more about happiness than Aristotle did, and when it comes to achieving it, there has been no progress at all. Despite all our amazing scientific achievements, people often come to the feeling that their lives have been wasted, and that instead of being filled with happiness, their years have passed in anxiety and boredom. Is it because the true destiny of the sons of men is to remain eternally dissatisfied, for everyone wants more than they can receive? Or is it that even our brightest moments are poisoned by the feeling that we are looking for happiness in the wrong places?
Oh, how right, how right was my first teacher of philology, Friedrich Nietzsche, when he spoke “of the clock hand of life”: “Life consists of rare, singular moments of the highest significance and of countless intervals in which, at best, we are surrounded only by pale shadows of these moments. Love, spring, every beautiful melody, the mountains, the moon, the sea – all this speaks clearly to the heart only once – if it ever speaks clearly at all. For many people do not have these moments at all and are themselves intervals and pauses in the symphony of real life.”
Let's remember – when we sit in the evening outdoors and mosquitoes appear – we no longer care about the beauty of the sunset – our entire existence is concentrated on the problem flying around.
The reasons, as is usually the case, seemed petty. It is known that people only suffer from annoying trifles.
We find happiness only by fully immersing ourselves in the little things that make up our lives, good and bad, without trying to seek it directly. The famous Austrian psychologist Viktor Frankl put it brilliantly in the preface to his book Man's Search for Meaning: "Don't strive for success at any cost – the more you fixate on it, the harder it is to achieve. Success, like happiness, cannot be achieved; they come by themselves as a by-product of a person's focus on something greater than himself."
Suddenly some luxurious detail will pierce me. Happiness is something we have to get on the go, otherwise we lose it. It's like a butterfly, the more you try to catch it, the more it slips away. But if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit quietly on your shoulder, Claire says in a fake, synthetically cheerful voice.
It is said that at an agricultural congress an elderly farmer was asked to give his opinion on what slope of the soil was best for growing a certain fruit crop. “It is not the slope of the land that matters,” he replied, “it is all a matter of the inclinations of the one who works it.”
An Eastern legend tells of a powerful spirit who promised a beautiful girl a gift of an unheard-of price if she would walk through a wheat field and, without stopping, without turning back or wandering back and forth, choose the largest and ripest ear of corn. The value of the gift was determined by the size and perfection of the ear. The girl walked through the field; she saw many magnificent ears of corn, but she hoped to find the largest and most beautiful among them. Having not chosen a single ear of corn, the girl wandered into a part of the field where the wheat had grown stunted and low. These ears of corn, as the girl understood, would not allow her to receive the reward, so she passed them by without stopping. Then she discovered that the field ended, and she had not chosen anything.
In my early youth, when I often crumpled the sheets and hay of nightly inspirations with girls, when I had not yet drunk tears from the cup of existence, I was a dreamer, like a girl. I loved to caress alternately the gloomy and rainbow images that my restless and greedy imagination drew for me.
You were slaves of two dissonant elements. You are a slave of the inherent language; the clientele is a slave of lethal languagelessness. Life is both vulgar and harmful, you complained to the beautiful ladies in the nightingale gardens. However, death is not a way out. For even death does not guarantee us free will. And you confided to them lines oozing with professional sadness.
Long ago, in the years of my youth, in the years of my childhood that flashed by forever, I had fun for the first time... I wrote poems, seduced silly women... You can protest, please. But what is left of this for me? – only fatigue. Let's go, violinist, into outer space – such is my mood. Look, please, into my stern eyes, look, perhaps, for the last time – such is my philosophy. Let him look into the good-natured thoughtfulness of the cow and learn to speak kindly to her. Pessimism is a weakened will to live. Even so, the main thing, however, is different. They are right in the details, but not in the main thing.
Let us not be as rigorous about it as Ferdinand Ebner, who noted in his diary that “the desire for happiness and bliss testifies to the inner impoverishment of life.”
The presence of an enthusiast has always been unpleasant to me. In general, someone else's presence only makes me angry. But I began to reason with myself. "What nonsense," I said to myself, "there are no grounds, there is nothing and there never was." This is not a sermon of despair, this is a sad piece of advice to live with dignity.
You must know that for some time now things have not been going well between me and the one you call the Creature. And that is why I visit bars.
He was not indifferent to abstract questions, he loved them, but he did not know how to interpret them and was not used to it. Many, many people, from among those who are usually called "the best minds of humanity", puzzled over this problem ( which to this day has an irritating charge of provocation for contemporaries ). As with solving other problems of this class (the so-called "damned questions"), opinions were divided into diametrically opposed ones. This view corresponds to a well-known position in psychiatry, according to which depression occurs only in people with a developed consciousness. The feeble-minded do not have depression.
What is more than life? Other people, other lives? Those we have no idea about – don’t even suspect that they exist. Have you ever felt that you are missing someone you have never met? What is the purpose of an adjective? What are some characters doing while the author describes others? Is there even one single event in the world worth telling? So why do we write? To wall ourselves in or to free ourselves? To disappear or to emerge? To take possession of the earth or to wash it away and move on, feeling for the branching, elusive affinities?
An explanation for this interest was left by one chronicler in an obscure passage that reads as follows: “Each of us takes his thought for a walk ahead of himself, like a monkey on a leash. When you read, you are dealing with two such monkeys: one of your own and one of someone else’s. Or, even worse, with one monkey and one hyena. So watch what you feed each of them. After all, their tastes are different... Imagine two people holding a puma, throwing a lasso on both sides of it. If they want to approach each other, the puma will rush at one of them, since the lasso will weaken. They are equally safe only when each pulls in his own direction. That is why they can approach each other with such difficulty: the one who writes and the one who reads, between them a common thought, caught in a loop that the two are pulling in opposite directions. If we ask the puma, that is, the thought, what is its opinion of these two, it will answer that the ends of the lasso are held by those who consider as food someone they cannot eat ...
The author's cautious train of thought: thought is a thought about thought. Thought, therefore, cannot exist before speech and outside of speech. How can one imagine thought in any language? It is impossible. After all , before a person began to speak, he could not think. The thinker is less real than his thought. Let us first ask ourselves a simple question: where does delirium come from? The answer will be this: Delirium comes from life, from the most ordinary everyday life. The author-character is far from serious, he is clearly playing the fool, modeling a version of his possible relationships, succumbing to the temptation to go at this fork in the road to "parallel", or, using computer terminology, hypertext. To think means to think yourself. It cannot be that the head is yours, and the thoughts in this head are not yours. At first, you do not attach any importance to this case: well, he died and died, who has not happened to, what author has not killed a hero? But this is not the point...
Aristotle believed that the poet's task is not to tell what happened in the world, but to show what could have happened, could be probable or necessary. Hence, artistic truth is not so much the truth of fact as the truth of laws, the essential manifestations of life.
"Woe to you because of the wheel that goes round in your thoughts." Do you think that anyone needs you? The saddest thing in the world is to know that people do not love you. But nothing – neither work nor women – exhausts the body and soul as much as melancholy thoughts. Thoughts about life are heavier than life itself. Even the pain generated by melancholy... is less unbearable than melancholy itself. But it is better not to think about such things... you will not invent anything, but you will strain your soul... Was it not Shakespeare who said that with a light heart one lives long? I have long been convinced: it is worth thinking, and immediately you remember something sad. The cheerful will instantly turn into sad, if only you stand in front of it for a long time, and then God knows what else will come into your head. As soon as a person reaches the highest level of development, ceases to be stupid, it is clear to him that everything is nonsense, deception, and that the truth, which he nevertheless loves best of all, that this truth is terrible. That, when you see it well, clearly, you will come to your senses and say with horror, like your brother: “What is this?”; it will completely stun you and you will shake your head in amazement.
The first thing you learn in life is that you are a fool. The last thing you learn is that you are still the same fool. What began in an unusual way must end in the same way. If you make fools think, they will become agitated, confused and find an unfortunate end. Just as people run around the world day and night, chasing each other, so you should run from thoughts about life, so as not to fall out of love with it. And if you think about it, you will fall out of love, it always happens. There are many such "thoughtful" people in Russian life. (Show me a place where a Russian man would not groan). Every thought is like dough, if you knead it well, you will make anything out of it. I know that this comes from thoughtfulness, but you don’t need everyone to see: here is a young man thinking. You know, all this is extremely conjectural, and I don’t particularly puzzle over it. The roots of knowledge are bitter, and its fruits are just the cream. I drink to your health, my friend, and you drink to the health of the old fool-idealist and wish him to die an idealist. He moved even closer to me and, with an expression as if he was about to tell something very funny, whispered secretly: “Here in Russia, no one knows what he is for. He was born, lived, died – like everyone else! But – why?”
( Until I know why, I can’t do anything. After all, it is known: without understanding, you won’t overcome!)
Sitting on the embankment until the train arrived, I thought about how we give up, how we accept the meaninglessness of existence.
But now I had made a maturity contribution to the insights of childhood – satiety and doom; a sense of what was inevitable in our fate; death; an awareness of our limits and how much harder life was than we had thought. Then, as a child, I had suddenly sensed the enemy; the urge to resist had spurred me on. I had jumped up, I had shouted, “Let’s scout out the area!” and put an end to the horror of the situation.
In a small person we clearly feel the breath of other worlds, from which he has just come. However, what difference does it make where you come from and what color your blood is, the main thing is in what land you will fall and in what dialect you will say your last "goodbye". – A person in this life should know two things well: why he lives and why he will die. A person is designed in such a way that even on his deathbed he must draw conclusions. Remember your past, so that your future is strong and reliable! Do not forget where you came from, so as not to forget where you will go!
Understanding one's mortality is a fundamental and unique property that defines a person's position in the world. However, most of us manage to keep this knowledge in a dark place and in disassembled form. We live in denial of death and, according to Heidegger, this is not life at all. We are unable to understand life without being aware of our impending death.
Relaxation is a decline of spirit, its exhaustion. Does that mean I am not there at all? There is only the soul, swaying in waves of emotions, rushing in and out: a wave of joy – a wave of sadness, a wave of tenderness – a wave of discontent, a wave of thoughtful immersion in... – a wave of recklessness... And everything is incomprehensible: why and why in such and not another sequence, with such and not another duration?.. The most terrible question is "why?". My wife, a Frenchwoman, sometimes asks such questions when we, left alone late at night, talk before going to sleep. And I hear similar questions from others.
He was also dissatisfied with himself because he had not managed to bring anything interesting into his life. “Oh, I will never have an interesting life, there is little that is pleasant in the world.”
But all this is rubbish, don’t be afraid,” he added, looking slyly at me, “everything in the world is nonsense!.. Nature is a fool, fate is a villain, and life is a penny! After this, is it worth the trouble of living? And you still live – because of the disgusting chill of curiosity: you expect something new... tomorrow... someone will come... someone... special... or something will happen. However, how can we brighten up the wait... I want to blurt out something about my life: touched to the quick, now I am always talking to someone. But some kind of corrosive, bad curiosity pushes me every time. And you still ask the lazy Ukrainian: “And still, how much is the millet?” And so I rush on, who cares.
A person becomes stale, like bread, because what brought joy yesterday, today can turn into a sea without wind, that is, not inflate your sails at all. Maybe this is nature's cunning? So that a person moves forward, does not stop? Searches for himself and the ideal world?
"Come on, you can't do this every day." Of course, it would get boring eventually... The sky always and everywhere remains the same... It's banal, and therefore understandable. M-yes, – he summarized.
In the same spirit, sarcastically and playfully, he resolved the question of the meaning of life.
- What, what! – says Yakov the guard, the hero of the story "God's Tree", written in 1927 in Grasse. – Once, my deceased parent and I were transporting grain from the field, and I came to him and asked him what, how, and why... and he was silent, silent, and finally said: "When I give you a good spanking with a whip, my boy, then you'll know why!"
Hello! What's new in the world, friend? Tell me, wizard, favorite of the gods, what does the coming day have in store for me, what will come true in my life? "There will be a ball, there will be a children's party. Where will my rascal gallop?" Our rascal is everywhere in time.
Maybe at the end of the way of the cross, if you have become super-correct, a hero in self-stopping your throat, you will kick the bucket in accordance... But this is without guarantees... a little less stinking at the moment of dying than when you were born... and then you will tip over into the night, polluting the air a little less than when you were born... But just don't get it into your head! Don't count on more!.. Watch out! Don't indulge in reasoning about big things! The devil knows how funny and annoying!
We firmly believe in the ancient saying. He will be brave who mows the grass three times a year at the most terrible hour. If we stand firm at least once at the most terrible hour, all our misfortunes will be grass. Drink, my friend, drink to failure, get your blood flowing, burn away your melancholy and spit on all this. And let's sit and admire the most beautiful street in the world, praise this soft evening – a woman's breast – and coolly spit in the face of despair. He suddenly switched to a whisper again. His eyes widened strangely: "Remember the main thing – life is short... And no matter what happens to you – do not take anything to heart. Few things in the world remain important for long. Remember, there is no greater misfortune than sadness. Everything in the world passes and is not worth tears. You can only say what time it is. And all that remains is to drink tea with apricot jam, the melancholy will pass. The main thing is that life goes on." A stupid expression appears on his face, the kind you can see on dogs when they catch flies.
And although he had already drunk enough by that time, he simply did not understand the question. More precisely, he understood, but was so amazed that at that moment someone entered and the question remained open. Trying to close it, I sometimes resort to the most banal parallel. There are different birds, I say to myself. And then my memory prompts a line by Jacques Prevert: "To draw a bird, you must first draw a cage." Of course, I answer, of course, there is a cage. And in it there are different birds. And the secretary bird, let's assume, tolerates its confinement perfectly, except that it gets a little fat. But the birds speak in the old-fashioned way, and, listening to them, you are convinced that there is a bird language, the study of which once consisted of the greatest science. Here one friend saw a good dream (he is generally lucky with interesting dreams). It’s as if a bird with a long beak is sitting on the window, and he says to it, as happens to us when communicating with all living creatures: “Don’t be afraid of me!” And the bird suddenly replies: “I’m not afraid!”
The root is buried in luck... Life goes by. You have to catch and identify the good things in each day, the shoots of tomorrow, the grains of yesterday. Life is short – break the rules – forgive quickly – kiss slowly – love sincerely – laugh uncontrollably. And never regret what made you smile. A good life is not a quantitative indicator; a good life is an attitude, it is an action, it is an idea, it is a discovery, it is a search. A good life is defined by a well-formed lifestyle, regardless of the size of your bank account. A lifestyle that gives you a constant feeling of joy in life. A lifestyle that stimulates the desire to become a person with deeper values and higher achievements.
Vigorously, tirelessly, forever affirm that you will become what you can be, and occupy the place in life that corresponds to your ambitious plans. Do not say, “I will be a success someday”; say, “I am a success. Success is my birthright.” Do not say that you intend to be happy in the future. Say to yourself, “I was meant to be happy, I was created for happiness, and I am happy.” Always assert your ability to win.
Over the past few years, the “How to Be Happy” crap has probably been shared eight million times on Facebook. But what no one realizes about all this crap is that wanting more positive experiences is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, embracing negative experiences is a positive experience. This is mind-blowing. Take a breath and reread: wanting a positive experience is a negative experience; embracing a negative experience is a positive experience. Philosopher Alan Watts called this “the law of reverse effort”: the more you strive to get something, the more insecure you become about not having it. The more desperately you want to be rich, the poorer and more unworthy you feel (no matter how much money you make). The more desperately you want to be sexy and desirable, the more of an ugly person you feel (no matter how much money you actually are). The more desperate you are to be happy and loved, the more lonely and afraid you become (no matter who is around you). The more you want to be spiritually enlightened, the more basely selfish you become in your attempts to attain enlightenment.
As existential philosopher Albert Camus said: "You will never find happiness if you strive for what happiness consists of. You will never taste life if you seek the meaning of life." Or, more simply, "Don't try." A person doesn't suspect anything. He just feels happy one fine day. The solution to the problem of life is the disappearance of this problem. (Isn't this the reason why people who understood the meaning of life after long doubts still couldn't say what this meaning consists of.)
The bitterness of open confrontation fosters greater trust and respect in relationships. Facing your fears and anxieties allows you to become courageous and resilient. No kidding. The list could go on and on, but you get the idea. Everything in life worth striving for is gained through negative experience. Any attempt to remove, bypass, stifle, or suppress negativity will only backfire. Trying to avoid suffering is a form of suffering. Trying to avoid struggle is struggle. Refusing to admit failure is failure. Hiding something shameful is itself shameful.
Pain is the thread that holds life together. Not only is it impossible to rip it out, it is destructive: you will tear everything apart. Trying to avoid pain means giving it too much importance. Conversely, if you take it in stride, you will be unstoppable.
Someone said the following: “There are two kinds of character, external and internal, and he who lacks one of them is good for nothing. It is like the blade of a sword that is well sharpened and put into a sheath. The sword is taken out from time to time, examined with a frown, as if before an attack, the blade is wiped, and then put back into the sheath. If a man keeps his sword always naked, he shows everyone its shining blade. In this case, people will not approach him, and he will have no allies. On the other hand, if the sword is always in the sheath, it will rust, the blade will become dull, and people will stop respecting its owner.”
We can conclude from this that thoughts are neither something internal nor something external, they exist in some third world (I think this is what Frege wanted to say). What does this mean and what are the laws of thinking? Everything that exists passes from the external to the internal and back. Conception occurs in the direction from the outside in, birth, on the contrary, from the inside out. I am convinced that this transition in the life of man, nature and culture is universal. According to Rank's theory of birth trauma, a person always wants to return back inside, to the mother's womb. Therefore, he builds himself a dwelling, a shelter, a house as something related to the mother's womb. This is the essence of depression, when a tired person symbolically returns to the mother's womb, covering his head with a blanket or burying himself in a haystack, like the hero of the film "Flights in Dreams and Reality". But it is impossible to live permanently in this cave, in this original "maternity hospital", it becomes a prison and death – a house, a coffin, this is a coffin. Man wants to break out again, to take a breath of fresh air from a dangerous life. But to do this he must undergo initiation.
Many people think the genetic lottery is inherently unfair, because it condemns some to lower intelligence, or ugliness, or birth defects of one kind or another; but in another sense it is profoundly egalitarian, because everyone, regardless of social status, race, or ethnicity, is forced to play. The most brilliant person sometimes has a worthless son, hence the saying that nature takes a rest on the children of geniuses.
— You’ve been philosophizing for so many years, how come you don’t understand that life can be neither beautiful nor not beautiful? It’s different for everyone – beautiful for the happy, terrible for the unhappy. It’s like water, sea water, do you understand? You’re swimming in it, it’s very beautiful and transparent; but then a cramp seizes you, you’re drowning, and it’s cold and terrible, and just now it was wonderful. And water, by the way, is still the same. You and Alexander Alexandrovich are reasoning and trying to generalize something; but there are no generalizations.
- Well, you know, you're an average philosopher.
- I'm not a philosopher at all, I'm just a normal person, and you're a dreamer and a bastard. Your imagination works, which is generally an illusory thing.
- And you have endocrine glands.
- And very good.
- Forgive me for being so frank, I feel bad for you. You have studied art, biology, astronomy, the history of philosophy, and you cannot get out of the very narrow circle of your personal feelings and make the most naive generalizations that are unforgivable to you. That you are displeased with this or that turn of events or the turn of your sentimental fiasco is completely natural. But that you are inclined to build some kind of negative philosophical system of a general nature on this basis – this would be understandable if you were a twenty-year-old, and not what you actually represent.
But he was inconsolable. He said that his feelings were losing their strength, that it was becoming more and more difficult for him to find again that lyrical world outside of which he could not imagine happiness, that he was thirty-seven years old and had little time left, that the spiritual wealth that fate had given him – if it could be called wealth – was coming to an end and that this end would be a catastrophe.
— Sometimes it seems to me that everything has a very limited value, which we tend to exaggerate. Perhaps this is not a judgment, strictly speaking, but a feeling. I don’t always experience it, of course, but quite often.
And this despite the fact that I had no naivety left; I knew that most people are born, grow old and die without ever knowing love. Soon after the infamous “mad cow disease” epidemic, new standards for cutting beef were introduced; in the meat departments of supermarkets and fast food joints, labels appeared with text like this: “Animal born and raised in France. Slaughtered in France.” Simple life, right? And cows, it seems, turned out to be the most miserable animals on the planet.
Can a smart person have a stupid life? Yes, a brilliant person can live a very ordinary life. What is life if not an attempt to fit into a context, usually with an unpredictable outcome?
What else do we have? What else, except this amazing, blissful moment of consciousness and being? If anything should cause us to tremble with awe, it is this priceless gift of absolute and pure reality. To shed tears because life is not eternal, because it has no meaning or established order once and for all, is asinine ingratitude. To invent an omnipotent God for oneself, in order to crawl on one’s knees before him all one’s life, is senseless. And besides, it is wasteful: to pour out love on ghostly chimeras, when the living lack it, is it not too generous? Is it not better to follow the example of Spinoza and Einstein – to bow one’s head before the incomprehensible mystery of nature, to bow respectfully to it and to live in peace and enjoyment? The earth is, above all, man’s resting place, the place where he is destined to become.
"... avoid speaking directly to Him – it is fraught with entering into disputes with patients" (from a dream of a patient of Dr. Jung). I will speak directly, because life is short. If there is someone contagious, they look askance at him, they are afraid of becoming infected and dying. But we will all die! And as long as your soul is alive, you must take everything that you like, while you are alive! For example, I drink so simply! I like to just drink! So I drink! The best remedy for grief and contagious diseases!.. Avoid people who never bring good news.
After talking to him, my screams die down , and I stop grinding my teeth. And everything becomes absolutely unimportant... One of those moments when colors disintegrate, when a gray shadow falls.
Overcome by a sense of hopelessness and a role of powerlessness; to end... a colorless voice... The place where I am is paradise, for paradise is a place of powerlessness.
He looked as if he was waiting for something. A dull face, pale and almost expressionless. Mortally tired – again, for a very long time, as if he had been counting the clouds in the sky all his life – and still not giving up. Another in my miserable place would have spat long ago.
In the midst of earthly affairs and joys, a sigh escapes from the chest of any person: it is impossible that such a life could be my true purpose. A holy man emphasizes this: even the creature, together with us, feels dissatisfaction and constantly sighs...
But you are not just tired. There is something else. You definitely want to die young. Yes, I will certainly die young. (The fact that he died does not prove that he lived.) There is nowhere to live, so you think in your head. Did you order the guillotine on your head? In essence... Thought always requires clarification – it is important to stop it in time. And yet, the essence of every creature... vibration, trepidation. It is impossible to evade existence with the help of explanations, it can only be endured, loved or hated, adored or feared, accepting the alternation of bliss and horror, reflecting the very rhythm of being, its vibrations, its dissonances, its bitter or joyful frenzy. Thought does not have to be clear. In the end, an exclamation mark is only a period that has thrown another one above itself.
The question arises: what causes moods, if not a specific person or event? Probably, they express the internal mobility, the oscillation of the personality itself, which passes from one mental mode to another. It is known that a person is not capable of remaining in absolute physical immobility. If he stands, then at the same time, imperceptibly for himself, he shifts the center of gravity from one leg to the other. If he holds his hand in the air, then it also slightly, imperceptibly vibrates right down to the fingertips. In the physiological sense, a person is a "trembling creature". And modern physics is increasingly inclined to believe that the idea of particles or points as the ultimate foundations of the material world is not accurate – it is more correct to talk about vibrations, about "quantum tremors", in the terminology of Brian Greene and the theory of superstrings.
Well, yes, I understand. You are above that. But still, the one who pulls the trigger is always lying. No matter how modest the place you occupy: if you have chosen something that attracts others, this means a certain vulgarity of taste. However, this concept is more religious than technical, so the taste is different for the well-fed horseman...
"But still, it is cowardice, brother, to close a book without reading it to the end! After all, the book is your indictment, in it you are denied – do you understand? You are denied with everything that is in you – with humanism, socialism, aesthetics, love – all this is nonsense according to the book?" In my opinion, there is no greater insult to a film than not watching it to the end. Damn those who throw their cards on the table without even looking at them... If this burden has fallen to you, then it is within your power.
A person should obey the rules of life: do not try to win at any cost, but do not stop fighting even in the conditions of an unbearable existence. Suicide deprives a person of the opportunity, having experienced suffering, to gain new experience and, therefore, to develop further. Having not achieved what they wanted, they pretend that they wanted what they achieved. In the case of suicide, life becomes a defeat. Ultimately, a suicide is not afraid of death – he is afraid of life.
It takes up your whole life. But you will understand that the web you have woven is a web of lies, and despite any successes and sense of humor, you will despise yourself. The only way for a boy to fight his stupid fate is to go off the rails. A dignified (without hysteria) death to decide "what is allowed" and "what kind of captain am I". The feeling of a sunny street without end.
I watched him go, not understanding anything, unable to cope with my amazement. It was very cold, I was freezing without gloves.
“But listen,” I said, “they’re waiting for us...”
- Who? – that's what he answered. One might have thought that he really didn't know who was waiting for us, where we were going, where we were. In any case, he didn't want to talk.
— I don’t know. I just remember that he couldn’t think of anything to say. So he didn’t say anything. But one day he called her, hinting at a new paragraph. The decision had been made, he was “breaking with all this nonsense” — that’s what he said: “With all this nonsense.” — What nonsense, man, what nonsense? — she screamed into the phone. — I LOVE YOU, do you hear? What nonsense? "I have several very serious arguments... " he repeated hastily into the telephone receiver just before his departure. "Lives are ending so quickly, just think about it! Does it all turn out to be in vain? What pain, what a terrible insight lives inside me now. All this was completely unnecessary. One continuous pain, nothing can compensate for it. Nothing can be born from it. Everything is in vain. Everything is in vain. The older the world, the more obvious it is. God is impotent. He cannot love us. He hates us because he is powerless to love. All this meanness, selfishness, lies. People do not admit it. They are too busy: they rake and rake for themselves. They have no time to notice that a short circuit has occurred and the light has gone out. They do not see the darkness and the spider's face behind the net, they do not feel how sticky the web is. That it is always and everywhere, you just have to scratch a little thin layer of happiness and goodness.
- It turns out that we must live, it is not worth dying. You will see – everything will come true, it is not for nothing...
- Of course, not in vain. Everything is not in vain. And why would we need vain, God forbid. Like a well-timed sacrifice of the queen. Like in a drawing. You can't hesitate when drawing a line. Courage is the line. It's about what you were born with, and therefore there is nothing to be ashamed of, – Hojo instructed each student. I thought it all out properly.
Thus, in the 20th century, the telephone became not just a symbol of love, but a symbol of unhappy love or separation, because if lovers talk on the phone, it means they are not together. A new world war broke out in Europe. He resolutely joined the Austrian army as a volunteer. True, although Wittgenstein was certainly a patriot, his decision to go to war was dictated not only by the natural desire to defend his homeland. He was tired of constant depression and wanted to die. It was easier and more honorable to do so in war. In addition, he wanted to be brave. "Perhaps the proximity to death will bring me the light of life." Fate intended that friends fight on opposite sides of the front line. However, after the war, his depressions increased. He did not know what to do, what to do with himself. The "Logico-Philosophical Tractate" was finished. The soul and mind were devastated. But first it is necessary to at least briefly tell what his main philosophical work was, which was destined to become one of the most famous philosophical texts of the twentieth century.
The moment before the receiver drops on the lever for the last time and the fatal click is heard, "Goodbye" eases the inevitability of the end. When the minutes of parting are approaching, these stony, dry minutes... "Goodbye" sometimes envelops them in gentle, warm vapors. Covers them with a light fog...
Yes, really, explain what happened? Why did you rush in when it wasn't your turn?.. Couldn't you wait? It's terrible what you've done... Yes, the one holding the phone probably thinks so... Long before the conversation could have ended normally, decently, suddenly, out of the blue – "Goodbye"... Amazement on the other end of the line... Then a short pause and "Goodbye" in response, like an echo... Oh no, far from an echo... There was another "Goodbye", icy... Yes... I can imagine... a kind of small stalactite... It seemed as if its second part – "goodbye" – had fallen off, fallen away, crumbled... No date. Only an offended, surprised "do", sounding like "yes?" – and the other end of the line began to ring... Do you even understand now? And what the hell bit you? If one of the partners suddenly forgets a line and the pause drags on, the other continues as if nothing had happened... Did it forget it? What are they talking about? Who did it, us? We were all standing nearby... All of us? Of course, ready to go... "Gentle greetings to your mother"... and "I hope you have good weather"... and "Have a nice vacation"... and "Have a good rest"... and "Have a nice trip!"... and "Zhanna is here, next to me, she's kissing you"... and "Thank you for calling"... and "Call me when you arrive"... In short, all of us... And us, by the way. After all, it's usually our turn right in front of you... I'm sorry, of course, but when we're here, sometimes you're not needed at all. Better say you were absent. Or he dozed off, and then suddenly jumped up and, half asleep, without realizing it, rushed... Confess... I have nothing to confess. Come on, what's the point of bringing him to clean water? We just know now that he is absolutely unpredictable. You can't rely on him... The call was not from here... So what? What do you mean? If the initiative for the conversation came from there, then only "Goodbye" from there, and not "Goodbye" from here, could end it. Such are the rules of politeness, as you all know very well. For me, this is an aggravating circumstance.
Now imagine: one day the phone rings, and the same voice... yes, that same one, on the other end of the line, as if nothing had happened... as if that damned "Goodbye" had never happened... as if nothing had happened... yes, imagine, the same voice in the most natural tone, sincere and friendly... as if all this was just a bad dream... the same voice... only it has the power to truly free me, to finally and completely rehabilitate me... well, that voice will one day say: "Hello!"... calmly, naturally... "Hello!"... Yes, "Hello! How are you?"
Chapter 22. In vino veritas
Lomonosov said: "Sciences feed the youth, give joy to the elders." Prince Vladimir repeated many times: "Drinking is the joy of Rus'."
On Saturday evening, when everyone is asking for half a bottle, the young lady asks in a capricious voice: "Do you have any canned peas?"
Oh, for the drink of the soul, for the last money, at least, God give me alcohol, alcohol, I have become more ghostly than zero, that such emptiness – no joy, no pain.
It wasn't very good to drink. The sum of sufferings gives absurdity. Slower music, please. O turning to alkaloids makes you kind, and time slower; a feeling of minutes stopping, gentle, sovereign. As time expands, increases in volume, along the rim of an open dial... Every time I talk to you, my blood pressure rises.
Everyday life is when you feel the movement of time, it is the form of its movement – pauses between events or events that have turned into pauses – it doesn't matter. The main thing is that you understand, you feel that it passes, taking away the former you, imperceptibly transforming, changing. And it is vitally important to understand "into what" and "how". It is sad, if you think about it... from how unrestrained tenderness slips away, note by note...
It's sad to say, mind you, the precious mirror has already become slightly dull and is becoming damper and more intent. With a pocket mirror in the soul. Now he looks to the side and writes, then out the window and writes again. Half of his life passes over a cup of coffee. Write to me about the cold of the rooms that have been read. About how winter burns in a spiral. To sit on the parquet of untouched letters. To sit and spit out the bones of laughter. To sit and pray over a cup of coffee. A healthy menagerie of harpooning thighs. Crimson rivers of the night hemispheres. Spilled by a small cup of coffee. What salvation to fly on a bed.
How much life and death in vain will I forget in a second illuminated forever, a second as meaningless as it is in harmony with the world – I will see everything and forget everything. The silk of leisurely seconds is given to me for free by retail outlets, just as I give my irreplaceable... Every moment of life wants to tell us something. About strings of minutes, about the anatomy of terms. And you open the closets of weeks, the sun gives you calendars. Always remember, a person never has, because a person never is. We always and only acquire or lose. A person is never present where he actually is. He is always delving into the past or looking into the future, but to simply be calmly in the present is such a rarity. And you fall asleep in woolen socks.
The most wonderful thing is to wander around the house, already knowing all the things by heart and still looking at them, finding something not noticed before. The thing is that life is generally a dump of dependencies.
Wooden time passes. This day sinks to the floor. Curd becomes cunning, becomes cheese. Slowly places the night of the city. Life is attentive, if alive. It wears out the throat of the hourglass. Time passes (to put a comma or not?) without pain. Real life is not what...
If I didn't calm down at the kiosk, continuing to fool around, he would spray me. I would fall silent, having fun inside. Let's get drunk in our own way, in a simple way, in a stupid way. Get drunk and forget deeply, irrevocably, plunge into oblivion, so that it would be impossible to crawl out. I had such a prank in mind. Pour me some, I'll pour out my coals... an allergy to life is anesthesia. And since then he would get drunk carefully every night, guzzle simple vodka. – Again I've washed down the storms, I drink and quietly grow old. And when I no longer had the strength to reach out for a glass of water, it would get cold at the bottom – all in vain, all in vain... Alcohol then has a sweet taste – how nasty is this verb " to" lose ». Vodka is a woman's energy. I made a discovery: he drank. This passion had eaten into him stealthily, thanks to the village loneliness. It wouldn't take long to end up in a noose when you're drunk. He took a rope, hooked it onto a branch, wrapped it around his neck and was gone. Or – just yanked his throat with a razor. Finally, the boots were removed... the master fell asleep. Well, such things happen in our dear remoteness...
He looked at me from the mirror, with a wrinkled forehead, bared teeth and eyes that showed not only anxiety, but also an ulterior motive... Idiotic laughter in the eyes, they suddenly became mistaken and sparkled with menacing joy, the face became stormy, small lambs were already flashing in the eyes. With a half-mad smile, talking drunkenly in large numbers, trying to quarrel with a friend... He had a little fun. True, according to him, he got drunk once or twice to forget. Feasted like it was the last time. Drank himself to horror and to death. Alcohol is consumed for the sake of joy. Pour your lady some wine, pour some wine... D rink the best wines of the eternal holiday. Oh, take off my hangover mask and put me to bed bye-bye, let me get up at the crack of dawn not so depressing or something. I took more good things from alcohol than it took from me.
A man walks along the loop of pain, moving his legs measuredly, and swinging his long, bent body. There is something thinking in his figure, and although indecisive, but decisive. Alien. Gloomy windows of houses. Drunk passers-by staggered, looking around with discontent, like big monkeys. These are the streets along which I walked, crushed by pain, with some kind of crazy and weak-willed desire for relief, help, and, not finding them in people, I looked for them in wine... A puddle that you mechanically go around. No one can understand the charm of the streets if he has not had to seek refuge in them, if he has not been a helpless straw that every breeze drove along them. He who talks to a drunk humiliates himself.
I returned to the swing I had just passed, touching it with my hand and fingers, carrying away the cold and roughness of the rust of the iron railings. I sat down on the swing and pushed off lightly with my feet. The swing made a light creak. It seemed familiar to me, reminding me of something. I swung again and heard quite clearly: "V-va... li... her..."
In a dreary search for beer. He walked and looked around, heard voices and talked to himself. The colonel walked as usual: it seemed that he was looking for a lost coin. A cautious and thoughtful gait betrayed a philosopher in him. A man who made his life a philosophy, and philosophy – life. He grinned and, loudly pronouncing fragmentary, meaningless phrases, again moved in the middle of the road... Two grenadiers from Russian captivity were wandering to France.
There are houses on one of the central streets of Amsterdam, in which behind the large windows of the lower floors, similar to shop windows, there are small rooms of prostitutes, who sit in their underwear right next to the glass in armchairs lined with pillows. They resemble big bored cats. They want to stick out. Prostitutes are good, sluts are bad. How incredibly dull, in fact, is the real world after you dream about cheerful whore streets and cheerful dance nightclubs.
Turn around and lean against an unknown house. The longer the streets, the happier the cities. The more time passes, the more valuable we are. I will no longer go to the neighborhood bars to smash enemy destroyers to smithereens with combat shells until alcohol finally breaks me into pieces. It is much more interesting here: here you can split thoughts, because drunkenness is a little madness .
He has no face, he is pale as a napkin, there is mourning in his eyes, shadows under his eyes. The alcohol has evaporated, leaving only an earthy taste in his mouth and a vague feeling of loneliness. His mouth is dry, as if everything is covered with blotting paper.
And he who is drunk and smart has two advantages. A drunkard, brother, will sleep it off, a fool never will. Just remember: drink vodka until you're fifty, and then don't dare, switch to beer.
In the evening, when it got dark, he became unbearably bored, as he had never been before – he wanted to hang himself! Out of boredom and anger at his wife, he got drunk, just as he used to get drunk in the old days when he was unmarried.
If they call, tell them: the owner has gone on a drinking spree. So much for your drunkard.
There was nowhere to wake up. The whole body was buzzing with an incomparable tavern melancholy. It was disgusting to think that I had to start the day over again.
Chapter 23. The Beginnings of Escapism
There are many people who have never known happiness, but there is no one who has never suffered, no matter how stubbornly he avoids suffering. Suffering is almost a friend. Our suffering could fill barrels. There is so much melancholy in our eyes that all the people of the world could be poisoned with it. Suffering maims, it teaches nothing except the sharpening of the senses. In much knowledge there are many sorrows, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow. The philosopher is a victim of his own curiosity. All happy people are alike, each unhappy person is unhappy in his own way. ( Sad man jokes his own way – A sad person always jokes in his own way.) Mental despondency deepens sadness.
All these thoughts, however, diverge from another idea of Bion, according to which thinking is connected with the ability to endure frustration: “The ability to withstand frustration enables the psyche to form a thought as a means by which the frustration that is being endured becomes more endurable.” But a thought is the same as a sentence. It is impossible to think without possessing the apparatus of thought, and the apparatus of thought arises as a mechanism for overcoming frustration, and a thought arises in the absence of a thing. If things were always nearby, a person would never learn to think. There would simply be no need for it. “I love her because I am afraid of losing her (Freud), just as I was afraid of losing my mother when she went away.” If his mother had always been nearby, he would never have learned to speak. And to love. You can hate without words, but not love. How can you hate without words? Well, just punch him in the teeth and run away. But love requires thought. In order to love, you need to be able to think. And now we have too few people who know how to think.
And by caviar I mean the whole complex of a carefree and enjoyable life. What is a grain of caviar? It is both a world and an object of consumption; as an object of consumption, a grain of caviar does not represent a satisfying whole; such a goal is caviar: a collection of grains of caviar; the consumer does not know the grains of caviar; but he knows the caviar, that is, the thick grains of caviar spread on the sandwich served. Not everyone can live wisely according to their means. It is impossible to live pleasantly while living wisely. Everything pleasant in this world is either harmful, or immoral, or leads to obesity. The difficulty is that simply living by the rules is not enough. If I drink, I drink too much, if I smoke, I get stoned, if I fall in love, I lose my mind, and when I work, I exhaust myself... I can’t do anything normally, calmly.
Suffering is the quickest way to attain the truth (cynical lie), which openly teaches that the destiny of truth is to be known. The tree of knowledge is not the tree of life, for it is of such a sad nature that it is no longer a tree but a ready-made gallows. Nothing is given for free in this world, and the acquisition of knowledge is the hardest task a man can face. A man goes to knowledge as he goes to war – fully awake, full of fear, awe and absolute determination. Any deviation from this rule is a fatal mistake.
The one who is smarter should be more guilty. There is no intuitive sense in this guilt of yours, there is no rational explanation for it. But you are guilty anyway. In reality, everything is not as it really is.
There is no other way for a man than the way to the barnyard of calm self-satisfaction. It is shameful and sad, but true: there are many people who envy dogs... Self-satisfaction is the very first and most indisputable sign of lack of spirituality. Tragicomically self-satisfied, this thought does not oppress them at all, and they will not perish under the burden of despondency and weariness. They imagine that an excess of cheerfulness can atone for the complete inability to think. That carefree region, on the gates of which is written...
In general, he was a man who shied away from any worries more than anything else, who was up to his ears in the mire of trifles of the most vile self-preservation and whose existence as a result left no traces anywhere or on anything. Wait a minute... why aren't you happy for me? Maybe you are envious? Since there is – no matter what – a reason for envy...
...To suffer internally, to eat away at oneself with dissatisfied thoughts, to suffer theoretically – with doubt, practically – with longing for unfulfilled dreams. ("The fastest animal that will take you to perfection is suffering"). The one who suffers looks with inevitable contempt at the dull, miserable well-being of a healthy person. And thus, the principle of harmonious development is perhaps applicable only to weaker natures.
The last time I was there he said to me, "Want to see a scorpion, boy?" and lifted up a rock – There was a female scorpion sitting next to the skeleton of her husband, whom she had eaten – With a cry of "Yaaaa!" he lifted up a huge rock and brought it down on the whole scene (and although I was not him, I had to agree with him that time).
He blurts out all his ideas – I get everything he says, but I keep telling him sullenly that it doesn't matter – Finally I snap: "I'm too old for such youthful idealism, I've seen it all! – all over again, do I have to go through it all again?"
All you need is a quiet corner and a woman, so that I can kiss her whenever I want, and she can answer me honestly – with her soul and body – that's it! Understand – everyone needs a little: a piece of bread and a woman. Love and hunger rule the world. The further you go, the worse it gets. Paradise has been asleep for a long time...
In principle, you can always go further, even if the ending is quite successful. The destination is not so important. Much more important is the point of departure – the point from which the metaphysical journey begins.
And as a result, you will end up looking like a fool. However, you will still end up looking like a fool even if you know the real story. – What to do then? – Be a scoundrel, – he said sharply and turned away.
Not a speck of dust in the eye and a bent arm. The hero is overcome by heavy thoughts about the joylessness of his future life. No one will take away the past from me, and I don’t need the future. I don’t need anything, not a single thought, not a single desire, all this unnecessary stuff! I don’t need anything, nothing, I don’t need anything!
When you receive a referral for analysis, think about what you will do if the result is: a) positive, b) negative. If the answers match, there will be no need for analysis.
Animals of all kinds, from crayfish to insects to birds, usually have a secluded place for solitude, because they need it. In this relatively or completely safe place, the nervous system can relax from constant alertness and put itself in order, which it needs time for. The body simply rests.
Everyone is looking for their own remote place where, unnoticed by others, they can lower their head and think about themselves and others who, at that time, are thinking about you.
But absolutely nothing happened, and most importantly, no one was humiliated. Is it really possible that the motionless photographic gaze, eternally expressing the same thing... the same thing, has such power, and is there anything in us that could just as eternally and consistently resist? – what?..
A person left alone for a minute may suddenly find himself so far away from those who left him alone that they will find someone else in his place.
The presence of a person who did not share the thoughts and feelings of those around him hung over everyone like a dark nightmare and took away not only the joyful nature of the holiday, but also its very meaning. We pay with loneliness for our superiority over others. And there is nothing more terrible than loneliness among people. When people have such different views, they cannot even watch a movie together.
All the time, there remains some unsurmounted residue of unspoken, unutterable, silently revealed only to oneself loneliness, about which one does not speak in words (but sighs only furtively). Endless, plaintive, ominous... when I am only an insignificant part of myself, when in myself I am surrounded and strangled by sullenly silent, mysterious enemies.
But all this is expressed in strange, broken phrases, in incomprehensible verses, in foggy images, and along with this morality there are a mass of sonnets, sonorous, musical, but imbued from the first to the last line with something that is clearly felt, but elusive for the mind. It seemed that they wanted to frighten or upset people. An irritating note of melancholy, eternal unsatisfied melancholy, and some kind of desire, also unsatisfied, tirelessly sounds in these verses, sounds and terribly bores the ears of society. But something painful and nervous, the psychosis of decadent creativity, gradually, imperceptibly, drop by drop, eats into the blood of society, and it wavers ... That disease is born in it, which its children – the decadents – nurtured and cultivated in themselves – cultivated and instilled in it its subtle destructive poison. They gravitated toward plotlessness, free verse, shocking vocabulary. Expressing disappointment, but not surprise, that they were not in the will, believing that provocative notes were not a tragedy, if one takes into account their previous activities and current lifestyle. They are all sad, sick children of a sick century. That is why I often refer to Lacan's words, which struck me once and for all, that "the norm is only a well-compensated psychosis."
There is a stone on my mother and a slab on my soul. Friends have long since left, acquaintances have been lost. False, they only came when they were upset about something. I won't even mention the traitors. No person can become more of a stranger than the one you loved in the past.
She left you as easily as people usually do. Now you're having lunch alone. You used to have a bunch of friends, now you have none. Which means they never existed.
Dear friends, there are no friends. No virtue is valuable in itself. Everything changes and is exchanged. Everyone you loved will either leave you or die. Except food, of course, which will be deposited as fat on your sides. You have become lonely, this often happens; those who are dear to you leave this world...
For you – one solution: A table. Coffee. Silence and a stack of books. Thoughts, since the time they began to grow heavy, are always far away in their wanderings. (And who could ask if there is no one to do it?) I thought out old-old thoughts and sat as an old man . And I fell out of love with going out anywhere. Nothing at all, nothing at all.
If all this constituted my essence, it is astonishing, especially since nothing seemed to change, but only to continue from the place of the last stop, in the same spirit as on my first independent walk as a child, when I came across a dead cat frozen in the ice of the gutter, when I first looked at death and accepted it with all my soul. From that moment on, I knew what complete solitude was: every object, every living and every dead creature are independent of each other. My thoughts, too, exist completely independently.
I live in the fields, I am accustomed to my hut and to loneliness; his breath will blow out sadness, as a gentle nanny will calm the cry of a child who has awakened.
There is no doubt that I have become a sluggish suitor. I am becoming more condescending and distant from people with each passing day. With a gaze that does not let anyone in, increasingly darkened. In short, I have withdrawn from people, I repeat. Lost sociability and as a symbol – television. In general, I have become a simple bundle of the most wretched reflex movements. Those who believed my loud statements that the secret to success on television is to follow Bataille's commandment and think no more than a girl taking off her dress will be surprised.
A parable about loneliness. I knew one guy, he was very lonely. One day I had a heart-to-heart talk with him.
"In dangerous times, do not withdraw into yourself, do not cut the wires between yourself and the world. That is where you are easiest to find. – I said that I "went all the way into a dream." Let this dream, that is, a ghost, "no." I don't care.
He had sunk so low that nothing could interest him any more, just as deep-sea fish are unmoved by storms raging on the surface of the ocean. "Where should I go?" he sometimes thought.
<...> ...it always becomes an assertion that in every solitude lies a secret guilt, the feeling of which suddenly falls upon me out of nowhere. I suddenly felt acutely my loneliness and defenselessness in this frozen world, whose inhabitants strive to confuse my soul with the charms of dark words. Amid these ugly and greasy, petty and disgusting faces and scenes, deeds and headlines; hackneyed greetings, hackneyed banalities, dull allusions, hackneyed flat jokes, all sorts of insipid nonsense; what air I breathe, like a prince forced to live among shepherds, a preacher and sower of the desert.
His last consolation was in dreams, but even dreams had become contemporary and topical. What is there to blame for man here – one must blame the sad environment in which every noble feeling is transmitted like contraband, under the hem of a coat and behind closed doors. There are no servants for such a feat these days!
Because dreams are nothing but thoughts, desires, aspirations, not lived out during the day. They try to complete themselves, at least in dreams. It is very difficult to find a man who dreams of his wife at night, or a woman who dreams of her husband. But very often they dream of the wives and husbands of their neighbors. The wife is available (the property of two square inches of the human body – the wife's vagina); as for the wife, the husband does not suppress anything. But the neighbor's wife is always more beautiful, and the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. And what is unattainable creates a great desire to get it, to possess it. In the daytime you cannot do it, but at least in dreams you are free.
A vile life, entangled in an iron net and oppressing the soul with its dismal emptiness, becomes disgusting to healthy people, and they begin to look for means of salvation from spiritual death. Often experiencing a bitter desire to "turn their backs on the world", to lock themselves away from hypocrites, malicious creatures. Young people, frightened by the terrible reality, amidst darkness and crushing melancholy, leave everything and go looking for a way out – an attraction into the distance, in thirst for another shore, out of here ... They leave behind memoirs about their youth, spent in a stuffy, nervous and attractively unhealthy atmosphere. After forty, the sun of death shines in everyone's face. I saw it at sixteen ... The era of sadness in the rank of a universal principle, a century of sentimentality, thoughtfulness, exquisite melancholy. It turned out to be only a decadent game with eternal values and the most severe discord with reality. They leave behind not only despair, nausea, vindictiveness, indignation and pity, but also all optimistic illusions, idealistic fantasies and the foolish belief in the "sufficiency" of fine sentiments and high principles. And gradually we feel an ever greater desire to give in to melancholy and die of it...
P astish pity. To suffer with you. It is gloomy and painful for the heart to live face to face with a blank wall. I am alone in the black world. Turn away from everything and look into the corner. How close can we be, giving warmth to strangers?
So he must have just been alone for too long – not being able to talk to anyone really hits the balls. Really. Especially in there.
The theme of inner restlessness. About one, about two – about all. Something so close to someone... The habit of not caressing strangers. Native and infinitely alien. We were completely devoted to each other; each of us trusted the kindness of the other, but an excess of trust... The tragedy of love is precisely that it is too strong to last.
There is no room for sensitivity in dealing with insensitive people. Something irritating and soft-soft, like silk, envelops me and alienates me from others. Like a child who closes his eyes and thinks that no one sees him. What do some children's gestures mean? – When a child covers his face with his palms, he shows that he does not see a way out of this situation and would like to disappear from sight. – If he puts his finger in his mouth, it means that at the moment he does not know what to do with his efforts, he has no goal.
Modern anchoritism, and duckiness, escapism or desertion of life; too rude misunderstanding, internal emigrant – open look, closed look – everything external becomes internal; reading books from the "Help yourself" series. As you know, a person cannot tickle himself. You have such a rich inner world, so rely on it . What if you create your own language and live in it, like a monkey in the forest? Understand that violence of reason only impoverishes you. In these internal conversations with yourself, the walk is equal to rejection. In old age, smart people withdraw into themselves, the rest – into those around them. Did you also know that American psychiatric textbooks classify hermitism as a form of mental disorder?
The world, sweetened by alcohol, was thus excessively full and tasty, but expanded, it must narrow somewhere. Look into life and heal yourself. God, the bigger the world, the greater the suffering. Jesus. His mission was interrupted. But he managed to do one thing: he gave us psychology. Its essence was that the internal is more important than the external.
Having accepted a bit of religion, interpreted it in terms of necessity, to enjoy life... – I will go where it is more fun, that is, to the West. To wake up, get bored by the sea and go to the city, where people rush about, encroaching on the love and attention of their neighbors. Folly and whim, just a whim that wandered into my head for a minute, hormonal stupidity. In my old head there are two, at most three thoughts, but at times they raise such a fuss that it seems there are thousands of them. Restrain yourself in order to be strong. The easier it is to restrain yourself, the more necessary it is. The trees are whispering something in German.
He spoke little, forcedly, like an actor who has difficulty recalling phrases from old roles. In the autumn, when his sister leaves, he leads a lonely, despondent life, about which we have only the briefest information. They avoid him and, fearing his intemperance, avoid communicating with him. And the gloomy mood again takes hold of him completely.
It was perceived as life. What stupidity I could commit: to touch the glassy-dusty landscape like that . I am like a cockroach, but not when it runs, but when it sits, frozen in place, in empty detachment, staring at one point incomprehensible to the mind.
I sit at home, hidden, receiving news from the fields. The life of a solitary: I am alone with Kant in an unventilated room – a cockroach behind the stove, a homebody-senile – in the room I celebrate the fact that I have managed to be alone again.
If there is no one somewhere, then there is someone somewhere. But where is this someone and where could he have gotten into? (From Sasha Grankin's Children's Library)
Or just settle down in a chair for the whole evening. And with a book of some sort. And so that the soul... as if in anticipation of some kind of disappointment, not really knowing what exactly it looks like: since the last time in the fourth grade, when the seniors took my money, I haven’t experienced any disappointments. Something like that, – closing the window, I say, – life is banal, like a runny nose. Something like that, even this day corresponds to the calendar to death.
If you have someone to tell your dreams to, you have no right to consider yourself lonely...
When the night pricks out my eyes, and the wind outside the window, growling angrily, gnaws at the cornice, when I can no longer bear it and lose consciousness; these smart guys say that I have fallen asleep.
The night has a tenacious hold on my brain and sucks out as much life as it can. And the night has much more strength than I do. You can hide from the night. For example, shield yourself from it with a woman, like a shield. You can escape from it to the Internet – there is never night there, just as there is no day. Or you can even try to love the night – everyone has their own ways of fighting, if not with fear, then at least with anxiety. It's dawn, gentlemen. How often are we caught by dawn on the verge of tears. I spent a disgusting night – I wanted to hang myself.
(No one noticed how dark it had become). The room, the city, the evening – everything was frightening. I didn’t even want to open the windows to let some fresh air into the room. Do you know how scared I am sometimes? Like a person who sits in a strange seat at the theatre and still doesn’t leave it. Fear and desire. Because, ultimately, fear and desire – that’s what we are. Our whole life, with rare exceptions, passes in desires and regrets. From one lust to another. We sin by going beyond our cocoon. Don’t leave the room, don’t make a mistake... There’s someone in my closet. I can feel it. Every night it looks at me for a long time with its colourless, unblinking eye through the half-open door. Soundless and motionless. But I know – it’s there, in the closet. A man who falls asleep alone behaves like a woman. Earrings are taken off as if at nightfall.
He lived alone, finding no friends, focused on some dissatisfied, sad thoughts; they curled up in his head like a tight ball and did not unfold. But instinctively, hour after hour, he hammered at the hard shell, trying to break it. But the loneliness was so hopeless, so intransient.
"What is this, what is this?" he repeated senselessly. I am tired of Chinese shadows, this whole puppet theater, I don't know why and who I see, I only know that I see too many people. Otherwise I would be completely alone, but here I am not alone, and I don't feel their presence, as if smoke is wandering around, my eyes are eating, it is hard to breathe, and when they leave, there is nothing left... Don't disturb my solitude and don't leave me alone.
Strange figures of madly drunk people, song lyrics, scraps of my brother's commanding speech flashed through my memory, someone's eyes that I noticed in passing glittered, but my head was still empty and gloomy; it seemed as if a thin trembling beam had pierced it and that people were dancing and spinning in it like specks of dust, preventing me from thinking about something very important. It seemed as if I needed to remember something, figure something out, or just lie down and get a good night's sleep.
I want to share with you some of my conclusions. I am surrounded by some miserable ghosts, not people. They torment me as only senseless visions, bad dreams, the dregs of delirium, the scum of nightmares – and everything that passes for life – can torment me. In theory, I would like to wake up. But I cannot wake up without outside help, and I am madly afraid of this help, and my soul has become lazy, accustomed to its tight shrouds.
To those who have bored me. You are all a bore (go away, for God's sake; your laughter is stupid, your faces are stupid, and the smart and sympathetic ones are simply unbearable!).
...and then he would plunge into concentrated contempt for himself, to say nothing of others, whom he simply hated at those moments.
The position, the place where they sit, will never compare to where they are not. There are plenty of people like you, for example: their name is legion. So step aside from me... And shut up there. Allow me to take my leave.
Already vaguely feeling on my shoulders the weightless, but unbearable burden of endless, already monstrous in its bottomlessness, super-loneliness...
Chapter 24. Loneliness
We feel good not with those we like. We feel good with those with whom we like ourselves. With those who turn on this backlight, this beam in which we perform our dance. If you like it, if it is easy for you to dance – it means that this person has this lamp. And nothing more is needed from him. Everything else is in you.
I would say it this way: snow was falling on a gloomy and depressing city. Night had come. Nice. Ingratiating. The day is common, the night is my own... When I am lonely, I cry. When I am lonely, different people speak to me from the darkness of the night. As trees rustle in the wind in the night, so different people speak to me. Ghosts, called forth by our melancholy, feed on the refuse of sleep. They dare not do otherwise...
And why are some girls trembling, fearfully turning their eyes, big as dolls? Still, this is real, orphan loneliness – you talk to yourself and, of course, you are not understood. And then the night comes, black, gloomy; it grows and gets stronger, lasts silently. It conquers with one glance and covers me with a black cloak. It becomes very quiet, sits softer and softer. I do not like the planet Moon, there is something sinister in it and, like a dog, it arouses sadness in me, a desire to howl sadly. Night complicates many things. It brings answers to questions. Answers that I do not want to know.
Afraid of dawn, she lay and knew that there was little night left. In the middle of insomnia, an island: there the cicadas sing their slumber, for there is no salvation. No, it is not the night that you lack, but the power of the night. The twilight is grey and sleepy, and the night shines intelligently and blackly.
Steel-grey eyes, outlined by the shadow of a sleepless night; a stern, dry expression, such as people have who are used to thinking stern thoughts always about serious things and alone. Yes, of course, but I still need to sleep. Insomnia terrifies me. On sleepless nights, all the ugliness of life presses on me. And the pain in my skull grows... I definitely need to sleep. In the quiet lair of my skull.
And silently cries about a former friend, about the youth of lips, about the boldness of syllogisms, about old neglected gardens, about very poetic and sad estates, which are boarded up tightly, in which the souls of beautiful women live. About how an amulet outlives its owner, how empty and scary happiness is without a person on a pre-dawn night, and how lonely the sphere of space is without a soapy iris.
No one who has true friends knows what true loneliness is, even if he had the whole world around him as his enemy. Ah, I notice, you don’t know what loneliness is. Loneliness is a state that you have no one to talk about. However, at the institute I met that very friend and began to think a little differently. I realized that the long habit of thinking everything over alone gives nothing except the opportunity to look at things through the eyes of only one person. And little by little I discovered that being completely alone is terribly sad. In my youth, many people willingly communicated with me. What didn’t they tell me... So many different stories – happy, beautiful. Strange – too. But suddenly, at some point, it all stopped. No one talks to me anymore. Not a single person. Not my wife, not my son, not my friends... No one. As if there was nothing left in the world worth talking about. The time when you need friends most is the time when you change the most. You know, sometimes it even seems to me that my body is transparent, and everything can be seen through me. If you are not like others, then you are doomed to loneliness. They will treat you meanly. Those who are lonely are as if they do not exist.
Do pet fish relate to this? Of course. People tend to take care of someone. In fact, why should there be animals? People want relationships, if it is difficult to build them with people, they start building them with animals. That is the effect. Many do not know this, they just get animals. House flowers are also an amazing thing. And it is also very good if there is some kind of garden and someone digs there.
I want so badly to sit down and just have a heart-to-heart talk with someone. Talk all night long. Look at the night sky together, discuss something, argue furiously, be silent. I miss spending time like this. I miss it madly.
When you have no one to share your thoughts with, your thoughts begin to divide you among themselves. When you watch a person behave alone with himself, he seems crazy. What are your plans for today? Will you come to play checkers in the evening? There were no reasons for refusal. He did not want to make plans and decided to accept the offer. At night, people do not think, they sleep. Today our kitchen smelled incredible. He wrote poetry, although it is very stupid.
The blackness of the night, full of human despair, turned into the gray blue of dawn, things in the room began to take shape. A deserted house of domestic hermitage and I myself suddenly want neither a smile that says anything in the edge and on the edge of the house – he became attached to this melancholic place (lonely everywhere is a desert) and reconciled ... We are all perverted by each other ... and lonely from edge to edge. And we all need each other ... A lonely look into oneself, into a gray-eyed sunken face, abandoned by everyone ...
He constantly saw himself, so that his double was always with him, which made loneliness itself amusing. Neighbors are ultimately infinitely external. We spend a significant part of our lives alone with ourselves. He who is lonely will not be abandoned. In the end, a person is always alone, and here it is important who is left alone. We can do only one thing – find something of our own, create an island for ourselves. A person is lonely, like a thought that is forgotten. I understand, I understand. If something is not needed, it is immediately forgotten. There is a remarkable line in his notebook: "As I will lie in the grave alone, so, in essence, I live alone."
From the threads of his own heart he wove a loneliness around himself and hid in it, quiet and wary, like a spider in a web, incurably becoming even more lonely than nature had created him. Just don't talk again about a corner of the soul – the soul itself is in the corner.
He fell on the bed, and the carnivorous worm of terrible, hopeless, self-boring melancholy twined around his heart. With increasing speed, it began to gnaw at this heart, which was not protected by anything. And the heart became heavy and sad, and there was nothing to help it with. He had neither sufficient experience nor determination to get out of this infinitely difficult state.
Hollow shadows fell on the pages of books, on bare elbows, on touching bangs. The wind ran in big sighs across the glass.
The sociability of people is based not on love for society, but on the fear of loneliness. It can be said that a person is sociable to the extent that he is spiritually insolvent and generally vulgar; after all, in the world one can only choose between loneliness and vulgarity.
Already in my childhood, the only idea capable of putting an end to all disputes and reconciling all differences, the idea around which a calm, uncomplicated, unconditional consensus most often arose, sounded something like this: “In essence, we are all born alone, live alone, and die alone.” This phrase is understandable to the most undeveloped minds, and it crowns the theories of the most sophisticated thinkers; in any situation it meets with universal approval, as soon as these words are heard, everyone feels that he has never heard anything more beautiful, deeper, more just – and this is regardless of the age, sex, and social status of the interlocutors.
Always, Mrs. Ramsay knew, you get out of loneliness, even reluctantly, by grasping at some trifle, seeing something, hearing something. She listened, all was quiet.
But sometimes, a wild spring wind, or a combination of words in a random book... will wake you up, will surround you in a disorderly manner. Among the flood of memories, the riches of old age, shreds that have not lost their strength, have not gotten sick, despite the power of time... a smile, held by a faithful memory, someone's, will suddenly pull... after all, recollection is a kind of meeting.
How strange it is to sort through old papers, to leaf through pages that lived – and faded for you, the one who wrote them. They are dear and alien, like the letters of women in whom you awakened the incomprehensibility that is called love, like photographs of people who were once close. Somewhere all this has gone forever. However, I look out the window and, having written “where”, I do not put a question mark.
There was nothing left in the chests of memory except a few scraps of the past. Memories only make it worse. Thoughts reach for the beginning of life – which means life is coming to an end.
When I forgot something, she liked to say to me with a smile: "Darling, pull your tail and remember this and that"; and before going to bed, caressing, she would say: "Good night." When someone loves you, it's like your heart is wrapped in a blanket. How not to miss it: time will pass, you can't bring it back. Forget about the past, we'll make another... When we are distracted by something pleasant, then our troubles are distracted from us. "But I won't even be able to put on makeup properly in that amount of time!" Remember, we used to gnaw together, like mice, the opaque time? After all, how everything changes if, undressed, you turn around in front of the mirror, like in childhood, feeling the ebb and flow. I know you won't judge – you understand yourself, otherwise I won't be able to fall asleep. And you too...
Loneliness is a dangerous thing. One day you will discover that you have only one problem left – yourself. If it does not lead you to God, it leads to the devil. It leads you to yourself. And these are only names for a bad life, only darkness without walls, without emptiness, without names, only memories of the present, only dust in the eyes – where are the husks and nuts for a small animal? Stocking up for the winter and living is not worth being born. To be first, to be last – to learn words by numbers in the ABC book, to grow hair, to look in the mirror, to eat dinner and to look ahead without opening your eyelashes. A body is forever falling somewhere, slapping against roadside posts, growing in the ground, growing a tree; scream – it is not clear what – a hole, a mink, or an executioner? Your cry will not be heard by me, I am cursed by heaven, God, earth, birds, fish, people, seas, air ...
Chapter 25. The Perfect Monologue
She: Why are you crying and singing the song of a lonely cuckoo? I am lonely too, we are all... lonely, like the moon in the sky, not warmed by anyone's affection. And not out of malice and not out of love, but simply out of a feeling of deep empathy for lonely people – a person should not be... We are both Aries, this is the sign of loneliness. A person must give himself to people, even if they do not want to take him. Two lonelinesses are drawn to each other. When you always know who made a mess in the kitchen.
Then explain how someone so kind can be so lonely? There is only one death in the world – loneliness... and love is a refuge from it.
The shell of a tree is the bark; of an animal is its skin; of a person is skin and clothing; of fruits is their peel; of nuts and eggs is their shell; of technical products is their capsule, armor, casing; of goods is their packaging; of letters is their envelope; of bedding is their bedspread; of pillows is their pillowcase; of bulk substances is their bag; of food is their jar, wrapper, package, cone; of candy is their candy wrapper; of space is their curtain, fence, wall, railing. Cover, case, box, covering, film, armor... All these are varieties of shell, the general meaning of which is to protect the internal from the external, and sometimes the external from the internal, to serve as an intermediary and a barrier between them.
At the heart of metaphysics, since Parmenides and Leibniz, is the question: "Why being and not nothing?" But there is also the next question in order: why not full being, but half? Why does every being exist only partly for itself and partly for others, dividing into external and internal? What is inside me is known to no one but me, and the external is known to everyone but me. Why does everything that exists exist differently for others than for itself? Why a veil and not nakedness? Why a mystery and not full revelation? Why revelation and not full mystery? Why a fruit needs a skin? Why an egg needs a shell? Why a soul needs a body? These questions can be answered metaphysically, mystically, and theologically. The "veiling" of being is its inalienable property. What is folded cannot be fully unfolded. You can turn a sea shell or an ear shell inside out – but then the mollusk will die or your hearing will suffer. The living cannot exist without covers. Absolute permeability and coverlessness are characteristic only of the non-living. The eyes are not only a mirror, but also a curtain of the soul.
He: We rustle slightly with the shells of our destinies – this loneliness protects the living kernels from contact with strangers. The court where our longing and awkwardness are weighed on small cups of coincidences.
Feeling lonely forever. Tako-dinok, I'm 1 night. Dolphins, sharks and maybe even elephants and birds don't live alone...
We need something "greater than ourselves." And the mirror is an ontological condition for the existence of consciousness because man reveals himself only by looking at another. It is not for nothing that animals do not recognize themselves in the mirror. When others cease to exist for us, we cease to exist for ourselves. Well, yes, I thought, for others we are always more real than for ourselves, and vice versa. For why are we here, if not as an object of observation?
The mind is set negatively. It is needed by someone who wants to survive, faced with nothing. But nothing is nothing if you are alone. And if you are in company with another, then you live. And this life hides nothing from you. And without nothing there can be no thought. And therefore, while you live, you do not think.
"Self-digging" becomes the most important element not only in the construction of an individual destiny, but also in inter-individual relationships. Each person becomes a "reflective theorist". If a person tries to reflectively realize the peculiarities of his personality, to comprehend himself as a whole, then the possibility of error is even greater. The fact is that a person as a whole does not open up to himself in the act of individual reflection, but is revealed most comprehensively in his relationships with other people, in his actions and socially significant deeds.
A man speaks. But why does he speak? We can conclude that a man speaks not to convey adequate information about the world, that would be too trivial and useless language. A man speaks, first of all, to satisfy his desire, to break through to the Other.
There is nothing human in man. This is one of Hegel's favorite thoughts. But not in the sense that most people give to this thought. After all, the human is not in man, but in man's world. This world is big. And it is always outside of a discretely allocated body. So, this world weaves its threads. And everything that a person has for itself, everything that is generally significant and universal in him, consists of these threads. After all, any person is he and his relatives, friends and enemies. These are mutual attractions and repulsions. Infinity of connections and dependencies. According to Hegel, man is an ensemble of social relations. If you think about it, books are actually just very long spells that turn you into a different person for the rest of your life.
But we only know about our attraction, if we have one. We know nothing about the Other. That is why Lacan said that sexual relations do not exist. He is echoed by Baudrillard in "Fatal Strategies", where he writes that man does not know the pleasure of another. In general, then object relations do not exist. That is why people are always "sorting things out".
My own long-term experience of being-with-others in the poorly organized cultural spaces of the big city leads me to think that the other is not so much to be loved and understood as to be tolerated and endured. Love and understanding are in fact selfish, they presuppose the transformation of the other into a likeness of oneself and thus turn out to be a form of his subjugation.
Sincerity of thought is incompatible with the Other. One thinks alone. One survives socially. A person hides thoughts in order to live in society and renounces the truth in order to be with the Other.
A lonely person does not need to decorate himself. Or his home. He does not need to please others. To show oneself from a good side is to be hypocritical. He lives in a non-simulative space of the authentic. In this space there is no reason for aesthesis. For an aesthetic distance to arise. For it is determined by the presence of the other. And there is none. Each person is given to himself completely. A lonely person is not an aesthete. He is an ethicist. The other makes you put on a show. To show yourself. And in order to show yourself, you need to decide what you will show and what you better hide. The other creates in us a reverse side, a hidden side as a condition for presenting yourself to the other. He makes us choose. To be hypocritical. And if you guessed the measure of the other, liked him, then you have the aesthetic ability to judge. After all, you chose not what you like or dislike, but what the other likes.
Speech can only be external, monitoring, evaluating and passing judgment. The word appears only as official, like the word of a Soviet announcer with an intonation of anonymous threat in his voice.
Perhaps the people we call crazy live in other slices of reality? What is confusing here is the fact that the mentally ill, as a rule, suffer greatly from their condition (for delusions of grandeur, however, this is not typical). But, firstly, almost all people suffer, and secondly, perhaps the crazy suffer simply because no one can share their suffering. For example, if all the people who are “pursued by aliens” united, their lives would become much easier.
8% of avatars contain images of animals (usually domestic animals). Everything is simple here – a case of ordinary totemism, a feeling of psychophysical kinship with animals, which shows some immaturity of consciousness. Those who are incapable of truly loving people, who sublime their unspent warmth of soul into the form of simpler and more controlled relationships, sincerely love animals.
And, from an internal point of view, it would probably be better... in its individual representatives. A person with the temperament of a true artist would probably be able to extract some sense from this solitude and beauty. But I, in the face of infinity, seemed to myself like a flea on oilcloth.
I need to live alone more than to read about five thousand problems and inquire about them. (He feels the need for solitude and values it.) After all, I have tried my way of life and many are trying it after me.
It is clear, at least, that computer addiction is gaining momentum, a kind of "psychosis with a computer", where the computer acts as an inductor of something like delusional influence. After listening to many people, you are convinced that if it were possible, they would get into the computer and spend the night there and see electronic dreams. It is unclear how to treat this. The person becomes completely autistic. After all, you can order books, food, medicine, anything you want via a computer or smartphone. Take away the computer from such a person, and he will start to suffer from withdrawal. He can no longer communicate normally with living people, he has forgotten how to do it.
The perfect monologue. So, each to each. So, his own to his own. I'm not worth much, guarding my prison. Either a "user" or a "loser." A cattle to myself, my own master. Having reached gray hair, I dine alone. (I've gone completely wild.) Consumption, as they say, "according to colors and regions." Having gone crazy, I'll lock myself away from everyone and surrender myself to solitude to the point of insensibility.
In the old naive times, when a tyrant, for the sake of greater glory, razed entire cities to the ground, when a slave chained to a victory chariot wandered along foreign festive streets, when a captive was thrown to be eaten by predators to amuse the crowd, then, in the face of such simple-minded atrocities, the conscience could remain calm and the mind clear. "Yes, there were people in our time, not like the current tribe." They died with a vengeance. Clinging to life was not in fashion.
"King Agid said that the Lacedaemonians ask about their enemies not how many there are, but where they are." <...> Ashes and desolation reigned on the battlefield... <...> "When entering battle, order the arrogant heads to be chopped off with swords, but forbid touching the hermits, killing children, women and old people, cutting down trees and destroying houses. And remember: life is a home. And the house should be warm, reliable and round. Work on the "round house" and God will not abandon you in heaven. He will not forget the bird that makes a nest.
That this old clock ticks like a heart, annoyingly. That's how life passes with every second. And the light is broken, and no one would fix it. "I'd like to change the battery on the clock, but there's no time." There's no more time to waste. Those who need time never have enough of it. There's still a wagon of time.
Mechanically, he glanced at the clock face, not noting the time. The dial said that it was not yet evening, but it was already quite late. So, again, he would have to measure time with rolls of used toilet paper... The water closet – as one state councilor noted – is a study of thoughtfulness.
It's terrible when you are not loved, not understood and nothing is forgiven. I reached the point where I could not see myself. There was no point in breathing alone. Something had to change. Change from start to finish.
Conclusion: it was necessary to start a family. Because any delicateness will always remain only delicateness. Sooner or later you will find yourself alone, without food, without mutual illusions and, most importantly, without warning.
Distant people can be hated, feared, despised, like the left – the right or the right – the left, the poor – the rich, the unbelievers – believers, etc., by all the signs of political, property, national, religious division. But it is the close ones, the ones from whom they expect a lot, hope for a lot, that they take offense. Resentment is a flash of disappointment against the background of enchantment, closeness, affection, attraction. Resentment is undeserved neglect. The offended person tries to hide the resentment, so as not to reveal his emotional dependence on the offender (real or imaginary). But this only intensifies the resentment, drives it inside. Resentment is conditioned by the feeling of one's own importance in the eyes of those whom we consider our offenders. There is a direct relationship between resentment and pride. Therefore, the best remedy against resentment is deliberate humility, the awareness of one's own insignificance.
The paradox of resentment: as people get closer, their “touchiness” increases, that is, their emotional score against each other increases. In this sense, resentment is akin to jealousy, which arises as a repulsive force within a loving attraction. We are jealous of our loved one for others, and we are offended at him for ourselves; but what we have in common is that we feel underestimated in the eyes of those who have the highest value for us. So we can talk about jealousy and resentment as a double negative force that arises from closeness and hinders it. An offended wife. An offended colleague. An offended class, nation, gender... It is small currency, so there is always a lot of it in reserve and it can be thrown around for a long time. The chain reaction of resentments and reproaches between close people is endless, like the exchange of goods in the market cycle. It is a self-winding mechanism precisely because reproach and resentment are both an expression of closeness and its destruction. Distant people are not involved in reproaches and grievances, this is a category of interactions at the closest distances. They reproach those and take offense at those who should understand, but do not understand, should care, but do not care. The distance of loved ones constantly bleeds, fester, fester. In family relationships, capitalization of rightness often occurs through the exchange of reproaches and grievances. Every omission is included in the balance of debts and loans. Reproach is an active currency, resentment is passive. Units of currency are "rightness" and "guilt". "Yesterday you unfairly reproached me, so today let's do it my way." A system of credits, failures, benefits, a constant game of rightness, of moral superiority. Who is more caring, wiser, more responsive, more prudent.
Reproach is one of the richest speech genres. The means of expression and emotional shades of reproaches are very diverse: from open abuse to sweet scolding and ironic praise. Reproaches with tears and with laughter. Shouting and whispering. Direct and figurative reproaches, when they reproach for one thing, but mean another. Reproaches-complaints and reproaches-denunciations... An entire speech universe, almost unexplored. Reproaches are among the most ingrained verbal automatisms. It is difficult, having met a familiar person, not to say "hello". It is also difficult, entering into communication with a loved one, not to say: "Why did you...", "Well, here we go again...", "How much can you...", "I asked you to...", etc. It is not for nothing that the most common epithet for "reproaches", as well as for "insults", is "bitter". They not only express the bitterness of the one who reproaches and, as a consequence, the one who is offended, but also give everyday life a faint taste of bitterness. There is a mechanism of inflated and therefore never fulfilled expectations in family and kinship closeness. It is precisely what promises to make life sweet that makes it bitter...
There would be far fewer grievances in the world if they did not give the greatest pleasure to the grieved themselves, who in every way exacerbate them in themselves. There is probably more masochism in the world than sadism, and if no one delights masochists with pain, they themselves come to their own aid. "So, this is me, so, this is me..." Even suffering, as Marx says, is self-enjoyment.
Gratitude is the most vile feeling, because I owe everyone, and resentment is a “holy feeling”, a “pleasure”, because everyone owes me. “They forgot about me. They didn’t call. They didn’t congratulate me. Everyone is silent. They don’t ask where I am... <...> That’s it! I’m offended. It hurts a bit sweetly. I try it with the tip of my tongue. I shake it and suffer. I pick at the wound with my finger. I don’t let it heal, I tear off the scab. And underneath it again... Again... – How could they?” It is in resentment against God, against fate, against the world, against history and politics, against genes and upbringing that many people find their consolation and justification, since it is much easier not to become someone or not to achieve something through someone else’s fault, not their own. In the 21st century, resentment begins to rule the world, less flammable, but more caustic, eating away at humanity from within. Anger is answered with war, insult with apology and capitulation.
That's how it always is – no matter how you look back, life passes behind you in a crowd. He thought – the appearances are more random than the guesses of terrible evenings, my life passes, you can't say words more sadly, you can't say words ...
You are spinning through the best years, a handkerchief in your hand, the inscription: "nowhere". And life, like death, is random and easy, so choose one for sure. But you are right about one thing – nothing can be done about the transient. We are children on the riverbank – the water flows away. No one can say if there will be tomorrow. Time is no longer the master in the hard labor of everyday life, it settles with learned laughter. Therefore, sadness has settled in tired faces here. No one is waiting for anyone and a glance flies through the familiar square of the window. Probably, everything will repeat itself, and if now I am alone, then tomorrow we will be apart. If you believe the clock, my trains have left. If you were going to leave me, why did you dance so beautifully around me?.. Gentle fingers tugging at the fur for no good. Children sat closer to the adults. Old people look into the fire. In everyone there is something that will not come true.
And I am also attached to my little things. It is stupid, but isn't everything stupid in general? For me, the problem of everyday life has always had a personal dimension. I have the same negative complex of everyday life as everyone who deals with it. All my life I have been carrying around an anti-bourgeois pathos: the main thing, they say, is not to be a thing-lover, a consumer. I try to distance myself from collective psychoses as much as possible. But, reasoning sensibly, it is almost impossible.
Reality is measured by lists of things. In this form, collecting is the most common philistine activity, which extends to buying trinkets from expensive catalogs and, say, adding to a Don Juan list. After all, ultimately , sacrificing the quality of a human relationship in favor of quantitative volume, speed, rhythm, etc. automatically gives any living phenomenon the status of an inanimate thing. Many things seek each other. Solitude teaches the essence of things, for their essence is the same loneliness. (Certain things protect themselves. There are objects lying in the middle of the room in the most visible place, but we are not able to find them. Modern occultists have even developed the concept of everyday "black holes" that exist everywhere). A still life with an uneaten pie, a broken or overturned glass of wine and an hourglass nearby becomes a characteristic set of objects. Things become trinkets for fun, they have no hidden meaning, they are only interior items and are good in themselves. Things enhance the sense of time. They often live longer than us. It is clear that we are talking about any action that builds the things around a person into a homogeneous series. Any objects are witnesses of life, they are sure to wait if you tell them.
Since then, a whole new movement has arisen, an interest in curious trifles. The appearance of the History of French Society during the Revolution and the Directory opens a new era, a new epoch of collecting trinkets. There is nothing derogatory in this word. Historically speaking, a trinket was once called a relic. It is a thing that bears witness to the present of the existence of the past. But we burden our museums with riches in vain, because the barbarians of future days will perhaps never be curious enough to look into them.
True, the famous literary hero Sherlock Holmes complains in a conversation with Watson: "Things can tell you much more about people than people can about things." Albert Einstein formulated a similar paradox about fish and water ("What can a fish know about the water in which it swims all its life?" or "A fish is the last to know water").
They take Marie Antoinette not as a theme, but as a motive around which to gather small facts from the queen's life. Having learned her amusements, words, dresses, hairstyles, they could more easily penetrate her soul, which was, admittedly, preoccupied with various political combinations, but nevertheless occupied at the same time with pleasures, and wardrobe, and hairdresser. All these trifles, which were considered trifles by respectable people of 1855, did not prevent the Goncourts from discovering the queen's true role before others and showing that all the threads of politics were tied around her thin and dangerous fingers. The key to the riddle, which "serious" historians and specialists sought in vain, was found by the Goncourts, perhaps, in a box of flies. But the fact is that they are ours.
Why are you wincing? The word "goat" is polysemantic, like any word, changeable, like a traffic light. Everyday speech has only a practical relation to the essence of things. And I will not tell you another word, because – you yourself can feel – any word is powerless here. The grammatical meaning that we impose on words becomes elusive, slips away. Perhaps it was created by someone's action and disappeared with it?.. Idiomatic changes occurring in language make love a thing: "I have a great love for you." Since words connect us with things, we are unable to give up things without first breaking with words. He who lives in the world of words does not get along with things. Presenting a surprise with the sum of its angles, a thing sometimes falls out of the world order of words. In determining the value of things, each requires special attention, but inevitably they run into words, and words will inevitably run into themselves. The inevitable is inevitable. It's sad, yes, but so what.
I smashed things. I know many objects and very few people. But objects also seem like people, people with a subtle soul, who are rarely encountered and for whom life has failed. Is it really the gift of seeing things as amazingly alien and inaccessible that is given to the eyes? The gaze leaves a mark on things. An unbreakable toy is useful for smashing others with it.
Time passes and hardens. Like cement in a bucket. And then there is no turning back. The more easily we bear what surrounds us, the sooner we give it a name – and pass it by. But to embrace a thing by means of a definition, no matter how arbitrary – and the more arbitrary, the more serious it looks, for in such a case the soul is ahead of knowledge – means to reject the thing, to make it uninteresting and unnecessary, to destroy it. What can an idle and inactive mind do, which joins the world only under the cover of sleep, if not to expand the names of things, to empty these things and replace them with formulas?
I see: you sit neatly at the holiday with a firm beard, you think: Mom, where is your pre-war laughter, the blessing of the clues, what is intended for whom, the alphabetical cut a watermelon, distribute slices, and if you compare the expectation of the eye with the result, it will turn out by the way – things will decrease akin, as if taken out of water, and others will increase a little, as if outlined with a pencil, where are you, tight shoes of donors in languid dresses, bespectacled cigarettes and fashionistas too much? I see, you sit at the table, and wandered, getting drunk from predatory speeches, the composer, and with his hair stretched to the essential sky, on the number of fate – 33 – rolled into the musical darkness, like money to the eye of the century. And the dress will swell like a bell. You were young and wanted to do what your God did to the proud girls of the city: take away their stars and pins, chains and little moons, the courts where they were tempered with a racket, and tubes of powder, hypnotic pendants, and magnetic jars with lotions, and whistles for calling dogs, and dogs, and ellipses-clips, and a common hoop around the neck, fur coats, dresses, shirts, bras, panties, midnight, pills and shoes that are possible for dancing, for skiing, the process of passing through boiling mirrors, because you yourself are a narcissist who confused a knife and a mirror, cut a fish with a mirror, and swaggered in front of the blade longer than an apple will rust on the cut. You heard more than you saw, but what was rushing into the cornea was: light does not bend, and darkness does not straighten out, for the witness everything was distorted, so the wheat field moved at the wax stage from silver into darkness, like a lit shower door, where you no longer recognize the one who wove a cage out of herself for you, on a bright resurrection, an elbow behind the knee. Each of us from the beginning inhales the heavenly pledge, but in the exchange of our life for someone else's, for alcohol, for a water lily in the backwater – Elena – this reserve disappears, and you, toastmaster of picnics and a lure of curiosity, dive under a floating island on the lake to refresh yourself, but in the darkness you get entangled, above from the dense snags above the diver at the speed of a pulse a cloud grows and sways – there a tower with a clock is being built, there the shooter stares at copper, you hear horns and steps, and your back rests on a new firmament.
The creation of a painting begins with the creation of the surface on which the painting will be painted. However, one of the fundamental laws of art is that a work of art returns to the world exactly as much energy as was spent on its creation.
Oh, you in this frail boat! What is the connection between the title and the picture? There is no connection between them. A frail boat carries nameless people across the endlessly dark water. There is no connection between the title and the picture. The picture comes first, and the title comes after. The players deal cards in a tiny boat. They rely on luck, that is their whole plan. They fall asleep, and everything is dark around them. There is no connection between consciousness and body. The picture has no name.
Let's say our director entered the chapel leaning forward as if he were stepping out onto the deck of a warship in a storm and giving commands through a megaphone, because people in power are always theatrical.
News diverges like roads at a crossroads. That's how it is. The girl's mouth spins, and the wind grows stronger like sherry. The tongue glows in originality. And the flesh, weighed down by the salt of power, is forced to question, to listen to the whistle of being, to feel the limits of the possible between vision and naming. The word is only a drawing. Is it possible to embody abilities? Truth is unobtrusive, seek it yourself. Being follows the deed. There are many ways to talk about the existing. Culture gives birth to meanings and ways of distributing them. Power gives birth to reality, rituals, truths, establishes a customs between doing and idleness. Teachings are vigilant. Power squeezes our features out of the freshness of the world. Wooden sky and a sea of violets. Here is the kernel of our modesty: a person is called to overtake himself, to be faster than his thought, faster than his feeling, and even faster than his own body. Nothing is more significant than a person. But this is not an obligation. This is the grain of our modesty. There are those who are completely deprived of a role in life. They have nothing at all. And this "nothing" is divine madness.
The one who is always himself. He neither swims with the current nor against the current, but only as he finds worthy. He does not swim because he is not ship-like. The one who demands nothing, much less asks? The one who throws a stone? Magic for everyone. The one who is love in everything? And does he then madly love his love? And others, they find this a reason to advocate for no love at all?
Eternity was actually ten years, and what he saw beyond the door astounded him. All that time he had spent in delightful exile, witty in his little room, the rest of humanity – unlike him – was busily building a huge city, building it not out of words, but out of relationships.
The man made a mistake with his apartment, keys, happiness, floor. People recognize themselves at home by the people passing by. Home is where it is good, but there is something in it that I don’t like. In apartments, everyone wanders off to their corners and does nothing. Each one does their own thing, as intimate and unburdensome as possible. There, outside the window, beyond the stone horizon of our meetings and the bare spaces of concrete existence. And somewhere inside them, waking up, a child wipes his eyes.
There is a social ferment in Moscow which gives you the illusion that you have some plans; but I knew that when I returned to San Jose I would become a lying stone; although I put on a show, I was gradually shrinking like an old monkey. I felt withered, shriveled beyond belief; I muttered under my breath in a very old-manlike manner. I was forty-seven, and for the last thirty years I had been making people laugh; now I was finished, spent, numb. The last spark of curiosity which still flared up in my eyes when I looked at the world would soon go out, and only a vague pain would distinguish me from a cobblestone.
Conflict within a confined space – like a house – usually results in tragedy, because the very rectangularity of the place encourages reason while offering emotions only a straitjacket. You become an appendage to stinking houses with equally faceless facades, houses where everything belongs to their owner. You never see him. Living here, you stop even realizing how joyless you have become. You just don’t feel like taking on anything serious – period.
Chapter 26. A Philosopher in the City
This book has two backstories, a short one and a long one. Let's start with the short one. One day, I discovered the website Quora. There, anyone can ask a question about anything, and anyone can answer it. Readers vote up the answers they like and down the ones they don't. In this way, useful opinions rise to the top, and everything else is destined to sink into oblivion. I was intrigued by the site. I liked its accessibility. There were fascinating discussions there, and it was interesting to see how many different opinions one question could generate. When I was taking a break from work or simply shirking my work, I would often go to Quora and look for questions that I could immerse myself in. I would ponder and eventually answer questions like, "What is the difference between happiness and pleasure?", "What gets better as you age?", and "What makes life more meaningful?"
The city plays atonal chess with you. This sleepy, simple-minded city hums angrily, about which you never know what is still alive in it, and what is already dead. The city is empty, not scary, – as if alien.
The sun-warmed asphalt hisses underfoot, the gates have grown into the asphalt, they will not be closed anymore. A tram running away on its millionth trip. The rustle of tires. Pigeons reluctantly give way to cars. Sparrows steal bread from neighboring pigeons – crumbled time, here it stands still, and everything else moves. Library folk mumble and are poorly dressed. Skeleton of a bird pigeon. To stop or not?
Everything in the world is built on human communication. We know very well that many animals live in packs, which have a fairly extensive system of specialization (wolves, rats, ants, monkeys, bees, etc.).
People – n. people born in a certain area; people in general; language, tribe; inhabitants of a country speaking one language; inhabitants of a state, country under one government; rabble, common people, lower, taxable classes; a multitude of people, a crowd. In which part of the world are there more people? Are there people on the moon? Craftsmen, spoiled people. Soldiers are a dangerous people. Our Chud tribes are all becoming Russified and merging into one, Great Russian people, and the Tatars and Jews remain separate peoples. The Russian people stood up for their fatherland against a common enemy (both Tatars and Kalmyks). The voice of the people is the voice of God. The people are everywhere rude and uncouth. At the festivities there was almost only one people. There were so many people in the church that the nobility alone occupied half the church. The tsar thinks, and the people know. The people are the body, the tsar is the head. If the people sin, the tsar will beg: but if the tsar sins, the people will not beg. Where the people see, God will hear. Nowadays the people have become very smart: they will not let you lie. Listen, people, to what the devil is shouting! About instigation. It is not easy to manage these little people, these servants. The Chuvashes are a bad people. People's, relating to the people. People's wealth, property, industry, everything that provides satisfaction; – everyday life, life and customs; – spirit, mind, morals, direction; – a feast given to the people; – a census, audit, nominal lists of the entire population. – the right, the basic rights of the people, against the government. Sometimes used instead of common, and sometimes instead of state: people's calendar; people's duty. People's adv. crowdedly, crowdedly; popularly, openly, publicly, in the person of the people, a gathering or a crowd. It was popular at the party. To declare what the people are about. Nationality, the totality of properties and way of life that distinguish one people from another. Popular, inherent in the people, society, the world, belonging. It is not ours, the people's property, a thief. Narodnitsa, driver, leader of the people. Narodokrashie cf. narodniki, narodstvo, narodstvo, democracy; opposite of autocracy, solecracy. Narodokrashie, narodstvo, republic. Novgorod, Pskov narodokrashie. Narodokrashie, democratic, relating to narodokrashie. Narodnaya cf. narodnaya, population, number of people at a given time. Narodnik m. chief or manager, ruler of the people. commanding, relating to it. Narodovitelitel m. victorious people. Narodnoschenie, ischeshchenie, census of the people, revision.
Everything seems wrong, the crowd is wrong – can you feel the treasure hidden in them? The bus at the hour of anchovies, worms, the sticky gum of common opinions, “what the people, so am I”, the big human porridge of the big city, the chaos of small individuals called society. Where everyone wakes up at the same time and hurries towards the same future. Poorly drawn, they speak too loudly, like in a mental hospital. In queues they look like monks. Society is not a set of bodies, it is a repetition of the same thing. We are simultaneously attracted and repelled by the duality of the robot. In the past, the danger was that people became slaves. The danger of the future is that people can become robots.
Everyone wants a personal butler. Robot servants are often depicted in movies (although usually rather silly) because they are funny and it would be cool to have one. Why don't we have them? Because a good servant is someone who understands you when you say something, learns from his mistakes, can move around the house without breaking things, annoying people, etc. (anything on that list is beyond the capabilities of the machines we can currently build). Don't worry about him chatting with other robot servants and deciding to form a union. There is no reason to build that into a servant. Real servants are annoying sometimes because they are people and have human needs. Computers do not have those needs.
Moral authority is bought at the price of persecution and torment and is not connected with the approval of the crowd. Otherwise, it would have to be attributed to the dancer who lifts her bare legs in the evenings in front of the lorgnette hall.
Vulgarity has enormous power. Victorious. The masses create reality (the masses have weight in a mass society). Small people and their virtues, the clang of spoons and forks on plates. Thinker, say something cheerful. The crowd wants something cheerful. What can you do – it’s afternoon. They also know that people believe in everything that is well said. This block stands (for some reason I imagined what kind of decks he would dump into its toilet, horror!), leaning on the windowsill, looking out into the yard. People all over the world wipe their asses. They feel – when there is free time... They can prove the uselessness of what they do not have and for them this is a sign of intelligence... (Oh vulgarity, you are not meanness, but only the comfort of the mind.) Our people are evil, only children and girls are beautiful. The main thing is to always avoid being sincere with them – a little sincerity – and you will be known as heartless, dirty, crazy. The word "mat" itself comes from the word "mother". To curse, that is, to send to hell. We were in a concert hall, listening to Beethoven. Only we wasted time – what the fuck is this!
The most typical typographic mark of vulgarity is the exclamation mark. Incidentally, nowhere in the world are so many exclamation marks used as in Russia. In English, it has almost completely fallen out of use (and first appeared on typewriters only in the 1970s). In British English, "!" is used mainly as a sign of irony and sarcasm, to emphasize the exact opposite meaning with an excess of pathos.
Studying the language of the Soviet era, one can come to the conclusion that the lexical meanings of words are inextricably linked with expressive and evaluative ones. The words “proletarian” and “materialism” aroused enthusiasm and ardent faith, while “bourgeois” or “idealism” aroused contempt and hostility. Words become signals for certain actions and relationships. This is what vulgarity is: programmed behavior, the absence of a personal approach and independent reflection. And not only in journalism – this is the style of public life, in which it is customary to introduce an exclamation into every public gesture. Vulgarity can be pathetic and even inspired in its own way.
There are two similar types of personality degradation: vulgarity and tediousness. Both have the inertia of repetition, weariness, bad taste and thoughtlessness. But the vulgarian repeats someone else's (the common, the known), and the bore – his own (gets hung up on a favorite thought). The vulgarian claims with the pathos of insight that the Volga flows into the Caspian Sea, and the bore explains that the Caspian Sea is not a sea at all, but a lake, since it is surrounded on all sides by land. The bore of the highest rank corrects both: it is not the Volga that flows into the Caspian Lake, but the Kama, of which the Volga is a tributary (and hydrographically he is absolutely right. At the confluence of the Kama and the Volga, the former is more powerful than the latter). The vulgarian strives for beauty, and the bore for truth. The vulgarian cares about the effect, and the bore – about the detail. The vulgarian is pretentious and self-satisfied, the bore is meticulous and didactic. Romanticism degenerates into vulgarity, and realism into tediousness.
The common people irritated him, he wanted to say very mean words to these people. It seemed that he did not even have the strength to despise these people. (Appreciate my tendency to respect the unworthy!) And your heart (oh, don't be offended, I beg you!), your heart is the most banal inn.
Surprised, frightened, suspicious, the square, narrow-browed head (from behind the glittering counter) with the protruding frontal bone looked after him; this frontal bone protruded outward in one strong stubbornness – to understand what had happened: to understand, no matter what, to understand at any cost; to understand, or... to fly apart. And the frontal bone could not understand; the forehead was pitiful: narrow, in transverse wrinkles; it seemed as if it were crying.
This assessment probably arose from the attention his literature paid to such "repulsive" parameters of human existence as loneliness, pain, fear, death, etc. He already said in his books – everyone is to be pitied, no one is guilty, everyone is human. A person morally, mentally – rarely is – capable of coping with the stress of life without despair. How, for example, his madness manifested itself in his passion for grasping all the terrible and vile features of life!
Like Robinson, we can guess from them that a certain type of person was at work here. But nevertheless, Le Vierge is an extremely objective novel. It is one of those works that are imprinted with a complete awareness of the uselessness of everything in the world. Without denying social activity, this awareness does not in the least hinder the work of the mind. On the contrary, it makes it possible to concentrate thought in one direction, to discard all other perspectives, because, speaking essentially, all paths have the same value, all are paths leading to Non-Being.
A necessary condition for creative development is the dramatic nature of the creator's own life. So, a philosophical discussion of death. The first question that may arise here is the question of why he addresses the problem of death at all and why he addresses it so often and so persistently. It seems that he himself answers this question when he argues that death is the only situation of human existence (or non-existence) in which a person finds himself alone with himself, when, consequently, his subjectivity and individuality manifest themselves (or should manifest themselves) to the greatest extent, when, consequently, the answer to the question "what is man?" seems possible (or impossible). Death is the only situation of human existence in which a given individual proves irreplaceable, when he identifies himself completely with himself (in the sense that he cannot pass on his death to someone else).
"...There is a high mountain, in it a deep hole; in that hole, in the sad darkness, a crystal coffin sways... And in that crystal coffin the princess sleeps in eternal sleep." The princess, swinging like a weight, despite the difference in color, represents variations of one guiding idea – the inexhaustible corpse, condensed death. Here something of Pushkin's own philosophical review slips through, although, as always, it results in a modest, truistic moral. Pushkin's slogan: "And let at the entrance to the coffin..." contains not only, according to the law of contrast, a pleasant idea of the cycle of life, promising a lot of pleasure, but also a disastrous condition under which this game of cat and mouse achieves the greatest artistry. "The coffin entrance" (or "exit") takes on the character of a crater, from where (to) a whirlwind of reality rushes with mad force, and the closer to us, the greater the gloomy pole of non-existence, the more frantically, fully and artistically we spend these hours, which have received the title: "A Feast in Time of Plague". On an unconscious level, this feeling and this fact turn into an increased appetite for past tense verb forms for the poet. As the Chairman explains: despondency is necessary so that we can later turn to joy. More madly, like someone who was excommunicated from the earth by some vision...
An inspiring sense of the truly tragic, a bold pessimism that does not turn one away from life, calling one to treat life more boldly, more courageously. A desire to learn to live in this swaying world as in a small disaster, no matter how crazy its fates may be. He presents the essence in dramatic form, with the motive of the tragic doom of human life... We constantly find in him the word "tragic", which sounds like a leitmotif, like a child repeating a word heard for the first time. His speech is inappropriately and abundantly sweetened... Such a person plays with suffering – a soul that has found sources of new and deepest tragedy unknown to the ancients. However, every fate is tragic in its own way. The tragedy of life is not at all something insurmountable, moreover, the very idea of a tragic person is an excess of life.
His moods are pessimistic, unstable. Most of all, he would like to forget about reality. His diary for this year is full of hopelessness and bile. ( It is precisely this inability to be disappointed that carries something reprehensible in itself.) Where does this fatalism lead? Why was this hopeless pessimism so pleasant to him.
I was frightened by the specter of a long, empty, aimless life, when a person only feels the full burden of his existence and is no longer good for anything.
There are only two important decisions in life: where to go and who to take with you.
- Let me go with you...
- But my path leads nowhere.
— All roads lead to nowhere.
- But this one is special.
All roads lead to disappointment, from nowhere to nowhere. My soul was not with me, but with you. Even now, if it is not with you, then it is nowhere. We are all like clouds that fly in from nowhere and fly away to nowhere. They say that at the end of this path you can become a rainbow.
I really wouldn't want to be 17 now. To take a risk again and not find the path – even if I'm mistaken that I'm on the right path. No, I wouldn't want to start life again. It's too vague.
Those who know the area well are the worst at explaining the way to strangers. They will tell you to "just go straight ahead", forgetting all the forks where you have to decide which way to turn. They cannot understand that their directions are ambiguous, because for them they are not, so they say confidently: "You will not pass by."
Here is the road. “Look left,” I tell my child, “then right. And then cross.” The road is dangerous. It can take your life. What is a road? A road is the possibility of movement, or, as Dahl says, “a well-trodden stretch.” That which allows the wheel to roll and the legs to walk. The road will always lead you somewhere. It will not abandon you, even if you have no goal. All roads are divided into those we walk on and those we have not walked on. We walk on some roads with a goal, on others without a goal. Animals have no road.
Where does the hero go – to India or China, to Indonesia or to the Pueblo Indians to learn Eastern wisdom from them? He himself does not know. The Road and the Anima will show him the right direction. The hero is not a representative of the thinking, intuitive type, he is an extrovert, therefore he is not directed inward, but outward, towards the road ahead. His main goal is to free himself from the shackles of the hearth, from the false covers of the Persona. Therefore, when the hero says: “Away from here!”, he thereby hints that his path lies through death. Freud, in one of his few works in which he does not strictly adhere to his sexual dogmas, tells a story about his grandson who plays with a spool, throwing it away from himself and saying “Away” (Da!!) and pulling it back with the words “Here!” (Ra!). Here, with the insight that did not leave the great scientist at the end of his life, Freud notes that we are talking about playing with death. "Away" is away from life – when everything disappears from sight. Da is back from death to life. Our hero will not soon – if at all – have to say Ra to himself, his path is too long and painful, not everyone is able to overcome the insidious regressive barriers of the collective unconscious and emerge from it clean and ready for a new life. Death is not a goal. It, like a boomerang, returns in another life, in another incarnation. But for now, the hero has just left home. He is full of determination. Away from here, from the false world of empty identifications. On the road, no matter how long it is! Let's wish him courage on his difficult journey.
Sam Lipschitz, a dentist from Philadelphia, went to India in search of the meaning of life. For several months, his mother did not hear from him. Finally, she flew to India herself and asked where the main sage lived. She was sent to an ashram, a monastery where a wise guru lived. There, the guards told her that she would not be able to see the sage for another week, and that during the audience she would be allowed to say only three words. She waited, carefully preparing her words. When she was finally allowed in to see the hermit, she said:
- Sam, come home!
The pleasure derived from using means to achieve an end becomes the end itself. Vitamins in tea are like letters in an alphabet that will not let you forget the goal of your journey – point "B". By what strange fate do some of us, having reached the point where they can accept some faith, retreat to follow a path that leads them only to themselves, and therefore nowhere?
If the works of Heidegger and Deleuze had been discovered in the 20th century, they would have been considered the ravings of madmen. But we read, take notes, admire. But, of course, repeating after Calderon that all life is just delirium is banal. But this is no worse than repeating after Hegel that everything real is reasonable. Nothing is reasonable.
Does the universe have a purpose? According to Aristotle, everything has a purpose that must be achieved. An acorn, for example, has a purpose – to become an oak tree. That is its “destiny.” Birds and bees have a purpose. In Boston, they say even beans have a purpose.
Indeed, hunger, sexual desire and fear are motives for a search undertaken emotionally, with the aim of discovering the means of satisfaction through acts of fulfillment, such as eating, copulating or running away. It also follows that the satisfaction of the desires is a kind of verification; it is the very test of the pudding which consists in eating it. However, we must admit that the pudding may be poisoned; we cannot assume that everything that an animal swallows will be suitable food for it. While we admit that animals are competent to choose their food, we must not nevertheless consider their choice infallible.
Everything we did was in vain. My only, my highest goal has fallen, and I have no other. About the tasks set by life. Missing the mark, with its worries, challenges and nailing to the unnecessary; and the failures in this life, and the vain death, the futility of all the best on earth, the worthlessness, the absurdity, the nonsense... Everything for which I lived... is only a link in the endless chain of human dust. The path of life is horror. But then horror itself is the path.
When we have to listen to the confessions of a friend or a stranger, the revelation of his secrets plunges us into amazement. Should we regard his suffering as a drama or a farce? This depends from beginning to end on our benevolence or on our irritation, dictated, for example, by fatigue. Since every fate is only a constantly recurring motif around a few drops of blood, it depends only on our mood whether to regard his suffering as an idle, entertaining spectacle or to see in it a pretext for compassion. Those who have seen it will say: "Very well." An incoherent novel. The result cannot but be insignificant. Ashamed before myself of the ridiculous structure of my life, how quickly I overgrow my being with meanings. What is unchangeable in the world?
If earlier, like everyone else, he believed it was necessary to move somewhere, now he knew that somewhere was the same as where, so why move at all? Why not park the car without turning off the engine? <...> The profession of a philosopher is akin to an astronomer, in the sense that no one cares about stars and galaxies, but they exist and they are studied.
Meanwhile, the earth itself was rotating, and he knew that it was rotating, and that he was rotating with it. But was it moving anywhere? He had undoubtedly asked himself this question, and he had undoubtedly answered it this way: the earth was not moving anywhere. Then who said that we should move anywhere? He became interested in this, and also in where everyone was heading. And, strange to say, although everyone was moving toward their own goal, no one would stop and think that the inevitable goal was the same for everyone: the grave. The living human heart is destined to stop – that is all that my insight says. Well, what if man was sent to earth as some kind of impudent test, just to see whether such a creature would get along on earth or not? Since I am curious, idle and young, that is why I am interested. It is absurd, and that is all. Does it make sense, or not? Is there a God? Well? Is there? Speak. Swear by heaven, swear by earth! As Deleuze said, the sentences "God exists" and "God does not exist" express the same meaning. But people cannot live like that. They need to "take and divide" everything.
The world is created at random, it is fragile. – Don’t vouch for your whole life. After all, if the stars light up – does that mean someone needs them? Does that mean someone wants them to be? After all, you don’t care now? You’re not afraid? Really?! Is something wrong? – Everything is wrong. Everything is done incorrectly (the world, they say, is dominated by simplicity of desires). The world only knows how to harp on us about standards that we don’t meet. And then, inhumanity is always easier to organize than anything else.
He felt that everything was dubious and ill-considered. Sometimes he complained to me: "Nothing is serious. My thoughts are automatically tuned to a frivolous mood. Every minute I think: what a strange and terrible thing our existence is. The most terrible thing is that it is simple, ordinary, with an incomprehensible speed exchanged for trifles. Even if all life is an evasion, in the face of death – truth and wisdom, then what is the result? And always, after such a thought slips through, life becomes darker and more boring . " The more life is spoiled, the more indistinguishable we are in it. Why is it ghostly and hopeless? ... and I thought and thought incoherently about the fact that everything in this world is conditional, relative and stupid. In a word, I was in a bad mood and was moping.
...Neither wealth, nor honor, nor learning can lead a person out of deep dissatisfaction with the insignificance of his existence, filling the gap between the feeling of his own dignity and his own worthlessness. If our death is insignificant, without value and meaning, then our life is just as insignificant. ...only that I do not know where I came from here, into this – should I say – dead life or living death?
Inheriting the tradition of the art of the absurd and pain, he took the next step: the night did not begin today – it has always been. The world has not grown decrepit – flabbiness is its eternal state. Decay is the original, constant, unchangeable property of humanity. In the midst of death, we are in life. The world as chaos, a farce, a brothel, a bestiary, a slaughterhouse. A wonderful Hegelian term from the "Phenomenology of Spirit", interpreting everyday life as a "global mess". History as a boundless panorama of meaninglessness and anarchy. Man as unpredictability and uncertainty. Life is created in delirium and destroyed in boredom. And knowledge was buried in boring monographs. The ability to see the world in its satirical perspective. Reality would then be, as Shakespeare said, a fairy tale full of fury and noise, told by an idiot. Blessed is the man who does not follow the advice of the wicked. Now everything is hard and disgusting for me. My sun has darkened.
He felt heavy and could think of nothing. It seemed to him that his head was huge and empty, like a barn, and that new, special thoughts were wandering in it in the form of long shadows.
Chapter 27. The Decision to Stay
I can hear our President's statement out of the corner of my ear: something like our goal is to build a society in which everyone would be comfortable. That is, turning the circumstances and conditions of life (comfortable/uncomfortable) into its own goal. If chaos cannot be overcome, it must be led. Here it is necessary to create an idea, since skepticism cannot be a goal. Therefore, the concept of "the meaning of life", generally speaking, is inappropriate. The word "meaning" etymologically implies "thought", but there is no need for any thought here, because it spoils everything. As soon as a person begins to think, he begins to doubt, weakening the confidence in victory that he needs for life. Finding meaning is not a question of knowledge, but of calling. We should not ask the question, what is the meaning of life, on the contrary, life asks us this question, and we must answer it daily and hourly, but not with words, but with actions.
But, having discovered the desert, one must learn to survive in it. And Nietzsche begins his exhausting search. "Is it possible to live without believing in anything?" The philosopher gives an affirmative answer. Yes, it is possible, if the absence of faith is turned into a method. The prophetic, methodical, in a word, strategic nature of his thought is beyond doubt.
Rising high above the grumbling, irritated thoughts ... To prepare that complete revolution in one's being, the achievement of which constitutes the actual meaning of life. He did not lose heart at the sight of reality, nor did he remain a stranger to pessimism; on the contrary, he carried the idea of a pessimistic understanding of life to its ultimate limits...
He is interested in the philosophy of violence, not the victim, at least he finds it more fruitful. She heard. He says terribly sad things, but strangely: as soon as he says them, he immediately cheers up. All these phrases are a complete game, she thought, because if she herself had said even half of them, she would have shot herself in the forehead long ago.
"And why these little phrases," she thought, and as if nothing had happened, she noted that the evening was absolutely wonderful. "And why is he groaning so much," she asked, laughing and annoyed at the same time, because she guessed what he was thinking about, "he would have written better books if he hadn't been married.
He doesn't complain, he said. She knows that he doesn't complain. She knows that he has nothing to complain about.
And when the first days of acute despair have passed, having confirmed to himself that life is short, science is vast, chance is shaky, experience is deceptive and judgment is difficult, well aware of the devilish absurdities of life and ready to live again, he will formulate, once again, the main positive task. After all, how inconsolable and meaningless life becomes without this . And, since it is necessary to somehow decide, to stand in a more or less learned line, to align yourself, then you make a strong-willed decision and formulate a credo. So, he left the fairway of traditional philosophy. And with the passage of time, his formulations become more and more precise and refined.
And here it becomes necessary, making a bold leap, to break into the metaphysics of art and to repeat the position already expressed that being and the world are justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon. Confirming this thought, the tragic myth convinces us that even ugly and disharmonious principles represent an artistic game played by the Will itself, which brings eternal and complete joy.
- But I must admit, I thought sadly of you. Well, we will live with Tanya, we will live a modest and decent life, although no clock hands indicate how to live. There is no point in waiting for other times to come. We must make the most of these.
His nature was still youthfully receptive, and his return to life was quick and joyful. Inspired by this mood, he better understood the problem that occupied him and formulated the principle he was seeking more clearly. According to Kurt Lewin's observation, a person is not emotionally affected by either a task that is too easy or too difficult, but only by one that he can solve if he tries hard enough. He had to defend persistence, not energy.
At the Wilhelm von Humboldt University in Berlin, I met people who saw something close to them and at the same time something alien and incomprehensible in my classes. In a modern lecture, the hunt for a thought is important. So you and I will hunt. Maybe we will catch something in this risky undertaking. But a teacher is not only a “hunter” for a thought, he is also an artist. So from time to time I will entertain you. How to entertain? To avoid the thought, to go away from it, to do not the work, but what is in between, between the work. My task is to tell in such a way that what is said is interesting to both you and me.
Gradually life takes on other shades: one wants to laugh and cry at the same time: heightened emotional intensity. The "new materiality" has finally penetrated his works. An existential current seems to flow through his rather cold, almost engineering fundamental-ontological descriptions. He begins by trying to kindle the imagination of his listeners. Anyone who has not experienced life as a burden – precisely in this sense – knows nothing about the mystery of presence, and therefore remains "alien to that inner terror which is inseparable from every mystery and which alone gives presence its greatness." Being means presence. But this easily pronounceable main feature of being, presence, becomes mysterious again in a moment, as soon as we awaken and turn to that to which our thinking refers, what we call presence.
I need to philosophize alone about everything that has happened and make the necessary predictions for the future. I can’t seem to collect my thoughts. Either I’m busy, or they are... There is a famous phrase that says you can’t be absolutely alone, there are always two of you – you and your loneliness. Remember: the moment when you feel your loneliness most acutely is the moment when you need to be alone most. As you know, nothing has a limit. – Even loneliness? – Even loneliness. The further into it, the further from the real him. The evil irony of life. Yes, not at all funny.
But against the background of this melodic hope, dark spots were already visible. Sometimes, when he was tired, he felt himself in a cold cloud of some special, anxious boredom. Once, having entered the rut of life, almost mechanically filling it with the same content. Allowing that evil can be defeated only by chance. People, as a rule, are busy looking for various kinds of reasons. However, how things really are – all the same. After all, it is enough to arouse suspicion, and an opinion already exists. And this nonsense is only a consequence ... – he answered, lying with his face to the wall. Walls are the embodiment of objections. Man has a habit of discovering a high purpose and meaning in an obviously meaningless reality. Freedom is not at all necessary for a crowd to celebrate. And if time "forgives" them, does it do so out of generosity or necessity? And in general, is generosity not a necessity? The love of freedom for slavery given in meat, in flesh, on bone... <...> More than anything else in the world, slaves hate not their masters, but those who have become free. And the word reason itself, in all likelihood, comes from the word court. Every judge is not independent, since he judges not on his own, but guided by the law, that is, by what is above him. In relation to Kant's example, this would mean that the criminal must not only think of himself as a judge, but also think of the judge as a criminal. Since the real world is given to us, and precisely as a problem... nothing is given, but everything is only assigned. The relationship of the lesser to the greater: for the gift is always less than the giver and thus strikes for sure.
Note that the rule does not presuppose any individuals possessing a rational and responsible will, but only those who are in an active relationship with each other, in the zone of practical (realized in actions) reach for each other. In general, an individual loses power over an action after it has been committed.
Everyone can say: "Why should I, if there are special services, funds, there are those who receive a salary for this"... But the most terrible thing is life according to instructions. According to instructions, only death is possible.
The truth is that there are no good or bad people. Good and evil are not in people, but in their actions. There is no right or wrong decision. There are only choices and their consequences. People are just people, and what they do – or refuse to do – is what binds them to good or evil. And those who do not wish evil cause pain just as much as those who do. In fact, we always know what is right. The difficulty is in doing it.
I live in the country of the Soviets, so advise me how to avoid in reality what has come true in a dream? The world of the happy and the world of the unhappy are completely different worlds. A dream from which you can never wake up is not a dream at all: it will already be reality, the real world in which you live. Thus, any reality is virtual. It does not matter that the recorded milk yield is not equal to the real milk yield. Everything that is recorded in heaven is recorded. And even if it does not come true in two or three days, it will still come true there someday. And in the highest sense it has already come true, and in the lowest sense it will already be forgotten. And it has almost already been forgotten.
Until now my life has been so frivolously arranged. Subordination to rules and daily routine have made us what we need to be – respectable citizens, watching the cleanliness of our teeth, taught to accept alms in difficult moments when they are being distributed, for this is an action – uncertainty and careless preparations, scattering seeds, crooked by a furrow. After all, how everything is arranged if you think about how everything is conceived if it will be arranged if you don’t like it then it is not a button if it does not spin in vain do not spin. There is nothing unearthly and imaginary on earth, there is no pedestrian like a ruddy splinter. Many sleep in quilted jackets and less than a thousand cards talk about war. Only love, a curious grandmother runs in knee socks and Fyodor Mikhalych Dostoevsky, and he would not have been able to resist and drank a glass of “Kindzmarauli” for the health of a fat Semipalatinsk boy on a creaky bicycle. You are right, Semyonich, an old cheesecake, – the bald crown judged this. It's all about skillful organization of everyday life: it's enough to put on a carrot instead of a tie or draw a dog on your cheek. In Leningrad and Samara it's 17-19. In Babylon it's midnight. All quiet on the Western Front.
He recognizes only a philosophy concerned with alleviating suffering, and not at all with the search for truth. However, although Buddhism, as indeed all Indian philosophy, had an anaesthetic effect on him – even inhibited his writing, making it less necessary – although at times it seemed to him that he was a Buddhist, upon mature reflection he came to the conclusion that everything was not so simple, for "it is impossible for a frantic person to achieve equanimity."
Desires became modest: “I seek a little leisure of thought, a little harmony around, I seek peace, this noli me tangere [don't touch me]. Tastes are very simple – food, wine, women and books.
Turning away, with a sigh of contrition, I search for a drop of delight in our sad, grey life. They are so necessary and remind us that it is always possible, always necessary to find in some corner of the world joy, without which the life of great and small people is absolutely impossible; a little hope, light, living colours, despite the most burning sufferings of our external life.
He should have called, apologized, told about business or even broke up, but he did none of that. He never made excuses. What is, is, will anything change if you explain it? There were various small circumstances that pointed to this.
Several weeks pass. What explains the sadder tone of his letters? Why does he no longer write about his interpellation, or does he no longer think about it? A feeling of discord in his soul. A state of indifference and satiety has replaced the joyful upsurge. Perhaps he would have overcome his disgust if he had had a goal in mind that would justify and atone for his efforts, but there was no such goal. Of course, we all know very well that it is precisely with respect to this condition that the matter is most shameful. Deep despair is the reason for the story about... You know, when you walk through the forest on a dark night and if at that time a light shines in the distance, you do not notice either the fatigue, or the darkness, or the thorny branches that beat you in the face. In every matter one must look at its end. This is a weak man, without a definite goal.
Waiting for the bitter drop of the last disappointment, it was time to tear out of my heart the last hope, which dies easily in the gas chamber of hopes. And if I have nothing to live for then? Is it possible to find meaning in the meaningless? Is there a meaning in life that would not be destroyed along with this life? Will anyone need an answer to the following question: "Why shouldn't my life be meaningless?" Is there any point in living without meaning? What is infinite in a finite life? The dilemma itself is more impressive than its solution, and it is this that remains in the memory.
An old rule says: the more clearly and inflexibly we formulate a thesis, the more inexorably it demands its antithesis. Then any notion of the essence of things will be eclipsed in merriment. And where else to put life? Nowhere. You still don’t know what to do with these lives – just give up. Existence, my lord, is not a shot from a cannon. What makes you think that it has a purpose?
So there is a certain division of duties: some serve progress, others use it. I see that you like to serve. And I, an old man, will lie on the stove. Better, don't be angry, to lie for a ruble than to run for two.
I sat under the spell of a life without a goal, I sat in anticipation, and I did not expect anything. The essence of the teaching is in the teaching itself, just as the meaning of life is in life (live as you live), the water of the river is in the river, and the heart of a person is in a person. The meaning of life is in what it is spent on. And the cause that a person serves is too short-lived. This tangled ball of sliding and elusive meanings. To embrace the whole world in abstract concepts. Everything seemed abstract, the world was crushing with its meaninglessness.
What if it is true these days (and increasingly so) that life is a self-sufficient act. It is life, and we live it. Emerson says, "Life is the thoughts that come to us in the course of a day." "It is not worth living without thinking," says Socrates. That might be a good epigraph.
But surely there must be a meaning in life that is more important than life itself? Or live like grass – from summer to winter?
There is only one meaning – don't do nasty things. And don't let anyone do it. And no other meaning is needed.
Everything was sad and sounded like a lullaby of a mother who has no hope for her son's happiness. It seemed like a sign of hope before the end of the world, like some kind of desire that does not yet know that it is in vain, like happiness born to die immediately.
A languid muttering: the essence of life is... "this is inexplicable". Ten seconds is enough to understand everything. Life is what it is and nothing more. We are what we are and nothing more. The most difficult thing is to explain the simplest thing. The most important thing in the world is the spirit – the ringing freedom. Everything is a warm breath, alive. – The same with everything else, and everything is generally sacred, as I have said for a long time – long ago, long before the "I" appeared to say this – words on this matter, well, screw them. There is no other meaning in life, except for the one a person himself gives it. And this is exactly what I do, you see? – do you get it? Do you understand? Perhaps the only meaning of life is to do as many things as possible, so that even the bastards remember you. Everything is and is not. " Tryam..." – that is the best explanation of the essence of existence. That's it – for sure. It couldn't be simpler... Voila, that's c'est la va. There's nothing more to add, and it's not necessary. Hmm... Was it really worth making a smart face and saying "khm"... That's how it should be. Wonderful...
The thought of spring touched him sadly and joyfully. And he still wanted to live – to live, to wait for spring, to live, submitting to fate, and to do whatever he wanted... This is new to you, because you have never thought about it. Not everyone can comprehend this word: but to whom it is given. Whoever can comprehend, let him comprehend, whoever wants, will understand the meaning of these secret words and will not feel the taste of death. You can understand this or not. There is nothing to explain here. In response, all the people smiled mockingly at him, although not all of them were idiots. And when they say – we see nothing, you in response remain silent: you should not. The sheep will be sacrificed, only the chosen fleas will be saved.
Everything in life seemed to me a crime. I thought that family responsibilities would fill my life and reconcile me with it. (The external side of life did not work for him, his enterprises did not go well).
And, left alone, he read the Gospel, looked for consolation, but did not find it, remembered books about losers, unfortunate wretches, superfluous everywhere. But reading and rereading them, he began to enjoy this painful feeling, as if they were whispering to him – to forget, to become weak, to squander something precious, to yearn for something that never exists. For someone who hides his defeated eyes.
There are terrible moments when the theatre of life becomes clouded, the audience disappears, our roles are played, and we stand alone in the twilight, still dressed in our theatrical costumes, looking around and asking ourselves: what are you, and where are you now...
- I don't even know how to live. I understand myself as prematurely worn out, lost, a so-so person and nothing more. I turned my life into a cow, that is, I disfigured it.
- You are not a bad person at all. You are a good person to whom many bad things have happened.
Knocked off its propellers, it flowed for him like a chronic illness flows. He lived poorly, trying to settle down as secluded and boringly as possible. An unhappy man, wounded by life. Life must be arranged more simply, then it will be more merciful to people... Life must be loved.
I suffer insults from everyone and hear no kind words from anyone. I am a homeless dog with a short tail, and the people are made up of chained dogs, each with a lot of burrs on their tail: wives, children, accordions, galoshes. And each dog adores its kennel. (Please don't bite). You will be surprised to learn that they act this way only because of their somewhat strange position towards their enemies. I will explain now.
- No, tell me... why can't I be at peace? Why do people live and do just fine, do their own thing, have wives, children and everything else?.. And they always want to do this, that, some things. But I can't. It's sickening. Why do I feel sick? Eh-eh-eh, eh hma!
— Because that’s why. That’s how it should be: go and look, have seen enough, lie down and die – that’s all. Ring the bell – and get off the bell tower! Be careful, these scandals are not for us; be an independent person, neither here nor there. This is noise for fools, and your business is smart: eat, drink, love and die. As for the rest – spit on your lips. You can’t take everything in the world into your head, you can spit on something, otherwise you’ll quickly go crazy. Sinners chase after God, chew him over, pester him with rams. A righteous person has nothing to talk about with God, as with a bus driver. The route is clear: take him there – get off. Everyone is like that: they are born, live and die. “Every natural thing grows until it reaches its usual perfection; and having reached its maturity, it decreases.” Give birth to children and kill one's own kind. Start walking, bury your nose in the ground. A coin in the piggy bank, a flower on the grave. Remember: our song is sung, we are no different from others who coughed in their apartments.
- Well, what about the misfortunes with the people you love? (And the same rust of bewilderment and poison of thoughts ate away at him, born to his misfortune also with a sensitive heart). "I still don't understand – you are beautiful, charming, kind. I don't know anyone else like you. But why are you unhappy? You always have sad eyes."
— The heart must be unhappy. I think about it all the time. It must be that when a person has everything, then he is truly unhappy... A person needs as much happiness as unhappiness to be happy.
He knows, no worse than any little man, how one can take life from the easy side, and how soft is the bed in which he could stretch out, if he began to treat himself and his neighbors decently and in the usual way; for all human orders are arranged so as to constantly scatter thoughts and not feel life.
— So what did you want to show me here? I hope it wasn’t something obscene? If you came to interact with me, interact. When people have opinions, they exchange them; when people don’t have opinions, they exchange the absence of opinions. In addition, circumstances change – opinions change. What you don’t understand, you can understand in any way you like. Yu. M. Lotman also liked to say that when communication is too clear, it is uninteresting, trivial, and when nothing is clear, then communication is impossible – that’s schizophrenia. People can be classified according to the most bizarre criteria. One goes to his neighbor because he is looking for himself, and another – because he would like to lose himself. The main inconvenience of sex is that if you want to have sex, you need a partner.
In view of these psychological truths, respect for the power of obscenity is not merely a feeble echo of an ancient way of thinking. Rather, obscenity should be seen as one aspect of a way of life of which grace is an essential aspect. Grace means exquisite moments of solitude and companionship, or graceful movements. It is an aspect of life well understood by dancers, orators, and followers of Zen Buddhism and other Eastern philosophies. Grace means the ability to speak gracefully, and to make every hour of life a work of art. It requires an appearance and behavior that make each succeeding year better than the last. And finally, it means that our entire journey through life, filled with friendships and feuds, intimacies and struggles, comedies and tragedies, can end, at least ideally, in some sense of wholeness and nobility that unites the whole range of experiences. For me, the rank of a person = grace = restraint, avoidance of exaggeration and disharmony – in conversation just as in ballet or in painting.
And here a person is wasted, because he sinks into a quagmire, symbolized by a melting, dying candle in a dark cell. The candle burns, and when it is finished, the wax falls in cold artistic heaps – that is, perhaps, all I know.
Watching the human soul disintegrate is like being present at the end of the world, because the soul is, in a way, everything that exists. How can a person know himself? He is a dark and hidden being.
- You... have pity on me! I don't live a sweet life... a wolf's life – it brings little joy. If salt loses its taste, what should I salt it with?
— Everything that cannot be changed must be endured. Christ endured and commanded us to do the same... His joys are placed on one scale, his sorrows on the other, he dies when the sorrows outweigh... What do you think happens to people when their world collapses? The smart, the strong in spirit float to the surface, and the fate of all the rest is to sink to the bottom.
But nothing, nothing pleases. And it drags the steering wheel a lot.
The manifestation of one's own will leads people to various achievements. He who has taught himself to think about a garbage pit will probably find it. The law that thought leads a person is wonderful. A wonderful thought will not allow one to enter into darkness. One cannot justify oneself with despair, because this gloomy sign is born from one's own weak will. A ghost that has entered one's spirit really damages one's health. A ghost has nothing to do with reality. It is like when you look at a zebra or a mattress: what do you see – black stripes on white or white stripes on black? What does it depend on? Only on yourself: whatever you want, that's what you will see. So is it possible to change the minuses of human life for pluses? Is it possible to play the zebra mattress game with life? If people trace the true causes of despair, they can be amazed at their insignificance.
Let's not hum on the pipe, but on ourselves, looking at ourselves, even despite the unpleasant appearance of slanders and insults, in the middle of September we will hum in vain. Again this damned duality – you do one thing, you think about another. Here you say – I'm reading a book and suddenly I throw it down and lie motionless for several hours in a row...
If the claw gets stuck, the whole bird is lost... "Yes, don't be silly!" he tore his short thoughts away from the quickly spinning ball. "Damn it," he muttered, confused and hesitant. "But what should I do now?" he asked himself. "So that's how it is," he said again gloomily. He walked around the room several times, and when he sat down in his previous place, his face was strange, stern and somewhat arrogant. This must be put an end to, one way or another... And prolonged bitterness makes them despair... A little angry and mocking, with a somewhat mocking intonation, smiling bitterly: laughing at people, who are you making happy? (Hysterical, rattling laughter, tearing the nerves of a person who does not need sympathy).
He angrily undressed and threw his clothes, sighed like a demon. He angrily glanced at his watch and spat rather fiercely, with poisonous glee . And you try to beat the yolk with an angry spoon. It turned white, it was exhausted. And, still, a little more. It is not enough to be happy yourself, you need others not to be. – Don't be nervous, sick man. In my opinion, you should be kinder. We are all kind in our essence. Therefore, never, never, never lie, in your conscience, in the main thing – do not lie. Don't be a hooligan – oh, don't be a hooligan, my dear. And this advice of mine to you is the first sociological advice that you read in books.
He lacks organic instinct. He turns away from it, he fears it, he makes his life more and more frenzied. He rushes towards death with sharp jerks of that very matter, of which he is never enough... The most cunning, the most cruel is the one who wins this game; in the end, he only gets more weapons in his hands to kill more others, himself.
"Nothing that happens to me concerns me, it is not mine," says our "I" when it convinces itself that it is not from here, that it has made a mistake with the world and that the alternative to indifference can only be a lie. So great is its blindness that it cannot even imagine that it is possible to choose the path of any other errors than the one it has chosen. Without even the respite necessary for self-irony, which a glance at its fate would inevitably cause, it thereby loses all possibility of influencing itself. And because of this it becomes especially dangerous for others. Let this be understood as deeply as possible: only sick people are destructive. Unable to punish others for their mistakes.
Chapter 28. The Eternal Secret
At least you know what you want. And that's almost the same thing. One-sided bliss... I also know that, according to the philosopher's estimate, this judgment is cheap. But it is even cheaper and funnier from some other, not clearly expressed, but generally accepted point of view.
The external diversity of religions and the striking similarity of their internal "religious practices", the specific forms of their residual spirituality become understandable if we recognize them as the consequences of the applied art of concealment. The prophetic power of influence was subjected to concealment. The Creator hid the ends in the water so that no one could pull them and exert a reverse influence on the Creator. In the old days, the meaning of life, as it were, was known.
One of the common plots is as follows: Columbine, Polichinelle's wife, is cheating on him with Harlequin. All the characters know this secret, but they don't talk about it, because everyone knows everything anyway. Only Polichinelle doesn't know about the betrayal, because he doesn't think to ask anyone.
The art of concealment was highly valued and perceived as the standard of hide-and-seek – “God works in mysterious ways”. The believer puts off what he wants for later, the scientist learns what is presented for learning, the philosopher undertakes to distinguish one from the other. Mog puts himself in His place and asks: what would I do? After all, this is how we look for a hidden thing, and man is a creature for whom a thing hidden by another is easier to find than a lost one. Therefore, the first thing to do is to hide the fact of concealment, to present the truth as the unconcealed (or more precisely, the unconcealed as the truth). A philosopher will come who will say: truth is the unconcealed, “aleteia” – that is why it is so difficult to find (acquire) it. Having formulated this thesis, Heidegger, however, did not ask the question: why do we look for the truth at all? Even if the truth appears as "something existing", it does not appear by itself, but may well be specifically presented by someone in this form of existence, for example, as bait. There is an aphorism: it is important to get to the truth, but it is even more important to understand who and why buried it so deeply. Deeper than all depths.
A comparison with the "diamond theme" is appropriate here. There are many players in it. After all, "diamonds" are the result of the work of geologists, mine surveyors, blasters, drillers, cutters, jewelers, etc. The diamond epic is long and dramatic. Everyone chooses a place in it to their taste. But the best role in the "diamond story" is still played by the one who wears diamonds. The same is true with knowledge. One should learn a simple truth: scientists are not "masters of thought", not interpreters of the world, but simply gnome miners. Their opinion means nothing. Yes, in their scientific mines they extract very useful texture, which is impossible to do without. But their craft is to dig it up and bring it to the surface. That's all. Their role ends. As does the role of science itself. Of course, the gnomes accompany each piece of mined "ore" with jealous sobs. And they are always pestering you with advice on how to use their finds. But! Once you've taken their loot, you should forget about the miners. And about their advice, too.
What phrases do you write down for yourself from the aphorisms you encounter in the collection? Well, first of all, those that confirm your own views: what you yourself perceive in exactly the same way, what you often think about, what contradicts the common view and justifies you. Then there are two types of statements that do not relate to you personally. Some are humorous and make you smile, amusing you with an unexpected turn of phrase or abbreviation, they are new as phrases and have the freshness of new words. Others awaken an image that has long been ready in the depths, endowing it with the clarity that allows it to rise to the surface.
It always seems like there is some book in the world that I absolutely must read, but I just can’t find it – which one?.. (To know what old bearded wizards or sages know in children’s books...) I don’t know, – I admitted. – Maybe because everything that concerns the mystery of life has always fascinated me. I always felt excited when I listened to a speech by some writer or scientist or read a book with a philosophical subtext. It seemed to me that now something would be revealed that would give an answer to everything, and everything would fall into place at once, and there would be no need to ask myself anymore, how? why? and what next? It always seemed to me that there was only one main question, and all the others, perhaps, are also important, but secondary. You know, how in science fiction physicists try to find the only formula for building the world or the formula for eternal fuel. (This is how we picked at sores in childhood, because curiosity overcame the pain).
Indeed, the world is too big, and people's heads are too small. And we need to simplify the world so that it fits in our heads. But whoever simplifies, distorts.
It seemed to him that he had discovered some final, terrible truth of life, his own truth, which other people could not and cannot understand. Which the mind does not dare to touch, but the secret course of events allows one to see.
A dream about the most important thing. The words spoken in it, for which one cannot be responsible. A door opened in me, and I saw... That's how the word comes, that's how understanding comes. Everything else in art, in science is an optional commentary. At first you're afraid to admit it out loud: in general, we all try to be nicer to people.
In order to answer this last question, after months of hard work, he considered it necessary to break his many years of seclusion and communicate with the outside world.
And I was sucked into the whirlpool with such speed that when I finally emerged to the surface, I could no longer recognize the world.
What's in the bottom of your mind, trying to pull yourself together, my poor little bookworm, mixed blood, your whole messed up life. My white divine brain. It all fits together, I'm scared.
Maybe, in us, on earth, and in heaven, there is only one thing that is scary – that which is not said out loud. We will find peace no sooner than we say everything once and for all. Then, finally, silence will come, and we will stop being afraid to remain silent. And so it will be someday. So, time tolerates everything, and you are always getting ready to tell, anyhow, what you know alone in the world. Every little thing acquires value when the main thing loses its meaning. My God, how archaically serious all this is. At the very thought of it, the soul becomes lonely and endless.
It is more interesting to think than to know, but even less interesting than to search. When everything secret becomes clear – do you understand? – everything! – then we will be in trouble. (Having thought this, I suddenly lost the ability to speak.) “When the water rises, the fish eat the ants, when the water recedes, the ants eat the fish. Let no one rely on his present superiority.” The living know that they will die, and the dead know nothing. Microbes do not make mistakes. Fish do not think, because fish know everything. And they remember everything for only 8 seconds.
She dreamed that she was working in a library and heard someone say to someone else, “The good news is, you don’t need a formula. All this Zen stuff is nonsense!” She smiled to herself, knowing that Zen was too simple to be meaningful to them. But the Tao that could be expressed in words, she still remembered, could not be the real Tao. A “thing in itself”—an object that could not be grasped by sensory or intellectual perception, although its existence could be demonstrated. An object as it appeared to the mind outside of its own existence.
All his antipathies are deeply thought out; his despair is tamed and even, as it were, invented after the fact. We attack and we defend ourselves; therefore, we know only the external manifestations of the Tao. It is impossible to be both normal and alive. (And his cheeks touched the wings of "she who reveals secrets").
You are sitting in brackets, as if in ambush, with the indescribable complexity of the secret. Be careful, do not reveal your secret, do not come out from behind the brackets. "In fairy tales there is deception, but every cloud has a silver lining," said the fox, "you have ended up in the land of fools." And every apostate from the slushy years is a reckless person who has penetrated the secret.
The answer demeans the question. The world does not explain why, and that is good for it. For everyone can bring their own meaning to it... I know this, and that is why I am not going crazy. I have enough conversations to last twenty years, until I meet the right person, whom I will create myself, when, let's say, the right moment comes. For all of the above must sooner or later occur to any person. On such days you feel: you are right. At such a time it does not matter that you did not get something. At such a time your gaze lags behind your gesture. And everyone here lives like this, pressed against each other. Pleasure at least in simply knowing what is worth spending time on and what is not. It does not matter that this knowledge of yours is not noticeable in your actions and outwardly you live the same way as they do. Only they were freed from the vulgar obsession with being useful. In conversations about death, place plays an increasingly important role than time. (And you will feel, you will only feel, but you will never understand).
You can change your mind, but you have to be aware of your thoughts to do it. Any reason or logical conclusion that you can use to explain everything incredibly easily is probably a trap. I know from experience. Someone said, "It's better not to explain anything at all that can be explained by a single book." I just want to tell you not to jump to conclusions so easily. "I'll remember that," she said. And then the connection suddenly went dead.
Intuitive understanding, also known as “hidden wisdom,” allows us to recognize the traps of existence. Some of them, like life itself, are insurmountable (not consumed completely , but as if forever mastered): the most we can do is to reconsider them in a new context. By gaining understanding, we begin to learn how to avoid this trap. This is the main function of philosophy, as well as art.
Only by forgetting the complex will you understand the simple... or vice versa? You will recover... Everything will be good again, as before... Does the whole remember the role of the particles? Does God himself love certainty? Does God have his own God?
Or , as Hegel would say: "History unfolding before us is the history of thought's search for itself. " "Just think," I said to myself, "in order to free yourself from the power of the unknown, in order to prove to yourself that you do not believe in it, you accept its charm." It is not man who possesses knowledge, but knowledge possesses man. Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the superman, a rope over an abyss. The value of man is that he is a bridge, not an end.
I should be at peace. I have understood. Didn't one of these say that salvation comes when complete understanding is achieved? I have understood everything. And I should be at peace. Who said that peace is born from the contemplation of order, from the order known, which has given joy, realized without remainder, that this is joy, triumph, the cessation of effort? Everything is clear to me, proadracio, and the eye rests on everything and "in each part, and sees how the parts contribute to the whole, and penetrates the core, where the lymph flows, where the breath is, where the root of all "why" ...
I should be exhausted by the peace. From the window of my uncle's study I look at the hills and the edge of the moon's disk beginning to rise, telling the story of the medallion's sleepy tossing and turning of mother earth, who, yawning and stretching, molded layered pies of "blue planes in the sullen glow of a hundred volcanoes" – these verses of Zanella are taught in school. No deep control of underground currents. The earth periodically awakened from hibernation and replaced one surface with another. Where trilobites and diamonds used to graze. Where diamonds and vines used to bud. This is the logic of a moraine, an avalanche, a failure. The displacement of one pebble is enough, an accident, for the stone to roll lower, leaving behind a void (hence the talk of horror vacui!), another hurries to fill the empty space, a third flies after it. Everything is on the surface. Surfaces on the surface on the surface. The wisdom of the Earth. The Wisdom of Leah. The abyss is the suction of the plane. How can one adore the suction? But for some reason, understanding does not bring me peace. Why love Fate if it kills you just like Providence or the Conspiracy of the Archons? Maybe I still have not fully understood everything, I am missing a connecting link, an interval. Where did I read that in the final moment, when life, the surface on the surface, is saturated with experience, everything becomes known to you : the secret and the power and the glory, and why you were born, and why you die, and how everything could have happened completely differently? You are wise. But the highest wisdom, at this moment, is to know that you will learn everything in the world too late. Everything becomes clear when there is nothing to understand.
I now know what the Laws of the Kingdom are, poor, despairing, disheveled Malkuth, where Wisdom has taken refuge, groping its way to find its lost clarity. The Truth of Malkuth, the only truth shining in the night of the Sephiroth, is that Wisdom that opens naked in Malkuth, and reveals that its secret is not to be, if only for a moment, and not for the last one. Then the Others will start after you. And with the Others, the obsessed, will seek the abysses where the secret is hidden, which is their madness. In a boring, oppressive game... Understand that everything is in the way.
"It is I who have changed and done all this and come and go and slosh and get sick and rejoice and scream, and not the Void at all, and so every time I thought about the Void... and I will know once and for all what is the meaning of all this existence and suffering and rushing back and forth in vain, but instead I came face to face with myself, no kick, no drugs, no chance to pretend to be a hose, but only face to face with the old me, and how many times I thought that I would die, die of boredom or jump off a mountain, but the days, the hours dragged on and on, and I did not have the courage for such a jump, I had to wait to inevitably see the face of reality – Pi."
Is he not born from the swirls of a mad brain? Why should I choose and be bitter or sweet, he does none of that? And O Banality, O decrepit old banality of the bourgeois mind, "take life as it comes." It was that drunken biographer, Woodward, who said, "There is nothing in life but simply living it." "In summer make jam, in winter eat jam." To simplify here, "do what you must, and come what may." But oh, God, how bored I am! And I am sick of words and explanations.
Wait, breathe, eat, sleep, cook, wash, walk, watch, get paid, pay off my debts, buy a bottle of wine and drink it during the day – and the Void is still motionless and does not stir – but I myself will be the Void, moving without stirring. In addition, I must note that more and more importance is beginning to be attached to significant emptiness instead of the emptiness of the significant.
Without looking at me, he said in a tone as if he were talking to himself, without addressing his interlocutor:
— The saddest periods in life are those when you feel an irreparable emptiness.
"Just imagine that I was just thinking about that too," I replied, "what a strange coincidence. In contrast to you, however, I am inclined to think that the feeling of emptiness is rather a pleasant thing. You and I have talked about this many times and will probably talk about it many more times."
Nothing lasts, it only lives-in-what-it-is, passing through, that's what happens, why ask questions, tear your hair or cry, the crazy purple Lear babbles on these heather moors of sorrow, he only gnashes his teeth, an old fool with winged sideburns, constantly pushed around by another fool – To be and not to be, that's what we are – does the Void take any part in life and death? does it have funerals? or birthday cakes? why can't I be like the Void, inexhaustibly fertile, beyond serenity, even beyond joy and lead my life from now on, that elusive image in the crystal ball is not the Void. The Void is the crystal ball itself. It is only the Void pretending to be a man pretending not to know the Void. What does the gaping of God mean? A hole. You can see the hole in the dress right away. A hole in the skirt. Oh my God.
Thirty spokes are connected by a single axle, but it is the emptiness between them that constitutes the essence of the wheel. A pot is made of clay, but it is the emptiness in it that constitutes the essence of the pot. A house is built of walls with windows and doors, but it is the emptiness in it that constitutes the essence of the house.
All my friends are getting old, fat and ugly, and I'm with them, and there's nothing there but expectations that don't burn out – and the emptiness will take its toll. I thought you lose friends in fights, but they just dissolve in time. Suck! Suck! Suck the tit of heaven!
Don't say anything about it, don't complain, don't criticize, don't praise, don't acknowledge, don't be witty, don't shoot thought stars, just flow, flow, be yourself, be everything, be yourself, as you are, that's just what it always is – Hope, this word is like a snowdrift – This is great Knowledge, this is Awakening, this is Emptiness – So shut up, live, travel, seek adventures, bless and don't regret. The fire of Moscow, when Tokhtamysh took it, seemed to leave no hope – but Moscow still stands. You return home a new person.
For a moment, the eternal invisible background against which everything else was happening suddenly began to move. It happens when you look at the sky and tree branches, and then suddenly a ripple passes over them, and you understand that it was not the world, but its reflection in the water. Before, I did not know that this background existed. And when I saw it, it turned out that before, I had misunderstood everything that was happening. And I immediately felt cheerful and light. The light lays eggs in my eyes, like flies saliva in a wound. It is known what can hatch from such eggs...
Oh, and I remember the days spent at home that I did not value at the time – the long afternoons when I was fifteen or sixteen. And in them my cat licks his front paw with his tiger tongue, lap-lap, and bites his tail, everything is tested and the dust is cleared away, soon it will be dark, my day's plates are washed, the food is eaten, I wait for September, I wait to descend into the world again. Motes of dust are all I have to read, the wretched magazine stuff I have been forced to read these last years, when I have become such an absent-minded, ephemeral, irresolute creature, cursing the gods in my bed and wandering around bareheaded, bad in the grey darkness – I can only grieve in the miserable grey terror of the morning, painfully I hate myself, painfully too late, and though I am better I still feel ephemeral and unreal and unable to get my head straight or even grieve properly, in fact I feel too stupid to really grieve, in short I don’t know what I am doing.
Oh, what hunted fools we are, I add a postscript to a long letter of love. I have always been afraid of emptiness, afraid that I would have no reason to exist at all. Empty, empty, how can I ever repay you? My life is a vast and mad legend, reaching everywhere, beginning and ending, like the Void – like Samsara – a thousand memories twitching nervously all day, confusing my alert mind with almost muscular spasms of clarity and memory – and how we got drunk, how we slid and fell, how joy swelled in my heart and exploded.
"It's just lovely, my dear," I say to myself, playing a child's sport, but the Void is a child too. "And this is how the game goes: what happens, how it's won, and who – And you think, "Who's gonna be my lady?" I sing, "Oh, coffee, you look lovely when you're brewing" – "Oh-oh, lady, you look lovely when you're loving."
In these strange words I hear every night, in many other words, varieties and threads of speech pouring out of that ever-remembering abundance. Take my word for it, something will come of it, in the guise of a sweet nothing, a fluttering leaf.
The bull necks of the strong raftsmen, purple gold in colour, and skirts of silk, will bear us, the uncarried, without crossing the intersected unintersected voids to the ulum-svet, where Ragamita's half-closed golden eye opens and holds a fixed gaze. Mice rustle in the mountain night with tiny paws, icy and diamond, but my time has not come (mortal hero), to know that I know, I know, so come in. Words... Stars – words... Who succeeded? Who failed?
And silence came over her, peace and contentment, while the needle, gently guiding the thread, gathered together the green folds and carefully, lightly fastened them at the waist. So the summer waves gather, swell and fall; gather – fall; and the world around seems to say: “That’s it,” louder, louder, more powerfully, and now even in the one who lies on the sand in the sun, the heart repeats: “That’s it.” “Don’t be afraid,” this heart repeats. “Don’t be afraid,” this heart repeats, having given over its burden to some sea that cries, sighs, sighs for all the sorrows in the world, again, again, well, there, gathers, falls. And only the one lying now hears the buzzing of a bee flying by; how a wave breaks; how a dog barks; barks somewhere in the distance and barks.
Chapter 29. Reflections on the Purposes of Human Existence
How vile and disgusting everything is, endlessly disgusting. Don't look at the majestic sun in the sky. There is no truth on earth, and there is none above. To live – the devil – one cannot live... Oh, if only I would perish. The serf girl cried all night long, thinking: I'll jump from the bank, splash into the ice-hole... And how quickly life summed up! So damp, so dark, passed so quickly... It all means nothing. Everything, my friend, is senseless. I, she says, will jump into the river.
And how can one not recall the sympathetic idealist who objected to his overly cautious predecessor by pointing out that the fear of falling into error is also an error. Is it really certain, he asked, that it is we who discover the world? Could it not be that the world itself reveals itself to us? Do we not know only because we are known? We are capable of thinking about God, but what if we ourselves are God's thoughts?
Turn on the television that brings families together to hear for the hundred and seventy-eight thousandth time: children love fruit. And if you gaze long into the abyss, said Nietzsche, then it begins to gaze back at you. (It is not only you who gaze at the television, but also the television who gazes at you. It is not only a person who can watch a film, but also a film who can watch a person.) When infinity opens its eyes, it becomes the eyes of a person. The thinker in the new model of reality is a person shooting at a target. But the target also shoots at him. The nature of such thinking is deeply mystical. In front of a painting, Schopenhauer believes, everyone should stand as before a king, waiting to see if it will tell him something and what exactly it will tell him. As with the king, so with the painting he dare not speak first, otherwise he will hear only himself. It was necessary to stand at the edge of the world to look at himself from the outside. But then a metamorphosis occurs: the one who gazes at himself in the mirror for a long time begins to fall into dependence on his own reflection. The author explained that anyone can turn on a TV, but not everyone is capable of turning it off at the right moment. Therefore, there is no better way for pioneers to temper their will and character.
Who you are depends on what you are ready to do. Man is, in principle, hopeless. And, accordingly, doomed. His vector is the abyss. And that is fair. A creature with such a brain cannot count on anything else.
But the program is not the materials of an anthropological expedition, it is a mirror turned to the subject of the action itself. This is the process of becoming a subject, which, as is known, is formed in the struggle for recognition by another consciousness. One can look at a work of art forever, because this is looking into oneself.
"The Archipelago" was burned, and Solomon, just in case, also burned "Winnie the Pooh". Grandpa always expected to be arrested. He thought that he was being bugged. He thought that they were spying on him from the TV, and he covered the TV with his coat. Incidentally, that same Spanish coat – that's when it came in handy.
We had not yet decided to talk about it, but the alleys were already crooked and the mirror in the morning, nodding to thoughts, was trying to spit in the face. He thought tensely and despondently about how much life takes for those insignificant or very ordinary benefits that it can give to a person. To be so blindly and madly attached to life without any higher reward from it, to not have even a remote knowledge of why and for what you suffer this punishment, but, on the contrary, with a terrifying passion, senselessly thirst for it, as some kind of happiness. But is the whole meaning, the whole merit of life supposed to be expressed only in this, that ... "If a jug of water is enough to quench my thirst, why do I need a whole lake?"
- You live out of mercy – don't forget! Just think about it... You see where this is all heading. And why was it necessary to bring up this conversation at all?
— Life, in my insignificant opinion, is simpler, more offensive and not for intellectuals. I consist of three parts: antiquity, absurd literature and a forest peasant. I am not an intellectual. Questions about the Russian intelligentsia have nothing to do with me. I live as if I am justifying myself. Intelligentsia is a feeling of guilt for one’s virtues. And I would put an end to it, if not for one “but”. In my opinion, there is only one form of human fall – loss of purpose. Due to the specificity of our research (the specificity is that the intelligentsia will be studied by an intellectual, using materials presented by the intelligentsia), the choice of a methodological approach is important... In a life environment destabilized in spiritual and material senses, the greatest ideal is presence of mind. Presence of mind is a sense of favorable chances. We live by existing ideas, making plans based on the principle: “it should be like this...” or: “it happens like this...”, naively forgetting that by our nature we have long since refuted the ideas formed before us and are discovering life anew.
- You know what your problem is? You keep expecting people to stop being who they are.
Although... although... there were prospects in my life. Prospects. There is no more disgusting word in the language.
With every shock in my life, I eventually gained something, this cannot be denied, I became freer, more spiritual, deeper, but I also became more lonely, more incomprehensible, colder.
A walk through the cemetery. Everyone, old and young, made plans. Now they don't make them any more. Impressed by what I saw, as a reasonable person, I swear to myself never to make my own plans. A walk that is undoubtedly useful. A cemetery at night is not the same as a cemetery during the day. At night in a cemetery, slowness, secret suspiciousness, and articulateness are immediately crossed out by some scratching sound. During the day, you walk through the cemetery as if you were a random passerby. As if you were a stranger, a completely alien face here. But at night in the cemetery, everyone looks you in the face, points their fingers somewhere in your face, or worse. It's hard to think of any entertainment worse than a cemetery at night in the already soggy October, that is, there is nothing scary, just waist-deep mud, cold, and someone's ridiculous faces, absolutely useless to me or you.
I will say decisively, in my final opinion, that no matter how much you love life, it will still leave you. This is indecently true. It is not for nothing that among the recipes for a long and happy life... is the feeling of love for people and the world. Fear of death is the hot coal of life's happiness.
Now further. I am reporting to you. I will not give my name ( n/n, i.e. without a title ) for a reason that will become clear from what follows. I do not know how to begin so that this does not come out so shamelessly. I ask your forgiveness so much, and now I do. I say this not for consolation, not for encouragement, but as an inevitability. I have seen this life without embellishment, I know the world to my own chagrin. Human existence is definitely such a simple thing! And at the same time so hopeless... You can quote me. Man is vile, and man does nothing worth doing and does not know anything about it. Life is crap! I despise it. It is all devilry. Horrible and disgusting. Our disastrous world is disgusting, painful and cruel. Sometimes I do not want to live anymore, that several times I even tried to hang myself... Oh, if only I could run far, far away!
O man, who has bitten his lip, gazing at the beauty of spring, enchanted by it! Look again at the cold of autumn and its yellowed, withered appearance! When you see the birth of the sun at dawn, painting everything around in rosy tones, then remember also its sunset, which is its death. On the night of the full moon, you see the beauty and grace of the moon. But think how powerless and feeble it is at the end of the month and how it longs for the time when it is graceful and full of strength! And man experiences the same thing. His beauty, maturity and perfection are doomed, in the end, to perish! O, who lusts at the sight of exquisite dishes! Go to the latrine and look at their end! And ask the filth: "Where is your beauty, your elegance, your wonderful aromas?" In response you will hear: “What you listed was a bud. I was a prepared trap. When you fell into the trap, the bud melted, withered and turned into slag.” And one more thing! If you fell for the bait of a beauty with an elastic body, look at her flabby and plump body in old age. There are so many delightful skillful hands of masters, but which later turned into trembling, shaking hands. In the same way, you will see that languid, dreamy, veiled eyes will eventually become lifeless glassy, festering eyes. Old age is when you still love life, but it no longer loves you. A horse dies and the saddle remains, a man dies and the result of his activity, his trace, remains. Tears should be shed not for the departed, but for the one who left nothing behind... And one should continue the work from the place where the one who left this mortal world stopped.
Where the caterpillar dies, a butterfly is born... In nature, a beautiful butterfly emerges from a vile caterpillar, but with people it's the other way around: a beautiful butterfly emerges from a vile caterpillar – it all begins with the stupidity of a newborn. Usually it all begins with a medical student memorizing the names of the various organs and tissues that make up the human body. The life of some is based on the death of others. And the more death, the fuller the existence of those who remain alive. Man, as in biblical times, desires his neighbor's wife, his donkey and all his cattle. Man is always both much worse and much better than you expect from him. The fields of good are as endless as the deserts of evil... And if there is a monster – do whatever you want, he is still a monster! Will you have enough courage to burn a cat in the furnace? Can we ever hope to ennoble humanity? Man is not sufficient, he is a transitional species. Man is not an answer, but a process, "an arrow of melancholy thrown to the other shore." All forms of life are adaptations. Hopeless clinging to rags, giving empty hopes. In the midst of all this mess... As if he had built a house in chaos according to all the laws. A mountain of meat flutters and that's it. Like a squirrel that would jump off a well-known wheel and suddenly look at this wheel from the side. And the world is not finished, not ready. I don't know which famous thinker said that man is a scoundrel. And everything suits a scoundrel. How right he was, this guy! Let's consider.
I was told that no law is needed, that if a butterfly is born to fly, then a person is born to be happy. You are not a person, he says, you are a larva. How dare you – what a tactlessness – etsetera. Fate is like a thimblerigger, he continued, it promises a win, but under each shell there is emptiness... Finally, as if taking revenge on a person for daring to live, a ruthless force kills him. Scythe, komsi, komsa. And it never tires of swinging its scythe. Blackmail, of course, is noble and effective. Not only do you have to live, you also have to pay for it every month. Life, which, like a gift, you do not look into the mouth, bares its teeth at every meeting. Everything that does not kill us, just plays with us before killing us...
So what is there to bother about? How can a person not see this and live – that’s what’s amazing! One can live only while one is drunk with life; but when one sobers up, one cannot help but see that all this is only a deception, and a stupid deception! Formally correct, but essentially – mockery, and if one thinks about it – there’s no need, as if it were mockery... That’s exactly it, there’s nothing funny or witty, but simply cruel and stupid. And a small price to pay, finally.
Such a sad ending casts doubt on the seriousness of the life that preceded it. After all, all these evasions and detours are ultimately explained by the crude simplicity of the event. Almost no one ever thinks about it, does not suspect that all their reasoning, all their actions, all their decisions, all their plans and all their opinions about the nature of things flow precisely from this premise...
Let us turn to nature: no one understands its purposes, and yet all creatures serve them. ...Forcing one to seek purposes – and man will never find what he seeks – says the evil rule of nature. Naturalists say that most people do not live purposefully. Someone said: if a writer writes about boring people, he is not obliged to be boring. In the same way, if he writes about people without a purpose, his story is not obliged to be purposeless.
They are not able to touch the heart without causing it pain. An endless change of pain and pleasure. Pain cannot be explained to anyone. And why is it necessary? The prince is not an authority on merciless nature... But pain is a necessary condition for any evolution.
What does the earth give to the sky for the beneficial rays of the sun and the life-giving drops of rain? – With its dust! A fly is digested by a dragonfly, and a man by a thistle. A man disintegrates into the same atoms as a cockroach. The earth, like a vegetable garden, is populated in two floors: the living are the tops, the dead are the roots. Struggle is the father and king of everything. And the sun shines on all of this. It is shameful to look at such things. These are the terrible consequences of Darwinism, with which, by the way, I agree.
What is life like here? It's just a drag, a drag, you don't live, you rot. In this continuous, hopeless gloom. Evil is the discrepancy between being and what should be. Everything is like this: there's nothing to do on earth, and everyone is terribly bored. They could have come up with something better. Such a stupid idea. In short, they didn't have to come.
We live on the surface of a gigantic sphere that flies in circles God knows where. What holds us to earth except gravity? Convince yourself that disgust is the most natural attitude toward an object and that there should be nothing on the surface of your planet that you would feel attracted to. If a confluence of circumstances should prove fatal to you and force you to leave the earth, leave calmly, with clarity in your gaze and thoughts. When leaving, turn off the light.
First, you live alone, gradually becoming Satanic. Then you have to live with someone and also become Satanic. As soon as you leave, another one appears and lies down on your bed. That's all. Personality is a product of society, which forms it in its own image and likeness. Bad society suppresses the development of a person's innate potential. Of course, conditions and restrictions contradict freedom in its vulgar sense...
An irreparable sleep in which children grow up. What are you doing here, wicked one, in the abode of children, lunatics, idols and those who have done neither good nor evil? Tell me with the voice of conscience: how appropriate is it and is it not too disgusting... – that is the agenda. Usually, weak minds are embarrassed. ... tacitly taboo: considered unpleasant and difficult. Usually they get off with a cheerful: "we will all die"; except perhaps for very empathic natures. There is no difference here – we will all die, and the question of when exactly – these are just verbal tricks and evasions. Withdrawal into the folds of the terrain.
Every breath reflects the constantly attacking death, with which we thus fight every second... In the end, death must win, for we are its property from our very birth, and it only plays with its prey temporarily until it devours it. Until then, with great zeal and assiduous care, we continue our life as much as possible, just as one inflates a soap bubble as long and as much as possible, although one knows for sure that it will burst.
"The only shame is that all this crap lasts much longer than me." Living on such a planet is just wasting time. How can women stand it? The heron lands on a garbage heap. The soul senses the measure of happiness intended for it from time immemorial when it thinks about its true liberation – that happiness which no one can help it achieve.
The unconscious is seen as a dark rubbish, a garbage pit, located beneath consciousness. The function of the archetype is to “significantly compensate or correct the inevitable one-sidedness and absurdities of consciousness.”
A meme is a minimal integral conceptual unit stored in people's minds and external information carriers. There are many examples of memes, the idea of a meme itself is also an independent meme, an obsessive melody, a fashionable word, a conceptual idea, a recipe, etc. But just as for genes, for memes fertility, i.e. the speed of self-replication, is no less important than stability.
A huge amount of information is condensed in metaphors, in money, in medicines. The role of a modern "compressor" is played, for example, by mobile phones, in which a huge amount of information is programmed. But the greatest amount of information is embedded in the Internet – it is actually a modern deity, level Zero, "O", Eternity, you just need to know how to use it correctly, in particular, not to use it as a typewriter. The Internet is a transitional object, an anchor, a compressor of our hypertime. Time in it is compressed with terrible force. Cinema continues to play a huge role in the formation of hypertime, which, according to Zizek, forms our desire. In this sense, cinema is the same fulfillment of desires as a dream, which it is so similar to. When we watch a film, it seems to us that we see some pictures, just relax. In fact, we absorb, without noticing it, a huge amount of both useful and harmful information.
Jung reveals the enormous role of myth in human history. But at the same time he shows that myth is not fiction. It consists of continuously repeating facts, and they can be observed over and over again. Myth comes true in man, and all people have a mythical destiny no less than the Greek heroes. Myth is an objectively existing structure, a code of a priori universal human meanings, a paradigm of existence. Justifying the connection of myth with the collective unconscious – "not people think myths", but "myths think people", or even "myths are thought among themselves". You can't run away from myth: if you don't build your own myth, others will come and make you serve theirs. ( They steal your fairy tale without inventing their own...) If we don't deceive ourselves, others will immediately deceive us. To be happy, you have to live in your own paradise! Did you really think that the same paradise could satisfy all people without exception? The very fact that a living being exists determines what it should do. This exhausts the question of the connection between "existence" and "ought."
The only life worth living is a magical one. Landscapes of biting lies. The light is filled not with secrets, but with a squeak in the ears. Pay the planet in its own coin. In a word, total anarchy, and in the ark I am a senile Noah. And this is what will happen: a beautiful end. Your mother! It is appropriate to say here! It is high time! All this is legal until blood!.. Life is a continuous tedium, and nothing more. As if I dodge, like a cat whose piss is poked. It is stupid to hope to do something global, for example, establish peace in the whole world, arrange happiness for everyone, but everyone can do some small thing, thanks to which the world will become at least a little better ... For example, shoot someone. "Shitty life" – he summed up once again. No one will get out of here alive.
It is difficult to judge the rebellion of the angel least inclined to philosophy without bringing to it sympathy, amazement and censure. The universe is ruled by injustice. Everything that is built in it and everything that is destroyed in it bears the imprint of some unclean fragility, as if matter were the fruit of some scandal in the womb of nothingness. Every being feeds on the agony of another being. Moments, like vampires, pounce on the anemia of time. The world is a receptacle of sobs. In this slaughterhouse, to fold arms or to draw a sword are equally futile actions. Even the most violent frenzy is unable to shake space or ennoble souls. Triumphs alternate with defeats, obeying an unknown law called fate, a name to which we turn when we prove ourselves insolvent in the philosophical sense and when our existence in this world or in any other seems to us hopeless, like an unreasonable and undeserved curse. Fate is a favorite word in the dictionary of the vanquished... Eager to name the irreparable, we seek consolation in word-making, in clear definitions suspended above our disasters. Words are merciful, their fragile reality deceives us and consoles us. For to follow their colleague in this world is to fall even lower, while human injustice imitates divine injustice and every rebellion sets the soul against the infinite and breaks it against it? We are carried away by the whirlwind that raged at the dawn of time, and if the whirlwind has taken the form of order, it is only so that it can more easily carry us away...
The more specific sense which Aristotle gives to justice, and from which all subsequent formulations proceed, is the abstention from pleonexia, that is, from taking advantage of the things which one acquires by seizing what belongs to someone else, his property, his merit, his place, etc., or by refusing to do what a person to whom one is indebted asks, to repay a debt, to fail to show respect, etc. It is obvious that this definition is formulated in such a way that it can be applied only to actions, and people are considered just to the extent that their character promotes a stable and effective desire to act justly.
Almost all the categories we use in the moral or religious sphere are to some extent contaminated by law: guilt, responsibility, innocence, sentence, acquittal... Therefore, special caution is required in their use. The fact is that, as lawyers well know, the law ultimately does not seek to restore justice or to establish the truth. It seeks only to pass a sentence, independently of truth or justice. This is proven beyond any doubt by the force of a judicial decision, which is inherent even in an unjust sentence. The ultimate goal of law is the creation of res judicata, by means of which the sentence takes the place of truth and justice and has the value of truth even in spite of its falsity and injustice. Law finds its rest in this hybrid creation, of which it is impossible to say whether it is a fact or a norm; and it can go no further.
I have seen one person strive for one goal, and another for another. I have seen people enchanted by the most disparate objects, people in the grip of petty and at the same time inexplicable plans and dreams. Analyzing each case separately in order to understand the reasons for the incredible amount of wasted energy, I have understood the senselessness of all actions and any effort. As sometimes a detective, working on one crime, accidentally uncovers a completely different one.
Is there a single life that is not saturated with the errors of life? Is there a single clear and transparent life without humiliating roots, without fictitious foundations, without myths born of desires? Where is it, the action free from all usefulness: where to find the sun that hates incandescence, or the angel in a universe devoid of faith, or the idle worm in a world abandoned to the mercy of immortality?
I now understood why hermit monks and cave contemplators showed so little enthusiasm when they were asked to return to the world. What to do in it? Masturbate to a torrented porn film banned in Australia because of the actress's small breasts? Munch popcorn while watching the blogosphere's toilet gladiators fight? Stood in a carbon-fueled traffic jam in a bright red Porsche?
As for lovers, they would be disgusting if, in the midst of their antics, they were not touched by a premonition of death. Perhaps in every system, in every individual, there is a secret desire to get rid of the idea of its existence, of its essence, in order to acquire the ability to multiply and extrapolate itself in all directions?
The fear of the final truth has become dull; it has become a persistent refrain, and people no longer think about it, since they have learned by heart the things that, if they had only glimpsed them, would have carried them to the abyss or to salvation. The discovery of the nothingness of Time has produced saints and poets, and also the despair of a few solitary lovers of anathema.
And I see that people do not live, but try on, try on and devote their whole lives to this. And when they have robbed themselves, having wasted their time, they will start to complain about fate. What is fate here? Everyone is their own fate! People say: "everything passes", but how many of them understand the scale of this terrifying banality? In order to understand everything, it was enough for one Indian prince to see one cripple, one old man and one dead man; we see them too, but we understand nothing, because nothing changes in our life. We cannot refuse anything; meanwhile, the obviousness of vanity is quite accessible to us. Vanity is the best healer. You can fuss over any feeling, thought, life; it is not for nothing that love is always a stop, a fall into another dimension. Bukowski once wrote: "We will all die, all of us. What a show! This alone should make us love each other, but it does not. We are frightened and crushed by the trivialities of life, we are consumed by nothing." Sick with hope, we are all waiting for something, and yet life is nothing more than waiting that has become a hypostasis. We wait for everything – even for Nothing – just to avoid remaining forever in a suspended state, just to avoid the fate of an indifferent deity or a corpse. Thus the heart, having made the Irreparable an axiom for itself, still hopes to receive some gifts from it.
See how it works. You're going to die someday. You're going to die, too. You're going to die because you're lucky enough to be alive. You may not feel it. But go to a cliff sometime and maybe you'll understand. I know it's obvious, but I'm reminding you just in case you forgot. You and everyone you know are going to die soon. In the little time you have left, you'll only have time to take care of a few things. Very few. And if you're going to freak out about everything, you're going to freak out.
Activity, passivity... how are they connected? The activity of some is possible thanks to the passivity of others. The inertia of the masses is what gives rise to the effectiveness of heroes. The feeling that it is not people who control circumstances, but circumstances that control the masses is generally a correct feeling, if the circumstance is the Fuhrer. We do not live – we serve out our lives, like soldiers – their service, prisoners – their term, the sick – the hospital. Plunging into shit, we hope for a miracle: for a liberator who will come and rescue us. We go wild with happiness when he comes: the butcher – to the herd. And the point is not that the peoples are driven to the slaughterhouses, but that they go there "with pride".
The fear of death turns a man into a slave, but the slave consciousness opens the way to self-awareness of the individual and the community. It took us almost a lifetime to learn what they seemed to know from the start: that the world is a very wild place and does not deserve better treatment. That "yes" and "no" very well encompass, without a trace, all those complexities that we discovered and built with such gusto and for which we almost paid with our willpower.
They constantly reproduce mechanical or organic repetitions with all their hesitation and monotony. The biological order of existence is based on these repetitions: the intermittent and repetitive heartbeats, the alternate rhythm of breathing fill every conceivable interval between birth and death and weave their monotonous fabric against the background of life. Man lulls himself to sleep with this endless succession of repetitions, just as he succumbs to the numbing effect of the ticking of a clock. But if he begins to comprehend the flow of this monotonous and homogeneous time and to free himself from its hypnosis, it is only to feel an oppressive boredom.
Chapter 30. Dasein and the Problem of Reality
Taking the pose of a "positive" person, in which there was also a shade of superiority, you often reproached me for what you call "a passion for destruction." So know that I do not destroy anything, but only record, record the inevitable, record the passionate desire of the world to liquidate itself, a world that, on the ruins of its obviousness, thirsts to see the extraordinary and grandiose, the birth of a certain spasmodic style.
I have a friend, an old, crazy woman, who lives in constant expectation that her house will collapse at any moment, and wanders around the room, listening to crackling and rustling sounds, angry that the event never happens. In a broader sense, this old woman's behavior coincides with ours. We count on some kind of global collapse, even when we do not think about it. It will not always be so, and it is not even difficult to guess that our fear of ourselves, a consequence of a more general fear, will form the basis of education, will become the principle of future pedagogy.
What is psychosis? It is a desire that cannot be satisfied in the Other. It is a lack of being that has gone overboard. At the same time, we must remember that the essence of psychosis is not the loss of reality, as those who have read Freud too superficially think – psychosis consists in the force that is called to life in place of this gaping hole in reality, in the force that takes the place of reality. The state of the subject depends on what happens in the Other. What happens there? What happens there is articulated as discourse. It is the unconscious. It is articulated as the discourse of the Other. The unconscious is never silent and never says “no,” as Freud liked to repeat.
Here we come very close to what is called a "level break". A level break is a total farewell to this "everything", which we now perceive only as a level, having realized its insufficiency. This total farewell is not a departure in the full sense of the word, because in this space, in this dimension, it is impossible to go anywhere, since we are talking about everything. But nevertheless, in the fabric of being in which we are immersed, which fills us from the outside and from the inside, a gap appears, the fabric of the level is torn. At this moment, we stop perceiving the absolute continuity of everything as everything, we understand that this continuity, spreading from us in different directions, internal and external, not only physical, but also mental and intellectual, encompassing the entirety of our actual being and the being possible for us, is torn. The experience of the realized break is a global payment for the suspicion that a person experiences. Subsequently, the laws of economy of psychic energy come into force. There is a "compaction" within the described process.
The structure of this suspicion is complex in itself. In its weakest forms, it is familiar to almost everyone, but few experience it in concentrated form. The feeling that reality is betraying us, that it is betraying itself, that it is, by and large, built on some kind of global falsehood, is so oppressive and unbearable that our being refuses to believe in it, because when we begin to delve deeper into the labyrinths of suspicion and painful mistrust of life, at some point nothing can hold us back, nothing can serve as a fulcrum for us, so that, on the one hand, we continue to live in these labyrinths, remaining in the world, and on the other hand, we increasingly go beyond its edge, with a heightened nightmarish awareness of its fundamental falsehood. Up to a certain point, this suspicion is embodied in an extremely heavy feeling of the inadequacy of all reality, the unbearability of the old world (or “first creation”) and remains exclusively negative, only wasting and exhausting vital forces, giving nothing in return.
After the collapse of the sphere of being occurs and it becomes flat, the prospect of breaking with it opens up. Understanding that reality, which we perceived up to a certain point as something all-encompassing, as a totality, is only a narrow, limited section of being, we begin to suspect the possibility of an alternative, to feel attracted to it. Already in this very discovery we break with this world, which is now exposed as not everything, but only as one of the possible creations, and having ceased to be everything for us, having ceased to be the sphere of “here-being”, Dasein, it shows us the boundary, reveals its limitations, admits that its claim to have no alternative is an unfounded fiction.
Sometimes a person gets a lightning-fast feeling that his wife is cheating on him. He thought that this could not be, but suddenly he understands that this is not so. Especially if he tried his best to answer for his jealousy, worked on himself, overcame his fears – only to find that they came true: he was really abandoned. And then a deep, foundation-shaking (if, of course, he treats his wife well, loves her) feeling of experiencing death arises, as if everything is collapsing. They say that on an emotional level, the experience of betrayal is equated with previous experiences associated with the death of a loved one. This is only a weak echo of that pre-initiatory state that rolls over a person who strives to get closer to metaphysics. This feeling of the most vile betrayal. A person begins to understand that betrayal is everywhere. This is a paranoid state.
There is always some urgent matter. Monday is followed by Tuesday; Wednesday, Thursday. Everyone sends their ripples on the water. The soul, like a tree, grows in rings. Like a tree, it sheds its leaves.
And one day, as I stood leaning on the gate leading to the field, this rhythm suddenly stopped; rhymes and mutterings, nonsense and poetry. A place cleared in my brain. I began to see through the thick foliage of habit. Leaning on the gate, I regretted that there was such an abyss of different rubbish in life, and so much remained undone, and we were so wildly disconnected, because you can no longer drag yourself across the whole city to see a friend, and unnecessary obligations have spun around, and there is nowhere to go; and I will never get on a steamship, I will not sail to India, I will not see how a naked man beats fish in blue water with a spear. My whole life, I said, was one half-baked, hackneyed phrase. And where can I, who helped myself to tobacco from every passerby on the train, where can I carry the baton – the memory of generations, the memory of women wandering with red jugs to the Nile, of the nightingale who sings amid the tramp of crowds, conquests and wanderings... This is all too much of an undertaking, I said, yes, and how can I now go further, climb up the same steps? – I addressed myself as one talks to a companion, traveling together to the North Pole.
He revels in the contemplation of a horrible, naked reality, the mere sight of which, according to Hindu legend, brings death. The Chinese, experts in torture, are just puppies; they would never invent such a thing.
And since his hatred of the world was absolute, it turned into absolute kindness, admiration. He loved the world. In this case, we are not talking about pessimism at all, but again about his boundless and inexhaustible amazement before life, that is, the reverse side of his unquenchable love for it...
The weight of matter and the difficulty of overcoming it, dark clots of disturbing certainty, impudent inevitability, universal doom . Awareness is usually suppressed by the provincialism of space. People say that everything happens for a reason, not just like that.
An unpleasant feeling of the givenness of what is happening. I despise reality as a loss in this hopelessly material world, gifted with such iron vitality. Just as you have come to terms with your name and age – a straitjacket invisible to the eye. The nonsense of fact, the “radical randomness” of human existence, almost every moment subject to surprises that are impossible to foresee and thus avoid...
While the manner in which a person dies usually seems to depend to some extent on circumstances, his mortality itself is inevitable. Human lives are full of such combinations of necessity and chance. We are all aware of the chance and inevitability of our particular genetic heritage, our gender, the era in which we happen to live, our physical abilities, our native language, and so on.
Rebellion on its knees in perpetual captivity... holds in its hand the fragile key to the problems of reality. Is this cage really our world? Or is it an evil parody of the bristling people around it? After all, they are vigilantly watching to make sure the lock hangs on the cage. The encyclopedia of movements is unfolding by its puppeteers. Bravely – both. Rather than a scarecrow among the living – I want to be a ghost – with yours... Scarecrow, human scarecrow – I.
The outlines of the other shore, in the place that the same Hindus talk about, where there is no time. (That which you firmly believe in, in reality does not exist.) Time is probably one of the most precious non-objectives that can exist. It turns out that a lot depends on the ability to believe.
For me it was something like a piggy bank, where I kept the evidence of the reality of existence collected throughout my life. You have to live like a carbon copy, so that in case of disappearance you have evidence of your existence.
So, our wonderful world is going through a catharsis, that is, it is being tossed around like crazy, and accordingly, it is kicking us too. If you somehow managed to shove your exhausted heart under the mind's safety cap, and burned through all the signs in one fell swoop (there's enough for our lifetime), then sleep peacefully, the directors of your dreams are paid so that you don't look behind the scenes.
Through the intricate net of quasi-reality, all the motley appearance, the conventional counting of time, the omnipotence of dreams, the selfless play of thought, leading far, far away from our world, which for too many exhausts reality. It seems like a hallucination, some kind of obsessive delirium on the theme of an inexhaustible winter, tempting you to laugh into your fist, as madmen do, guessing at the endless rigging of things. That's what some sages say: in order to know the world, you need to want it madly. Out of delicacy, it is customary to call this desire a sweet word – "love". But no one thinks about what it is like for the world to be known, and then thrown out into oblivion as unnecessary. If you want to do something for the world – do not get involved with it. And then, drying himself with a white fluffy towel, the Chinese thought that he was not at all sure that he wanted to experience enlightenment. Did he really want to suddenly, in a split second, see the truth? To illuminate the world like an X-ray and see the skeleton of Emptiness there? In general, at that time, he was uninvitedly enlightened.
A monkey on a tree branch tries to reach the moon in the water. Until death seizes it, it will not give up. If it lets go of the branch and disappears into the deep pool, the whole world will shine with dazzling purity. The illusory nature of the moon's reflection in the water, the attempt to seize and stop the shaky phenomenality of the world turns into death, and this death is the penetration into the true essence of the world. Because life is like this reflection of the moon (which of them is the real Moon?), a bubble on the water. What does it mean: is reality an unreal part of unreality? Or vice versa: when you open the door, does someone come in or you yourself? The moon is an impudent thief, And it steals its pale fire from the sun.
Read history, advises the sage, and another: spit on everything, be like the sun, not like the moon. The third laughs mockingly: live as if in front of a mirror, ape what you see in the void. The higher the monkey climbs, the more visible its backside. Let the glass itself drink up the rest, I am everywhere behind, and let the double from the mirrors get lost. Yes, the world has a stuffed double, but no matter how strong its ambush, blessed is he who penetrated the garden with a knife in his teeth and cut off a flexible branch near the garden. I left circles on the water with a rectangular brick, since then I am no longer sure of anything.
So are the strange moments in a person’s life, when everything – youth, health, love, a slight deprivation that adds sharpness to all other feelings, a piercing awareness of how fragile and fleeting it is – melts into golden resin and hardens somewhere deep in the brain, constantly disturbing and helping to live in times of gray bitterness, exhausting the soul with a constant, chilly burning.
Stuck in deep black tar, time stopped. Life, deprived of the traditional attributes of being, not possessing an ontological status...
Everything around me became empty. It seemed to him that this was some kind of absurd dream. (He gave the impression of a man who had come from a country where no one lived.) My illustrious brother, do you not sculpt figures from the fog? This wonderful new hobby that has come to us from the unknown?
The uniformity of the flow of time in all heads proves more than anything else that we are all immersed in the same dream; moreover, that all who see this dream are one being, the Chinese sage Chuang Tzu, who one day, after waking up, asked himself whether he was a butterfly dreaming that he was the sage Chuang Tzu, or the sage Chuang Tzu dreaming that he was a butterfly.
R. Descartes believed that there are no precise signs by which one could distinguish, for example, the reality of wakefulness from the reality of sleep. The philosopher considered the only basis for such a distinction to be the coherence of events occurring in sleep and in reality. At the same time, the eventfulness manifested in a dream is characterized by fragmentation, mosaicism, while the events of reality can be correlated with each other without violating integrity, sequence and causality. G.V. Leibniz argued that when distinguishing realities, the main argument can be the determinacy of future events by past and present events.
- Well, well, well, well, look at these miracles! You're a complete madman! How did you come up with such precise formulations? Where do people come from who are unsure of the rationality of existence, supporters of ephemeral views? It's already trying to crawl out of its human skin. And don't you think that a spermatozoon is the most terrible of microbes? The human mind is a clever little thing, oh, so clever! Logic itself says so. I bet you can't go against the nature of things and objects! You can only rely on yourself, and that's a pretty bad situation if you're an unreliable person, isn't it? That doesn't make it any worse, because even the most delicate mind is located entirely on the outside? Well, yes, it's clear: in order to establish the true meaning of a function, you have to take its limit. So, what I see, that's what I sing. Don't touch my song with your dirty hands. It is tactless to hint at physical defects to anyone! The real thing, that is, the way it should be.
Crazy is always curious. Psychiatrists consider all people slightly crazy. Man, if provoked, is curious. There are almost no truly crazy people left. The creators of these poems died long ago. All this is some kind of madness. I am crazy. Airplane pilots are crazy. Never look at the pilot. Get on board and order a drink. I hope you lose less than you gain.
Here we must remember that as we move through the three phases of schizophrenic delusion – paranoid-projective, paranoid-extractive and paraphrenic-extractive-identification – the schizophrenic’s I increasingly loses its positions, is subject to, to use an existentialist term, “peacefulness”, “loses itself to the world”. This loss, the degradation of the I, is compensated for by internal inflation, the crowning glory of which is delusion of grandeur. Since, so to speak, there is nowhere else to inflate, the I “bursts”.
It is not reality that concerns me, but the handful of opium in which reality is hidden, he confesses, and does not take his eyes off the taut windowpane where large flies have mated. From a close distance, any little thing, even a midge, looks mysterious; from afar, it is a complete nonentity. Distance abolishes metaphysics. To philosophize is still to be at one with the world. But I cannot be an egoist for long, perhaps because I have nothing to defend. Strange things happen at the end of all roads. In the corner, the fan shakes its head. Is exile at an end? Is it an end? Nothing awaits a man anywhere. One must always bring everything with oneself. A true exile takes everything with him.
The desire to turn the generally accepted inside out, to distort a little, to show the illogicality of the ordinary: the more paradoxical, the better. And I, a person who has spent my life formulating paradoxes, I, as a specialist, must tell you that I am disgusted by this foreign paradox.
The authenticity of everyday life. The problem of the authenticity of being as opposed to imaginary existence. Let's get together and decide that it doesn't exist at all, that the "I" is an illusion, a collection of feelings, thoughts and desires. A program for overcoming everyday life by charming it with love. You have proposed a number of absurdities, unrealizable, ridiculous; how shameful of you not to believe in them in the magnificent! I even find that since you look at all things from their ridiculous side, you cannot be relied upon. For example, the statement that life is "freer there, where it is closer to non-existence" is an abstract rational one, that there is a door through which one can go somewhere, that at least something can happen.
If we use concepts from the field of photography... The lens does not believe in reduced scale now... Black cherries-temptations on a fishing rod pull cold eyes. Sleep – the sediment of the day – packed everything, repacked everything with the frenzy of the fanged binding. It is tense, like a competition of two weakened tops. It called you when it was drowning in you. There is a gaudy soldier and a worm smelling of vermouth (everything is hidden behind the back). There is no forgery in the witnesses – rescuers and firemen back and forth. What is the testimony provided by? Me and the obituary column. And the recluses became breadwinners. History wants the worst and starts the engines. It would be terrible if we were ordinary photographs, like rotten tomatoes. The defense mechanism is broken, and who knows what it was. Cherries fell into a jug. The selectivity of vision is significantly higher than the selectivity of hearing. Each sees something different, the soundtrack is the same for everyone. Hence the special suggestive potential of sound. It is as if the music to which life danced has died down in us. There are no physical capabilities. I am turning into ice. The pupil is sinking into the thick night, but hardly deeper than death. There, in the depths, are my eyes – the eyes of a stone statue in the Nile desert, devoid of eyelids. I see women walking with red jugs to the Nile; I see the swaying of camels, men in turbans. I hear the tramp, rustle, murmur around. The orphanhood of things, you cannot make them food for the eyes. You can saturate a capacious gaze, but you cannot extend a thought. Life does not give a reason for fixation. The marble pupil does not react to light, but flash after flash they continue to try – what if!
I just don't want to get into the plot, I have to stay outside of it. The play should have a simple and obvious idea for everyone. It's better if it's an idea in general. For example: someone thinks that everything that's done on earth is not just like that, not selfless, that in any human manifestation there is first of all a personal interest, and nothing can be done just like that. But another doesn't think so, he has a human approach to life: people are herd creatures and should live together, helping each other. This is how philistine plays are made, it seems.
The smallest hints begin to take on sinister meanings (a dark past, fictional or real scenes of violence), and an arbitrary (made up by someone) plot suddenly becomes inevitable.
Language has this strange feature: it makes sense of everything. Every word can be described by another word. This is what the effect is built on – metaphorical poetry. To move, in Greek – metaphorein, to transport: language is initially a translation, but precisely in a register heterogeneous to that in which the affective loss, refusal, rupture is realized.
I had a habit and even a passion for such meticulous personal observations. When, for example, you look closely at how words are formed and pronounced, how sentences lose their weight against the background of their slobbering decoration. The mechanical effort that conversation demands of you is a more complex and painful thing than defecation. The lips, this crown of swollen flesh, which, convulsively whistling, sucking in air and fussing, pushes sticky lumps of food through the stinking barrier of carious teeth – what a punishment! However, this is the only way we can partake of the ideal. It is difficult. Since we are nothing more than a warehouse of warm and not yet rotten offal, we will always have difficulties with feelings. To love is trifles, to get along together – that is the rub. Impurities do not try to hold out longer, and especially in an unchanged state. In this sense, we are even more pathetic than our shit: the mad desire to always remain in our current state is an incredible torture. The feeling of an ideal basis for personality.
The truth is that all of us, as well as what happens to us, happens, comes true, meets us, moves us, divides us, merges us, dominates us, what we collide with, what we rest against, advance, dissolve in, swim, fly, flounder, this is a series of words that is composed of words cramped against each other, adjoining each other, embracing each other, shining through each other, thought of with each other, involved in each other, similar to each other, standing behind each other, tightly fitted to each other, communicating with each other, blaming each other, fastened together by mutual insult to each other, blaming each other, lying on each other, hearing, seeing, devouring each other's flesh. There are only clever words with which people only create the appearance of understanding.
We roll words onto the soul, turning them, and from there we joyfully watch them roll down to the beginning, turning around, because we want to deal with stones.
Well, if there are any doubts, at least assume the presence of spirit. Let me be a metaphysical substance... After all, language is also a form of existence. It is possible to exist in language without existing in reality: many do so. Allow me too. Especially from an interlocutor whom I do not even see.
... gradually becomes more cunning and understands that reality on this planet is distorted, and the naive will perish. And there was no time to worry about what would happen to his small physical structure, a soft doll that could close its eyes.
The body is the receptacle of the human soul. The destruction of the body or disdain for the corporeal inevitably results in the destruction of the personality. What does the body add to consciousness other than limiting it? How does the greatness of the spirit turn into physical weakness? After all, every great wisdom always turns out to be the impotence of life. The spirit is cursed to be burdened with matter. The natural elements form a fragile and painful composition of the body, the devil penetrates the flesh and corrupts the soul. With age, the body begins to destroy the soul.
There is no sleep even in a cold bed. He is from the winged race, and there you can become something, lie down in a cloud, as in a bed, you can take off your body without pulling buttons out of loops, there you can embrace your shadow. When the night hides the flaws of the body... Sometimes even the body can be of some use: you can close your eyes.
Flesh is a perfect mixture of all the elements: its density is from the earth, its softness is from moisture, its warmth is from fire, its breath is from air. In the surrounding elements this primary consistency of flesh disintegrates into its individual elements. The ancient cosmology of the four elements probably based its understanding of each of them on their integral image and coexistence in human flesh, its hard-soft elasticity, combining the properties of earth and water; and its warm coolness, combining the properties of fire and air. For within the flesh we feel fire, and on its surface, where it comes into contact with air, coolness. It is this combination of warm and cool, a kind of thermal or temperature elasticity of the flesh, that makes it seductive, increases its “loveliness” to the same extent as the elasticity of its consistency. The alternation of cool breasts and the hot hollow between them; cool thighs and hot crotches; skin, cool to the touch and warming under caress... The hard and smooth corresponds to the cool, because it holds on the surface or pushes to the surface. The soft and pliable corresponds to the hot, because it lets in deep, closer to the sources of internal fire. Thus, the seductive elasticity of the flesh is not only a consistent, but also a thermal property: it is the alternation of warmth and coolness, depths and surfaces...
In our culture, the relationship between face and body is marked by a fundamental asymmetry, which implies that the face should be naked and the body, as a rule, covered. The established prejudice that the essence of things is hidden in the depths makes us treat the surface with disdain. In fact, the surface is the depth in the relationship of bodies, the depth of their adhesion and penetration to each other. Every surface becomes depth as soon as a community, attraction, interest arises between two beings. “Interest” means to be within and between (inter-esse). Paradoxically, touch is the deepest of all interpersonal senses.
Wait, there must be two, it takes two to tango. It's not for nothing that they say: "It takes two pairs of eyes."
Often I thought that my eyes would never die... The body flows back into the darkness – a bag of sand that should be placed on the bed – a hole in the universe; the soul – forward into the darkness. To see at a distance, you don't need eyes, no.
The human body lives for a certain number of years. Then it ceases to live, turns into inorganic matter. We are all just helpless passengers in our bodies. After all, temptation is a manner: a body without a soul will not tempt. The body in which you live... I myself made a boat out of it – for consciousness proves its own vitality only through the state of the body, which, however, must be present as if as a passive and powerless spectator. Remember: any movement is, in essence, a transfer of the body's weight to another place. Life is the sum of small movements that are precious for understanding the laws of the stage. The essence will not be receptive to existence when thinking is not the thinking of experience. After all, the departure of the horse from modern civilization does not at all cancel the interest in horse racing (and betting) on crowded hippodromes. Learn to think abstractly. It is always a matter of principle. Of the idea that is embedded in a thing, and not in the thing as such. They will say that happiness exists only on the other side of the grave, for only that life is blessed which exists in an idea. When you find yourself in a place similar to the center of the world... Life is an idea. The world in itself. Not life for a thing, but a thing for life... It is not even a matter of essence: only of degree. Even if you do not understand. Even if you do not notice all the exciting toy theatricality of life.
Paradoxically, the only growing movement of modern times that still takes the reality of the body seriously and assigns it a global religious-political mission is terrorism, obsessed with the sanctity and mortality of the body, determined to blow it up for the sake of the heavenly bliss of its martyrs and the deliverance of the world from infidels.
The impressions that the environment produces, all these portions measured out by the hand of the material world, became more and more clouded with fog every day and finally ceased to exist altogether.
The existence of swindlers who try to obtain some benefits from the state by deception casts suspicion on all those who apply for these benefits and forces those who are truly entitled to them to demand a multitude of different certificates. You cannot register something that does not exist. You cannot go to a blockhead's office and explain to him that time is a solid substance, that there is no future, that there is only the present, that you cannot make it rain by washing your car. You have to show him some kind of paper, otherwise he will not believe that you exist. The bearer of this is truly the bearer, and not some riffraff.
And the long skirts of the teachers' wives whistled past, menacing as mountains. And throw 260 thousand forms to all of humanity. And our hands flew up to our caps. And let the children grab, and the ladies throw caps from their fluffy locks, and the unshaven warriors thunderously thunder – "Hurrah!!!" However, all the same, as soon as you wash your car, it will start raining.
Eternity is only the beginning of a gesture that has already been completed. Gravity – that’s who! – holds us on a leash. In a sensitive grip you can barely move. The path is accommodating, but still it could not take you out. Your character and rights are sculpted on the concrete roads of the homeland. Like a bubble, afraid to prick its shell on the radius, gravity wanders around you, waiting for you to jump into the sky, shining and rejoicing, indulging in it and coinciding with it.
I can only state – and I am bored... I am interested only in the apparent. I like "no" more than "is". Because every "no" means "no longer" or "not yet": "no" has a past and a future, "no" has a history, and "is" has no history... The most interesting thing in the world is what is not. In a word, I bet on "no". But you seem to be more interested in what is. It's a shame.
Hegel has a saying: "Essence is what was." And Hasek: "It was never so that it was not. It was always so that somehow it was!"
What we encounter in life is being. The latter is sometimes called becoming. It differs from being in that it contains both being and nothing; i.e. being in some sense is, and in some sense it is not, in some places it is, and in some places it is not. This "no" is present practically everywhere. Man encounters non-being, some kind of absence of being, everywhere. Therefore, strictly speaking, the word "is" corresponds better to life than the word "is". Such preferences are life. Expectation. The state of "before", or the protracted "after".
The means of communication is a clock. Meetings in time. Some walk very quickly. With a change of places the sum of feelings changes. Indeed, what is the point of the fluid constancy of the complex human body, when there is nothing to thank it with. Does love save it? It is easier to be a part of it. And slowly penetrate its immensity. On the copper sea. Any moment sprouts infinity, when its duration is a matter of your mastery.
“Subhiti, the living who know, before teaching the meaning to others, should themselves free themselves from all afflictive desires aroused by beautiful sights, pleasant sounds, sweet tastes, fragrance, soft touches and tempting thoughts. In their practice of generosity they should not be blindly influenced by any of these tempting manifestations. And why? Because if they are not blindly influenced by such things in their practice of generosity, they will pass through the bliss and virtue of this beyond calculation and beyond imagination. What do you think, Subhiti? Is it possible to calculate the extent of space in the eastern heavens?”
Chapter 31. Return to Childhood
It is very difficult to feel good without having flesh. It is very difficult to prove your existence by spreading electric heat and moving unwieldy objects. It is very difficult to listen to senseless reproaches and cries: "You don't know how to live. You don't want your house to be in order." In the evening, burying my face in someone's shoulder, I think and fall asleep in a few minutes. In the morning, all fears become so much less that they hide or disappear. And at this time, the same scratch appears on my left hand as on my right.
My being is too weak. I wish to have so little strength that I do not feel my existence; when I feel it, I sense all the disharmony of everything that exists... Having exhausted yourself in being, you have learned that time does not see traps.
And what is going on in that strange world where an unknown force has been throwing me every morning for so many years now? Because, if you want to know, we are all like sparks driven by an unknown wind. And anyway, why enter where there is an exit... Progress is slowed down by problems with the body, headaches, grief, or some kind of unreality, strange thoughts, evil intentions, unclear sensations, illogical impulses, a feeling like "simultaneous presence on two time tracks" and so on. Obviously, a midwife or nanny caring for a mother or child has a much greater influence than distant planets. What can I say, if even dreams depend on the sleeping person's position.
— I'll give you an example. Imagine that there is a prisoner in the Bastille who has committed some dark crime. One day at dawn he is put in a carriage and taken to Paris. On the way he understands that he is being taken to execution. There is a crowd of people in the square. He is taken to the scaffold, the sentence is read to him, he is fitted to the guillotine... A blow of the blade, and his head flies into the basket...
He slapped his palm on his knee.
“And?” I asked nervously.
- At this moment he wakes up and remembers that he is not a prisoner, but a loader from a supermarket. In his sleep, a large fan in the shape of a heart, hanging over his bed, fell on his neck.
— In other words, something happens in reality that a person does not understand because he is sleeping. But he cannot ignore what is happening completely. And then the sleeping mind creates a detailed and complex dream to somehow explain everything.
When a woman is about to give birth to a child, she has water inside her, in which the child grows. This water is almost exactly the same as the water in the sea. And about as salty. The woman creates a small ocean in her body. And that's not all. Our blood and sweat are also salty, about as salty as sea water. We carry an ocean inside, in our blood and sweat. And when we cry, our tears are also an ocean.
The baby left her womb easily, but left her with folds on her sides. The body, not at all shamefully served, but not eaten. The soul is satisfied with phrases, but the body is different: it is more picky, it needs muscles. The body is something real, so it is almost always sad and disgusting to look at. Freedom remains a ghost on this continent of sorrow, and they are so used to it that they hardly notice.
I know that these things are self-deception, hallucination and crazy things in general, but, in the end: "When a child is born, it falls asleep and dreams the dream of life, when it dies and is buried in a grave, it wakes up again..." – And in the end it doesn't matter anymore... And then the question is why, why does strength find delight and joy in both ignorance and enlightenment, otherwise there would be no ignorant being side by side with enlightened non-being, why should strength limit itself to one or the other – either in the form of pain or as intangible ethers of formlessness and painlessness, what does it matter? I am at a loss for words, I am tired of inventing what to say: in any case it doesn't matter. I lie on my back in the dark, with my hands clasped, joyful and knowing that the world is a baby's sleep – but it all has to be excited and remembered, it is not there by itself, and that is because the mental nature is, by its nature, sleep-free and free of everything. Like those pipe-smoking deistic philosophers who say , "Just look at God's marvelous work, the moon, the stars, etc., would you exchange it for anything?" If it weren't for some primeval memory of when, of what, of how nothing... Certainly one must believe.
Joy that leaves a trace in the soul, like that which gives the style of a scribe to a scribe's table, a nurse that grows a thought from milk, bread and herbs, that searches for a child's dropped name among the stars, that transforms the inner part of his eyes into two open flaps of a mother-of-pearl shell, and their outer part into the outer part of the shell, so that the child's eyes look at the world as a shell lies at the bottom, in the thickness of the water, and in it ripens a pearl, the mistress of thoughts, for whose sake they do not know what they do, know that they know nothing, see what they hear, grow inside the earth, swim against the current, fly without wings, search for names that have been forgotten seriously and for a long time, feed animals, kill people.
When, say, I am lying in a ditch, the day is windy, and it has rained, and clouds are floating across the sky, huge clouds, torn clouds, shreds. It is precisely this confusion, this height, this detachment and fury that fascinates me. The big clouds are constantly changing, floating away; something ominous, eerie swirls, breaks off, rears up, tumbles and crawls away, and I, forgotten, tiny, I am lying in the ditch. And then I see no story, no plan.
And since it is impossible for us to become children ourselves, we have a child. So, if we compare all this – sleep, childhood, and death – it turns out that life lived as "the development of a conscious personality" easily disappears and is good for nothing. Whoever we become, whatever we learn, we are left with only the reserve that we had in childhood and have before sleep. With it, only with it, we will leave here, forever forgetting all other acquisitions – knowledge, money, fame, work, books that imprinted our personality, but have no value in the face of a child, sleep and death.
Observe a small child, a newborn. It is not surrounded by any shell, vulnerable, open, innocent – life in all its purity. It is quite clear that life does not believe in old age. In fact, if life were governed by economists, it would seem very uneconomical, a waste. The indication is clear: life loves softness, because in a soft being it can flow more easily. And the second thing Lao Tzu insists on is that weakness has its own beauty, because it is tender and soft.
But perhaps our greater value and more important function is to be an unwitting illustration of the depressing idea that a liberated man is not a free man, that liberation is only a means to freedom, not a synonym for it. This shows the extent of the harm that can be done to our species, and we can be proud of the role that has been assigned to us. However, if we want to play a greater role, the role of free men, then we must learn – or at least imitate – how a free man fails. A free man, when he fails, blames no one.
Freedom makes it easier to find meaning. Otherwise, there may be nothing meaningful in it. Ultimately, one can only see meaning and significance in life through the rejection of alternatives, the narrowing of freedom, loyalty to one place, one faith, and even one person. This insight has been coming to me slowly, slowly, over all these years and wanderings. This is what happens with excesses: you have to immerse yourself in them to realize that there is no happiness in them.
If he were married, if he had at least a life partner, well, just some kind of girlfriend, everything would have gone great, women are better than men at managing family get-togethers, in a sense it is their strong point, because even if in reality there are no children, they still potentially have a place to be, looming, so to speak, on the horizon, and old people are interested in grandchildren, this is common knowledge and is somehow connected with natural cycles or something else, in a word, some feeling hatches in their old heads, in the son the father dies, of course, but the grandfather is reborn in the grandson or takes revenge thanks to him, in short, all this would be more than enough for at least Christmas dinner. Sooner or later we all become like our fathers: this is the truth that falls on me again and again with the ease of a falling brick.
We were raised with our narcissism constantly fed, but more and more of us break down and burn out when we enter the big adult world. It turns out that the world is cold and rude. Any success is a failure delayed.
There is nothing to be done: life is a serious game, nature is a complex economy: inevitability, a sentence or release, pardon, punishment or an act? Because any death is a loss... cruel, senseless – a complete loss. Since death is every insult and failure, self-torture, but life is also every insult...
Chapter 32. The Possibility of Error
And then something happens to me: some little wheel inside me is so tired and worn out that it can’t turn any further, and it suddenly stops, and I can’t help myself – I cry. I cry because the future has once again sparkled before me and has become even a million times bigger. And I also cry because I am ashamed of how disgustingly I treated the people I love – how disgustingly I behaved while my personal dark Middle Ages lasted, before I found a future and someone who cares for me from above. Today it’s as if the sky has opened up for me, and only now am I allowed to touch it.
A toddler who tripped over a stone asks his mother to punish his offender. Naturally, the sight of a crying boy usually affects parents more than the sight of a crying girl, and pushes them to even more destructive actions in an effort to get rid of their own discomfort.
How could I have been so wrong? Wrong about everything. Like a child. As if I knew nothing about life and that you only really understand things in hindsight. As if I had never lived in the era of exaggeration and cowardice. I was too young to understand that cynicism always hides an inability to make an effort – in a word, impotence; only he who has truly fought can rise above the struggle. Yes, it can be hard to admit that you were wrong. Especially when you have been wrong for so long. Freedom is worthless if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes. <...> You can spend time dying, or you can spend time living. To be young and stand with your face turned to the sun – that cannot be compared to anything. Life is beautiful. Not mine, of course, but still. Many people are prone to subconscious masochism and unconsciously, and often consciously, enjoy their misfortunes.
One of the few rules I have established for myself over the years is: “If I think one thing and everyone else thinks another, then it is much more likely that I am wrong.” Experience has shown this. I do not mean to say that the majority is always right. Yes, there are times when you are right and everyone else is wrong. But such is life: if you feel like it is you against the world, most likely you are going against yourself and nothing else.
"To change 'it was so' into 'I wanted it so' – that is what I am prepared to call true salvation." Applied to his present situation, this idea of Nietzsche could mean only one thing: he had to choose his own life, to live it, instead of letting it do it for him. In other words, he had to love his fate. He remembered Zarathustra's favorite question: would you like to live the life you are now living and have lived until now, again, and again, and so on ad infinitum? A curious thought experiment – and yet, the more he thought about it, the more clearly he understood what Nietzsche wanted to say: yes, you have to live your life in such a way that you want to repeat it again and again.
And I realized at that moment who I miss. I realized what kind of person I miss in my life. I realized with all clarity who I miss unbearably, have missed for a long time, and who I miss so much every day I live. I miss myself. The real and happy me. Does a person really need to experience a catastrophe, pain, poverty, the proximity of death in order to understand something?
As you get older, you stop making demands on the world. Because you really want to keep it. At least in your soul. Why is it that only at the end of life do we understand the value of every moment. Why do we wait so long and only when there is very little time left do we begin to strive for what we dreamed of? Why don’t we do it earlier, when we have so much time? Why don’t we look at our loved ones as if we were seeing them for the last time? How bright, how rich life would be. A life truly lived.
That's it! First get everything out of life, and then – and only then – die. Don't leave behind a drop of unlived life.
Suddenly he felt like an idiot – how stupid could he be – stupid, like an eighteen-year-old boy trying to prove something to himself. There was probably more dependence in such behavior than if he had... cheap despair. You always fall into a trap because of such nonsense. You are not the first. And with caustic condescension she added: – It is not your fault. No one knows traps better than the one who sets them. You tried to accommodate two opposites and, unable to reconcile them, you yourself split into two. You are a victim of dialectics. We have all been cruelly deceived. So console yourself at least with the fact that you know what you have become a victim of. And do we realize that we are deceived if we ourselves seek deception? Where the deceiver already lies to himself.
Spirit is not “secondary”, it is identical to matter. Not opposite, but identical. The opposition of spirit and matter is “removed” through a higher category – “life”. Matter and spirit are life. As man and woman are man. As even and odd are Number. And so on. All opposites are “connected by ends”. Both “primary” and “secondary” are only partially, at some point, but not by definition, not once and for all. Life and man are the synthesis of spirit and matter, their harmony, the desire to achieve this synthesis and this harmony. But every thing is best known through its opposite.
Of course, if you are twenty years old, if you don’t really know how to do anything, if you don’t really know what you would like to be able to do, if you haven’t yet learned to value your main asset – time, if you don’t have and don’t expect any special talents, if the dominant feature of your being at twenty, like ten years ago, is not your head, but your arms and legs, if you are so primitive that you imagine that on unknown planets you can find some treasure that is impossible on Earth, if, if, if... then, of course.
I don't have to be a hero at all, to cross the road without stopping for a car braking furiously, to blindly tempt fate, my mood, to feel anxiety; I don't understand how I could, because life is as precious as nicotine. Everything is somehow connected to everything. My God, would I shoot?! I'm ready to nibble grass and eat carrion if you give me canary pants and a magic wand – I'm so selfless! How boring it is to rot underground. It's simple: you have to live like the ocean. You have to live as if you've had a few drinks and are in no hurry.
Both the average person and the person of high consciousness, all those whose feelings never rise to pathos, would find support for their souls in him, would learn, guided by him, to appreciate the poetry of everyday interests, all the charm of quiet and deep inner work. They would comprehend the meaning of humility, of aimless words. They would understand that the laughter of a child and the twittering of a woman, infecting with their soulfulness and exciting with their incomprehensibility, are as significant as the most brilliant speeches of sages.
I'll walk the earth, see more people, meet different people, get into adventures... Life is pleasant. Life is good. The process of life itself is enjoyable. Let's take the average person in good health. He likes to eat and sleep. He likes to take a breath of fresh air, to walk with a spring in his step. Or in nature: a rooster crows at the gate; foals run in the meadow. There is always some urgent matter. Tuesday follows Monday; Wednesday follows Tuesday.
Orange mood: their life is here! I hear life, I hear its triumph. People's miracle! Let life be big. Inside, some kind of holiday is buzzing, buzzing. Thoughts are cheerful, heartfelt, spinning... Core happiness is turning. Let's be filled – it's so enchanting. Everything will be illuminated by a smile, a majestically calm smile of joy.
The more I peer into the darkness, the brighter life becomes, the quieter the world becomes, and the less subconscious resistance I have to anything. Lord, how good! How glorious, Lord! What a tolerable life the small shopkeepers have, I said now, as the tram dragged along the outskirts and I saw the light in their windows. An active, energetic life, like in an anthill, I said now, standing at the window and watching the workers with bags in their hands flow into the city. What strength, what flexibility, what fortitude, I said, watching the guys in white trousers kicking a ball around in the January snow. When I grumbled about some trifle, say, about tough meat, I allowed myself the wonderful luxury of stirring up the smooth surface of our life with a slight ripple, which became even happier from the trepidation that our son was about to be born. I snapped at supper. I talked the devil of a lot; I, a millionaire, could afford to throw away five shillings; a great climber, I tripped over the footstool on purpose. We made peace on the steps when we went to bed, and, standing at the window, looking at the sky, clear as the inside of a sapphire, “Thank God,” I said, “we don’t have to beat this prose into poetry. Childish babble will do.” For this clear, this high sky promised us a long, unhindered journey, over all the chimneys, all the roofs, smooth – to the very edge.
Perhaps it was because I was nervous, perhaps because it is very difficult not to smile when you are close to each other. But then again, it was a completely different smile, from some plump herbarium of smiles. (Children bake smiles of big eyes in braziers of dark eyelashes and give them to random passers-by with laughter.)
A wonderful day, you are languishing with boredom, complaining about it; by the way, recently faith in Buddha was born in his little heart. To guess, to feel, to suspect... What a sad charm! And everything is so full of inexpressible sadness, there is no strength to resist: with the sweetness of powerlessness, lack of will... have an ineffable charm, like a dream that you can’t tell, but in vain do I look for words – a broken shell, I offered him a pillow and, having chosen a decent subject, we began to talk: and you, I see, are seriously saddened – a quiet conversation – you know, no one ever tells me sad stories. It will drive away, catch up, drive away your spleen. I feel somehow cleaner here.
A fly is so small that you can't call it a real enemy: it walks on your face with its wet paws. An ant is so light that it runs freely on the water: so funny and so weak that it seems that you only imagined them. Ants in a jar of sugar. Sparrows bathe in a very funny way: bending down, they wet their bellies, and then shake themselves off for a long time. And at this time it is very noticeable that they have no arms. I wonder how mice treat birds and how beetles treat butterflies? They can see each other. But what do they think? I want to find out as soon as possible who was born: a boy or a girl, a solid jackpot, an assassination attempt, cancer, important changes ... but for this you need to rely more on your intuition, and I am an inveterate skeptic. A mallet of happiness, that is, a trifle. This talisman will keep me from hobbies. And my little animals are undoubtedly interested in where I am driving them, why I am tormenting them, and, getting lost, they are just as concerned about their future as I am about mine. To be born someday or not to be born? And who is more important than whom?
In the big houses that are white as skulls, live little people, commoners, – under the visceral growl of refrigerators and sleepless alarm clocks in the depths of apartments – a sip of water walled up in the tap in the middle of a short night – huge gaudy sockets, white bathtubs, when you suddenly wake up from sleep on young shoots of hemp and do not fall asleep again, one day, when you were alone... Alone, because alone. She has a touchy nature. "You give off a cold feeling," he says with a slight hint of annoyance. I hear the commentator's hurried speech on TV: "The football players are already a little tired and that is why they began to make even such gross mistakes." There was nothing in the refrigerator, only an egg, like a sleeping spectator in a movie theater, in the middle of empty seats on both sides: above and below.
Not sleeping all night before a duel. Trembling hands towards morning. At dawn to go with your best friend to a wide clearing, where there are grasshoppers, where the dew is alive. A horse, crossing a ford, will stop and will drink water noisily for a long time. An episode will let go of the reins. On this day of blue bears, running along the paths of veins, along quiet eyelashes, I see behind the blue water in the cup of the eyes an order to wake up. Somewhere a deer wanders with a groan near the hairs of your eyebrows, which you carefully pluck, wincing, with tweezers, that is, silver tweezers brought for you by an overseas merchant. They play checkers peacefully, leaning on their hands. A motley chicken, squeaking, wanders along the windowsill, knocking its beak on the glass, catching flies. A damn fine morning, sir. Makes you want to move, not talk. Makes you want to take a picture. And that friend... that dead friend on a cold morning... Humbling with its innate anger, rolling in and out with the force that dilates the pupil on the potter's wheel of the face.
You will be there soon, promise me to notice everything. Will you give the beggar some flatbread and bombard her and her friends with questions. – Do you have a friend? Where do you live? Who will I sleep with tonight? An embarrassed cripple, an inept bow to the ground of a peasant boy, that is, a serf, who ate all the master's pies, ran into a burning hut to save a ginger kitten, but did not find it, if this is your servant, looking distrustfully into liquid, dark eyes, asks: Are you kind? Yes, I am not evil, – the owner answers. Having thought, he will ask again: Or maybe you are drunk?
Rub your fingers lightly on the leaves of a lemon tree in a bucket of earth with winter from Ufa, remember the blows of an axe, or a hen hatching eggs in a night shed, when you came for a dirty bottle of moonshine hidden the day before, and the light of your grandfather's cigarette. As you exhale, cry out: substandard! When there is snow everywhere, a heartfelt conversation in a warm room with fragrant pillows. Velvet eyes give you a long look, without shine, soft, as if stroking you, seeing you off luxuriously and extravagantly. And my hair is shaggy because Mrs. Constable told me to comb my hair, and I saw a fly in the web and thought: "Should I free the fly? Or leave it for the spider to eat?" That's why I'm always late. My hair is shaggy, and there are splinters in it. Worthy friend, why do you say that flies bother you, close your eyes, yawn. You gave me a heart for a long memory. No matter how unusual it may be.
The main thing about a gift is its anticipation. More precisely, the feeling. And what do you want most of all? I know, I know. But that's nonsense. Forget about it. Think about the main thing. Especially since you already have the main thing. All that's left are, in general, the little things. Women, children, men are so similar when they receive gifts, birthday presents. Almost instantly melting from an excess of sensuality.
If the passions raging in the human soul give rise to certain gestures, then, according to the masters of the tea ceremony, there are also such gestures that are capable of influencing the soul, calming it. With strictly defined movements, their beauty and regularity, the tea ceremony creates peace of the soul, brings it to a state in which it responds especially sensitively to the omnipresent beauty of nature.
Chapter 33. Packaging Dreams
And finally he said to himself: sleep, sleep without footnotes. Gradually thoughts drown in sleepy darkness and incline me to a vile sleep . Eyes stuck together, barely managed to raise his hand and throw away the rest of the cigar. The broom swept over thoughts, swept away branches, children's talk, passers-by, the rustle of feet, the rumble of the street, the growing, falling rumble. Down, down, down the feathers and feathers of sleep were drawn, and now he had already fallen through and got stuck in the feathers.
In the open field it is light, in the open field of consciousness it is light and careless, there is no magic mirror, no intent. Sleep, prey of sleepy nonsense. Normal sleep is the basis of all bases. Lie down – and sink to the bottom, like an overturned, overloaded ship. In the duck of every street – a Venetian backwater under the silent bottom of a motorboat will go. The thickness of the deaf swaying green water. The lake curvature takes over, but I do not want. The sycophant of reflection is remarkable in his own way. I do not seek you, you are found in your freedom. Sleep doubles in the speed of reactions between a toad and a snake. And now I slowly float up from the bottom and somewhere in the middle of the depth I open my eyes. Something happened while we were sleeping.
Sleep, slowly stroking the shoulder. Only the waiter and the dog could somehow move in space, but doubts arose: how long will they last. Sleep packed everything. It is tense, like a competition of two weakened tops. It called you when it was drowning in you. Night. The rim of the glass trembles, like your bracelet. The tram in rapid speed twists its path, going to nothing. Like a roulette, you sleep. The needle of the broken compass does not tremble, it is free from responsibility. And the snow Mouse is dreaming. You can’t keep an eye on the tailed one, and we immediately set a pregnant point on his existing tail. Without publication, scissors cut the belly of the unconscious Mouse. And the biologist whispers: She. Like acorns, her embryos in the belly, or a bicycle chain a year long. The mice did not create anything. We released all the mice from the mirror jar. Slender, like a folder dozing on the table, the skeleton of a white Mouse. Dreams rename objects that do not exist. The hole is perceived as an advertising zeppelin, but it is not there twice. Dreaming dogs do not pick up the scent... And the carousels stopped while the Eskimo melted. The remains of the dream are filled with something married, like viscous jam. If someone wakes up on the mirrored door of the closet – a shard of sun – in my eyes. There's the alarm clock, the ever-busy gnat of the mind that discerns and chews on the differences, the old dry mammal poop in the barn, the bison-bison of the morning flies, a few strands of clouds, the heavy thump-thump of matter rolled up into a ball, all of this is one rare liquid dream imprinted on my nerve endings, and, as I said, that's not even it – the iiiing bug hangs precariously...
I wanted the house to be a Universal House. Is this a correct desire? It would be better not to have a universal one, but a simple house and in the heart. Is the Heart angry? The Serbs will not rush to the rebus. And the rebus does not ask. The heart jumps from "d" to "c". Nonsense is good, it scratches the charisma of the face.
The sleepwalker has a hard time explaining who he is every time; he gets confused in defining his identity. He falls into a trance and does not remember what happened to him, and that all his troubles and unsettledness are due to this illness. His repertoire of messages about himself is poor: he insists that he wanders at night, does not harm anyone, that his parents do not believe in him and that he is a fish by nature. But the more the sleepwalker listens to Lee's confessions, the more he thinks about who he is and what his purpose in life is. The person only thinks that something is happening to him, while he sleeps or plays a secondary role in some provincial TV series.
The fleeing man expands the night space, and the trees, confident in the integrity of their shadows, remain in place, at the same time following those turning into a horse. The tree does not run, it stands – therefore thoughtfully... The pursuit is pulled taut by a bowstring, the emptiness is reduced, the heart beats in the temples. A side route opens, and the representatives of the pursuit lose their tracks, not seeing each other, not seeing themselves. Oh, where are they, learning signs! Someone disappeared, someone reappeared, the night burst, but nothing followed, because the goal was achieved and the conversation was over.
Our inner world is exaggerated. It leaves no deep traces. We experience pleasure and sorrow because we exaggerate the significance of our experience. “A dull look is stronger than oneself...” – I whisper automatically and as boundlessly as possible. That is why we are happy, that we are insignificant. Turn to the wall and say: “I am sleeping, I am sleeping.” “Depict,” – someone whispers in my ear. – “Depict.” “Nobody lives there and does not open the door, there are only mice rubbing flour with their palms”... We are woven from the same substance as our dreams. And our whole little life is surrounded by sleep.
Enough, I said to all this, there is not even this page, not even words, but only the predetermined appearance of things, encroaching on the energy of your habit – Chevamotmyanado, should I swear or something?
But when we start talking, we forget how the world really looks, how it works. And who knows? Of course, not scientists, but children. Why? Because all children, unlike scientists, sleep the same way. What does it mean “they sleep the same way”? It means that they all see the same dream. And this dream is the world. It also means that adults sleep differently, because each of us sees our own dream. When children start talking, then language will destroy their unity. And each of them will also begin to see their own dream, submitting to the existence of an irremovable multiplicity of languages. Therefore, no one except children knows how the world really works. And Deleuze does not know, because we all forget that a gesture in children refers to consciousness, and a smile to the productive capacity of the imagination a priori. Children are closest to the self-evident. They know that only a miracle is obvious.
When we speak of language, we speak of it in a broad sense as a semiotic principle in principle – as we speak of the language of ballet, the language of gestures, the language of mating dances, etc. The language of norms and prohibitions, the language of the Superego, is very important. Imagine that you watch an infinite number of films simultaneously in all the languages of the world, and all these films tell you about yourself, and you yourself are the heroes, the authors, and the viewers of these films. Developing this teaching, we introduced the concept of hallucinatory hallucination, where the hallucinant is the hallucination itself (and the dreamer is the dream itself).
Come on, come on, children, wake up – come on, the time has come, wake up – look closely, you are being fooled – look closely, you are dreaming – come on, come on, look – to be and not to be, what difference does it make? – Pride, hostility, fear, contempt, disdain, personality, suspicion, foreboding, lightning storms, death, rock: worthy of guilt, eat away the art of precise descriptions of polite, soft, soothing, ingratiating coats of arms, the art of expressing affection, skillful bleaching, caress pale or white, the pleasure of courtesy, paler, flatter dimly, unprotected emptiness-emptiness, white or pale late, joyless cold cutting, not written or printed on or passionately sharp, dimly dullness marked, emptiness empty unoccupied pale, confused unqualified completed confusion, make the eyes unrhymed, so that the paper does not hurt and water, envelop in images, dim what is written on, the form is not filled in, watch, an inflamed and watery lottery ticket that wins nothing dim or blurry, with inflammation empty space, mental modification of unoccupied blue and a tiny crooked pathetic understanding smile for me, you – she has a sullen curl, like a woman who has been cleaning all day and hasn't washed her face – she mocks – and says "Should I go out?" That she is a well-known slut and seductress, although she deliberately shows off in front of them (as in the photo), the boys grin at her, smiling at the camera, in a dream I am angry at her for being such a bitch, but when I wake up, I understand that all this is just a pathetic trick that she resorts to so that one of these boys will impregnate her, so that she becomes soft and a mommy with a tiny baby at her breast, Madonna Out of the blue.
To lure happiness: a trifle or a delicacy – an insignificant gift to remember the years. And there is no strength to erase the memory... Sell your dresses and keep your thoughts.
And how strangely he expresses himself, the language itself seems like a translation from a foreign language. For those who have suffered the loss of gifts, it is harder to get rid of troubles, a tested soul. Have I gone mad? Unbearable. You shun everyone so much that you are not like anyone. And you go and water the flowers on the window.
He will call, offend, trim his mustache, and come. An elevator will hiss somewhere, a dark case. Sooner or later, like his own, greedily and unyieldingly languidly sleep, hear the breath with his cheek, sullenly holding the emptiness in himself, hear his resigned reluctantly lecherous heart.
"You will soon know too much and become old," she answered, not in Russian, and her excessive breasts rose above her tightly drawn bodice. Clear traces of previous relationships, clear and undamaged, were imprinted on her. Yet she was mistaken in the details of life.
An elderly Chekist told me this while drunk. At the beginning of the NEP, he went into a teahouse with a group of Red Army soldiers to warm up, and by the way, to draw up a paper about the confiscation of a coil. Suddenly, the Chekist heard a squeak in his ear, a rattle, a drumming in his eardrum, as if someone blew into the receiver and said: – Hello, hello, call Lavoisier, ask Trotsky – who will bring back the lost love to the heart? Who will grasp with his eye the inventions of the universe?.. Oh oh, slanting devil, caress, slanting devil, have pity, the runt burns sweetly to give birth to puppies with Feuchtwanger's fangs I can't crush the pants the tanks are coming take out the cyst the tanks are coming I want to bite off the crested one let's run to Leningrad!.. On the treasury sits a beautiful maiden, a beautiful maiden and a robber, to the captain – a dear sister, to the ataman – a lover...
In the back seat he's such a natural sly one, in the sense that there's nothing wrong with him, he's just taken the back seat in life to watch and be interested (like me), and so, like me, he's got a bit of a fool in him. In fact, it's not me in the party, the party is in me... Does that surprise you? The gentleman does not want to know (“a real gentleman, I repeat, does not want to know anything, he only wants things to GO THEIR OWN way.” I followed him into the carriage, pushed my way through the crowd in the aisle and, opening the door, squeezed into the crowded compartment where the machine gunner sat in the corner. The foreman nodded. The adjutant sat down and said, as if addressing an iron stool: “ What, you don’t know his nonsense theory?” I, in any case, consider you a most noble person, sir, and even with the beginnings of generosity, sir, although I do not agree with you in all your convictions, which I consider it my duty to state in advance, frankly and with complete sincerity, because above all I do not wish to deceive ... Although you are the honored depressionist, it is my turn to grumble and cool your ardor. I send you all sorts of warm and good wishes. I can't follow your banner, just as you can't follow mine. But the world is wide and there's room for both of us to continue being wrong. That's what the porter Alexander Kuznetsov tried to explain to his colleague Yashchenko, nicknamed Snickers, when he told him the following: "I don't give a damn that you're telling the truth today, faggot, because I know that you always lie, bitch."
In Posad, a measure of potatoes (August 12, 1918) is 50 rubles. I heard from old lady Elova that in the city of Aleksandrov, near Posad, a measure is 6 rubles. I hurry to the station to find out when trains leave for Aleksandrov. A craftsman with a badge answers:
- At three.
I:
— Is this according to the old or new time?
By order of the Bolsheviks, the clocks in Sergiev were moved forward by 2 hours.
- Of course, in a new way. Now everything is new. (After a pause:) – Everything old is now in the grave.
Yes. Rejoice, Russian literature. And rye flour is already 350 rubles per pood.
The poor are dying. The rich barely have the strength to hold on.
"And you?.. [You] began to proclaim to the whole world that Russia in the past was a vessel of abomination and desolation... that "laziness" and the desire to "sit on the stove" are almost a national trait of Russians in general, and therefore of Russian workers, who, having carried out the October Revolution, of course, did not cease to be Russian. And you call this Bolshevik criticism! No, highly respected comrade Demyan, this is not Bolshevik criticism, but slander against our people, the debunking of the USSR, the debunking of the proletariat of the USSR, the debunking of the Russian proletariat (italics Stalin. – T.M.)."
On January 2, 1930, Stalin sent a telegram to the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine: “When is the trial of Efremov and others planned? We here think that the trial should not only unfold the insurrectionary and terrorist cases of the accused, but also the medical tricks aimed at killing responsible workers. We have no reason to hide the sins of our enemies from the workers. In addition, let so-called Europe know that the repressions against the counter-revolutionary section of specialists who try to poison and slaughter communist patients are completely “justified” and, in fact, pale in comparison to the criminal activity of these counter-revolutionary scoundrels. Our request is to coordinate with Moscow the plan for conducting the case in court.”
Chapter 34. From scratch
It seems undeniable that there are degrees of conviction, and that our convictions change over time. However, a conviction does not cease to exist because it is weak or subject to change. It may be considered foolish for Zeno to deny the possibility of physical motion on the ground that an object must be in a definite place at any given time; but it is equally foolish to argue, contrary to Zeno, that we never commit ourselves because our commitments change.
Things get worse before they get better. Life is accompanied by death, and joy by sadness, and vice versa. Calm down, because the laughing life has changed, the iconic city has become a system. Do you hear how it rejoices and babbles? The world is a mirror that returns our reflection to us. If we laugh, it laughs back. This is in the order of things, everything passes... and this too shall pass. Just don't cry. Everything will or will not be. A river is not a sea, melancholy is not grief. Joy is not eternal, sadness is not endless. It is, you know, like a smile on a tear-stained face. All it takes is a drop of oil to stop the creaking of axles or door hinges. In the same way, the sun's rays disperse the shadows. Life is quiet and regular, and under this gentle indifference of the world the train runs on schedule. Where there is neither illness, nor sorrow, nor sighing, but endless life... And troubles... troubles everyone probably produces for themselves. Only nature can heal the invisible sufferings of the spirit. And please, don't be sad. Be patient. There will be so many friends in your life that you won't be able to keep up with them all. And although our shelves are bursting with books that we'll never get around to...
The immediate participants see a crowd of individuals gathered together for a while, waiting to get off. It's like in the subway. You ride a few stops and then come out again. When you get on the train, you're already thinking about where you're going to get off. People behave in a constrained manner. The desire to get off that everyone carries within them and the story of how they got there are not conducive to communication.
When an older friend showed how beautiful this world is and convinced that tears do not poison it, but, on the contrary, conceal a sorrowful sweetness, and our world is beautiful precisely because there are tears in it, for in them he learned to find both consolation and pleasure. This conversation made such a strong impression on me that I could not close my eyes until the morning, and in the morning I finally decided to go to Newcastle to help the families of the unemployed.
And although your life has never been particularly joyful, let us still rejoice in it – a gift from heaven, a priceless gift that comes to a person only once, and then by chance and by accident. Erase the random features – and you will see: the world is beautiful and delightful. New love – a new life – a holiday that is always with you. In the life of each day you can find the best and most unexpected exercises. And each is multiplied and tender, like a darling of the living God. Life is an amusing thing, and the one who sees its essence, discovering the funny sides in it, is smart. There are many beautiful things in the world besides happiness. And there is probably no less funny in life than sad, really, no less. Fun is an insufficiently well understood philosophy. “In general, I am a happy bastard, and life dances its slow dance with me.” Let’s heat up the bathhouse again, and invite some dashing girlfriends so that they laugh. It cools you down in the heat. Of course, of course.
So, from now on, we should not let into our consciousness disharmonious and gloomy images that torment our soul, be it fear, anxiety, egoism, hatred or envy, just as we do not let a thief into our own house. We must firmly remember that such thoughts are worse than thieves, for they steal our peace, happiness, well-being. We must learn that these enemies have no right to invade our consciousness. Treat them as offenders, immediately throw them out.
A generic person is not an absolute ideal, but rather an ideal type, the limit of desires and social aspirations of every rational being who has realized his responsibility for the fate of the world and the people around him. Therefore, the civic consciousness of an individual is not only high moral asceticism, service to all humanity, but also a readiness to maintain the integrity of life in everyday affairs and small actions, no matter how insignificant they may seem.
It was a void fraught with catastrophes, promising adventures, teaching to live on a whim, taking risks and competing in risk with discharges that hit at random, heads or tails, seeing in their flashes the only chance, foreseen by no one, to go out into the world, to meet face to face with the unknown, to go blind, to demand an answer, to make one's mark and, falling, to know that you are not killed, but found, collected by the finger of fate as a material support for an occasion that is no longer a trifle, but a signal of a meeting, of eternity – "a pledge, perhaps, of immortality."
His book A Rebours appeared unexpectedly, and it served not only as a starting point but also as a sanctification of the new literature. It was not a question of introducing the crude flesh of life into art by means of visual expression, but of extracting from this very flesh motives for dreaming and inner growth.
Apparently, the situation of the extrinsic "Consolation of Philosophy" is quite universal in world culture. Another striking example is the "Bhagavad Gita". The leader of the Pandavas, Arjuna, is visited by the god Krishna and in a long conversation (which constitutes the content of the poem) he removes all contradictions.
His philosophy is cheerful in the spirit of pantheistic positivism: the world develops from the embryo to fullness, from unconsciousness to reason, from instinct to law, from right to duty, always for the better. In an elevated tone, to strengthen the note of cheerfulness, hope. To be reborn for a new life... – Truly I live! A hymn to life, burying the old. A new dawn will shine in all directions, for life is a Swedish table: take what and as much as you want. To discover yourself in philosophy and philosophy in yourself (as, in a certain sense, a generalizing approach). Where I will have a field to shine with my mind and express proven thoughts, theses of the soul. And the desire for good will be the beginning. Think about it like this – and you will be encouraged. And, reconciling, it always returns to that distant past, to that very day at the end of the beginning...
Congratulations have become worse. A slightly joyful holiday, but crowded. A wonderful, soft mood. Joy takes you by surprise. Stupidly joyful. And due to sadness, or rather habit, the little joys of the weekend come unexpectedly. Snowdrops are sold on every corner. And , if you want, tell yourself – sadness is poor.
Then I will be caught up in things again; to be surprised by life again, or rather, its continuation, to cling to people, to smile at acquaintances every day, to put it in the asset, to buy condoms, and to love everything in the evenings. To finish with something and to start something. To forget grievances and to sympathize. All the dark that awaits us has already passed, I am not guilty of anything yet, and you have nothing to fear... I chose this day without thinking from the proposed fan, before the played deck was sealed forever. But I am in no hurry to open it.
Here we met Ginny, and Hal, and who knows what; and we had our jokes and secrets; and we never parted at the door without agreeing to meet again there and there, depending on the occasion, depending on the weather. Life is pleasant; life is good. After Monday comes Tuesday, and then comes Wednesday.
The next day I reread the letter and I see that it might give the impression that all I do is sit and remember all sorts of sad things and feel very sorry for myself. In fact, I am a very happy person and I feel it. I am going to marry a lovely little girl. And there is so much love in this world that there is enough for everyone, you just have to know how to look for it.
He lives in peace of mind, one might say achieved beyond despair. It is not even humility, but a fragile and paradoxical happiness. After all, only a life sufficiently devalued in one's own eyes acquires real taste.
Chapter 35. Palindromy
But dimly understanding that the fear of error itself is wrong... He felt some disappointment, as in childhood, when the magic word turned out to be the well-known stupid "please". That which rises in me and does not want to die... Respecting justice to the end. The value of life is the final basis. We all want to live, and therefore it is not surprising that everyone tries to find an excuse not to die. Pursued by the dogs of belated regrets. Times, years are no longer what they once were... And time tolerates us, and we – it. This time in a dream we will push apart stronger than the strange country of life.
Time is greater than space. Space is a thing. Time is essentially a thought about a thing. Life is a form of time. Carp and bream are its clots. And even worse goods are clots. Including waves and the firmament of land. Including death. Sometimes in that chaos, in the scramble of days, a sound arises, a word is heard. Either "love", or simply "hey". But before I can figure it out, everything is again replaced by a ripple of blind stripes, like from your hair.
But whatever happened, I could no longer turn back. As in a dream, where it is impossible to make a choice – there is no determining principle. Or we have no alternatives to establish this principle. When the form reaches the optimum, the alternative becomes meaningless.
These balls seemed to me like puppet heads, which, however, you can’t play with. I thought that men were cursed, because at the height of passion and happiness, sweet feminine fruits in their hands suddenly turn into two bags of sand... Thus, a burst Christmas tree ball leaves a prickly trifle in the mind – a funny threat... Hold them, little Rosie, straighter and longer in this funny dance pose, forget that they smell of newspaper.
Her grief would dissipate in her usual life, in frankness... She would live a pure life, settle down more comfortably, cultivate a sense of modernity. The desire for the most modest, unnoticeable existence. A tenacious illusion, lurking, concealed. Does hope kill or vice versa?
Having suppressed his disgust, having forbidden himself to curse... his life became pliable, at least his melancholy lost its former shade of gloom. Life, as you know, is merely a stage on which everyone is given the opportunity to grimace until he gets bored. And if life is an inevitable approach to death, then it is better to walk this road (to the scaffold?) with a smile, laughing, top-top. Nobility is found only in the denial of existence, in a smile hanging over a lifeless landscape. One must die cheerfully.
Everything became more beautiful than it was before, what can I say: I will avoid the coming, unbearable melancholy, and I do not envy someone who does not love life. Having restored the correct law, you can confidently see and feel with joy that you are living correctly.
When meeting him, she always tried to put herself in a bright and joyful mood, although she had no reason to feel such. He muttered that everything was right. Night thoughts, aesthetic whims... At such moments, philosophical bugs attack. He began to doubt whether it should have been so. There were few grounds for faith after all. But here's how: only someone who questions everything can doubt the doubt itself. Therefore, he was in a bad (donkey) mood all the time.
The thought was incoherent and sad: I will have to cope alone with the demon of despondency, which, perhaps, is a part of true life, because in such boring moments, perhaps, the most important things in life happen in us.
He was overcome by the indifferent mood that criminals fall into after a harsh sentence. Unsteady desires, indifference and cold melancholy in this tired room. He wanted to sleep. The world becomes indifferent, watery, worthless.
Why does bastardism appear again? Because it spontaneously flows from your infernal nature, do not build illusions about it, but do not spoil your blood either. Bastards always survive at the expense of good people. Everything starts again and again.
And with poetry? I understand poetry as such less and less; I can now only tolerate hidden, implicit poetry, poetry completely without words, I mean – without those devices and tricks that are usually used in poetry. The older I get, the more I am convinced that my hopes for it, too, were clearly excessive. I loved it to the detriment of my own health and even believed that I would die from worshiping it. Poetry! If in the recent past this word conjured up images of a thousand universes in my mind, now it is associated with some kind of inarticulate purring, with worthlessness, an aimless waste of language, with a foul-smelling mystery and pretense.
Be that as it may, do not accuse me of speaking to you in a peremptory tone. My convictions are nothing more than food for thought: so by what right would I impose them on you? It is different with my hesitations: I do not invent them, I believe in them, I believe in them in spite of myself. So I have taught you this lesson in bewilderment with good intentions and without much desire.
There is an end in the world, and the essence of the end is transformation. And nothing, nothing can be groped for. Nothing is needed. Man is the end. A philosopher must express himself laconically. Man deserves only pity. What really concerns us is the circumstances of our death; the circumstances of birth are secondary. All days come to an end. There is no need to prove anything. The day of death is better than the day of birth.
"And people must be worried about you?" she asks cautiously. "Our girls are afraid of you..." "Well, someone must have told you a lot about me." " And which ones do you like more?" You always answer evasively. Answer together – or, more precisely, wait with the answer... The pause I make before answering will tell you more.
I weep and sob when I think of death. Go and never come back. Was I wrong to hide my fear of death with this? Ostentatious fatalism? Am I not flattering myself by considering myself unfortunate among people? And you were afraid of the growing difficulties? What a sad mistake... And I am in no hurry to stop.
Suddenly I realized that I am a moment in time, created by those who lived before me, and I myself, in my turn, am the creator of others. What is most precious to me in life? Does it matter that I am dying, he thinks, since nothing separates, nothing brings us closer, because every moment returns, every minute is eternal, so no one will be touched by the feeling of loss... So that no one will forget either the tears, or the lame combinations of truths we have memorized, or the most insignificant trick... Is it not all the same what bread without salt you chew later.
Streams, brooks of hot words, friendly mediation, which we throw around like fluff and then hide in small cowards and tricks. It is useless to present anything to the accused – he will not confess to anything anyway.
Our romance ends with a smile of tenderness... – women are like silk, but, of course, with a venal kiss and in dislike they are the first. Women, like dreams, are never what you want them to be. A woman is always ready to change her mind if there is none. They came together without loving and separated without hating. Love has its own laws, but more often than not there is chaos. Who knows. But sometimes, my affectionate friend, I want to say three ten-letter words... Bold words will not break bold relationships.
Why do we get married? We all need a witness to our lives. There are billions of people on this planet. Who needs one life? When you get married, your partner promises to be caring about you, the good, the bad, the mundane ... Everything. Every day, every hour. You say, "Your life will not be invisible – I will notice it. Life will not be unknown – now I will follow it." All our relationships are like a dance – one step forward, two steps back – because we are afraid to open up, because a naked soul is vulnerable. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer described the law of porcupines: "When people come into close contact with each other, their behavior resembles the behavior of porcupines trying to warm up on a cold winter night. They are cold, and they press against each other, but the more they do this, the more painfully they prick each other with their long needles. Forced to separate because of the pain of the injections, they are drawn together again because of the cold, and so on all night long ... »
A town house for rent with many small apartments, narrow backyards, closely spaced and economically arranged staircases, but with a palace fa;ade and a corresponding front entrance – something like this we perceive as false... or when a corner house is adorned with a turret that serves no purpose and is in no way connected with the rest of the building.
"Don't you think, madam, that beauty is not allowed, is unacceptable?" he said in a stern voice, emphasizing that he did not want to give the words ambiguity. "I assure you, in the future they will make laws against beauty..." According to Kant, beauty is a form of expediency without a goal. But it should be remembered that a man's thirst to become more beautiful is of a completely different nature than a woman's: for a man it is always a desire for death... Beauty is a sense of self, and it is reflected in your eyes... Beauty is always arrogant, cruelty is ugly. I love men with a future and women with a past.
In short, there was some cruelty in them, but just in moderation, a cruelty that you want to kiss, bitterness, insidious and pleasant. And even if he is dealing with an intelligent woman, he still "eats" himself. The fact is that the ritual of courting a woman is nothing more than a man's attempt to apologize to a woman for his obvious lack of attention to her.
His speech confuses the mind, instilling fervor in the soul. Your theory is stunningly immoral! "He is a very severe philosopher, he often writes about terrible and hopeless things – she said, – but he is the most tender, most devoted friend, and for everyone who knows him ..." Who, seized by you and feeling your stern gaze, could run? Why do those condemned to death need compassion? We will perish from love or be crushed in the struggle for love – it's all the same: we are destined to die ... Happiness is a successful life, suffering is a signal warning of failure.
If you ask him what the difference is between the phrase Morning Star and the phrase Evening Star, he will most likely answer: “Oh, leave me alone, what do I care about your games when everything is so terrible both inside and outside! ”
What a great spiritual disappointment he brought me! Pessimism supports and nourishes the traditions of elegance. I have now understood and appreciated the danger of pessimism, which accustoms one to constant complaints, weakens the soul and predisposes one to mystical consolations. If you live as long as I do, man, who has appreciated life, when did you manage to acquire skepticism, where did you pick up such wisdom, after all, man is given a soul so that he can love.
Nothing can be bad that never happens, if you don’t have time to finish a book, then the end is unhappy, but we, after all, adults, know that there are no hugs that will not eventually break apart, that holding hands for a long time often ends in death, and that if you live long enough, you can see the end of the world.
I've been watching you. Everything will work out, you just have to be patient. Everything will be fine, especially considering that nothing happens, and I guarantee you, I guarantee, everything will be dazzlingly fine. But don't be afraid, it won't be soon. A lot of time will pass before that, a lot of cattle will be born. Life will be magical again, you'll see. We'll still get to Tibet! Despite the feigned external cheerfulness, everything will be awesome, right? ( In the beginning it was like in the beginning, but everything will end in the end ). Wonderful, right?! She knocks on our door quite often and asks what's new with us and how things are? Every time I tell her that everything is fine. Oh blah-blah! Everything is just wonderful!
"I am already 30 years old," he writes in his notes, "life is becoming a heavy burden. I see no reason to be cheerful, and yet, it would seem, there should always be a reason to be cheerful." I do not want to live for the sake of business. No. I want to be (not there, not here), but in life, in life. Not in a game of detectives and robbers, but on the front lines of reality, in this unbearable life, not life itself, but its slow, marking prose. (- No, no, don't say that there is much prose in the world!). A stupid doll playing at life. Stupid dolls looking at the sky.
All this is commonplaces, cheap vulgar philosophy, skimming the surface, some kind of rosy nonsense, castration by militant optimism.
To achieve the far more important philosophical goal that I have set for myself, I will need, on the contrary, to discard everything superfluous. To simplify. To eliminate a mass of details, one after another. The course of history itself will help me in this task. The third millennium promises to be wonderful.
Chapter 36. The Alienated Man
The economy is stabilizing, the sociologist casts aside doubts. Modest cars shine outside elegant bars. Wars are over. The government is too soft. Spring hormonal activity prematurely removes boys' hats and bares girls' knees. Daughters-in-law bite their lips. A generation is growing up that gives each other books. Every woman can count on a man. Everyone does their job, everything goes on as usual, and life slides, flows into the eyes, incomprehensibly. And no one really knows what the catch is.
It's Saturday all over the world. I'd wander around to get a taste of life, go to the movies for three whole hours, get hooked on the funny scenes and the unheard of dialogues and plot twists. And with a new haircut, here I go, dull-faced (autumn, evening, delight), no schoolgirl can resist, this is one crazy movie. I pass by a department store and look into the art frame department, where Psyche works, always dressed in jeans and a sweater with a cowl neck and a white collar laid out from under the bottom to the top, I would just steal her trousers, but leave the sweater, collar and everything else. I stand on the street and stare at her through the glass for a long time.
Once upon a time there lived an old man and an old woman. And the old woman gave birth to a son for the republic. The old woman saved money for the boy to buy a motorcycle. As befits a cultured young man who is of benefit to the fatherland and a consolation to his parents. The children give their mother an ultimatum: I will bring a wife with painted fingers. "Bring whoever you want, but come yourself." What else can she answer?
Once upon a time there lived a poor knight, a soldier of good, and he lived in a peculiar way. The hero of popular comics, cartoons and films all over the world possessed incredible strength because as a child he fell into a cauldron with a magic potion. I must show up – well, perhaps, by the same necessity by which a cricket chirps, or someone in the same insignificant spirit; without any need, but as if by instinct, by the same impulses by which a sparrow chirps or a cockroach moves its whiskers (these are such things that seem to be of no use, but only simply to know that they exist). What is a being? A being is a thing that is original, requiring nothing else for its execution.
You turned out to be so trusting, so nice. You smoke beautifully, speak deliciously and everything else. The most beautiful things arise through oversight. My bearded baby, with an old-old soul. You are so foreign to me, so maladjusted. I love you so forgetful.
Favorite pastime – to be interested in everything that does not bring in income. He is so impractical and completely incapable of managing his affairs. With his heightened, acute sense – with a completely terrible impressionability – a whim of nature, a great child of this damned world. After all, they happen so rarely – and so many laws rise up against them. They are rare as comets. Too sensitive and insightful to have a strong character. Combined with an extreme degree of frankness and recklessness ... He is too sensitive to painlessly endure that monstrous absurdity, vileness and idiocy in which normal human life flows. A special beast caught in the forest, which must be studied, but with which one cannot be angry because it is a beast. (Rimbaud is gifted with one of those talents that we don't like, but are interested in.) The mind itself is tough, rough, even treacherous. And when he used his mind, everything worked out well. But when he opened his soul, its fragility and tenderness led to nothing but trouble. He is as wise as a snail (a symbol of wisdom in the East). But this snail always wanted to crawl without the shell of the mind. It's easier that way. The chosen one is marked with a red sign, like a tree in an endless forest, destined for the axe (Nature's chosen herald of her beautiful secrets).
Here we all invent systems of education: this is how we should educate, that is how... But in reality, parents and educators have one task: to keep the child's nervous system intact and unharmed by the age of 18. Life will put such a burden on his shoulders that he will need intact nerves; but we tear them to shreds from an early age.
“Some people begin to grieve too early,” he said. “It seems there is no reason for it, but they are probably born that way. They take everything to heart, and they get tired quickly, and tears are close to them, and they remember every misfortune for a long time, so they begin to grieve from a very young age. I know, I am like that myself.”
I saw a warrior sent into an ambush die because he didn't want to defend himself. And rightly so: where it's thinnest, there it breaks. People used to be psychologically more stable, less pampered, because then survival required much more effort, which made life more valuable, because it is human nature to value only what he gets with great difficulty.
We are unearthly, we are unhappy and unsuccessful, and they are successful, may their names be passed on to posterity. Life-loving, repulsive and warlike, like weeds... And as if overexcited by the fact that next to him, a step away from him, there exist such people, incapable of clinging to life, for no one...
Considering where he came from... Not fully molded by nature, not yet accustomed, not yet awakened, unlearned heart. Interesting as a representative of a degenerating class, of museum value. Socially determined inferiority... Statistically more susceptible, if only they remain alive at all, and do not commit suicide because there is no other way. A person, in principle, cannot live in a world that he does not understand. No one is capable of doing anything that would be uncharacteristic of him. You can’t fix what is not broken. Since the competition is also too great. Metaphysical homelessness, “non-worldliness” . Either you are simply a fool, or you are a man who fell from the Moon and understands nothing about earthly affairs. You act as if you were born yesterday. He never managed to find and attach a suitable face.
Habermas is one of those who are trying to save the classical project of philosophy, where the main role in achieving the unity of people was given to reason. He believes that this project has not only not exhausted itself, but, generally speaking, has not even been realized. Habermas tirelessly thought about improving this project, and its main addition was the concept of communication, in which he combined rationality, ethics and freedom.
Philosophy was invented by smart people who did not belong to the majority, who did not have their place in the world. That is why smart people are always out of place and untimely. A philosopher is, first of all, an immigrant, a "limit worker", a guest worker. He is always not a local. He came from somewhere outside, from another world. The question is "why"? – and the answer is: because the environment is hostile. There is an innate nobility in young minds that does not allow them to devote all their strength to an unprincipled life: they strive to achieve their goal, to achieve victory, but certainly through struggle. However, the hostility of the environment grows proportionally to the duration of your presence in it, no matter how well you adapt to it.
"In essence, they trust not the individual, but the environment that can force the individual to fulfill the obligations of the deal." No matter how great the role of passionaries in ethnogenesis, their number in the composition of an ethnos is always insignificant. After all, we call passionaries in the full sense of the word people in whom this impulse is stronger than the instinct of self-preservation, both individual and species.
If you want, we will be brother and sister, we are free, molding the clay of actions, there is no need to fear the laws. No one has ever known how you spend your nights. It is not so strange, considering your origin. When he kisses on the lips, he watches from under long eyelashes. When he kisses knees, he closes his eyes . Mascara charmingly kisses timid eyes. He has everything – in this he is incomparable. Everyone considers him kind, but he could also become evil, if it did not seem meaningless to him.
"What you call impurity, I would call characterlessness, but in the sense that he has literally no character and certainly no particularly bad qualities. Yet he lives with a depth and passion that is not easily forgotten."
Similar statements can be found in his letters, where he wrote to her about his loneliness. He did not complain, but accepted loneliness as an inevitable external consequence of the fact that he was endowed – and, therefore, separated from other people – with a special "ability to think". "Loneliness arises and is expressed not in the absence of what-belongs-to-you, but in the arrival of another truth, in the eruption of an abundance of the merely alienating and unique."
"My soul is woven from dirt, baseness and sadness... They are goldfish, "playing in the sun", but placed in an aquarium filled with manure slurry. And they do not suffocate. Even "all the more so"... It is implausible. And yet – so." And just try to approach him with a forgiving smile: "We will catch and wash the fish, and throw out the slurry."
I sank so low then, my father didn't even want to talk to me. Do you want to know one secret? – My "I" was once humiliated. There is something incurably poor in me. And, you know, one more detail – I am always drawn to die under a fence. I am vain about humiliation. And this is ineradicable in me, like sadness.
When you suffer from insomnia, you inevitably become a theorist of suicide. Someone rightly said: "We are what we failed to do." That is, in each of us there is no other content, except for everything that we have not done and what we constantly think about. In other words, I am my regrets. The Indians believed that people get sick from unfulfilled desires.
I think with my throat. My thoughts – if I have any at all – are a howl; they explain nothing, they scream. I have thought through everything in detail that I have never taken on. From morning till night, all I do is take revenge. On whom? For what? I don’t know, I don’t remember – on everything in the world... Powerless rage – no one knows this feeling better than me. My strength is that I have not found an answer to a single question. I live as if I had just died... Everything we are incapable of comes together in one thing: the inability to love, the inability to break free from our melancholy. Something in me is drying me up and has always dried me up. A black principle, dissolved in blood, fused with thought. How would I live, what would I do without these clouds? The brightest time of my life is when I watch them. The life of a loser, a half-ruin, with fits of useless and endless melancholy, a meaningless, self-contained nostalgia; the life of a pygmy, barely able to move his legs, mired in illness and mockery... There is a special pleasure – not to give in to the urge to commit suicide right now. And it is also pleasant not to take yourself too seriously. On the border of feverish oblivion, thoughts are sultry, extraordinary, persistent and passionate.
An ulcer is a mark of ambition. If you have an ulcer, it shows that you are a very successful person. If you have no ulcer, you are a poor person; your life has been a failure and you are a failure. If you have your first heart attack at forty-two, you have achieved great success. You are probably at least in the cabinet, or a rich industrialist, or a famous actor; how else can you explain a heart attack? A heart attack is the definition of success.
I ask myself: does anyone talk to themselves the way I do? I ask myself: am I okay? I come to a certain conclusion: I am different from others.
"I have enriched the mind's toolbox with a sigh of regret." I owe all that is best and all that is worst in me to insomnia. I have sunk so deep into my emptiness, I have buried myself in it, I have reached such depths, that it seems that nothing remains of it: I have drained it to the bottom, I have exhausted the very source. All my abilities have been killed by melancholy.
Sleeplessness seems to be kind to animals. If animals are forcibly deprived of sleep for several weeks, radical changes occur in their nature and behavior. They begin to experience previously unfamiliar feelings, specific, it would seem, only to humans.
If I go to extremes, the reason is my melancholy, satiety, craving for strong emotions, an attempt to somehow break out of my own insanity. What is this sign and where does it come from? I am from another world, I have centuries of continuous troubles behind me. I was born in an ill-fated land. Remembering the plans that were abandoned at the very beginning due to laziness or bad mood, you feel like the worst of deserters. Yes, the deification of melancholy cannot go unpunished.
There is a kind of people who live half and less than the opportunities given to them by nature. Who have behind (in front) another, reserve opportunity to live in another place and for another reason, and so they exist as if half-heartedly and as if not necessarily. Therefore, they are hardly noticeable and silent and even physically seem not quite complete, not fully revealed. As if they dissolve with their backs, disappear into the darkness from where they came, so as to pass between us without a trace and disappear unrecognized. Only a narrow strip of a person is visible on our surface.
No, he does not change at all in the intervals between those incidents that we hear about from time to time – except that there are more gray hairs, surprise is higher, sadness is deeper – his life goes on in a continuous line – he does not change at all: he is true to himself, like a bomb that flies at us. But, alas, to live means to be mistaken about one's own significance...
A man who is ideally sober-minded, and therefore ideally normal, should not go beyond the nothingness that is within him... I imagine him saying: "Torn away from the goal, protected from all intentions, I keep only the formulas of my desires and bitterness. By resisting the temptation to draw conclusions, I have conquered the spirit, just as I have conquered life with my aversion to finding any way out of it."
Once I had a self; now I am merely an object. I have been stuffing myself with every drug of loneliness I can get my hands on; the medicines supplied by society have proved too weak to make me forget this.
Today, when I signed the form, it was as if I saw my name for the first time, as if I didn’t recognize it. The day and year of birth – everything seemed unfamiliar, incomprehensible, completely unrelated to me. Psychiatrists call this a feeling of alienation. As for the face, I often have to make an effort to understand who it is – an effort to get used to myself with difficulty and hostility.
One of the Pythagorean prohibitions: "Do not write on the snow" ("he who draws ether with ether on ether"). Why? Because of fragility? This will be my farewell to the idea of man. Everything alive frightens me, because alive means moving. I am infinitely sympathetic to everything non-existent, because I feel the curse that weighs upon any life as such to the point of pain and hopelessness. I am only a sequence of my states, my moods, and I search in vain for my "I". Or rather, I find it only if everything superficial evaporates in the rapture of self-destruction, when everything that is called the word "I" is erased and disappears. One must destroy oneself in order to find oneself; essence is self-sacrifice.
To be irrelevant. Like a stone. True poetry begins outside poetry. The same with philosophy, and with everything else. I have seen too many losers around me to simply become one of them. But maybe I am already one of them... All morning I have been questioning myself if there were any mentally ill people in our family, even among my most distant ancestors. Their secret is nostalgia, which has become knowledge, the science of sadness.
My "calling" is to live among nature, to do manual labor, to make something in the yard, and not to read, not to write. Or to heal people. There are such dramas there... It is close to me, familiar... Somehow natural. Everything is alien: everything is very nice, but, as I wrote in the postcard: just look into the distance at the water and nothing more. The wind, which so beautifully replaces music and poetry. It is strange that in the lands where it blows, they look for some other means of expression.
A fatal, singing emptiness in every cell of the body – that is Melancholy. When she says that she recognizes poetry by that icy cold from which it seems that one will never be warmed. When we carry within us the seeds of disappointment and a kind of thirst to see them sprout, the desire for the world to dispel our hopes at every step increases the voluptuous confirmations of evil. Arguments come to mind later; thus a doctrine arises, after which there still remains the danger of "prudence."
We are exiled from the community of the living, whose only virtue is to wait with bated breath for something that is not death.
When the soul is sick, the mind is unlikely to remain untouched. You can talk about melancholy in the same words as about the sea... There was a song in your soul. Who killed it? What do I want, what do I want? Who will ever tell me what I want? To cry and fall asleep, in other words, to return to childhood – that's all I want now. To withdraw into myself and listen to this silence, quiet as a thought, old as the world, no, even more ancient – the silence before the beginning of time. Once I saw such a huge caterpillar that I still can't forget it. All the best and worst in a person is laid down in childhood. A neurotic is a person who is unable to forget.
Trinity Day. I just finished reading the book about Madame de Stael's last love. The thought that all the people mentioned in it were long dead made me feel physically ill, I even had to lie down.
I like the heresiarchs whose writings have not survived and from whom only a few mutilated, absolutely dark phrases have survived. How funny it is to die. They will come with flowers. Greetings to flowers. I like it when style reaches the purity of poison.
A clear sense of the unreality of everything around. Not a feeling, but a conviction. Music could partly replace the non-existent world for us. The constant awareness of this universal game, the dance of ghosts. The habit of seeing things as they are sooner or later turns into mania. And then a person mourns in himself the madman he was and will never be again.
Chapter 37. Cardiac Inadequacy
This is your secret garden, but you sound like a child, it doesn't happen that way. In one of your past lives, you were a woman. Women are a special form of life. Because this thought is more characteristic of a woman than a man.
It is necessary, necessary to walk around the city at dusk. There are no or almost no important matters for which it is worth giving up this pleasure. During such walks, the eyes imperceptibly learn from the street lamps how to shine. And that is what we need.
Don't go, stay with the man, because it never hurts to caress him. Don't feel sorry for me: my heart is so warm... Just an arrogant lion's heart. The main thing is that he loves, his heart is big, there is a lot inside, I wish I could live. Enormous, I wouldn't miss even from 30 steps. Who can deceive him, who can make his heart big and heavy, like a calf's. He needs a country, a world that is impossible and simple. And for this he needs to close his eyes and keep walking... And if he can cross the whole world, wearing out his iron shoes, his heart will become so big that it won't fit in his hand. Where are you, my blessed country of blue walls and the freshness of the night? On such a night, horses wander through the grass above a beautiful river and the space, wet with dew, dozes. And a huge white moon comes at midnight to keep a meaningless watch, to shine. I have searched for you long and hard, I cannot find you, my country of unrealizable dreams. Oh, how I want beautiful words and everything simple – and there is nothing.
The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or heard... they are felt with the heart. If you do not spare the heart, you will lose yourself. Whichever of the two you choose, you will still regret. Oh, how infinitely painful and pitiful... In an empty school locker room: "What's that you have?"
Oh, the eyes are a significant thing, like a barometer. To say why the echo sounds, why the heart beats, it is not enough to have dialectics and postmodernism, to touch with a trembling hand: it stirs on the sweaty table, wants to be silent, but is unable to be silent. But, I repeat: it is not enough to beat with the heart, you have to chatter with your teeth. That's how stupid my heart is, it suddenly gets hot, nothing can calm it down. It shudders, splashes, aches in the fingertips, in the knees. By hugging yourself and rocking, you can also lull the heart, like a baby. Little by little, a sweet and strange melancholy begins to creep into the heart.
Habits call to us – crazy lovers: twitching neighing, even more painful – pauses. We are insulted by advertisements, and we loved them so much. Palette of days, endless nights, are you really, are you leaving us too?
"Where to go? Where to?" he repeated sadly. I'm running, the bastard has escaped. He runs, runs, his heart beats; a beating heart is a holiday. There is a vague notion of "uncontrolled" robots that have escaped from their creator. Perhaps such incidents are indeed inevitable. Nevertheless, some person or organization must be held accountable for them. The straight horses were breathing tiredly. The gardener is not responsible for the horse's trembling . An experienced cat. Scarlet falls, scarlet. India. Sleeping elephants. A limp body, a pool of blood. Call an ambulance, let him not move. The best I can do in response to these alarmists is to roll my eyes. The heart, as the autopsy showed, was completely worn out.
I will lie here until they take me away, until they suspect me, until they notice me. Until all the swallows fly away to the rally, until all the air defense systems lay their eggs. I will lie here not moving towards the star not getting closer to the truth and the goal. There is much in the world, there is much, but it is not visible everywhere. Here, for example, there is nothing. Here I lie not moving towards the rally not getting closer to the swallow, the air defense systems will notice not getting closer. And our farewell manifesto will be heard by the whole country, although what does the whole country have to do with it, the country has nothing to do with it.
I met her only twice. Rarely enough. However, the extraordinary cannot be measured by time. The atmosphere of absence and confusion that surrounded her instantly captivated, her whisper (she never spoke loudly), her unclear gestures, her quick glance that did not linger on people or objects, finally her ability to look like a delightful ghost... "Who are you? Where did you come from?" – these questions haunted everyone who found themselves near her. All attempts to identify or, even reluctantly, dispel her mystery, were shattered by the obvious impossibility of obtaining an answer to such questions. No one was able to understand either how she breathed – what, in fact, made her breathe at all – or what she was looking for, having found herself among us. The only thing that was not in doubt was that she was not from here, and the motives for which she participated in our hopeless circumstances were somewhere in the realm of simple politeness or some kind of morbid curiosity. Only angels and terminally ill people could evoke feelings like those that arose in her presence. A charm caused by supernatural illness.
The moment I saw her for the first time, I fell in love with her shyness, an extraordinary, unforgettable shyness that gave her the appearance of a vestal virgin who had given all her strength to the service of a secret deity, or of a mystic exhausted by an ecstasy that had forever deprived him of the possibility of returning to the surface of everyday life.
With all that the world had prepared for happiness, she nevertheless seemed desolate – on the threshold of perfect poverty and condemned to murmur about it. Some unimaginable curse seemed to loom behind her. Indeed, what in this world could she acknowledge and call her own, if the silence in her soul was the result of bewilderment at what was happening? Was she one of those creatures of the moonlight of which Rozanov spoke? The more you thought about her, the less it seemed possible to apply to her the tastes and habits of the time. She should have been born in another place and in another era, in the misty and desolate moors around Haworth, near the Bront; sisters... Fortunately, this presence in the past gave charm to her "absence" in the present.
Her expression clearly showed that patience was not her destiny, that the nightmare of years would not touch her. Alive, she seemed so unaccomplice to life that even a brief glance at her left no doubt that you would never meet her again. "Adieu" was the sign and law of her nature, a reflection of predestination, the mark of her brief presence on earth; therefore she wore it like a halo, not out of tactlessness, but out of solidarity with the invisible.
Chapter 38. Suicide
So far we are only talking about absolutely indisputable cases: medicine is powerless, death is inevitable anyway, the suffering of the patient is incredible. But, having set out on the path of recognizing the legitimacy of suicide and complicity in it, society will no longer be able to turn back. Are mental anguish less painful than physical? And in general, the threshold of pain is a purely individual concept. Mucius Scaevola held his hand over a fire and at the same time spoke courageous words, and someone is ready to jump out of a window because of a toothache. Half a million people commit suicide every year because their threshold of moral, mental or physical suffering is lower than the average. But these people are not to blame for being born so sensitive, why doom them to jumping from bridges and roofs, to hanging themselves, self-poisoning with all sorts of crap and shooting in their own foreheads?
One modern English writer thus depicts the most fundamental danger for extraordinary people, or, to put it bluntly, suicides, living in a society attached to the mundane: "such alien characters are first burdened, then fall into melancholy, then fall ill, and finally die." He who should not have been born does not die, but perishes ... because of this abandonment, unable to withstand the demands of the most ordinary life.
Bad bile. Bad habits. Bad bosses. Bad genes. Hence Sartre's "nausea" or, in Russian, "a thug." "You can pull a child out of depression, but you can't pull depression out of a child," Leonard Lauder noted about his generation.
But to live while you live is only because you do not die... The root of all this lies in the deep instinct of life, but this instinct of self-preservation is sometimes precisely the true impulse to suicide – the highest form of self-love... It is in vain to warn a being who, I repeat, perhaps languishes in longing for life. Calculation of the reliability of the calculation on the feeling of self-preservation. Death appears in this case as a perversion of life, although it does not directly indicate its only and main inspirer.
I forbid anyone to question him. Later I learned that he committed suicide that same evening in some vacant lot. The reason for the suicide was the rejection of the surrounding reality, which led to a nervous breakdown.
Of course, it is quite possible that the "outsider" who died "on the move" is not the one I described; that he did not live, feel or think like that. Who was given the ultimatum to self-destruct. Defeated, but not vanquished.
His eccentricity was striking, his loneliness merged with the general. For in life everyone thinks about the same thing, but each about his own. Therefore, how monstrous it is to call delusion egotistical encroachments... "Why think about the same things as others," he often repeated, licking his dry lips, "everyone should think about their own..." And when the air smelled of spring, he thought that the world in which adults rule was created for children.
And then came the realization that he was insane, and therefore not guilty, as all madmen are innocent, even the most cruel of them.
He was a hidden freak of nature, an absurd extreme that had acquired a soul and flesh, enveloped in inhuman currents. Was that why there was something irresistible in his appearance – the features of a dark deity?
— It’s disgusting in this donkey cave. I’d like to fall asleep... and in general – commit suicide. Like the best student in the class, who has plucked up the courage to skip classes at least once. The beautiful are always brave. Our lives are given to us for education and entertainment. We create problems for ourselves to test our strength. No one can study at school without test questions. God wants to send you a gift, and so he wraps it in a problem. The bigger the problem, the bigger the gift. Even a small child is taught to be grateful for gifts, but an “adult” can thank not by teaching, but by free will, from the bottom of his heart. In fact, the Matrix is just a set of questions, a mechanism needed to make an ignorant or tired mind ask questions about as many things as possible.
It takes optimism in sufficient quantity to sustain hope, and pessimism in sufficient quantity to motivate anxiety. You can't surprise an optimist with good news. Of course, there are other ways to find yourself – to come to your senses from the stupor in which you usually live, as if in a dark cloud.
Tell me, is there anything in life that would make suicide unacceptable in principle? There is nothing necessary in life.
Until now, no church, no city hall has come up with a single valid argument against suicide. Suicide is one of man's distinctive features, one of his discoveries; no animal is capable of it, and angels barely suspect it.
Guess why angels are angels? They are here. Around us, among us. They are animals. Any kind. An animal is complete, absolute innocence. It does not know calculation, cruelty, betrayal, cunning, malice, vanity. It is transparent, like pure water. It does not know that evil exists. Just look into the eyes of a cat... Deleuze in "The Alphabet" will say one very good thing: you cannot treat animals like humans. You need to treat them like animals. Why? Because equals deserve equals, and unequals deserve unequals.
Without this, the human world would be less interesting and less picturesque: it would lack a peculiar strange atmosphere and a whole series of mournful possibilities with undoubted aesthetic value, necessary at least to introduce some new solutions into the tragedy and make the endings more varied.
The ancient sages, who gave themselves death as proof of maturity, created a discipline of suicide that our contemporaries have forgotten. Condemned to a commonplace agony, we have ceased to be the creators of our partings with life and the arbiters of our farewells. Death has ceased to be our death: we lack the splendor of a unique initiative by which we could atone for a banal and talentless life, and we also lack the sublime cynicism, the luxurious ancient art of dying. Corpses, hardened in despair, resigned to our fate, we all outlive ourselves and die only to fulfill an unnecessary formality; as if the purpose of our life were to postpone the moment when we could get rid of it.
For everything a person does, he pays for himself. In what world does a person exist who places suicide in this same world as one of the points of his own "activity", and what is the world of a person who does not allow himself to commit suicide? What is the difference (if any) between being that has suicide in mind and being that does not have it in mind? What does accepted suicide and rejected suicide mean? On what basis is this acceptance or rejection made? Thus, the necessary conditions of suicide are consistently clarified.
I recently read in a school psychology textbook: "A person's openness is expressed in the idea of him as a natural being, in whom the essential foundations of the world are manifested at the macro level. As a rule, the concept of will refers to a mature personality, fully aware of his actions and deeds. Research in recent years has also raised the issue of the controversial understanding of suicide as a purely auto-aggressive act of a mentally ill person for modern suicidologists, convincingly indicating that a significant portion of suicides are committed by mentally healthy people as a result of socio-psychological maladjustment of the personality in the context of a "microsocial conflict."
Only motives of actions can be "bad" or "good", and conscious and freely chosen, and emotions can only be "pleasant" or "unpleasant", and that depends on what actions they generate. Buddhist meditators and people experimenting with psychedelics noted that our mind is always half a step behind our behavior, constantly trying to catch up with it.
But we must not assume that the conclusion of our argument is a feeling of despair. "Angst" has been a fashionable emotion at all times, and a misreading of some existentialist texts has turned despair itself into a kind of psychological panacea. But if we are really in as bad a state as I describe, pessimism will also be one of the cultural luxuries that will have to be given up in order to survive in these difficult times.
However, when you are in pain, you know that at least you have not been deceived (by your body or your soul). Besides, what is good about boredom, melancholy, and the sense of meaninglessness of your own or everyone else's existence is that it is not a deception. (For me, unhappiness is better than false, deceitful happiness.) The finite thing does not simply change, it "passes away," but it passes away in such a way that it might as well not have passed away. Only the possibility of catastrophe distinguishes reality from fiction.
It is accepted that people are not inclined to discuss many things seriously. In this way, we seem to avoid the need to answer some questions. Suicide is precisely one of these topics. I didn’t even know the word suicide before. And now its tenacious tendrils are in every cell of my being.
Let the theme always be as terrible and serious as the problem of life is terrible and serious. Perhaps I know better than anyone why only man laughs. On the contrary. I have finally understood the meaning of a sense of humor. It is a demonstration of freedom. For only he who knows how to smile is free. An example of elusiveness is L. Carroll's Cheshire Cat: present and absent – because he disappears, leaving only his smile... And once the smile disappears – everything in the universe is predetermined.
Life is a kind of joke, it is foolish to take it seriously. Only art deserves to be taken seriously, and everything else should be taken ironically. But by getting rid of life, do we not deprive ourselves of the pleasure of mocking it? The final mockery is that, having slipped away many times, you suddenly realize that you have slipped away irrevocably – and, in order not to be ridiculous, you sacrifice yourself. He who laughs last probably didn’t get the joke.
My intention is to warn you against Seriousness, against that unpardonable sin. Instead, I would like to suggest that you engage in trifles. For why not admit: trifles are the most difficult thing in the world; I mean conscious, deliberate, voluntary occupation with trifles.
Jokes, witticisms, ridicule of human shortcomings, absurd situations, harmless deceptions have accompanied human life since ancient times, easing its burdens and hardships, helping to relieve mental stress. We are so frivolous by nature that only entertainment prevents us from actually dying. Intellectual entertainment is necessary for our spiritual health.
Humor is a great balm for anger. A great way to avoid getting angry is to imagine yourself as a character in an absurdist play: things make no sense, people are incompetent, and justice, if it occurs, is purely accidental. Instead of getting angry at all this, I convince myself to laugh. And at the same time, imagine how the imaginary playwright could make life even more absurd. Since the world is moving toward a delusional state of affairs, we should also shift toward a delusional point of view.
Hegel and the early Kierkegaard, who devoted his dissertation to irony, were generally critical of the romantic understanding of irony. “And immeasurable sadness overwhelms us when we watch how magnificence turns into nothing, submitting to the inexorable laws of earthly existence.” It is precisely this “moment of transition, when the idea itself inevitably turns into nothing, that should be the true center of art, where wit and reflection unite into one, each of which creates and destroys with opposite aspirations. It is here that the spirit of the artist must embrace all directions with one all-seeing gaze. And this gaze, reigning over everything, destroying everything, we call irony.” “Irony is not a separate, accidental mood of the artist, but the most secret living embryo, the center of all art.”
The conclusions of the Russian mind, so comprehensive, so full of compassion, inevitably have a taste of exceptional sadness. It is precisely the feeling that there is no answer to the questions that life poses one after another, and that history ends in a hopeless interrogative intonation, that fills us with a deep and, in the end, perhaps offensive despair.
The decision to commit suicide, according to Camus, is a person’s admission that life in his eyes has become meaningless, incomprehensible, absurd, that he has begun to feel like an outsider in the world.
However, suicide is a false conclusion from the awareness of absurdity. Absurdity is clarity, i.e. a clear awareness by a person that existence is meaningless, and this clarity does honor to a person. In addition, suicide does not cancel the meaninglessness of existence, but only supports it. "Absurd man" is a man who has realized the absurdity, he is able to attach value to his existence, to live in this world as a human being.
He always means not how long life is, but what it is. For it is not life itself that is good, but a good life. In fact, there is nothing at all tiresome in being and becoming, just as it is not at all difficult simply to exist; in some illnesses it is difficult to breathe, but existence itself is as simple as can be; what is difficult and tiresome are the ways of being and the way of life. In other words, to live is easy, it is difficult to create the conditions for it.
We threaten and are threatened. After all, we ourselves are in question.
All you can do is lament the imperfection of human nature. And why not replace the action with tragic amateurism?
These two arguments are connected to each other. Or rather, they connect us, so tightly that we can no longer choose our own problems. It is they, the problems, who choose us in turn.
When one tries to extract the rules of Action from the feeling of the absurd, one discovers that, as a result of this feeling, murder is at best regarded as indifferent and, therefore, becomes permissible. If one believes in nothing, if one sees no meaning in anything and cannot assert any value, everything is permitted and nothing has any significance. There are no arguments "for", no arguments "against", a murderer can neither be condemned nor justified. It makes no difference whether one burns people in gas ovens or devotes one's life to caring for lepers. Virtue and malice become a matter of chance or caprice.
If there is neither true nor false, neither good nor bad, the rule becomes the maximum efficiency of the action itself, that is, force. And then we must divide people not into righteous and sinners, but into masters and slaves.
Outside of human existence, the absurd wager is unthinkable: in this case, one of the two parties necessary for the dispute is missing. Only a living, conscious person can declare that life is absurd. How, then, without making significant concessions to the desire for intellectual comfort, can one preserve for oneself the unique advantage of such reasoning? By recognizing that life, being a good for you, is also such for others.
Our century readily admits that murder can be justified, and the reason for this lies in the indifference to life that is characteristic of nihilism. Of course, there were times when the thirst for life reached such a strength that it resulted in atrocities. But these excesses were like the burn of unbearable pleasure; they have nothing in common with the monotonous order established by compulsory logic, which fits everything and everyone into its Procrustean bed.
Perhaps Becker's greatest achievement was the creation of a science of evil. He helped us understand the relationship between the denial of death and the dominion of evil. In general, evil is almost always larger in scale than good, because the former is impersonal, while the latter is targeted, addressed to specific individuals. Such pinpointing, purposefulness, and limited scale are inscribed in the very nature of good as an action of the personal and discriminating. But evil strikes many at once, indiscriminately: wars, revolutions, dictatorships, catastrophes, natural disasters... There is no such natural phenomenon, equivalent to a tsunami or an earthquake, that would be positive, i.e. would cause mass jubilation and be accompanied by universal happiness. Evil is full-flowing, volcanic, hurricane-like, easily unfolds into a majestic panorama, is painted, aestheticized. Not only is totalitarianism evil, but evil itself has the property of totality.
In a certain sense, a person who condemns only himself to death denies all values except one – the right to life that other people have. This is proved by the fact that a suicide never destroys his neighbor, does not use the destructive force and terrible freedom that he gains by deciding to die. Every solitary suicide, unless it is committed in revenge, is in its own way magnanimous or full of contempt. But contempt is in the name of something. If the world is indifferent to the suicide, it means that he imagines what is or could be important to him. The suicide thinks that he is destroying everything and taking everything with him into oblivion, but his death itself affirms a value that perhaps deserves to be lived for. Suicide is not enough for absolute negation. The latter requires absolute destruction, the destruction of both oneself and others. In any case, one can live in absolute denial only on condition that one strives in every way toward this tempting limit. Murder and suicide represent two sides of the same coin – an unhappy consciousness that prefers the dark ecstasy in which earth and sky merge and are destroyed to the suffering of human fate.
What is striking is that, according to Freudian analysis, negation ultimately turns into affirmation, but an affirmation that affirms nothing. This is the deep structure. The unconscious is the womb of language.
The absurd is contradictory in its content, since, in its effort to support life, it renounces value judgments, and yet life as such is already a value judgment. To breathe is to judge. Of course, it is wrong to say that life is a constant choice. However, it is impossible to imagine a life devoid of any choice. For this simple reason, the concept of the absurd, when put into practice, is unthinkable. It is equally unthinkable in its expression. The whole philosophy of meaninglessness is alive with the contradiction of the fact that it expresses itself. It thereby introduces a minimum of coherence into incoherence; it introduces consistency into what, according to it, has no consistency. Speech itself is coherent. The only logical position based on meaninglessness would be silence, if silence in turn meant nothing. The initial emotional anguish thus risks becoming comfortable. The wound, so assiduously aggravated, can eventually become a source of pleasure.
Rimbaud, who sings of "the pretty little crime mewing in the mud of the streets", runs to Harar to complain only about his life without a family. Life was for him "a farce in which everyone plays without exception". But this is what he cries out to his sister at the hour of death: "I will rot in the earth, and you, you will live and enjoy the sun!"
However, it is impossible to justify a position based on any particular emotion. The feeling of absurdity is a feeling like the others.
Both great pains and great joys can equally serve as the beginning of reflection; they move it. But it is impossible to experience these feelings again and again and to maintain them during the whole period of reflection.
Of course, death requires some kind of consent, i.e. a capitulation of the will to live. That is why the doomed one thirsts for the life-giving air of the future. One more minute, executioner, one more second to make a wish, to think about the future, and perhaps the great miracle that sometimes justifies our hopes will fill the emptiness of this tiny delay, turning it into an immense future.
The mystery of suicidal consciousness? A question of temperament, an uneven character, isn't it? Perhaps. I don't rule out that death is simply the result of bad upbringing.
Blinding noon. Suicide is sacred. And life is not a self-evident process or even a hobby... Life is continuous suicide. But why tell you this? You and I are molded from different wax, or rather from different ashes. I just don't want to be in this nasty place. It's unbearable to be here. I don't want to be. Rock and roll is dead, and we are not yet, someday we need to fix this...
In the words of Nietzsche, only he who constantly denies life itself deserves real life. Every being that can be denied, therefore deserves to be denied; and the wisdom of this world is madness before God, and to be truthful means... And any person at the end of his life, before death, is given the chance of such a life, which, unfortunately, is more virtual.
Why is there anything or anyone at all? "I feel that I may not be... Therefore I, as a thinking being, would not exist if my mother had been killed before I was born; therefore I am not a necessary being."
How senseless death is. How senseless life is. And when the noose of loneliness tightens under the heart and the mind's net profit has to be paid, a miracle may happen, and there will be no need to justify anything. But the miracle comes late and only for a moment, when the sun is squinting in a tight noose. It is unlikely that this number will work today.
He nods with satisfaction when the elevator gets stuck. I always know who will do me harm, even though the person himself may not yet intend to. Even the slate crawls at the sight of me. I have nowhere to put my problems. Guys like me come back less and less often. I will perish, like children perish.
"I" – that drum skin on which the boy is forever beating with sticks? Or do we speak only with words, through words, about words, like a novel that aspires to be in the French manner? I do not understand you. I pass through walls as if they had doors. Many say that there are.
I bore no malice towards anyone. I am kind and just tired... I am done with it. I wished them every luck. There were kind and brave and patient and sensible among them, and they deserved luck. Each of them had their own specialty. But it was no longer my business. And yet, before leaving, I turn to face them, so that it will be etched in their memory.
You are deprived, my dear, deprived. You are completely twisted...
Publican. Christ was probably the same kind of eccentric.
In both Russian and English, the words "strange" and "wanderer" are cognate. They have a common beginning. "A strange person" is someone who wanders. We are all wanderers here on this earth, because we are given a body and other parts. They say that our earth is also a wanderer.
- You're weird, that's the whole idea.
— Idea? What idea?
One should never discuss ideas, only sensations and images – for ideas do not arise within us, ideas are never truly ours.
And freedom, being a necessity, often tore away my true essence with a monstrously unconditional super-slavery, and I fled from freedom... Freedom was always an exceptional possibility. But I fled in a spiral...
If you look at a problem closely enough, you will see yourself as part of the problem. I have thought about this a lot. And it seems wrong to me that I am part of the problem. Not good. For many people. I cannot be the solution to a problem if I am part of it. There are no problems that cannot be escaped. In principle, any problem that depends on people (and in our life almost everything depends on people)... How easily some of them are resolved! However, it is amazing with what fabulous ease sometimes... However, who said that life should be more complicated?
Whatever it is, it is so offensive to live, we console ourselves in advance with death and – at the slightest thing – say: – Let me die, I don’t care! Probably, for this insolence, which sees death as an exit from the game, we will be held accountable. Nature does not give too easy endings, like leaving a party, when you can take your hat and say: “Well, I’m going, and you stay and do what you want.” Probably, death (even in the form of simple physical disappearance), like everything else in the world, must be earned. Nature will not allow us to be capricious in her house.
Every pleasure is preceded by peace. But peace is not an incentive to action, a source of anxiety. That is why Kant suggested that "every pleasure is preceded by suffering." His arguments are as follows. Human life progresses. It becomes better. And therefore, if it began with pleasure, it would end with pleasure. And people would die with joy. With pleasure. Which is absurd. Suffering is not an objection to life. Where is the logic? After all, if life is natural, then resistance to it is unnatural!
For biological systems, this phenomenon was described by Cope. In order to move forward, one must step back. As a pious man, Cope saw in this a confirmation of the words of Christ: until you become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of God. The plasticity of human consciousness is also not unlimited; it is limited at the neurophysiological level by the ever-increasing threshold of neuronal excitability, and at the level of consciousness – by the growth of conservatism as a result of the formation of an increasingly rigid ideological skeleton (increasing cooperativeness of consciousness).
Our suicides discredit suicide – not the other way around. A potential suicide, a deliberate one, appears as an unlucky debutant who has failed to cope with the canonical role, making fun of himself. Although, they say, before this a person curses his life. The thought of suicide, as we understand, is a difficult mental test. What is played out in the imagination replaces real action. Still, something in a person is really killed. He seems to carry within himself the corpse of his former self.
"What kind of people are these? What kind of people are these?" I repeated to myself in despair, picking at the herring.
He found melancholy in his soul, he also informed NN about this . Rejoice, – his friend responded to this. – Melancholy is not a waste, but the core of the blood. It gives birth to heroes, because, bordering on frenzy, it moves them to courageous deeds. My dear friend, you are already at an age when you make manly decisions. Suicide is not a denial of will, but a manifestation of its powerful affirmation. A sure way not to go crazy in other circumstances: to remember the unreality of everything around you and not to part with it...
And he dined with friends less and less often, because the time of friendship was gradually fading away, and he already had little faith in the fact that one could have friends and that friendly relations could play any role in a person’s biography or influence his fate. Friendship as a phenomenon – almost like love – is the source of so many disappointments and senseless abuses that it would be complete madness to try to exist without it, depriving oneself of all these surprises.
You know, the actions that you regret at first are the only ones that remain in your memory. And if they remain, then they are the most valuable. If you want to do something, never ask about the consequences. Otherwise, you will never do anything. When it comes to trifles, you can ask, but when it comes to important things, never.
"You once said that you hate our whole life," the father asked, enunciating each word distinctly. "Do you still hate it now?" The son's serious answer sounded just as measured and slow: "Yes, I hate it from the very bottom to the very top. I hate it and I don't understand it."
- Did you find something better? Say thank you for surviving, for living, you forgetful fool, – the owner scolded him.
— And the dung beetle lives! If people are valued for their work, then a horse is better than any man, it carries – and keeps quiet. A piece of clay is no more noble than an orangutan. As Thoreau said: "Being busy is not enough: so are ants. The question is what you are busy with."
"You can't earn stone palaces by honest labor." Sometimes you forget yourself, you remember that you work for children too... Of course, there are also decent people – those who work, who are engaged in the efficient production of consumer goods, or who somewhat comically or, if you like, pathetically (but I was first and foremost a comedian) sacrifice everything for the sake of children; those who in their youth had no beauty, later – ambition and all their lives – money and who, however, with all their souls, more sincerely than anyone else, are committed to the values of beauty, youth, wealth, ambition and sexuality; so to speak, the salt of the earth.
As if dying, I saw all the years flying by, all the efforts my father had made to make life at least somewhat interesting... "Somewhere children are sleeping," I thought, "dreaming of something seemingly childish, but in fact already earning money, like adults. Everyone works from infancy. After all, it happened to me too, I remember how... I remember how this bright red drop of hope ripens. It seems that we are about to understand something, complete it, reason it out, and then another life will begin, correct and real. But this never happens, because the red drop always disappears somewhere, and we begin to accumulate it again. And then it disappears again, and so it goes on all our lives, until we get tired. And then all that remains for us is to lie down on the bed, turn to the wall and die..."
Between you and me is the difference between a man who has fallen into the water and a man who is swimming: both must swim, but one out of necessity, and the other out of pleasure. But the true swimmers are those who swim without a goal. It is a game that anyone can play. And the swim continues, although it is written: "do not swim."
As long as the heart remembers the prohibitions, a person is alive. But little by little they are forgotten. And the one they wanted to save dies. Thus they squander the most precious of their treasures – the meaning of existence.
I gave up the idea of finding any flaw in him. But he wouldn't let me go. I read in his eyes a calm and inexorable sentence. And then I realized what separated us: my opinion of him didn't affect him at all – for him it was a pathetic psychology, like the kind they breed in novels.
It's a shame to be good. It's a good habit to say nasty things to people you meet, but I like to do noble deeds, it's my weakness. Scoundrel, why did you pretend to be a good person!
Injustice today will be justice tomorrow. I pave the way where they tried to forget about them and called hibernation happiness. I work for the sake of man, created by beautiful injustice. And the logic of well-wishers is familiar to me.
What is the most precious thing in the world? It turns out: to realize that you are not participating in injustices. They are stronger than you, they were and will be, but let them not be through you.
The advantages of your refined life... If you compare yourself with others, you can become complacent or bitter, because there will always be someone higher or lower than you. So, in fact, there is no life at all. And until you feel sick from the constant need to think about what is and is not advantageous to you: the only thing you know for sure is what you should not do. If I left, I don’t think I would want to go back.
I don't want to play with dolls or fool around, and I ask you to free me "from all filth." Well, until we meet again... – and goodbye, I doubt we'll see each other again. I ask you to love and complain. – I don't have any business waiting here!
Why shouldn't I want to die? I hate living. The only reason I continue to do this is because I stand out from the rest of the people, and I don't need crumbs. If I knew what was waiting for me ahead, I would have jumped out the window right away.
Chapter 39. Uncertain Presence
Where there is a pensive face of a stranger – presence becomes easier. These are the same daydreams into which a person imperceptibly falls many times a day, when his gaze moves across a glossy page, a screen or strangers' faces...
As you know, as you know... It was not predicted, not thought. The word "utopianism" was invented in 1516 by a certain Mr. More, who formed it from Greek roots, and it means something like "coming from nowhere". A person often, against the vile life in his dreams, strives to reach the unattainable and find access to the inaccessible. And as a result, either a reason for repentance, or the grief itself for himself.
In each person a scarlet flower of hope blossomed – and although this hope itself was most often meaningless, like the farewell "cock-a-doodle-doo" of a broiler rooster, its flower was real, and the invisible reaper who was rushing on my lathered back cut it with his scythe. A red spiral of energy trembled in people, a smoldering discharge between what they accepted as reality and what they agreed to accept as a dream. The poles were false, but the spark between them was real. The tongue swallowed these sparks, swelling and tearing apart my poor skull.
Necessary is a duty. We always do what we must. Even when we are having fun or washing dishes or just looking indifferently into the distance. It is still a duty of some kind. A person can tolerate monstrous inequality if it is approved and sanctified by law. A person can endure any "what" if he has a big enough "why". But do I need it? Will eternity figure out "who among us is a serf"? Why am I writing about eternity? There is no eternity. Everything very, very good and very, very bad lasts a very, very short time.
We do not know the goals, roads, what to want and what not to want. We are all looking for a universal law of organizing our lives that will make us all happy. A person is inclined to perceive any fate as a real purpose of some providence.
For help, we turn once again to the modern philosopher Allen Stewart Koenigsberg, known to everyone but his mother as Woody Allen. As Koenigsberg said, “Time is nature’s way of avoiding everything happening at once.”
Jumping "out of time" should not be confused with time-sequence confusion, which has become a popular screenwriting technique used in films such as Memento and Mulholland Drive.
You will quietly whisper to one of your chosen ones: " Life is an evil snake, slowly crawling in the damp labyrinth of time, each scale of which reflects the face of each of us, those who consider their existence not useless, moving quietly, changing day and night as often as scales; it leaves behind a trace that is later washed away by rain ... Life is also a precious stone in the frame of death, a cherry pit, a kernel in a nutshell, a pearl of elastic rhyme in the mollusk of prose, an animal in a labyrinth, a child in the cradle of laughter, who even in sleep wipes away tears with his sleeve." Flowers are needed to brighten up coffins, and the coffin will remind: we are flowers ... Life is short, sir, and we are wildflowers. Flowers became so beautiful for bees, not for people.
They shone in the dank air, they wandered, and in the sepulchral atmosphere of the carriage – the windows were steamed up and the lamps had misty halos – they were like dancing lights, like the wandering lights that people say dance over the graves of those who sleep uneasy in the cemetery. An absurd idea? An empty fantasy! And yet, since nothing ends without sediment, and our memory is a dancing light in the mind when the lived is buried, perhaps these eyes, shining, wandering, are the spirit of the family, the spirit of the era, of culture, dancing over the grave?
The guy thought: "Who will protect us from evil here?" The student, overwhelmed by the abyss, is more concentrated than the filter of an agricultural unit. The walrus shakes up something ticklishly fluttering inside itself, which does not know sleep. The walrus and the student in their difficulties without return... A mustachioed fish in an aquarium jerkily removes the seams from the lunar bottom. Dreams rename objects that do not exist. Cities are completely different in a dream than on the development plan. Plains slow down, falling asleep at the angle of a tennis ball catching a net. Where to choose a place? Dreaming dogs do not take a trail... The landscape in the original was, as you understand, somewhat more refined. And suddenly it begins to seem to me that we have been here for a long time and that all this is a dream in which we are frozen; a dream that can be interrupted by any trifle, even a simple movement of the eyelids.
The spider's web is silent, reflecting equilateral slumber. Pioneer, take your glasses away. The web will work later. My spider, the shepherd of deaths, did not ask to come to the table. Scared, as if a circular saw was brought to his throat... He resorted to transparency, reproducing nightmares. Catching sleep. The web will work later. A lean spirit, provided with rumors, he locked himself between the lines, a spider. Let's start from the middle. From independent silence. The spider is grabbed from the inside by the nervous system. Ball lightning and ruptures of his will are reduced to an eternal stop, shaking the walls of the insect's shell. Scratched zero, my spider, yours is someone. Teach your little spiders better. Through a random speck of dust, tightly binding them. And time, like a chain on a chatterbox's neck, shifts, surrendering to zero. The forces of your nimble touches have coincided. Spider, sleep, Vesuvius. You – to spin yourself, having puffed up with ordinary malice and determination, my former friend, trained for suddenly. The king of the middle, having wrapped a fly in dull saliva, returning the statue – to sleep. My spider, shepherd of deaths. A slobberer, scattered across the universe.
The spider's paws tremble from weakness, but he, not knowing "up-down", weaves arcs. The wild grass of madness and the wind to the heels. They are similar to the grasshopper, who sits in a golden hole, he was lost in it for a while, trembling, the energy was spreading in circles. Turning away, I waited. I achieved the change, as much as I could change. Behind me, the city of hysterics was blackening, there was a liquid sun... As before, my angel, your gloomy rustle is intimate... Dragonflies and fragile rods breathe with a velvet current, on the earth and in the sky – not a path, but one crossroads. And here is the quietest sea, as if the eye muscles have slowed down from marijuana, – pass the cigarette to the calm horizon, wait, don't rush... from a mollusk – to a cow, from an idea – to an object... Here you will time whoever you want, whoever you see, to your death. You live like leaves, and I come out of a coma. And all this is from childhood and for a long time. I am too small to wink back. Is he stupid if he is pure? Have they come to life? Across themselves, but – they have come to life. Forgive the vignette of prose. The witches are waiting. A characteristic trial awaits. And the zeroing was revealed so purely, my friend, of spaces and rhymes... Here, the path of a pin will bring you to white heat. A pin is a submarine; search, close your search circle. You are here as here. He is too there. In itself – a forgotten concept, but you yourself are a spare part. Don't be nervous – passed two witches, the third remains. It's time to start getting stronger and remember the garden, with the hissing wind; the light candle went out so obsessively; there are enough stooped matches for a century. Write your cycles, la-la-la for herbs. Like the movement of lips. Like snakes of death on the edges, but you have not kissed anyone at the door and the scene breaks off. You are filmed. Don't climb like a sword swallower through an atom, calm down, you are one of us. Get rid of this mental hassle, too, lie down, finally. Gnaw your pillow. Die at dawn, when your loved ones are exhausted. The dead have no shame. Before the shot, call someone.
There was nowhere to go, but I had to go somewhere. It's in rainy weather that people ask "Where are we going?" In my presence, a woman paints her nails. Most often, my thoughts are sad and thoughtful. Mostly, I'm bored on Sundays. And all my memories are bored.
I missed the feeling of work done, and I was already overcome by the mortal melancholy that comes at the end of every day lived in vain. Am I really going to leave? Nowhere. What the hell am I, a slacker, smoking the sky for? You decide, because you are a busy man, a worker, and I am hanging around this world like a trinket. I am living in vain.
It was precisely because of this thought of death, which on the one hand liberated me and on the other paralyzed me, that I did not acquire any profession. When you think about death all the time, you cannot have a profession. That is why I began to live the way I did – on the sidelines, like a parasite.
Somewhere in the mists there is an island. On the island there is a castle. In the castle there is a large hall, lit by a small lamp. In the hall there are people who are waiting. Waiting for what? They don’t know. They are waiting for someone to come and knock on their door. Waiting for the lamp to go out. Waiting for Fear. Waiting for Death. They occasionally utter words. Yes, they drop words that break the silence for a moment. But without finishing the sentence, stopping their gesture, they listen again. They listen, they wait. Will she come or not? She will come! She always comes! It’s too late. Perhaps she will come only tomorrow! And the people gathered in the large hall, lit by a small lamp, smile. They hope. And then, finally, there is a knock. That’s it. That’s a whole life. That’s a whole life.
(The small, charmingly unreal dramas of Maeterlinck are distinguished by their profound naturalness and truthfulness. His heroes, like visions, are full of life. They resemble those balls which, when charged with electricity, emit rays at the touch of a pin. These are not abstractions – they are syntheses. The characters in his dramas are separate states of one human soul, or, more accurately, separate states of the collective soul of all mankind. These are moments, minutes, which could become eternal: they are real precisely because they are unreal.)
What is death? Is death a reality? Death is a transition from external reality to internal reality. There is no death, essentially. How do you know that? The body dies. The soul is immortal. I don’t know what the soul is. Is it the psyche? Well, yes, we can say that it is the psyche, a combination of the conscious and the unconscious. But can we say that the conscious is death and the unconscious is life? In a certain sense, yes. In what sense? Well, in that the unconscious can be collective, but the conscious cannot. And is the individual unconscious mortal? No, it temporarily passes into the collective. And then again into someone’s individual. Any event, any thing is both conscious and unconscious.
Looking at the velvet sky, I walked towards him in a depressed mood. A man is born to die. What does that mean? You work yourself to the bone for no apparent reason. You hang around and wait. You wait for route A. On an August evening, you wait for a pair of big breasts in a hotel room. You wait for a fish to speak. For a crayfish to whistle. You hang around. Back and forth. Either turned this way or that way. In order for the doors to move, the hinges must remain motionless.
I've been feeling uneasy and bad for the last few days. I don't even know why this is happening. Probably because of the heat. My thoughts are wild too.
Having looked closely, I realized: people – everyone – have absolutely nothing to do, life is not about finding something to do and doing something. In the evenings it is most noticeable. Finally: I am bored, and I am constantly doing nothing. Writing really is like work. They say that work makes a person kind and honest. Well, here is a chance at least.
In the clear, deepening sky, one round, sullen cloud hangs. The same split thought haunted him. There is the earth, and the sky, and me. There is always now, and yesterday is today. Where did you stop, where? The character is spoiled, somewhere in the field a rattling tractor is skidding. Somewhere in the world there are... attentive eyes. Chosenness? The myth of the calendar. Unfortunately, there is only one life. The mystery is great, I would like to know at least something in life for sure.
I turn off my phone, otherwise it will ring all night, and I will hope every time that it is you. And every time I will be disappointed. How could I have foreseen this? If I have nowhere to go, I go to her, but every time I quickly get entangled in endless excuses that do not satisfy her. All she knows how to say is: "And how could you even think of this... And how could you even think of this..." This spell haunts me even when I am alone.
He saw his mother all the time, how they told her: “Your son is missing in action,” and what her face was like, and how his father rubbed his cheeks and looked around in confusion, and how cold and empty they were...
And only one thought: somehow it is awkward to fall and die in front of strangers. You live only once, only once. Death in the bustle of life. It is awkward to fall and die in front of strangers... It is clear that dying among strangers is bad form. A man should die surrounded by his family and in private, so to speak. If I die at home, they will not miss me until I smell... Sometimes you do not understand the simplest things, he thought. There are few forest Udmurt women left, those who wear braids. But there are some in China. I must forget myself and go somewhere deep. The tenderness of water is more reliable than anything I know. And then I did what I had done all my life in any difficult circumstances: I simply stopped thinking.
Intense concentration, fatigue with a hint of bitterness, confusion – these are the last portraits.
Is he who is tired of the world infinitely tired? And does that mean that he is also tired of being tired? For the question of human freedom always becomes a question of man's tiredness of his existence. For he who refuses to cultivate, like others, reaps his harvest in the autumn.
You don't govern, power is to make the final decisions, to decide when the conversation ends, that's what power is. So, if we can bear them, we will bear them; if not, we will leave life, since it does not bring us joy, as we leave the theater.
And pour number after number, like grains of cereal in a mortar... And act like a child, evil, and reason like a woman, stupidly. Whistle like a goldfinch and live well, and also climb into the yoke, then add both and get shit. A short smell of the evil meaning of your everyday worries, and the hands do not turn quickly, and time does an abortion. It was the meaning of life to prove that I am I. The gift of self-affirmation, like an inscription in the light of headlights, will flash in the darkness of the night... You are you, and God be with you. The wormwood light of lanterns rustles along the roads, and cats seem like monkeys... In the twilight I watched through the window the herds of mooing cars scurrying back and forth. And the day runs, and it rains, a car flies in the darkness, and someone steals our lives, but it is not clear who.
The enormous city is pulsating, and everywhere in it there are waves – ebb and flow. A city-mixer buzzing in ambush. Such a waltz: ebb, flow, and – in circles, in circles. The waitress, deftly holding the tray, rushes back and forth, and in circles, in circles, giving out greens, compote and cream when it’s due, to whom it’s due. Does everything in life really have to be equalized to zero? Does that vile concept of balance, about which you once wrote me three long pages, really work here too?..
Even the author's sincere intentions do not change anything – this is the case when they pave the road to hell.
"I'm not going to put hot water bottles around the audience and give them sleeping pills... I want them to shudder, to lose sleep and to think for once before they start burning and blowing each other up again. And they may well return to their old ways if that's what life is and only that..."
At the same time, of course, doubling the lack, raising it to the absolute, making of it an "incorrigible insufficiency of being", "a lack of being, which is called life". And you will not make faces full of reproaches at fate because of it. And if this, as you say, makes us people, whom the hour hand, having grabbed by the collar, drags and then pushes off the cliff, if nothing can be forgotten, but only reproached, circled, and if this, as you say, makes us people, then I would prefer to grow old for a long time, but quickly and, without having time to say goodbye to anyone, to turn into something sincerely having no relation to anything, especially to me. But he was absolutely right, absolutely right, because it is late and impossible, as you rightly noted, this is precisely what makes us people.
Buddha, in order to avoid “death” ... invented “did not live”, “do not live” (commandment), “there is nothing” (nirvana). He conquered death ... yes! But at what cost? By extinguishing life ... Buddha returns the world to “before the creation of the world”, and his “nirvana”, in essence, coincides with that “chaos”, where “nothing was visible” – but where everything arose from. All this “before the creation of everything”, called “Buddhism” – is very profound, very puzzling. “Know yourself – what happiness is in that? You will know, and where to run then?” Therefore – do not know, but forget yourself. But for this oblivion one must have something to forget. For self-giving one must have something to give. In a sense, it would be better if nothing worked, nothing functioned. Not to be born, to leave the wheel of births, without a mouth to suck, without an anus to defecate. God created everything from nothing, but the material is always felt.
The people standing behind the counters had a kind of fussy and casual look. The sellers moved slowly. The fatigue of the day lay on their faces like heavy makeup. So slowly that one could live on Jupiter.
Suddenly to see the tired eyes of a father reflected in the window glass. You see, the speaking eye is tired, watching, tired of thinking, arguing with itself, tired of hearing, hiding its unsuitability for the cause, in the village of fatigue, where all beings are identical. I do not want to fight against ugliness, I do not want to be an accuser, I do not even want to accuse the accusers. My argument, remember this firmly, is only disgust. I will look away, from now on this will be the only form of my denial. In essence, it makes no difference to me who I object to. In essence, the very subject of our discussion interests me little. Salespeople are slaves of shops and stalls. When I die, bury me and write on the monument: "Died of disgust."
As often happens, the right word did not come to mind – so I turned and walked out of the store. I remember leaving there as if I were crippled, with some kind of irresistible, mortally destructive melancholy in my heart, such that it was impossible for me to live at that time, absolutely impossible. As if I were the only person in the whole world. And I became scared and very sad, and so it is to this day. I must have this disease. This is what will kill me. It is only good when I forget about myself. When there are only eyes, or ears, or skin. For the last two or three years, I do not remember a single happy minute. Why do I feel so lousy every morning when I wake up? I keep wondering if I will be able to go to the toilet normally or not? Will my body work? Will my intestines cope with what they are supposed to cope with? Will my decrepit organism grind the food to a brown state?
Even the trees stood dejected and motionless, as if tortured. Everything looked gloomy, sleepy, everything spoke of oppression. It was something bitter, full of hopelessness and at the same time helplessly obstinate.
He looked around lost in the bouquet of streets, where flowerpots were on the window, where carts passed, dropping straw – a lost sheep, a moon cat, making his way about his business, crawling on the street all damned day. Gloomy, looking dimly around, he wandered through the streets and, finally, returned home late. Returning, he felt only one thing – a dull melancholy.
I came back. I kept the most disgusting memory of this trip. With only one solution: to plug that black hole in my soul. Plug it, concrete it and live so that it would never open again. I became different. Quiet. Taciturn. Thoughtful. Scared. I didn’t drink. I read. Woke up and read. Until the evening.
Chapter 40. The Story with the Girl
The girl looked. She looked strangely – with the kind of expression one usually has when watching a river flow or seeing off a plane flying by – long, sticky, thoughtfully floating away...
Oh, there was one little Jewess in my life, I will never forget that little Jewess! Her hair was black, curled like a small devil, her eyebrows were also black, shaggy, like two worms, and her skin was swarthy, yellowish, and to the touch – morocco. She chatted in Russian – you couldn't tell the difference, but in Hebrew she knew one word "tsores", which in their language means grief, trouble, some kind of melancholy rubbish that pricks the heart, and from this heart rubbish you get "tsores". And there was a grain of tsores in her, a zest such as not picked out, but planted, that zest was embedded in the composition of the soul. Sometimes he would laugh, caress, but his eyes were so sad, so sad, and they evoked the Arabian desert, or perhaps the Sahara, through which they ran then with their children, with junk on their backs, on camels, and they bore all the world's sorrow on themselves and on those hump-nosed camels, arrogant and also similar to Jews, with heavy, round eyelids.
Elizabeth was waiting for the bus in Victoria Street. She was glad to have escaped from the shop. She did not want to go home yet. It would be nice to walk a bit in the fresh air. She had to get on the bus. And already, while she was standing at the bus stop in her superbly tailored raincoat, it was beginning... They were already beginning to compare her to poplars, and the early dawn, and hyacinths, deer, a flowing stream and garden lilies; and this was terribly poisoning her life, because she dreamed of doing whatever she wanted in the quiet of the country, and everyone wanted to compare her to lilies, and she was forced to go to receptions and hang around in this terrible London, when it was so nice in the quiet of the country with just her father and the dogs. The buses flew into the stop, froze, and moved off, vulgarly glittering with red and yellow varnish. Which one to sit in? In general, it didn’t matter. As long as she didn’t have to squeeze through. Elizabeth preferred peace. It was precisely the liveliness that she lacked, but she had beautiful eyes, Chinese, oriental eyes, and with such shoulders and posture, her mother said, she always looked charming; and lately, especially in the evenings, when the conversation occupied her (however, it was impossible to excite her), she seemed almost a beauty – majestic, quiet.
She sadly sat down on a chair, looked around the room vaguely, was silent for a moment, looking at her feet, then, in a neutral, tired, colorless voice, asked: "Well, how are you? What have you been up to?" And how is our friend Yubelblat doing?.. huh?.. is he still short-sighted?.. And is he still into watching dreams and reading other people's thoughts?..
- You know, now in Europe and in the best houses of Philadelphia they have revived the old fashion of pouring tea through a strainer. It is unusually effective and very elegant.
The mood is normal. Only there is a slight fog in the head. Like in the morning, when you wake up. Well, as it happens, the thoughts are already completely different, in any case...
I study smoking men with sleepy eyes, in rumpled trousers, with traces of the night on their skin. Anyone can be anyone. This environment becomes irreplaceable and the main one when otherworldly signals come to me.
I've been doing God knows what for the last few days. I spend a lot of time looking at myself in the mirror. Sometimes I seem unreal to myself, as if I'm not looking at my reflection at all. I have to look away. I look at my face, my eyes. I try to figure out what they're saying. What am I. Why am I here. It's strange: a person is quite happy when he forgets himself, when he doesn't belong to himself. He misses himself. The means to replace himself are work, play, love, wine, etc. The happiest moments – we don't remember ourselves, they've disappeared from our own eyes.
In the morning there is morning, and in the evening there is evening. My gaze on the bus does not bother anyone. Notice how many years we have been saying the same thing. When surges arise by themselves, and we do not have to make any special efforts, we reach for them, missing something exciting in our lives. And therefore, we support fleeting moments of pleasure in every possible way in order to create the largest possible picture of pleasure, and moments of unhappiness – to create a picture of global grief. And if everything is clear with happiness – it is yours and only yours, then you want to share grief with everyone.
The thought that she was ugly, insignificant and of no importance did not leave her, but rather it was not even a thought, but a certain atmosphere, not something clear, but a certain gloomy reflection of another gray day.
I am not very happy here. But there are so many people in the world, aren't there, who are not very happy either? You agree with me, don't you? What do you think?.. I am here like a peach in a carpenter's shop. For whom and why am I saving myself? For what dark obscurity? ...and my thoughts are like bad drawings that should be torn up right now.
I am no good and I have nothing... nothing... I am fed up, I am superfluous here... There are people who are born "okay" and who are born "not ok". I was born "not ok": and that is why I have such a strange, prickly biography, but quite interesting. A person born "not ok" always feels "out of place": that is exactly how I have always felt. The opposite is my grandmother. And her noble life. That is who was born... "okay". And in poverty, insignificance of the situation – what continuous light from her. And benefit. From me, I think, there is no "benefit". From me – "turmoil".
The world has become no joy to me. Like those maidens who "put out their lamps." I – who so loved to listen to how its gears squeak, clinging to one another, to admire how beautiful the colors of its bizarre mosaic are. And to walk down the street with feeling, with arrangement – now the right foot forward, now the left.
Hegel remarks on a specific occasion that does not concern us now: “When the dissonance of unhappiness bursts into her life, she is in the grip of a cruel contradiction, not possessing the necessary skill, not knowing the ways to bring her heart closer to reality...”.
Everyone is sinful. But it is said: for one breath everything is forgiven. And, therefore, value only one thing – the breath of life. You are superfluous everywhere, and all the people on earth are superfluous. Just remind him more often that he is a good guy, he will believe you. Remember: as soon as a person admits his mistake, everything is forgiven.
I will press my tired eyelids to your gentle fingers. Despite the inability to change the imprinted lines on your palms and the encrypted horoscope card with an arrow. Do you think that my life does not disgust me with tomorrow? I will give you advice: do nothing! Just – burden the earth, and then let the scoundrel fate carry you, because that is what you live for, to pick the flowers of pleasure. Nature and fate are the only forces that should never be denied obedience. Here, fate plays with man, and man plays the trumpet. External and internal destinies are different...
There are no latecomers to God. Sooner or later we will all die, therefore, to be sad is, at the very least, reckless. Grandma was right when she said: "Don't rush to the next world – there are no pubs there!" Generally speaking, you shouldn't do that.
Spinoza was fond of the Latin expression sub specie aeternitatis, which means “from the point of view of eternity.” He said that everyday problems seem less terrible if you look at them from the point of view of eternity. When your lot is to endure something that is (or seems to you) worse than the ordinary lot of humanity, Spinoza’s principles of thinking about the whole, or at least about matters greater than your own misfortune, are useful. There are times when it is comforting to think that human life, with all its evil and suffering, is an infinitesimal part of the life of the universe. Such reflections may not be enough to make a religion, but in a world of misery they are an aid to sanity and an antidote to the paralysis of absolute despair.
Actually, the performance didn't inspire her then either. But, for the most part, it was just annoying that everything was turning into another "Santa Barbara", and strange human cubs running around the streets caused nothing but bewilderment.
Each of us dreams of making a shot at a French opera. No matter how disgustingly slushy the day is. The moral of this fable is this – when you want to meet and immerse yourself in an atmosphere where you don't have to lie, hide, conceal anything, where you can "dance, moan, undress, dress, kiss, drink, wipe wet body movements, trample on the spot, sort things out leaning against the wall, take pictures, disappear..." I don't want to cry into my pillow anymore! Fry some corn, comb a woman's head, look in the mirror, smell of perfume. I'll flop down on the pillows, and look for me... sobbing at the screen.
Well, hit while the heart is boiling and the blood is hot! I will make myself new blood. It is hard, I am tired inside. In the heart there was no other desire, except for the thirst for absolute silence. In two steps the dawn. Two steps, two steps...
What should I do now, though, what trick should I try? I ask: what should I do? Be born again? Among those wronged by fate? Or should I just send it all to hell? As much as I like, don’t bother. Please don’t be shy, do whatever you want. In our pitiful life we’ve done worse. I, too, am glad of my own monstrosity. I pee right on the linoleum wherever I want – and I’m glad that it doesn’t change anything. Everyone is their own crawling nit. – So don’t give a damn about your life, carefree one. – Go to hell! And an expression of hopelessness and despair on his face. Lord, where should we go? Go to hard labor, even. Where should we go, even though there’s nothing to do here, looking around with disgust? Well, where should I go now?.. I have... no... nothing! Otherwise, to hell with him altogether; Damn it all! Come and save me. Ask... Ask now... Maybe tomorrow will be too late. Replace me, change me... never change places, never with anyone!
Of course, I like to read other people's letters and diaries, looking for something that will touch the sluggish soul of the understudy. For example, scribbles touch: "I braided my hair in the morning." I want to say something very elegant, for example: "Nothing in the world lasts forever"; you don't have to travel far for this aphorism, and even less back. He who thirsts for light is dark, and let the dark ones deceive him. The sun is gloomy, although it warms, like vicious love.
Walking past me in the yard, she looks at me from under her bangs in such a way that my old heart stops...
- She is an amazing woman, truly your kind, marry her...
- Self-denial is the essence of a woman who gives birth and raises children, the essence of a family. I am not capable of this. No, I am a pessimist, I hate the idea of the continuation of the human race. Marry her yourself, she is very attractive to you and will be just the right wife for you.
- Nothing happened. I just saw myself. You are a very smart, very decent person, but you are too much in love with harmony, and I would always destroy it for you. Deny me your friendship. No, no, let's forget each other. You made a mistake in choosing me.
Summer evenings, when the faces of those you meet become mysterious, when the rare passers-by look at each other especially attentively. – My respects to the indispensable member! Someone said good evening. I must answer: she is an acquaintance.
Dating ad. Penniless, hopeless, cynical romantic seeks soulmate with opposite sex body to cuddle up to when sad. I am nervous, tearful and cynical, suffering from stomach ulcer and sick, childish imagination. Good thoughts, good beginnings. With the utmost respect to you, I have the honor to wish you health and joy. And so, farewell and bonjour. Always thinking of you. Loser and simpleton. Your sad, clumsy admirer. Detailed address is in the subject line.
I want to find: a piercing look, a dazzling smile, sunny, swift, decisive, sensual, amazing, mind-blowing, bright, attentive, fatal, attractive, cool, honest, awesome, strong, daring and funny, lively and glorious, hot, desirable, etc. My lucky, strong Pierrot, there is no love without you, forgive me that evening. Malvina. P.O. Box 32. However, you seem more modest than others, so cozy, like a big fluffy cat. A woman near you probably feels secluded, warm...
For me you are like the olive brought by the dove into Noah's Ark. I am always ready to satisfy you at this very hour, for this has always been the object of my most lively desire, in the hope of which I remain always ready to serve you.
The little girl is not bad at all. I look at her again more closely. The skirt fits tightly to her figure... and her smile too... She smiled not because she was having fun, but playfully and, at the same time, as if to say: "I'm going to commit suicide now." Her gait was also precise, her legs and ankles were of a good design – lovers of life, certainly capable of straining themselves properly at the right moment. Now I have the same attitude towards her that many of my readers must have towards the pretty little black girls sitting opposite them on the subway, looking at their thin, strong legs growing from that place that conceals pink secrets.
She climbed into bed and fell silent, her eyes tightly closed under the blanket. And a fox, when she sleeps, wraps her tail around her body, and she is warm. That must be nice. I always wanted to have a tail like that. <...> And the foxes took matches, went to the blue sea, lit the blue sea.
He learned that “lately she is most afraid of the words ‘never’ and ‘always’, and also ‘nothing’ and ‘nobody’.”
Nothing she said concerned the world around them; all her words were addressed exclusively to them alone.
She tilts her head to the side and says, "Here I am!" You can chat with me, swap music, scold me for being lazy, praise me for everything, let me go free, rustle pages, pet cats, massage me, look down on me, remember despite... And she says, "You should be worried."
My interests: music, auto, voyage, speed, wind in your face, playing with your hair, the spicy scent of lilac, linden blossom, strawberries, caramel ice cream, pineapples in champagne, going crazy about you, summer, July thunder, melon, movement, Venice, night, night walks, Maugham, Milan, shopping, meeting friends, When the Gods Go Crazy, smart and positive people, sunshine in the rain, doing stupid things, laughing, awakening of nature, exciting books, enjoying the little things, pleasant awakening, sea, sea breeze caressing the skin, people who know how to feel, strong and weak, old and new, changeable and constant, distant cities, new sensations, cats and horses, Japanese cuisine, the aroma of almonds, tangerines, orange blossoms, when you smell of Givenchy pour Homme, the wind of change, the smell of fragrant tobacco and lavender, taking pictures, receiving gifts, holidays, passion, kissing, chatting on the phone, giving love, fantasizing, falling asleep on your chest, unexpectedly good movies, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, expecting a miracle... Tulips (because they're juicy and crunchy), choosing gifts for those I love, a fresh bed, bookstores, the typographic smell of a book I've just bought, petting big fluffy cats that I'm not responsible for, the smell of autumn and withered leaves, knowing that friends are doing well, the sound you make when you open a bottle of wine (that quiet "pop"), waiting to meet, kissing someone for the first time, making love, fireplaces (not fake ones), high heels, wandering aimlessly around the city, brand new banknotes of a decent denomination, watching the foam rise on your coffee, being strong, being weak, preventing grandma from getting old, checkered woolen blankets, big calculators, dreaming, achieving, watching smart little kids play, blueberries and blackberries, turning on the radio and hitting your favorite song, big sharp knives, getting wet in the pouring rain, coming home...
We say, "Thank you for being here," when we can't say, "I love you." We say, "I have no reason to live anymore," when we want to be told otherwise. We say, "It's cold in here," when we need someone's touch. We say, "I don't want anything more from you," when we can't get what we want. We say, "I didn't pick up the phone because I was busy," when we are ashamed to admit that hearing that voice no longer brings us joy. We say, "Nobody needs me," when in fact, only one person needs us. We say, "I can handle it," when we are embarrassed to ask for help. We say, "You're a good friend," when we forget to add, "but you can never be more than that." We say, "That's not the point," when we know we have no choice but to make peace. We say, "I trust you," when we fear we've become a toy. We say, "Forever," when we don't want to look at the clock. We say, "I was there," when we can't justify ourselves.
After meeting him, Caroline wrote in her diary: "Besides, he has a nice face with dark and soft eyes. He is crazy and spoiled. It is very dangerous to be acquainted with him."
The aura of disgust for life, for all the games of his contemporaries, which I understand so well, comes from him. He is lonely and angry at the whole world, just like me. Just like me, he does not idealize the nature of people, does not believe in anything or anyone. I also like him because he never judges anyone. An adult immoral guy who loves to say unpleasant and cynical things. For example, he really likes the saying that "even a chicken rakes only for itself." His speech is literate and florid. And at the same time so obliging. When he crossed the threshold, he seemed a little embarrassed and constrained until he saw familiar faces. He had a wonderful, soft and warm voice, with a captivating kinship, it was perceived not as a sound, but rather as a touch. I treasured this feeling.
She wanted to go up to him and call out, "Mr. Carmichael!" And he would have raised his smoky, green-clouded gaze good-naturedly. But you wake people up when you know what to say to them. And she didn't want to say just one thing – everything at once. With these little words that chop up and mow down the thought – you won't say anything. "About life, about death, about Mrs. Ramsay" ... No, she thought, you won't say anything, and to anyone. An urgent need presses you, and you say it, and it comes out wrong. The words are carried askew, past the mark. And – you give in; the thought drowns; and you stand there, far from a young person, wary, secretive, with wrinkles on the bridge of your nose, with a wary look. Well, how can you convey the sensations of the body in words? Convey the emptiness there (she looked at the steps under the living room window; they were terribly empty). You understand this with your body, not your head. The sight of these steps alone suddenly made her feel physically sick.
But all this, unfortunately, was in French, which was terribly desalinated in translation. English was too obvious, too frank, too honeyed a language for Sasha. After all, in everything she said, no matter how she sang like a nightingale, something always remained hidden; behind everything she did, no matter how reckless her impulses, something was always hidden. The impossibility of fulfillment of desire tormented her. To want the impossible, to want and want – but from this the heart throbs and turns over!
What is happening to us? What do you say to this? she wanted to ask Mr. Carmichael again. The whole world seemed to have spread out at this early morning hour – a pond of thought, a deep pool of reality, and it seemed that if Mr. Carmichael spoke, a crack would touch the surface of the pond. And then what? Something would emerge, something would show itself. A hand would be raised, a blade would flash. All this was nonsense, of course.
He once told me: "It doesn't matter how many men there have been in my life, it matters how much life there was in my men." I love this man. Exactly. (The ice, as it should be, is cold, the roses, as before, are red.) And love carries me away somewhere. But it is impossible to pull myself out of this powerful stream. Not a single chance. Who knows, maybe it carries me to a completely special, unknown world. Or maybe it is a dangerous place. And something (someone?) is already lurking there, and it will deeply, mortally wound me. I will probably lose everything I have. But there is no turning back. There is only one thing left – to trust the stream. Even if such a person – "I" – burns to the ground in it, disappears forever, let it.
It's probably because you don't expect anything from anyone, she said. I'm not like you. Different. But I like you. A lot. Where does the music and magic come from? To whom does this amazing tenderness come from? Unexpectedly, with an almost childish, causeless resentment, with tears tickling my nose, keenly envying the unknown addressee...
This was becoming dangerous. She was dangerously close to the state where a man would fill her entire world again. She didn’t want that. This had to be friendship. Not love. Now, for the first time, she used that word when thinking about him. She didn’t want any love. Love includes suffering. And it is inevitable, at least during separations. And they separate every day. Friendship – no. Love can be unrequited. Friendship – never. Love is full of pride, selfishness, greed, ingratitude. It does not recognize merits and does not hand out diplomas. Besides, friendship is extremely rarely the end of love. And it should not be love! At most, an asymptotic connection. It should constantly bring them closer to each other, but never reward them with a touch.
Of course I still love him, I say out loud, so that the words hit my very pupils. But why not, why shouldn't my feelings be as confusing and contradictory as he is? Aren't the feelings one experiences for a person, albeit subjective, a reflection of that person? Everything that happens to a person in life inevitably resembles him.
The wonders of melancholy surround him. Sluggish and absurd, like everything around him. The best of men are always ready for death. This readiness is felt immediately... and attracts inexorably. There is no doom or hysteria in it, on the contrary – the movements and look of such a person are calm and simple. And everything else is unimportant – neither appearance, nor age, nor education. To live one life with someone like him is the same as a hundred with others. Acquired by chance. The treasure of a moneylender. And there is not a single flaw in you. Miracle medicine consent gift trust. Enchanted, wonderful, fatal, unspeakable...
For example, that my eternal essence is very important to her and she doesn't care at all what can happen to me in life. You, guessing everything in the world... In general, I made it clear to her with a very complicated phrase that I like her. When I met a girl, I always guessed whether she would love me or not. Too much is not said, but guessed.
For the last few months, she had been the most important thing in his life. Every time something important happened, he wanted to tell her about it right away. This desire crept into his life quietly and unnoticed and took possession of him. It changed him, evoked completely new feelings. For example, every time he turned on the computer in the morning, he felt as if a butterfly was fluttering in his stomach. Then such an irresistible thirst for experiences appeared that he could crawl out of a warm bed in the middle of the night and rummage through old cardboard boxes in the basement, looking for collections of Yasnozhevskaya's poems.
And then, at one of the most melancholy moments of the feast, when the cookies were being served... Finally, a joyful surprise occurred, and even to a certain extent a surprise. An event that had an indelible effect on him.
And most importantly: the day before yesterday I dreamed (well, almost dreamed: it was on the verge of sleep and terrible stuffiness) of a new strange cycle. Yesterday I even wrote some impossible for me three stanzas. Perhaps it was some kind of dark trap for the half-asleep. And now it has collapsed, twisted into a point, disappeared into the wall.
Sometimes, of course, it was not bad in IT – nightly gatherings of sherochka-masherochka with a bottle and a bunch of people, or, there, chatty daytime lying down on the sofa, when – music, wine, and at the level of smiling eyes – someone else’s smiling eyes, and laziness is spilled everywhere... The numb enchantment with which we sometimes watch a speck of dust swirling in a sunbeam – and somewhere a clock is ticking, it is hot, and willpower is at zero. It is interesting to think at a minimum – when there is nothing, no necessary books, no strength, no Internet, so that you can get a certificate. Sometimes IT was a huge aquarium and multi-colored songfish swam in it, seaweed languished tenderly like well-bred girls, the paw of a huge cat beat on the glass. And the girl was riding on a tram. A week of lying flat out on a bed in IT led to partial brutalization: cold sweat, a white cup with fish that had broken (in a dream, Freudianism), pain in the most indecent places, a temperature of 38.5, people polluting the air, pop music, a heater that was taking away oxygen, a mess, stuffiness, ass-pa-pa... Himself: silent-s. There was no strength to strain a certain group of muscles and get up, but staying in IT was even more impossible. I-i-i-i-n-irritating: a table, a chair (broken), a mirror, curtains, voices, sounds.
Oh, hell, who cares when I was that same student, sleeping until three in the afternoon and setting a new university record for skipping classes in a single semester, and I still have nightmares about it, where I eventually forget what the class was or who the professors were and instead wander around like a tourist.
Life was so soft and non-committal that it was possible to waste kilowatts of mental effort on absolutely unprofitable dead loops of the mind. Through efforts and play of the mind, a person creates the most exquisite products that are of no interest to anyone except him. The head seemed light, empty, like a strange box on the shoulders, and these thoughts came as if from outside and in the order that they themselves desired.
Far, far below, behind the thick foliage, gardeners swept the meadow with huge brooms. The lady sat, writing. Shocked, dumbfounded, I thought: "I can't stop a single stroke of the broom. They sweep and sweep. And the lady writes and writes." How strange – you can't stop these brooms, or drive this lady away. So they stuck in me for life. It's like suddenly waking up in Stonehenge, in a circle of giant stones, in a circle of spirits, enemies.
He is so devastated that he does not know what to say or who to say it to. A branch into the wilderness, where the balm ripens, vibrating, and it is impossible to wake up. Say what you see. – I see... I am tired, – she says, – of being a wheel in the dust, a hostage to the lottery. Chance presses me and, running ahead, holds me – on a motionless axis. I am conjuring over a project – what else can I do under house arrest? Be careful, there are crowds of people there, even if you are insured in the sleep phase... A real storm. And a bunch of plants whose names I do not know... Maybe I caught on some rake in my clumsy outfit, maybe I started the computer with the left hand instead of the right? Maybe I rearranged the books in a way that is not what nature wants? The reflected tower split in two in the pond, like untied shoelaces. Only here is my entry in the notebook: the trinkets angrily multiplied, but a blockage formed, protecting me. And she took it for one of the heavenly vents. For three days she got lost in the basements: she drank and wrote a tablet. And it seemed to her (terrible, absurd, jealous, gone off the rails) boarding mirages, a mirage of boarding swarmed the de-energized airship.
No, she’s not jealous at all; it’s just that when you force yourself to look in the mirror, you feel offended that you’ve grown old, and it’s probably your own fault (the bill for the greenhouse and so on).
Such girls know how to pause, listen to the pause and generally not rush anywhere. You don't necessarily have to keep up a conversation with them, you can just look at each other, as if playing a simple game: well, what are you like? you're beautiful, right? and you're looking at me? why? And she answers all these questions without saying anything.
Chapter 41. Acquaintance
"It's strange," she said and extended her hand. "Goodbye, don't forget me," the hand said. "Thank you." "For what?" "I don't know," she took my hand in her palm, shook it, but didn't let go. "Not at all. You're just dear to me in and of yourself," her hand said. Then she added something else, but I didn't understand.
And immediately I felt in her a close being, already familiar, as if I had already seen this face, these friendly, intelligent eyes, once in childhood, in a photo album.
It seemed to her that his eyes, so attentive to her, could look at her in a different, uneasy way, with a masculine gaze that she had never even suspected before.
He shook her hand in a casual manner and laughed too. Casually, in a friendly way, as if we had known each other since the sandbox... "Let's go," you said, touching my elbow. "Let's go, I'll show you the place where I was born and raised. " You say it so carefully, I said, as if you were afraid of offending someone.
No goal, no desire, no presentiment stands between I and You. God arranges the meeting precisely when we... Every means is an obstacle. Only where all means crumble to dust does the meeting take place.
What does not happen under the moon? There are "floods, fires, swords, t r u s es" (prayer to the sweetest Jesus), and there are also good meetings. After all, you were not foreshadowed by the lines of fate on my palm, you were not predicted to me by fortune telling on coffee grounds, you did not appear in the mirrors of my loneliness... The soul senses everything, but cannot predict.
Since the times of Ancient Rus, girls have loved to tell fortunes. This is what Svetlana does – the heroine of the ballad of the same name by the romantic poet V.A. Zhukovsky. They did this especially often and willingly during Christmas week. There were a great many ways. Among the most popular was the one that involved lighting candles, pouring water into a dish, asking a question of interest and then waiting for an answer while contemplating the images that should appear in the water. Most often, fortune-telling was about fate, about the future. That is why the expression “as if he had seen into the water” indicates the gift of foresight, prophecy, that a person seemed to know in advance about the possibility of some event.
— Doesn’t the thought that we might never have met disgust you?
- A little. By the way, when and where did we meet?
- I don't remember. Where can you meet people in a hole like ours?
People are interesting creatures. We are raised by our mothers and fathers, we play in the yard with boys and girls, we are friends with brothers and sisters, and then suddenly one complete stranger becomes the closest.
It's a pity to leave me in the eyes of the crowd... How, however, you know everything about me! But you will never guess those words with which our acquaintance began. "Signora, you are too luxurious for me, and I am too florid for you." Too wonderful and too alone. How to offer your love to a fairy who laughs at you?
- I heard that you are an interesting person, and I came to meet you. Do you have anything against it? – I am very flattered, you are most welcome. I just have to warn you that the rumors that have reached you are unlikely to be true: there is nothing interesting about me.
— "Madam, would you allow me to close the door? I have a peculiar nervous sensation: I cannot bear to sit with my back to an open door. " You came up to me from behind, laid your head on my shoulder and said: "Please don't send me away if you don't like me." — You looked at me, hesitated for a moment, and then decided that I could be trusted.
- Can't you make me the most pleasant company out of your lovely person? And then, unable to drive the stupidest smile from my face, I said to you: "I understand how disgusting I am to you, but..." Firstly, I'm good, and secondly, firstly is enough. – What happened next is not so important. Really, nothing?
At first she kept looking at him. At first she was so embarrassed that she kept looking somewhere into the distance. Then she began to answer more boldly: "I feel so good, I want to chatter terrible nonsense!" Then she became sleepwalking, and walked, leaning her head on my shoulder.
We talked, and when she asked about something, she would step forward to see my face. It was important for them to tell each other everything. Their words were simple, like in the kitchen. Whatever I started to say, her eyes nodded back. We talked about what we considered good. We could tell each other absolutely anything. Because talking to your mother is like asking advice from a cat. Because he walked next to me and purred something thoughtfully... It seemed to me that my entire previous life was just preparation for meeting him, and all the men appeared to teach me how to communicate with him, listen, understand and love.
If you speak so beautifully, you should be composing postcards. Forgive me, – I interrupted, wanting to show off my erudition, – but the sutras say that the most precious thing is human birth, since only a human can achieve liberation. Isn't that so?
I learned of your existence at around 4:30 p.m. It's only 5:15 p.m. now, and you've already managed to surprise me, amaze me, interest me, touch me, make me envious, sadden me, and delight me. I've had few experiences lately, which is why I'm more sensitive to such feelings. You were right when you said that I didn't need any advice. I simply had to get it out of me, tell someone. Now I even know that the last thing I'd want to tell you is you. Besides, it's suddenly become too banal to waste your time on.
What a strange alchemy of our relationship. Dear snowy friend, remember, I am not angry with you, because metaphysics has intervened in our relationship. Maybe I will get tired or offended, but I will never, never show it. Isn't that enough to take a closer look and not part?
Frankly, she has so many reasons for counting on my gratitude that it would be boring to list them all. It is pleasant to notice such a tender heart in someone as general as you. To whom else, if not to you, should I tell all this? It seems to me – although perhaps it is immodest to say so – that you and I have a surprising similarity of character. Let me also tell you that I have never had such a soft, gentle friend as you. Only promise, we will never kiss. – I do not give promises, but I promise.
And do you remember how I said then: "let's get drunk and kiss...", and you were so happy that my eyes started itching. Then you'll be disappointed, then you'll get attached, and we'll be friends for life.
Her lips were not full, but very soft. She kissed in a relaxed, hesitant way, as if her mouth could not find a place to linger. He glided over my body like a beginner on roller skates. I always hoped that he would finally stop somewhere and feel at home, bringing me to ecstasy – but he always slipped away too quickly, never finding a place for himself; he sought nothing for himself except balance, as if he were attracted not by passion but by a banana peel. God only knows what F. would have said about all this. He said: – Don't tie anything together.
...Now I can guess why they wore the burqa. It had the meaning of a curtain in a theater, which was pulled back on the rare days of a performance. During the four hours that we were almost silent and only looked at each other, I became completely convinced that the face is a window, a kind of porthole, from where you can look out, where you can enter, and from where a soft light pours onto the earth.
You are the secret one, and I am the fool. Remember, I smiled, was sweet, kind and nice.
She is special. Kind of a fool. I don't like her very much, she is capricious. When she was very close, I started making signs to her, as if to let her know that I recognized her. She looked at me as if I were an animal, not at all flattered, but still somewhat interested. We somehow got to talking, since you knew more about the past than I did. And as we moved from topic to topic in search of the exact meaning, the exact expression...
“I’m a small-scale wholesaler of casual clothing,” she blurted out, and then admitted that serving fashion was only a temporary occupation for her. “I don’t think I’m becoming a better person: the clothing business is full of scams. Yes, I love my job, but I don’t attach much importance to it. I’d like to go somewhere with rocks, somewhere like Malta, and just empty my brain: read books and talk to people who have the same plans. It would also be nice to settle permanently on the island of Cuba and go to a port tavern in the evenings. However, this is an empty dream. I don’t like to dream, and dreams don’t like me either. All my relatives consider me an eccentric, since I’m not married yet. In my youth, it was very difficult for me to decide what to be.
Then we decided to celebrate the purchase and went to the cinema. On the way she asked if I was jealous, because I looked especially sad in the new outfit. But I just didn't want to go to the factory anymore. A new suit can turn everything upside down in a person's head. She was terribly proud of me.
- Will someone mess up your hair tonight or make it stronger? – He won't mess it up, because he's far away and doesn't even know how much I want it. But act as if he will mess it up.
She kissed me when no one was looking. I tried to think about something else. She came to me. I liked to let down her hair, and she sat on the bed without moving, only sometimes she quickly leaned over to kiss me. And I took out the hairpins and put them on the sheet, and the knot at the back of her head barely held, and I watched her sit without moving, and finally I took out the last two hairpins, and her hair came down completely, and she bowed her head, and they covered us both, and it was like being in a tent or behind a waterfall. We closed our eyes and kissed in a friendly way, without opening our mouths. I took the hairpins out of your hair, everything. I took the money and the knife out of your pockets.
Laying her head on his chest, she thought about many things, about how good it would be for them together.
- Since we're together, let's talk about something? – Okay. – But about what?
I, however, was not interested in the milestones of her life, secrets or problems. I was interested in something completely different – her attitude towards me. And this became clear right away. I was not mistaken. I could have just kissed her. She was not at all against it. She even expected it. Moreover, she would not have objected if it had not been limited to a kiss, but had gone further... How far exactly, she herself did not know. Maybe, I thought, it is not too late?
"Let's go to bed," she suddenly suggested. Such unexpected desires were typical of her nature. We grew quiet and stopped talking. I also looked at her, eye to eye. We had something to exchange. A woman would look closely and ask: "Can you see now?" And I would stay late and longer... " Well, is it time?" I would ask. "Yes, perhaps today was very good," she would answer. He looked at me for a long, long time. Then his mood changed, he took out his chess set.
While she washed, he watched a loud-voiced comedian hosting an entertainment program. It wasn't funny at all, but he couldn't figure out who was to blame for that – the comedian or himself. Who knows what will happen tomorrow? – Who knows, – he repeated mechanically. – Hm, – she snorted discontentedly and put her ear to his chest again. The earrings touched his skin, as if something foreign and secret. She traced intricate patterns on his chest with her finger – as if she were casting a spell. And this is only the beginning... The beginning is, in all likelihood, more than half of the whole thing.
I didn't dare look at her. I was talking to the ceiling. She was silent. My eyes couldn't bear her gaze. I lowered my head and said, "I'm a goner, Lizon." She took my head in both hands and forcibly turned me to face her. "Hey! You're having a severe bout of depression! That's why you speak in words from a photo novel! So that's why you became a recluse, turned off your phone, stopped shaving? Have you created your own personal apocalypse?" She sat down, crossed her legs, put my head on her beautiful lap and rocked me. It was getting harder and harder to bear all this...
Film Leaf Fall-Theater. The day will come, and we will come here together: Veta and I. "Which row do you prefer?" I will ask Veta. "The third or the eighteenth?" "I don't know," she will say, "I don't see the difference, take any." But she will immediately add: "However, I like it closer, take the tenth or seventh, if it's not too expensive." And I will say offended: "What nonsense, my dear, what does money have to do with it, I am ready to give everything, if only you were well and comfortable."
The children behave as if they were at home, they joke, push each other, and finally sit down. The girls are pretty, the boys are just boys. The boy hesitates and is afraid to say anything else... A shy little girl is holding on to her mother's dress, the men are talking. There is terrible confusion in the house: one little girl declared that she wants to be the mistress of all the men. She is four years old, but she says that she is two. Rare coquetry. And she told me very seriously: "Macaroni grows in Italy. When they are still little, they are called vermicelli. This means: Misha's worms." Thank you, but I have already brushed my teeth. It is nice that the child has taken a liking to the word "it turns out". I don't know how often I use it. But the meaning is always: it turns out. Curiouser and curiouser! Wonderfuler and wonderous!
And they talked quietly, in low voices. All day long they came and went. The old woman chatted in the kitchen; and the curtains were sucked in and then pushed out by the wind; everything was swelling; it was blooming; and on the plates and cups, on the yellow and crimson roses, long-stemmed and swaying, towards night a yellow veil, thin as a grape leaf, was stretched.
A female teenager with a powdered nose and slicked-on rouge. A girl without a specific occupation, a rogue, a secret cocotte. With such forms, one can do without maintenance. She laughed, was naughty, made cute faces, knew how to squint her eyes, and strike beautiful poses. She said sweet nonsense and laughed at herself: "If a man is without a hitch, he looks more like a blockhead." How many kisses will she give and take?
She had always been so busy with her personal life and the creation of this absurd world of which she was the shifting center that she seemed to have no time for anything else. The company of older men seemed natural to her, and the world seemed to her to be peopled by brothers.
The little rascal has already noticed the effect she is making on me, although nothing in my attitude, not a single extra glance, not the slightest tremor of my thigh against hers could have given her any indication of it. They always notice. I detect, by some alertness in her sullen imperturbability, that she knows and does not forget the presence of a male, just as I know that she is a female. I have always wondered whether women are familiar with this tormenting sexual obsession, thanks to which the life of a male acquires meaning. Whether our sexual organs and everything else have the same powerful arousal power for them that their own do for us... In any case, the little one sensed my sudden interest in her femininity, and I think she responded instinctively. Unperturbed, she strikes a pose. Little rascal! A budding, delightful little rascal! And yet this is an extremely feminine child.
I was not exaggerating in the least, and I knew that I was not exaggerating: for both of us, everything had become absolutely simple. Of course, I had touched on the subject of sexuality, or rather lust, many times in my sketches. I understood as well as anyone – and perhaps better than most – that a great deal in this world revolved around sexuality, or rather lust. In this situation, I sometimes succumbed to skepticism, felt devastated: perhaps sexuality, like much, like almost everything in this world, was a phony thing; perhaps it was just a banal ploy to increase rivalry between individuals and thereby improve the functioning of the entire community. Perhaps there was nothing special about sexuality that was worth making such a fuss about.
Back then, long ago, I imagined – and fifteen years later I still remembered it with shame and disgust – that at a certain age sexual desire disappears, or at least becomes less of a nuisance. How could I – I, with my supposedly sharp, caustic mind, have succumbed to such an absurd illusion? After all, I knew life, I had even read a few books; if there is one obvious thing in the world, something about which, as they say, all the evidence agrees, then this is it. Sexual desire not only does not disappear with age, but, on the contrary, becomes even more cruel, even more painful and insatiable: even in those men, however, who are quite rare, in whom the production of hormones, erection and all the phenomena associated with it cease, the attraction to young female bodies still does not weaken, it turns into something, perhaps, even worse, into a cosa mentale, into a desire for desire. This is the truth, the obvious truth, which all more or less serious writers have tirelessly repeated.
There is a popular belief in our society that women reach their sexual peak only in their forties. Interestingly, these myths do not exist in the cultures of those nations that are more sympathetic to female sexuality. But as women approach forty, they begin to realize how much prudish nonsense they have swallowed about themselves and their sexuality throughout their lives. Unfortunately, by that time, most of their peers are already fat and out of shape.
Sexual pleasure not only surpasses all other pleasures granted by life in sophistication and strength; it is not simply the only pleasure that does not entail any harm to the organism, but on the contrary helps to maintain in it the highest level of vital energy; it is in fact the only pleasure and the only goal of human existence, and all the others – exquisite dishes, tobacco, alcohol, drugs – are just ridiculous, desperate compensatory measures, mini-suicides, cowardly hiding their true name, attempts to quickly destroy the body that has lost access to the only pleasure.
Sex between those who love each other often resembles a walk. I know, it sounds completely unerotic, but believe me, it is. And then there are other walks, when you just hang around the nearest park, just to avoid sitting at home. And you see kids playing ball. Or a cute dog. It doesn’t matter – hardly anyone returns from a walk regretting the time spent on it. The only unpleasant kind of walk is the one you were dragged on by force under threat of punishment.
Melania is nine years old. At night she suffers from crying fits. She wakes up in the middle of the night sobbing bitterly, but cannot remember what made her cry. Neither her mother nor her father can console her. These fits last from twenty minutes to an hour. In all other respects, Melania is a wonderful child, she is always in a good mood, she is full of optimism, she studies brilliantly, she is loved by her friends, her parents see her as their only joy.
During the day she was serious, but when she slept there was something childish, sad, lonely about her. He was told that she had a subtle mind, a richly gifted nature, a courageous character, that she was irreconcilable in her quests and convictions, that from childhood a heroine was already visible in her and that a brilliant future awaited her. She was simple, sad, confessed her weaknesses. She loved to talk about the doubts to which she was subject, expressed all her torments... She combined coquetry with awkwardness; she was young, shy, tender, enchanted by life, like a fairy tale, like a dream. The owner of a remarkable mind and extraordinary intellectual receptivity. She was in a hurry to live and in a hurry to feel.
Her beauty was not classical, but this circumstance only made her better and more charming. After all, people don't fall in love with beauty... They fall in love with laughter, eternally curly hair, dimples on the cheeks, a mole above the lip or even a scar above the eyebrow. But not with beauty. They just want beauty... She walked uncertainly, unhurriedly... And, as always, she looked as if she had only come in for a minute.
Can you imagine, one day I went for a walk with my dog, and near the gallery a man of completely unremarkable appearance comes up to me, sits down next to me on a bench and calmly says: “Marina, don’t marry the man with the mustache.”
What is an ideal relationship for me? When each of the two close people enjoys complete freedom, but neither wants to use this right to the detriment of the other... After all, all we need and what we are looking for is a person who will allow us to do what we want in this life and will accept us as we are.
Isn't it true, she added in a voice of tender confidence, isn't it true that there is nothing in me that would exclude respect? I ask one thing of you: think better of me. I want you to respect me. The fact is that I like you very much.
A Christian at heart, a young lady, she is also a high heart and feelings ennobled by education, a schoolgirl, a charmer. I am slightly confused, and admire her confusion. It is impossible to offend her, if she does not first feel offended herself...
Her face is neatly made up, her wrists are bare, pinkish, soft and tender in appearance. In general, she is neat all over – firstly, that is her job, and secondly, she is always ready to please the right person. The person who will pluck her from here to the best. There are many such young ladies in the city: they walk and tap their heels. And, like any beautiful girl, she is capricious.
But I must tell the truth, I myself felt a strong affection for her. Tipsy lady, you are such a good ideal of mine. Tell me how you spend your day. Her attitude towards him could rather be called sympathy.
But she can always please me with something tasty when I come to her. A guest comes to me, a guest comes to me. A guest of perfect deeds and small acquaintances. You brought a guest to my house. You brought a moth with you. Everything that sadness can do – I know, I remember by heart. "Like a moth, I am eaten away by the blues, sprinkle me with mothballs, put me in a chest and put me in the attic." And every time after his visits she was a little out of herself.
It was sad. Potatoes from the oven. Salted milk mushroom. "Amaretto" was brought to me by a guest – he is trying to tear the sadness out of me, like a nail from a brick wall. But that nail has no head, and there is no point in getting into the ribs, and my sadness in many years, perhaps, will turn into news... Not all of us like to experience milk mushrooms: a strange sensation, and the eardrums itch. But an experienced mushroom picker specially looks for the place where clusters of exquisite sadnesses delight the heart of a gourmet. We love our mushroom pickers and our glorious mushroom eaters. We love to scratch each other's eardrums, having eaten our fill of sadness. We know how to smile monotonously at those passing by, just like she does... And thoughts grow in the head like mushrooms, gradually boiling. Klara says that those people who do not know how to be sad are prone to depression.
Even the most practical people do useless things. You fell in love. I wonder why you needed to do that? – Well, yes, you are a fool, but I fell in love with you because I have the right.
Knights ride with a quiet and tender dream of princesses... Princesses are so sensitive that they even feel the Earth spinning, that is why they feel dizzy so often. Meekly and femininely they lower their long eyelashes onto sad and tender eyes... Through the trembling of the eyelashes – a tenacious look, enveloping, viscous. "With an involuntary flame of cheeks, a young nymph, not understanding herself, sometimes looks at the faun." There is a special quality in it, as if it were divine fire, but I feel an overwhelming anxiety around it. The deceased princess.
Then we see her as a beggar. She is helped by a horseman who seeks death in battle. The princess eats stale bread taken from his holster: a black piece!
- I didn't mean to offend you at all, I just said it...
- What do you mean "like that"? That is, without thinking? You don't understand that there is an insult in your words, is that it?
- Of course, I didn't mean it. You're already offended now.
- That's even worse. You have to think about what you're talking about. Chat with others if you like, but be careful what you say to me! I feel every word I say and hear. I've become very sensitive and impressionable.
And you – like a young fir tree – prick yourself. Inaccessibility is so beautiful for a woman. Come on, let out your claws. Possession mostly becomes less important from the possession itself.
The great sculptor of the early Renaissance Donatello made not only statues, but also cassone, i.e. wedding chests (this was an Italian tradition – a decent bride had to have a beautiful chest with her dowry).
"Gentlemen husbands! Isn't it time to enter into open combat with your wives and thereby save our daughters from the stupid habit of turning their heads into flower beds, like those cultivated on modern hats... Labor money is not so cheap as to be thrown away on such outrages. The only ones who benefit from this are the merchants, which they take advantage of by jacking up impossible prices. Ladies! If you treat yourselves so stupidly, then at least take pity on your daughters! Instill in them that the best decoration for the head is intelligence."
Be like the mistress in a dressing gown. Be as corporeal as a drake in the morning. The vulgar ordinariness of the apartment and the extraordinary nature of its mistress. He, approaching her, makes various gestures that are supposed to show that he does not have a high opinion of himself. The mistress, with her gestures, tries to show him the opposite. There are only gestures. These are nothing more than simple air signs. I am to some extent her friend.
Always an obedient slave of your desire, I will tear out half a page from the book of my days and paste it into your album – you know I am weak before the will of a woman, especially – a girl... Somewhere dogs were barking into the fading distance, I came to you in a black tailcoat, elegant as a piano... I bowed, cursed the weather. But for some reason we did not turn on the light... You chewed a cucumber in a completely noble manner – without opening your mouth. Your mouth was covered with that mysterious smile, as if running away somewhere. Somehow we became too familiar. Playing under the blanket. Disheveled morning rush.
A woman appeared in his life and filled his thoughts and his whole existence with joy. From now on, his life will be livelier, more varied, richer in impressions. As if you uncorked a forgotten bottle of perfume in a dirty and dark room... And, like a person in love, you immediately became indifferent to the vicissitudes of fate, to its harmless blows, to the rainbow fleetingness of life.
But since I have to jump (to tell you this story), I'll jump here and land on a very ordinary object, say, a poker and fire tongs, as I saw them a little later, when the lady who made me Byron got married – in the light of another flame, which I will call Miss Number Three. She is the girl who puts on a special dress when she expects you to dinner, picks a special rose, because of which you suddenly feel, while shaving: "Attention, attention, this is not a pound of raisins!" Then you ask yourself: "How does she treat children?" You notice that she holds her parasol a little awkwardly; but she took it to heart when that mole fell into the trap; and finally, a bun at breakfast (I thought of the endless breakfasts of marriage while I shaved) would not seem so prosaic with her – if a dragonfly suddenly alighted on the bun, you would not be surprised when you were sitting with her at breakfast. Then she aroused in me the desire to advance, to climb the ladder of life; then she taught me to look with interest at the once repulsive faces of newborn babies. And the small, hot beating of the pulse – tick-tock, tick-tock – acquired a more majestic rhythm. I walked down Oxford Street. We are the continuers, we are the heirs, I said, thinking of my sons and daughters; and though this feeling is so grandiose that it borders on idiocy and is hidden, jumping on a bus, buying a paper, still it is a curious component in the joy with which you lace up your boots, with which you now turn to old friends who are going along a different path. Louis is a dreamer in the attic. Rhoda is an ever-flowing nymph of the brook; "the flypaper of dreams of motherhood," the hope of eternal love. Both denied what then seemed to me immutable.
- You don't love me? – Don't love me? I'm like jelly as soon as you touch me. Kiss me again before they disperse us.
All children in schools are taught how to write and read: "I love you". Hundreds of little people are looking for locks in me with English keys. My love for you is not a weakness, it is a strength... I love you very much and I value you highly. In 2 minutes you can say I love you 200 times.
Listen, my lord, I am cold, my hands and shoulders are frozen. It is so cold, I will cry now. Think, think: you cannot drink from the tap with your mind. I know: you will leave me sooner or later.
Over the blanket, over the stone-made sheet, a hurried, awkward, immortal embrace. Knees in slipping stockings spread wide; hair disheveled on the pillow, face charmingly distorted. Oh, longer, longer. Quickly, quickly. Ah, look, he takes up the whole room, my legs are numb, kiss me or I won't last until the end, until the end...
Morning in your own strange city with a pawn in your coat pocket... Two people love each other, but something has come between them. Maybe you and I will meet somewhere between these lines – me and my love, you – and yours.
I am tormented by the suspicion that I have missed something, that I have forgotten in the hustle and bustle about some important thing, like people forget money or a note with necessary information in one of their trouser pockets or in an old jacket... And only some time later do you realize that we were talking about something extremely important, decisive, the only one...
I cannot remember whether it was one dream consisting of several pictures, or several dreams seen one after another during one night, or simply visions mixed together. I am looking for a woman whom I know, with whom I was so strongly connected that I cannot understand why I weakened this connection – it was all my fault, because I did not come. It seems stupid to me that I have lost so much time. I am sure that I am looking for her, moreover – for them, she is not alone, there were many, and I lost them all for the same reason – because of my own laziness, and I am depressed by a feeling of self-doubt, and one of them would be quite enough for me, because I know that by losing them I have lost much. Usually I cannot bring myself to open my notebook with phone numbers, and even if I open it, I cannot read the names – as if I were farsighted. I know where she lives, or rather, I don’t know, I only know what that place looks like, the gateway, the steps, the landing are imprinted in my memory. I don’t run around the city looking for that place, I’m overcome with some kind of anxiety, I feel inhibited, I can’t stop being angry at myself for allowing or wanting our relationship to fade away – even if it happened simply because I didn’t show up for our last date. I’m sure she’s waiting for my call. If only I knew her name, although I know perfectly well who she is, I just can’t remember her facial features. At times, in the approaching half-sleep, I question this dream. I try to regain my memory, I know and remember everything, only maybe I’ve already settled the score with all of this, or have I never had these scores to settle? There’s nothing I don’t know. Nothing.
I knew that she wouldn’t want to see me, that for her I was a distant past, to be honest, I had already become a distant past for myself.
— What are you thinking about?
- Huh? Me? – she came to her senses.
“Yes,” he said. “When you think, you wrinkle your nose so touchingly.”
She seemed sad. Her voice was dry and dull.
“Eat, otherwise you’ll be as thin as a skeleton,” she said at dinner.
She was a person with an open soul and intelligent and attentive eyes, like a thoroughbred dog. She, like me, had the bad art of mimicry. Not guessing right away by appearance: the familiar hides in an inconspicuous guise. But I recognized her: when you meet such mimicry, it is immediately clear what is hidden behind it, its perspective is visible. We all pretend to be dead for a while.
She herself adheres to her old principle: “Don’t make anything more difficult than it has to be.”
What did we talk about? About everything. About nothing. About books. I read a lot, yes, I just devour books, it’s something like a vice, like smoking for others, I’ve always had this need, as long as I can remember, and since I can’t stand torturing myself, I only read what I like.
I tamed her, she tamed me. Love can teach what cannot be taught. I taught her will and courage, she taught me intuition and not to be afraid of the dark ("Darkness conceals, it is kind, like everything in the world," she said). Light can never be as mysterious as darkness. Light is very prosaic; darkness is poetry. Light is naked; how long can you remain interested in it? But darkness remains under a veil; it arouses deep interest, great curiosity, a desire to tear the veil from it. To merge with darkness, you must reconcile yourself with it.
I vividly imagined all this – and in rich colors, as if I had seen it myself, I described it to my beloved. I wanted to surprise her, I liked to surprise her. She was surprised with pleasure.
This is what we point out to each other with our eyes – like, look. What a joy it is – when you can point something out to another with your eyes; like, look. And not say a word. And wander along the dark paths of the soul, and enter the past, and visit books, and, bending down branches with them, pluck some fruit. And you accept it, you marvel, as I accept the cheerful, leisurely, dexterous movements of your body and marvel at its harmony, strength – how you open the window, how nimble your hands are! After all – alas! – my soul is slightly crippled, it gets tired so quickly; at the goal I fall, sweaty, and perhaps I am even disgusting to you.
What did he not warn her against? Against her ideas, against her ambition, against parallel action, against love, against intelligence, against intrigue, against her salon, against her passions; against sensitivity and against carelessness, against intemperance and against correctness, against marital infidelity and against marriage; there was nothing against which he did not warn her. "That's just the way she is!" he thought. Everything she did he found absurd, and yet she was so beautiful that it made him sad.
The taste of this job is like sawdust. Squeaky , servile work, rewarded with handouts and incentives, like those lumps of sugar they give to a bear riding a bicycle at the circus. Empty sharas-montage, nothing to catch. My position was truly a bitch, and being forced by the nature of my work to meet many heavy idiots... I returned home and officially told her that the world was full of degenerates. She promised to console me, and we ended the day quite naturally. There were several teachers working next to me, in whom I could easily recognize myself in ten, twenty and thirty years – and this spectacle was so dismal that I began to think about leaving life somewhere else.
And even if a suitable vacancy were to appear, I would hardly fill it. I have never worked anywhere – I have only worked part-time – I cannot imagine myself, month after month, year after year, going the same route to a certain place, staying there for eight hours... I remember how, after a rather long break, I ran into my classmate Irina in the restaurant "Priboy". I went there one day, deciding to have a tasty meal, drink good vodka. And I saw her in an apron, with this white waitress's cap on her hair. "What are you doing here?" I was amazed. And I heard a calm and tired: "I'm getting old here." I do not want to get into a situation where a similar answer comes to mind.
Naturally, we slept together on the first night; that's what always happens in serious relationships. When it came time to undress, she was embarrassed for a moment, and then looked at me with pride: her body was incredibly strong and flexible. I learned much later that she was thirty-seven; at that moment, I would have given her thirty, at most.
“Do you do any gymnastics?” I asked.
- Classical dance.
— Not fitness, not aerobics, or whatever else there is?
When we gave the example of young people who were going to a concert and interpreted it with lines from Yesenin, we wanted to say that the concert was only a pretext, a sublimation of their sexual desire. But can't people go to a concert or a theater sincerely, out of love for music and theater? Of course they can! However, people can't go to concerts all the time. They have to earn a living. And this is where the real nonsense begins. They sit in offices, as they did under Soviet power, they don't get off the Internet, this modern quintessence of the delirium of influence, they look at their watches, waiting for the work day to finally end. But there are other people, the younger generation, who, on the contrary, passionately want to study, study, and study all the time.
Every five days a small tragedy is played out between them. Any visit to him is accompanied by difficult scenes over trifles.
We are created for sensitive understanding of each other. A quarrel materializes understanding between us that was not there before. When there are no quarrels, it means that everything will end soon.
They quarreled as if they didn't know that evil words can't be taken back and forgotten. They didn't know that people quarrel in full, but make peace halfway, and so each time love is cut off, and there is less and less of it. Or they knew, but couldn't do anything about it.
Without greeting me, without uttering the usual phrases, he made a short, ragged speech and fell silent. I understood little – something about his wife, some man, or several men... Finally, he made a gesture that brushed aside the previous, and said: “Everything I wrote to you about her is absurd, and, without a doubt, what I am writing to you now is no less absurd. Corrupted to the marrow of her bones and not at all corrupted. I think that no one thinks so well and so badly of her as I do.”
With drunken recklessness and sick scope, she could, in the course of one minute, smash to pieces the best things: luck, a good day, a quiet, clear evening, the best dreams and the brightest hopes.
And from that time on, a wall of alienation began to grow between them. No, it's better not to, some other time... She was rarely without company, but this evening, however, she thought she would spend alone.
Tell me this: how many women have you loved in your life? Do you remember how you rejoiced that we were similar and conspirators, how we smoked evil tobacco so daringly? You and I, together in the same junk, partners in being. I remember something, I remember something... Listen, let's move the junk. And you will set a date. You will come shaved and languid. The plot is the place of the date. I waited. She was very late. The density of expectation. To be half an hour late, there is no other way to call such an attitude clumsy, and yet, she arrived... Uncle finds us squatting over an inconspicuous plant, in agonizing thoughts. The quiet splash of her voice behind her back. And the girl puts her hands on her shoulders, and, laughing, the name is pronounced. Sit with me with your hands, put your little finger on your lips, move your hands, want to say something, there is much more life in their movements than in what they say.
We agreed to spend the night together, to come to a woman – don't look at the exterior – to talk about feelings, to lower the curtains, such small things keep us together in this place – what do we need revenge for?
At the sign she smoothly approaches me. Hot, caressing. Sometimes, I remember, she would hug me and kiss me on the lips – like pouring hot coals into my heart.
Ah, you fool, you fool! What a child you are, you don’t understand anything. And with a soft feminine movement you reached out to me, timidly, alone. You were sincere, warm. I adore your scent, your arms spread out on the pillow. Only you are more tender, my little girl, my baby, my baby... And if in hundreds of years a detachment comes to excavate our city, I would like to be found forever in your arms.
If you are dumb, you are your own master, if you are blind, you are your own astrologer. We will not get there, I know, but I am with you, are we moving or have we stopped? Does it matter to you? We are no longer on earth, we are silent-silent, the one who finds us will be neither a beast nor a thief.
In a minute it will be six, and there is no point in sleeping. You know, I am sure that I will never let go of the pen from sensitive hands.... In the dreary list of everyday life – neither tomorrow, nor, especially, yesterday we were not. And, apparently, will not be. And, loving justice in your soul, if you were at this performance, you could perhaps recognize yourself in me – we will die out, won't we? I thought about you all day, you are pleasant. (She was flooded with tenderness).
Sometimes you're just so nice. Like Christmas, summer vacation, and a new puppy all rolled into one. I mumbled something unintelligible in response, as I always do when I'm praised. The only thing that sometimes worries me is that you'll go and marry some perfectly decent woman and forget about me completely. And I won't be able to call you any more whenever I feel like it, in the middle of the night. Right? – If you want to talk, call when it's light. – No, it's wrong to call during the day. You don't understand anything.
It is hard for both of them to meet among people as strangers. The August night catches up with them suddenly, at half past eight it is already dark; the time of whys is creeping up. "Why don't you leave your husband?" – "Why are you asking now?" – "Because you won't answer tomorrow" – "How do you know that I will answer today?" – "I know" – "Because the earth is round" – "I will..." – "Cool down, not now..." – she lights a cigarette. She is afraid to make any decision. What should she do? What should she do? And when she had almost finished, she suddenly turned her head to the side, looked at the back of the sofa and said: do you even understand why we need all this? It was clear from his face: he wanted to say something, but didn't. Omne animal triste post coitum (lat.) – Every animal is sad after intercourse (sometimes added: “except for the woman and the rooster”). Only after having had enough sex do you understand (but only temporarily) that this is not the main thing. The sexual act at the moment of its completion reminds one of death: the act of reproduction makes me unnecessary. Hence the sadness that is experienced after intercourse, in the so-called “post-consummation phase”.
Every now and then she would look up from her book and stare at him inquisitively. "What are you thinking about?" she asks, biting her lips.
Do not think that the sexual is in the depiction of bed scenes, but that life is a beautiful goddess who came into the world to produce the most beautiful of all forms, as if there were in life the slightest capacity for accomplishment and progress. Life is a tumor and mold, and its characteristic, as many wrote before Freud, is nothing other than a tendency toward death.
The ellipsis of your pupils and the one who lives behind them. Having moved away a little, I admired her. I loved to look at her – and turned her face towards me: what was there, in her eyes... It seemed that her face could not get boring, it would always be a source of desire and care. She parted her eyelashes and smiled. She looked at me, forgot herself. And he also thought that he really felt very good when she smiled – barely, with her lips, and a little, sadly, with her eyes, and that sadness can never be deceiving. As an impressionable girl... but still it was not possible to bring her out of deep thoughtfulness, in response to him she only moved her eyebrows. And she was like an actress after a performance, tired and thoughtful.
He became sad and suspicious. Everything around him began to seem treacherous and colorless. A miserable struggle arose instead of the spiritual happiness he had dreamed of.
A "healthy" person walks down the street, noticing anything around him (only his unconscious registers everything). A psychotic cannot allow himself to do this. If he sees, for example, two cigarette butts, it means that his wife and her lover were standing there smoking. If he sees a car, it means that it is watching him or is ready to crush him. Pursuers are hiding in every window and around every corner. All objects, words, events and facts are full of hidden or obvious meaning for a psychotic.
In genuine delirium there is nothing insignificant. If a car comes around the corner, it means that it is watching me. If there is a red flower in a pot in the window, it is a signal, but if there is not, it is also a signal. There is no such thing or fact that would not mean anything.
I will embrace you a little ahead of the one looking. You have been replaced again by the wild and alien to me. Protect your soul from such actions and henceforth have even greater success with others than you ever had with me.
The last meeting, the stale phrases. There are many other fish in the sea. We leave for other eyes like these, cold as the sea. They say it can dissolve the bile of a monogamous world. Ecclesiastes told us: there is a time to embrace – there will come a time to avoid embraces. "A time to throw stones and a time to gather stones." Do you remember that? "I, Ecclesiastes, was king over Israel in Jerusalem." You were talking about my makeup. Maybe it is because I am overloaded with quotes and memories of other people's feelings – and they have so often prevented me from living my own life?
One of the main difficulties is to overcome the fear of emotional-sexual hunger. This requires a lot of trust – you will have to let go of what seems to be yours and hope that the generous world will return everything in abundance. You need to clearly know that you are worthy of love, care, warmth and sex. And this is not easy if the world has not spoiled you with generosity in the past.
Until one day she left, leaving only a pink strip of lips. She left, like everyone else, so there is no place for her in the collection.
I dreamed of the smell of your cigarettes. To forgive is to forget. It would be stupid to say hello after you have already met once. Be careful not to be late, the hour is uneven and the place is crooked, don’t mix things up. So what if they are late? They will be greeted with smiles anyway in one of those mirror spaces of memory where it will be possible to cross its endless plains.
As if by notes we will play out mysterious non-meetings, sustained within the framework of the genre, love – like a well-played chess game, not a single speck of dust of an unnecessary episode. Sweet – not to meet, having met in the mind beyond the mortal threshold, where we will arrange a meeting for each other, for there is nowhere else to meet until – until death at that hour when lovers say goodbye at all entrances with tenderness on their fingertips . They do not shake hands in the rain. They do not sort out relationships in the rain, because there are no relationships in the rain. And therefore she is especially arrogant. Although we certainly had something to talk about with her.
Thus they played summer and winter, spring and autumn. The decrepit world obediently bore the heavy yoke of endless existence and now turned red with blood, now shed tears, filling its path through space with the groans of the sick, hungry and offended. Before his eyes passed a series of absurd lives and senseless deaths, which he looked at with evil indifference. And people simply walked along the streets and talked to each other. Life should not have turned out exactly as it did now. Think or not – it will not be our way. However, everything is in the order of things, he thought. Nothing can be changed here.
I wanted something special, and it was strange to go home to sleep. Fortune-telling ticket, horoscope: "Through one middle-aged person you will receive great joy. Do the work you have started. In difficult times you will be helped."
My and other people's affairs intertwined in me like warm bodies. It's good that your eyesight is bad – you didn't notice me on the street, I was passing by. I recognize you, but not at first glance. I'm standing. You pass by. That's how it should be. No one is coming to you, no one is in a hurry. I listened sadly the whole way, smiling cheerfully. Arriving home, I rushed around the apartment like a fish thrown into a jar. When , thinking about you, she suddenly stands in the middle of the room, she forgets why she came. She can't fall asleep from excitement.
She left my life, and I found that much of myself had disappeared forever, too. Like a wave that takes something away from the shore after a low tide. All that was left was an empty, meaningless world in which everything was distorted and things had lost their true meaning. A cold, gloomy world. What we had together was no longer possible in this new world. I knew it. It is like that with every person: you can receive something special from fate only at a certain time in your life. It is like a tiny tongue of fire. People who are careful, attentive and lucky are able to preserve it, fan it into a great flame and then live, holding the torch with this fire high above their heads. But if you lose it even once, it will never return to you again. I lost not only her. Together with her, I lost this precious flame.
My friend, she knows me a little, she is also very tender + I miss you sometimes. And sometimes I don’t miss you at all, but I remember. She is a friend + she knows me a little. I just decided to ask her out among various names – to find love, but it turned out – I only lost. And my best friend also almost disappeared, with him only rare letters whistle, and memory + who came – you are my friend, you know me a little. I rarely managed to catch you on the air, but it was always nice, you are a princess there, and I, sir, have always been here. And all my prickliness comes down to the fact that I am sir. Yes, it is difficult + but even more difficult is fate, by the notes of which we play. Of course, it was me who started the whole theater, drama, but + what can I say? Forgive me. And nothing will help. Are you my friend? Do you know me? A little? I thought a lot, but remembered little, what did I talk about with you? I see – life, deeds, years, and names, a dream + and then? Erased. Now I am brave, now the question: "Tell me, how much bigger/smaller than a watermelon seed is your thought about me?"
I admitted that she could only return in this way: to emerge through the bustle of everyday life, through the vulgar city bustle, through existence, familiar and bland, like bread. I was glad to see her. Meeting her reminded me of the beginning of my life, which was undoubtedly better than its continuation.
P.S.: "Well, now that we've seen each other," said the Unicorn, "we can make a deal: if you believe in me, I'll believe in you! Deal?" Make me happy, and I'll make you happy – that's what a cat's "purr" means.
Then we would start a leisurely, half-conversation, half-entertainment: "Listen, if you can," she would suddenly say, "let's go to the movies on Sunday or wherever you want. I see you love books. You can always tell by the way people hold them... Your tragic laughter, which I parody at home.
Chapter 42. Marriage
A bed is a special matter, a very delicate matter. In order not to lose face in the eyes of the seller, you have to buy a double bed, even if you do not need it, even if you have nowhere to put it. Buying a bed for one means publicly admitting that you do not have a sex life and do not intend to start one in the near or distant future (for these days, beds last a long time, well beyond the warranty period; they can last five, ten or even twenty years; this is an important purchase that will leave its mark on your whole future life; beds are usually stronger than marital ties – we know this only too well). Even buying a double bed will give the impression of a tightwad and a miser; in the opinion of the sellers, if there is any point in buying a bed, then only a double one. Buy a double – and you will be honored with respect, reverence, maybe even a friendly wink.
Let's take a simple example. An ordinary sofa that needs to be placed in the living room. You spent a long time shopping for it, you and your husband saved money for some time, cutting the family budget. Then you went to the store together, argued about what kind of upholstery you wanted for this sofa. Then some other troubles arise, you finally brought it home, installed it and everything seems fine, but you sit down on this sofa and understand that all this action was in vain, because despite all its parameters – it does not create a state of comfort in your home.
At various points, both men and women who have lived together for a long time gradually become disillusioned with each other. Couples who live together tend to focus on each other's negative traits – this is not good, we would like to correct this – but if people decide to share their lives with each other, they need to consciously look for the positive traits.
Almost every woman is concerned about the time she spent and her future. After a divorce, a dangerous illusion may arise that much of what happened, what was experienced – all this was in vain and was done somehow wrong. But one divorce is not like another. Divorce cannot be viewed as an event in itself, it is what a person makes of it, that is, a certain person in his certain situation.
Remember – it is much easier for you to evaluate how a dress sits on a friend than on yourself, even if you see your friend infrequently, and yourself – many times a day. A person is inherently inclined to want the best in his life. And if he does not get the best – this is a reason for change.
What should we do now? We puzzled over this question. Just live? It is in such situations that people, overwhelmed by a sense of their own insignificance, decide to have children; this is how the human race multiplies and reproduces, albeit in ever smaller numbers.
The myth of eternal love and marriage forever serves the basic human qualities – laziness and cowardice. People don't get married to live happily. They get married so that they don't have to get married anymore. So that they don't have to bother with this dangerous and unpleasant nonsense anymore. And they instill this in their children so that they can be pushed into marriage out of sight once and for all. And not be afraid that in a couple of years they will show up again and sit on their head.
Contradictions are played out primarily between two people, in the kitchen, in bed, in the nursery. Their background noise and characteristic signs are eternal arguments about relationships or silent hostility in marriage, flight into and out of loneliness, loss of confidence in a spouse whom you suddenly stop understanding, the excruciating pain of divorce, adoration of children, the struggle for a share of your own life that you have to fight to wrest from your partner and still share with him, finding tyranny in everyday trifles, tyranny that is, in fact, you yourself. You can call it whatever you like – "trench warfare of the sexes", "withdrawal into the subjective", "the era of narcissism".
Meanwhile, sex is a peaceful activity, opposed to war. Until men stop fighting: "I will not raise my feet to the ceiling... I will not get up on all fours like a lioness..." Family life is the art of presence. In divorce, children turn into little diplomats.
In the animal world, idyllic equality of the sexes almost never occurs; such a system would constantly generate a struggle between the sexes, as happens, for example, with the small penduline tit birds. Both sexes are equally capable of incubating eggs, and there is no clear dominance of one over the other. Therefore, females try to force males to incubate, and males try to force females to incubate. As a result of their struggle, in 30% of nests the clutches perish, since neither the female nor the male starts incubating. In 60% of nests, males overpower females, and in 10% of nests, vice versa, females overpower males: regardless of which sex wins, the clutches in these nests hatch successfully.
If social processes in civilized societies – from Ancient Rome to the present day – have led to the liberation of women from men, this has always been accompanied by a decrease in family stability. Such a simple idea of marriage with complete equality of the sexes, humane and reasonable, turns out to be unexpectedly difficult for us to implement in practice precisely because for its sake we have to constantly suppress ancient instincts.
Love makes a man blind. And since, with all the sorrows, love also seems to be the way out of the troubles that it itself creates, the existing inequality cannot possibly exist. But it does exist, and that is why love fades and cools.
Slightly exaggerating, we can say: who and when washes the dishes, changes screaming babies, goes to the store and vacuums, becomes completely unclear, as well as who and how earns money for buns, determines mobility and why, strictly speaking, the delightful nighttime delights of bed are allowed to be enjoyed only by agreeing to the envisaged and registered weekdays at the registry office. Marriage can be taken away from sexuality, and the latter from parental ties, parental ties can be multiplied by divorce and all this divided into joint or separate life and raised to the power of several residences and the always possible revision of the situation. This computational operation gives to the right of the equal sign a rather solid, but still fluid figure, which to some extent indirectly reflects the diversity of direct and extremely complicated shadow existences, increasingly hidden now under the old and so dear to everyone words "marriage" and "family", where the fatal triangle teaches a lesson in balance in the arrangement of someone else's happiness and one's own peace of mind.
When sex disappears, the body of the other takes its place, its more or less hostile presence; sounds, movements, smells come; and the very presence of this body, which can no longer be touched, sanctified by coitus, gradually begins to irritate; unfortunately, all this has long been known. Along with eroticism, tenderness almost immediately disappears. There are no immaculate connections or sublime unions of souls, nothing even remotely similar. When physical love goes, everything goes; a languid, shallow annoyance fills the monotonous succession of days. And regarding physical love, I had no illusions. Youth, beauty, strength: the criteria of physical love are exactly the same as those of Nazism. In short, I was up to my ears in shit.
Fim can also talk about a divorce, but at the end of the story it is noted that this divorce is a terrible mistake; or show two characters who throughout the film throw everything together, but in the end think about a life together, about children, even if they do not love each other at all.
A child costs work and money, it is constantly associated with surprises, it fetters and confuses carefully thought-out daily and life plans. From the moment of birth, a child develops and perfects its "dictatorship of need" and already with the power of its vocal cords and the radiance of a smile it imposes its natural life rhythm on its parents. But, on the other hand, this is precisely what makes it irreplaceable. A child becomes the last and indissoluble primary connection. Partners come and go. The child remains. A child is the last means against loneliness, which allows people to somehow compensate for the elusive possibilities of love. Everything that a person dreams of, but cannot have in a partnership, in marriage, is directed at it. When the relationship between the sexes loses its strength, the child seems to seize a monopoly on a feasible life together, on the realization of emotions in the primordial bustle, which in other areas becomes less and less frequent and doubtful.
It's called: divorce without claims. It doesn't matter who did what. The birth rate is falling. However, the importance of the child is growing. There are usually no more than one. Such expenses are almost unaffordable.
A marriage is made in heaven, and then separation reveals that the man is a troublemaker and a fool, and the wife is a hysteric and a bitch. It turns out that most families are hotbeds of anger, discontent and irritation.
Chapter 43. Enchanted
When a person is possessed by one thought, he finds it in everything. You don't see the meaning of life and want to die, but what if you don't see the meaning of death when you die, and then what?
"I won't hide from you that I have a sad feeling because you " will sail away from all vanities," she says pleadingly. She confuses her phrases, her face takes on a tearful expression. It turns out that when she regrets, her eyes become very sad.
"Don't close yourself off, don't withdraw into yourself," his wife begs him. "You've scared me. Tell me it's not true. You often say things without reason. Tell me it's not true."
Her voice was weak, completely papery. How many people go out to the kiosk for cigarettes and never return to their wives. Remember, I told you that you and I are in a conspiracy against the whole world.
- He's lost, he's lost, and I don't know how to disenchant him. The most tender thing in the world won't stop him.
But, incorrigible, he kept saying his own thing. Either some good fairy is casting a spell on me...
- Trying to disenchant him, you only reenchant him. Besides, time, which will eventually put everything in its place...
I have never heard of a wolf getting lost in the forest, even if it is not the forest in which he was born. – She constantly tried to dispel his gloomy thoughts, it never occurred to her that he could only save himself with these sad thoughts.
“You seem to think too much about me,” he smiled like a big, smug cat who, while playing with a mouse, inadvertently tamed it.
- If only I knew what I was guilty of. What I did. It was useless, useless.
I couldn't change anything and I had to put up with it and hope that time, which changes so much, might change you too... not you, but who you have become. Not for who you are, but for who I am when I am with you...
- I don’t touch him anymore, I’m afraid I’ll make him lose his temper... He likes to be like in a dream, so what!.. God bless him... How can I not be jealous of his strength?
The humming chrysanthemum of a gas stove. A ladder of three pieces of black bread lying on top of each other leading into the void.
“Sorry,” she whispered in my ear again. Then she pulled away. “Sometimes I myself stop understanding what’s going on.” My shoulders began to shake.
“No need, it’s just not the right time,” he said quietly.
“Not that one,” I agreed, passing through the eye of the needle with unexpected ease.
Chapter 44. The Female Element
...How I would spread her across the bed at night, all my and diligent, and look for her rose, the copy of her hips, that emerald-dark and heroic thing that I wanted. I remember her silky hips in tight jeans and how she would fold one leg, tucking her palms under herself, and sigh when we watched TV together...
So we sat there, mentally and physically spying on each other, when the doorbell rang and immediately, without a pause, four women burst into the room, greased, red-haired, plump – all meat, jewelry and familiarity.
In confectionery shops, women eat cakes without leaving the counter. For some reason, men don't do that. But these ones – they run into the shop as if it were a restroom, and then, in the crowd, they gobble them up in front of everyone! Sweet tooth. From little ones to old women. It's uncomfortable to watch them eat, something shameless can be discerned in their poses, gestures, in their biting, greedy like amorous kisses. They'll enjoy themselves, wipe themselves off and go on their way...
Men are divided into worthy and unworthy. Women are divided into young and old. But a new woman is always more interesting than an old one, even if the new woman is old. As is well known, a woman sees herself in the mirror through the eyes of the Other (her suitor, her rival, her opinion leader). If you witness the mystery of your beloved woman preparing to go out (and it is implicitly impossible to appear on the street without makeup) and interrupt her with the compliment "you are beautiful even without makeup", you will hear the classic answer: "You don't understand anything!" This is where the truth of the situation is revealed: a loved one, "the only one" is not important: he "does not understand", does not see with the same gaze with which a woman evaluates herself in the mirror. What is important is the big Other – the imaginary summed up Man, the supreme master of sexual-symbolic exchange. (A dress has no meaning if it does not inspire in men the desire to take it off you.) This impersonal Other is ideology in its purest form. And this is not the naive political propaganda of the past, which created a saving distinction between one’s own and another’s, between the spheres of aggressive power and peaceful everyday life, between internal and external.
The husband ate too many pears. The exact origin of the expression has not yet been established. It is possible that it was a random humorous rhyme. Another version points to the Chinese pear as the "culprit" of male infertility. The enzymes in its juice really do dull male potency. Its analogue is pumpkin, which girls have long exposed to unwanted guys. The effect of pumpkin juice, due to the large amount of bromine, also dulls desire. Finally, thirdly, you cannot eat pears in the morning and on an empty stomach – it is fraught with an upset stomach. It is much better to pay more attention to your wife. And the expression means something like this: there is a husband, but where is he and what is he doing – try to figure it out! The female sexual organ – the uterus has a pear-shaped form. These are the pears that the husband ate too much of. Apparently, the pears on the side are tastier than the wife's pear. Brain better strain, how will they get to your wilderness. They'll arrange such a taharrush, you'll be forever twisted like an eel. And you'll be "a husband who ate too many pears."
Now it's September. In front of me is a garden. Distant thunder deafens my ears. In the thick foliage, ripe pears hang like male attributes.
"I am an individual with a scrotum." He repeated these words three times, and the third time he shook his genital organ through his trousers. Nodding to himself, he pulled his trousers down his legs, straightened up and uttered a hackneyed truth: – Red-haired women are as slutty as goats. And a man is just a pathetic asshole... a sexual giant! He is far from a fly! Yes, he is still oh so far from a fly! Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Cunt lice – no one!!! What are all these efforts to continue the race worth? What kind?.. Long preparations! Little gifts! Sucking! Vows! Affection! All the banalities and blatant obscenities of life; pressing into their stomach, we lick here, suck there, and then what?.. We lie on our sides for eight days! True! I am like a Latvian – a dick and a soul. Fucking fools is just a stupid dick. A sperm matures in a man's testicles for about 72 hours, millions of them mix with prostate juice and are ready for battle. Don't you agree about the fly? The fly that shoots a hundred times every minute? Now that's a sexual Giant! A real Giant!
If the future child is male, then nature "glues" the labia together and the result is a scrotum that covers the testicles. The seam in the middle of the scrotum is the place where the labia are joined together. If the future child is female, then the distance between them remains, and the labia are filled with fatty tissue.
Sooner or later – everything was heading this way. Alas. The late eunuch Harlampy used to say: it will not be the longest and thickest of you who will suffer, but the smartest and most sinuous. The old man was right... Yes, I am smart. Even Shorty-3 admitted it. I am sinewy and sinuous. I am agile and dynamic. I dance a juicy samba and a slippery lambada, I spin like a dervish of the sexual desert, I spin a hula hoop with all five vaginal rings. I am elastic. If you pull a bowstring on my five-inch body, the arrow will fly out the window of the royal bedroom, whistle over the rose garden and fall into the green labyrinth of the palace garden. And our lanky guys will follow it with envious glances of their snail eyes. If you pull me back and let me go, I can knock the last brains out of the queen's next lover. For example, the current one.
By picking the flower, the boy comes into contact with the world of nature and the world of things. This interference with nature leads to catastrophic consequences (remember the fairy tale "The Scarlet Flower", where roughly the same thing happens). The source of this catastrophe is that symbolically picking the flower, this rough, aggressive contact with nature, is nothing other than a sexual act, and not just a sexual act, but a violation of the virginity of the natural world. Let us not forget that literally picking the flower of virginity – defloracio virginitates – is nothing other than an act of defloration.
It's just... there are limits. A limit. Maybe I'm just tired. Not physically, not physically... Depression? Possibly. Mental turmoil? Probably. Complexity of character? Oh yeah! How dangerous it is to sit for too long as a favorite. Even more dangerous is to read a lot of books. To develop a truly inexhaustible theme of the highest feats and the lowest abominations. I am an individual. That says it all. There are things in yourself that are hard to explain to yourself.
She had resorted to a commonplace trick; to politeness. She would never know him. He would never know her. All human relations are like that, and the worst of all (if it were not for Mr. Banks) are those between a man and a woman. These are the most insincere in the world.
Leonardo da Vinci wrote: Do not be carried away by women with thin and long legs, a thin body, a narrow bottom, no matter how attractive they are in person. Such a woman will give little joy in bed, but will demand a lot, because she has an insatiable womb. You should stop your gaze on a woman who is strongly built, but below average height, with a wide pelvis and large hips...
By the way: Alexander Ivanovich thought in passing that Zoya Fleish's facial features were rightly taken from the faces of a wide variety of beauties: the nose from one, the mouth from another, the ears from a third beauty.
Taken together, they were decidedly irritating. And Zoya Zakharovna seemed to be sewn together from many beauties, being far from beautiful herself – by God, by God! But her most essential feature was her belonging to the category of what is called burning oriental brunettes.
Girls in black tights, what the young swineherd raves about. They are representatives of the cunning sex: liars, coughers, gourmands, gapers, because the truth brutalizes and devours them. Short friend. Lakomkina O. A giggling, jumping girl, white-breasted and white-necked. Unceremonious dark hands, dexterous behavior. Mademoiselle-stricazel, legs of lamb, je vu pri! Madame-Prodam, touchy boulevard, retired innocence. With a velvet body on steel springs. She spoke in the same mannered and supposedly friendly voice as usual, reported nonsense, laughed out of place, was, in fact, unbearable, but all this was nothing new.
The goal of a man's search is to find women who agree to surrender to him; the goal of a woman's search is to find a man to whom she would like to surrender. A man's consent to sexual intimacy, if physically possible, occurs almost automatically; as a rule, not all men are granted a woman's consent.
The most reliable test is the pool. It is clear who is who by the pool: an intellectual will bury her head in a book in a bathing cap, a sportswoman will organize a water polo match, those prone to narcissism will take care of their tan, those prone to hypochondria will smear themselves with sunscreen... If a woman by the pool is afraid to get her hair wet so as not to ruin her hairstyle, run away. If she jumps into the water laughing, jump in after her.
Having realized what happened, you feel like a victim of a random connection – a connection of egoistic circumstances, times. It's as if you're covered in cobwebs, entangled in some sticky interweaving, in some yarn. Damned parks. Look how I'm swaddled, puppeted. Unravel me immediately. It's insulting to me. Where is your vaunted nobility? Am I a fly? Do you hear? Apparently not. In any case – zero attention. Unheard of. In general, typical pleasure is below average. That's how you joked once in your youth. That is, not you, but they, others. And you, having realized what happened in all its ugliness, were in no mood for fun. On the contrary, finding yourself in the snares of an a priori inherent dialect, you fell into chronic gloom. And if you smiled at times, it was only out of politeness; and even then sardonically. However, life arranged things.
"When you fall and hit yourself, or you're hurt, or you've been hit mentally, or when you feel yourself getting angry, take a very deep breath, two or three times, and be sure to go pee," our gym teacher used to advise us when we were teenagers. He was an old warrior. I always followed his advice, I won't swear on my honor that it worked, in any case I'm sure that if I didn't, things would be much worse. So I breathe as prescribed, then I decide to go and empty my bladder in the bathroom sink. It's not that my apartment doesn't have a separate toilet, tiny but functional, it's just that the sink is the most convenient place for me to release my stream. Agatha didn't approve of this at all. Agatha thinks like a woman on this matter. Oh, what a woman she is! She finds it quite natural that, apart from the other vital need for urination, which requires both sexes to squat, the toilet has been designed rather as a comfortable seat for the ladies than as a proper receptacle for the male stream. A man pees standing up, it is his privilege and pride, and since the toilet is much lower and unless the operation is performed with the utmost care – almost impossible in a dire emergency – splashes are inevitable and there is nothing to be done about it. And unless you want to be known as a dirty pig, you have to wipe up, with a discontented grunt, the occasional drops on the walls, on the floor, with squares of toilet paper that come apart in your hands. In short, the ideal and friendly vessel for a man's stream is a sink, located at just the right height, you lay out your precious luggage on a welcoming cool earthenware with pleasant contours, it is convenient, it is happiness that you can also cool down the heat accumulated during the day in your testicles. The relieved male can button up again, enlightened, relaxed, overflowing with treasures of goodwill to all mankind. So the sink in the bathroom.
In addition, it is necessary to take into account that it is always hot in the hospital and the nurses usually have almost nothing under their gowns, except for a bra and panties, clearly visible under the translucent fabric. And this, undoubtedly, creates a certain erotic aura, light but stable, especially since they touch you, that you yourself are almost naked, and so on.
And once I heard on a steamship (and cried): "Buy 15 kopecks worth of acetic acid – I'll drink it and die. Because he cheated on me." A 14-year-old Jewess sang, and her 12-year-old brother played the violin. And the Jewess was serious. Oh, serious...
I will show the forgotten one that I have not forgotten. Who the hell is tramping around there, who is this bib mumbling nonsense into her yellow, tangled locks as she sways in my arms? "What dancing, Zarathustra," she mutters. "Go away, don't bother us..." Go away, dancer, and you too go away, you who guzzle sleeping pills by the handful and let your fish blood into warm baths, how dare you make faces even if life has shat in your mug? Rejoice! – she has marked you as her territory, she will protect you! And everyone else, from the fisherman to the informer, get out! She lacks air, and I lack trust in your playful little hands: you will certainly plunder my thin leafy time, the enamel of feelings, the vice of circumstances, the hammer of the heart, mint a whole pile of heresy – a drunken prodigal son traded his dad for a sinner – and all this will remain unclaimed, like the yellow rings of a market Armenian ... – I would beg for a marble heart – but all this could be better than it can be, lonely unkissed lips grimly twist in the crypt. I will do it, I will lick the last corner of life, where it has all hidden itself. Everyone out! In my small flickering frame there is room only for two, and I do not need apostles, and especially spectators. Now, before I sober up, I will have enough tears to wash her dirty feet, and the heat of my lips to dry them, and then I will lay at these feet all the money earned in the war, all the diamond-studded medals, and, asking – no, not for absolution, but just permission to stay until the morning, I will lie down at her feet.
I had a dream which I have never been able to forget and which I still see as prophetic when I compare it with the strange circumstances of my life. We are made of the same stuff as our dreams – and our little life is surrounded by sleep… Dimly, in the depths of our souls, we know who we really are. This is what causes the sorrow of our soul: we are not what we would like to be.
Long gone are those most complex interweavings of the most diverse and forever ceased to exist reasons – because no one's memory has preserved them – which forced me to find myself in an armored train that winter and travel by night to the south; but that journey still continues within me, and probably until my very death I will at times again feel myself lying on the top bunk of my compartment, and again before the lighted windows, crossing both space and time, the hanged men will flash by, flying away under white sails into oblivion, the snow will whirl again and this shadow of the vanished train will begin to glide, jumping, flying through the long years of my life. And perhaps the fact that I have always regretted for a short time the people and countries I left behind – perhaps this feeling of only short-term regret was so illusory because everything I saw and loved – soldiers, officers, women, snow and war – all this will never leave me again – until the time comes for my last, deadly journey, a slow fall into the black depths, a million times longer than my earthly existence, so long that while I fall, I will forget everything that I saw, and remembered, and felt, and loved; and when I forget everything that I loved, then I will die.
I'm walking. Where am I going? I don't know. I'm not even thinking about it. Some fragment of consciousness, in some dark corner of my brain, must have known this, because I come to in front of Elodie's house. I'm surprised myself. Why Elodie? Oh, yes, because she is the cause of all this, because it is her fault, because I want to tell her that the deed is done, the sacrifice is made, because I want to pour out all my rage on her, because I want to cling to her, because I want to slap her cheeks, because I want to cry between her breasts, because I want her to admire me and console me, because I want to make sure that I have not done the stupidity of the century, because I want to make love to her, because I want to prove to myself that it was worth it, because most of all I want a woman to rock me to sleep, to say to me "Now... now, calm down...", and to give me her breast, and to open my thighs and womb, and to take me by the hand and lead me into her, and to listen to me mix love sobs and love croaks, whispering to me those stupid words that one whispers to a suffering child. Well, that's it. It was this instinct that pushed me, made me run here. To a woman, the only refuge, to a giant vagina where you can immerse yourself completely and curl up like a fetus in its very depths, far from the world and trouble.
The abbess of the heart, who brings to me the priceless amber, the aroma of my mind, the witness of the movements of the body that I foresee and love, which form a honeyed story about the duration of those trials to which it subjects itself in disunity, the researcher of what I have to see and hear, caring and selfish, eloquent and clairvoyant, the source of discord, mutual accusations, weakness of will, carelessness, strong touches, an open mouth, a large nose, the interpreter of dreams handed from hand to hand.
Every now and then I look at Genevieve. Often. I like looking at her very much. As she tries, she sticks out her tongue. And that sticking out tip of her tongue, wet and pink, makes me think of all sorts of things. I wonder what I'm going to do with her tonight. She lets me do whatever I want. Whatever I come up with, she's pleased. Oh, it's not that much. I'm not wicked and I don't like to complicate things. I like to bury my face between her big breasts or between her full thighs or between her big buttocks, between everything that's big and full on her. I lick everywhere, I push my way into her cunt as far as I can, her vulva is like a scallop on my face, but the scallop is alive and warm and wet and fragrant and loving, oh yes, loving, so loving! I penetrate her wherever I please, here or there, it is always pleasant, always extraordinary. In all places – a woman. With full handfuls, to the fullest, to death. She can have her orgasm twenty times, while I – only once, quietly screaming, loudly sighing, with eyes overflowing with gratitude and love. And then she hugs me, covers my face with small kisses, saying: "My dear, my darling...", for a long time, and then we fall asleep like that, and wake up like that, and sometimes in the middle of the night I suddenly want to bury myself somewhere in her, then I spread her full thighs, for example, and I enjoy looking at her tightly closed plump womb, I carefully spread her tangled hairs – she has abundant hair here, a mass of thick vegetation along the entire slit – I smooth them with the back of my hand, these wild curls and free in all their beauty large lips, as dark, as tender as the skin of my testicles. Finally, the labia minora appear, pink and pearly, I spread them too and enjoy the contemplation of everything that is inside, even our own secretions, left over from the last time, mixed, frozen and forming threads of a web, and the smell, mommy, the smell of debauchery and a lair, the smell of love... This is our life.
One of my acquaintances once confessed that she got a clear idea of the structure of the female body only by carefully examining her newborn daughter. I was amazed (after all, I am a married woman!) – and only then did I feel the whole abyss separating us from women. It is outside, and for women it is inside: such a secret that they themselves do not have clear access to it. They do not know themselves, but we know ourselves. Isn't it because a woman needs a mirror so much, because, unlike a man, she is deprived of one in herself. And she always has a mirror at hand, like a man – his natural double. He has no need for this fragile piece of glass in his purse, because he carries his continuation-reflection with him alive and can always feel and recognize himself. One acquaintance recalls how, at the age of five, when his mother fell asleep, he would climb under her blanket with a flashlight and try to see at least something ... But where can you, if only darker darkness emerges from the darkness.
It's getting light. Rustles, creaks, stifled voices – all slowly disappear, carrying away laughter, like an epilogue to a night of fear: such serious people, and how they rolled head over heels! Leave me alone, woman, what are you babbling about? Don't you see – we've flown this far; don't you feel – it's already blossomed, my flower. An unblinking reptile, a magic pentagram folded from scraps of snakeskin – a keepsake from the Lord of the Flies to a friend. All the aristocrats of flora – from the rose to the nettle – all fear and despise it. It is sickeningly beautiful – a camouflage star smelling of rotten blood – and the longer I know it, the more acute the desire to bend down to it and inhale. Blowflies, vultures, red-eyed hyenas, you have nothing to eat here, it is human, all too human – step aside and let the man come closer. I need this smell, so disgusting to many – I recognize it and adore it – the smell of return. That is the smell of the sun rising over the mountains… People, things, countries ultimately come down to smell.
And she gives him a languid smile that is worth more than her whole naked body, a truly philosophical smile, lazy and amorous and ready for anything, even rainy days or hats on the quay, a woman who has nothing better to do than to go and see her old lover and tease him with questions about life. ... It may happen that by chance I will be left with a great deal of love, and I can always leave them and wander on – mockery – mockery of a woman’s love would be better, I suppose…
Chapter 45. About Men and Women
She always said that I was difficult to understand, she always complained about it. Maybe a person doesn't need love as much as understanding? I understand you so tenderly, but I act like a janitor. I approved of one thing and followed another... I hear, is it really true that everyone is guilty before everyone else? And there is so much to say that I cannot restrain myself. Therefore, a person cannot ultimately fail to hear another person, if that person really, really wants to, because his thoughts are always open to the thoughts of others, his creativity is open to the creativity of others, his love is open to the love of others. What a joy when a person hears something.
That's not what I meant, not that and not that. And so, listening to each other in such very tense negative statements, people can fall into some kind of state of mutual understanding, which they, naturally, cannot put in their pocket, since they have to fall into it both in a second and in five years. A person needs someone like himself, and therefore must be able to clearly explain his need. And, of course, a person is given the opportunity to once again make sure whether he can act effectively.
But most of all, it is this childish, painful d;j; vu that convinces: the sudden rush of nausea when looking at two lonely pines. One of those tender and poignant landscapes that evoke a feeling of vague melancholy, and whose dreamy thoughtfulness turns into the most important thing in life.
Life lasts for a kiss, everything else is a memoir. The fleeting light that shines on us, the smile, lasts as long as it needs to, never longer than the circumstance that gave birth to it. You need love. But remember one thing: of all that is eternal, love has the shortest duration.
And if they had spoken, they would have told you that a woman who lives in the palace rules here; she is cheerful, she is good-natured, she foams with joy...
- Little mouse, where have you been? – "In the chapel." – And what were you doing? – "Weaving lace." – For whom? – "For the lady from the palace."
Mom stood in front of the mirror in a black velvet dress and assumed the poses of a woman who was tired and disappointed, but not without ideals, which were fashionable at that time.
I am a spectator, an actor and an author, I am a woman, her husband and child, first love, last love, a random passerby, and love again. And a man's work, his evening sadness. I establish relationships between a man and a woman. Between my loneliness and yours. My flesh is never a stranger. And the ugliness of death speaks to me about life.
A woman is loved for the joy she brings. A man loves not the woman herself, but his state next to her. But where will you get a woman if you don't steal her.
The woman will then have to love the winner, accept his customs and believe in his gods. And it is better to do it sincerely. Moral principles, customs, traditions and men from the previous life must be forgotten as soon as possible.
- Would you like a geisha?
— The one who can look so hard that a person falls off a bicycle? Mind-blowing.
God alone knows between whose knees your happiness has found shelter. And the woman will fuss joyfully. They all dream of falling asleep (forever?) on the shoulder of a loved one. But one cannot rest on the chest of such a person, for the graces have not come to him. .. And the dawn delays, reminding that love is preceded by a certain twilight of the initial feeling. Every girl or woman, before giving her destiny a happy turn, once in her life had to...
So, a woman hides her breasts and then emphasizes their contours with the help of a bra. This device, which has the character of a sexual signal, can be padded with cotton wool or inflatable, so that it not only restores the shape of the breast, but also enlarges it, thus imitating its state during sexual arousal. In some cases, women with sagging breasts even resort to cosmetic surgery, undergo subcutaneous silicone injections to achieve a similar effect, but on a permanent basis. Reading about all these numerous sexual restrictions and artificial methods of attracting members of the opposite sex, you involuntarily come to the thought that it would be much easier to dot the "i's". Why cool the room in order to then light a fireplace in it?
Any man who looks at a woman with lust is already committing adultery with her in his heart. From the tear-off calendar "Did you know": a woman breastfeeds not only children, but also men's looks. Knead the boobs.
— Don’t judge your men for looking at other women. If he only looks, and nothing more, then there is nothing wrong with that. After all, you yourself take maximum measures to make men look at you, and as much and as long as possible, although you may have been married for a long time. Forbidding men to look at other women is equivalent to forbidding you to look beautiful and attractive (to attract men’s glances).
It is a mad attempt to get into each other's pants, avoiding deeper meaning and greater possibilities. "In a relationship with a woman, it is always more important to take off her pants than to satisfy your natural need."
The best-behaved woman is the one whose behavior is not known or heard of. A woman smells good when she does not smell of anything. So the ancient Romans believed that a woman could commit only two deadly sins: to cheat on her husband and to get drunk. Cato the Elder believed that the custom of exchanging kisses with relatives was established precisely to keep an eye on a woman to see if she smelled of wine. And, indeed, women caught drunk were punished by death: and not only because when drunk they knew no bounds to their licentiousness. The Romans were afraid above all of that orgiastic and Dionysian principle that women from the European south periodically sought at a time when wine was still little known in Europe. For lack of a gesture, for lack of a word, for lack of something better and more important, we stop at women and make them various bad offers in order to do something and say something.
In the eyes of all strangers there was a secret question: "Are you the stranger who will save me?" Longing for affection, afraid of being abandoned, I thought: maybe sex is just an excuse to look deeper into the eyes of another person?
Find yourself one of these intricate bitches and fuck her with all your heart, so that the sky seems like a sheepskin, weave yourself into her ethereal clothes, suck out all her worthless juices, suck, suck, lap greedily, like a heavenly dog dissolved in the ether, then descend back to the sinful earth and wander around it idle in your stone shoes.
Sometimes a person has nowhere to stick, and he bumps into a woman, who also needs to find a place to stay. A long, meager life, and nothing at hand except for the shameful parts that dangle like a child's rattle, and why shouldn't a bored person play with it for a while? Or for a woman to have fun with an unknown man is like going to a new movie. Here there is not always an attraction to the forbidden fruit, to sex, to risky pleasure, but simply – an attraction "into the distance", self-pity and a desire to have fun with something, to leave, to change the scenery, and even love for a neighbor, whom we have no other way to caress. All this triviality of human life does not remove or justify sin, but next to it, taken separately, as such, in its original abomination, it is less frightening and seems like an outlet. In it there is the end, a crime, a hole, hell, death, that is, all concepts are extreme, maximum, but here, in everyday life, in life, there is a dreary existence, in comparison with which death itself is better.
Since women began to write, not one of them has dared to speak of herself with complete honesty, to pour herself out to the reader with proud humility. And everything that is in the literature on the psychology of women has been written by men: we can learn more about them from Lady Roxana than from the complete works of George Sand. Perhaps this is explained not so much by the falsity of women as by their natural inability to think about themselves, to be aware of their own Self not with the help of other people's ideas and words, but with the help of their own mind. Even when women naively write for themselves, in small secret notebooks, they think of an unknown God who, over their shoulder, may be reading what they write. That is why, if often an outstanding work of a male writer is superior to him, then a beautiful work of a female writer will always be inferior to herself, who created this work. Women should be compared only with each other.
In order to try to penetrate this meaning, one should use the technique of motive analysis. Before getting to the room, Seymour rides in the elevator, where an absurd episode happens to him from the standpoint of common sense, which spoils his mood. In the elevator with him rides some unknown woman, and the following dialogue takes place between them:
“I see you’re looking at my feet,” he said as the elevator rose.
“Sorry, I didn’t hear,” the woman said.
- I said: I see you are looking at my legs.
“Sorry, but I was looking at the floor!” the woman said and turned away to the elevator doors.
“If you want to look at my feet, just say so,” said the young man. “Why this eternal pretense, damn it?”
“Let me out, please!” the woman said hurriedly to the elevator operator.
The elevator doors opened and the woman walked out without looking back.
Nietzsche described woman as "a little dressed up lie," and that's true. Man is only evil in his heart, woman is nasty.
Women, more than men, are characterized by such human qualities as petty egoism (although for the man she loves, a woman can be selfless “on a large scale”), stinginess and greed, harmfulness, deceitfulness, constant dissatisfaction with the surrounding reality, stupidity and stupidity, lack of taste and artistic flair, increased pretentiousness, as well as overestimation of one’s own personality, coupled with a complex set of psychological complexes and fears.
And of all people, women themselves know all this very well. But, of course, they do not advertise it. After all, ladies are masters of conspiracy and mimicry, and they manage to hide all this quite easily: in relation to women, a man lives with myths and illusions. As the poet said, it is easy to deceive someone who is happy to be deceived.
In order to judge the true merits of a woman, one must wait until she ceases to be pretty. There is no creature more unbearable than a former pretty woman. As paradoxical as it may sound, an old woman is a true woman.
All the negative (and positive) character traits that you can observe in old ladies are the main feminine traits. Old ladies are simply freed from the need and necessity to attract sexual attention to themselves, are no longer able to extract material benefits from this attention and therefore behave naturally.
Observe how old women behave, what they talk about and how they talk, what they are like in principle. And the scales will fall from your eyes, because in the most blooming girl you will learn to see the true female ego – constant discontent, quarrelsomeness, irritability, greed, simple-minded cunning, increased suggestibility and a certain clumsiness of mind.
And the most interesting thing is that old women almost completely lose that imaginary dissimilarity and desire to look original, which can often be seen in younger women. As they age, any person begins to behave more naturally and in accordance with their nature. But if old men are still different, then old women are all the same.
There is even an old proverb: “If you know one woman, you know them all.”
After all, the expression “women and children” is not without reason so persistent: women are spoiled children. With looks, smiles, conversations, requests for trifles.
A striking example is Sweden, one of the most prosperous countries, which has been the leader in suicide rates among adults (primarily men) for many years. But in almost all southern countries, populated by people with a greater tendency toward logical thinking, these problems are not so acute, although life itself is much more difficult there.
Apparently, the alliance of civilization (well-being) and the ability to critically analyze has a rather detrimental effect on a person, driving him crazy and pushing him into the fog of drug and alcohol oblivion.
A woman's heart is smarter than her mind: that is why she feels intelligently and thinks stupidly. From this we draw a simple conclusion: women's thinking is rigid, but it is precisely the limited perception that makes it stable and flexible in its own way. A woman never sees a problem as a whole and cannot evaluate it, so she often does not see any problem at all. Small, momentary needs, everyday difficulties, questions of the "inner" circle – this is what worries a woman and occupies her mind. The peculiar "Sharikovshchina" of women's thinking is the guarantee that this thinking is a simple and reliable mechanism. A woman is a fool not because she is a fool, but because she is a woman.
Being more egocentric creatures, women have more difficulty driving a car. Usually these difficulties are associated with various purely psychophysiological differences, such as difficulties with spatial orientation and misunderstanding of the principles of car operation. I fully admit that these features really have an effect, but I will focus on another aspect of the issue. Driving a car in a traffic flow is unthinkable without constantly predicting the behavior of other road users, and caring about the predictability of your actions by others, which is incompatible with egocentrism. The reluctance of female drivers to use rear-view mirrors as intended has become a byword; they say you need to look at me, and not vice versa. Therefore, the average egocentric woman feels extremely uncomfortable behind the wheel, attributing this to the rudeness of male drivers. I believe that women's driving technique itself is not fundamentally different from men's; in any case, as driving experience accumulates, the differences are leveled out. The essence of the differences lies in different behavior on the road.
"Your problem is in your worship of women, you put them above God, while you should love God selflessly and above people, even your mother. When you learn to love Him, then you will love people. For real. Judging by your texts, you love women exclusively carnally, there is no love for their souls, you do not even understand what it is..."
A woman is the best event. This is the only opportunity to delve into a person completely, to know him to the depth allowed by nature. Perhaps only graceful women, even without understanding the whole hidden secret, will say, thoughtfully twinkling their eyes: "There is music in this..." Whatever you say, music does not depreciate as quickly as thoughts. Therefore, everything she did now received a special meaning.
Until now, our meetings have been filled to the brim with sex and what goes with it, that is, love. We lie spread out like frogs in the sun, catching our breath and holding hands. Coming off into a rubber bladder is, in my opinion, just nasty masturbation. As if making love were about getting that final shudder at any cost. This latex partition between us, won't it grow to the thickness of a car tire?
The metaphysics of the feminine principle (or the "great wife") consists in the denial of the masculine principle. But the secret is that this denial is not symmetrical. And if the masculine is light, then the feminine is not some kind of "counter-light", but the absence of light, i.e. darkness; if the masculine is expansion, then the feminine is the absence of expansion; if the masculine is direct movement, then the feminine is crooked movement or, in the limit, inertia, immobility... Any denial of the order-forming complex is a trace of the influence of the feminine principle on various ontological layers.
It is clear that women need men and vice versa. The fact that a person has an irresistible attraction means that he is metaphysically not self-sufficient, that he exists in a dual reality and lacks something other than himself. The very need for another, the original erotic movement is already in its root impulse a consequence of ontological duality, a seal of the fact that we exist in a world born of the superposition of male and female ontology, that we are, as it were, stretched between these two poles and, not being a finished static result, participate in a complex dialectical mystery of the sexes, in the intricacy and polylogue of various levels of being that fill the abyss yawning between the poles of sexual metaphysics.
Why is the ancient god of love a boy with a drawn bow? Why is this piercing of young hearts entrusted not to a boy, not to a girl, but to a baby? Is it not because he will ultimately come from their union?
Is it not the Greeks, long before Schopenhauer, who expressed here the idea that in all their passions and encounters men and women are driven only by the goal of future conception, at which this infantile arrow aims? According to Schopenhauer, lovers, enchanted by each other, are in fact only tools in the hands of the universal will, which seeks the best combinations in order to give birth to the most viable fruit. It is not so much that a child is born from marriage, as that marriage is compelled by the will of the future being, drawing its parents to union. And the infant Eros shoots into their hearts as if from within their loins. With its reverse vector – a feathered arrow – the future strikes the present. Otherwise, how can one explain that in mythology the infant is the instigator, the "shooter" of love? He who is born of love, himself gives birth to it.
This is the original paradox of love, captured in the images of an ancient myth. Love is a means of procreation, in it there is initially someone Other, unknown to the lovers, but persistently pushing them towards each other. And at the same time, love is entirely directed at the individuality of the one you love – everything else disappears, dissolves in him, the One. Conventionally, this can be called "individual" and "super-individual" in love, or "personal" and "generic". And how this generic enters into the personal and transforms it constitutes the five types of love that will be discussed.
"What you want always seems necessary." This effect can even be compared to a drug. Drug illusions are also often perceived as some kind of higher wisdom. Also, the notorious "wisdom of love" is in fact only a feeling of wisdom. In fact, love evaluates the object of choice very superficially – in accordance with a rigid, somewhere even stupid, genetic program that sets the strategy for choosing a marriage partner. The mind has no choice but to adjust to the answer. In general, it is very common for a person to adjust to the answer.
The everyday explanation of the reasons for the emergence and development of love usually boils down to the simple: "She came or she went." Girls are worth 3 kopecks, and guys are worth a ruble. When they decide to get married, they take three-kopeck ones.
Each actor is in a situation of interdependence and tries to increase their personal benefit, while including the expectations of the other in their strategy. However, the solution does not depend only on utilitarian axiomatics; other options are possible here. However, in the absence of excess, even the most inferior resource will almost certainly find its consumer.
Neither individual freedom nor independence leave room for love, all this is simply a lie, a cruder lie it is difficult to imagine; love is only in one thing – in the desire to disappear, to melt, to completely dissolve as a person in what was once called the ocean of feeling and for which, at least in the foreseeable future, a death sentence has already been signed. About three years ago I cut out a photograph from Gente Libre: a man – only his pelvis was visible – half-plunging, so to speak, slowly, his penis into the vagina of a woman of about twenty-five, with long chestnut curls. All the photographs in this magazine for “free partners” always showed more or less the same thing; what was it that captivated me so much about this picture? The woman, kneeling and on her elbows, looked at the lens as if she were surprised by this unexpected intrusion, as if it had happened at a moment when she was thinking about completely different things, for example, that she should wipe the floor; but she seemed rather pleasantly surprised, her gaze tinged with a languid, impersonal satisfaction, as if it were not so much her brain that was reacting to this unexpected contact, but her womb. Her vulva itself looked soft and tender, the right size, comfortable, at least it was pleasantly open and seemed to open easily, at the first request. This was the kind of welcoming, untragic and, so to speak, unpretentious hospitality that I wanted from the world now, only this and nothing more; I knew this, having studied the photograph for weeks; but at the same time I knew that I would never get it again, that it was not worth trying, and that Esther's departure was not a painful transition period, but an absolute end.
Moreover, photography ideally recreates the model of the female and male view of the world. Men most often like to hold the camera in their hands, and women willingly position themselves in front of the lenses. The dialectic of voyeurism and exhibitionism, active and passive self-expression finds its most direct application in the process of photography.
Modern urban civilization is a world created for women. And for single women. It is precisely for them that the light industry, household appliances, cosmetics and perfumes, tourism and entertainment industries are oriented. Advertising promotes mainly women's products (well, with the exception of beer, which, to be honest, is not the most masculine drink either). Stores are littered with women's rags, stalls – with women's magazines and books, television – with series and melodramas, mass music culture – with boy bands and evergreen pop slag in the style of "love-carrot". Everything is designed so that the principle of "consumerism" works with maximum efficiency. Probably, supermarkets are a real emblem of today's culture. If the symbols of bygone eras were temples, fortresses, sculptures, then our time has immortalized Food and Rags.
Yes, it works because a woman is the ideal consumer. She is designed that way, starting from the physical features of the organism. It's simple: the vagina is a symbol of insertion, consumption, absorption. "To receive" is the original biological task of every woman.
In general, the modern world needs obedient, easily zombified consumers, who at the same time have sufficient financial resources to spend on all sorts of things that are not the first, second or even fifth necessity. And women are the best fit for this purpose.
In general, one of the most important female characteristics is that a woman by nature is inclined to take and accept. She is a kind of vampire, always feeding, poetically speaking, on "reflected" light. Any of her perceptions, both rational and, of course, emotional, must be provoked from the outside. It is difficult for a woman to fish out anything positive from herself.
By the way, feminism was born from this inferiority complex. What is it if not a monstrously developed complex?
It is hardly worth arguing with the assertion that modern Russia is a society of male chauvinists. It just happened that way: we did not have the Age of Enlightenment. From this point of view, the patriarchal social structure is a phenomenon of the same order as the absence of parliamentary traditions or the slave mentality traditional for a peasant country. We did not invent parliament. But we have shown its worthlessness. Parliament was created to talk and to curb the rulers with talk. Parliament is unthinkable without parties, and Russians do not like parties, because a party is a part of the whole, not the whole.
Almost all women are unshakably convinced that it is easier for a man to "get a broad" than for a woman to get a "man." For example, when two people carry one load, you often get the false impression that it is heavier for you than for your carrying partner. Yes, radical feminism looks crazy. It is similar to the theory of a "master race." It shows that feminism is trying to move (if it has not already moved) from the stage of women's liberation to the stage of men's suppression.
Who rolls the asphalt? Women. Why do they do it? It's an extreme degree of mistrust of men. She thinks: "I'll tear my own out of this world." And you won't see anyone there with a manicure, makeup. It's going somewhere. Some kind of practical haircut.
And even the most rabid feminists, with their categorical statements about men's duties, once again demonstrate their subconscious trust in men and their dependence on them. Giving men duties first and foremost confirms once again the perception of them as leaders, fathers, protectors, and patriarchs.
That is, they have everything they want, they have rights and money, opportunities and prospects, but they still feel that something is going wrong and, as the sad joke goes, “the Christmas tree decorations are not real.”
In fact, women are designed differently – even physically. They have dimples where our bulges should be, and vice versa. And so, reasoning in this way, a man either sees a woman as some kind of ennobled man; or, realizing that such a perception is untrue, he becomes disappointed and, in revenge, endows the woman with the most negative qualities he can think of. In this case, a certain demonization of the female image occurs, and the unfortunate loser begins to fear the woman, and therefore tries to get rid of this unpleasant feeling in every possible way. This is clearly visible in teenage and youth informal societies and get-togethers, where a dismissive and derogatory attitude towards a woman is simply a way of masking his misunderstanding of female nature and the fears caused by this misunderstanding.
And learning to understand women is quite easy; you just need to not imagine too much. A woman is like a handbag – you can't find what you're looking for in her.
If we operate with symbols, inside a woman, as inside a vessel ready to receive, and not to give, there is a great emptiness – until the moment when a man throws a part of his male essence into the vessel ... And then a completely different story begins.
The male world is informational; the female world is material. The male strives for knowledge; the female strives for consumption. The male thinks abstractly, the female – objectively. The male prefers fantasy; the female prefers detective stories. And, in the end, the male expresses himself through creativity and creation, and the female – through motherhood. The essence of every woman is her womb. As terrible as it sounds. The womb is the essence, the value and, ultimately, the justification for the existence of every woman in this world. Everything that is around the womb – that is, the female herself – is merely an auxiliary mechanism, a complex of services that must ensure the maximum realization of the womb. From this perspective, the female is like an apple or any similar fruit: juicy, ripe, bright, sweet flesh performs a service function to ensure the survival and germination of the nondescript, small, brown seeds located deep inside.
Metaphysics begins where talk of infinity begins. Philosophy is not an education, but a mindset. Here the following point arises. If metaphysics is true in itself and in itself, then a person, in order to get into the “zone of higher attention,” in order to “become interesting for metaphysics,” must make some effort, live his life in a specific way. In other words, it is necessary to live a very special life in order for metaphysics to be interested in you. From a psychological point of view, the choice “to think or not to think” means “to concentrate or not to concentrate.” In an existential sense, the choice “to concentrate or not to concentrate” means “to be aware or not to be aware.” In a metaphysical sense, the choice “to be aware or not to be aware” is, of course, the choice between life and death.
In Dovlatov's notebooks I found: "Brodsky said that he loved metaphysics and gossip. And he added: "Which, in principle, is the same thing."
Fellatio has always been the queen of porn films, and only it can provide girls with a useful role model; besides, only in these scenes is there sometimes some semblance of real emotion during the act, because only here is the woman's face shown close-up, and in her features one can read that proud joy, that childish admiration which she experiences when giving pleasure.
— The thing is that in cinema, as in any work of art, there are only two themes: death and sex.
— And love is not a topic?
- No, of course not. Because love inevitably leads first to sex, then to death. Or straight to death. Balzac almost came up with a third theme – money, but it "didn't work" because it turned out that money ultimately leads either to sex or to death. Or vice versa.
I silently looked at the lips. A little wide. Lips kiss, kissing, kissed. What can you do, girlish lips, tender, light. She drank tea, full lips smiled, raspberry-colored, sticky, tight. Sweet V kiss, white V let go, quiet V draw, smooth V scrub. All women are lips, only lips... You can't find a way from the heart to the lips – it is long and the road is not easy... The beauty of love in her chest will wander among her spaces for centuries, until she understands that the goal is as far away as before and the way out will never be found – leaving for the world, only a sad series of meager words escaped from her tongue. Quiet writing, my letter-making , my unthinkable addressee... As for things, I thought, accessible to you, if not in essence, then in the general tone of the complaint... Beauty is simple, and love is intricate.
The creation of oneself in oneself or in another? Is there more beauty in the world than love and is the feeling of wounded pride stronger than love? And the feeling of dependence is something when a person does not exist and cannot exist without another being different from him, because of the inability to depend on himself . Fear of censure, unless it comes from a friend.
Any hatred is a more dependent feeling than love. To love the one on whom you depend... But love is more astute and penetrating than hate. And the source of love turns into the object of love. And they love in such a way that you won’t believe how they rape and take revenge. You must understand that love is a secret that lies between two people, and not the similarity of two. Unbalanced interdependence... The great goal of every human being is to realize love. Love is not in another, but in ourselves, and we awaken it in ourselves. But in order to awaken it, this other is needed. To love love for love itself. The intensity of love, therefore, is explained and determined by the ability to love, and not by the object of love. The universe acquires meaning only if we have someone to share our feelings with.
I was about to put the sheets back into the tube when I noticed that there was something else in it. It was a page torn from a pocket-sized book and folded many times into a narrow strip; when I went to unfold it, it fell apart. When I read the largest fragment, I recognized the passage from the dialogue "The Symposium" in which Aristophanes expounds his concept of love: "When someone, be it a lover of young men or anyone else, happens to meet just his half, both are overcome by such an amazing feeling of affection, closeness and love that they truly do not want to be separated even for a short time. And people who spend their whole lives together cannot even say what they actually want from each other. After all, it cannot be said that they strive so zealously to be together only for the sake of satisfying lust. It is clear that the soul of each wants something else; what exactly it cannot say and only guesses about its desires, only vaguely hints at them." I remembered the continuation very well: Hephaestus the blacksmith appears to two mortals, “when they lie together,” and offers to fuse them and grow them together, “and then from two people one will become, and as long as you live, you will live one common life, and when you die, in Hades there will be one dead man instead of two, for you will die a common death.” The last phrases were especially etched in my memory: “The reason for this is that such was our original nature and we constituted something integral. Thus, love is called the thirst for integrity and the desire for it.”
The great Orthodox ascetic Abba Dorotheus said something like this: “Love is the convergence of the spokes of a wheel as they approach the hub. Therefore, love for God as for the hub (this is the first Christian commandment) and love for one’s neighbor as for the spoke (this is the second Christian commandment) are inseparable, similar. Striving to get closer to each other, we approach the third – the hub, God, and striving, on the contrary, for God, we approach each other.” What could be closer than the closeness between the knower and the known? This is the highest degree of love. Knowing, we identify ourselves with what we know. When this happens at the polar level, we are talking about perfect love.
You know, all those saccharine Indian metaphors about God and his seeker being like a pair of lovers – that's the real truth. Of course, this isn't the kind of love that leaves behind children or even the song "Show must go on".
First love or last pity – what difference does it make? Pity is just the other side of schadenfreude.
God, dying on the cross, commanded us pity, but he did not command us to mock. Pity and love for the world are one. It was not God who died, but God's law. Love for every dust, for every womb. And for the fruit of every womb – pity. But pity is the basis of love. Not because it is light for me with you, but because it is dark for me with others. I did not love you in you... I learned a lot from you, but not this.
From distilled tears, from blood so corrupted by you... We whisper "have mercy" and so on to ourselves out of greed, only to then say: "Forgive, dear, the sins of your beloved harlot-daughter."
- Eh, – she hums into her armpit for no apparent reason, – we were fools when we were young. No, we didn't want to party like crazy. Who were we saving them for? For our alcoholic husbands? Like Snow Maidens, we were afraid to melt. And now no one needs us, like dry roses... Careerists of love.
Don't rustle, old woman. A big and sluggish heart of a whore, capable of being kind without getting attached. It is not for nothing that they say: all men are goats, all women are whores... Love is evil, but where can you find a goat? All problems have one beginning – a woman was sitting, bored. I was born under the black sun. I was not born. I was squeezed out. This is not one of those things you get used to. I was not given life, I was not allowed to live. She was not a mother. Stop it. Stop it (mother's voice).
- Just no advances! – warned Z., lying down on the couch. – Remember, I am the faithful wife of my third husband, and you must not lead me astray from this samurai path. Let's have an abstract conversation. You can tell me about the war – by the way, you have such a nasty fascist mug in your war photos! It seems like if he falls into his red paws, he'll put you in a doggy style position, a gun to the back of your head – and rape you like a Viet Cong. So convince her, calm the girl down, tell her about something far from this couch...
One of such examples is presented in the well-known song "What a Hawk Didn't Get Along With", recorded in the 60s of the last century by Balakirev from Yakushkin. In its full version, it contains a detailed description of the murder of an unfaithful lover by a girl and the creation of a bed from his legs and arms, "drunken beer" from his blood, an endova from his "wild head", and candles from his body. The riddle then presented to the guests and the sister of the murdered man sounds fantastic and terrible: "And what is it: I am sitting on my beloved, I am sitting on my beloved, I am talking about my beloved, and I am drinking from my beloved, I am treating my beloved, and my beloved is burning like a candle before me?"
There is no fundamental difference between women, that's what he's used to thinking. They differ in their anatomical structure, and that's what interests a man. And the details of their anatomy, to tell the truth, aren't that different. They have the same main things.
He preferred to work for the ladies, in order to get rid of the harsher customers. And each time, meeting a new woman, he told himself that he already knew everything, there would be nothing new, there would only be new hassle, and what was the point of it? Each time he forgot his experience, but not for long: the situations repeated themselves, the women's remarks were the same, already heard, the promises and requests were exactly the same as in the last story. And our lady shudders all over, and clutches her sides, as if a tickler had attacked her, and, shaking, hits the fingers of the prankster with her fan. And the next morning, leaving the woman, glad that he had gotten rid of her, he said to himself: what did you want? Didn't you know how it happens? Was it interesting? Did you learn anything special? What is a woman? – a life support system for the vagina.
Sometimes, lying in bed, I think about my past and I see it so real that I have to pinch myself to remember where I am. Especially when there is a woman nearby. You know, I forget myself easily with women. That's all I want from them, really, is for them to help me forget. Sometimes I withdraw so much into myself that I can't even remember my woman's name or where I picked her up. Like the taste on your lips that you wake up with when you dream about a stranger. Funny, right? It's good to wake up in the morning and feel a fresh, warm body next to you, then you yourself feel clean. It's uplifting... until they start their usual song about love and so on... Can you tell me why women talk so much about love? It's not enough for them that you are a good lover, they certainly want your soul too... They just can't switch off from their misfortunes – it's like a stone inside them that they roll from place to place.
I want to give myself to a woman completely. I want her to take me away from herself... But for that she must be better than me, have a head. She must make me believe that I need her, that I cannot live without her. Find me such a woman, huh? If you find her, I will give you my job. Then I will not need a job, nor friends, nor books, nothing. If only she can convince me that there is something more important in the world than myself. God, how I hate myself! But I hate these bitches even more, because none of them are worth a spit.
I don't bring women to my place. Never. Therefore, married women are forbidden to me. However, I have noticed that they prefer to do it in their own place, in familiar surroundings. It gives them confidence, I think, it gives them the impression that they are not rushing headlong into God knows what unknown. They keep one foot on the ground, cling with one hand to the fence... I prefer this too, and not only because of my shameful filth as a lazy bachelor. To penetrate a woman's private life before perhaps penetrating her, that is an adventure equal to discovering Tutankhamun's tomb. However, they are all terribly banal, but so touching in their encroachments on originality. Many times she pressed my hard and soft flesh to this place and told all sorts of stories in the night. Why did I always feel somehow uncomfortable? Why did I listen more to the elevator and the fan?
But he had had his fun. He had had his fun all the same, he thought, looking up at the pale geraniums swaying in their pots. And now – all this fun has been shattered; because he had, after all, made it up himself, of course, he had made up this stupid escapade with this girl from beginning to end; made it up the way we almost all make it up, he thought. We make ourselves up. And her. Delightful amusements and some more serious things. But here’s the strange thing – and it’s true: you can’t share anything with anyone – everything is shattered into pieces.
And she cried all the time. Listen, have you ever had sex with a crazy woman? You have to experience it. From the very beginning she was chattering nonsense. I can’t reproduce this nonsense, but it was as if she didn’t suspect that I was working hard on her. Listen, I don’t know if you’ve ever had sex with a woman who was eating an apple at the same time?.. But you can imagine how that gets on your nerves. And this was a thousand times worse. It got me so fed up that I thought I was a little cuckoo myself... And now you won’t believe me, but it’s the absolute truth. Do you know what she did when we finished? She hugged me and said thank you. Wait, that’s not all.
And what do you think that crazy woman did? She shaved, you understand... Not a hair between her legs. That's why statues leave you cold. The thing is, they're all the same. When you see them with their clothes on, you imagine all sorts of things; you give them an individuality that they certainly don't have. Just the gap between their legs. It's so meaningless that I stared at it, fascinated. I studied it for ten minutes or more. When you look at it like that, completely abstractedly, funny thoughts come into your head. The whole mystery of sex... and then you discover that it's nothing, an emptiness. Think how funny it would be to find a harmonica there... or a calendar! But there's nothing there... nothing. And that's what's disgusting. I nearly went crazy... You can always learn something from a book, even the worst one, and that's a waste of time, you know... Guess what I did after all that?
A priceless friend, a mother, a dear friend. A very appetizing thing, honestly. Round and plump, like a milk bun. A pensioner's nightgown covers this abundance of naivety, so unusual in this granny that a sudden excitement covers my lower abdomen.
I dedicated sessions of intense masturbation to her and froze, shouting out her last name and calling her Madame and addressing her as "you". I called her then with such passion that she could appear here at any moment, materialize in my arms, in all the glory of this body that I imagined as delightfully too tender, which I adored, not in spite of the signs left by time, but precisely because of these elusive and so exciting flaws.
She thought I was cute, witty, and... knowing me, you can guess that I slept with her. A month later, she invited me to move to the other side of the country with her. I took that as a red flag, so I tried to break up with her. She responded by saying she'd kill herself if I left her. What a red flag. I blocked her email and all her devices. It slowed her down, but it didn't stop her.
It is even possible that she cried; I can well imagine how in the morning, while dressing alone, she suddenly bursts into tears. And, unnoticed by her, it distracts her from the source of her sad mood, so that after a few minutes she herself asks herself in surprise what has happened to her. She feels that relief when the doctor sits down at her bedside, his wise glasses shining: "Well, my angel, from now on we will behave like this..."
The next one was a Russian with ash-blond hair and a very developed figure, despite her fourteen years, a real piece of trash in appearance; then he asked a couple of questions to the others, jumping up and down, showing off in his silver-trimmed tuxedo, making more or less obscene jokes.
And the whores scream for hot water – their hands down between their skirts and bare feet (oh, the dimpled knees and, yes, the dimpled ankles), the straps of their dresses falling almost to the elbow, so that one tightly bound breast is almost all visible, the force of nature's throw, and you see the small fleshy corner of the thigh where it meets the hollow of the knee, and you see the darkness hiding underneath – I want to go where there are thick thick carpets for the toes, where the drama rages all thoughtless...
When we were talking with Blackie, his sincere seriousness sent shivers down my chest – it's always like this, and men are men – is Blackie any less of a man because he's never been married and has no children and hasn't submitted to nature's behavior of multiplying its own corpses?
And even the wiles of clever females... Don't scream. Don't whine. You were treasured. Sit down and write a letter. Don't turn on the TV. You ruined my life as best you could... (Heroes whose mighty spirit is high are often ruined by a woman's hair.) I would sneak into my house like a thief and, having barely crossed the threshold, lock myself in. He usually liked to listen to the rain. Especially when you're sitting somewhere inside, the rent is paid, and no woman is eating your brains. When a woman marries for the second time, it means that she hated her first husband; when a man marries for the second time, it happens because he adored his first wife. Devil girl, reveal a secret before we part. Why are you crying, woman? What are you grieving for, fool? Has the world converged like a wedge? Console yourself. Return the insults somehow. Well, what else do you want from me? Damn you, girl, melancholy and poison, my eternity to the left, your eternity to the right. Women with cotton wool, men with weapons. A woman chooses a man who chooses her. How vicious and sly women are!
She brought me happiness, but, as I predicted from the very beginning, she also brought me death; and yet this presentiment did not shake me at all: it is true what they say, that we are given to meet our own death, to see it in the face at least once, that each of us knows this in the depths of our souls.
He spoke to me as if I were a man. And with every word he drove a sharp nail into my heart.
Men don't get offended, men get upset. Real women never live with real men. Because real women never say "yes" the first time. And real men never propose a second time. A woman can only refuse. A man can harass a woman. An independent woman is a woman who hasn't found anyone who wants to depend on her. It turns out that it's basically impossible for a strong woman to find a man she can love. Because she can only love a man who is stronger than she is. You truly love only when you don't live together. And once you start living together, you love for something.
Men also feel the situation perfectly, I assure you. They just evaluate it differently. If he likes the situation, he will drag it out indefinitely in the form in which he likes it. Because he understands that in the next... uh... incarnation he may like the situation much less. And the woman believes that if she likes what is now, then she should quickly run further, because it will be even better there. What is the beginning for him is the end for her. And, accordingly, vice versa.
The man's hand is free to grab a dagger; the woman's hands are busy, holding back the silks falling from her shoulders. The man openly looks into the face of the world, as if created according to his needs and taste. The woman glances at the world furtively, sideways, almost with suspicion.
"...to marry a woman, a dull and stupid beast, but funny and sweet, so that she could season and sweeten the dreary importance of a man's mind with her stupidity." Arguing with a woman is like shearing a pig: there's a lot of squealing, but no wool.
I thought about the following, as it seemed to me then, paradox. So you live alone. You work, create, build, everything is great for you. Great friends, reputation, colleagues respect you, relatives love you, success at work, money is plentiful, time is plentiful, self-esteem is high. But then you have a steady girlfriend. And you do a lot of nice and useful things for her. Gifts, services, signs of attention, etc. And after a while, your life is transformed. For some reason, you suddenly turn out to be bad, sometimes you feel like an idiot, money evaporates in an incomprehensible direction at a breakneck speed, time is taken up with some nonsense. And on top of that, you also constantly find yourself guilty of something and are forced to constantly justify yourself for some stupid reasons. “Then why do anything for a woman at all if it makes your life worse?” I thought then. And why does this happen? I became curious. Then I began to carefully observe women and systematize the accumulated material.
Some women touch the heart, others get stuck in the liver. (She ate all his liver and the children grow up twitchy). She had a strange way of tugging at a man's nerves, and at the same time they sang like violin strings. Neuropath. Yes. The fiery man stared dumbly at her well-groomed nails. The words infected him with hopelessness, and he felt himself catching it like a cold. Varicose veins crawl up your wife's fat legs... Women on the island of Fernando do not wear any clothes except for the hats on their heads.
Relaxing between two palms raised to at least some height, I graciously await further ceremonies that do not defile my lips, however.
Young bourgeois girls stroll between the shelves of the supermarket, elegant and sexy, like geese, proud of themselves. There are probably men here, too, but I couldn't care less. A miniskirt is the summer uniform of hope. Mincing. Shoes. Nose. Boobs – nose. Fashionista. Independent look. Smoky glances of dressing gowns, shrunken men. Not lust – a spectacle, like a movie or a circus. Oh, what a beautiful word – "pliers".
At the very moment when the typist with a meager salary recognizes herself in the participant in the lavish ceremony of a bourgeois wedding, the bourgeoisie's renunciation of its own name fully achieves its goal.
— I walk on tiptoe, on my toes past the languid, languid boys. I answer them with the utmost politeness: I am as far from you as I can be – smilingly and mockingly, I am as far from you as I can be – purple-violet, cool off with a mint candy. The only opening through which communication between you and others is possible is the entrance to the vagina.
Whatever the lady, she is still ... "You take it gently... It needs to be rougher!" (By the way: a woman is the same as a chicken – she likes to be beaten at that moment). You take it precisely gently...
It was believed, and not without reason, that beating strengthens the family. The fact is that the female instinct forces the woman to constantly provoke the man, that is, to probe for psychological stability and at the same time try to carry out an inversion of dominance. If he gives in, then the instinct identifies the man as a weak, non-viable, and therefore genetically inferior male, turns off love and forces her to look for another male producer.
We lived according to the Scripture: God joins, man does not separate. The wife obeys her husband, and the husband loves his wife. There is a Russian proverb – love your wife like your soul, and beat her like a fur coat. The husband is the head of the house, everyone obeys him, only then is there order. So, brother, our grandfathers lived, so we lived, and we were happy.
Here is a very ancient text. Proverbs of Solomon Chapter 31: “Who can find a virtuous wife? Her price is far above rubies: her husband’s heart trusts in her, and he will not lack gain. She does him good and not harm all the days of her life. She obtains wool and flax, and works willingly with her hands. She, like the merchant ships, brings her food from afar. She rises while it is still night, and distributes food within her household, and a portion to her maids. She considers a field, and buys it; with the fruit of her hands she plants a vineyard. She girds her loins with strength, and strengthens her arms. She considers that her labor is good, and her lamp does not go out by night. She puts forth her hands to the distaff, and her fingers take hold of the spindle. She opens her hand to the poor, and stretches out her hand to the needy. She fears not the cold for her household, For all her household is clothed in double raiment. She makes herself carpets; fine linen and purple are her clothing. Her husband is known in the gates, When he sits with the elders of the land. She makes linen and sells it, And delivers sashes to the Phoenician merchants. Strength and beauty are her clothing, And she joyfully looks forward to the future. She opens her mouth with wisdom, And the law of kindness is on her tongue. She looks after the ways of her household, And does not eat the bread of idleness. Her children rise up and call her blessed; Her husband also, And he praises her, Many women have done well, But you excel them all. Charm is deceitful, And beauty is vain, But the woman who fears the LORD, She shall be praised. Give her of the fruit of her hands, And let her works praise her in the gates.
Housekeeping Magazine (USA, 1955). A Good Wife’s Guide: “Have dinner ready. Plan ahead, even the night before, to have a nice meal ready for his arrival. This will demonstrate that you are thinking of him and are concerned about his needs. Most men are hungry when they come home, and the prospect of a good dinner (especially if it is his favorite dish) is a necessary part of the warmth of home. Prepare yourself. Take 15 minutes to rest to freshen up before he arrives. Straighten your clothes, put a ribbon in your hair: be fresh and cheerful when he arrives. Be a cheerful and interesting conversationalist. He needs a lift in his spirits after a tiring day, and it is the wife’s duty to provide this. Tidy up the house. Go through the rooms before he arrives and make sure everything is clean. Put away school books, toys, newspapers. Wipe down the dust from the tables. In the cold months, light a fire in the fireplace. Your husband will feel that he has reached an oasis of rest and order, and he will be delighted. Besides, caring for his comfort will give you great personal satisfaction. Take care of the children. Wash the little ones and wash their hands, comb their hair and, if necessary, change their clothes. Children are a little treasure, he will be pleased to see them in an appropriate form. Observe silence. When he arrives, turn off the washer, dryer and vacuum cleaner. Try to persuade the children to be quiet. Be happy to see him. Greet him with a warm smile and show a sincere desire to please him. Listen to him. You may have much important to tell him, but do not do it the moment he returns. Let him speak first – remember, his topics of conversation are more important than yours. Make this evening his evening. Never complain if he came home late or dined and entertained himself without you. Your job: Make sure that the home is a place of calm, order, and peace where your husband can recuperate in body and spirit. Don’t dump your complaints and problems on him. Don’t complain if he’s late for dinner or doesn’t come home at all. Treat it as a small thing compared to what he’s endured during the day. Make him comfortable. Sit him in a comfortable chair or lie him down on the bed. Have a cold or warm drink ready for him. Straighten his pillow and offer to take off his shoes. Speak in a quiet, soothing, and pleasant voice. Don’t question his actions or doubt his judgment. Remember, he’s the head of the family!
Family life is the beginning of social life. The family consists, firstly, of the husband and wife, and then of their offspring. They have duties towards each other. The main duties of the husband are: to treat his wife kindly, to take care of her, to provide her with everything necessary for life, to be faithful.
The main duties of women are the following: to carry out the orders of the husband, corresponding to religious rules, to protect his honor and dignity, to be content with what there is, to avoid wastefulness. This is the path to a happy life together. Modern family life requires a certain intelligence, thoughtfulness, care. If we live simply as life has turned out, where it has carried us, it is unlikely that anything worthwhile will come of it. When entering into marriage, you need to ask yourself the question: do you think that you will be able to have a good conversation with this woman until old age? Everything else in marriage is transient, but most of the communication belongs to conversation.
“And so you look at this man and think – no, this is not what you need at all. But this man makes so much effort to get closer to you, he is so persistent in trying to break into your life, there is so much of him. He is everywhere. He meets you after work, waits for you somewhere, sees you off, constantly calls, says something or is silent into the phone, and you understand that it is him. And because there is so much of him, you are even afraid to turn on the TV, because you think – if you turn on the TV, he will appear there. But one day, sitting with friends in a cafe, you suddenly think: I wonder where this person is now, and why has he not called even once today? And then you think – oh, why did I think about this? And as soon as you thought about it, after a while you understand that you cannot think about anything else at all. And your whole world, in which there were so many friends, all sorts of interests, narrows down to this person. And that’s it! All you have to do is take a step towards this person, and you take this step... And you become so happy. And you think – why didn't I take this step before, to be so happy?
But this state does not last long. Because you look at this man, and suddenly you see: he has calmed down! And he has calmed down not because he has won you over, and he no longer needs you. He really needs you. But he has simply calmed down, and can continue to live peacefully. But this does not suit you. This is not what you wanted at all. You cannot say exactly what you wanted, but definitely not this. And you begin to arrange provocations – grab your suitcase, leave, so that they stop you, so that for a while you can return what was in the beginning, so that, at least for a little while, that thrill and trepidation return. And they stop you, return you... And then they stop stopping you, and you return yourself. And all this is terrible, dishonest, but it can last for a very long time. A very long time..."
And weave soothing, quiet speeches, interrupted by flaming kisses, powerful to eradicate all sadness from memory. Meanwhile, the gears of habit continue to turn. We are just a lump of habits. If the seed is spilled in vain, the gods become angry.
How can two soldier friends know each other... And my answer to your question is not an apology for humility. After all, when people are cold, they start to wrap themselves up without any agreement. Individuality is expressed only in the choice of how and what to wrap yourself up in. Comforting is a woman's instinctive need, and separation is based on who you are parting with. Because some people have been sought after by many, while others have been sought by no one. Well, as for favorites, everyone is free to choose... Youth passes for everyone, but love is another matter.
When you come, don't rejoice, when you leave, don't be sad. When you leave, don't go far... Love is just a preface to separation. And those with whom God sent us separation, have done well without us. And even – all for the better.
Communication is devastating – it is an excuse for idleness. Only separation is the beginning of the path. The break in friendship plunges into the relic waves of a thirsty libido. The flesh attracts hell. The keys of power are from hell. The flesh – the keys?
You would be at her mercy. You would eat from her hand like a poodle. How would you like that? Or do you not think about such things? You would not even be able to deceive her – she would follow you everywhere.
If it really hurt you that I was dying, I couldn't die. The one who doesn't know how to love can only skillfully take offense. You don't know me, you only know about me. The one who loves you hates changes in you.
When people have only one goal – to be together, they enjoy everything, because then there is an illusion of freedom from worries. You forget about life, that is, about money.
"Get out, liar" – wonderful words. Pack your things. Secondly, when frequent meetings are excluded, there is no point in arguing with each other, and this is already a serious gain.
Sometimes, in her raptures, she would say to me, "You are a great man." And though she had gone away, had left me to perish here, though she had left me on the edge of a howling abyss, her words still resound in my soul and illuminate the darkness beneath me. I was lost in the crowd, the hissing lights had stupefied me, I was a zero who saw how everything around me had turned into a mockery. She looked at me across the table with eyes veiled with sadness; the melancholy that grew within her flattened her nose against her back; the marrow, washed away by pity, had turned to liquid. She was light, like a corpse floating in the Dead Sea. Her fingers bled with grief, and the blood turned to saliva.
This bell ringing was strange, but even stranger was the torn body, this woman who had turned into the night, and her wormy words that had eaten through the mattress.
Humans can hear sounds in the range from 20 Hz (lower than a double bass) to 20,000 Hz (higher than a piccolo). Oddly enough, the noise of blood flow in the vessels of the head and neck is within the range of hearing, but we do not hear it. Doctors cannot explain why. When we speak, the sound of our voice reaches our ears mainly through the bones, which slightly change its timbre. This is why many people do not recognize their voice recorded on a dictaphone: only the sound “transmitted through the air” is recorded.
He turned away again and very slowly, very carefully poured coffee into the cups. And he spoke again: “All my life I needed women. And all my life they brought me almost nothing but grief. And most of all – those for whom I had the most, so to speak, purest and noblest feelings.”
The lady has bloody holes instead of eyes, and in her letters there are spaces in the margins and between the lines. She takes care of every fold of her dress, what other occupation can she find for herself? I am determined not to be afraid of her, and I hold on to my thoughts, and continue to speak calmly: it was stupid of her to give the only floor lamp to the bishop, her heart is pounding – poor human hearts are pounding everywhere.
Out of delicacy, she feels obliged to ask me stupid, absurd questions, behaving like a servant caught in a misdemeanor. Women generally have the soul of a servant. Besides, she told me all sorts of nonsense from her life without stopping. Honestly, the world should be closed for at least two or three generations, so that no lies or tales remain. So that there is nothing to blab to each other. A gigantic amount of work must be done, requiring youth, health and the renunciation of one's "I". Old people are not viable, they may not exist. Who will teach the children then? This is one of the reasons for women's "chatty talk". The biological and social function of a woman is to survive herself at all costs and, if possible, preserve her offspring.
I don't think that the so-called activities of society, this everyday, glorified work, are really so important. It would be much, much better if people were told to be idle, to shirk their duties, to spend their time in idleness, to have fun, to relax, to cast aside all cares and worries. I think then all this work would be done somehow differently. For it is essentially the same thing: everyday work and menial work. Every day people suppress their instincts, desires, impulses, intuitions. You have to get out of this trap that you fall into and do what you want. But we say to ourselves "No", I have a wife and children, it is better not to think about it. That is how we commit suicide every day. It would be better for a man to do what he likes and fail, than to become a successful nonentity. Isn't that so? I think that the existence of a wild animal – hunted by a hunter, experiencing a host of different fears – is preferable to the existence of a traveling salesman with a briefcase. I had no idea how or what, but I decided that if I was destined to be poor and miserable, then let me be poor and miserable in a job that I love.
; Lord have mercy, ; she said, standing at the window and watching the pigeons' antics. ; What a world! This is where one has to live! (The complexity of the world puzzled her.)
It is unlikely that, wandering through the hot bedrooms, she understood the influx of uncertainty and anxiety – oh, tears, tears choke, and between her temples – a hum of oppression; why is she, like carbon dioxide exhaled – unnecessary, green, angry?
And now the water is twisting around his finger, distorted, the stones have turned away from him, a logical chain – their ridge excludes him (and this is close to me).
I fall inside, through the crusty crust of consciousness. The razor shines in the fierce bathtub, and you are alone, like a queen, chiseled in the foam of options, tangled, and the hot flax of drying towels, when it flies off your shoulders, you imagine yourself a friend of those traitors who have no one to entertain. I tore to shreds tapestries with obscene short stories of the Renaissance, depicting languid girls in gondolas, the girls change places until dawn, disappointment shines through in their every gesture ... artists, possessed by the aesthetics of death. And by the power of the sea I called those who have a direct connection with you, and after you sent them into the abyss: walk, as a queen dreams on a board. There are only two coordinates left: there is you and me, and in the middle, blinking, space jumps like a fish on the grass. Only the aimlessness of paradise is elusive. The bush of the universe is empty. The cosmos is poor. And you are wound up in a circle of blanks and bases by a mandatory machine. And they move apart, and the axis trembles from parallel torture. The cosmos is poor, poor and goes without pants. In the cold, where the crust is box-like, and where the crowd is more diverse than falling from the stairs, there we are vouched by the Hour and the Eye alone.
Not a man who has within himself an immaculate Virgin, while Judas is still alive under the purple robe of Christ – only Babylon amuses herself under the veil of the virginity of her daughter Dinah, so that the beautiful daughter can commit fornication without hindrance and sleep sweetly with her lover Judas.
It can reach a level of mild madness, similar to the whim of virgins who imagine that they are pregnant with the globe. And they lull their globe...
For similarity they take from the one they meet, they become him themselves, their vision is diffused, does not distinguish differences in a glass tower, I will replace the main thing is not to die in a glass tower, otherwise you will not see a ram hovering over a mountain, they are mistaken by me and it is scary, than glass towers are mistaken by me, they climbed the mountain, perforation of the world, and at the same pace they fell down, it is a pity you have a sweet tooth and a pretense, you slept in one of the towers and no one saved, escape from the tower is possible by magnetic wave, inspiring the air around with a whistle of lips, you need to run for a long time with her on par, to make sure her body is empty without you. It seems that there is nothing to add to the loops of the beginnings. Twitching of the earth shakes off the contour from the oncoming one. But you, the solvent of marriage rings and the mutterer of your incarnations, want – in any of the runners you will find a twin, to save yourself. Her frontal lobes are no longer functioning. She wants to pick buttercups from the blanket.
And he doesn’t relearn how to fight, responding to anesthesia with anesthesia. How much babble, threats! How I was a fierce teenager, a buffoon! The TV stirs us up like sand with resin. An old man goes to an old man for tea, such diligence in lumpy blindness, traces of his beloved are collected like beans in a handful, somewhere lies a counter of silence, a pipe of squealing! So that, having laid eggs of memories, not warm chickens under the line to hatch. You are a mongoose in a duel with men, a nervous mongoose. And your feudal rage is a disheveled current. Your eye, winged by resinous poison, is thick. Take a breath and take another sip. The game does not save, but washes away shame. You love carnage and the fainting of societies. Where blood is popular, there is no point in holding a grudge, and you can't braid your hair by touch in a mental hospital without a mirror...
(Apart from a handful of multi-colored pills in the morning and evening, most of all – tragedies and descriptions of other people's suffering. Thanks to this, suddenly everything that happened to me found its place in the general system. It no longer completely filled the space and my brain. Suddenly, compassion, pity and meaningfulness of existence burst out again. In that quagmire of despondency, absurdity, hatred and resentment towards the world, it was like a rope, holding on to which you could gradually, little by little, pull yourself up and climb to the top.)
Chapter 46. Love
"Love," as the apostle said, "is patient, kind, love does not envy, love does not boast, is not puffed up, love is a friend of the world and thinks no evil, it does not seek its own advantage, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices in the truth and leads to the light, love covers everything and always, in every place blesses... The happiness of true love does not consist in possessing it, but in turning love into purely spiritual pleasure." Love has no "why", but there are "in spite of", for love then becomes love when it begins to interfere. Love will never cease, although prophecies will cease, and tongues will be silent, and knowledge will be abolished.
The thing is, veins work hard all day long, pumping 7,500 liters of blood. At the market, you can buy 2 zucchini, or 20 zucchini, or not buy any at all – it all depends on how much you like zucchini. We call it love, and experts in the behavior of living creatures have dubbed it a blinding dominant of subjective perception.
Hurry to love, because love is a justification. To do good – without distinguishing to whom. Because “not to love” is a small murder. Love is a phenomenon of spontaneous over-trust. The highest form of interest, a phenomenon of excess. Love comes from nowhere. I could say – from the heart, but it is the same thing. “Love,” he wrote in his notebook, “is either a remnant of something degenerating, once enormous, or it is a part of something that will develop into something enormous in the future, but in the present it does not satisfy, gives much less than you expect.” This is not love. We simply enjoy each other.
I would compare this situation with the development of painting after the emergence of photography. In the "pre-photographic" era, painting performed a huge amount of technical work (for example, commissioned documentary portraits, capturing historical events, general views of cities, naturalist sketches, and so on). But when photography appeared, artistic tasks proper came to the forefront of painting. Of course, this statement can be surrounded by various reservations, but we understand that we are talking about the most important thing – about the archetypes of love, its idea, which then becomes overgrown with corals and mollusks of being and existence to a lumpy unrecognizability. The feeling of love even began to be measured by a certain measure of suffering, a measure of absence, a measure of non-existence.
Falling in love is not true love, it is a temporary emotional outburst, "a genetically determined instinctual component of mating behavior; a temporary collapse of ego boundaries that serves to increase the likelihood of mating and the emergence of mutual commitments to ensure the survival of the species." True love cannot be born until falling in love dies.
Selfless obsession with each other is not proof of the strength of love, but only evidence of the immensity of the loneliness that preceded it. When a woman cries for her lover, it most often does not mean that she loved him, but that she wants to seem worthy of that love. Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired. We want to be the source of all the joys or, if this is impossible, all the misfortunes of the one we love. I desire someone else's desire, which desires me. (Whispering into a whisper and falling in love with love...) Longing for love is love itself.
We fall in love with a soul, and it has no age, no appearance, no social position. Through dogs we pay homage to love, to its very possibility. What is a dog if not a device for love? It is given a man and charged with the mission of loving him; and no matter how vile, how vile, how lopsided, or how stupid he may be, the dog loves him. This peculiarity of its caused such astonishment and shock in human beings of the previous race that most – all the evidence agrees – eventually began to reciprocate the dog's love. Thus the dog was a device for love with a teaching effect, which, however, took place only with dogs and never with other people.
"Oh, damn it," I thought, "is this really the time to argue?" I became curious – you know, I'm as curious as a kitten – and I decided to wait and see what would happen. I loved her less and less and waited in cold blood. I threw up my hands and was no harsher than the circumstances. And the times have long passed when a deceived girl could turn into a heliotrope out of grief, I don't want to say goodbye to her: for me there is nothing more disgusting than women's tears and prayers, which, changing everything, essentially mean nothing. In my soul I thought coldly and indifferently: "I loved her – yes, but now ..."
In the virtual world in which I am typing you a letter, you and I have been corresponding for a year now. Not a single atom can touch. But you, woman, need them more than I do. You have long confirmed my theory. And I am that cretin. Touch me, touch me.
...That's exactly how they reason with their sparrow brains. The scum wanted love, the most stereotypical one. Here, feel how I love. It will suit you, bitch. The only thing worse than a mutt is two mutts. I'll fuck you like a goat, I'll plow you and sow you, such a whore!
I dream of women, women in tight panties and careless negligee, one sits next to me and shyly removes my limp hand from its place on the soft roll of flesh, but even then I do not make the slightest effort, one way or another the hand remains there.
There comes a moment when this creepy arrogant bitch who was my wife arrogantly walks away from me to the toilet, saying something nasty, I look at her slender ass – I am a regular idiot, enslaved by lust for women who hate me, they spread their venal flesh all over the sofas, it's all one meat cauldron – they are all, in the end, mothers.
At night it is difficult to endure an attempt at reconciliation; at night both the body and the will are relaxed, and I did not want to make peace.
She sat, leaning her head on her hand. The radio in the kitchen was mumbling. I should have done that a long time ago. She came to her senses. This shouldn't turn into a system. And Vova the Yogi advised to forget and throw it away, because women are dust that settles on our feet on the way to Eternity.
A fading shadow, forgotten, forgive me, our history has gone down to the comments. It's all like a decrepit web – you can't touch it. Our little garden is in decline. A luxurious and already worm-eaten garden of love. I treat you terribly well, I wish you all the best... But there's no point in remembering what was, let everything bygones be bygones, nothing of the past remains... We don't owe each other anything, handshakes, smiles, promises, banal words...
Morning. A semi-dark room. Two people are lying on a wide ottoman. She is smoking. He has his hands behind his head. "Listen," he says. "We've been together for a few years. Maybe we should get married?" She takes a drag, exhales smoke and says with a sad smile, "Who needs us..."
On the day his son was born, he went around the newsstands and bought all the newspapers for that date. So that later, when his son turned eighteen, he could present him with: what happened on your birthday! The plan failed. His wife got married, and his son doesn’t know his father, and the bag of old newspapers was probably thrown away. His wife had no imagination. But it was a good idea!..
I will tell you one thing: I have never been happy in life, please don’t think so. Forgive me for perhaps hurting your pride, but I will tell you frankly – I loved my wife madly. But she cheated on me, abandoned me even more insultingly than I did you. I adored my son – while he was growing up, I placed all sorts of hopes on him! But he turned out to be a scoundrel, a spendthrift, an impudent fellow, without a heart, without honor, without conscience... However, all this is also the most ordinary, vulgar story. Be healthy, my dear friend. I think that I have also lost in you the most precious thing I had in life. May God grant you what is too late for me to expect. Be, in any case, happier than me. Farewell. I wish you a peaceful and sinless life, an undefiled bed, health, salvation and good success in everything. My regards to all.
I feel guilty, I feel sorry for you... Maybe I just haven't understood the theory of emptiness yet. After all, the emptiness after something good can only be filled by finding something better.
“Because we all revolve here in an orbit of guilt and forgiveness, crying in the evenings, looking out the dark windows, without reason, closing this endless cycle within the framework of the body, the street, the park, the city...”
So here we are, dancing, in a frozen, icy rhythm, on long and short waves. I like to think so.
- Whenever you feel like it, or if any night seems too empty to you, come.
In social psychology, a chronotope is understood as a certain characteristic communicative situation that is repeated at a certain time and place. “We know the chronotope of a school lesson, where the forms of communication are determined by the traditions of education, the chronotope of a hospital ward, where the dominant attitudes (an acute desire to be cured, hopes, doubts, homesickness) leave a specific imprint on the subject of communication, and so on.”
It probably won't seem strange to you that I won't set foot in your house again? After all, if a man can return to the scene of his crime, he can't return to the place where he was humiliated. But still, the time I spent in our union was the happiest and best in my life. In spite of many sad moments, caused by external reasons or by ourselves – and from which no life can be free, for they serve as beneficial tests for it...
I was sincerely glad to meet you. Let me squeeze your paw, stretched out like a board. I wish you a sea of happiness, a drop of adversity, an ocean of luck, a stream of worries. Farewell, love, call me someday, that is, write greetings on frozen glass... Farewell, dear unforgettable friend, from all train stations trains depart for distant lands... Train stations have seen more sincere kisses than registry offices.
Live to your fullest pleasure, console yourself, write more often to your friends... Be healthy, cheerful, successful in all your affairs and do not forget the brown northern compatriots suffering from indigestion and bad mood.
And I thought: are these not the nets that entangle human life with sticky nonsense? The desire to become the root cause of events affects everyone like madness, like a consciously accepted curse. They don’t weave lace now (but my mother did), it was in use at a time when life had no value, and when its value was determined, everything ended. (“You see how right I am, I don’t throw anything away: the day will always come when it will be useful!”)
And the man decided that he had nothing to do with it. That's the way it is. Thank you, I say. (We talk like two crazy people. I only saw it now, when I wrote it down. He talks as if I am free to go wherever I please at any time, and I answer in the same spirit.)
But no, there she was, sitting as always, sewing, her lips pressed together with that tense, sad expression that a woman always has when she sews. Nothing to worry about, he assured himself, looking a second and a third time at her face, her hands. Indeed, what could be terrible or repulsive about her when she sits and sews in the bright light of day?
- Shut up, I hate your rightness! Do you think that you've arranged things in such a way that nothing matters to you?
- Not at all. But it's not so hard to get settled in life when you have nothing to lose... when you look deep inside yourself for a long time, you realize that there is nothing there. How can you want something for nothing?.. But I'm waiting for the ships to sail in... sail in mysteriously. It's just that when you look from above, everything gets smaller.
Hey, don't be harsh, don't be harsh, but be simple, like all the oak groves. Cut off the sentence that comes to your lips, rises to your heart. That the stars and the sun – everything will be settled later. And you, you – a girl on Trinity Day. You, dissatisfied with me. I, dissatisfied with you. You have dignity, I have freedom. These are our feelings, which "are not potatoes, you can't throw out the window."
Pale and thoughtful, she said, "I see the source of your laughter. It is not difficult to see. Because you are simple-minded. A man can not only escape from the world, but transform it."
— I don’t understand your choice... You don’t dare leave me alone. Don’t abandon me... As long as people love, they forgive. You yourself wrote that love implies not only freedom, but also responsibility, that true love is associated with respect . You are responsible for me, and duty is the divine principle in man. You have no right to leave this world of your own free will, because next time you will start the game from the same place, only I will no longer be there. It doesn’t matter what a person can give you, what matters is what he refuses for you. You will meet the one to whom you owe your soul.
("For those who ended their past lives by suicide, there is no other way but to be a messenger," was the unspoken rule of letter carriers. The official slogan was different: "We are not late." And that was also true. Wherever the letter was sent, in whatever godforsaken place the recipient was reborn, the message found him.)
Our life itself is something greater than life itself, and greater than its manifestations. Life is more significant than we think, yes, more significant than we think. Moreover, it is all permeated with currents... The whole world is a big deal. Life is full of pleasures, and those for which you don't have to pay. But the pleasures for which you pay are still better. We must give to life at least as much as we receive from it. He who moves, he grows. You will believe that time is the source of life. You will find the dependence of love on life. And then we will win philosophically – do you understand?
Everything is in its place and has a special position, just as our mind does in relation to God. The world in its visible and tangible substance is a map of our love. Not God, but life is love. Love, love, love.
Who will bring me sweets on weekends, who will ring the chimes of my days, if you are gone? And all those familiar little things that are not destined to be known... Will not hug, will not kiss, will not say kind mysterious words...
- Because I love you and I think you deserve the best – what you have now...
She handed me the tube and said, "Let's become different people." I think she was inviting me to kiss, bite, suck, and caress each other differently. "It's stupid," she said breathlessly, "but let's become different people." Why did I underestimate the depth of her desires? Maybe she wanted to tell me, "Let's go on a new journey together, one that only strangers go on, one that we'll remember when we become ourselves again, and we'll never be able to be the same again."
- You know my method, Watson. It is based on observing small details.
People can drink together, they can live under the same roof, they can make love, but only joint idiocy can indicate real spiritual and emotional closeness. You can laugh at anything, but not with just anyone. After all, there are no trifles for kindness.
And threw nuts at him. Even non-writing pens can be a sign of careless happiness. In those moments when you see people funny, you really understand how much you love them. Life does not stop being serious because people laugh, and it does not stop being funny because they die. The degree of closeness between people is determined by the comfort of silence... Life diverges from philosophy: there is no happiness without idleness, only what is unnecessary gives pleasure. For example, football is the most essential of insignificant things. We love to chase small bouncing objects that are difficult to catch and hold. Why? Because we once did something similar to survive – we hunted. Football is like chasing a rabbit. The same animal energy boils in our society. "I declare fools all those who, kicking their legs, find satisfaction in foolish jumps and spinning." Dance differs from ordinary walking in that the forward movement is replaced by rotational-oscillatory movement, in which each gesture receives a symmetrical reflection in the counter-gesture, and space is isotopic at each of its points. I was smart enough to live my life stupidly.
Remember how you yourself told me that love is mutual penetration into each other, that it is also a search for truth, and that it is as strong as death, and therefore you should not fight it, but enter into a trusting relationship with it. You can love death, but you cannot kill love. It is not customary to talk about love at all. About death – please.
It's time to sum it up. Is love stronger than death? Yes. Because love includes death. And death does not include love. No, that's not true. Any word includes any word. For example, death (suicide) due to unhappy love. Then why is love stronger than death?
Freud wrote a letter to a friend in his last days in which he says that, as far as he has noticed... one conclusion seems absolutely certain: that people cannot live without lies. A big lie that helps to understand the truth of life. The truth is dangerous. A lie is very sweet, but unreal. Delicious! You continue to talk sweet nonsense to your beloved, and he continues to whisper sweet – but – nonsense in your ear. And meanwhile, life continues to slip out of your hands, and everyone comes closer and closer to death. Before death comes, remember one thing: love must be lived before death happens. Otherwise, you live in vain, and your whole life will be futile, a desert. That is why love has the courage to flirt with death, because it is not afraid of losing to it. Before death comes, make sure that love has happened.
But this is possible only with truth. Therefore be true. Risk everything for truth, and never risk truth for anything else. Let this be a fundamental law: Even if I have to sacrifice myself, my life, I will sacrifice it for truth, but I will never sacrifice truth. And you will be immensely happy, and untold blessings will pour out on you. Many examples of bizarre or atypical behavior used to disprove the existence of a universal model of cognition have been shown to be defective, such as Margaret Mead's study of Samoan adolescents. The Hopi Indians were said to have no concept of time, when in fact they do: the anthropologist who studied the tribe simply did not recognize it.
Well, here I am again, opening up. I can’t keep my distance. Who knows, maybe I’m destined to captivate you with the confessional genre – which would be quite nice. Schopenhauer notes with surprise that it is very difficult to lie when you write. (No one has developed this idea since then, and I can only agree with amazement: the epistolary genre encourages sincerity, truthfulness – I wonder why?) It’s not that I prefer confessions in particular; I like all literary forms without exception.
By forgetting yourself, you forget me. If you have no more joy left for me, so be it! I will be left with your suffering. Love is the only cure for death, for it is akin to it...
Tears began to trickle down her cheeks, first the right one, then the left one too. "The bastard, he brought me to tears. He fought with those he loved so often that in the end the rust of the fights invariably ate away everything that connected them. He loved too much, demanded too much, and in the end he was left with nothing.
A breath of love that seems to happen to us. As a result, barriers collapse. The lover is close to the beloved, to his fate, whatever it may be. In fact, it is not love that possesses a person, but, on the contrary, it is love that possesses him. It is easier not to love than to love. Love does not transform. It simply tears off masks.
But he was offended every other time. She moved the bolt again. It was not stupid at all, but good. We will remain ourselves. To live means to live for others. We all feed off each other. We must seek consolation for ourselves wherever possible...
You are behaving like a C minus, what an intolerable creature! The bride's little finger, alas, is touchy. And touched the reins of a bored horse. Let us show how unworthy and unhelpful it is to nurture resentment within oneself. "N. 193. Urusvati knows how worthless the garden of resentments is." She ran away – a child stung by a bee. Resentments were ripening, and you let them fly into the sky as balloons... There are no rules for your game, and there is no game for these rules... If you reproach me for this now, you will make "this" incurable.
A turtle crawls and crawls towards a snail while I think, pull myself together and answer your question, the theme is exhausted at sunset, the lilac has faded, turned black, only the antenna is obedient to the night wind, completely out of place, out of place... Oh, snail! Climbing to the top of Fuji, you can take your time... There are plenty of snails on the top of Fuji anyway. That's the whole trick, that life and the bride are saved not by strength, not by valor, not by cunning, not by a wallet, but by a hare's sheepskin coat. That unforgettable sheepskin coat must be hare's: only a hare's sheepskin coat saves. C'est la vie.
Cats. They reign: soft top-top-top near pipes and antennas. The cat is talking. What is the cat talking about? You can take the cat off the street, but you can’t take the street out of the cat. Who would think of caressing the radiators of a steam heating system with their hand – they are always covered in fluffy dust. Well, come here, prostitute. Sleep, kitten with a dotted voice, I will lull you, and my hand. He has a girlfriend in a black dress, he has a cat with a feather in her mouth. He beats the girl, does not feed the cat. The cat does not write poetry, and ladies' stuff is like a fig in a pocket. The cat does not care about perfume, she becomes more beautiful with age... Pay attention – cats do not have a single ugly movement. Cats know what they are doing. You will never meet a cat who would do something he does not want. Anyone, but not them. A kitten with a big soul is a socialite. Someone else's love. Go, my soul, rejoice, jump, knock palm to palm. His leather jacket holds the meaning of killing animals and people. And the girls have nothing against this nice young man. The cat does not stop catching mice, affectionate little ones, even having become a lovely princess. A cat ran between us. It seems to me that I am not a mouse, but a mousetrap. A bar-mousetrap – a dog-vodka swims in Nowhere, and Nobody sets it on you. You walk upside down on the water, and mollusks rattle in your hair. We are in a mousetrap of self-satisfied logic, and logic is a blade of boredom and will not give a chance to return, because Orpheus does not recognize the returned Eurydice as his – for himself!
Everything will remain between us, as Harlequin and Pierrot would say. And not a single note will be lost. Only the lazy and incurious will not lie down under the wheels of the metro now. Cracks. A favorite place. Where there is no cat, there mice frolic. They symbolize time here, continuously undermining the "bush of life" to which a person clings, hanging over the abyss of non-existence.
The girl, by the way, dyed her hair chestnut. When she enters the room, everything takes on meaning, colors... She came up to me, looked at me as if she were looking into a dog's mouth. I like to act like secret lovers. With one look you say to each other: let's forget that life can be hard. She speaks to him exactly the way I would like a woman to speak to me.
In response, you will be tormented by how everything could have been different. Then you will draw an algorithm of thought. If you defeat me, we will be even. You will find cold comfort if you defeat me. You will have to endure autumn, spring and summer.
You know what it is, of course? It's spring fever. That's what it's called. And when you've got it, you want to – you don't even know what it is – but you want it so much that your heart aches. If you think about it, what you want most of all is to get away, to get away from the same familiar places that you see every day and that you're sick of; to get away to see something new. That's what you want – to get away and become a traveller, you're drawn to distant lands where everything is so mysterious, amazing and romantic. And if you can't do that, then you'll settle for less: to go where you can – and thank you for that.
Spring, spring... But the rooks are black. But the sun is blinding. Hands are freezing. And doctors do not save the dead. And there is nothing to buy the pledge of separation. Sooner or later... everything will die, but you will remain with me. Sooner or later...
A truly cruel creature, and harsh, and at the same time... The gods wanted it that way. It is written in the book of fate that we had to become strangers to each other. Strange gods only inspire fear, they will not accept sacrifices.
The popularity of love, but in vain... a flash... of love... will pass. What do they do when they love? All lovers swear to fulfill more than they can, but they do not fulfill even the possible. If no one owes anything to anyone, then everyone is very grateful to each other.
All in you is complete. So the bumblebee, anticipating the frontal question: what are you ringing? is heard with all its might over the field. So the smell is responsible only in the question of the flower, ringing out of place.
We have a horizon and mail, embraces and earth, and lightning... Night. The heights are demanding. The melancholy is intoxicating. Then the figure of intuition is more noticeable: it goes alone, but from both ends of the bridge. Light a cigarette? Night, the night is in vain.
"Nothing spoils a target like a hit" (Artillery Proverb).
"Damascus steel" means: lady make a blade, and I listen, it turns out I love you, my dear, and the letter "a" in the word "steel" is the third in a row; this is for fools who immediately melt with love for you, Damascus steel. The Pre-Raphaelites lived bohemian: they walked, had fun, had affairs, stole each other's wives, and so on and so forth. The scarlet-lipped lady is just one (and the main one) of Rossetti's lovers. The expression "microlepton radiation of the Damascus steel flow" means: microscopic notes fly guy, but there is only one ray of them Nikolai, her guy is normal as an artilleryman's current, that is, the core of a star or a planet. The word "planet" means: guy, flies, artilleryman, no anomalies. An airship is, first of all, a toad. Then: tear, hold, fats and Jews. It was a stagecoach and became an airship. (But for some reason I still hear Simferopol in the airship). The word "artilleryman" means the core of the planet and the surrounding environment. The word "inhabited" means: no offense to you, artilleryman, a master from A to Z, that is, you made the planet according to the law, you can rest. The word "Kolya" means: a blade made of Damascus steel, the norm, a joy to behold, but using it for its intended purpose is the last thing, it is not the letter I, which is placed wherever they want and used by whoever wants. Put the blade in the sheath and do not take it without need. The patronymic "Ivanovich" means that he lies on his side and plays around, that is, does nothing, and everything is fine with him. We get along with you, Vladimir. Okay. Adjust, smooth out, caress, delight. The expression "word of honor" means: we worked hard, there is a new craft, we will do it skillfully and normally. The word trud means: now they have decided to do something smart, that is, something their soul desires. The word dama means simply a girl, an artillery craftswoman. It costs her nothing to inflate a balloon right on stage with a Soviet vacuum cleaner to a critical explosion, thereby making it clear that she did not come to stroke your withers. Why do people love the name Katya so much? – because it comes from the word to roll and to ride. Baba. Katsapka. Such tits. Tamara.
"...Everyone says: pretty face, pretty face... But the face can't be pretty. Imagine if the face gets smudged, then how will the person see? – after all, the eyes should be sharp, and not at all smudged... The same with the mouth, nose, etc." (...From the thoughts and reflections of mathematician Fix)
The next day, the concert "With a song through life" was broadcast on TV. And it suddenly seemed to me that all the songs were performed especially for me, for my mother, for my husband and for Igor. Igor is a guy I loved a long time ago, about 8-9 years ago. And when I listened to the songs, it seemed to me that the artists were singing about my first love for Igor. And in the artists themselves, it seemed to me, I recognized him, Igor, my husband Rodion and myself.
That day I listened to all the radio programs and started taking notes. It seemed to me that the program "Chess School" was on the radio especially for me. I began to imagine myself as a spy, and the program "Chess School" was like an encrypted message from the "center" for me. So, first I am an artist, then a spy, and finally, an astronaut.
I set my hair on fire. I want a girl... I want a girl! I beg and plead so. The one I love, the one my soul thirsts for, and at the thought of whom, in me, a poor simpleton, my breasts swoon and sweat, and whom I am ready at any second to squeeze in my damp embrace and strangle from an excess of feelings! A well-fed woman. With a romantic idiot in her gaze. B ig, like cobblestones, cool white breasts, a wonderful bust. And how dressed up, to smithereens: a magazine, just a magazine! Comrade, know! That life, like vodka, is bitter for everyone, but sweet to me, when at my feet there is a beauty, like a dog, faithful to me to the grave!
Vladimir was raging again today. This slave is terrible and menacing, rushing about earthly blessings... Most people would rather die than start thinking. Many do so.
A neighbor is not a simple matter, he is not just anyone, not a passerby, not a wandering cripple. A neighbor is given to a person to weigh down his heart, to confuse his mind, to inflame his temper. It is as if something emanates from him, from a neighbor, a heavy worry or anxiety. Sometimes a thought comes: why is he, the neighbor, like this and not another? What is he doing?.. You look at him: there he is, coming out onto the porch. Yawning. Looking at the sky. Spat. Looking at the sky again. And you think: what is he looking at? What hasn’t he seen there? He stands there and stands there, but what he is standing there for – he himself doesn’t know. You shout: “Hey!” – “What?” – “Nothing! That’s what. You’re getting carried away, you idiot... What are you getting carried away for?..” – “What do you want?” – “Nothing!” – “Well, then shut up!” – "Shut up, or I'll give you a good thrashing!" Well, you can share another time, even to the point of death, otherwise you'll just break your arms and legs, knock out an eye, or something else. Because you're a neighbor. But the other thing is that living alone is kind of boring, you need company. Family. A woman. A dear fellow definitely needs a woman – how can he live without a woman?
When Benedict comes to her, he immediately blows out the candle and starts to roll around and spin and tumble, making love in every possible way. And squatting, and spread-eagled, and here and there, and jumping around the hut – my God, what he sometimes does in his thoughts! Now, when you're sitting alone, thinking a thought, stirring a spoon in your cabbage soup – you'll never jump around the hut, or stand on your head. It's somehow stupid. But when you come to a woman – it's a must. Straight away, take off your pants – jokes and laughter. A woman's nature, or rather body, is the most convenient for jokes. So, having joked, you'll get tired. Afterwards, you'll want to eat so much, as if you hadn't eaten for three years. Well, come on, what have you cooked? And she: ah, where to, Benedict, where are you rushing from me? I want, she says, to fish some more. An irrepressible woman. Fiery.
"Don't whip the bastards; tell the story." He clearly heard the same song coming from the janitor's room to his ears: "Whoever loves the cantor, I would love him... Educated people know what to say..."
He compared thoughts to cabbage: "In thoughts there are mistakes. And that's great. Cabbage still grows "with mistakes and without mistakes."
Peredonov performs obsessive rituals of incantation, bordering on delirium, he "shuns". Peredonov spins in place, spits in all directions and mutters:
— My head is empty, like deserted places, I fly away somewhere like a tree from a leaf. Chur-churashki, churki-bolvashki, beeches-bukashki, vedi-tarakashki. Chur me. Chur me. Chur, chur, chur. Zur-perchur-ras chur.
- I took the ball out of my head... shaaar... shaa...
- Put it back, you fool!
- No, I won't !
- Well then don't put it.
- Well, I won't!
- Oh well.
Anything else?
Why does this harmless scene seem sinister? It has two attributes (a ghost?) of an obsessive strange object and a fact – pedantry and magic (the buyer and seller seem to be conjuring or charming each other instead of making a purchase/sale transaction).
The sky is in the moon and stars. Through and through, like a horse in apples. When a horse leaves home, you can put a rope around its neck. Take it by the hand, return it to the lady. But when love leaves, you can no longer return it, because love is not a horse... There are many good things in the world, but all the good lives far away from me, far away from me. And behind my back, as always, there is nothing. In my pockets, as always, there is nothing. Bad, bad everything around, not good. A lamp in my dad, a nail in the bench. E... E... Although I was born a long time ago, although I'm an adult now, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know where, I don't know where to put me, so that everything would be good there, where I was there, where I was. Bad, bad everything around, not good. Listen, mom, give me a knife. Mom, give me a knife.
Chapter 47. Impossibility of Dissuasion
What was love becomes death, and people make up stories to console themselves. And I know that love is like a bird in a cage: if you don't feed it every day, it will die. And this story, or rather its ending, is about love.
I coax, I force him to tell me this story. I encourage, I coerce, I indulge, I praise, I tempt. Every story has its time when you simply must tell it, I persuade. If a person does not do this, he condemns his soul to remain tied to this secret forever. The word "novella" would be quite appropriate. But, in the end, he begins his story. Little by little. In pieces. Some immediately burst out, others remain lying in the same place without moving. The gaps in the story are very different. Sometimes they themselves acquire a special meaning. As a storyteller, I must carefully collect them all together. There is only one path in life – the one behind.
Now I am telling you about the most important person in this whole story, and the best one. And, as you can see, we were both right, despite the fact that nothing in some way turned into nothing. ( Trust is to be nothing.) We will also take this away from what is not. And what is most absurd is that we both ended up, in general, fools. But it makes no difference. The days go by. The whole point is that the days go by. Whatever you do. Only the vanity of life does not allow a person to be both at the same time. Always is a bad word. And I tried to be the way you wanted, and suddenly you say "always". Where were you? What happened to you? I believed in your independence. And now you have returned to your native nest. Who were you, I repeat. Knees are bruised and heels are askew, you – falling backwards, clutching the ring of an imaginary parachute – who? Things in themselves were recognized, but not you. And I loved more, and words became more tender. And I forgave what I had previously considered unworthy of forgiveness. And he says so quietly and sadly: "Child, go away."
She saw something more in that second than could simply be seen standing like this: leaning against the door frame, unbuttoning her not new dyed goat fur coat. "The little one, all trembling, clung to his father; – what can you do? – the old man holds him and warms him, hugging him..." However, this amazing state, when you "shine through" animate objects, like fluorography shines through diseased lungs, lasted only a split second: it was this split that she would remember to the fullest.
When she entered the apartment, she had an expression on her face that showed that she had just made a very important decision.
You are lucky, you can control your heart. (There is not enough strength to forget you. When you disappear irreversibly.) There are connections that cannot be destroyed... without irreparable damage to the soul. Instead of the sky... your eyes. To scoop up for the last time. I know nothing about this, but when you can’t live without a person – I know. The one who has met the other half of his soul at least once – will never find another! You burn – and I will not go out ... You are dear to the gods – and such do not leave in youth: they are taken for other games, believe me. Something like: this is what you want to hear, and why then want to hear someone else? At least once do not go to strangers. Straighten your eyes, pupils parallel, do not think, be silent, rest ... In the eyes, as in the sky, it is light ...
Just don’t be offended,” he said. “I’m telling you everything honestly, how I feel. If you want, I’ll lie. Only then there will be no point in talking to each other.” He fell silent, and then added: “You know, the only thing I can say,” he turned his head towards me, “is try to avoid compromises. Not so much with people, they are sometimes good with them, avoid compromises with yourself. You have to pay for them. Sooner or later, but you have to... sometimes dearly...” He fell silent, breaking off the phrase on the rise, as if he wanted to say something else. I expected him to say something, he looked at me so confidentially. In love, they don’t know why they love, and when they know, they no longer love. His voice was touched by an even more moist haze, as if there was a constant, slightly tired understanding in it. I still felt sick, although his voice did make me feel a little better. It was important to realize that on this dim night someone, at least a little, existed for me. The main thing was to hear the voice, assuring each other in such a direct way of mutual existence. This unfinished conversation, for some reason interrupted by him, still excites me and deprives me of peace.
But how to combine duty and pleasure? For the absence of rights is worse than your absence. But maybe the whole point is that it is not he who is waiting, but he who is being waited for? Yes, it is you, without a doubt you! Welcome! These walls, all this junk, my old woman's granddaughter – all yours! We thought: everything will still be, but it turned out that everything has already happened. Everything has already happened and is described in every lousy novel.
"After a long journey, I see again the same room where I used to come to break the bread of our desires with you, because in broad daylight I no longer love you, because with sorrow I remember the time when I went to look for you, the time when I stood before an incomprehensible world and before the incoherent system of communication that you offered me. The beautiful negatives of dates, when we met each time forever. Didn't you yourself suffer enough from the naivety because of which I had to turn your whims against you forever? What thoughts did I not think over then. And now I have come to be convinced once again that it exists, this great secret – the endless absurdity of my life. I know that you are never sure of anything, but even the thought of pretense, even the thought of a possible mistake is beyond our strength. After all, since time immemorial has the monotony of hope secretly fed boredom. You and I have decided not to let to itself the spectators, for there was no spectacle. Remember, there was only loneliness, and the stage was empty, without scenery, without actors, without music. Each of us is a shadow, but we forget about it in the shadows. (We all stand on the sad earth, casting long shadows, the breath is cut off by the flesh. We try.) You hoped with your strength and weakness to reconcile the disharmony of meetings and the harmony of separations, the awkward naive union – and the science of deprivation. And in the integrity of time there suddenly arose a day, such and such a day of such and such a year, and I could not reconcile myself with this day. There were all sorts of days, there were all sorts of nights, but this one was too painful. Life and love suddenly lost their point of support. To the women whom I did not love, I said that they exist insofar as you exist. In order to return to life, I tried to stop loving you. In order to return to your love, I lived very badly."
Leaves rustle in the darkness. I'm afraid to touch the wood in the fireplace. The huge boots of duty remain behind the door and guard us like dogs. And we slap barefoot on the floor and enjoy the happiness of being our own size, not getting tangled in the hems of desires, always too big for us – at least twenty years. Even to tell that woman that I know everything about her – everything will tip over like a plate of cherries – laughter all over the floor, blood on the carpet... To be. This cannot – I always remembered it and today, but I did not understand how – my ashes along the ground along with the ashes of your cigarette are dragged on the rough soles of the ants.
Now listen: I love you, I have loved you for a long time, since that stupid meeting, in that bustling, oppressive house. My dear, believe me, if anyone at all, it was you. It was harder for me than it seemed from the outside – after all, we are not crazy, you and I. Please, wear earrings. Please, take this money, buy tickets and arrange our seats – and in general do whatever you want. Please, control yourself. Lord, if only I were worthy of being waited for... I have never taken anything to heart in my life, that may be why we ended up here, and even now in some way it is a pleasure... but, honestly, we really are just...
A person never forgets the place where he once buried a piece of his soul. He often returns, circles around, tries, like an animal with a paw, to scratch a little from above. For both of them, these were real and at the same time imaginary places of metaphysical experience, which remained alive thanks to memories and the spellbinding power of language.
Failure to find the right word, second. I think you'll forgive me, because you know: I've never done anything out of malice... In case she's not around when you read this – she was your wife. In case you're really not kidding...
Live more quietly, I beg you, live more quietly, walk more easily, more quietly than water, lower than grass, breathe more easily, because all the whorish blood, the convict giggling river, the underground water, the oily shine are felt by people like poison in the blood. Keep what you know, hide, hide, hide, go into secret. Oh, love teeth in a dark tower with the touch like snow. (Snow is also pleasant because it falls completely silently, like light). The heart beats more quietly, does not disturb thoughts. What I do not hear is most precious to me.
Unlike animals, man is able to leave what he loves. Every man kills what he loves. Strange as it may seem, the ability to be alone is a condition of the ability to love. You, you answer: maybe, maybe... Something has disappeared, but something has also been found. Nothing to take away, nothing to add. In such quiet corners, habits are quickly formed. We divided the inheritance. You bequeathed your share to me, I bequeathed mine to you. Your face is only what I did not become... But how can the faces of loved ones be collected? There is no closer closeness than... There is no brighter unity than... Yes, what can I say – I'm simply drunk.
This has never happened before. How can I explain it to you? Or (not) leave, (not) admitting to (not) co-recognition of the rules, laws of corrosion? – your environment is (not) aggressive, I still (not) believe in (un)stability, tell me, old and new, yes, too, forgive me for the bombastic revelations, that is, believe it or not... Eyes that have never cried cannot be beautiful.
There is no division into strangers, there is a border of shame in the form of a difference in feelings at the word "never". Parting is possible, the female version is typical, the lips rustle. The dead envy, as do the living. How to express it? Show. Open for yourself. Something unbearably difficult, from which the head goes empty, the fingers release the pen, and I fall on the bed. An idol with watery eyes and a nervously smiling mouth ... Oh, how I want to pull it out of myself. This life-slurry, with which you always have to live in a state of symbiosis. Pull it out. Put it on its feet in front of you and look into its eyes. It seems, says Augustine, that much in the Universe is wrong, but you can't understand the beauty of the whole house, standing in the corner, like a statue.
We realize we'll never cure cancer, fly to the moon, or feel Jennifer Aniston's boobs. Oh well.
I answered that this is usually the case, that it happens – a common crime of passion. I read that when the crime is unclear, the punishment should be lenient. In the past, we would have exchanged mocking glances. In the movies, bad guys who escape from prison are usually caught because they go to their loved ones one last time before leaving their homeland.
Feelings are based on the unity of worldviews, – the passport officer chirped, – we'll have to discuss the amount of severance pay. The ideal couple, from my point of view, is a devilishly beautiful woman and a devilishly smart man.
I didn't understand anything then. I had no idea that you could inflict such a deep wound on a person that nothing could be returned or fixed. Sometimes your mere existence is enough for this. You see, no matter what I do, I am doomed to cause pain.
The secretary takes courage and quotes an Indian proverb: "He who has understood the secret of vibrations, understands everything." Oh, please, don't mumble, the director said nervously. Firstly, it's against the rules, and secondly, I'm telling you in Russian and I repeat: I don't know.
October is the month of sadness and colds. In his opinion, there are much more pleasant ways to catch a cold – at least on the Ferris wheel, and all the chrysanthemum sellers are swindlers. A young American and a mulatto woman touch each other with their eyes from different corners. We glance at each other; we make sure that we are strangers, and, having first looked into the void, we look away. “Will you eat?” – looking somewhere past and clumsily hiding her professional hatred for the eternally chewing humanity, the tired waitress chattered on one note.
On bad days you want to pick up the phone and dial... the six-digit IQ of a half-forgotten number that is better than you and kinder. It's a shame you can't call yourself to ask about rumors. In such situations, you decide that it would be nice to call someone in the middle of the night, somewhere after three, to wake this someone from their peaceful sleep with a sepulchral voice.
I make a late, and therefore indecent, call and hear the barking of dogs on the other end of the line, apparently flying in through the open window from the street.
The secret shades of your voice... Sometimes, in the jumble of days it seems to you to call, like, just like that, just to find out how yours is nothing to chat to find out how things are asking where the melancholy is from it's a pity it's impossible to convey on the wire, on the rough radio, like a necklace tears to complain, like, I'm getting sick I'm sick, how did all this happen how far it went, it's too early to recover, not to recover is strange. Talking about a cold is a tattoo.
The phone looks like it's about to ring. But it doesn't. I lie there and stare endlessly at the silent device. We live to wish, so I'll wish...
Suddenly – a phone call – you run to the phone at a trot – a voice on the other end of the line after midnight instead of a phrase – a long, slow needle in the heart, painfully squeezes.
- How stupid you are! Is it possible to give an example? It was unbearable. I shouldn't have called, she thought. Is it possible to explain anything when you don't look each other in the eye? Not feeling/you/.
He poured himself a glass and drank it quickly. He wanted to get rid of everything he had just thought about, to forget the grimaces of the past... the fangs of time slowly gnawing into the heart.
Nuzzling each other: e-e, darling! Bad weather wrinkles puddles – sometimes you need to cry. It is easier and more pleasant for us to reproach each other close by. Inability to say goodbye. To you, and not to someone else. Not to one of many, but to one of all... (And isn't it in every woman that the infinite universe smiles at us?) ...You are a silver lining... of all... Be in solidarity with him to the end. You were better, and in the case of death this is always a sign. Not the final one, but precisely the last one.
Somehow we said goodbye. When you get there, be sure to call, okay? Bye, we'll keep in touch... Don't forget me either. As soon as the war is over, find me. And I'll look for you. Definitely, okay? One day. We'll see each other again. I'll tell you: "Now move over, everything that was – God bless it, and what is – that's how it should be." People who were so close always meet again. They will always find their loved one in the next world. Goodbye... what a beautiful word, irrevocable... It's clear from the first word: never like that, never... in another life, when we become cats.
And I always forgot everything in the world, because you were more important than everything in the world, and you know it. In this war, only one thing was for the best – it brought me together. Well, don't cry... Remember that we might never have met at all. The verb to love is an action – not a state... The price for love is equal to love. After all, we have nothing to regret together. Don't be afraid, you won't feel betrayed. I've prepared a drink that makes you forget your loved ones... Then you move away and look at my face. Your eyes are anxious. Finally, you're in love with me. For real.
... is sometimes enough to overcome temptation in your soul and find the desire to live. He who has not understood the lesson given to him must learn it again. Only he who loves has the right to criticize and scold. And he who loves is always more right than the whole world, for love is higher than man.
I know the lesson by heart. They all will never know as much in life as I do. I know all the cases and aspects; I would know everything in the world if I only wanted to.
It seems to me... – she said and fell silent. Let's... help each other... Maybe it's time for you to stop thinking about life and start living? To grow old together, and not carelessly separate for eternity. Life partners for life, like two toothbrushes... We must be terribly careful. Because our life will be very strange. We can order special suits or go to a country where it doesn't matter. – We are already in a country where nothing matters. I couldn't. In this country.
I can leave if you want. Any moment is good, to leave or to stay. A woman should prepare to be a soldier's wife, for she has a "built-in weakness". One must always say goodbye forever... From nowhere with love from no one... Not mine, but also no one else's. And eyes, as if all-forgiving... Let me tell you goodbye: I love you so much that I no longer know which of us is not here, because when you steal, you steal from someone like yourself. Never again confuse your feelings with mine, do not cut fate in half. Never again come out to me with words... Live with me until April. I want to see how the snow melts, how the clouds run silently across the sky. Don't leave, not now, not now, in the day that is homeless than the night... and I will pour the doomed time of losses in my palms...
What should I do if I'm Scottish and crazy? I'm an old-school poker and the mother of everything here. People like me are always rewarded... But I'll stop. It's all nonsense. Don't forget your crazy woman. A woman is a woman, right? And not a witch? Good-natured and harmless. You're just so kind to me, because you can make a city out of those who forget me. (Oh, forget me, don't be such a nasty thing!) What you forget, you miss all your life. And I'm in your debt forever.
Only once, the only and most beautiful time, everything in my life was real – you, my greatest love, my greatest joy in this world, you were with me.
And the eyes will be filled with the sky. "Outside is a man, and inside is the sky," because you are like a cloud. That is, the appearance of a maiden is, of course, the appearance of a soul for a man. For souls are incorporeal. Well, then, the further you are from me. You cannot step into the same cloud twice.
Our separation is majestic, for we are parting forever, having exchanged the filthy lucre of separation with interest... We are parting forever, my friend. Draw a simple circle on paper. This will be me: nothing inside. Look at it – and then erase it. This is how a cobblestone is suddenly thrown into a pond, for the reason for separation is more important than the separation itself.
Stop, stop! What is going on?! Someone give me a handkerchief! Just look at him – he’s crying! Take him away! Take him away! But according to the laws of theatre, you have to cry at this point. Every new performance should be a cultural shock for the viewer. Where can you cry in an imaginary world from an imaginary bitter insult? Tears shed at performances should be collected in decanters. The young man trembles in the same way from the insult – the refusal of the girl with whom he wanted to lie.
Where are the screamers and the mourners now? It's all about the stature and the bite. The mourners are far away, they have no one to lie with.
It will pass like a spring cough, become invisible in a motley crowd, bow elegantly, like a column of Chinese verses. And it is a pity, like an old dress.
He kept reading her magical poems, he kept scaring her: like, when I die, I will come to you at night. And what about my love? It will die too. But my love is like that. It cannot die. And he will follow my shadow – how? With love? Acceptable – perhaps – words cried. Do you want me to think the same way you do about me?
How is it better to do this – with a letter or during farewell? A bow at parting, you curtsey? – Perhaps. That’s how immortals say goodbye. And a hug, a kiss, anything... for the last time?
The country beyond the eyelashes – there you will be my wife; we will start a family, we will have children, we will raise them to be smart and kind. They will watch silently, not understanding anything... Lord, I want us to have a child – this is the most real thing that God can do...
Finish painting your eyelashes quickly... they will tremble and slowly fall. Don't hurry, live, the second floor is empty, if you want, we'll sort everything out...
You can't get your maiden honor back; for a girl, it's even, you could say, the first treasure in life... When you grow up, my daughter, they'll marry you off to a big village, to a strange village, the men there are all angry and drunk, it rains on weekdays and on holidays... And she shed tender tears...
Hello, my dears, I want to marry your girl! – And who are you and what is your advantage? – My advantage is that I am young, healthy, and handsome, and I have a good, clean job, and you know...
It was a light, gossamer day when I first went out. The little white clouds were running away; but already in the east the cold air was turning blue, and I thought that on such a day Andersen's field mouse, who had given shelter to Thumbelina, would lock the door of her hole, inspect the grain reserves, and in the evening, going to bed, would say: "Well, now all that remains is to have the wedding. You should be grateful to God, because not every groom has a fur coat like the mole's. And please don't forget that you are dowryless."
And he will remember it for the rest of his life. No, she thought, selecting some of the cut-out pictures – the icebox, the mower, the gentleman in the tailcoat – children never forget anything. That is why it is so important to say what to do, and you feel relief when they go to bed. You don’t have to think about anyone. To be with yourself; to be yourself. Now she often has this need – to think; no, not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. The usual – bustling, broad, ringing – evaporates; and with a sense of celebration you diminish, shrink to yourself – a wedge-shaped core of darkness, inaccessible to the gaze of others.
The sisters burst out laughing. The boy who reads aloud about Ali Baba will wake up in the morning arrogant, grey-haired, rich, will start counting sheep, trusting the oath, like a spy, sneaking around the house, will marry you. I'll run away from you to heaven, the boy says, I'll become a swallow, I'll hide in the next world, no one will ever find the swallow girl, I'll meet her for several years, young children, inflamed skies, so. She probably frowns in her sleep... The girl is unlikely to sleep: tomorrow is already spring.
A woman must experience the love of a bad man in order to be grateful for the love of a good man.
His theme—influence of somebody on something—they walked quickly, and Mrs. Ramsay could no longer grasp the meaning, only separate words... dissertation... department... lecture... opponents... She listened with half an ear to the nasty academic Volap;k that was going on like clockwork, but she told herself that now it was clear why the invitation to the circus had upset him, poor thing, and why he had suddenly burst out in such a way about his parents, brothers, sisters; and now she would see to it that he was not teased any more; she must tell Pru everything. He would probably like best to tell him later how Ramsay had taken him to see Ibsen. He was a terrible snob, yes, and a bore to the extreme. Now they were entering the town, striding along the main street, the wheelbarrows rattling past on the cobbles, and he was still talking and talking: about teaching, calling, common workers, and that our duty was to “help our class,” about lectures – and she realized that he had completely recovered, had forgotten about the circus and was going to tell her (and again she liked him terribly) – but the houses on either side parted, and they came out on the embankment, before them stretched the bay, and Mrs. Ramsay could not help crying out: “Oh, how lovely!” Before her lay a huge dish of blue water; and the lighthouse stood in the middle, grey, inaccessible and distant; and to the right, as far as the eye could see, green sand dunes with tangled grass ran and ran into uninhabited moonlands, melting and falling in soft folds.
"The young maiden will often exchange her light dreams for dreams," he said, fingering her fingers. C ' est tres nature , you savez , dans les young filles (French) – This, you know, is very natural in young girls. It will dress in a new love. And the heart, knowing nothing, knows tenderly again. To whom the maiden heart is destined by inevitable fate, he will be sweet to the detriment of the universe, to be angry is stupid and sinful. ("Your perfections are in vain, I am not worthy of them at all. "You will love again, but... learn to control yourself.)
There was a note of despondency in their words, and I too was quietly touched by sadness, because the cold sky threatened rain, and I remembered the incessant noise of the city, the variety of its sounds, the quick flashing of people on the streets, the briskness of their speech, the abundance of words that irritated the mind.
In the village it is a pity to sit at home all day in rainy weather. In the village no one goes crazy. It is better to be without a fool than without a liar. As long as there are simpletons in the world, it is convenient for us to live by deception.
He slid down, looking at that hedge that had so often marked a pause, summed up the results, looking at his wife and son, looking again at the urn with the red drooping geraniums that had so often set off the train of his thoughts and preserved them on the sheets, as scraps of paper that came to hand in the frenzy of reading preserve our notes – looking at all this, he slid quietly into reflections on the article in The Times about the number of American tourists who annually visited Shakespeare's cottage. If Shakespeare had never lived, he asked himself, how much would the world have changed today? Does the progress of civilization depend on great men? Has the lot of the average man improved since the time of the Pharaohs? Is the lot of the average man the criterion by which the level of civilization is measured? No, probably. Probably the highest good of society requires the existence of slaves. An elevator attendant is an absolute necessity. The thought seemed unpleasant to him. He threw back his head. No, no; better to find a loophole and somewhat reduce the role of the arts. He was ready to prove that the world existed for the average man; that the arts were mere trinkets on human life; they did not express it. And Shakespeare was of no use to it. Without knowing why he felt the need to reduce Shakespeare and rush to the rescue of the attendant who was always hanging around at the lift doors, he plucked a leaf from the hedge. All this could be used to treat the youngsters in Cardiff in a month, he thought; here, on this lawn, he was merely making ends meet, merely grazing (he threw away the leaf he had torn off in such irritation), like someone leaning over a horse, picking an armful of roses or filling his pockets with nuts, trampling at random the fields and meadows of a district familiar to him from childhood.
Where to find a companion, – he twisted the ring on his ring finger, – when each wanders into his own steppe. For when two people part, then, before opening the gate, each takes something from the other in memory of how their life was lived, and perhaps... In Ancient Greece there was such a custom: friends, parting, took some object (a clay lamp, a statuette or a waxed board with some inscription) and broke it in half. After many years, these friends or their descendants recognized each other when they met, convinced that both parts were connected and formed a single whole – a symbol.
To die with the thought that contact is still possible... The touch of ju, the touch of shu...
You should take a wife from another nation and let your friends raise your children. If you get a good wife, you will be happy, if a bad one, you will become a philosopher. When Antisthenes was asked what kind of woman to marry, he answered that no matter which one you take, you will regret it anyway: "A beautiful one will be common property, an ugly one will be your punishment.
By the way, what was her name? The professor ran his tongue over his lips, his gaze grew cloudy, he repeated the name of the woman who had long since died.
This led us to suggest that the severity of the loss is not necessarily the most important factor in determining the nature of grief. What is most simple and easy to see here is... if only the matter were that simple.
Therefore, for example, "in the case of Mr. N's death , they speak of the death of the bearer of the name, and not of the death of the meaning." (Mom will be upset if she reads this. Don't read after this point.) Don't read if you feel bad. You'll feel even worse. Read it when you're in a serious mood and inclined to reflection. And don't cry. Everything has been mourned so many times already.
Your wife will be very upset, so you'd better address this to her. I think she wouldn't approve of what I'm writing here either. And of course, my father wouldn't approve of it. He was a proud man.
I am speaking to you, and it is not my fault if I cannot hear. You will not answer me, not because you are shy or angry, and not because you are dead. Nothing will ever fill the void. I say: "The words are about to end, but their limit is within the voice, because your voice falters when you speak of this sorrow that cannot be communicated."
The bird of freedom does not tolerate indecision, and when it flies away, it does not return. Never meet those you once loved; these are bad meetings, like meeting the dead. Sometimes there is nothing more vulgar than returning.
Here... the human soul knows a lot... that's usually why... I can't go against the soul. Soul, soul... It's walled up in a shell and deep, that's what. You have to understand it, brother, and then... And if you listen to it, you won't be mistaken. Soul, soul! Stupid, kind, soft and warm . Breathed into man by God, who can you teach something with your feverish aphorisms? And who needs your pile of withered illusions that you once took on short-term rental? Don't cry, don't hope! Tell your story, fugitive soul, just tell the story. Soul, it has wings. Helicopters are the souls of dead tanks. Souls have everything. Eat something hot – and your soul gets warmer.
How do you roll the dice in a casino? Most players throw the dice as hard as they can if they want to hit a big number, and as soft as they can if they want to hit a small number. Which is nonsense, of course.
The same goes for football fans who, sitting in the stands, move their arms and legs as if this will allow them to join in the game. Many people who want to improve the world by sending their own good thoughts (energy, karma, impulse of the soul) into the surrounding space are in the same illusion.
I have this habit, like many teachers, that much of what I teach is simply a heavy burden that I can no longer bear. I feel that the supply of all sorts of nonsense that has accumulated in my head is drying up. Soon I will have nothing left to share with my neighbors, only my stories. Then, perhaps, all that will be left for me to do is spread gossip, and my prayers to the world will dry up.
Chapter 48. Several letters
She lies down on the bed without undressing. One, two, three, four... I'm afraid she'll go crazy... It's so good to feel her body under the covers in bed again. But for how long? Will it be forever? I have a feeling it won't. She speaks so feverishly and quickly, as if she doesn't believe that tomorrow will be another day. "Calm down. Just look at me and be quiet." Finally, she falls asleep, and I pull my hand out from under her. My eyes are sticking together... Her body is next to me, and it will be here... at least until the morning.
He shook the salt shaker and watched the grains of salt bounce. He took his head in both hands, leaned his elbows on the table and thought. And you sit and guess, and listen carefully.
Depressed by the gloomy day today and the anticipation of a bleak tomorrow, mechanically bringing a spoonful of tea to your mouth... And only when the teaspoon falls and does not ring, but hangs in the air, you realize that this is a pale maiden playing with you, bloodless Lilith.
- Why do you always say Joan and Marjorie, and not Marjorie and Joan? Do you like Joan better?
- Not at all, it just sounds better this way.
If something pleasant happens, she explained to him, you always need to season it with some unpleasant little thing – that way the moment will be remembered better. Because a person remembers evil longer than good.
Everyone around her was terribly busy with important and interesting things, and she was simply waiting for one day to end and another to begin.
What happened next? For the first two days I kept thinking that he would call, that it was just a passing fancy. Then I got scared that I wouldn’t see him for a long time – months, maybe even years. It seemed ridiculously absurd. Unnecessary. Incredibly stupid. His weakness angered me. I decided that since he was like this, let him go. This mood didn’t last long. I decided: I’ll decide that it’s all for the best. He’s right. It’s best to break up completely. Concentrate on work. Be practical, businesslike, serious, that is, completely unlike myself.
- No, tell me... don't hide from me, my dear friend, where he goes? And is there somewhere my rival with him? Tell me: maybe he loved someone before me and returned to her, or is he, my villain, planning to marry?
You don't want to see me, as if I were some kind of insect. I thought about writing you a letter just in case, but I never did. True, I came before your letter, and the apartment was empty, and that seemed terrible to me, I simply couldn't see the road when I was returning, I could have been run over by a car. Thank God you're still alive. But where are you? By plane or by train? I'm so used to always knowing where you are, and now it feels very strange to me. Because I don't know and have simply lost you, like some kind of wallet. Sometimes I feel like I'm at a loss for words and am silent. Where should I talk? Today, just in case, I called your phone, and of course they told me the subscriber was unavailable. Of course! I didn't sleep all night because of you. And what did you think? I talked to you all night. Do you know what I told you? You're so smart, and how come you didn't understand that I know everything? You have one smile that you don't know about, because you can't smile like that in front of a mirror, and when you smiled like that, my whole old life ended. Love is a joke at first, but in the end it's a big deal. Oh, if only I could write, but I am so incapable of it, and when I write, it seems to me that I am a blonde and have a blue ribbon in my hair... I hate blondes and blue ribbons!
Just don’t tell me I asked you to. Don’t tell me that! That excuse doesn’t work for you. I wanted to know just a little bit about the women in your past. Just a little bit. Just that they existed, that they had such-and-such eyes, such-and-such hair, such-and-such biographies, and that they were all in the past. Mostly, I wanted to know that they were finally and irrevocably in the past. There had to be many of them, and they had to be different. And they had to leave different traces. Their meaning had to be distributed. So that you wouldn’t prefer any of them. That was my plan. Any woman in my place would have had exactly the same. “Any woman in my place” – God, how terrible it sounds when you say it out loud. And from today on, I know for sure. Your biography is too complicated. And you change other people’s biographies. In fact, this is not true. Other people are eager to change their biographies for you.
I wish you were here – I feel very excited when I write to you, and I would very much like to hug you. When I reread a letter to decide how far to go in it, I realize that perhaps I have already gone too far – well, I always do. “When I write, I have the sensation of being in a state of extreme unfocusedness and of being completely out of control, like a sieve, with holes in my head. I cannot explain why I write this way, because in what I have written there are things that I cannot recognize. Therefore they have come to me from outside, and therefore when I write, I am not writing alone.”
Have you ever thought that if you carefully follow all, absolutely all, the impressions of just one evening, it would almost be a depiction of an entire human life? I want to say: just as much.
It is similar to a situation when a person gets lost in an unfamiliar city. Just imagine (or remember, if something like this has happened to you) – you are walking around the city, looking at shop windows, at houses, and at some point you are literally struck by the realization that you are lost. This state comes suddenly , and suddenly from a peacefully walking and relaxing woman you instantly turn into a woman who is lost. You can read the names of the streets, you can talk to people, but you do not know where you need to go or where you are.
But, nevertheless, I would like to know what your thoughts are about this? Please write to me what you think of me, poor thing. Will you come back? Remember what I am like and come back quickly, quickly. I am afraid alone and without you, you have frightened me... Everything is nothing to me for your sake... You were like this, and I am like this. And you don't like to procrastinate at all, do you? At least write that you are not angry if you don't want to write at all.
He liked snakes, and she liked chalk and solemn oxygen. Be like that. Stay. Break all ties, don't download letters, forget about tomorrow. And even if there are no words, I will still hear you...
I have the honor to inform you that such are my rules, gracious lady, and I beg you not to trouble me with objections. Forgive me for my ignorance, for which I am not to blame: since I had nothing better to do, I decided to write to you, and since I have nothing to write about, I will finish. This is a joke. I did not write because I could not tell you anything pleasant. Forgive me, my dear friend, if I am a little late with my gratitude. In every word of your last letter it was felt that you live a holistic intellectual life. I remain yours, loving you in spirit.
We embraced, our breaths mingled. Tell me, how did you live during these years? Describe your feelings. Anything you can think of between two embraces... I didn't live very well without you. And he whispered to her, looking into her eyes: "If there is another life, I will give you a sign: a dragonfly will knock on the golden window. And we are lost here so that we only see each other. Darkness spreads over the thawed patch of the third back."
I thought. Why does everyone have to be so lonely? Why is it necessary to be so lonely? So many people live in this world, each of us greedily searching for something in another person, and yet we remain so infinitely distant, torn from each other. Why does it have to be like this? For what? Maybe our planet rotates, feeding on human loneliness?
“I’m alone,” she said out loud, because no one could hear her.
The fact that silence becomes thicker after noise still requires scientific proof. But the fact that loneliness is more vividly felt immediately after you have been loved is confirmed by many women.
Just listen to how smart and neat I sometimes am, what brilliant thoughts sometimes come into my head, she continued cheerfully. “A person is 80% water. If a person has no dream or goal in life, then he is just a vertical puddle.” And suddenly she burst into tears. Oh, what a delight: what wonderful things we bought on this gray and gloomy morning, but if you are not in this world, then it is all in vain. The color of the sky is blue. At least for a moment.
She had her own little philosophy, simple and practical. Don't run ahead, but don't lag behind people, she said, that's my rule. Live and let others live, that's what I always say. And you're such a handsome man and you speak so sinfully! You'll definitely be so gloomy if you lock yourself in a room... And you 'll still be so cheerful that you'll be surprised.
What to do, my dear, sometimes it seems to me that the world consists of reminders. Life is not needed for happiness, a moment is enough for happiness... And you will live a long time, – she said calmly, as if about something long known. Your eyelashes are short, and the longer the eyelashes, the shorter the life. Hope has not left the eyes. First the eyes die, then the person himself.
— I tell you: everything is on credit – joy, happiness, and hope. Sometimes my temples even pound: on credit, on credit, on credit.
- And-and, foolish child, you have neither sin nor debt.
Where have you disappeared to? Have you fallen out of love, died, or forgotten? You are not a bird to fly away from here. The bird returns to its cage, and the cage saves its life. If you don't want to. And don't. You die, well, God be with you. In our jealous kingdom, everything is suspicious. Those who loved me more than themselves... Love itself in its other existence. Those who are loved are not deceived. Suspicion that it is not only you who is cheating, but also you. No, no, don't cry, you are leaving anyway. Someone always turned out to be a pity. Because death always has a witness – he is also the victim. Nobody cares about you and me. Death, you know, if there is a witness, puts an end more clearly than alone. A story about how unexpected the end is. Always a surprise. At least when you end, I will mentally note the fact of loss.
Not in one case of the language, which you want to speak in the morning... Sixth case: about what? about whom? Someone is crying all the time, can't calm down. Something is torn and not torn. Where is winter, where is the room, stupid love before winter, a lousy forest heart, a cigarette is the last of the night, all people are one and one God is tomorrow and always for everyone... It's not a problem if your pet has never heard of the instrumental case... Again something asks to live.
Her bedroom: a doll between the pillows. She kept thinking that she needed to be alone to think seriously. Big tears trembled, but she did not think of hating; a swarthy face with dark, dreamy eyes, a doll thrown out of a carriage window. A strange guy, my tikhotherapist. A particularly dangerous specimen. The tactics of the ungrateful. They do not need much. They need a little. Move over a little: there is never enough room. Everywhere all the places are taken, everywhere all the hearts are hired.
Your soul is like a mouse, it doesn't believe in nonsense. It's in vain that you didn't turn off the light. Your acquaintances don't keep your secrets. To tell a story not by its rules, but by your own. A conversation within a conversation. Where will I go? I understand that it is possible to love more strongly, more impeccably... About their wondrous life...
Of course, the case is empty. To overcome the red tape. All the same, the appearance of reality is fictitious and unpleasant. Some words – a pin will scratch. However, whoever came here first ... But I do not need to tell you about it. Or maybe each of us goes where he wants? Then there will be no more meetings with melancholy ... Reduce a little more. Lending without listening. What a meanness – without listening to anyone, regardless of the facts, cursing some people and forgiving others.
"Behave like a human being, try to make a good impression right away. Do you hear me or not?.."
In order to greet, you must first say goodbye. Have you noticed how children communicate? They meet for the first time, as if they have known each other forever, and say goodbye forever, as if until tomorrow. Goodbye, children. Love everyone who lives near you – the tour has come to an end.
We understand that life is finite and that our only immortality is in our children, and we are happy to give them our place in this world. We do not exclude that people who have realized how short and hard their life is may be kinder to each other, and not the other way around.
So, here are the three final phrases of his letter-testament. These phrases are very short – like a man's last breath: "Help the poor. Take care of your mother. Live peacefully."
It is better to lose with a smart person than to find with a fool. Read serious books, life will do the rest.
Someone needs to love someone... No one can help but feel when someone loves them. – You have too affectionate, too clingy a disposition. Nothing can compare with the misfortune of loving.
This letter is the last one you will probably receive, the last word you will probably hear from me from now on. Does the fire continue to burn for a long time, once extinguished by thought, deep in the earth, a fire that, as it became clear, cannot be removed. Birds are not visible, but they are heard.
In my life I have seen a lot of birds, I stood in one place and looked at the sky, the birds flew past and I remembered them, adding them to my collection, but I was tormented by the question: where do they die? In my past life I was a witch and for some reason the death of birds was indifferent to me.
She lived, no doubt. This past, hunts as always in autumn, armed with memories, mortally dangerous, space again, will split under my heels; autumn, I await a happy hunt. This is some kind of hunt for love, everything is snatched up, but the hunt goes on, because the day after tomorrow, perhaps, the time for hunting will come to an end altogether. (Are they really unworthy of our hunt?) Don't tell me what I myself will soon recognize in someone's eyes. I accept your gift, your weak-willed, thoughtless gift, a sin washed away, and perhaps a signal – a friendly one – about a life lived.
I won’t call your name anymore. Wake you up in the morning. Options are possible: a doorbell, a phone call, a kiss in the ear, a kiss through the window. Silence, a pulse... I call out quietly by name. Six legs hurry. Two heads listen. One says: Who’s there? Under the crossed tam-tam of pairs of hearts. (I see you there, where my fallen spirit can no longer reach...) I’ll open the door, and suddenly there you are behind it. It asks questions: where is the person, and where is the image? Doubt buzzes like an annoying mosquito. Knock-knock-knock, – who is it that is knocking so briskly on my door? Here is a fool receiving letters from abroad. Receiving a letter from him is an event. Doors exist to be locked. – Do you want to send a letter? – Yes, two letters, and also, where can I have lunch here? When I don’t know what to answer, I say “yes”.
Your letter surprised me greatly. I confess to you frankly that I did not expect it at all, and even less so regarding unfair reproaches on your part. I come to you with kindness and greetings, and you snort. And how can one fill letters with such nonsense? Allow me to think better of you! However, all this aside. I am very glad that we decided to write to each other. I am very willing to inform you of all the events that happen to us. Write, let's gossip... chatter with you personally.
What a pity that what your existence has become for me, my existence has not become for you. A singular event. Singular means leaving no trace of existence behind, canceling any repetition by its uniqueness. He gave me everything and took everything away. He even snatched away what was simply impossible to lose. Things that everyone has a right to: an hour of respite, a kind word. A chance to talk. Without accusations, without contempt. And the kindness that I seemed to have inherited from him.
It had to happen and, in her opinion, it explained everything. The vague languor, the fear, the grey sand, the empty dachas – everything was so terrible, my dear friend, that it could not have ended differently.
- But in general, the whole thing happened because of a woman, I think so.
A shudder ran through me, as if the room had suddenly become cold, and then I understood with all my being that the love we receive and give to others is all that matters and is remembered. Suffering goes away, love remains (that's what they say when suffering never goes away).
When you are sick, call the doctor. But more importantly, call those you love, because there is no medicine more important than love. Call those who can surround you with beauty, music, poetry, because nothing heals like the love of others.
"Let the secrets of your bed always guard you; let the bridegroom always rejoice with you inwardly. When you pray, you converse with the bridegroom; when you read, he converses with you; and when sleep overwhelms you, he will come behind the wall and stretch out his hand through the window and touch your womb; and, awakening, you will rise and say: "I am wounded with love." And you will hear from him in turn: "The wind city is shut up, my sister, bride, the wind city is shut up, the fountain is sealed."
I sleep, but my heart is awake. The voice of my beloved, who knocks at the door. I opened the door for my beloved, but he turned and left. I looked for him and did not find him, I called him and he did not answer me...
Love is stronger than separation, but separation is longer than love. Oh, please leave me alone, I'm sleeping and you're not here. Who's to blame – the candle or the moth that was attracted by the candle's flame.
A ritual to strengthen relationships. Blessing of love. Take two glasses of rose petals. Make two paper boats, decorate with beads and flowers, name one with the name of your loved one, the other with yours. Put a small candle on each. Go out to the river late in the evening. Light candles on the boats. Lower the boats into the water, sprinkle them with petals and say: “Where I am, there you are, and where you are, there I am. The river of life will protect us from separation.” And leave without looking back.
She gathered up what was left of her strength, raised herself up, and – bam! She ran as fast as she could, but when she saw her ugliness in the puddle, she burst into tears, remembered herself – a written beauty: soft, peachy skin, shining eyes, scarlet lips, silky hair, white breasts... She did not recognize herself in the old woman: a dear friend, a cockroach behind the stove! – what have they done to me? And the cockroach took it upon himself to answer syllable by syllable: “Za-ta-ry-li”.
He... you don't know him... nothing could be done. He was young, dear... And – as far as I can remember – he was saying goodbye. And he knew the price of everything in the world.
And not to leave behind any memory of himself. It is boarded up here, but the memory grows faster because it is objective. Where only does it have the right to remember him. To find out what it looks like from the inside, what you have been looking at from the outside for so long. Like the sun – it is impossible to look straight at.
Chapter 49. Death and Immortality
Long before Leo Tolstoy, ancient thinkers reminded us of the interdependence of life and death. The Stoics (for example, Chrysippus, Zeno, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius) say that learning to live right means learning to die right, and vice versa: the ability to die right is the ability to live right. Cicero wrote that to philosophize means to prepare for death, and St. Augustine noted that the human soul is born only in the face of death. Many medieval monks kept human skulls in their cells to focus on the thought of death and what it teaches the living. Montaigne said that the windows of a writer's office should look out onto a cemetery – this makes thoughts clearer. In this way, great teachers remind us through the darkness of centuries that although death physically destroys us, the idea of death gives us salvation.
Someone told me that few people actually see death. In most cases, it is accepted out of stupidity or custom, but not with determination. People die because there is nothing they can do about it. (What we cannot escape is death and taxes.) Only philosophers know how to understand death as a duty, to meet it willingly and without fear: while we exist, death does not yet exist, and when it comes, we will no longer exist. What torments a philosopher much more is not the naturalness of the end, but the mystery of the beginning.
It is precisely the doctrine of immortality, as humanists claim, that impoverishes the meaning of life. If one believes in immortality, then little here on earth matters. Everything becomes a preparation for death; life becomes a waiting room for the afterlife . This life becomes meaningless, since only the next one counts.
We imagine life as "non-death", and the ancients imagined a full life as life and death together. Everything was grasped simultaneously. The ideas about one and the other necessarily at some point turned into something integral. Such paradoxes for the mind lead to the awakening of a new logic of the soul...
For exceptional individuals, there are ancient philosophical paths of wisdom. Becker, like Socrates, advises us to practice dying. Cultivating awareness of one's mortality leads to disillusionment, the loss of personal armor, and the conscious choice to persevere in the face of horror. The existential hero who follows this path of self-examination differs from the average person in that he/she knows he/she is possessed. Instead of hiding in the illusion of personality, he/she sees his/her own weakness and vulnerability. The disillusioned hero rejects the standard heroism of mass culture in favor of a cosmic heroism in which there is real joy in throwing off the chains of uncritical, failing dependency and discovering new possibilities of choice and action, as well as new forms of courage and perseverance. Living with a voluntary awareness of death, the heroic individual can choose despair or take a Kierkegaardian leap of faith in the "sacred life force of the cosmos" toward an unknown god of life whose mysterious purpose is expressed in the vast drama of cosmic evolution. There are signs – Decker’s work is recognized as one – that some people are awakening from the long dark night of tribalism and nationalism and developing what Tillich called a transmoral conscience, an ethic that is universal rather than ethnic. Our task for the future is to explore what it means for each individual to be a member of an earthly home, a community of kindred beings. Whether we will use our freedom to enclose ourselves in tight, tribal, paranoid identities and create ever bloodier utopias, or to form compassionate communities of the abandoned… That remains to be determined. As long as humans have some freedom, all hopes for the future must be couched in the subjunctive mood – we could, we would be able, we would have the opportunity. No expert’s forecast can tell us whether we will prosper or perish. We can choose to increase or decrease the reign of evil. The script for tomorrow has not yet been written.
Four : Society provides a second line of defense against our natural impotence by creating a system of heroes that allows us to believe that we overcome death by participating in something of lasting value. We achieve ersatz immortality by sacrificing ourselves to conquer an empire, build a temple, write a book, start a family, accumulate a fortune, further progress and prosperity, create an information society and a global free market. Since the primary goal of human life is to become a hero and overcome death, every culture must provide its members with a complex symbolic system that is covertly religious.
Our heroic projects to destroy evil paradoxically bring more evil into the world. Human conflicts are life-or-death struggles: my gods against your gods, my immortality project against your immortality project. The root of man's evil lies not in his animal nature, not in territorial aggression or innate pride, but in our need to find self-respect, to renounce our mortality and achieve a heroic sense of self. Our desire for the best is the cause of the worst. We want to cleanse the world, to make it perfect, to make it safe for democracy or communism, to cleanse it of the enemies of God, to destroy evil, to found an alabaster city unstained by human tears, or a thousand-year Reich.
Life may not have meaning as such. But doesn't it offer us a huge number of opportunities that we can fill with meaning?
We are responsible for who we are; and we can achieve a happy life here and now if we work hard and strive for it out of compassion for other people and our desire to achieve justice.
The existential conflict is that everyone will have to die; and although for most of their life everyone is free to ignore this, they cannot, in the end, avoid death.
I see the confusion of the living and sympathize with them. The deceased who is remembered is more alive and more powerful than the living. When you die, you become unusually significant (but bright memory is easily overshadowed by facts from the biography), and while you are alive, no one cares about you. The attitude towards the dead is as reverent as towards small children, defenseless, can do nothing and are completely dependent on us. The dead are always right. The dead shut your mouth. Besides, dying is scary only when the decision does not depend on you. But when you hold all the strings in your hands, then it is not scary. He who has not lived, will not die. I am dying – because I want to.
Mark felt that his entire life was nothing but a circle above the airfield called Death. Man lives to die. Even at the moment when man is born, he has already lived long enough to die. Death gives life a plot direction, unity, certainty. It is a logical conclusion that is reached through life's proof, not a break, but a chord prepared long ago, starting from birth. Compared to the dead (especially compared to historical figures and literary characters), we look underdeveloped. It is as if our chest and head were lost in a problematic fog. That is why we are so unsure of ourselves, of our understanding of our role, destiny and place. Until we die, we are always lacking something. The end is the crown of everything.
We unconsciously envy the integrity of the dead: they have already extricated themselves from an intermediate situation, acquired clearly defined characters, lived to the end, and incarnated to the end. Hence such an interest in their end, fortune-telling, predictions, blind searches for the final point, the decisive stroke. We are attracted and tempted by suicide, promising a profitable deal that allows us, by our own choice and decision, to receive the missing amount and sign for the receipt. But more reliable than this receipt is to accept the death penalty with an announced sentence, granting the victim the rare right to be present at its execution and to realize himself in true readiness and completeness. Those sentenced to death grow by half in an instant, and if they manage to maintain their presence of mind, it is difficult to imagine a better way of calculating.
Let us ask fate for an honest, dignified death and, to the best of our ability, move towards it in such a way as to properly fulfill our last and main task, the task of our whole life – to die.
But the dead, thought Lily, coming upon an interruption in her work, stopping, reflecting, retreating a step or two. Oh, the dead! she murmured. You pity them, you brush them aside, you even despise them a little. They are at our mercy. Mrs. Ramsay has faded, she has melted away. We can spit on her wishes, we can smash her narrow, old-fashioned views until there is nothing left of them. She is moving further and further away from us. There, at the end of the long corridor of years, she sits, funny, and what is she talking about? "Marriage, marriage!" (She sits very straight, and it is already morning, and the birds in the garden outside are beginning to chirp.) And yet one can answer: "It didn't turn out as you wanted. They found their happiness in this way; I did not. Life is not what it used to be." And all of her, with all her beauty, suddenly seemed ancient and dusty.
A man immersed in thoughts is already immortal. The Thinker said: "Happiness is that we are given the opportunity to appoint our own payment for our labors." The spirit itself, without persuasion, determines its sacrifice. The size of the sacrifice is decided in the heart. No one can induce an increase in the sacrifice, but much joy is created about an undiminished sacrifice. The Teacher advises to recognize one's size by the sacrifice accepted voluntarily by the heart. How great is the law of such voluntariness, it determines the future from small to large and to great events!
Life has imprinted itself on him, “consolidated,” and death has jammed like a door. The flickering of some midge already seems to him an apocalyptic undertaking.
You have nothing to do with it, I've been working towards this for a long time. – So you're sick. Another childhood trauma? And in that case, it's amazing how you're still alive. You think, therefore you die. You exist by dying, not by living.
"I believe Dr. Kevorkian is on to something important. I think he's a great man. Because suicide is our way of saying to God, 'You can't kick me out. I'm leaving on my own.'"
Chapter 50. Treatment
I do not hate anyone, but hatred stains my blood black and burns my skin, which has not hardened over the years. To tame – perhaps with the help of tenderness or old logic – my unsightly sadness, how to restrain a painful cry?
I wanted to love the earth and the sky, their exploits and daring, but I found nothing that did not remind me of death: flowers, luminaries, faces – symbols of decay, potential tombstones of all sorts of graves! Everything that is created in life, everything that gives it nobility, rushes either to a dark revelation or to some incomprehensible end.
In our opinion, even the most abstract painting (for example, Malevich's "Black Square") also tells us something. What does "Black Square" tell us? What will happen next? Obviously, death, the black hole of death.
What a powerful stimulant this is, death turned into an obsession! For death, before it crushes us, enriches us; we experience a surge of strength from contact with it, and only then does it begin to destroy us.
Too obvious and inevitable, it resembles a disease whose inexorable mechanical nature paradoxically calms both the patient and the doctor: an agony that proceeds according to all the rules, an agony that is as neat as a contract with agreed terms, an agony without surprises and nagging pain...
To indulge in melancholy, but in reality – to feel sorry for oneself – is weakness and nothing more. Most likely, physiologically conditioned. And perhaps even because the body is infected with parasites (I recently saw on TV: infected fish themselves succumb to birds (suicidal tendencies!)), since the parasites inside them need to get into the bird’s body in order to reproduce. Parasitism is when a mentally weaker partner uses the energy reservoirs of a stronger one. It seems that any change in consciousness serves some purpose.
The researchers found a link between the frequency of suicides in rural areas and the number of places where alcohol can be purchased. To do this, they analyzed data on suicide attempts, as well as the geographic location of bars and stores selling alcohol.
Just as psychology knows suicides who are murderers of someone else in their own guise, there are also murderers who, in essence, turn out to be suicides, destroying themselves in another. You yourself understand that dissatisfaction with the world is, first of all, dissatisfaction with oneself.
Experts in the field of human studies believe that most people who commit suicide repeatedly heard the word "disappear" from their parents as children.
As is well known, this can be clearly observed in the example of people who, say, cannot fall asleep without performing a certain ritual, for example, without fluffing and smoothing out the pillow. To an even greater extent, this is characteristic of violence, which, supposedly for the purpose of the most rationally ordered life possible, permeates the behavior of various kinds of pedants, sadists and misers.
The scientist notes that due to an erroneous approach to education, men are taught to endure physical or mental pain without tears and eventually pay for it with stomach ulcers and colitis, – according to Frey – typical ailments of suppressed sadness. In such cases, experts recommend going back and, having gone through everything again, getting over it. Others somehow manage to do without – and it turns out well. Who are they – talented ascetics or just embarrassed? Suicide is a loss of moral courage, an escape from our obligation to accept the absurdity of life. Returning to hopelessness, to the poverty of impressions: help a brother, take him into company, show him how to think about everything else, also quickening your breathing ...
There are fears and depressions that stem from the very fact of human existence, and it doesn't matter how much your mother loved you or how much your father condemned you. They are the ones that give rise to all those specific fears and depressions that you moan about on the therapist's couch.
The emphasis on the concept of the frailty of existence indicates a morbid fixation of attention on a gloomy topic, which is often interpreted as an expression of psychopathology. There is a situation of the deepest life decline or ideological crisis, a morbid delusional state, after alcoholic depression, long forced loneliness, etc., and indeed, it is based on the most typical forms of radical disappointment.
We are talking about initiation by death, experiencing a similar range of sensations not of death itself, but rather of its playful dummy, but no less painful and depressing. Being an unprovoked illness, despondency in its purest form... He fell in love not with death itself, but with consciousness, the thought of death.
You can often hear how asthenia is understood as a disease. In fact, asthenia is not a disease, but rather a state of mind and body. Here are just some of the signs of this condition: weakness in the body, inability to concentrate on problems, increased fatigue, irritability, insomnia, poor sleep, fears, etc. Asthenia can accompany any disease and manifest itself both at its beginning and at the end. Asthenia can appear with ARVI, and with the flu, or simply due to severe, especially constant, fatigue. Treatment for asthenia is simple at first glance: more positive emotions and fewer negative ones. Alas, many of us are more focused on the negative ones.
Positive emotions: joy, delight, admiration, joy, jubilation, celebration, fun, bliss, rapture, euphoria, enthusiasm, uplift, elation, happiness, contentment, satisfaction, pleasure, delight, consolation, enjoyment, revival, ardor, cheerfulness. Negative: sadness, sorrow, grief, grief, melancholy, sorrow, despair, contrition, despondency, melancholy, hypochondria, depression, the blues, grief, disappointment, frustration, oppression, dejection, sullenness, gloom, frowning, sullenness, gloom, gloom, grief, irritation, joylessness, hopelessness, hopelessness, discontent, annoyance, bitterness, pain, suffering, torment, agony, torment, anguish.
It is characteristic that the line between life and death is crossed more often by extraordinary, accentuated personalities of their own free will – people who are, in principle, mentally healthy, but, as they say, “odd”, that is, “prone to affective instability and hysterical behavior”.
Depression (which was once treated with leeches and cold water) is a depletion of vital force, that is, a conscious or unconscious desire to die, the main symptoms of which have been well studied: guilt, hypochondria, excruciating insomnia and, to an even greater extent, fear of insomnia, fear of losing control over oneself, nightmares about disasters, falls from heights, etc. However, despite the thoroughly studied symptoms of this condition, its origin is interpreted in different ways. When the human psyche was not yet studied by so many scientific disciplines, they talked about unhappy love, shame, remorse or satiety. Modern sociology is looking for the roots of depression in the social and psychological maladjustment of the individual, which usually occurs as a result of the loss of a person's usual role function – in the family or other social structures. From the point of view of psychobiology, depression is a neurophysiological dysfunction determined either by heredity, or hormonal imbalance, or other similar factors. Finally, existentialism gives a more “flattering explanation for us”: “it is not genes or hormones that are to blame, but ethical nihilism and the loss of the meaning of life.”
As T. Shibutani rightly notes, cultural marginality gives rise to socio-political, role and other types of marginality. An individual is acutely aware of the difference between social worlds when he finds himself in the face of opposing demands that cannot be met at the same time. Since a marginal is a borderline personality, he is not perceived as a full-fledged personality in social terms. This is clear from the fact that within the framework of synergetic anthropology, a personality is, first of all, a communicatively competent personality. Since no group considers him as one of their own, negative traits are formed in him. He begins to doubt his value and self-worth. He develops a fear of being rejected, painful shyness or aggressiveness, and resentment towards the whole world. He is characterized by excessive dreaminess and excessive anxiety about his future. A false confidence in the injustice of the world that surrounds him is formed in him. The dilemma that faces an individual in the status of a marginal is that no matter what he does, someone will be dissatisfied with him. He tries to justify his actions, but in vain. As a result, he is haunted by a feeling of guilt, which develops into irritation and dissatisfaction with himself and others. For someone who has already become a stranger to himself, such crises lead to the formation of neurosis. Alienation from others and from himself can end in a state of depersonalization, the removal of any responsibility for his actions. (There are no evil people in the world, there are only unhappy people.) Losing his integrity, the individual loses not only a holistic view of the world, but also the ability to measure the part and the whole, to coordinate his behavior with the integrity of the world.
There are, I admit, clinical forms of depression, sometimes treatable with one or another drug. But that melancholy, however, which underlies the most unbridled joy and accompanies us everywhere, does not leave us in peace for a single moment. And there is nothing that can help to get rid of this lethal and omnipresent battle with oneself.
The desire to surrender to uselessness, the pleasure of disorder, reveal themselves in culture as nudity (fashion practices, striptease), theft, fraud, gambling, etc. Consciousness, like language, culture is a constant refusal. The digested fragments of the psychotic's psyche are distorted beyond recognition, they are, so to speak, his mental excrement. They are unpleasant and dirty. They are the products of the psychotic unconscious.
But this is true if we proceed from Freud's model of the individual unconscious as a kind of waste dump. If we proceed from Jung's model of the collective unconscious, then we will have a completely different picture. The collective unconscious is archetypes. In a certain sense, we can say that Freud's unconscious is nature, and Jung's is culture.
As we have already said, anality is akin to homosexuality, that is, non-viviparity, deadness (New Viennese music was dead and sinister). It was dead water. What is the essence of anality itself? In squeezing out waste through the anus and an overvalued attitude towards this waste. Such waste were the old, obsolete, dead forms of musical culture. The analogy is obvious. This is not the birth of new music through conception, gestation and birth itself, it is an artificial squeezing out of fecal matter from obsolete material and giving this material an overvaluation. We can say in general that culture is the overvaluation of waste. This is the anality of culture, its neo-mythologism. Schoenberg and his students imposed an artificial anal law on music and forced it to be repeated obsessively. This is the most striking case of obsession in a psychotic culture. The ritual repetition of cultural "defecation" is the key to the revival of the world. This is how culture is maintained. If man did not defecate, he would die. If culture did not do the same, it would die too.
Let us recall that the idea of considering depression in its dependence on time (and not on place) goes back to Kant. Reflecting on nostalgia as a special kind of depression, Kant comes to the conclusion that the nostalgic person desires not the place of his youth, but his youth itself, that his desire seeks to return time, and not a thing. Freud's concept of the mental object on which the patient with depression fixates is included in the same concept: the mental object is a fact of memory, it refers to lost time "in the Proustian style". It is a subjective construction, and in this capacity it belongs to memory, of course, elusive and transformed at every moment of actual verbalization, but at the same time initially located not in physical space, but in the imaginary or symbolic space of the mental apparatus. The thesis that the object of my sadness is not so much this village, this mother, or this lover, which I miss here and now, but rather the unobvious idea of them that I preserve and construct in the dark cell of what later becomes my psychic grave, immediately places my painful condition in the imaginary. The depressive person, inhabiting such a truncated time, necessarily becomes an inhabitant of the imaginary. This linguistic and temporal phenomenology, as we have already emphasized several times, reveals the incompleteness of mourning for the maternal object.
According to classical psychoanalytic theory (Abraham, Freud, M. Klein), depression, like mourning, conceals aggression towards the lost object and thus reveals the ambivalent attitude of the depressive person towards the object of his mourning. “I love him (this is how a depressive patient seems to speak about some creature or lost object), but I hate him even more; since I love him, in order not to lose him, I place him in myself; but since I hate him, this other in me turns out to be a bad I, that is, I am bad, I am insignificant, and I kill myself.” A complaint about oneself, therefore, turns out to be a complaint about another, and the killing of oneself is a tragic disguise for the murder of another. Such logic, as we understand, presupposes the presence of a stern Super-Ego and the entire dialectic of complex relationships of idealization and devaluation of oneself and the other, with the entire set of these movements based on the mechanism of identification. For it is precisely through my identification with this hated-loved other, accomplished through incorporation-introjection-projection, that I place within myself his best part, which becomes my tyrannical and inexorable judge, just as I place within myself his disgusting part, which humiliates me and which I seek to destroy. The analysis of depression therefore proceeds through the discovery of the fact that the complaint against oneself is hatred of the other, and the latter is undoubtedly a wave carrying an unconscious sexual desire. It is clear that such a displacement of hatred in the process of transference is risky for both the psychoanalyst and the patient, so that the therapy of depression (even that which is called neurotic) borders on schizoid fragmentation.
Our main hypothesis is that in depression the connection between the psyche and the unconscious is lost or significantly weakened. Depression, first of all, is the loss of the meaning of life and meanings in general, and meanings are in the unconscious. Therefore, a depressed person becomes indifferent. This happens because the sphere of the signified, denotation, plays a much smaller role in the life of a healthy person than the sphere of the signifier, connotation. We communicate not in order to convey some information, in any case, not only and not only for this, but in order to, so to speak, express ourselves. There is "Lacan's law", formulated by him in the seminars "Psychoses", according to which "the signifier entails another signifier". The famous linguist Professor T.M. Nikolaeva spoke about the same thing in a different way: "Forget about the denotation, look for the significator!" It is not what is said that is important, but how it is said. If this were not so, the technique of free association would be impossible. All words are interconnected, and speech competence is in the unconscious. That is why depressed patients have poor associations; they have lost touch with the unconscious. That is why Freud considered melancholia a narcissistic neurosis (psychosis was usually put in brackets), which is poorly amenable to psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Why and how the connection with the unconscious is lost in depression, one can speculate and put forward additional hypotheses. First of all, if the connection of the psyche with the unconscious is lost or significantly weakened, what is left for the depressive? What is left is what is traditionally called consciousness, that is, precisely that part of the psyche that is in charge of the signified, denotation, reference, in general, the connection between the denotate and the object. This shows what a pitiful role consciousness plays in human life.
What is the most important thing in a person's life? It is love. A depressed person is not capable of love, although he himself needs love very much and receives it (otherwise he dies).
Treatment of mental illnesses is carried out using electroshock, psychopharmacological agents, verbal psychotherapy (free association method, conversation, destruction of stereotypes).
There are many psychos in this world, every third person in the world is a psycho. Speak to me quietly: maybe I am one of them. As for him, he was simply a schizophrenic. Moreover, because of his obsessive neurosis, he even went to a psychiatric hospital to undergo treatment with the outstanding psychiatrist NN , but in the end, he still committed suicide.
But what kind of a bet is this, in which the final word belongs to the psychiatrist! So to speak, the doctor's conclusion here is as untenable as the patient's violence.
Many social attitudes are formed in childhood and are perceived by children from their immediate social environment. Children model their attitudes by copying those they like, respect, and even fear. In older children and adolescents, obsessive fears become more complex, and actions take the form of painful protective, sometimes quite complex rituals. An obsessive fear of catching an infectious disease is accompanied by frequent hand washing, an obsessive fear of getting a bad grade leads to a number of prohibitions (for example, going to the cinema or watching TV on certain days, not getting on a bus or tram that has a certain number in the number, etc.). Teenagers often develop rituals (wearing “lucky” shirts, socks, etc. for tests or exams) and ritual objects (a ribbon around the neck with a “lucky” trinket, a “lucky” pencil or pen, etc.). Obsessive thoughts, obsessive counting (windows in houses, cars, men or women met on the street, etc.), obsessive repetition of the same words are also possible.
Rights are always the rights of a citizen. A person has no rights. Rights are not demanded from fate. The absurdity begins where civil privileges are transferred to the spiritual sphere. And in general, I cannot recall any discussion of human rights in any company, even a student one. That is, not fleetingly, but thoroughly and seriously, with calculations. In parentheses: perhaps I was hanging out with the wrong crowd, that happens.
In a being where harmony is not given but is not prescribed, where it is posited not as something ideal but as something eidetic, the death of every “this” is inevitable, it is required by the aesthetics of the present order. A person for whom departure is necessary can relate himself to this necessity in only one way – by desiring it. There is no reason to worry about the abolition of death. The fatal inevitability of death, accepted as a “solemn-heroic doom,” as a “desired inevitability,” turns into a love of fate, into a love of natural destructiveness, which suppresses and destroys the particular. “I want to learn more and more to look at what is necessary in things as beautiful,” says Nietzsche. “Amor fati: let this be my love from now on!” This painful "love" testifies to the hopelessness of a monistically structured existence, in which the longing for something different can realize itself only in such a slavish way: "to go out to meet fate oneself, zealously and frantically loving and blessing the most destructive law. The element of a perverted, masochistic sweetness of destruction is obvious here, for for a person, love of fate is ultimately love of one's own death. Amor fati is an attraction to the hateful, a voluptuous submission to force; it is "a vile fear that does not even allow itself to ask: is this slavery of the rational to the unreasonable really inevitable, is this love for what should be hateful, that is, for slavery, not superstition?" And the more inexorable fate is, the more delightful it is.
Nietzsche saw in Ressentiment the vindictive malice of the weak, who declare vital values inaccessible to them to be vicious. Need is proclaimed a virtue, vital values are condemned as sinful, therefore Nietzsche considers the priest to be the type of person for whom vindictive malice is most characteristic. Scheler agrees with Nietzsche in assessing Ressentiment as a feeling characteristic of the lower strata of society, who dream of overthrowing everything higher out of envy. Scheler considers rancor to be the main source of "modern humanitarianism", secular morality, social movements whose goal is to achieve equality. In this sense, for him there is no difference between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat: humanitarianism turns traditional values upside down, subordinates the higher to the lower – this is a rebellion of slaves in morality, the universalization of slave values.
Bitterness is beautifully defined by Scheler as self-poisoning, as a destructive secretion of protracted impotence, taking place in a closed vessel. Scheler himself emphasizes the passive character of bitterness, noting what a large place it occupies in the spiritual world of a woman whose lot is to be an object of desire and possession. Scheler is right in saying that bitterness is brightly colored by envy. But one envies what one does not possess.
According to Scheler, the bitterness of a strong soul turns into careerism, and that of a weak soul into bitterness. But in any case, it is a question of becoming something other than what you are. Bitterness is always directed against its bearer. Nietzsche and Scheler are right to see a beautiful example of such a feeling in the passage of Tertullian, where he informs readers that for the blessed inhabitants of paradise it will be the greatest pleasure to see Roman emperors writhing in the flames of hell. Such is the pleasure of respectable citizens who adore the spectacle of the death penalty.
The loss of a job, betrayal, a fatal illness, an accident or injury that suddenly separates me from the category of normal people that seemed normal to me, or that falls with the same effect on a being dear to me, or finally – what else?.. The list of misfortunes that oppress us day after day is endless... All this suddenly endows me with another life. A life that is impossible to live, a life burdened with daily worries, tears swallowed or shed, unrequited despair – sometimes burning, but sometimes colorless and empty. In short, a lifeless existence that, overexcited by the efforts I make simply to prolong it, is ready at any moment to slip into death. Uninvolved in someone else's meaning, alien and accidental to naive happiness, I extract from my melancholy a higher, metaphysical clarity. On the borders of life and death, I am sometimes overcome by a proud feeling that I am a witness to the meaninglessness of Being, a revelation of the absurdity of all connections and beings.
Scheler wants to show that humanitarianism goes hand in hand with hatred of the world. One loves humanity as a whole, so as not to love anyone in particular. But the attachment of man to man can arise from something other than the arithmetical calculation of interests. In man one must see what cannot be reduced to an idea, that ardor of the soul which is destined for existence and for nothing else.
Meister Eckhart experienced the same impulse when, in a stunning fit of heresy, he declared that he preferred hell with Jesus to heaven without him.
Many die too late, and some too early. Die in time – so teaches Zarathustra. Of course, whoever has never lived in time, how could he die in time? It would have been better for him never to have been born! – So I advise superfluous people. But even superfluous people still put on airs about their death, and even the most empty nut still wants to be cracked.
A person well prepared for everything is interested in your life, although he knows that you are ill; he is eager to describe to you both the symptoms and the illness itself. For they are only different dialects in which one can speak of the same thing, which is love, however severe the sentence. It is useless to tell illnesses what they are called. People are embarrassed to ask condemned people why they were condemned.
On the contrary: for the one who is “open” to the other (others) in his innermost being, who does not think of himself without the other, who from early childhood has become accustomed to thinking of himself “together” with others, thus unconsciously accepting existence not as his “personal property”, but as something given to people all together, who, therefore, truly loves others – in a truly moral sense, for him death ceases to be something absolutely unbearable, striking him with an incurable disease. Having comprehended the meaning of life through this love, he also correctly comprehends the meaning of death – and the more deeply he comprehends this meaning, the less he trembles before it. Death is like a high, extremely condensed existence. You stop being ashamed of the desire to die. And it stops tormenting you with its meaninglessness.
Having internally comprehended that life is something immeasurably broader and deeper than what he experiences, lives through, and outlives as such, the loving person feels with his whole being that it does not end with his own death. Those whom he loves remain to live, and in them – he himself; and the more of those whom he truly loves, the more of his – common with them – life remains after his death.
I fought. I abandoned one thing, I didn’t pick up the other... Only he who has lost everything that makes life worth living is free. And the only thing that remains is a grain of courage, even if I have been endowed with the egoism of a cat who wants only one thing – to live. There are no regrets. The last hopes only get in the way. Many sins, but no malice. Here I would be disappointed – but I was never enchanted. It’s all the same to me. Either way, I was disembodied. It’s pointless to continue the fight if the time has come to leave... Ultimately, it’s no one’s business. Besides, we forget to what extent all this is a matter of chance. In the end, it’s all happening in my head. However, triumph is already near.
The secret is to be able to become someone else. Then, with each passing year, more and more pointless. Lonely, like a pilot piloting a dream in which there are only bare elms and you, like an indefinite feeling before leaving home, in which there is nothing left to explain except longing... What you think about at the last moment, that you will become later. The second thought is always somewhat more reasonable than the first.
Know how to position yourself so that you are sought after. It used to be that I, sullen and gloating... would hang out in these houses. And I come to my senses. From now on, the place where you are becomes hostile and empty. A silly and annoying rain. Days look the same. You trade in a faded smile. Everything is overgrown with people, hairdressers get rich. The thought of you recedes, like a demoted servant. Yes, many people walk. They circle.
A young animal, a light touch, lips unnecessarily kind. Something distinctly erotic in the sliding of a hand over the smooth skin of someone you love.
Life there was unusual. Grass grew among the cobblestones. And street scenes, curious glances. The main small cell of time and the entire network, long-dead events. A man reflects on his own life. The night is certainly cumbersome. Two ordinary bodies. Strengthened sadness. What do you love most in the world? You will be forced to remain silent.
Narrow hips of young girls, comfortable as a rifle stock. A tender pink nipple, bravely sticking out to the sky – wait, it will prime the still pale marshmallow of the armpits, roast the arched back. That's why they decorate themselves with metal, stones – bare arms are animals.
Someone's weak glance from afar, that's how time will treat you, look at the moving mouths, you will have no life from fools and it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish their faces, melancholy lies across the face, melancholy sometimes quieter, sometimes faster, like ten years forward or backward. And what would you choose for yourself here?
To pass off loneliness as freedom. To remember and love one's imperfect deeds. To empty houses, and empty streets. And again nothing happens, and death visits the sick.
The most important thing is to surpass the continuity of shells with an increasing chain of thoughts. With a dream – a star rising in the sky. And with sadness – the loneliness of a stone at the bottom of an infinitely deep sea...
And no more data. One in many. One in many! Quiet, quiet, quiet. Move closer. Look into my eyes. I have always been a wise creature, that it will be a joy for you to look at my quiet dance. And it was a strange time... One in many. One in many! Soul in place, soul in place... And no more data.
Chapter 51. Pause
I will put off a thousand plans for tomorrow: nothing is too late. My coffin still rustles in the forest. It is a tree. It nurses nests. Yes, with each passing day it is becoming more difficult for us to say why we live, what we are waiting for and why all this is necessary.
I almost stopped reading – it was becoming harder and harder to concentrate. I can no longer remember when and where an event happened. This or that. These fucking things. I don’t understand what’s going on. The rubbing of eyes on the bodies of their own kind. The brain organ.
Also my smart companions, images of friends and hospitable people of the whole earth, who cannot be deceived and should not be deceived. (Not trusting friends is more shameful than being deceived by them). Of course, we are talking about a situation when, in principle, all people are not bad. That is, your friends communicate with your prot;g; introduced into their circle without effort and are happy with this communication. And your prot;g; does not lower your authority in the eyes of your friends. And yet the situation is ticklish.
What else? I want to live, cross the street in an unauthorized place where no one cares about anyone else. Wait for a tram. Look around, order another beer.
I love fate... short. So that it would take my head, press it tightly between its chest and armpit and purr: "Behave decently." Why list them? I was embarrassed by the high cost, sometimes I had the feeling of having to be in a certain place... Why does this list depress me so much? I shouldn't have made this list.
And then it will be impossible to pick up pebbles, scratch the palm... It is a pity about soft palms, things, handshakes. A bit pitiful. Kittens' whiskers . Watermelon seeds. Also the rustle of stubble under the fingers on the cheek, a waffle towel, pillows for sewing needles; long snow, hot pies when hungry and cold; walking around a children's toy store, spinning a globe; a cast-iron bench, watching the leaves fall, swirling, from the trees and thinking that everything will pass... everything will be in the past... and will return in dreams. A kind ice cream seller on a hot day. A bumblebee drowning in a river. We will never know that endlessly mysterious look eye to eye, which happens between two people united in their happiness, humbly accepting the structure of their organs and the limited bodily joy; we will never be real lovers. And the "night" promises to be so long. Yes, it looks like that... It's a pity.
In a letter to her, he expresses his thoughts, born in solitude. First of all, he speaks of fear.
"My life was a desert and a tavern, and I was alone, and in myself I had no friend. There were days, bright and empty, like someone else's holiday, and there were nights, dark, terrible, and at night I thought about life and death, and was afraid, and did not know what I wanted more – life or death. The world was infinitely large, and I was alone – a sick, yearning heart, a clouded mind and an evil, powerless will. And ghosts came to me. A black snake silently crawled in and out, shook its head among the white walls and teased with its sting; absurd, monstrous faces, terrible and funny, leaned over my headboard, silently laughed at something and reached out to me with lips, large, red as blood. But there were no people; they slept and did not come, and the dark night stood motionless above me. And I I shrank from the horror of life, alone among the night and people, and in myself having no friend. I have always loved the sun, but its light is terrible for the lonely, like the light of a lantern over an abyss. The brighter the lantern, the deeper the abyss. And it did not give me joy – this beloved and merciless sun. And I know, I know with my whole body trembling from memories ... My language is powerless and poor. I know many words with which they speak of grief, fear and loneliness, but I have not yet learned to speak the language of great love and great happiness. All the words in the world are insignificant and pitiful before that immeasurably great, joyful and human that your pure love awakened in my heart, a pitying and loving voice from another bright world, where his soul was eternally striving – and is it perishing now? Are not the doors of his prison wide open, where his heart languished, tortured and insulted, disgraced by men and by himself? Am I not now my own friend? Am I alone? And does not that sun which before only burned me now shine for me with joy?
My little pearl. You have often seen my tears, and what can poor and dead words add to them? You alone of all people know my heart, you alone have looked into its depths – and when people doubted and I myself doubted, you believed in me. Pure in thoughts, clear in an unspoiled soul, you breathed life and faith into me, my bashful, proud girl, and I have no grief when your sweet hand touches my stupid dreamer's head. Life is ahead, and life is a terrible and incomprehensible thing. Perhaps its inexorable and terrible power will crush us and our happiness – but, even dying, I will say: I saw happiness, I saw a man, I lived!
Today is your birthday – and I give you my only treasure – these lines. Accept them with all my suffering and longing that are contained in them, accept my soul. Without you there would be no... You are a wonderful woman. And you are right in everything.
Wrap your shoulders and throat, my love. Shield yourself from the wind with the scent, taste, and smile of my. Warm your slender fingers in a gesture of forgiveness. In the voice, in the rhythm, in my attitude towards you, you will find protection. Take care of yourself and button up your buttons. Remember me only when you are happy. Well, and now, farewell forever! Be able to swim on the treacherous waves of life. Don't let yourself be trampled. No one deserves your tears, and those who do will not make you cry... Strive for purity and be your own deputy. May my words about you be imperishable. Yours forever.
Why do people go hiking? In addition to all the other joys of life, hiking has an unobvious consequence. Human feelings work relatively, not absolutely. We feel the difference between the base state and the current one. For example, smells. Remember how quickly you adapt and stop noticing the smell of paint. You got used to it, and the bar of sensation shifted. The fact that feelings are relative to some default value affects the feelings of joy in life. For example, we got used to the comfort level of 8 and 10. 8 is the base value. Everything above it feels like joy, below it is not felt at all. Now we go on a hike, where we carry a heavy backpack all day, walk through cold water, spend the night in a tent ... The comfort level drops. Let's say to a value of 2. Now we return from the hike to the city, and everything above the value of 2 begins to bring us pleasure! A hot bath, food, a bed, dry clothes... We enjoy things that we used to take for granted. Joy comes from benefits that we didn't perceive before (in the range of 2-8 ). Hence the life hack. Want to get more pleasure from life? You need to not only raise your standard of living (it's hard to do from 8 to 10), but also consciously do the opposite. Lower your internal level of comfort in order to start feeling what's above it. This won't be obvious to rich and successful people. They strive to raise and raise their standard of living, but this also shifts the default value relative to which we feel joy. Therefore, you need to lower, at least temporarily, this internal value of comfort in order to feel joy from ordinary benefits again. And a hike is a way to combine business with pleasure. To see the beauty and reset the basic value of comfort.
It all happens as if on an old film reel, somewhere from the beginning of the last century. Maybe it's because it's me, not Charlie with a white face, smiling while in the silly finale my beloved says a stern farewell word to me.
I am writing you my last letter. Everyone would love me when I am cheerful, but I don't flare up twice, everything in life stands for itself.
There is Zhuang Tzu, who dreams that he is a butterfly. There is a butterfly, who dreams that she is Zhuang Tzu. And there is a third point of view, where it doesn't matter who is who, and who is dreaming about whom. If only life would become easier from such a point of view.
The child buried a dead butterfly, digging a grave with a penknife and setting a mound with his palms, and cried, and hot tears dripped onto the butterfly. I say, the latter could not help but rise again. And it did! The delighted child cried out and dropped the penknife from his hands.
Then the idea that “the butterfly is the soul of the caterpillar”, “the entelechy of the caterpillar” became even more firmly established in me: and most importantly, it was explained and proven to me that the Egyptians in their thinking and discoveries of “afterlife” followed the same path as I, i.e. “through the butterfly” and its “phases”.
The butterfly of the heart only wanted to fly by will and the will flies itself if it is not tied by anything why will you fly? just don't be afraid so many blue reasons laugh fly there is enough for everyone emptiness of an open golden crown... Butterfly of the heart butterfly of the heart are you a mirror or a bow if you know tell me? Thin wings soared brightened eyes if you know tell me? who walks in space there is a thawed patch of sound blooming if you know tell me? if a butterfly sleeps who sounds who will hear? Who is tired becomes a tree suddenly a tree suddenly slowly roots flow quietly inaudibly branches grass flow sea mountains flow everything flows wants to go back. If you know tell me where does becoming live? And what is the purpose of touching us? If a butterfly sleeps who sounds who will hear?..
A butterfly is neither kissed nor hunted. Even gentle nets will smear its pollen – the butterfly flies away, extinguishing the breadths of passion, drawing a weak chiaroscuro across its face. Life will not keep up with it, death will be afraid of it – the butterfly flies away, the butterfly does not care... The mad fern will pray for it and wring its hands, as if in a silent film. A butterfly is neither kissed nor hunted – earthly closeness is alien to it, always far away. The butterfly flies away as a frosted note, a tattoo of pain on the wrists of love...
Chapter 52. Waiting for Winter
Snow is falling in flakes, and sleepy spring winds are blowing. I believe that the wind loves to be sad about nothing. Wind, well? Air – when it is not wind – is banal. Moths – the life of vibrations. That is why they are related to fire. Why does the wind bring sleep? Because it is breathing. Let's forget.
To slide along... To be nameless... Pure... Light... The most important thing is to be nameless... To take off all the masks, to shed tears... To prostrate oneself under the cries of seagulls... To bury one's terrible pain deep underground... To take it beyond the high mountains, beyond the wild forests... To drown it in the sea. Blue. Gray. Red. Black... any color! To sink to the bottom like a ship, to lie motionless. To learn the language of dolphins. To become a little smarter. Not to read a single line, not to say a word, not to board a single train. Not to dream of a single illusion. Not to believe in a single idyll. To become sad – to become sad to the point of devils, to mermaids, to wood goblins and witches! (an axe handle is cut down by an axe handle) – and to get up and go. And to pray to God. To blush. To turn red. To cleanse oneself. To have one's stomach washed. Drink activated carbon. Don't think about the truth, etc. Read Sartrushka on the beach, shocking the primates. Don't fly Aeroflot. Smile!
For example, in winter people become more introspective and get divorced less often. The winter environment is conducive to family life. In summer, people want freedom. They get rid of ties and travel more. If people are serious in the morning, then in the evening they allow themselves to think and fantasize.
Peaceful... Once, on a cosmically black December evening. A room with soft walls, quiet as breathing; you sit in a chair as if in paradise. How good that you came. When we spoke, our voices were hoarse and alien.
Meanwhile, evening was falling. And he became... He was as handsome as could be. He often came to me... We talked a lot... We had a lot in common. Of all the people I knew then, he was the only one who was truly close to me. He was real... Do you understand? Real. He sat in my room for a long time. It was so good with him. He just sat down next to me in the armchair and was silent. And then he took my hand and played with my fingers for a long time. I love him very much. He probably knows.
“I recently came across a book,” she said once. “I opened it to tell fortunes, that is, to read the first phrase you see, the first words. Do you know what it was?”
- What? – I asked.
"The slow sweetness of waiting," she said. "I've never known that feeling before. And I thought of something that might seem strange to you. When I come to you and we talk, I have the impression that a mirror appears next to you, in which I see myself. Not a mirror, of course, like glass, but something else, and my reflection is in it.
— And you appear in it in a way that you have never seen yourself before?
“It’s so good that you’ve stopped being unbelievable,” she said. “I feel so at ease with you now that you’ve given up that constant make-up I never believed in.”
Just like that. Because it's getting dark. A decent person always becomes melancholic when evening comes. No other special reasons are needed. The bluish twilight sadly dies.
She found three white volumes of Bessonov's poems in the bookcase – a completely decayed memory. She read them in silence. In the poems she found words about her sadness, about loneliness, about the dark wind that would whistle over her grave... She dreamed. She lay down in bed, covered her head with a sheet, hugged the pillow, and cried her fill about various sad things. Even if the pillow would be damp afterwards, even on both sides... On such a night, tossing and turning in bed was more pleasant than...
A hug is good for your health. It strengthens the immune system, cures depression, reduces stress and improves sleep. It rejuvenates, gives strength and has no unwanted side effects. A hug is truly a miracle cure for any disease. A hug is completely natural for a person. It is organic, has a natural sweetness, does not contain artificial components, does not pollute the air, does not spoil the environment and has a 100% beneficial effect. A hug is the perfect gift. It is great for any occasion, it is pleasant both to give and to receive. It shows your care, does not require additional wrapping and, of course, pays for itself completely. A hug is almost devoid of disadvantages. It does not require changing batteries, is not subject to inflation, does not spoil the figure, is not associated with monthly payments, is protected from robbers and is not taxed. A hug is an underutilized resource with magical powers.
I myself experience this when I go out for a summer evening walk barefoot. I usually walk slowly so as not to miss anything: the summer breeze blows on my skin, my feet are warmed by the warm asphalt or earth, the birds are singing and the rosehip smells, bringing me peace. Along the way, I think, ponder ideas and problems. Quite often, people on the street ask if everything is okay and offer to help. It is so nice of them, but it bothers me, tearing me out of a state of complete bliss or thought process and forcing me to pretend to be a sociable person. Then I have to restore this almost meditative state for quite a long time.
The long, languid, dreary autumn evenings arrived. The rain poured for several days in a row, dismal, dreary, persistent, like an obsession. The trees stood dejectedly, dropping yellowed leaves to the ground. More and more often he paced from corner to corner, stood for a long time at the window, frowning, looking out the window and drumming his fingers on the glass. Here he watches the leaves slowly fall, and sees only one thing in this – winter is coming. ( Where will you go if it snows?)
— Do you know what the difference is between summer and autumn?
- In what?
— Summer goes away, autumn constantly returns.
The neighborhood outside the window is quietly numb. Rain, a dim look through the glass, a capricious path of sticky threads knits a sweater of memories, of days lived.
It was as if I stood up from my chair for a second, looked out the window, then turned around, wanted to sit back down, and there I was still sitting. Thunder was growling somewhere.
Autumn night, your blue rains beat in vain on the ground. I fell asleep. Winter will come soon and lie like a shadow under my feet. I am calm... The memory of summer in my heart is weakening. What is it? Darkness? Maybe... Winter will manage to come during the night.
The mice run out and the whole crowd gnaws off a tasty piece of memory, that your cheese has holes.
I wish winter would come sooner and cover all this up – the cities, the people... Then I will sleep without undressing, or read someone else's book from any place, while the rest of the year, like a dog that has escaped from a blind man, crosses the asphalt in the right place.
Then, stretching out weeks and months, winter crept in. It’s really cold here. Your ears just fall off. And if a drunk falls asleep on the street, it’s forever. Winter is all around me, I’m freezing and stiffening. My sky has become iron, I myself have become stone. It’s cold, God, how cold . The high night above us is full of green and blue stars; winter, winter – for hundreds of miles, iron, cruel, protracted. The fish were asleep, the swastika of the snowstorm was twisting... God forbid I die when winter sharpens the pencil of darkness and everything around is strewn with whitish shavings. White is the color of oppressed innocence. As winter snakes, the shades of its mica-scaly wings change.
In the gloom of the room, all things seem to be lost in thought. We have been talking about things since childhood. Again, a whisper that comes from nowhere. After so many winters, it no longer matters what or who stands at the window behind the curtain. The creaking of snow under the stone wheels of winter moves into sleep parallel to the wooden December.
There are days that are the only ones you remember in a series of months that were probably not worth living. There are nights when I don’t know where to hide from melancholy. So, I need to pull myself together... I reason with such prudence in the mornings. Watching how the flickering of a gray winter day gradually fades. All life goes like a dream. Where do the nights go that we slept? Remember each one and leave notches on the inside of my thighs. Otherwise, "who" will remember it? There are empty days, years, even decades. There is nothing to cling to.
How did it happen that we died before all the other tasteless, bland; it turned out that there is no hand on a dried up penis, why does no one jerk off, why did no one come and stay, it is quite cold here, in general, very cold.
Snowy thoughts of the stone brain, growths of melancholy, crust of lips, breath, steam, thaw, winter boasts of a sunny day, no self-interest, flakes of snow in the morning, oatmeal, flakes, sweet feeling of melancholy, flakes in lumps, roll up, yes, I can say winter and what else, actually, remember something, white, shaggy December, dry, warm lips, speech as an opportunity, as a sign, winter and go outside, find out the meaning of the sign, signs of change, first meeting, second return, evening, winter, nothing more, no pain, no, my God, crust of lips, crust of snow, melancholy, getting stronger, no laughing matter, it would seem, winter, what else can I say?
However, the one who is abandoned in love is in fact a sign of something else, something that continues itself, something that is meticulously measured: the belated tenderness of things, the memory of details as alive as if they were numb. Indeed, they can do everything, although in detailed dreams through a transparent brick they are not visible at all.
By the habits of the winter snail-scruff I will understand the game of cat and mouse. And you will lie down on the bed again. What next. And then – winter. While I write, the houses have cooled down... The restlessness is different, but the same restlessness is still the same, however different, but in essence mysterious – it is the same.
I am probably wrong, I have made a mistake, I have gone blind, I have lost my mind. Winter embraces you and me like a dead white woman made of plaster. An empty look into the void through the double window frames sets the mood for a peaceful winter mood. And snow is my friend. Only fire understands winter. The fear of winter is the fear of fire alone, for it dissolves winter into strands and senses with unfailing precision the time when the message will be crumpled.
Better than any mortal, the king should understand the tragedy of life. Although human life has no price, we always act as if there were something even more valuable. The king has no friends, and in general "friend" comes from the word "other", but in all other respects the king always does the right thing...
The conductor, of course, will put two fingers under the lid of the house in which the onion game of hide-and-seek and riddles lives. Two chess kings divide the fields for winning, hope for. Say: kings can do anything. Put a bouquet of evil in a glass on the table, find the King's figure in the crowd. There are tons of forgotten kings in the world, it's September now, then winter will come. Winter is incredibly silent, crazy about life and death. Just life... passes so easily between us. It's already September, and the new winter will drive more than one crazy.
Such a long winter, it seems, will not pass by itself, and something must be done about it. Since I have not decided to escape, I rake the snow with my palms and warm it, warm it...
Snow sows its figured, kind grain on houses, and the soft man hardens, rushing to where it will be three times harder. Around: a huge winter lies like a manuscript, but reading does not threaten it, because it is conceived to be similar to the inside of its own scroll.
My dictated calendar, why winter, why sadness fell like snow on the houses, and I am alone, and you are alone... Under the lampshade is a stool, on the stool is a learned cat blessing our midnight t;te-;-t;te with his sleepy paw. Bye-bye. Probably, it is time. Bye-bye – it is never too late. It is still frosty outside, winter is still angry.
"Well, farewell until winter, but not this one, and not another, and not yet – after another." Lord, I didn't know how ugly she is... Listen, winter, this slow rhythm, leaving – it doesn't hurt at all. Winter's letters turn into phlegm, which is forgiven for loneliness and everything else. This winter I didn't go crazy again, but lo and behold, it's over. Not lower than remembering evil is turning paper into a scapegoat for insults. Forgive me for the sublime style, the time of worries never ends, winters never end. Witches are waiting. A characteristic court awaits. And the zeroing out was revealed so purely, my friend... The thread of weightless happiness breaks. It's so easy to leave if you don't come back...
Chapter 53. Tea with a boy
My boy, playful and rebellious, I love to catch your mysterious threads with my gentle hand, carpets of deceptive events. What do you say?
But I have a choice before me, which is, of course, not a choice. Everything will happen anyway. But I will try and endure until the end. How tired I am, my dear boy. You are at the beginning of the road, we are at the end – and the only thing I can tell you is that everything is right, no matter what happens to you. Everything is right. It is strange how much a person thinks when he is on the road. And how little when he has returned.
So, here I am, sitting in the kitchen, all quiet and peaceful, and it all reminds me of a dream I have over and over again (I know you hate it when people tell you about other people's dreams). I talk about it as if it were a distant past, but it is always with me. With that love that remains somewhere in my heart for my whole life.
So, it seems like only recently we were together, drinking tea... You were so young. Why did I let you go, when I knew you better than you, for many tea parties ahead, my boy. However, could you stay? I don’t know where you are now. It’s night again now, not the same, but similar to that one. And now, after so many years, what a wonderful night it was then! I can still feel its warmth. I trace your path by the swirling of tea leaves in the water. Soon we will meet again. You know, the unfinished tea in your cup never got moldy. People who think that no one needs them are often the most needed.
Night is a short but necessary absence. There are few objects in the world that at least resemble you to the touch, as they say. What should I remember, what should I do? Iron my trousers in your presence. I will learn about the absurdity of vegetating, like a square. This world is sad and bland without you – everything is not very good... I really miss my friend’s cheerful face and cheerful responsiveness. It’s high time to forget everything, but I miss you, I miss you very much. Come back, I’ll make tea. Worthless tea drinkers. Such things happen in life.
We'll come and warm up some tea, go to bed. My angel, I don't know what to say even now. Wait, a rich year will come, the delirium will subside. Then wrap yourself in a thick, shaggy old blanket. Lean your cheek against it for the last time. Would I like to die with you? No and yes.
Write to me when life ends and the alarm clock beeps to remind you that there is nowhere to rush anymore. Write to me when words stop being words and money stops being money. Write to me, and let the lack of an address be a guarantee of a sincere answer. Write.
In fairness, it should be noted that the tone of these letters can be explained by their addressees. But there is no sense of strain or falsehood in them.
She would open up to him her whole small, but already aching heart, in which small, cheerful birds sang, and black crows cawed, as she confessed to her diary. And she would give him her diary, – and in the diary on every page it is told how useless and unhappy she is. If a woman gave a man her heart, she will give him her wallet too.
If a woman has not had a man for a long time, she begins to feel unattractive and useless. And something needs to be done, to help, to fix, or at least to learn more about her.
They say, "a free woman," which means that she is most likely abandoned.
You see, she says suddenly, I am who I am, no one needs me. The main thing is that I don’t need myself. Like an old palm tree at the station – no one needs me, but it’s a shame to throw me away. (Sometimes no one needs even a princess). It’s as if I speak a different language. And you know, I don’t understand this world anymore.
Loneliness in the square of a window, loneliness in the cube of a room, when you want to be alone and seriously think about why the hell you are glued to this place with your gaze... Then my inner voice says to me: "How fragile are the cobweb-bridges of relationships and the wrinkles of false smiles – a sign of impossibility. Futile, as it warned, are all efforts. The paralysis of dreams exposes our hopes... and then look how the golden word "impossible" and the silver "never". The brain plays the same checkers with itself. An old Soviet book for schoolchildren who cannot force themselves to study. The course of events does not need justification. There are too many obligations to loved ones. It is better not to fulfill them, to behave arrogantly. A small romance, a simple song, sung by so many before..."
If relationships between people gradually become impossible, then this is certainly due to the multiplicity of degrees of freedom, a phenomenon whose enthusiastic herald was Jean-Yves Fr;aux. He himself had no ties, I am sure of it; he had the maximum of freedom. I say this without any mockery. As I have already said, he was a happy man; but I do not envy his happiness.
You will see: the lamp light will be covered with a newspaper, and such sadness will set in, as if you are pondering whether it is worth living or not, it is not very attractive. I love you there and I know nothing more infinite, I know nothing purer, more beautiful, sadder, more humane than that indecisiveness and beggarly freedom. And I cannot say that I cannot live without you – because I live. As is evident from the letter – I exist. Existence is a long word, but it means little. But what a strange word it is! It resembles the sound of emptiness dropped from hands... They try to fill emptiness with whatever comes to hand. Life goes on, even when it essentially does not exist.
No, but... you don't love life as such, you can love places, animals, people... food, literature, music... and sometimes you meet someone who absorbs all the love you are capable of. And if you lose them, you think everything around you has stopped. But everything else lives on...
Here everyone is busy leaving, certainly not just pretending! At least you will remember that I have submitted to you. I am leaving. How cruel this word is, when you love!
Farewell is truly the obsession of this tragedy of finality, where every word is a sign of the end, where everything that is said and done is said and done for the last time; where everything that happens happens, as at the end of a moving film. The tragic intoxication of the last time corresponds to the strangeness of the first.
The life that is forever leaving him seems to him an illusion and a dream, as sad as last year’s calendar, reminding him of past worries, past bustle and long-forgotten meetings.
The illusions were scattered like hairpins torn from a dressing table along with a napkin.
Why does such a minor and harmless change as a change in color suddenly acquire such great significance? The bitter irony inherent in the awareness of one's own aging makes itself felt: the appearance of gray hair evokes a whole series of associations, premonitions and anxieties; the silver thread on the temple turns out to be an omen of our fate, the quintessence and, in a way, a symbol of human existence. One has only to go all the way in deciphering this sign, and death will be discovered at its core! Thus, looking at herself in the mirror, a beauty suddenly notices a small but significant wrinkle: one fine morning, the mirror forces the frivolous woman to accept the bitter truth about her age and, in general, to take a serious look at her existence. And she immediately understands everything ... Everyone knows what fading beauties think about when they carefully examine themselves in the mirror: their thoughts relate to death, although they do not dare to pronounce this word. Everyone knows perfectly well what a wrinkle hints at. A man wants to cry at the thought that he will die so soon. A woman – at the thought that she was born so long ago. The silent language of wrinkles, alas, is universal, and it is not difficult to understand...
And only the adventure of death is an adventure that is completely open, so that the "farewell" that is born in our soul at parting corresponds to an almost unbearable thought for us. We can bear it only on one condition: if we do not delve into it and especially if we do not give ourselves a full account of it. Now we can understand why Farewell is such a popular elegiac and lyrical theme. After all, Farewell is an allusion to death, and the smallest deaths of separations form an ellipse of the great parting of death. Farewell fills human relationships with passion and imparts to them a high romantic and tragic tension, because if the absence that follows parting can be called a tragedy, then parting, which is a prelude to absence, is simply tragic – the tragic of this tragedy.
Chapter 54
(Agreements must be kept)
Having appeared, I only slightly inclined her interest in my direction, and a drop, long ready to fall, rolled into the outstretched palm...
The money melted, imitating cool snowflakes that had settled – may their souls rest in peace! – on hot palms... The dust is driven, swirling like grains of sand, they see nothing, everything is lost, everything is meaningless, what can you ask of them? Let them go...
An empty shell of a bed, the beach of a home bed. I sit on the edge, like an eastern god. It's hard to live without a soul, especially when you remember that you had one.
I walk around the house like a ghost. But not the one that once lived here. But the one that will come. An unpleasant excitement overcomes me. I begin to wander around the apartment, carefully looking at familiar objects in the hope that one of them will send me a secret sign or give my thoughts a new direction.
He dried himself with a towel and, dissatisfied with everything – this murky morning, this stuffy world, his stupid situation, and the overly fatty breakfast he was about to eat – returned to the room to make the bed.
"Ugh, damn..." he exhaled and sat down on the floor. "I need, I need to decide on something urgently," I think and immediately rise. "Yes," I say to myself, as if waking up and seeing clearly, "yes. It's now or never," he bit his lip and looked at her photograph with his dog's eyes.
What is bothering you inside needs to be given an outlet. And it doesn't matter in what form the pain comes out. All people come from pain. In any case, the retribution is terrible. After all, murder is murder. Those who do not die, live. This is the essence of change.
Actually, there is nothing to talk about. We have said and told each other what is necessary about the past long ago, and what is not necessary – we will never say. We also know the outline of our current life in detail.
Now the end is written, nothing can be changed – they will bring everything that was ordered. And they – let them go... In order for the past to end, it must be limited.
I have managed to maintain a measure in life. Seriousness becomes boring. Clowning is off-putting. Jesting becomes boring. Philosophizing is tiring. I combined all these styles according to time and occasion . He was also a court jester. His example is a lesson to others. But, my God, how boring... <...> I know more about death than dead people.
In a word, no matter from which side you approach it, all the calculations with life are finished; now that it has become clear in its entirety, down to the last detail, it is painful and unnecessary to live, what was – was, and what remains is only trifles; not to know is absurd, I thought that you knew something that no one needed.
Seriously – nothing can be done. As they say – "the incident is over", a crime without a victim. Don't be sad that I'm leaving. It's funny, really – again, you'll say that I guessed... Blessed is he who drank to the bottom.
- You did the right thing, I also gave up everything, let them comment (a nimble publisher of disgraceful letters), – the funniest thing is that there is nothing important in it, nothing at all. I feel the same as you, and that we will be real wimps if we limit ourselves to only weak complaints and do not escape from melancholy by some energetic action... To appear to the offender with a sawed-off shotgun and a canister. I finally understood what Schopenhauer was talking about. It is better to perish from extremes than from despair. In order to make a reasonable choice, one must first of all know what one can do without.
I am still so young, but I have already made a fortune. Depressive state. No, I will not sell the house, I will just abandon it, and I will even specifically stipulate in my will that I forbid its sale, I will leave a certain amount for its maintenance; I will turn this villa into a kind of mausoleum – a mausoleum of shitty things, because everything I experienced there was ultimately shit. "A mausoleum of shitty things..." – I tried this phrase on my tongue, feeling how, together with the alcoholic heat, an unpleasant delight was rising in me. Our way of thinking is determined by our biology. The mouth is in front, and the anus is behind. These facts somehow relate to what we are going to eat or what we are going to meet, as well as to what we leave behind and defecate. Hunger certainly has something to do with the future, and defecation with the past.
In the meantime, to brighten up my last minutes, I'll call some whores. No, not professionals, I said to myself, after thinking for a minute, really, they do everything too mechanically, too ordinary.
And, without delay, make ships from your idle ideas, gentlemen scribblers: fighting and dangerous. If the wind does not blow this place away, it will explode itself from vulgarity. A ghostly city of the moment (I am sure, the moment will not last more than a year). Come with me to burn ships for fools, to forgive everyone forever, as if I do not know you...
Of course, even the least of people can do something for themselves. But, by the way, do not judge, lest you be condemned. Everything is clear here, like in a cemetery.
Be brave at the trial. What else can I say except: "Ships, ships..." This is a city familiar to those who suffered. How sad, sad, outside the window, dirty, dirty, the city has a thousand problems, I am completely confused. Sell everything I had and buy a ticket to you, to come to your city to frankly die. We are leaving. And we will hurry, because no one loves us here and the money is running out. Thursday, already Thursday, and I do not care. As if I am standing in the shallows, the current. Like copper in water, now every little thing shines with meaning – like in a bad movie.
All events became omens, signs shook their fingers. I lost the ability to perceive anything literally. I wanted to laugh because I understood the essence of hints.
Everything is hasty, unused time is somehow stuffed into suitcases. Letters written from the past lie unread. Everything is ready for an endlessly extravagant journey. The goal is so tempting. The sun rolls along the shining tram rails.
Death... It's the same as going from one room to another, inside me, isn't it? A sentimental adventure. The royal road to the other side. Away, into another beauty!? In this world, swallowing a pack of sleeping pills is not a choice, but simply a gesture that becomes inevitable in the light of the outside, of some other place, that is, a non-act, rather a symbol of completion, an almost aesthetic achievement of harmony in the fictional fullness of the "other world".
The cult of size gave rise to the pathos of quantity, the aestheticization of magnitude, the contrast of the small man and the omnipotent gods. With the development of science, the mystified perception of nature went away. Man began to evaluate it from the standpoint of the dream of his own power. The very concepts of the sublime and the base, etymologically connected with the words top and bottom, seemed to speak of man's aspiration to light, sun, sky, freedom from the power of the earth.
A person, exposing his physical body to death, does not waste time while it feels out the prey; he authorizes and eludes. The Author's epigraph to the text should sound like this: And I am already here. The result is a misnomer. The move consists in eluding death by means of authorship, "in the treasured lyre" to take with him the most precious thing – sweet habits, names of friends, incidental moments of fate and other "ribbons-bows", in a word, to carry out a genuine transmission of the I in accordance with the definition of Ortega y Gasset: "I am I and my circumstances". All the same, what "seemed to us to be us" now seems to them to be them. Only now has the dual orientation of the elusive become a conscious technique: concern for the text and concern for the context. This kind of orientation is the best disorientation of death to date. "Rumors about oneself" are the capital of immortality, because they preserve the most important definition of the personal principle – the unpredictability of the posthumous fate. Contemporaries intuitively bet on the genius, understanding that this is their chance, too, a chance to flash in a two-volume work like "Pushkin's Friends". In terms of chronosensorics, Eros is deciphered as the desire to replicate oneself in other individuals, as the imposition of one's own motive on the choir of singers and on each singer individually. Thanatos appears as an inexorable desire to finish singing a song to the end, having learned at the same time what it consists of.
Centuries will pass. Passions will subside. The followers of all your teachings will die out. Descendants will look coldly at the content of my paintings, where I illustrated the ideas of my friends... But in my paintings there will remain something for descendants that is not in any of your creations.
The picture froze evenly here by the window you see a lonely old man – and the mirror is like the border of a room filling itself between the room there and the room here.
The case is moving towards its denouement. In the folds of clothes, ghosts are restlessly spinning, they are trying to hold you back, quietly casting spells. And for no apparent reason I feel incredibly happy, from the smile thrown after me: it would be a pity not to wake up in the morning...
The cat is watching him closely, he worries about her fate and even starts writing a note asking her to take care of the animal...
"She'll take care of everything..." "It's death from a broken heart," he says to himself, and suddenly realizes that she's insulting him. That's right – insulting. "Death in this room – ugh... They'll come in... They'll make a racket..." And he adds: "This doesn't suit me for one reason: it's painful, tedious and vulgar." The desire to remain anonymous.
A gloomy midday hung over the city. Half of life has been on the clock. So look back sometime: the houses stand in narrowed eyes. What will remain of this time? Look how people turn into balls. Nothing foretells a return.
He went upwards, however, in the darkness he broke down silently. He found nothing, and there was no intended purpose. Self-deception, like a hole for a nail in a calendar, on the cover of which is a city (plan from above), therefore – loneliness has improved me in this.
Grace arrived, with much the same sensation I had experienced a few years ago under anesthesia: a sense of easy, voluntary departure from life, with an intuitive awareness that death is, in the end, probably a very simple thing. A painful languor paralyzes the mind.
There was no time to think, you are already neighbors – that your stern creditor, tamed thanatos in the waistcoat pocket, the tread is already heard in every word, how far you have come, how far you have gone. Just think about it, fool, but how beautiful the ending is, how timely; they leave their notes in a conspicuous place: like, the end of everything, from now on, search and whistle and already touches the rails... Expectation of the impossible . An absolutely necessary creature.
Moving from scene to scene, from meeting to meeting, sometimes stopping, like barely visible figures in Chinese landscapes, just to gaze into the immensity, realizing that all our actions and words are merely ripples on the surface of a vast, vast universe.
But all this infinite perspective in space and time is just a theatrical decoration. Incidentally, astronomers and physicists have already understood this. They say that if you shoot a beam of light into the sky, after many years it will fly back from the other side of space... The universe is closed. Think about it, even light cannot fly out of this world. Do I need to prove that we are in prison?
But I am not irritated, because no scene will last forever and will probably be replaced by thousands of others... There can be no epilogue by definition, since there is no one who could write it. We very rarely fully realize what we are really striving for. Our conscious life is nothing more than an arbitrary rationalization of actions that we actually commit for other reasons. The desire for an absence with which no presence can measure... What was well conceived will necessarily be conceived again, in another place and by someone else... And yet, Barnabe, I could not get the huge mercury lakes on the surface of Saturn out of my head.
Sometimes, in the tireless turning of the wheel, I came to a vague awareness of the need to make a leap. To break away from the routine – that is the thought that makes one free. To become something more, to become different, me – the most outstanding madman on earth! Being just a man on this planet is boring. Bored even of defeating evil. To study goodness is amazing, because it invigorates, revives, renews. But simply to be is even more amazing, because it has no end and requires demonstration. To be is music, it is a profanation of silence in the interests of silence, it is beyond good and evil.
We are obliged to breathe only air, and everyone can listen to music as they like. You cannot fight for the purity of music with the same methods as for the purity of air. Music cannot harm. It cannot be made pernicious, like the atmosphere.
Music is the manifestation of activity without action. It is the act of pure creation, when you swim by yourself. Music neither urges nor protects, neither seeks nor explains. Music is the silent sound created by a swimmer in the ocean of self-consciousness. It is the reward that each one gives to himself. It is the gift of the divine, and one becomes a divine being by ceasing to think about God. It is the augur of the divine, and each one will become a divine being at a special hour, when all that is will be beyond the imaginary.
In essence, no one can resist music. There is nothing you can do about the heart – you always want to give it away. You just need to be able to hear in any music a motive that cannot be expressed by any notes, but is created for all of us. There is nothing better than music – perhaps melons?..
Close your eyes, do not feel and do not think – in fear do not think! – why and what – as never before – hurts. You want to forget, they will not let you forget. "God, how I want to sleep..." – they will not let you forget. The sky is cloudy... Sleep is pulling you to the ground... Would you like to get some sleep? Shouldn't you get some sleep? Everything is possible. But you can somehow "make do".
Lying in the darkness with his face buried in the pillow, he tried with all his might not to think about anything.
The need for concentrated attention is always accompanied by an irresistible desire to be distracted.
— Di-di-di, la-la-la. Di-di-di, la-la-la, — he muttered with concentration. It seemed to him that by switching off his brain with the help of obvious nonsense, he would get rid of the spies spying on him from within. It was not enough for him to turn the whole world against himself. In himself he noticed traces of my secret search and decided to fight me on the paths of his consciousness. "Di-di-di, la-la-la" — try to break through this wall. And you won't catch on. What does this stupid, talentless didiculation mean?..
And the nerve cords are playing tricks – and yet, hurry up. You’ll be watching TV in the next world. Am I ready, or not? It’s about time. My life has dragged on. I’m hopelessly outdated, that’s clear. Making a final decision can sometimes feel like a civil war within yourself.
The possibility of not making a decision becomes impossible according to the trend. The possibility of a decision reveals an obligation from which one cannot simply retreat.
"There's no doubt about it, there's no way to d-i-i-i-i-ve... Every louse has its own path," he said as if it were well thought out, long ago decided, and as if, by doing so, he had put a blunt, round point. Let fear not touch the tried heart. He went to the door, opened it, closed it, and was gone.
Here the killer has woken up, he is putting on his shoes. The concentration of maniacs, carefully closing the doors behind them, with all sorts of precautions, moving as if on mental tiptoes... The key is the calm owner of the door. If you are not careful yourself, no one will be careful for you.
In my last mood I could rattle off a whole book while riding on a tram. What arose in me could be briefly called the book of times, the tedium and monotony of a life immersed in terrible activity. Wasn't this the book I had been thinking about for years, wasn't it the book I wrote every day on my usual way home from work? But driving across the bridge when the sun was setting? And observing all this with the self-sufficient clarity of a future memory (as, you know, when you look at things, trying to see them as you will remember them later), I related to the past the memory of the road there and back across the bridge, the road to work, which is death, and the road home, which is a morgue.
Why am I going to work, what am I going to do in the evening, will I be able to kiss her hot bosom, ride away and stop, drop everything and look around, don't die yet, wait another day, good luck, rivers, put an end to it, down, down, in a corkscrew, head and shoulders enter the mud, legs are still free, the fish will gather, start eating, tomorrow a new life, where, yes somewhere, why start all over again, everywhere the same, death, death is the key, but don't die yet, wait another day, good luck, a new face, a new friend, a million possibilities, you are still too young, you are melancholic, you mustn't die yet, wait another day, good luck, this and that and so on, over the bridge into the glass hangar, all stuck together, worms, ants crawling out of a dead tree, and their thoughts crawling out the same way...
Perhaps, raised up on its piers, above the traffic, above life and death, with the high tombstones on either side, the tombstones flaming in the sunset, and the river flowing carelessly below, flowing like time itself, perhaps every time I rode there I was subjected to some influence that unstoppably troubled me; in any case, every time I rode over the bridge I felt immensely alone, and no matter what happened, the book began to write itself, taking in events I had never lived, thoughts I had never suffered, conversations I had never had, hopes, dreams, delusions I had never experienced.
Then, in the middle of the bridge, in the middle of the road, always in the middle: of a book, of a conversation, of the act of love – it dawned on me again that I had never done what I wanted, and therefore a being had arisen in me which was nothing but an obsessive growth, filling me like a growing coral, and displacing everything, including life itself, which had become so unwanted, but still supported itself.
In a person, including me, there is a craving for unnatural aesthetics that is difficult to explain. When I first saw aquarium fish with monstrously bulging eyes – "telescopes", something inside me turned over. I looked and looked, and felt how their strange protruding eye sockets, fat bodies, convulsive movements in the water both disgusted and attracted me at the same time. But at some point I began to like them, although they were the "wrong" fish. Fish do not realize that they live inside the water.
For a time I was struck by the most astonishing proof of my unfitness, or worthlessness, that I was not at all interested in what people wrote or said. Only one object haunted me, a completely isolated, separate, insignificant object. It might be a part of a human body, or a ladder in a burlesque house; it might be a chimney, or a button picked up in a gutter. Whatever it was, it opened up new horizons, allowed me to make concessions, to sign my name.
Living in a world where everything was new, I became attached to the old. In every thing there was some insignificant detail that especially riveted my attention. I had a microscope eye, trained on the vices, on the grains of ugliness that alone made a thing charming to me. That which placed a thing outside the law, that which made it unsuitable, that which defamed it, that was what attracted me and inspired love for it. If this was a perversion, then it was a healthy perversion, given my non-belonging to the world that was growing around me. And soon I myself began to resemble the things I adored: an outlaw, a useless member of society.
Am I speaking with malice, envy, hostility? Perhaps. All things, all animate and inanimate objects, standing apart, are covered with ineradicable strokes. And what constitutes me is also ineradicable, because it stands apart.
And yet I retained the ability to be surprised, to inspire, to nourish. But I was not accepted simply and artlessly. Desiring, feeling the urge, I was able to choose any person, from any social class, and make him listen to me. I could keep him in suspense if I wanted, but, as a magician, as a sorcerer, only as long as I possessed the spell. In the end, I aroused mistrust, suspicion, hatred, which, since it was instinctive, proved insurmountable.
It always amazed me how easily people got irritated just by listening to me. Perhaps my speech was a little extravagant, although they often got irritated even when I was trying hard to restrain myself. A turn of phrase, a choice of an unfortunate adjective, the ease with which the words came out of my mouth, the mention of taboo subjects – all seemed to conspire to take me beyond the pale, to make me an enemy of society. And no matter that everything began gloriously – sooner or later they smelled me a mile away. If I was modest and simple, then I seemed too modest and too simple. If I was cheerful and sparkling, impudent and shameless – then I was too free, too cheerful. I could never put myself on point with my interlocutor. And if it were not a question of life and death, and for me then everything was a question of life and death, if it had been simply a condition of spending a pleasant evening at the house of friends, everything would have remained just as difficult. I emanated vibrations, overtones and undertones, filling the atmosphere unpleasantly. It could happen that everyone listened to my stories the whole evening, I could exhaust everyone, as often happened, and everything seemed to foreshadow only good things.
“...I don’t remember this dream of mine anymore – like a story. With a beginning and an end. Some kind of force that threatens you. And that I grab you and drag you somewhere. That we get on some kind of train and walk through the carriages, and the carriages are all different, some are like those in commuter trains, and some are like halls in a castle. And I drag you through this entire train by the hand. You are scared, inhibited and detached. And one of the carriages turns out to be a room with stairs somewhere up, and a friend of mine – a theater lady – is coming down these stairs in a long velvet dress, so old. I rush to her and try to explain something, asking for shelter.”
Don't I remember you saying that this trip was unnecessary, but that you had to go if you felt the need? Why didn't you persuade me not to go? Ah, it's not like you to persuade. And it's not like me to ask for advice. So here I am, bankrupt in the desert, with that real bridge behind me and only the unreal ahead, and only God knows how puzzled and confused I am. If I could disappear, drowning in the sand, I would.
But as fate would have it, something would happen before the evening was over, a vibration would be released that would make the chandelier jingle, and the more sensitive souls would remember the chamber pot. The laughter would not yet have died down, but the malice would already make itself known. "I hope to see you soon," they would say to me, but the limp, sweaty hands extended in farewell told a different story.
There is no choice: I must accept everything as it is and learn to love it. I must learn to live in the scum, swim like a sewer rat, or drown. If you decide to stick to the herd, you are protected. To be accepted and appreciated, you must zero yourself out, become indistinguishable from the herd. You can dream, if your dreams are the same as everyone else's.
The evening was disjointed, stupid. They killed my evening.
Chapter 55. Cowardice and Pain
In the shimmer of the great fiery waves: from the very depths: no police will notice: three little birds of suicide fly out: three tiny souls: so tiny: that even the waves of flame cannot swallow them: believe me: the flame groans: in the depths of the world: the police see nothing.
I can refuse... Let's taste this thought: I can... "Don't do it if you don't want to." When there is no need to make a decision, it is necessary not to make one. The dying person is in the position of a person who left the house and forgot the keys, he cannot return to the house, because the door opens only from the inside... It is simple, like in the classroom, according to Peryshkin's textbook: the carriages slowed down, but the slippery baggage with the passenger continued its journey.
- What if I refuse?
— There are no rules in this world except those dictated to us by death.
The idea is sweet and viscous, you can savor it all night. So – give it up? Go back to where things make sense? There will be no official condemnation – only those with whom I started will shrug their shoulders. But do I have to explain to them that I came here with them and yet apart from them; that I wanted to take lessons here in vertical growth – I, torn off and round, attached only to my own center, wanted to learn how roots appear, how they suck in life, wanted to learn to drive it upward and turn it into a noise and a rustle, enchanting those who, finding themselves in my shadow, raise their heads ... For them ... for them everything is different. They have aged differently. And everyone will be right, everyone except you.
Am I afraid? If I were to catch this thought flickering on the edge of my consciousness by the tail of a mouse, I would clarify: I am not afraid, I am suspicious. Is it really possible that my confused movements, which never quite formed a straight line, have been decided to be turned off?
In the end, death is a matter of hours, maybe even minutes, while retirement is like poverty: for life. Such popular troubles as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's are especially bad for the brain. These ailments quickly bring down a host of functions: from fine motor skills to urine retention. Convolutions become emaciated and fall apart. The bottom of the furrows is exposed. Death in old age is nothing. Horrible how unpleasant it is for the sick and the poor: this and that, the years go by, teeth deteriorate, suddenly you also have to go to the doctor, etc. Memory does not need the brain. It is the brain that needs the memory of matter, so that it can fold into an organ each time from fatty acids. Memory is slightly older than reason. Self-organization of matter, all chemical and physical events are impossible without it. In old age, we all remember the Greeks. The Hellenes were going to war on the beautiful island of Salamis.
Life is given to find out the reason for existence... What does this symbol mean? If you are not ready to part with yourself, your greatest beloved, then nothing will happen. By the way, the Gospel symbol is not accidental in this regard: he who gives his soul will find it, and he who is afraid of losing it, loses it. About death within life: you have to kill your life, but having killed it, you yourself will remain alive – trampling death by death. But the older you get, the more difficult your life is. And it's a pity that suicide avoids me. This happens in some dreams – you urgently need to run away, but you stand still, and you can't tear your leaden feet off the ground.
A classic mythological plot is the descent into hell. In modern literature, this may look like a visit to some sinister drinking place, say, a tavern run by suspicious Chinese, where sailors gather to set sail on a voyage from which no one will return. Dark regions of existence, hell has a mysterious attraction. There is no positive and negative, no dry and wet, no right and left hand. There is nothing like that at all.
But what is stronger – stronger than passion and whim? Every man who took a razor in his hands could not help but think how easily he could break the silver thread of life...
There are not many events in a person's life that have such enormous significance as the process of dying and death. In this last, often the only possible indivisible personal act of the soul – a phenomenon of cosmic scale – I feel with an irresistible fatal delight a certain highest, intense moment of being. After all, death is almost the only thing that one can freely choose for oneself, alone, and in this sense death is something undoubtedly mine, personal. The most intimate center of personality.
In such a world, where everything seems necessary, act as you please, for the world itself in its organization allows this possibility. And what do you need a soul for if you do not dare to abandon it whenever you want! Leave what does not suit you. However, before we bury this idea, let us define what a soul is. We do not need surprises along the way, for example, if we discover that the part of ourselves that is capable of surviving death is not very pleasing to us.
One of the early Greek philosophers, Thales, believed that the soul was simply a force that moved the body. He observed that one of the main differences between a dead body and a living one was that the former did not move, at least on a horizontal surface.
The Bible doesn't give a definitive answer, but it seems to be like the difference between a charged battery and a dead one. A dead battery isn't missing a part of itself; it's just missing energy, the life itself.
A passenger sails on a steamship because he wants to. Freedom of choice is invigorating. It is important that there are no intermediaries. Like in the evening in a field, when you lie on your back and look at the stars. It is pleasant when there is no one around. This is because of the crowding. But they write in books and magazines that every person needs personal space and if there are people everywhere, you can get sick. Opportunity exists only then and therefore it is an opportunity because it is desired. You are all you have. The night is sublime, the day is beautiful. The beauty of an act consists first of all in the fact that it is done easily and as if without tension.
For the first time in a long time he felt like a free man, doing as he saw fit. And the face with attentive eyes, albeit with difficulty, with effort, like a rusty door opening, smiled...
It is a well-known fact that soldiers go to war trembling. Deep down they know that not all of them will return in the evening. Who will return and who will not is unknown, but it is possible that they themselves will not return. But psychologists have noticed a strange phenomenon: as soon as they reach the front line, all their fears disappear. They begin to fight very playfully. Once death is accepted, where is its sting? Once they know that death is possible at any moment, they can forget about it. I have met many military men, I have had many friends in the army, and it was strange to me to see that these are the most joyful people, the most relaxed. At any moment the order can come – "join the armed forces" – but they play cards, they play golf, they drink, they dance. They enjoy life to the utmost.
It was strange that one could be morally brave – which I certainly was – and physically a cowardly bastard. One thing, at least, was clear. You would never, never in the world, want the pain to increase. You wanted only one thing from pain: for it to end. There was nothing worse in life than physical pain. There were no heroes in the face of pain, no heroes, he repeated to himself over and over again, writhing on the floor, clutching his bruised left elbow.
There is a famous saying that artists are divided into two categories – revolutionaries and decorators. I suspect that revolutionaries are people who are able to accept the challenge of a merciless world and respond with even greater mercilessness. I simply did not have the courage of that kind. But I was ambitious; perhaps, deep down, decorators are even more ambitious than revolutionaries.
However, tragedy is not just a description of sad events and terrible murders. It is not the number of dramas or deaths that gives birth to the genre. The heroes of tragedy seek justification for their actions. They find themselves in a situation where there is no way out, when they have to fully comprehend their fate, their choice, when any decision turns out to be catastrophic. And the hero overcomes the situation. Most often at the cost of his own death. In this case, there is no winner. Both sides end up both winners and losers. The Greeks were dualists (not to be confused with duelists). The essence of a tragic situation is that a tragic hero without real guilt inevitably becomes guilty by coincidence, by the will of an all-powerful fate. But here is what is strange. The hero of an ancient tragedy died, and the audience, wiping away tears of pity, left with an enlightened soul and heart, ready for the most difficult trials. Thus the Greeks discovered the great secret of dramatic action, preserved by all the world's theatres of all eras and by cinema in the 21st century.
The Greek idea: the world is changing, but not improving. The ancients proved this by their example. Everything we know about the performing arts was already in the ancient Greek theater. The nakedness of the device – a character lifted by a theater crane shouts: "Hey, you, machine master, have pity on me!" A direct mocking appeal to the audience: "Looking from heaven – you seem vile, looking from the earth – you are real scoundrels."
And that makes sense to most of us. After all, when we read Plato's Republic, we want to know as much as possible about what the author originally meant. Most of us don't want to know what the Republic meant to my grandmother; we want to know what it meant to Plato.
And as soon as I returned to my apartment, I had again that feeling that I had known for so long – that everything was not going as it should, and that there was something irreparable about it. I could never remember where, when and why this feeling appeared and remained in me, as I thought, forever.
A cursed evening of the same cursed day. The night will be difficult. I feel something breaking inside me, like a glass breaking. I pace from corner to corner, like a caged animal straining to be free, but I can do nothing: all plans seem doomed to failure from the start. Failure, failure everywhere. Life is an eternal gluing together of fragments. Only suicide glistens invitingly in the sky. At midnight something happens inside me: as if a switch on a railway had been switched; pain spreads deep inside. I don’t understand anything anymore.
The fish passes through the net. I return, like a cat or a fox returns when its fur has turned grey from the frost and its paws have hardened on the hard earth. I make my way among the cabbage, and it creaks its leaves, shakes off the dew. The night is eaten, the night is gone. And if it weren’t for one shaky memory, it wouldn’t really care anymore.
I was saved from suicide by bad cigarettes. Unharmed. That night I understood why my father drank when my mother died. That night vodka was like oxygen. I could breathe again. But that dawn hour cost me half my life.
He survived, but something important was missing from him. Everything was in its place – so simple, ordinary, natural.
I went out into the yard; a whispering light rain was falling there lazily, almost silently. The daily routine had come onto the scene. Everyone expects a whole day, so it is not the answer. People have always fought for life, bitten into it. After all, people used to be alive and somehow... in general, they enjoyed life. They knew not so much its meaning, but their place in it. And they were quite confident in their fate.
I say to the thief who fell ill: what are we going to do? – Do we need to live? Do we need to smoke? – Life needs to be pushed. – Life is a touching combination.
He walked along the bank of the pond, lulling his whining soul. What is delirium? Delirium comes from the word "bresti". It is when a person is wandering somewhere, not knowing where, and suddenly sees a cat: "Wow, it's a cat!" Or when Repin saw barge haulers, he said: "Wow, it's barge haulers!" He saw barge haulers as strange objects and painted the picture "Barge Haulers on the Volga", which is delirium. Exhausted people are dragging a ship behind them. It seems to me that this is a completely delirious sight.
I thought, not without some pleasure, of how I would enter my apartment and regain those familiar comforts of which I had been deprived during my absence – my armchair, my table, my books over my head, my sofa, the arrangement of all the objects, each of which I could find with my eyes closed, everything in which so many days of my life had passed and in which there was no element of uncertainty.
So, due to the parties not having reached an agreement, the meeting continues. I am still alive and still thinking. My unkempt appearance still lives in the mirrors. And you advise restraint.
It's strange, he thought. You always expect that a person who escapes death will be immensely happy. But that almost never happens.
Having mustered up some dubious courage, how easily a person can harm himself so much that no doctor can heal him. Murder is a naive form of death, the work of, as a rule... Have you ever thought... that every year... we experience the day of our death? Maybe it is today?
Because at some point – you never know – when, having reached the end of your rope, having encroached on the rest of your days , they will lay hands on yourself, cut off your breathing, tear off, desoul, murderers. In times of peace, every person with warlike inclinations turns against himself . If you destroy yourself, then you do something worthy of the greatest respect: by this you almost deserve to live. To go against nature is also a natural quality. And he who does not know how to despair does not truly live.
- You weirdo, you mortal, why kill yourself? – When a person suffers, he has a need to torment others. You didn't notice. In order to destroy another, a sorcerer first destroys himself. He does his work alone. He who encroaches on himself, spits on people.
They told me that this road would lead to the ocean of death and I turned back halfway. Since then, crooked, deaf, roundabout paths have been stretching out before me... A person cannot be delayed, later he will never reach it. A qualified specialist is a person who successfully avoids small mistakes, steadily moving towards some global delusion. In essence, every life has a good end – death. But not every life has a good middle. Kafka, apparently, understood this very well. It is better to light one small candle than to curse the darkness all your life.
You can't tell, it's stuck in your chest... The poor horse fell in the field... never in a lifetime... well, you're just being silly. Like a night train that blows its whistle every time before a blind turn, so in these dreams of mine the same theme is repeated obsessively. But how can you make someone who hasn't reached the turn yet look around it?
I feel well, but badly. Oh, I feel sick, I feel sick... sick-sick-sick!.. No, no more. I'm done for. Take some aspirin and don't worry about it.
Life was compressed again and again, reaching down to the smallest universal basis. Some closed and most peculiar danger, salvation from it, danger coming again, again desperate efforts and again salvation – always such a situation as on a perishing ship.
He had the feeling that he was blocking his own path by living. A dangerous path that he shouldn't have stepped on. But in this obstacle he again drew proof that he was alive. Maybe living meant being in danger? Being human was dangerous. Especially when leading some strange, half-ghostly life in which some secret was hidden.
Beauty is comforting because it is safe. It does not threaten to kill, it does not hurt. And it always makes reality a little meaningless. Sadness cannot be ugly. I mean, beauty is confusing, you forget what you were going to do and how you should act.
"Some people think that Ateh was not beautiful at all, but she learned to give her face such an expression and to control its features in front of the mirror, that the impression of beauty was created. This artificial beauty demanded so much strength and effort from her that as soon as the princess was alone and relaxed, her beauty crumbled like her salt."
From an excessive love of external life comes danger to it. We think too little of our own soul. It is natural to conclude that there are more exciting themes than the fragility of our body or the torments of our soul. This conclusion, made both by the public and by its overseers, places poetry, and with it all the arts, in the category of dangerous occupations. And this fear brings me to despondency, to that feeling, still unfamiliar to me, when a man, caught in a whirlpool, lays down his oars and begins a song. This happens when you spin in the same circle of unresolved contradictions.
For several weeks Nietzsche is in a state of melancholy and rapture; such experiences are undoubtedly familiar to mystics, and their use of words is most appropriate to the present case. Perhaps he wants to exploit the state of paroxysm and lyrical sursum into which despair has plunged him. Under the impression of melancholy and bitterness, he wrote pages. And here this mood is combined, as it should be in art, with tragedy, with death...
He stood on the evening street, like a man who had once again managed to escape. Expressive fleeting glances. Once again the grey leprosy of life would be brightened by a few hours, mercifully given by fate – brightened and flown away like doves. And these hours were also a lie – nothing is given for free – only a reprieve. And what is not a reprieve? Isn’t everything in the world only a reprieve, a merciful reprieve, a motley canvas covering the distant, black, inexorably approaching gates?
"Every man who speaks to me is in my eyes a dead man; a dead man in respite, if you like, living by chance and for a moment. Death lives in me. And it makes me laugh! This is what you must not forget: my dance of death amuses me like a huge farce... A waltz with devilry. Believe me: the world is funny, death is funny; that is why my books are funny and deep down I am cheerful."
Who are we and where are we from, when all those years are just gossip and we are no longer here? It is written in the sky; it burns and dances there like a harbinger of horrors. It has eaten into our souls, and that is why we are now as dead as the moon. Who are we, so preoccupied, deciding each time what we want to become or remain? What is worse is that we are all, in a sense, created by circumstances. What to do with the sad faces of passers-by?
There was an ambiguity in the air, something vague and unpredictable.
Chapter 56. The Vanishing Game
The Romans called a rhetorician a man who knew how to speak, to whom words obeyed, who knew how to yoke them, to direct, to drive, to spur them on, so as to make them at any moment perform hard work, the most dangerous, the most unusual. A Latin by origin and by taste, Taillade has a right to this beautiful name of rhetorician, which so offends untalented pedants. He is a rhetorician in the style of Petronius, who masters verse and prose with equal mastery. If he sometimes treats language like a tyrant, it is only because this language itself slavishly obeys him. (Words, in turn, are also great tyrants, of whom one must be especially wary.) At times he is deliberately incomprehensible. His rudeness is sometimes full of grandeur. If the subject of his poem is rich in images and thoughts, he combines them with the feverish haste of a peasant caught in a thunderstorm while gathering branches, and throws them to us still full of the fragrance of the land that gave birth to them. But he wants to die alone, without hope and without love. The stern hero sings the song of death.
If you meet a woman with an empty bucket, it is an unfavorable sign, if with a full one – favorable. If you add up the numbers on the license plate of a passing car and get an even number, it is a favorable sign, and if an odd number, it is unfavorable, and so on. It turns out that an obsessive person still has hope for a favorable outcome, a paranoid person has practically none, because if everything has a meaning, and the same thing, then this is almost equivalent to the fact that everything will soon lose its meaning, that is, the meaning will cease to be a meaning and will become reality.
Paranoid delirium is interesting because here, perhaps for the last time, the patient still tries to speak in a language common to him and the world. It is no longer possible to argue with a paranoid about whether the sign given to him really means anything or not, but in any case it is clear to what element of reality it points: smiles, stains on linen, meaningful glances – formally -phenomenologically they really exist in reality for another person.
In his quest to comprehend everything, he himself becomes little understood by others, and the originality of his verse fades away on the threshold of our consciousness, like a lantern lit by a shipwrecked traveler on the top of an underwater reef. The poet arrogantly plunges into the fog and dim reflections of his proud mind, and the night is filled with terrible cries. Under the moon, covered with smoke, words are heard that are unknown to human language, causing no response in us. His heart was too cold, and he died. The fakir of glory, preferring to remain unknown than to be misunderstood, he hid in his secret tomb. The beautiful pose is convincing.
And now the most interesting case – my own. In conceiving this plot about age, I wanted to lead the reasoning to an elegant in its straightforwardness conclusion: a person is in fact guilty of his age. That is, on some existential level, in the spirit of Kierkegaard's self-digging, everyone must accept the blame for having lived to such and such an age. It is known, for example, that for a number of objective reasons a Russian poet is ashamed to live past thirty-seven. Rock musicians who are still alive today, continuing to cash in on their long-standing popularity, have also, from the point of view of the average person, somehow lingered in death. The hero of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground directly calls such an age "vulgar", "indecent": I am forty years old now, and forty years is my whole life; after all, it is the deepest old age. To live beyond forty years is indecent, vulgar, immoral! Who lives longer than forty years – answer sincerely, honestly? I’ll tell you who lives: fools and scoundrels live. I’ll tell all the old men to their faces, all these venerable old men, all these silver-haired and fragrant old men! I’ll tell the whole world to their faces! I have the right to say so, because I myself will live to be sixty. I’ll live to be seventy! I’ll live to be eighty!.. Wait! Let me catch my breath... And it’s not that upon reaching such an “indecent age” a poet or a person with an unspent conscience is better off shooting himself. No, it’s quite possible to live happily on, but at the same time accepting responsibility for each “extra” year, filled with more losses, betrayals, cowardly compromises. Each “excessive” year adds cynicism, cowardice, and unbelief to you. In this sense, age really makes a person, in Kierkegaard's sense, “infinitely guilty,” and the real act of moral courage is to recognize guilt entirely and completely as an internal, and not an external factor.
But it is characteristic that this idea of mine – first to define age through external coercion to guilt and responsibility, and then to give the phenomenon of guilt features of internal regularity – had the character of a pre-setting (in general, it resembled a philosophical attraction, a spectacular construction of a double paradox). And this means that the same remote programming of my consciousness by some social agents took place. The problem of guilt for the current age is also my personal problem, an obvious result of psychological repression. But, reasoning sensibly, I still do not find any reason to join the chorus of condemning voices – both those for whom I am still young and those for whom I am old. In my dreams, in my emotions, in reactions to external stimuli, in the sensation of my body, in the tossing of my soul, I am not burdened by age at all. There is no age.
Neither birth nor death are events in the life of the one who is born and dies. A child learns of his birth quite late and most often does not believe that there was a time when he did not exist.
Schizophrenics are very smart and profound people. We know this very well from antipsychiatrists, and we thank them for it. But still, at the end of the 20th century, privileged strange objects appeared – such as television, mobile phones and the Internet. Their purpose is to influence. And it is certainly no coincidence that they were invented in the 20th century – the century of schizophrenia. Do these privileged strange objects have anything to do with death? Yes, they have an ambivalent attitude towards death. On the one hand, they intimidate, on the other, they distract.
Death is not an event of genuine reality. The word death does not resemble death itself, although we do not know what death is like either, and we do not know whether it exists at all. It is just that the people around us cease to exist from time to time, or rather, their bodies cease to exist. Then a very complex bureaucratic game begins, the goal of which is to determine a place for this body in a cemetery or a crematorium. This distracts loved ones from their grief. Van Gennep called such things rites of passage. But if the rite of initiation is the death of a boy and the birth of a man, and the wedding ceremony is the death of a girl and the birth of a woman, then the ritual of death is a transition to an unknown destination. They used to say that it was to another world. Well, let's say to another world. But we are not going to explore another world, because this is another play on words. We do not know what it looks like and whether it really exists. And we do not really know anything about parallel worlds. And Dunn, in my opinion, was unable to prove that nothing dies.
Death is something that happens to others, a hereditary enemy. Enemies are silent. Something that cannot be exchanged. Death takes us away slowly, one by one. From fear and reverence before it, the faces of reasonable people turn pale and fade. Death stands, waiting on the way, and man still walks and has fun. Death is at a distance from us at an eye and an eyebrow. This is even closer than wasting time on reminding us of it. However, where is the mind of a short-sighted person? I don’t know. Modern man also knows that death is inevitable, but nevertheless, each time it overtakes him and his loved ones as if something incredible had happened that should not have happened. Death for modern man is both the norm and a deviation from the norm.
Let's creak some more. By the way, we'll all die, and you'll die too... an ordinary death, like old women die – quietly, without malice. Quiet, concentrated readiness: our deaths are painless, shameless, peaceful. "A tree dies calmly, honestly and beautifully. Beautifully – because it doesn't lie, doesn't break, isn't afraid, doesn't regret." A dead old woman is more perfect than a living one. Death is good because it puts us all in our place.
And so on until death. No pill will save you from a shameful death. In the end, they will nail you into a coffin and throw you into a hole. And everyone in the world will sigh and laugh happily. Only the boots will remain. The name. "Lived. Suffered. Loved." Without dates of birth and death. A generation comes and a generation goes, but the earth remains forever. Century after century, century after century, every person lies in the ground, unhappy and happy, angry and in love, more than one million lie underground.
Therefore, the idea of creating a register of living beings, the first real codification and inventory of the population, is found precisely in the Old Testament, where it is listed in detail who gave birth to whom, who flew where, who went where. It is there that history arises, presupposing the uniqueness of individual specific events and personalities who acted and will never act again, will never turn into anything, and whose very existence is filled with exceptional meaning, precisely because they were, and now they are gone. Death unwinds a long series of causes, but never becomes their consequence. The one who mimics death cannot count on an outcome: it belongs to another series, gathering from the random circumstances of external life.
I do not consider myself a pessimist, but I must say with all responsibility that if you think more closely about the essence of life, it becomes clear that everything ends in death. Death is a tax that you pay for life. There is nothing special about this, and it would even be undemocratic if any of us suddenly survived and remained. Of course, everyone wants to live, but when you think that Leonardo da Vinci also died, your hands just drop.
And everything would be fine if there were complete equality, brotherhood and iron law in this matter. If, for example, we were leaving the face of the earth in an organized manner, in large groups, serially, by age, for example, or by nationality. One nation has lived out its allotted time and that's it, let's move on to the next one. Then, of course, everything would be simpler, and the inevitability of this separation would not have such an exciting and unnerving acuteness. But this is the main difficulty and at the same time the piquant charm of existence, that you never know exactly when you will cease to exist, and you always have the opportunity to surpass your neighbor and outlive him by at least an extra month. All this gives our lives great interest, risk, fear, excitement and great variety.
Death is like a mother to small children. The dying person participates in the game of disappearance. Only later does death become lonely and "wild". Death prepares an ordinary person gradually. First he sees his grandmother in bed, and she no longer gets up, she disappears. Then life shows him a drowned classmate, then his parents. And finally, he is overcome by senile melancholy. The fear of death consists of two parts – the fear of others and the fear of one's own. First, the selfish fear of the death of loved ones, then the fear of one's own disappearance.
It is surprising how much fewer books have been written about death – far fewer than about life. Death is much more interesting than love – if only because everyone has death, and many have questions about love. Death is generally a synonym for the word “meaning”. Life is finite, and someone has spent most of it on arranging his burrow, on building a house in which he will not spend a day due to infirmities and illnesses. A person saved up, refused all joys – and there is no one to pass on his house to. A son has forgotten him, a tree is knocking on the window with dry branches. Is there anything more important in human life than the outcome with which it ended?
The Latin word finis means both "end" and "goal". At the moment when a person is unable to foresee the end of a temporary state of his life, he is unable to set any goals or tasks for himself. Life inevitably loses all content and meaning in his eyes. On the contrary, the vision of the "end" and the focus on some point in the future form the spiritual support that prisoners need so much, since only this spiritual support can protect a person from the destructive action of the forces of the social environment that change character, and keep him from falling.
The fear of getting sick is stronger than the disease itself. The fear of going broke kills the joy of money – it is incredibly scary to lose your health and money, simply because there is nothing else except health and money – and you have to save, save, save... "A person who is afraid of getting sick is already sick: with fear." It is probably unpleasant to read this, understandably – we are all, like, surviving with our last strength, and "the money is with others, the bastards." But the thing is that culture exists only on the money of rich people. True, not all rich people are equally useful.
The problem is not solved by him, the entire preparatory period is wasted – it would be good if the lab assistant reads the observation log. This division, however, is conditional – I knew ordinary people who had a secret business no worse than Captain Ahab and boring professors who died in the middle of the dacha pines, and besides the dacha, they practically had no special achievements in life.
Attentive and calm looking into death to determine the meaning of life is a sign of an adult. There is also a danger of some fuss in death – for example, when a person is frightened, he begins to fuss in anticipation of the hour of death. And he does something, as he thinks, sublimely poetic – again, he plants a tree so that his grandchildren can sit under it, but in the family, meanwhile, things are not going well, and the children are so special that there may not be any grandchildren. He begins to do something absurd and senseless. But everything can be simulated – love, happiness, but death is such a thing that you can't fool around with it. As a result, the average person is much more concerned with the level of comfort of his death than with his fate after death.
“Everything is boring the second time,” he yawned, pulling the skin off the whites of his eyes, “that’s why you only die once...” “And yet, death is a matter of habit,” someone insisted in his head.
"The insignificance of the world", hatred of a dull, moderate life give rise to interest in "the mysteries of eternity and the grave", in the knowledge of "otherness", death. <...> A mystery exists only to be revealed, to give itself away. What is more fickle in the world than life? But death is the only thing that is certain in life.
The unanswered deceased is a pure concept. It can be as accessible as a collection of dried insects or an exhibition of mummies. A prepared surprise, we would say, and a long-standing novelty... It is absurd, a lie: a skull, a skeleton, a scythe. "Death will come, it will have your eyes."
Chapter 57. Pushkin
“It is best to say, not to define, but to make clear what a genius is: he is the opposite of mediocrity.”
Pushkin's gloomy state begins long before jealousy and the last duel, accompanied by a decline in creative work. Outwardly, he is oppressed by prohibitions, restrictions, lack of rights, debts, and internally, he is alone "between four walls" (his expression). Alexander Turgenev wrote: "He is full of ideas." But the energy to implement these ideas has dried up. An unhealthy lifestyle and a shattered mental state make him irritable, distrustful, and touchy. He becomes withdrawn and sullen.
Pushkin is used to the misunderstanding of those around him, having long ago decided that he has plenty of friends, but no friends, but both are traitors. His wife does not notice his problems and therefore is unable to calm him down or support him. The children are too young to honor their father. He has no relatives around him: his mother has died, he is offended by his father for his stinginess, his sister and her husband are in Warsaw, his brother is in the Caucasus. His Lyceum friends are all over the place, Sobolevsky is in Europe, Nashchokin is in Moscow, Vyazemsky is away from him, Zhukovsky helped stop a duel in November, and Pushkin is angry with him for this too. He is alone, surrounded by enemies.
Melancholy suffocated him every spring. Brother Lev warns his neighbor in Mikhailovskoye Osipova: "...I am even more worried about my brother. Spring is approaching; this time of year disposes him more to melancholy; I confess that in many ways I fear its consequences." "Consequences" are fears that in connection with the unsuccessful escape abroad the poet will lay hands on himself.
Pushkin lives in a space enclosed by the borders of the empire, with his every word under surveillance. “I see with regret,” he writes to Benckendorff, “that every step I take arouses suspicion and ill will. Forgive me, General, the freedom with which I express my complaints, but for heaven’s sake, deign to enter into my situation for a moment and see how difficult it is. It is so precarious that every minute I feel myself on the eve of a misfortune that I can neither foresee nor avoid.” How can one not develop claustrophobia here?
Later, my sister wrote that Pushkin stopped even opening letters that came his way.
The same V. Chizh wrote: “...in reality, Pushkin’s character was irritable, “moody,” in his own words, deeply unbalanced and pessimistic.” Pushkin was suspicious and stubborn, his mother believed.
Pletnev adds to this: “The ardor of his mind formed from him this extraordinary, even strange creature, in whom all qualities took the form of extremes.”
In his last letter to Chaadaev, he explains the social reasons for his condition: “The absence of public opinion, indifference to everything that is duty, justice and truth, this cynical contempt for human thought and dignity – can truly lead to despair.”
Zhukovsky tries to convince Pushkin, but how to rid the poet of his obsessive desire to bring death closer? The duel would be meaningless if the duelist was going to live on. He managed to postpone it for two months.
Ivan Turgenev, in his speech at the opening of the Pushkin monument in 1880, declared that the duel and Pushkin's death were tragic accidents, all the more tragic because they were accidental. But what if they were not accidental? And the reason was not his wife's betrayal. Not Dantes, not the Tsar, in a word, not the evil entourage, where for a century and a half they have been trying to find the guilty in order to whitewash the poet. The root cause of the tragedy is in Pushkin himself, in his condition. It explains his last steps: stubbornness and intractability, malice and hatred. Life has become harder than death. The best is in the past; he clearly saw his end and purposefully went towards it.
A man who seeks death is more likely to find it sooner than one who does not seek it. The shot was fired by a man who had been driven to the brink by Pushkin, driven into a dead end by him. Dantes did not want to kill. The duel was unavoidable. Couldn't Pushkin have outwitted his enemy with his mind? Can we believe his talk that he decided – no, not to strike him down with an epigram, as he had done before, but to primitively eliminate Dantes physically? Pushkin turned a banal love conflict into a deadly fight between two males for a female. He staged it so that under the guise of a noble duel defending honor, Dantes was forced to act as a killer.
On the way home from the Black River, Pushkin said: "I don't want to live." In bed he repeated: "...If Arendt finds my wound serious, fatal, you will tell me about it! You will not frighten me: I do not want to live." He declared that if he remained alive, the duel would resume, since he wanted to go to the end, but hoped to live no more than two days, every now and then asking his faithful Danzas whether he would soon die. He felt his own pulse and said: "Death is coming." Dal wrote down the words that Pushkin repeated: "Dal, tell me the truth, will I die soon?"; "No, I cannot live here; I will die, but it seems that it must be so"; "And is the end soon? Please, hurry up!"; "Life is over. Life is over." He was not a tenant. Pushkin did not fight for his fatherland, not for his family, but against himself.
Having lost a lot of blood, he calmed down after the opium given by the doctor. It is no accident that Vyazemsky wrote: “Unbridled, passionate, disorderly, not remembering himself in all his steps that were to lead to a fatal outcome, he became calm, simple and full of dignity as soon as he achieved what he wanted; for he wanted this outcome.” If Pushkin had not been mortally wounded on January 27, he would soon have repeated the duel or, perhaps, would have committed suicide in another way.
The famous surgeon (as he is described in the Brockhaus Encyclopedia) Nikolai Arendt, who took part in the war with Napoleon, and therefore dealt with similar cases more than once, said only: “It is a pity for Pushkin that he was not killed on the spot, because his suffering is indescribable.”
Pushkin's self-annihilation always took place, he never clung to life, and it remains surprising not that he settled accounts with earthly existence early, but that he was able to live so long and managed to leave us so much. As Ivan Turgenev's hero would later note, "by destroying myself, I cease to be superfluous." Poetry moved away, leaving him in the turmoil of life. Suicide became an active defense, a protest, a demonstration of his independence. He decided to deal with death himself. Let us emphasize: it was not she with him, but he with her. It was the only and last step towards complete freedom.
V. Rozanov believed that Pushkin died at the right time. The poet told us his "dreams", recently turned to business concerns, and one can assume that if he had lived longer, this part of his life would not have been devoted to poetry. The path that Pushkin traveled was "tediously long". Pushkin wanted to combine family life with bachelorhood, financial security with squandering money at cards, contempt for the journalistic fraternity with the desire to publish a newspaper or magazine himself, service for the government with the opposition, aspiration for a solitary heavenly life in the village with daily social receptions in piggish Petersburg, a desire to escape there – with work in the archives and the bustle here, love for the homeland with hatred for it and for everything that surrounded him, except for the "paternal coffins". What would have been enough for a hundred talented people, he tried to accomplish alone. He succeeded in many things, but not in everything, polylife physically could not be embraced by one person. The collapse came.
How can one not agree with the irony of V. Velichko, who said at the end of the 19th century: “In Russia, a tragic death helps writers, perhaps more seriously, than a long and fruitful life in the West.” Pushkin accomplished his death and, perhaps, in the process of annihilating himself, and not at all in other guises, became free, independent, and therefore happy. “Lucky, lucky!” Ryukhin suddenly concluded venomously and felt the truck move under him, “that White Guard shot and shot at him and shattered his thigh and ensured immortality.”
When at two and three quarters in the afternoon on January 29, 1837, the agony ended and they closed his eyes, another era began. Pushkin entered a second life, now independent of himself. However, his soul did not have time to fly away. It was held back, as they say now, by the authorities.
Prince Mirsky, who had become an ardent Marxist while still living in the West, argued, comparing the deaths of Mayakovsky and Pushkin, that the latter had found the only way out for himself. He found himself in this position by making endless concessions to the Tsar.
A poet in society is always strange, like the town madman.
Since the time of Peter the Great, death, according to the official ideology, crowned a heroic life in Russia, becoming a reward and the shortest path to glory. “The face of the era was reflected in the image of death,” wrote Yu. Lotman. “Death gave freedom. Death was sought in the Caucasian War, which seemed endless, and in a duel. Under the barrel of a dueling pistol, a person was freed from imperial power and from the Petersburg bureaucracy. The opportunity to see your enemy face to face and point your pistol at him gave only a moment of freedom. Without understanding this, we will not understand why Pushkin went to the barrier, and Lermontov bragged about his readiness to put his chest under fire. Where death came into its own, the power of the emperor ended.”
In US criminology, methods of suicide common among the black population have been recorded: a suicide on the street quickly runs straight at a police officer with a toy gun or pretends to take out a gun on the run, and the police officer shoots in self-defense.
One desire accompanied him throughout his entire conscious life – a craving for the West, and this desire remained unfulfilled. When Roman writers said emigrare, it simply meant “to migrate”. In Caesar, the meaning changes slightly: “to leave one’s homeland”. Later, this word came to mean violence: “to drive out of the country”. Cicero was the first to say: “to emigrate from life”, that is, “to accept death”.
In his "Treatise on Crimes and Punishments," Baccaria reflects on countries where suicide is prohibited by law, but emigration is permitted. Utilitarianly speaking, from an economic point of view, it is more profitable for the state for an individual to commit suicide than for him to leave for another country, since an emigrant takes his property with him, while a suicide leaves everything in his homeland. Dostoevsky used the title of this treatise by Baccaria for his novel "Crime and Punishment." Svidrigailov persuades Raskolnikov after the murder to flee to America as soon as possible or shoot himself.
Chapter 58. Being Late
It was said: there is no beauty in the desert, beauty is in the heart of the Bedouin. In the desert there is room for death. In the desert house of your body... Masher, give me back my knitted dreams, or at least be in them: let's be honest, while I am here in the kitchen – in the silence of long sighs, and meanwhile, look, I was given that... take it... and do something... You will be more beautiful and smarter. And I... I will simply be nearby, at the end where the path is not obvious, I will be a birthmark and a teddy bear, and someone will be a son and a father.
I don't know a soul in this town. Going out into the street one evening to find a place to have dinner, I found myself in the thick of an extremely enthusiastic crowd shouting something unintelligible – I understand that they are having elections in a few days. I was wandering along some endless main street, with horns blaring, jammed with people or vehicles, not understanding a word – and suddenly it occurred to me that this is the other world, that life has ended, but movement continues; that this is eternity.
Forty-five years ago, my mother gave birth to me. She died the year before last. Last year, my father died. Their only child, me, walks the streets of the evening Athens, which they have never seen and will never see. The fruit of their love, their poverty, their slavery, in which they died, their son is free. And because he does not meet them in the crowd, he guesses that he is wrong, that this is not eternity.
(It is still unknown who is the greater nomad: the one who wanders in space, or the one who wanders in time.)
No, we will not find vulgar sociologism in the books of N. Krasheninnikov, so you can safely open these books, which depict people who no longer exist, a society that no longer exists, a way of life that no longer exists, Russia (together with Bashkiria, which is part of it), which no longer exists.
I'm late, I'm not in this country in this city, I'm late, I'm not in these books and these libraries, I'm late with my arrival, I'm delayed somewhere, I'm not in the bustle of the streets, in the crush of the shops, I'm not in your questions, these trees and this sky know nothing about me, my nostrils won't inhale this shashlik smoke, I didn't have time to appear in your house, in your eyes, in your dog's fur, in your daughter's arms, and I didn't appear on the threshold, the thunderstorm passed without me I didn't hear the thunder, I was late, I didn't become someone, I didn't change the events, a terrible dream, everything passed without me, you went out into the yard and didn't know that I was somewhere nearby, you dried the laundry, walked the dog, kissed your daughter and went home, I didn't cry in your arms, the world went along its own road over the very edge of the abyss, I was late, I'm not here... Today It's just not my day. And not my week. And not my life.
The testament of these sharp and brittle edges. Contains no threats or intricate harmonies. Only facts, embarrassing, like mutilations. Also a woman. Also a man.
I visited our former home. In its inferiority it was more human than we were. The chairs, torn from each other, were frozen in their delusion. Memories wandered among them, interrupting each other and violating the chronological order. The old table, which had been amazed and alarmed by all the moves, looked out of the corner at the new shelves, like a barge abandoned in a backwater.
Longing is provided by nature, she said, but oblivion is also provided by nature. He who disturbs the ghost of the departed gives no peace either to himself or to the one who has fallen asleep. It is a mistake to make the opinion of the deceased the criterion of the behavior of the living. One cannot demand of the world that it remain faithful to one moment that seems true. Why look back? There will be other moments, no worse. And the ghost, whatever one may say, belongs to the kingdom of the dead; its only difference is that it is a restless demon among the dead...
The family hearth not only gives warmth, but sometimes it also smokes. Amazing crap sits in the house – like an abscess. A concentration camp is located at home. Handfuls of soot leave a mark on the cheek. Barbed wire bends gently, and roses bloom on it.
Chapter 59. Guesses
I sense things, sometimes vaguely, sometimes with painful acuteness. Perhaps it is useless to talk about them? Is life necessary or unnecessary, are the trees rustling wisely or stupidly, is evening coming, is it raining? I experience a mixed feeling of superiority and weakness towards my surroundings: in my consciousness the laws of life are closely intertwined with the laws of sleep. Perhaps because of this, the world's perspective is greatly distorted in my eyes. But this is precisely the only thing I still value, the only thing that still separates me from the all-consuming ugliness of the world.
In essence, I am a happy person. That is, a person who is inclined to be happy. This does not happen very often. I want the simplest, most ordinary things. Freedom and a warm bed. I want order. It is not my fault that order is destroyed. I want peace of mind. But the soul is like a stirred-up garbage can – a herring tail, a dead rat, nibbles, cigarette butts, now diving into the murky depths, now appearing on the surface, racing. I want fresh air. I walk down the street. I think about various things. Intelligence is the ability to achieve complex goals. Now we have the wisdom of a significant part of humanity. It is passed down from generation to generation in an accessible and complete form. Salad, gloves... Of the people sitting in a cafe on the corner, someone will die first, someone will be the last – each at their own precise, determined to the second, time. Dusty, warm. This woman is beautiful, of course, but I don’t like her. She is in a smart dress and walks smiling, but I imagine her naked, lying on the floor with a skull split open by an axe. I think of lust and disgust, of sadistic murders, of the fact that I have lost you forever, it is over. "Over" is a pitiful word. As if, if you think hard enough with your ear, not all words are equally pitiful and terrible? A thin antidote of meaning, surprisingly quickly ceasing to act, and behind it the deaf-mute emptiness of loneliness.
If not God, not a priest, not a class, not a neighbor, then at least you. And the "dimensions" of this you are just an inversion of the emptiness that reigns around. This also means that marriage and family are based not so much on a material foundation and on love, but on the fear of loneliness. In addition, "whoever is incapable of either love or friendship, most reliably places his bet on marriage." The man with whom I conducted the initial interview, when asked about the nature of his sexual relations with his wife, answered gloomily and with pressure: "I do this work."
But what did they understand in the pitiful and the terrible – they, who believed in words and meaning, dreamers, children, undeserved darlings of fate! I think about various things and, through them, I think continuously about God. Sometimes it seems to me that God just as continuously, through a thousand extraneous things, thinks about me. Light waves, orbits, vibrations, attractions and through them, like a ray, a continuous thought about me. Sometimes it even seems to me that my pain is a particle of God's being. So, the stronger my pain... I think about the pectoral cross that I have worn since childhood, like a revolver in a pocket – in case of danger it must protect, save. About the fatal, inevitable misfire. About the radiance of false miracles that alternately enchanted and disappointed the world. And about the only reliable miracle – that ineradicable desire for a miracle that lives in people, despite everything. The enormous significance of this. A gleam in every consciousness. Oh, this wavering, swaying, musical, masturbating consciousness. Eternally circling around the impossible, like gnats around a candle.
The laws of life, fused with the laws of sleep. Terrible metaphysical freedom and physical barriers at every step. An inexhaustible source of superiority, weakness, brilliant failures.
Oh, this abyss of nostalgia, where only the wind walks. I walk down the street, thinking about God, looking into women's faces. This pretty one, I like her. I imagine her washing herself. With her legs apart, her knees slightly bent. Her stockings are slipping off her knees, her eyes are darkening velvety somewhere in the depths, her expression is innocent, bird-like. I think about the banality of such reflections and at the same time I feel, like warmth or light, the soothing caress of banality. I think about the era that is decomposing before my eyes. About the two main types of women: either prostitutes or those proud of having abstained from prostitution. About nature, about how stupidly literary classics describe it. About all sorts of nasty things people do to each other. About pity. About a child who asked Santa Claus for new eyes for his blind sister. I remember an old lullaby: "The cat Vorkota had a bad stepmother."
A shudder that evokes pity. A shudder that inevitably turns into a feeling of revenge. For a deaf child, for a meaningless life, for humiliation, for leaky soles. To take revenge on a prosperous world – the reason is indifferent. “Who has a heart” knows this. This almost mechanical transition from confused pity – to “just you wait” – another form of impotence. A shudder is the source of a pattern, a system of wrinkles.
I return again to the thought that I am a person who is disposed to be happy. No one hurts me, I myself become vulnerable. I wanted the most ordinary thing – love. From my, a man's point of view... However, a point of view can only be a man's. A woman's point of view does not exist. A woman, in and of herself, does not exist at all. She is a body and reflected light. But now you have absorbed my light and left. And all my light has left me. A man always follows principles – even if he is selfish, self-seeking and evil; a woman obeys only impulses.
We are still gliding along the surface of life. Along the periphery. Along the blue waves of the ocean. The appearance of harmony and order. Dirt, tenderness, sadness. Now we will dive. Give me your hand, unknown friend. Flour, similar to admiration. Everything is unreal, except for the unreal, everything is meaningless, except for nonsense. A person simultaneously goes blind and sees clearly. Such harmony and such confusion. A part that has become greater than the whole – a part is everything, the whole is nothing.
The guess that the clarity and completeness of the world is only a reflection of chaos in the brain of a quiet madman. The guess that books and art are like descriptions of exploits and travels intended for those who will never go anywhere and will never accomplish any exploits. The guess that a huge spiritual life grows and burns out in an atom, a person, outwardly unremarkable, but chosen, unique, inimitable. The guess that the first person you meet on the street is this one, chosen, inimitable. A multitude of contradictory guesses, as if confirming, in a new way, the eternal intangible truth. I try to remember where and when I first asked myself that question.
Secret dreams. – Tell me what you dream about secretly, and I will tell you who you are. – Okay, I will try to tell you, but will you hear me? Everything is smoothly walled up, not a single bubble will break through on the surface of life. An atom, a point, a deaf-mute genius and under his feet a deep subsoil layer, the essence of life, the coal of rotted eras. A world record for loneliness. – So answer, tell me, what do you dream about secretly there, at the very bottom of your loneliness? Like a background, like a tragic underpainting. But the desire for strength, density is so powerful that I feel its thick woven silk by touch. It was woven from morning till night by blue-eyed craftswomen. She was a bride... It was not woven anywhere. Past. Past.
Oh, you disobedient doooooor! Come back! Come back alone! Respect your father. So, am I inviting suitors for myself? And what suitors! Purebred wizards! Why are they ringing? Boom. Boom. Boom. But the sound is already empty. And because there is no wedding of the bride and groom under the bell. That other one, – did not help. And this one, who still helped in small things – a little, but helped, – a little, but tried – in an earthly and stupid way, but still tried – was sent far away. And the naked bride did not sigh for the groom.
You took away my light, leaving me in darkness. In you alone, without a trace, all the charm of the world was concentrated. And I painfully regretted that you would be old, sick, ugly, that you would die with sadness, and I would not be with you, would not lie that you were getting better, would not hold your hand. I should have been glad that I would not go through at least this torment. Meanwhile, here was the main thing, perhaps the only thing that constituted love. The horror of this thought alone has always been the star of my life. And now you are long gone, but it still shines in the window.
What was possible yesterday has become impossible today. It is impossible to believe in the appearance of a new Werther, from whom the ecstatic shots of enchanted, intoxicated suicides will suddenly start clicking all over Europe. It is impossible to imagine a notebook of poems, leafing through which a modern person will brush away the tears that have come of their own accord and look at the sky, at the same evening sky, with aching hope. Impossible. So impossible that it is hard to believe that it was once possible. The new iron laws, pulling the world like raw leather, do not know the consolation of art. Moreover, these – still unclear, already inevitable – soullessly fair laws, born in the new world or giving birth to it, have retroactive effect: not only is it impossible to create a new brilliant consolation, it is almost impossible to be consoled by the old one.
I want the simplest, most ordinary things. I want to cry, I want to be comforted. I want to look at the sky with aching hope. I want to write you a long farewell letter, insulting, heavenly, dirty, the most tender in the world. I want to call you an angel, a creature, wish you happiness and bless you, and also say that wherever you are, wherever you hide, my blood will curl around you in a myriad of unforgiving, never-forgiving particles. I want to forget, to rest, to get on a train, to go to Russia, to drink beer and eat crayfish on a warm evening on a swaying float over the Neva.
I want to overcome the disgusting feeling of numbness: people have no faces, words have no sound, nothing has any meaning. I want to break it, no matter how. The history of my soul. I want to embody it, but I can only disembody it. I envy the writer who polishes his style, the artist who mixes paints, the musician immersed in sounds, all these people who are still alive on earth, a sensitive-heartless, farsighted-shortsighted, well-known, no longer needed breed, who believe that the plastic reflection of life is a victory over it. If only there were talent, a special creative spark in the mind, in the fingers, in the ear, one has only to take something from imagination, something from reality, something from sadness, something from dirt, level it all, as children level sand with a shovel, decorate it with style and imagination, as with icing a pastry cake, and the job is done, everything is saved, the meaninglessness of life, the vanity of suffering, loneliness, torment, sticky nauseating fear – transformed by the harmony of art.
I know the price of this and yet I envy them: they are blessed. Blessed are the sleeping, blessed are the dead. Blessed is the connoisseur before a Rembrandt painting, firmly convinced that the play of shadows and light on the old woman’s face is a world triumph, before which the old woman herself is nothing, a speck of dust, a zero. Blessed are the aesthetes. Blessed are the ballet lovers. Blessed are the listeners of Stravinsky and Stravinsky himself. Blessed are the shadows of the passing world, finishing its last, sweet, false dreams that have lulled humanity for so long. Leaving, already gone from life, they take with them an enormous imaginary wealth. What will we be left with? With the certainty that the old woman is infinitely more important than Rembrandt. With bewilderment as to what to do with this old woman. With a painful desire to save and console her. With a clear awareness that no one can be saved or consoled by anything. With the feeling that only through the chaos of contradictions can one break through to the truth. That one cannot rely on reality itself: a photograph lies and every document is obviously a forgery. That everything average, classical, peaceful is unthinkable, impossible. That the sense of proportion, like an eel, slips from the hands of those who try to catch it, and that this elusiveness is the last of its surviving creative properties. That when it is finally caught, the catcher holds vulgarity in his hands. “In his arms lay a dead baby . And how alive the child was... ” That everyone around has these dead babies in their arms. That for anyone who wants to make his way through the chaos of contradictions to the eternal truth, at least to a pale reflection of it, there is only one path left: to walk above life, like an acrobat on a tightrope, along the unsightly, disheveled, contradictory transcript of life.
And suddenly the thought that you are breathing here on earth, suddenly in memory, as if alive, your lovely, heartless face. How the lamp burned. How the dawn brightened. How the alarm clock ticked. How the hand approached five. How, hesitating, having decided, he licked his lips. How in an awkward, sweaty hand he squeezed the revolver. How the icy barrel touched his burning mouth. How he hated them, those who remained alive, and how he envied them.
Chapter 60. Blue Dress
I would like to go to the seashore, lie down on the sand, close my eyes, feel the breath of God on my face. I would like to start from afar – from a blue dress, from a quarrel, from a foggy winter day.
It took me a great deal of effort to write in the third person. Even today, when everything happened as it did, when all the participants in the events got what they could have gotten, or what they deserved, even today, I say, after many years, it still seems to me that I could have changed many things, had I acted differently, said differently. And when I write my own lines and try to look at the past with a detached gaze, I find it difficult to reconcile myself to the fact that everything happened to me for the same reasons as to others, and with the same inevitability. I think that others, too, if they only take the trouble to look back, are amazed at how little their own will mattered and how little intention determined. Life went the way it went, and this simple, inexorable maxim hurts. Everything turned out the way it should have, and if there had been another possibility, it would certainly have turned out differently – and then what is the purpose of direct speech, what is the purpose of any attempt to personify what is happening, if history is created with inevitability, dissolving people within itself without a trace...
I heard somewhere the phrase: "There's no other way" – and I liked it so much, it just stuck in my head and that's it. There's no other way here.
I remembered how I had kept everything to myself – and in vain, too, I might as well have made scenes or cried, it would have changed absolutely nothing – and I was once again convinced that I would not last long in such a situation, I was too old, I had no strength; however, my sadness did not diminish at all from the statement of this fact, now I had only one way out – to suffer it all to the end, because I would never forget her body, her skin, her face; and I had never realized so clearly that strict determinism reigns in human relationships, that they are born, develop and die as inexorably as planets move in orbit, and that all hopes of somehow changing their course are absurd and futile.
Life no longer understands this language. The soul has not yet learned another. Harmony dies so painfully in the soul. Perhaps, when it dies completely, falls off like a dried-on sore, the soul will again feel primordial and light. But the transition is slow and painful. The soul is afraid. It seems to it that one by one everything that gave it life is withering away. It seems to it that it itself is withering away. It cannot remain silent and has forgotten how to speak. And it convulsively moans, like a deaf-mute making hideous grimaces.
A blue dress, a quarrel, a foggy winter day. A thousand other dresses, quarrels, days. A thousand sensations, unconsciously running through the soul of every person. I noticed her, I notice them all. What she had, another would have had the same, but differently. But the thing is that she had it exactly like that, and on this I built my chimera... A guess that the true path of the soul winds somewhere to the side – like a corkscrew, like a corkscrew...
I want to speak about my soul in simple, convincing words. I know that such words do not exist. I want to tell how I loved you, how I died, how I died, how a cross or a crescent was placed over my grave against my will, and how time and worms turned this cross and crescent into dust. I want to gather a handful of this dust, look at the sky for the last time and blow on my palm with relief. I want different, equally unrealizable things – to inhale the scent of your hair on the back of my head again and extract from the chaos of rhythms that single rhythm from which, like a rock from a detonation, the world's ugliness must collapse. I want to tell about a man lying on a dug-up bed, thinking, thinking, thinking – how to save himself, how to fix it – and not thinking of anything. About how he dozed off, how he woke up, how he remembered everything at once, how he said out loud, as if about a stranger: "He was not Caesar. He had only this love. But it contained everything – power, crown, immortality. And now it has collapsed, honor has been taken away, shoulder straps have been torn off." I want to explain in simple, convincing words many magical, unique things – about the blue dress, about the quarrel, about the foggy winter day. And I also want to warn the world of a terrible enemy, pity. I want to shout so that everyone can hear: people, brothers, join hands tightly and swear to be merciless to each other. Otherwise, it – the main enemy of order – will rush and tear you apart.
I want to summon your face, your body, your tenderness, your heartlessness from the void for the last time, to gather yours and mine, all mixed up and decayed, like a handful of dust in the palm of my hand, and to blow on it with relief. But pity again confuses everything, again hinders me. I see the fog of a strange city again.
A beggar turns the handle of a barrel organ, a monkey, shivering from the cold, goes around the onlookers with a saucer. They, gloomy under umbrellas, reluctantly throw down coppers. Will there be enough for a night's lodging, to hide, embracing until the morning... And from caustic pity, as from an unbearable glare, I lowered my eyes.
Chapter 61. Animals
Even the little animals were worried, whispering, and spent a long time composing: "Pamphlet-protest" – "You who torture cats." They asked if it could be printed in the newspapers so that everyone could read it. The little animals were inseparable from us. They ate from our plates and slept in our bed. The two Razmakhaychiks were the most important of them.
We won't get any soap or awl here. Excellent sabayon! You would still like to know how long it will be now. Unfortunately, I don't know myself. I am always notified at the last moment, I have complained many times, I can show you all this correspondence if you are interested.
That there is a mystery in this that has a fundamental meaning (the mystery of death and birth) is beyond doubt. However, another question arises that resonates with the problem of inner Nordicism: who is the subject of this path? The wet path is obvious, but who are we? Are we not ferrets with coral teeth or cut-off pieces of dense water, or, at best, ominous birds that frighten wanderers with cries of "tekeli-li"? Is there something in us at the subjective level that will help us overcome the threshold of the winter solstice, that has a chance of participating in the festival of the new Yule, at the beginning of a new dry path?
In a detective story it is interesting to know "who killed?", and in a philosophical study it is always important to understand "why is there something and not nothing?" Or, slightly changing the question, it is necessary to know why there is this and not that? Why do people die sometimes for metal, sometimes for plastic? Why does a collector spend his life collecting perforated paper, what is the basis of women's mania for taking photographs, why does a "real macho" not use a seat belt in a car, etc.
This is today, this trembling, flying moment of my unique life – of course, how can you compare – this is higher than all the poems put together. In the words of Nietzsche's hero Zarathustra: "They have their pleasure for the day and their pleasure for the night; but health is above all. "Happiness has been found by us," say the last people, and blink."
You have to come into contact with a woman, it is part of life. The opposite sex becomes important because only then can you know the harmony of opposites, conflict, suffering and ecstasy – agony and ecstasy at the same time.
And then she sighed, and he said to her, "What's wrong?" And she said, "Nothing." That's what we say when we think of "everything." Who are they, these two? Oh, what does it matter? They're not here now. There's only the glow, trembling outside, while it lasts. Only the tension, the rotation, the burning, the blissful rebirth of the secret meaning of life. Uh... uh... uh... Desire describes a full circle in a spiral, thrown deep into eternity, and returns back into the void. Everything is achieved, but the soul is not yet completely sated and trembles that it will not have time to be sated.
To love someone more than yourself, and then to see a hole of loneliness, a black ice hole. How many billions of inhabitants of the globe. Each one is complicated with its own painful, unique, identical, useless, hateful complexity. All are disgusting. All are unhappy. No one can change anything and understand anything. My brother Goethe, my brother the concierge, both of you do not know what you are doing and what life is doing to you.
Your image, my love. A blue dress, a quarrel, a foggy winter day. The desire to speak. To go out, to choke on simple, convincing words, words that do not exist... How did our love begin? Banal, banal. Like everything beautiful, it began banal. Perhaps harmony is banality. Perhaps there is no point in complaining about this. Perhaps, for everyone there was and is one and only way – like an acrobat on a tightrope, to walk above life along the painful sensation of life.
The elusive feeling that arises in the last physical closeness, the last inaccessibility, in tenderness that tears the soul apart, in the loss of all this forever, forever. Dawn outside the window. Desire has described the full path and gone into the ground. The child is conceived. Why do we need a child? There is no immortality. There can't be no immortality. Why do I need immortality if I am so alone?
Even Melanie Klein did not think that the first cry of a baby, announcing its birth, is a hysterical reaction. And one can say that this is also the first thought, or proto-thought. A cry for help. Because the trauma of birth is very difficult. And secondly. It follows that any thinking is essentially pathological. This is the basis of the new model of thinking. Any thought is pathological, because it would not occur to a person to think, to think, if everything was in order. A person begins to think when something is wrong. And what is wrong? Everything is wrong.
Dawn outside the window. On the crumpled sheet in my hands is all the innocent charm of the world and a puzzled question about what was done with it. It is divine, it is inhuman. What should a person do with its inhuman radiance? A person is wrinkles, bags under the eyes, lime in the soul and blood, a person is, above all, doubt in his divine right to do evil. If a horror film is showing in a cinema, this does not mean that the projectionist allows evil, although with a great philosophical mind one can say so. "A person begins with grief," as some poet said. Who argues. A person begins with grief. Life is full of contradictions. Life begins tomorrow. The Volga flows into the Caspian Sea. As a rule, men prefer to marry women shorter than them, and women want their husbands to be taller than them. The establishment is always suspicious of new ways of communication. Any truth is banal. Dill Tomato. Asphalt Betonovich. Not everyone knows that the composer Beethoven's surname translates as "beetroot". The beginning is more promising than the end, a tomato is tastier than a cucumber. Dyr bu shchyl ubeschur. If only, yes if only, mushrooms grew in your mouth, then it would not be a mouth, but a whole vegetable garden. "The Countess's husband is a decanter?" Baroness. Pompadour. "He-he-he-s..." I am fading, I am fading, I am no more. In essence, he has no essence. "Everything is fading: alternatives exclude each other." Things are more like they are now than like they ever were. Particular attention should be paid to the natural features of the North Pole. We know that the day there lasts not a day, but six months, and the night lasts six months. We know that any rodents, having bitten and soiled, impart their aroma to the damaged texture. Fresh linen smells of Antarctica.
And the darkness is getting smaller Brodsky's poems slowly crawl to you and me, tops and roots, in general, postmodernism, and the river has sins, but that's not the point, your hand has a greater task. Immanent mandrakes rustled in the reeds, and rough-decadent verses – in withering ears.
His poems are nothing more than "grumbles at life." What is important in postmodernism? Integrity in doubts, and no one will approve of random, thoughtless doubts. Destruction is an extremely important principle.
Pushkinschuler! Pushkinzon! Why, that's our Charlie Chaplin, a modern ersatz-Petrushka, all dressed up and trained to sing in rhyme... Little black Pushkin with a big, big pistol. A civilian, but louder than a military man. A general. An ace.
Dragonflies only chirp. They sing hymns to life, but deny it with their stupidity. They do not understand that the light will shine without them, that “other people will come and live under the same sun as us.” One must feel this, so that the sunbeams that burn us act as a balm. Love for a good, simple life is sad, like the look of a faithful dog. Death extinguishes the wise gaze in the eyes and makes it accidentally aimless. The Golden Head sees how Sebes dies. First, dear May, then the time will come and people fall like apples from trees. The hour has struck. But listen to how the apples fall, and you will feel life again. Sebes dies: death strangles him with gentle, tenacious hands.
They occupied the huge University of Louvain, where, in clouds of chalk dust, students discussed in earnest in Latin whether Adam and Eve had spoken to each other politely or familiarly. The French had set up a stable for horses in the courtyard of the university, and had converted the university itself into a medical and engineering school. “Yes, it was a pure accident that I was born a Frenchman; but, after all, France is eternal.”
Four soldiers have already died in the sanatorium. Death is the strongest thing on this planet. Is there a soul? Is there an afterlife? This is more important than all the revolutions! I feel sorry for Tsar Nicholas. I guess he was a man of a soft character and very weak-willed. Everything, everything will pass, but what will happen "there"? You are 61 years old, you have thought a lot, suffered – tell me, my dear soul mate. Leizer Shatsman.
In a wooden camp outhouse: all shades of yellow and brown, commas on the walls, a complex stench interrupted by the freshness coming through the cracks. A recruit, a pink guy, holding the door with one hand, hastily masturbates with the other. Choking, with a muffled cry, he finishes with half a glass, covering his fingers with sticky warmth. The guy's face turns gray. He sluggishly pulls up his pants. Of course, he will be killed in the war, maybe this year. And Don Juan's list includes everyone. "Nothing, nothing, silence," he mutters, rolling his eyes into the void, masturbating under a cold sheet. And now, now... what else can be done? Silence and night. Complete silence, absolute night. The thought that everything is ending forever fills a man with a quiet triumph. He has a presentiment, he certainly knows that this is not so. But while this second lasts, he does not want to resist her.
The meaning of life? God? No, it's all the same: your dear, heartless, forever lost face.
If the little animals could know in what important official letter I use their Australian language, they would certainly be very proud. I would be long dead, and they would still be having fun, dancing and clapping their little hands.
Rising above myself, stretching out my melancholy to the cosmos, I asked a hundred questions to existence, and it answered me with non-existence. But each question must have its end.
Forever is not a word, but a number with zeros. Try to overcome such melancholy, where time falls in the deep night, and the wind blows like a shepherd. Scroll through the film of a familiar dream about how a stern spoon catches souls floating to the shore. And at the end of September, October, November, somewhere between "woke up and fell asleep", you perform your hardly inevitable ritual, seriously standing on a chair. And you stick your head into zero, you stick a new melancholy into zero with a tail, and the tail to the ceiling. And zero is so round, because it is pregnant and full.
The thought of suicide was a coquette in my youth. To regret that I didn’t have a fatal disease. I wanted to shoot myself, but it’s difficult with a gun; a bomb or lead? The similarity of the room to a suitcase. And the alarm clock ticks so loudly in the silence that the house will explode in 10 minutes. The most ominous of all earthly sounds is the ticking of a clock. “Hang yourself – you’ll regret it; don’t hang yourself – you’ll regret it too; in either case, you’ll regret it.”
The engineer squints at the dark walls and reads a pencil inscription on one of them: "On October 16, 1849, in this abode of the dead, a junior lieutenant from the intelligentsia of the Russian army, Sharikov, fell into melancholy and attempted suicide." Could he have written that himself, despite all the objections of the reviewers? There were no people nearby. Without thinking twice, T. went up to the cart, fell into the hay and stared up. In a well, God with his head can't do everything: he can't commit suicide whenever he wants. Then I would know that I have something... For Monsieur, there is nothing sacred anymore. That's the whole point. But when a person no longer has anything sacred, everything again and in a much more humane way becomes sacred for him.
Where effort and will are applied, zones of weakness and impotence are formed. The irony of desire is that it desires itself, drags itself forward – and in doing so it makes a substitution, since the desired desire ceases to be desired (externalizes) just as a conscious thought ceases to be thought. Human desire (and only man is capable of desire) has a built-in mechanism of slippage; desire desires – and demotes – itself. Desire cannot be artificial, but it cannot be natural either: it drives itself, incites, spurs itself on.
We can say that philosophical consciousness is a desire stretched out over all things in the world in search of the strongest shudder called Truth. So, it is worth distinguishing between short and long desires. There are desires as long as a thought or as long as love.
Throughout their entire existence, the basic rules of human society have not risen in their meaning above the primitive taboo, therefore, the greater the heights of development the mind reaches, the more naturally it transcends prohibitions.
A great many tribes and peoples sowed grain and created lines of culture on Earth. Thousands of thinkers and artists lived and created on Earth. Prophets spoke on Earth. Writers and poets captured the unity of thought and feeling. Architects and stonemasons complemented nature. Scientists, engineers and workers made it a home. But all this is not important now.
You can't laugh at a joke that's boring, you can't eat when you don't want to. All's well that ends well. Man is getting closer to the nest. I loved everything I saw. What was planned is done. The end is the end. But what will happen is that we won't be. In atonement for our guilt, we will say: we were... That's how it happens in this world. I bequeath to the needs of public education... It happens... It sounds stupid and hackneyed, but it's true.
Chapter 62. The Fact of Death
The ancient Greenlanders perceived the soul as an obligatory but easily replaceable part. They were sure that a good sorcerer could easily replace the soul of a sick person with a “fresh”, healthy soul of a hare, seal or child.
Russian peasants (until the beginning of the 20th century), Fijians, Hottentots and Ceylonese Veidahi were convinced that the soul constantly moves around the body and can only be seen at the moment when it leaves the body. In this case, it takes the form of steam or "little smoke".
He died instantly. That's how heroes of dreams die when the dreamer awakens.
The corpse is photographed both full-length and naked to record special features. If necessary, the forensic physician gives the corpse a life-like appearance before the photograph: washes, combs, opens the eyes, and powders the bruises. "The fact of death, established on the basis of medical and biological data, is certified in the death certificate issued by the Civil Registry Office."
Apparently, the funeral was very modest. Few came to say goodbye on a frosty day. In the literary world, his passing also went unnoticed. The only response was an obituary written by an anonymous person in the city newspaper: "The death of talent and the talent of death."
"The sharpness of his creative mind, the breadth of his intellectual interests, the subtle psychological observations, the emotional energy of his style of presentation, and the unusual plots and reflections on life that are characteristic of his works provide a powerful impetus for the study of cultural phenomena. He wrote articles on the contemplation of nature and the meaning of travel, on the role of chance and unexpected adventures in human life. His articles on religion and the personality of God, on the philosophy of history and culture, on love and fate are full of deep meaning. His thoughts on the philosophy of money and wealth, on stinginess and generosity, on death and immortality, on fashion and its inconstancy, on male and female culture are unexpected... The thinker, having proposed many new and original problems, enriched cultural studies with new ideas and prophetic insights."
I quote from the same interview: “But no one can say how long he intended his poem to be; it is possible, however, that what he left behind is only a small part of the work, which he saw as if in a dark glass.”
But the summit was too rocky and bare for such a fog to cling to it. It lacked those simple devices that bind one man to another. It remained aloof; mysterious; a scholar capable of inspired, even frightening, meticulousness. My phrases (how to describe the moon?) did not meet with a favorable response in him. On the other hand, he was sadly envious of the ease with which I treated the servants.
And they should know that of the two of them, he is a thousand times more important, and what she gives to the world cannot be compared with what he gives.
Of course, he knew the value of his achievements. It was proportionate to his respect for discipline. That is where his success comes from, after all. Although his life was not happy. But look, his eyes turned white while he was lying in my palm. But here I am confused, my head is spinning. I return him to the element where he will shine again.
It was from him that I picked up notions about Latin poets, without bothering to check them myself, and I adopted that shaky train of thought that would lead God knows where: and his mind, like the tongue of an anteater, sharp, quick, sticky, explored every turn, every twist of a Latin phrase, and he sought out one someone, always one someone, with whom to sit next. The style of his texts is like fishing: throughout a paragraph he fishes out a thought, and then abruptly hooks it. Both are characterized by an aphoristic manner of writing. But Shestov's aphorism is superficial. In essence, he is a terrible one-minded person and a monotheist. All his life he wrote one book and developed one idea. Often we come across last-minute additions, inserted into a sentence for which they were not intended, and which they nevertheless provide the meaning of, by introducing something unexpected into the sentence (“... The desire that he should love girls who are not yet grown up, sad, shameless and without a voice”; “Their union is built on callousness, on a method that is universal and of which they are sometimes conscious, and from which all preference is banished”). We come across overly learned and pretentious words, or, on the contrary, words that are banal and worn out, expressing a frozen verbosity, artificial and painful: “I don’t know. I only know something about the immobility of life. Therefore, when it breaks, I know about it.” “When you cried, you cried only for yourself, but not for the delightful impossibility of reuniting with her in spite of the difference that separates you.”
Let me tell you his story. He suffered from high blood pressure, high sugar, depression, loneliness, bankruptcy, divorce, and sexual perversion. He was on the verge of self-destruction. He went to doctors, he went to lawyers, he went to hypnotists, he went to prostitutes. He went to priests, he went to meditation clinics, he went to terrorist organizations, he even went to his mother.
And he left life, completely confused in it. His irritability and anger were partly connected with his illness, he himself explained them by depression and forced sobriety, darkness of the soul and even clouding of reason.
He was close to literature, which goes back through hundreds of generations of authors to stories told around Neanderthal fires, for which the storytellers were allowed not to work or fight.
"He, whose thought was never exhausted, was writing the story of his life at that time. But it is difficult to depict the story of his life, for he had neither life nor history. He lived an almost abstract life. He was a philosopher who found the strength to live, and to live a full life, knowing that there is no life. And there is nothing.
He once remarked on this subject: there are several things that nothing can be done about: death, illness, love... All in one row. "I have an earthly mind," he said. "Why should I want to understand something that is not of this world?" But he lived only for this, and such a proud striving for the absolute took him away from the earth, on which he loved nothing. In his "Black Notebooks" Heidegger will say: I wanted to pose the question of being anew. It did not work.
He was shy, restless, gentle and kind, but the books he wrote were cruel and painful. He saw a world filled with invisible demons tearing and destroying defenseless people. He was an artist and a man with such a sensitive conscience that he heard even where the deaf mistakenly considered themselves safe (conscience as a form of neurosis). Like no one else, he could convey the icy breath of crisis. He considered thoughtfulness to be the most productive state. And there is no better auto-training than reading his works written in the darkest times.
“The fact is that Eliot’s poetry does not lend itself very well to translation: firstly... many allusions are not read or simply disappear; secondly, when translated literally (or, more precisely, not radically enough), some of Eliot’s discoveries look like banalities in Russian; finally, English poetry is, on the whole, emotionally poorer and more restrained than Russian poetry – and where it seems to an Englishman that he is shouting “at the top of his voice”... it seems to us that he is merely politely asking again, not having understood the question asked of him the first time.
Nor was he an enemy of Christ, who enchanted the world with the beauty of death. However, this collapse does not change the essence of the matter. When asked what philosophy gave him, he once answered: "At least, readiness for any turn of fate."
Besides, the women with whom he broke up were in for inevitable disappointments – very soon after parting with him they became convinced that no one else thought the way he thought: he left firmly established ideas in their imagination, sharply contradicting everything that could await them in the future. He possessed a rare gift, which I would call kindness, if this word were not so hackneyed, let us say: true concern for people. And he also said that we would see each other again, only it was not known when and how.
I wandered thoughtfully through the rooms where he had surely lived through one of the most difficult moments of his life; then I went out onto the balcony where he had looked out over the cityscape before, as he put it, "entering the home stretch." My thoughts returned again and again to the passion of love in humans, its monstrous power, its role in the genetic structure of the species. This crazy carnival in which he reveled, this constant battle of the sexes, this spider-like ferocity that made him the favorite writer of the dull-witted northern morons... Every great writer is a victim of his readers. They want to introject everything he has written, to devour him, to tear him to pieces.
Noting once that snow is a very important event in his life, since during a snowfall, images of his childhood appear before his eyes, he wrote, in particular: "In Paris, even the slightest snowfall is looked upon as a catastrophe. But in my homeland, the layer of snow sometimes reached two meters, and no one complained." <...> A dry, condensed form of light – snow...
A man without a cave where he could lick his wounds and catch his breath is prone to fatigue, stress and the negative impact of the environment. That is why he does not live long. Most often, he suffers a heart attack, stroke or other illness due to nervous strain and fatigue, for example, a stomach ulcer and decreased immunity. In ancient times, he was eaten by a predator, or he died of cold. Even such a punishment was practiced – expulsion from the tribe. The same death penalty.
When he is alone, he develops a hawk-like vigilance and writes two or three fleeting lines that will outlive us all.
Once, in a newspaper interview, in response to a reproach for pessimism, Bunin replied: “Perhaps the newspaper was misled by the sadness that shines through in some of my previous, youthful works, but sadness is a need for joy, not pessimism, and from here it is still a long way to world sorrow. On the contrary, I love life so much that I would gladly live at least 2 thousand years.”
And when they try to destroy him, this world from the point of view of Schopenhauer, existentialism, etc., then Rozanov calmly says: "I know" – and shows that really "there is nothing": no love, no friendship, no truth, nothing at all. A complete desert, nihilism. He talks, talks, talks ... But the more he talks, the more clearly and distinctly all the horror and pain of the world appear before us, the more strongly we feel the alternative nature of this philosophy, the possibility of other points of view. Ideological nihilism turns into a thin, super-dense ray – murderous, but already by its very existence providing for the possibility of other rays, other points of view. Inwardly you understand that yes: all is vanity of vanities. And I am "vanity". But the life of "vanity" in "vanity" is no longer "vanity". This is not vanity, but life. And therefore there is no need to fuss. Let me be emptiness and I do not exist. But there is life around. And outwardly, from the vanity point of view, I am alive, I am a human being. What is so scary about that? I see the stars and I know that they are not there, that they are “drawn”. But they are drawn, after all, someone drew them. And that means they exist, the stars. That is not scary at all.
However, although he was always a radical thinker, he did not radically change his views. In the end, he, who had the most life in him, became the saddest of people, and it could hardly have ended any differently.
Here is an entry in the diary of one woman: “Women never part with their loved ones... And unloved ones. Women are not capable of parting. This is my conclusion. This is the amazing way a woman is made. She, that is, I, we never give up our lands. Every man who has looked at us at least once in a manly way is ours forever, and what happens to him later in life will forever have a direct relation to us. A woman is a strong and insidious creature. Beautiful and cruel. When we part, we hurt. We stick a needle so deep that the mark from it remains forever in the heart. And then, years later, we remember exactly where the blow was struck, and always keep in reserve the opportunity to use it, but... A woman is also wise and merciful. She humbly accepts her contradictory self. And most often, she buries such thoughts deep in her soul. No one has entry there. Not even her own awareness. Only a fleeting emotion can stir up these depths.”
“Men... They are completely different... Their bodies give off warmth even in chilly weather, they sit with their legs spread, they smell differently... They pee standing up. Their hands are strong and reliable, their palms are large and powerful, even the pads on their fingers are different, it is cozy and warm in their embraces. They chop wood, make a fire, they watch football, they disassemble engines. They write tender poetry, create brilliant music, they advance civilization. They have a different timbre of voice, their hair grows all over their bodies, their eyes, lips, eyebrows and cheekbones are completely different... Their bodies are cut completely differently, their clothes are completely different, they do not wear 42-44. They are simple, they are straightforward, they are simple. Their friendship is real friendship, they do not plot intrigues in the fight for a woman, they know how to negotiate. They are not at all like us. They are our support, our complement, our lost half."
“The thing is, they have warm palms, and we have cold fingers. They are strong and can lift us up. One day they will definitely understand (at least for a minute) that there is no one better than us. They have principles. Sometimes they wash the dishes. They are taller than us and can get a book from the top shelf. They give us their coolest T-shirts. When they say, "I love you," it seems like they mean it. They know how to install Windows. They know and can even explain that when a person is alone, he is a person. They forgive us our feminism, although we forgive them nothing at all. They kiss us on the forehead when they can't stay. They think that there are things we will never understand, and that is the only reason we understand everything. They put their hands on our knees. They want to pay for our coffee with manic persistence, although they themselves have long since ceased to understand why. Tears flow from their eyes only when a strong wind blows. They want to have our photos. They remember us completely differently than we remember ourselves. They keep quiet when we say stupid things. Although when we say something smart, they also keep quiet. They love our voices. They don’t care what we say. They know better than us: maybe in a hundred years, maybe from some other planets, but they will call. They will go to war if there is a war. They pretend that they are not sick of the 8th of March holiday. They can change our lives. They will never learn how to unfasten a bra properly. They think about more than just love. They do not want to be like us, and we want to be like them. Deep down, they know how to sew on buttons. They can easily admit to themselves that they have only one goal in life – to sleep with us. They pull us out of other people's guests, take us home and cover us with a blanket. They just sometimes cover us with a blanket. They always see us off to the airport, but they do not always meet us. They buy us cigarettes and dresses. They think our bags are heavy only when they are around. They look when we say, "Look." They are silent when we scream. They do not want to break us, but we do not want to break them. When we think about our past life, we think about them. They can be counted. They can fight. They count faster than us. They give their last names to our children. They do things that we are proud of. They go on vacation with us. They are funny."
Here she suddenly fell silent and stared intently at the hood of her own car in deep thought.
Chapter 63. Time of Consequences
“Osya, my dear, distant friend!
My dear, there are no words for this letter, which you may never read. I am writing it into space. Maybe you will return, and I will no longer be there. Then this will be the last memory.
Osyusha – our childhood life with you – what happiness it was. Our quarrels, our squabbles, our games and our love. Now I don't even look at the sky. Who should I show it to if I see a cloud?
Do you remember how we dragged our beggarly feasts to our poor wandering houses-kibitkas? Do you remember how good bread is when it is obtained by miracle and eaten by two? And the last winter in Voronezh. Our happy poverty and poetry.
Every thought is about you. Every tear and every smile is for you. I bless every day and every hour of our bitter life, my friend, my companion, my dear blind guide...
We were like blind puppies poking at each other, and we were happy. And your poor hot head and all the madness with which we burned our days. What happiness it was – and how we always knew that this was exactly the happiness.
Life is long. How long and hard it is to die alone. Is this fate for us, inseparable? Is it us, puppies, children, or you, an angel, who deserve it? And then it all goes on. I know nothing. But I know everything, and every day and hour of yours, as if in delirium, is obvious and clear to me. You came to me every night in a dream, and I kept asking what happened, and you did not answer.
Last dream: I buy some food in a dirty buffet of a dirty hotel. There were some complete strangers with me, and after buying, I realized that I don’t know where to take all this stuff, because I don’t know where you are. Waking up, I said to Shura: Osya died.
I don’t know if you’re alive, but since that day I’ve lost track of you. I don’t know where you are. Will you hear me? Do you know how much I love you? I didn’t have time to tell you how much I love you. I still don’t know how to tell you. I only say: to you, to you... You’re always with me, and I – wild and angry, who’s never been able to just cry – I cry, I cry, I cry.
It's me, Nadya. Where are you? Goodbye. Nadya."
That day she feels herself suddenly an effect, deprived of cause. The enormity of the loss makes it incomprehensible. The mind, exposed by this loss, shrinks and increases its significance even more.
For those who truly love, the death of the beloved seems incomprehensible, just as their own death seems incomprehensible. Girardot said: "Only one loss in the circle of countless people is significant. All the others are an addition, a blurring of the vision, a meaningless cloud surrounding us, something distracting, a hindrance, nothing more..."
Sometimes, a loving person endows the one he loves with his own virtues, which he does not value in himself. Most likely, there is one copy. Originality in life is as necessary, as beautiful as all other types of originality. And then, as eternity, love is experienced.
It is impossible to say, "He loves her unconsciously," but it is possible to say, "He hates her unconsciously." Why does love presuppose consciousness and a non-psychotic state? Because love presupposes introjection, the acceptance of something into oneself, into the unconscious, and for a psychotic these movements are impossible. A psychotic cannot experience depressive sadness for a lost love object, because in the psychotic's unconscious there are no integral objects (as Melanie Klein showed). Because, as we have already written in this book, one can hate "everyone," but one can only love specific people.
I can find the causes of my present collapse in the loss, death of someone or something that I once loved, or in the mourning for them. The disappearance of this indispensable being still deprives me of the most precious part of myself: I live as a wound or a deprivation, only to discover at some point that my pain is only a postponement of hatred or the desire to gain power over those who have abandoned me. My depression shows that I do not know how to lose: perhaps I have not been able to find a worthy replacement for the loss? It follows that every loss entails the loss of my being – and of Being itself.
The reason is dark, but the empty bottle and the loop are transparent. And, like a snake on a tablecloth, the message is closed and unambiguous... As the essence of things, passion will be criminal, life – virginal, and death is generally accessible. The instinct of death – such is its name, and death does not remain without a model. And how strangely it looks afterwards.
There is nothing wrong with a person crying, shedding tears and grieving over the deceased. You just can't say too much. It is forbidden to cry loudly, tear off clothes, tear your hair, grieve, scream, wail, throw tantrums, etc. All this means disagreement with divine predestination. Muslims carry the body of a deceased brother to the cemetery thoughtful and upset. They commit him to the earth. They pray for him, ask for mercy.
To visit a friend's grave, to make an ugly scene ( you can't do that... a-a-ah, you can't do that ), to count the loves that grew out of it – there's little good, but... Somewhere there are ships near the sacred land and your hot lips. I miss you catastrophically, I burn electricity, but I miss, the air is in jolts and the pulse on three counts-ta-ta, hits the bridge of the nose: I know everything I know, but... as if no one specifically dies – it's unthinkable... What's the point of arguing, delving into what happened. Everything ends in boredom, not bitterness. Or, on the contrary, since we never know what to do at the grave, we start planting flowers. After all, some kind of activity for the living, who are somehow not busy with anything, standing next to the deceased. A friend does not get lost, he simply stops being there. When we go to a friend's grave, we hope for a secret meeting with him.
And if there is no God, I will have to act myself. And I went out. I saw the first morning that he will not see – sparrows jumping like toys on a string for a naughty boy. To see things abstractly, from the outside, and to discover beauty in them – how strange! And then this feeling that a burden has been lifted from you; the pretense, the given, the unreality have ended, and it became easier, and a feeling of weightlessness and transparency appeared, as if you were walking – invisible – and everything shines through you – how strange! "What other discoveries will there be?" And she remembered some other thing, nonsense for others, but unbearable for her, and she understood how life withers when there is something that cannot be shared.
Trying to understand this is useless, but Myshkin understands Rogozhin. Why did the prince not prevent the murder or avenge the murdered woman? Why does he become an accomplice, if not to the murder, then to its concealment? Why does he spend the night next to the corpse of his beloved woman and her murderer? Of course, this experience is extremely important to him – it drives Myshkin crazy. We feel that Myshkin understands the reasons why Rogozhin committed the murder – but why he did it, we learn neither from Myshkin nor from Rogozhin. Why do they not talk about it? We are deprived of the opportunity to understand these events from the inside, because in this situation both the characters and the narrator and the author himself refuse dialogue. In the previous scenes we heard their voices. They carried out that complex but communicable exchange of internal positions in which Bakhtin found the key to reading Dostoevsky.
And after his death, she hid the memory of him so deeply that for the rest of her life she never spoke of him out loud to anyone. (There are two cures for every misfortune – time and silence.) “I am as if dead, but I do not even have the thought or desire to kill myself, as if it had already been done.” I am trying to be born again, but only in such a way that it turns out better...”
Already, she felt, the blood ran more lazily, more boringly through the veins. I am dirty, weighed down by impressions, I irritate and hurt. I do not love, but I demand love, sensitive care and attention.
Aftertaste is everything. In everything. Everything depends on what you feel after. After communication, after a kiss, after a fight, after sex, after coffee, after a look. This “after” is in many ways decisive. In order to live, a person needs memories, like fuel. It doesn’t matter what kind of memories. Expensive or worthless, super important or ridiculous – they are all just fuel. If memories were sold, they would be bought instead of fuel. Perhaps we ourselves are worthless. Perhaps it is not we who are important, but what we keep inside ourselves.
I have loved few. However – strongly. I am loved only by those I love. Whom I love, I love. According to Novalis, “what you love, you find everywhere.” Precious originality. The silhouette is reproduced carefully and lovingly in all the whimsical sinuosity of its mysterious outlines.
I'm not pushing you away. I just can't. After that story, fourteen years ago, I can't be with anyone in this world. This is not decided here – somewhere else. And you and I will stop saying hello, then – we will, because, essentially, nothing happened. I don't want to quarrel, I'm afraid. And there is no one to talk to anyway... And summer is still a long way off.
So you didn't understand that I couldn't hold out? You, who knew me better than anyone, better than I knew myself, did you know me so little? Or did you suddenly know me too well, perhaps? Did you discover that I was unworthy of you? Unworthy of this great love that you dedicated to a non-existent one, which existed only because you needed it, a poor thing that turned out in the end to be none other than me? Pig jam? So? You were right. I am only me. A little... But why do I feel so bad? You killed me by killing yourself, but you missed. The wound will not kill me soon. I will drink my death to the dregs.
What I am writing here is a message to myself. It is like a boomerang. Tossed up, it cuts through the darkness in the distance, cools the little souls of the unfortunate kangaroos and, in the end, returns to my hand. But a returned boomerang and a launched boomerang are not the same thing. That is clear to me. Boomerang... Boomerang...
There is a hole in a man's soul the size of God, and each man fills it as best he can. That is what his death taught me. No truth can cure the sadness of losing a loved one. No truth, no warmth, no strength, no tenderness can cure that sadness. A man is born in a single copy, and when he dies, no one can replace him.
We have no other choice but to let this sadness go to our heart's content and learn something from it, but none of this knowledge will be of any help in the next encounter with sadness, which we are not expecting.
Then it seemed as if someone leaned over her, brushed a strand of hair from her face and kissed her eyes, cheeks, corners of her lips, lightly – with one breath. The sweetness of that kiss spread throughout her body. She slowly woke up.
The blood rushed to her face, so that her cheeks burned, she, like a string, stretched out under the blanket, convulsively clutching the sheet with her fingers, and lay with her eyes closed, with a strange smile on her lips, trying not to move, so as not to frighten away some visions. She wanted to revive everything in her memory, and this desire was so strong that she wanted to scream. She bit her teeth into the joint of her finger and in the unbearable pain she found some kind of burning pleasure.
At different stages of life we are “charmed” – by different people and to some extent, consciously or unconsciously, we adopt their traits. This should not be resisted, because by absorbing the traits of others, we create ourselves throughout our lives. (In short, when you are in the forest, you become part of the forest. All of you, without a trace. If you get caught in the rain – you are part of the rain. Morning comes – part of the morning. If you sit with me – you become a part of me. That’s it. In short.)
The time of consequences was coming. Now that your light breath had once again dissipated into the world... I would surround myself with you, wrap myself in your tastes and habits, and in this strange way I would belong to you again.
I have a secret footnote to tell you everything interesting that happens inside and around me, and I am so used to enduring all this with you that this direction of objects towards you gives them meaning. A stupid habit – to live in a landscape drawn by you.
This theory is the salt of your being. Without it, love would be nothing more than a cardboard cutout of love, because what is love without the magical knowledge that someone shares your feelings?
It is the satisfaction of being able to finish another person's sentence, and the peace that comes over you when you hold hands in silence. Happiness is sweeter when you think that your loved ones are happy, too. Grief is easier to bear when you think that the person who left you would have been proud of you.
The water will not wake up the one sleeping on the edge of a waterfall. But your whisper... You are there, where the whale's powerful breath! Everything in the world is built on contrasts. Much can be forgiven...
— I need colors, lines, light, precious stones of fantasy...
“Silly girl, in reality there are no such stones, and if they do, then only here,” and he would put his hand on my heart.
How to describe the moon? How to convey love? With what phrase? What name to call death? I don’t know. I need the babble that lovers use, or the short words that children babble when they enter a room, see their mother sewing, and pick up a bright strand of wool, a feather, a scrap of calico from the floor.
A name can be given not only to winter, but also to a star, a tree, a house, a window, a dress or a sweater, a city, a place where we met, a day when it was especially nice, the year when we met... This "we" is already in itself loving. Precisely because the meaning of a name cannot be defined, it itself acquires the power to define everything. A love spell has two sides: the frantic delight of the caster, who has appropriated the name of the beloved, and the petrified insensibility or even mortal anguish of the one being spelled, whose name is alienated, stolen and no longer belongs to him.
Secondly, in terms of plot and genre, it is to a certain extent typologically consonant with the eastern dastans and, accordingly, the poems of the Kyrgyz “small epic”, which often center on the exploits and adventures of two faithful lovers who were separated by evil enemies or fate.
If you say: everything you said here is not true, because where is it? I will answer: here it is and now... I swear to you, if it is so, I will accept it as my due.
From the heart one either lives or dies. But if you have disappeared, as if a sponge had run down the list of mortals – who then writes all this to you, dear? That former inhabitant is drawn into our day by a simple feather, destroyed by the moment.
The chick, not having returned to the Ark, proves that all faith is nothing more than one-way mail. The softly magical tickling earth glows, a funny dream. In vain do I seek you, not being myself, perhaps the earth is dissolving us. From the sleepy abyss, names are heard, while children whisper them. Someone else's pity, like the moon: it does not warm and does not shine itself.
And your herds greedily came to drink from my sorrow... Why is it like that? Everyone needs a person for whom they would like to try. From one pump of love to another. Most people are worthy of each other. There must be someone in the world who needs only one thing from you: that you are alive, and that everything is good for you. In some higher sense, man is doomed to love. Many – in fact, everyone! – in this world, at least, are worthy of love...
I love you more than yesterday... but less than tomorrow. It is not the one who has no one who is lonely, but the one who does not know how to love... Our affection for people weakens not because they have died, but because we ourselves die. And he said: "One day, I hope, you will be able to live as if you were dying."
After the death of many of my loved ones, I understand how it works: first, the horror of loss, and then this horror seems to be covered with some thin ice. Then this ice imperceptibly becomes thicker, and then everything somehow moves away, and after a few years, the departed loved one will sometimes get through to you through a photograph, or an object that accidentally came into your hands and was loved and significant for both of you. Therefore, the first reaction is important here.
Perhaps we are so constituted that death is prescribed to us in small daily doses, in order to overcome the difficult task of life? Perhaps we exist only because someone thinks about us?
There was simplicity behind the kiss. Behind the bifurcation – the flickering of scissors. God grant that emptiness remains. I see in this the last possibility. After all, our names are not multiplied, but multiples of the open land, whose triangular mind, whose fox-like cunning will demand back silence and noise, silence and noise.
Puff up, make a sound, land surveyor-ruler. He was your patron, became your patient. Became a footnote. Forgive me that it was then and in such a way that you met me, that is, your fate, empty and tu-tu-tu... Eh, he won't forgive. A specific fly. The intentionality of water. Ugh, he's angry with it. <...> Leo Tolstoy once noted about spring water: "And if it has chips, it's even cleaner." I learned not to yawn when people yawn; I need to learn not to get angry when they get angry. (Gestures, intonations, and words can also be contagious).
Your obstinacy in remembering me , in order to reflect on whether these interruptions of memory are not simply the hidden voice of your suspicion that we are all strangers to each other? Mutual affection between a man and a woman always begins with the overwhelming illusion that you think alike about everything in the world. There is no doubt that we are all careless. And no one can become more of a stranger than the one you once loved... People to whom you are attracted invariably think that you remind them of someone.
Somewhere you are striding. A little talk about good and evil. Who could be more of a stranger here? After all, courage is funny, fear is amusing, it is easy now to be made a fool. Everything is fine, but life has flown by, you can’t show fools half the battle. (It is quite enough to not consider the allotted years as nothing from above).
From the day the daughter-in-law entered the house, the hurried summer passed, autumn turned yellow and became sad, the great untouched winter began and ended, meltwater ran through the ravines.
The most important thing in life is words. They are like children's games, absorbing a person, unfinished by feeling, but then the heart switches on, its beat echoes now the inhalation, now the exhalation, one must listen to this flickering of words, to this movement of the essence of form from awareness to astonished clarity. But, trembling, speech breaks away from the source, our second nature, the trembling hieroglyph of the letter disappears and the words seem to be armored, cutting us off from each other, I myself break away, in this dim touch of misunderstanding – I imperfectly see myself as another, having gone beyond myself, recognized in a non-random single rhythm: spiritualized transparently alien.
Let me know for a moment, for an earthly moment, that the flesh of time will appear to me naked, so as not to be separated from me, and then with my speech we will meet again and, trembling, I will arise again from some essence of mine – asking, will I be able to reproduce that primordial realization?
Just as unbelieving ourselves, your and my flesh languish in search of our faces, lips, hands and bones, in the transparency of the dawns of our eyes (saying “us”, I mean the fragile watery bags called people), the melodic silence, the uniform silence in her emerald grotto, here you do not ask, but you become needed by someone, weightless in desires, when the bottom and the top shift and are unambiguous, here objects do not perceive me, I do not penetrate them and only in words am I forced to turn into meat or wine, the respite we need.
My expectation turns your face into fragments, preserves your face in me, this duty, the inevitability of rejecting, rejecting, another can love – your teeth recklessly and cruelly pierce my eyes with the sting of desire, I will reject them in order to ask about – (I know, I know, this fall is uncontrollable) I will come to my senses thanks to you, I will return from you separated into life, only to designate the frosty bewilderment of your face, you pierce me resonantly – and so evenly you peer into the pictures that have arisen in us, condemning, perhaps, disdaining time with the wind I will burst into it I will burst into his face, occasionally caressed by it out of sequence and order, as if into the gaps of memory, as if into a hole. The room will crush his face, penetrating through this hole where we, not accepting, judged each other, into the love preserved by this room, measuredly and tirelessly returning back. Our knees tremble, but do not bend; our hands seek each other, but do not connect; our eyes look up, but see nothing... How simple everything is, how easy.
Chapter 64. Epilogue
Eco's work gives an example of a dialogue between a husband and wife at midnight in a country house. The wife looks out the window and says anxiously: "There is a man in the garden." After checking, the husband answers her: "No, my dear, it is not a man."
She goes to the window and, despite the cold, opens it. She exposes her face and shoulders to the damp night wind. She listens to the yapping of the fox, the rustling of the pheasant's branches. She listens to the snow, rustling, splashing from the roof.
"By God," she cried, "it's a thousand times better here than in Turkey! Rustum," she cried, trying to out-argue the gypsy (this new trait – the ability to keep an argument in mind while continuing to argue with someone who is not there to refute it – once again proves that her soul continued to develop), "no, you're wrong, Rustum. It's much better here than in Turkey.
It is not so important because I came here simply to be. Nature calms rather than captivates : either to become an accomplice or a neurasthenic. That is why Ulrich and the author himself preferred passivity and loneliness to the meanness of the world. And I understood: they need silence. In silence, everyone will find their truth and take root in it. But this requires time, as when feeding a baby.
“Like a work of art,” she repeated, looking from the canvas to the window and back again. “I need to rest a little.” And while she was resting, looking from one thing to the other with a clouded gaze, the old question, eternally hovering in the firmament of the soul, huge and terrible, which at such moments of respite is especially urgent, rose before her, froze, and obscured everything. What is the meaning of life? If the world around us is familiar and disgusting, and life is sad. That’s all. A simple question; a question that increasingly overcomes you with the years. And the great revelation does not come. The great revelation, perhaps, cannot come. Instead, it sends out small everyday miracles, insights, flashes of matches in the darkness; like then, for example. This, that, the other. The candle guttered, didn’t it? And the shadows wandered, didn’t they?
It's time, my friend, it's time; the heart asks for peace... Days run after days, and each day takes away – a piece of being; and you and I, together, decide to live; and then – look: and we will die... "In the midday heat in the valley of Dagestan..." Mountain peaks sleep in the darkness of the night, quiet valleys are full of fresh haze. The road does not dust, the leaves do not tremble... Wait a little – you too will rest! The more you want to rest, the more terrible life is. Life runs – the load becomes heavier. Feelings change, attitudes change... Sometimes a lot of time passes, an awfully long time, before everything falls into place.
The same is true for psychotherapy. Reasonable discursive behavior should not be limited to reassuring the patient that nothing terrible has happened to him, that this happens to everyone, that sometimes it happens, you know, much worse, and you, consider yourself, got off easy. Or even worse: all this will soon pass on its own or with little effort.
And only dead silence, which you can’t take even by storm, a thousand-pound torture, where the insects step on a watch – thousands of miles away, drops are hurriedly dripping into a white washbasin cup, and I am the universe, and from drop to drop – eras, epochs, and in this heart-squeezing silence you can only hear the thousand-year-old creak of the Earth, rotating on a rusty, unlubricated axis. My mind goes silent, like the surface of a lake during a complete calm: nothing happens at all. The doctrine of the inner time of consciousness as a constant “duration”. It is difficult to say how much time passes. And then a drop falls on the surface of this nothing.
I turned the tap tightly and stepped out. The beating of my pulse died away, swallowed up by a spacious, capacious silence in which the machine-gun bursts of tirelessly ticking time died away. (The length of a minute depends on which side of the bathroom door you are on.)
Scientists and doctors write that sex is only for procreation, but there are also opinions that sex is the best, legal and most pleasant way to commit suicide.
And yet, while we still understand that emptiness can only lead to emptiness, and that the universe is merely a by-product of our sorrow, why give up the pleasure of stumbling and smashing our heads against the earth and sky? While death is almost too neat in this respect, all the arguments speak in its favor.
Where can so much emptiness and incomprehensibility lead? We clutch at the days allotted to us, because the desire to die is too logical and therefore ineffective. If life had even one clear and indisputable argument in its favor, it would destroy itself – instincts and prejudices evaporate from contact with the Rigorous. Everything that breathes feeds on the unreliable; for life, this craving for the Unreasonable, any introduction of logic is fatal... We, as Hegel would say, must exist because we are not.
Love or faith in me is realized, even if you are not near me: so you believe in God, letting and not feeling the truth clearly and materially in yourself. God's essence is necessary for you, converted to love, love is weightless, it is not even in realization, only drafts of love slide and shimmer on our faces, you know, you feel it – the swing of drafts, rocking us. (Since the Caliph could not look at Layla with Majnun's eyes, he did not manage to unravel the mystery of this love).
The hieroglyph for "death" is a combination of petals on the asphalt near the entrance. The hieroglyph for "death" is a headache. Happy dreams that end with the passing of childhood. Thick potato peelings, apple seeds. Glow in the dark. Indifference and vulnerability. Despair, rage, hopelessness. Tears of questions, questions, questions. The hieroglyph for "death" is the crumbling pages of an unborn book. Children who cannot speak or laugh. The hieroglyph for "death" is long torments, hospitals, nights in the arms of pain. About suffering. About slow death. Becomes the hieroglyph for "death".
Something like cuckoo-here-I-am, from which, as they say, faces brighten and cinema goes numb? It will become bigger, smarter, more florid, more refined, more exquisite, more inventive... The first third of my life is remembered by the rims of things. It was empty, but also, on top of that, a wonderful order emptier, while you reign, angry at yourself, you exist, scratch a little, – (and in this stretch of consciousness you can’t take a single step forward). It is fraught with nothing, only the circles in their mother-of-pearl womb say that it exists.
What if you come and put your hand on my eyes. You'll come anyway, why not now? Is it really another 3 years? What? Waiting is kefir. But before the waiting becomes too long? Please, huh?
Really, her friendship with William Banks brightened her life considerably. A charming man, William Banks.
She caught herself thinking this, became excited, amazed, as if again through the veil of hopeless despondency she seemed to see... What a pure year! Uninhabited, unburned, lonely, monastic – at night. I adore the early morning, at about five o'clock. You walk, and there is not a soul on the street. The world seems pure. And do not expect a heavy, full year, do not expect adversity. (It will not come, but as if, as if...)
Life is given to a person only once, and mostly by chance. In a certain sense, there is no one in the future. In a certain sense, no one is dear to us in the future. Our gift of speech, that is, the gift that allows us to locate ourselves in time in relation to another, could not exist otherwise than on the other side of the abyss. The future always comes when someone dies. I have nothing to weave a wreath from to somehow adorn my brow at the end of this extremely dry year.
And whether he is a merry fellow or gloomy, like September in its last days... Pain is far away, do not hide your eyes and do not grieve. Whether fate is merciless or forgiving, in the end it weaves and unweaves any unexpected and strange wreaths. Then once again we begin to study time. We learn about time, which pulls together the edges of ideas, foreknowledge. Its needle, sometimes gold, sometimes platinum, pleasantly cools the overheated brain. Einstein probably said it best: "Time exists so that everything does not happen at once." But! Let us not forget that time is a crooked and cloudy lens. No one can compete with it in the ability to distort any fact and image. When you sleep, time seems to stop for you, but for everyone else... it goes on and on, passing you by furtively and leaving you in the past.
It is a time when concrete relationships are severed, except for a thread stretching from the pupil; a time when bundles of the most subtle sensations disintegrate without a trace – a triumph of impressions as such. Disintegration is simultaneously someone’s gain, and sacrifice turns into the possibility – and necessity – of demanding sacrifice.
The sum of days and convulsive thoughts... strictly from need to need... without using the anesthesia of reason... so that we do not notice the loss. Disdainfully small. Forgive me, lovely idol. We speak, as a rule, in fits and starts. Resourcefulness is the source of vanity. He believed in the brotherhood of people, while all people are evil. That a lie, without meeting objections, will evaporate, even against the rules, precisely because of the touch of non-obligation in the falling intonation. The boy is traced in the husband, his target is always outside. The essence of the train? Why do they love us? What would he think about if he were not gnawed by melancholy, attacks? If he loved? Not even less so a lover, no one will tell you this at the moment of your complete defeat.
- What can you do forever?
- I think, to be disappointed.
Instead, I spent an hour looking out the window, which would be even more striking to the eyes. (There is a word called boketto. Translated from Japanese, it means looking into the void without thinking about anything in particular.) A very tense situation... we'll get over this, too, she reclusively says. You shudder and find yourself in the future. I peer down the street – this one could kill.
Not everything is so stupid in the romantic concept of passion. But does passion need memory? After all , memories are precious because they can be forgotten .
A completely secret thought about death... There are no things in the world more perfect. In the middle of a long or at the end of a short life... How I love these smells – the smells of an aimless, but lasting life.
The happier people can be, the unhappier they become. The better we know each other, the worse. It doesn't matter who is in your "consciousness", as long as they give a sign or a gesture, no matter how you explain it (perhaps there is no explanation: memory is inexplicable). The shorter the memory, the longer the life. The more you remember, the closer you are to death. And it must be said, when such guests, what does a good memory have to do with it... And she got the impression – she stood up and walked on the grass – the impression – a very unpleasant impression – that one should never, never express one's own thoughts.
Here, finally, is the heroine without a name or outline – a dash in the column about her characteristics – hurrying from the gate to the bus stop.
- Is this really possible? – She strips naked, she runs to the water, she doesn't remember any more "boys"!
“It happens,” someone who doesn’t care about the coordination of words answers her.
Not understanding anything, she looks at the sky.
It happens.
© Iskander Shakirov
Anamnesis
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Ñâèäåòåëüñòâî î ïóáëèêàöèè ¹225022702012
Ñâèäåòåëüñòâî î ïóáëèêàöèè ¹225022702012
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