Kitabı oku: «True Sadness», sayfa 2

But let us come back to just another attempt of islanders to go beyond the border. It must be noted that on the day when Alan told me about his idea to go beyond, a retired patient died of a stroke. I had been taking care of this patient for a month and studied him well, even though he couldn’t say a comprehensible word. His image pierced through the mask of his disease: he made an impression of a stingy and capricious person because of his sunk look independent of his memory. Alan would see the results of neglected flaccidity in the man – he was always irritated by people without natural generosity, what made him behave really courteously with hypocritical people who, in the first place, try to represent benevolence and sympathy. That day he died of doctors’ malpractice, who prescribed him incompatible medicines. But their attempts to interact with him initially looked like communication of prison wardens with a retarded criminal. When I was first taken to him, he was tied to bed, as he was said to “show aggression”, but in the first two hours in his room I was able to acquire rapport – I had no sympathy to his mutilated body and no pity to his condition but the desire to communicate with a person who appeared to be in one room with me. This was the reason why the care for him was given to me, and I started to feel direct responsibility for his life, which refined my perception. That is why his death impressed me – I was furious.

If we look more attentively, our mentality works like a camera obscura: our consciousness presents some dark soggy room with a tiny hole, and an ethereal divine hand sends us shapes of the external world with a ray of light, but we receive an inverse and vague image and we have to cleanse the field of our turmoil of those vague images; though more often we concentrate on these scattered pictures, keeping only impressions and, finally, we live not in our mentality, which like an eye has to look to see, but in the kaleidoscope of our impressions, which turns our turmoil into a dense forest with various plants and insects with no colour, smell, taste or matter but with an enviable submission to our narcissism.

It is just the analogy I recollected but not from the death, that I had seen a lot of times, but from a legendary abyss between people – detachment. Pronouncing this word with just a touch with it I find myself in that room smelling of medicines, besotted with its sharpness and with a feeling of detachment as if you are in the devil’s office. Limitless vials and syringes as vessels of an ancient alchemist surrounded the dying, in order to press the soul to the body and not let it go, but they did serve to the decomposition of this body just as the room itself – decomposing of the various smells. Earlier I liked this combination of smells for their specific atmosphere of worship of a human’s desire to live, as frankincense opens the temple doors to worship the desire to believe. But it is a peculiar law of feelings that affects our perception.

We do not live by judgments, we live in a special world of feelings, an endless stream engulfing our energy, which can be renewed only by our suffering, and we can guess that by the movement of our thoughts, whose acuteness, in a greater degree, is shown in the moments of deep loneliness or loss, when we are ready to perform really heroic actions in good faith, with no conceptions and arrangements – on the contrary, all the chaos of these ideas confines our mentality in the moments of pleasure, which delivers envy, and we begin to consider all the received pleasures as a part of justification for our previous sufferings, but the true nature of the feeling is that it cannot be an entity, and so we have to form different feelings towards familiar places and people, familiar events and thoughts – they are in fact difficult to distinguish in our mentality, and we sometimes perceive more details of environment that thoughts in a person; additionally, we constantly have to feel our own existence, which is hardest to do, because we don’t want to reject places, people, thoughts and events as their loss leads to the loss of ourselves, our warm corner of life, in which I futilely tried to put the death of this man – with all my persistence I wanted to make it my own comprehension of life, but this spiritual passion emerged not due to his death but as a result of its incomprehensibility for myself and the impossibility to react to it in any way because I (if we remember my own feelings) have always seen sufferings and I understood that death was a real gift for that man, although, the thought of it was so exotic for my mentality that I was trying to outvoice myself so as to conclude that continuation of life would be the best outcome for him because the man’s identity and his sufferings joined in an integral whole and the real face showed only when the sufferings disappeared and I started to find living feelings towards him as I stopped seeing his sufferings. And now I see living feelings towards Alan too.

It was midday when this patient died.

To distract myself I accepted Alan’s earlier invitation to visit a famous venue orotundly called “Port Charlotte”, that offered the best smoking narcotic mixes, which disgusted me. Because of his eccentricity, Alan visited this place quite often. He always persuaded me that this experience is a wonderful method of work with one’s mentality. Without excessive attraction, these mixes could open new ways for contemplation, Alan said to me, and that day I yielded to his suasions but because of the horrific fear of this harmless action I decided to note down all my experiences in order to gain myself back deciphering the notes if something goes wrong. This experience was overshadowed by the necessity to communicate with Alan’s friends, whom I had never liked, but I needed to distract. Being in the basement of an old residential house on Owen Street, which crept out like a dead man’s bony arm from a grave in this quickly developing district of our island, I was irritated by each perceived object – this building of architecture, forever painted pink, made an impression of a dummy which is tried to be presented as a museum exhibit; this Alan’s drug habit made me despise all of him, as it subdued all his enriched impulses of self-realization with a vulgar attempt to leave for the lair of his fantasies, but on that day even more irritation was caused by the street name with the surname meaningless to me, so I submerged into this patch of the conceptual approach to life comprehension with a squeamish feeling towards myself.

On this joyless and boring patch, in addition to my nasty disposition, Alan introduced me to a so-called disciple of art, whom he admired, however, this young man completed my picture of loneliness because he seemed a really “vulgar larva of society” (using Mr. Huxley’s expression). But it was him who made me look at Alan in a different way – as if by accident, providence put these two people together to make their faults intensify each other. Staying in the presence of this man I realized why I had always considered Alan “weaselly” – I even felt “weaselly” myself. The worst was the fact that a mediocrity considered himself something unique and stood in front of his art not giving it its own word. This genius was beaming with “simplicity of truth” in this dark room of the painted building, but in a complex refraction we see a more colourless yet more clear image than looking at a direct source of light: mediocrity always strives to shine filling the space of impression with dancing shadows – this is why we cannot descry what a person or their art really are.

And I think he understands how much I despise him and so he closes even more in his shell because the opinion similar to mine is encountered not for the first time, and it serves just as a confirmation of poor judgement of the “collective consciousness”, although, observing it from my position, I can see the manifestation of this phenomenon towards him too. Genuine people of art, whom I love, unlike Mr. X, didn’t suffer from “conceptualism” though their approach was not understood by many – I’d better say, it was understood by all but it took time to perceive it, it required concentration and presence of some kind of ambition. They didn’t shine with meaninglessness but tried to find its reflection in their own lives, so their art didn’t lose gravity – it could be imperfect, undeveloped or unfinished, but it had spirit while Mr. X paraded his impotence of creative outlook, showing hard work and achieving “high quality” in unworthy things, which made a spectator feel own pretension. Does a spectator have to feel their presence in a work of art at all, does he have to feel that he is addressed? I don’t think so – the difference between people is so tiny that we can raise our creative outlook to Olympus, that will be inaccessible to the others, that is why I see the right way in creating a single outlook with a spectator not in achieving infinite levels of abstraction, which lose their content more each time an author (similar to Mr. X) tries to input more meaning in them. In the limitless vastness of my ego, I can imagine that my text will be read by people of next generations, it is possible that our island will disappear and the Earth will be united again, and my text will present only historic value, but all of this is a farfetched position – eternity and supertemporal actuality manifests itself with a maximal closeness to the mysticism of an author’s current moment. While I am on the island, no matter how familiar and banal it is for me, no matter how much I want to go beyond – I will be writing about the island, not inventing something extra, and also about the project of going abroad, which Alan produced.

In the heat of such passion, because of influence of the irritating environment and even more irritating Mr. X, I was finally allowed to fulfil my experience when some of Alan’s friends had already passed substantive way in this direction. At some moment they reminded me of a pack of headless space chickens, but their condition helped me to relax and not to feel embarrassed by my notebook, in which I recorded my experience on a low and hardly noticeable table, falling deeper and deeper into the atmosphere of a smoke-filled room and dark green walls with velvety surface of floral patterns.

“First, it’s frightening, then you get used to it. I’m unreasonably fun. As if I’m in a dream. I’m afraid it will affect my cognitive abilities (fear of castration). There’s no time, I’m moving in time and space (!). I have no responsibility (!). I’m interested to learn. I don’t perceive all the reality. I have a feeling that I will forget it all like a dream. They say, the events will stay in my memory. We’ll see. I live with feelings. You must just think of a feeling and you start fulfilling it. I’m moved by something inner. It might be instincts, it might be a part of my thoughts that rule me. It’s not repressed, I don’t feel fear. I might not understand that I am alive. I don’t believe I can manage it to the table. I can’t think concretely (!) and invent. I can count, I’m totally rational, do what my brain orders, but with all it – it’s not ME. I am different. Level of banality decreased. I answer rationally but not the way I would answer. I am not ashamed. Although some repressed traits of character reappear. I start to obey the flock, looking for a leader. I’m eccentric, but I understand this is not real ME and so, I’m not afraid to behave this way. I am sometimes afraid to stay like this forever. I can’t articulate words well. The more I’m surprised with this difficulty, the bigger it becomes. It’s funny. I speak slowly. At first, I thought that my heart stopped but then I felt it was beating too slowly. It might not be true! I’m beyond the time. At some moment everything started to whirl but not for long. I perceive people as mine among those who have also taken it, others are not from our narrow world. There are only them and matter. At some moment voices started to be heard as prophetic, especially at the beginning. I think that nobody hears me. I suddenly thought that I am somewhere far away (!), something is happening to me, I’m in a dream”.

I am ashamed to admit that during this experience I almost started to love the people around me, including Mr. X, however, as I had expected, this experience later evoked negative reactions in me as I had always been dedicated to the love phenomenon of my soul to waste it on despised people. In addition, being charged with own impressions doesn’t give the output to new spheres, where the doubt in your own sensations must always serve as a defense from the monsters of your unrestrained fantasy, and where the question “Is our whole life a dream?” nourishes every receptor of our life with pleasant sensations of spiritual independence. Here I recall again the story of poor Hoici: once he dreamed that he was an owl whiter than a snowy desert, and the sensation of being this creature appealed to him so much that he covered unthinkable distances in his dream and closer to his wake he saw the eyes of a lonely wanderer who engulfed him with his sad blue look, and to the question: “Why are you so sad?” the wanderer answered: “I have been listening to this forest spirits’ tales for too long on condition that I will never tell them to people, but I told them to my beloved and they took away my ears. Waking up, Hoici couldn’t decide who he is: an owl, an earless wanderer or Hoici, and are those owls what they seem, and are people what they think of themselves?

But Alan was proud of his broad-mindedness and, probably, the leap of his narcotic imagination pushed him to develop the idea of going abroad, which he had mentioned before. He told me about his determination the next day in my room. He came early in the morning, which he hadn’t often done, and almost immediately went to the core of his topic, giving numerous reasons and tending to a cup almost every second – he seemed to be in a tense disposition and drank a lot of coffee. But for me, it was more interesting to gaze at morning rays of light on the table, which seemed especially golden and nonintrusive that day. But when I understood what Alan was talking about, his decision was unexpected to me and hinting me how badly we know our friends and relatives: or, rather we know their static state, but when comes the time of change, only true feelings and sensations remain stable, all the rest is swept from the field of our life.

– Physics, philosophy – they will never lead to significant advances because they don’t have anything new. We need a novel method of uncovering reality, which the island gives. We must be engaged in an idea of a real movement. These people sitting still and scared of everything that will not help them warm their flabby snouts must not be the landmarks in our search. They can’t even buy flowers to fuck well. Going beyond is a wonderful idea not to dry out in this bog. You know, I have been thinking a lot about mentality and concluded that you were right – everything that we see is an illusion. I am sure that we can invent an instrument to break this illusion and find the way to new realities…

After these words I felt such a stream of inner malice and violence that his words still sound in my head like a prophecy harbingering the upcoming disaster – I have never talked about the evanescence of reality and when I was talking about “illusion”, I only meant our personal inability to perceive accumulating layers of perception, which take so much of our energy, that we are often unable to understand everything according to its inner nature.

– I recall you were going to start a family? – I asked half-jokingly to stop this delirium, but indignation from my phrase spread over his face.

– Children are too easy, it’s the easiest way to achieve something, but then we will never move and will die of hunger on this island – sooner or later, it is going to happen as said in your lecture by… – here Alan mentioned the name which I completely forgot, but whose lectures he really liked – I was looking for these lectures later but couldn’t find, or I might not have wanted to find, – you must listen to them. He actually speaks about illusions which surround us.

– Yes, but I meant those illusions that are only in ourselves, and the problem itself never leaves our mentality. As if it exists only in us. Why do you think that we are surrounded by some worlds? – I had a feeling that I was talking to Alan for the first time, although, I had already had this impression before.

I gradually started to lose the thread of our conversation and started to concentrate on my own soul. Only some words and sensations were left in my memory after this dialogue. “Maybe, you don’t want to develop your idea yourself?”. “No, I meant a completely different thing”. “I think you go aside from the real way”. “What is the criterion of this way?”. “We can prove it. You can’t prove philosophy – it’s just a fib and yet another illusion”. “I don’t think so, do you want to go abroad the island?”. “Yes, this exit is the most important for our island, though being a dangerous enterprise”. “Whyever did you start to have such thoughts?”. “I was observing a bee flying in our flat, that was banging the glass to fly away but couldn’t notice an open window in two metres. It was so silly and limited. I didn’t help it because my help would have killed its will. I was just watching her hit and thought that we are banging in the same way. We are no less unhappy than this bee. Suddenly I was so furious with these snotty thoughts – I wanted to jump out of the window myself, but then returned to my human consciousness and understood that the window is our border”.

Earlier I liked various analogies, which seem to help to understand the topic, but later, when Alan did what he did, I found their dangerous meaning. Analogies are an attempt to manifest your thought for another person and they serve as an excellent way to explain, but any explanation is justification, even a scientific one is justification, which we recourse to admit our inability to understand a deeper truth than a shallow comparison of a person to a bee. But “I decided to go abroad and even if I go alone, so be it” and “I am used to being not understood by people, to inability of achieving synergy with them, although I expected another reaction from you, but you just stuck too deep in your thinking – lately I haven’t understood it at all”.

Ursula

Following my spiritual weakness, I agreed to think about my participation in the mission, although I was sure of my resounding refusal, again, due to my cowardice – contemplation of a faint-hearted philosopher was much nicer to me than useless bravado of newly-minted knights, but inside I agreed to observe the project process and take part in its preparation. I also hoped that Alan would face the strict principles of his beloved, who would take decisive measures in order to nip this project in the bud. Ursula. Incredibly skinny, a bit taller than Alan and with an eagle face. She was a real stalker in life, a strategist in communication, a curious child in thinking, and in my imagination was always presented as an amazon grown up in the wild forests abroad the island. Her original light mannerism shifted my understanding of beauty, and I started learning to find charm in all faces – both men’s and women’s, gradually removing the layers of sociality and intellectuality from genuine features, which have the traces of the life which moves parallelly with our social fate. That face, in which Ursula created her own kingdom with steadfast principles, felt in all her caprices, which I observed beyond the gate of their relationship. She spent most of her life in that kingdom, thus making the public feel the absence, where we can easily guess the arrogance, egotism and even the lack of intellect or – what is even worse for a social human – originality.

Symbolics of a social human is the most developed branch of science, of which nobody even speaks, because one swims in it like a fish in water or as an experienced comedian in the world of human vices. This symbolics fills our minds, which yearn for a real human, but cannot accept him, so we invent notions which, as we think, accurately describe a human soul – selfishness, avarice, gluttony and so on. But let us imagine that a man considers himself kind and in the moment of distraction forgets to leave a tip in a wonderful restaurant, where he had a date with a woman, who, following even a more ancient science than the symbolics of a social human, starts to rebuke him with her look, and he, not suspecting the mysterious conclusions, which circle around his head like a halo, constantly reminds himself of his kindness.

And the broken process of mutual trust makes her think about her companion’s greed, and him, starting to feel light detachment, think about insufficient effort that he makes. He begins to show what best he considers in himself – kindness, and on the peak of mutual misunderstanding, she declares him cheap, and he – because of the eternal man’s weakness in front of a woman – starts to justify himself not understanding what the reason of this deduction is, implanting the opinion that he is cheap into himself, and that kindness is the reason of his meanness, and he himself is the meanness in its genuine sense, as if descended from Giotto’s frescos, and, to cut this image out of his heart, our hero turns to the divine power of god Susanoo’s legendary blade, but in fact he cuts the way back to himself and begins to live in an illusory world of a “social human”, where the abyss between opinions of different people is smaller than the abyss between a thought and one person’s thought of a thought. In this world of Giotto’s images, we rather tend to believe the others than ourselves, and so people’s exterior attitude to us is so contagious: someone’s distorted fantasy or their genius is closer to us than comprehension of our shortages or our genius. And, as Little Prince, we are thrown to the different planets of human vices – that is how the symbolics of a social human works.

But if we want to return to our inner empire, we will need Ursula’s power, who had a natural talent not to notice this strange symbolics, and so had to find her principles and create her notions. To tell Ursula about his idea, Alan called me on the pretext of going to the cinema together. After the film (I can’t remember which one), he shared his idea.

– You are an absolute fool! – she replied to his offer.

– I will take you.

– Thank you, you are quite thoughtful. Might we have a baby and take him with us? Or better, I will become pregnant and give birth right there – he will be the first child born abroad. I like your aspirations not to become a bore but don’t be an idiot – at least you need a decent plan.

– We’ll do it. See, it is our possibility to wade to the unknown. People have strived for that in all times. Right now in front of us is a phenomenon which has already changed lives of all people, and if we don’t learn to be friends with it, to understand it, we will all soon die of boredom. We will build an ideal society of idiots. How can one think of an ideal society when we are on verge of a super-breakthrough? Especially when the government gives money to anybody who wants to go there.

After the film we were sitting in a small café. Observing Alan, when he was presenting Ursula his points, I felt uneasy of my presence next to their electric looks. And I thought that the birth of “divine” and “cosmic” in a man’s mind has the same way as giving a woman her mental shape. In a man’s mind, a woman is always in the process of evolution and objectification – in the process very similar to art, so a man, to a greater degree, creates but not perceives a woman. At first, he senses only a light spirit of dissimilarity between these angels and his own vicious entity, which, contrary to fallacy, is shown since infancy. A woman’s spirit has no body, or rather, a woman’s body shell is only its temporary shelter as well as her clothes, environment in which she lives, and so, a man gives the same sensual look to many women, seeing nothing reprehensible in it and being afraid to enter the area of any of them, not to induce his own vice in his own fantasies. Studying his fixations, a man loses his will, so what we call “vice” starts to live its own life, assembling a wonder-woman as a Florentine mosaic – from different parts of woman’s ontology. But gradually, a particular woman begins to form its own material planet in a man’s mind, which leads to a light gradient between the perceptions of different women, starting to manifest its difference between various soul angels. And here emerge nagging disadvantages, which deprive particular women of their female spirit, and they immediately fall into the world where our material vice lives, so the objectification of female passes through the research of the women who a man doesn’t like – a man protects his angel’s image for a long time from these whores of the material world, that’s why he wastes his quite real time on unworthy women (with his actions or thoughts), but finds this image only in details unable to assemble the wholesome fantasy. Gradually, a man ceases to have energy for the continuous and creative task, which paves the way for the dependence on particular relics, who jealously protect a female spirit in the very woman’s body and behaviour – these relics exist due to the difference from a man’s anthropology, so, a man has literally “kind” feelings to the tags of femininity, but eventually, every woman is objectified because of the presence of the human in her – simple wishes, jealousy and other vicious thoughts, as our human is initially connected not to high ideals but to vices, so any human community unites on the basis of common vices but not aims. This process of objectification happens continuously and with each perceived woman, so “an angel” stops being an aim and becomes a method of a woman’s perception – a benchmark for those women whom he likes, and gradually such criteria as “she was charming” step to the background if they don’t satisfy a man’s fetish, because a vice is a vessel for fantasy, which ceases immediately as soon as a man starts to perceive a woman-person (a woman’s main enemy to a man’s mind). A man can quite satisfy himself with such a woman but only temporarily – as well as with flashes of comprehension, which give us motivation to change only for a short period. Desire is not an aim but a milestone that triggers our thoughts and they, languishing in our mind, invent complicated ways to satisfaction, and when we try to reject our vicious desires, we actually return to our initial desire, which demands not satisfaction but maintenance. Isn’t it the same with divine?

Afraid to lose the draft of thought and deciding to interrupt their argument a little, I asked for paper and a pen, and Ursula gave me her sketchbook which Alan had presented to her trying to make her show her creative spirit, and unexpectedly for me, Alan snatched it from her hands – I had never noticed such sharp movements in him, but I definitely understood that it was the time for me to leave. Only a few days later I learned from Alan that the beginning of this project became the end of their relationship but it didn’t influence his wild intention.

After what happened to Alan, Ursula told me for the first time that he had been beating her, and once again I became assured that violence is not flapping arms. To me, thoughts about mind and violence always went side by side, and I think that the thoughts of violence have more metaphysical nature than people tend to think. These ponderings were caused by my observations that fighting people in a bar do not spread so much violence as a person who quietly weaves inner jealousy towards everybody but shows nothing with the actions. On the contrary, such a person is often courteous as was Alan.

– I think violence can never be justified. Never – even protecting close people. If you want to protect them, you should run away from any signs of violence but not to show protection when you are cornered… You know, he sometimes beat me.

– Why haven’t you ever told me about it?

– Because he was a good man. One day we were in a restaurant and he told me: “If I ever cheat on you, she wouldn’t be this kind of a chick. Nothing can be more stupid than a farm chick. I’d better sleep with a Boucheme’s bust, it seems to have more life”. He meant the students celebrating their graduation and behaving provocatively.

Ursula was crying while she was speaking, and I thought how women’s tears are different from men’s – a woman always cries about an unrealized reality and a man cries about a shattered dream. Walking along the street with her, I looked at the habitual environment, but Ursula’s tears coloured my soul even more than the rain. But no matter how habitual the word “soul” is, which we use in totally different contexts, we are quite far from understanding some rich vastness of our own depths, having a mixed nature of two substances: cosmic and our own – this mixture hints at the content of our thoughts, aspirations, feelings, which, on the one hand, are ultimately close to us, on the other hand, do not belong to us at all. And probably this formula is the best definition of ourselves with our intrinsic content, which bears the spirit of the wholesome space but not its dissolving parts, to which we got used to due to our imperfection – and for a fleeting moment it became clear to me that all the living was born beyond the space and then was mixed and put here. Some short time later, this moment of comprehension left only a dry formula: “was born beyond the space…” – generally meaningless because I can peer into this combination of words infinitely but cannot develop that short moment of comprehension – it should be looked for again.