From Phosphor

Arkadii Dragomoshchenko

St. Petersburg, Russia
atd@HM.SPB.SU

 

Habits of mind result from a redistribution of the places on which the eyes fall. Yes, I’m probably right about this. What I’m thinking about at this particular moment allows me to assume so. A rusty rat crossing the street. A soft, interminable twilight, and above it the night lights burning. The room in which we lived was almost eighteen meters long. In the mornings, on streets billowing steam, I went around the corner, bare foot but for sandals, to drink a cup of hot milk and eat cheese pastry. Liteiny Prospekt was blinding. I shuffled along in unbuckled sandals. Amid mocking seagulls and love cries. Through a courtyard to the Fontanka, passing the library, toward the circus, the bridge. This is about many things. It’s about emigration. About T.S. Eliot and Turgenev. But what are you thinking about? What did or what does your life consist of? I like your question. In the kitchen in a glass jar she kept demons (warring with cockroaches) which she fed with poppyseeds. Your question comes at absolutely the right moment, although it makes me slightly nauseous, the way roses or moldy dolls might–vertigo. By evening my skin stung from the sun. It happened the first time on an anthill. They rushed frantically toward the river. As if through a magnifying glass. In the future, if he’s to recount a couple of the plots that interest him (let’s suppose), he will have to get rid of her. But of whom, one wants to know! History? Geometry? Mental habits? One of these plots begins with a murder.

 

A yellow-edged photograph. Beads of laughter on his glasses, on the windshield. Thought is a system, producing systematic eliminations. At the same time, a question arises–as to whether or not it is right to assume, having left one’s message on the answering machine, that the resulting communication will be from a living person. “I’m not home,” for example, “I can’t come to the phone now,” or, “You have reached so-and-so,” etc. This question, however, despite its apparent silliness, is essentially theological, since it inevitably touches on the question of the life force, the soul, its migrations, and the places it inhabits, suggesting “voices of existence,” too, not to mention routine speculation as to presence and absence. And indeed, if my voice reaches your ear across a particular stretch of time (or period of endurance–the experience being in what remains), it presupposes a “distance,” since you are never I. Does my voice, even being inside me, a single being–does my voice reach you, that is, my essential “I” (our breathing is an out-terance, a crazy moment dangling between “out” and utterance), which does exist, but not for you, in your complete acceptance of flickering, glittering matter, shrouded in the most delicate rustle of awakening that flows from your pursuing vision, where the present has already existed? Where do our identifyings take place? A vibration of the surrounding atmosphere–microwinds, a mystical notebook. And “who” or “what”? Moreover, the people involved in a narrative, in other words the characters, don’t in themselves represent much of anything, except in the case of a woman who takes an important role in the action (and there is such a portrait: a familiarly shaped mouth, wide lips, a habit of adjusting the shoulders of her dress, etc.–and another, intimate portrait, more transparent: her brownish pubic hair cut short, an imponderable scar on her waist, wide pale aureoles around her nipples, the trace of a tattoo between them), whose son died a few years ago. There is some thought that he didn’t “simply die” but that he was killed near Kandahar not far from Thebes, but instead of this romantic invention most people prefer the truth, namely that he was hanged on the 14th of May in the assembly hall of his school by his classmates, using a silk cord from the white curtain; and possibly, due to unforeseeable circumstances, one of them has some notion concerning the silk cocoon of the window and a tedious description of a flight across the Atlantic, abounding in similes and necessary to the progress of future events.

 

One would have to be an idiot to speak of a “sequel” to the new. This is impossible to explain to artists. It’s utterly impossible even to explain it to the man who sits rubbing the crystal eyes of the fish swallowed into the museum’s lottery drum. Ball lightning, rocking, froze over my grandfather’s glass of vodka and after a few moments crept in through the window, where my grandmother, because of her nearsightedness, took it for one of the demons living in the kitchen in her glass jar which had somehow slipped past the cockroach patrols. The terra-cotta colored morocco leather of the book bindings, the faded imprint embossing the leather, the copper coolness of the sextant, the mother-of-pearl sheen of blackened silver inlaying the yellow bone paper knife–that day is no different from yesterday. There are two types of suicide (of course, it’s possible there are more). First, when your will and the world’s desires meet and you are shattered while attempting to enclose them in your own existence–you become too strong, sturdy, bulky, heavy–and I don’t pity you–like a porcelain Christmas bird. Second, when you suddenly find yourself in a realm of deafness, where nothing reflects anything else and where for a while a terrifying image of a false world is erected: what surrounds you surrounds you, fingers flowing into the porous substance of matter, every second thought finding uniquely correct solutions. No questions exist. You are born, you die, you eat, you explain the essence of phenomena, enumerating all of them. Or you don’t enumerate them. In which case, I don’t pity you.

 

What, one asks, is there to pity? Probably some contradiction between “desire” and “wish.” The more intense the desire, the stronger the non-wishing. A person, realizing this, dedicates himself to Demeter. The morning flowed smoothly, like a comparison slowly unfolding into similarities. And this was all in the course of things. What is this “there are no senses”?….

 

No? Could it possibly be “no”? But they waved sunflowers after us, which had turned gold like their eyes, withered by grief and yet also by consciousness of the happiness which had befallen them; or rather, of course, first by one and then by the other; but they simply hadn’t managed to figure out that they had been happier in other times when other models of happiness had been offered them. But we already know how the smoothly flowing morning takes a bend toward the nightingale darkness, when night, snow white as a sable, nurtures the phosphorous in a half-sphere of a porcelain cup. And to that extent we know the figure of fate and the theory of catastrophes, painstakingly illustrated by the dazzling pulse of a system which upsets all calculations as to how they’ll behave–in the same way, gusts of wind strike one’s face with the finest sands and with crackling leaves when the street is parched with yellow like a throat sifting the granular air. A mothy murk. I suggest we take the following walk. Beginning on our street, we’ll cross the intersection at the point where the huge shadow of a nut is falling on the sidewalk, its sound momentarily making voices completely unintelligible; then we’ll proceed straight ahead toward the school where after all I happen to have studied and from which I was expelled as from so many others, although I suppose it’s inappropriate to mention this. Then we’ll go through a sparse grove of mulberry trees and barren apple trees and come to the chemical plant’s sedimentation tanks, incredible in their magnitude, always astounding both his and my (that is, to put it another way, your and my) imagination–to the cyclops-like squares and rectangles formed by the embankments, which were formed in prehistoric times by bulldozers and are, as always, filled in some places with milky nacreous slush and in others with a substance startling in the beauty of its unearthly color, an “electric,” azure emerald threaded with some kind of fibrous, brass gold spasm, shot in some places with jasper blazing up at the very moment you look away and streaked like rainbowed spots of oil in the sun, and in yet others with a hellish red plasma, and all this in one sense forms a single field as far as the forsaken shooting range: in its terrifying flatness, a mirror, in whose zenith is placed the formula for the inversion of light. It would be naive, in light of this field, to think about your brother’s bones, brittle, whittled like a wafted message, or about your sister’s hair. The girl here doesn’t comb her braids, the geese don’t honk, our meeting here is set for noon. And further on we’ll come to the shooting range, empty cartridge cases, willows. In a two hour walk among the hunted wormwoods there’s much else to be found. A map of poetry. The broken mirrors of the foliage. The broken mirrors of number. Tendrils of conclusion. The “humane” is washed from a body endowed with feelings–not one single reflection falls on the object. On an uninhabited island an object replaces memory as that which proceeds toward the future. A decision has been made. Torquato Tasso’s first visit to Don Carlos took place at the end of the 80s, the second at the beginning of the 90s. It’s worth noting that comment regarding a collaborative writing of madrigals, and not only such poems as they both wrote about the prince but also about his wife, including stanzas on his first wife’s death. Hounded by madness, Tasso dashes from one courtyard to another. The autumn weather remains dry. Near Kherson the stubble is burning. The first visit. Some correspondence. A second visit.

 

The musicians–one must give them their due–were quite good. But Monteverdi! Why, he began composing when he was fifteen…. That time whose splinters resemble broken mirrors of foliage has never come.