A knock sounded at the door.
My last image was of the girl trying with trembling fingers to press the recalcitrant lenses back against her eyes.
A minute later I was on my way down the stairs. I felt as though I had tripped over a corpse in the dark.
I left. Forever. In vain did she try to overtake me with a letter; its jumping lines begged me to forget something and promised with a naïve simplicity to “always remember.” Yes, remembering me always in my new corpse-like condition could prove useful, but . . . as I searched her letter, word by word, I knew that the glassily transparent cold in me would not abate.
With particular care I examined my name on the envelope. Yes, nine letters, all calling to me. I heard them. But I would not answer.
It was then, I remember, that the period of dead, empty days began. They had come before. And gone. But now I knew: They had come forever.
This was not a source of pain or even uneasiness. Only boredom. Or rather: boredoms. A late-eighteenth-century book I once read mentioned “Earthly Boredoms.” That’s just it. There are many of them: There is the spring boredom when identical people love identical people, when the ground is covered with puddles, the trees with green pustules. And a series of tedious autumn boredoms when the sky sheds stars, clouds shed rain, trees shed leaves, and “I’s” shed themselves.
At the time I was living not in your, forgive me, our room 24 but in an unnumbered roomlet in a small five-windowed annex in the provinces. The panes were spattered with rain. But even through the spatters I could see the trees in the garden tossing in time to the wind’s blows like people tormented by toothache. I ordinarily sat in a splayed armchair, among my books and boredoms. The boredoms were many: I had only to close my eyes and cock an ear—and I could hear them sliding lazily across the creaky floorboards, dragging their felt-shod feet.
For days on end, from dusk to dusk, I thought of myself as a biconcave creature inaccessible both outwardly and inwardly, from within and from without: Both were equally forbidden. Beyond reach.
Sometimes I too, like a tree tormented by the wind, would toss between the oak arms of my chair in time to the tedious tossing of an idea: The dead, the idea glimmered, are to be envied. Barely stiff, and down goes the lid; on top of the lid goes damp earth; on top of the damp earth, sod. And that’s that. But here, as soon as you begin bumping along in a dray, they cart you on and on like that, from pothole to pothole, through spring and winter, from one decade to the next, unmourned and unneeded.
Now, when I think back on my state then, I cannot understand how an absurd trifle to do with some pieces of glass could have so wounded and discombobulated me. I cannot understand how my soul, if indeed I still had one, could have been crushed and desoulerated by such a speck of dust. But at the time, I took that trifle as an object lesson to me from my “glassy adjunct.” Even before, my attempts to penetrate the world on the far side of my biconcave ovals had been few and fearful. If the formula natura abhorret vacuum[1] has been disproved, I now know why its converse—vacuum abhorret naturam[2]—has yet to come under attack. I think it will prevail.
Be that as it may, I ceased all attempts to enter my outside. All those passes at friendship, experiments with another person’s “I,” endeavors to give or take love—I must, I thought, forget and renounce them once and for all. For some time I had been mentally constructing a flattened little world in which everything would be in my here—a little world that one could lock away inside one’s room.
Space, I reasoned while still in earliest youth, is absurdly vast and has expanded—with its orbits, stars, and yawning parabolas—to infinity. But if one tucks it inside numbers and meanings, it will easily fit on two or three bookshelves. I have long preferred the narrow margins of books to the monotonous miles of earthly fields; the spine of a book has always seemed more intelligent to me than confused lectures about “the roots of things”; the sheer accumulation of those things, everywhere one looks, strikes me as crude and meaningless compared to the wise and subtle concatenations of letters and symbols hidden in books. Though the lines in books deprived me of half of my eyesight (55 percent), I never resented them: They knew too well how to be meek and dead. Only they, those silent black signs, could deliver me, however briefly, from my importunate, listless, and sleepy boredoms. It was then, while finishing up at the Institute of Oriental Studies, that I became completely absorbed in the painstaking work of my dissertation: The Letter “T” in Turkic Languages.
I still feel deeply indebted to that little two-handled “T” for the trouble it took and the help it gave me during that black lightless time. That “T” led my eyes from lexicon to lexicon, down long columns of words, never letting me sink for even a second into oblivion; that tiny, black-bodied letter stirred up the dust on my books, showed me tangled paragraphs in old glossaries and collections of syntagms. Sometimes, in an effort to amuse me, it would play hide-and-seek: I would hunt for that tiny sign, twirling my pencil along the lines and down the margins of a book, until I found it hidden in among other letters and symbols. Sometimes I even smiled at this. That’s right, I smiled. But the companion of my leisure could be of greater comfort still. “You see, ‘I’ is just a letter,” the “T” would say, “just like me. That’s all it is. Is it worth grieving over? Here and gone.”
I remember that then, between things, on a lark, I took up the philology of “I.” My notes—if only they aren’t lost—must still be in a folder somewhere. But I haven’t time to look for them now. I quote from memory (inaccurately, I’m afraid): “‘I’ has a changeable root, but always a short phoneme. I-ich-moi-я-yo-ἐγῴ-io-ego-аз. One can hypothesize the process of its shortening, or ‘contraction.’ Most likely, it is the result of ordinary speech patterns. Phonetically, however, much remains unclear. Incidentally, a count of the word ‘ich’ in Stirner showed that nearly 25 percent of the text consists of ‘ich’ (and its derivatives). Keep that up, and soon the whole text will be one continuous ‘I.’ Yet if one searches life, is there much ‘I’ in it?”
Come dusk the bustling “T” would go exhausted to bed, usually under a bookmark, while I, so as not to disturb it, would pace from corner to corner in the dark. And every time, I distinctly heard my soul—with a high thin tinkle, drop by drop—dissolving in the emptiness. The drops were rhythmic and ringing, they had that same familiar glassy sound. This may have been a pseudo-hallucination, I don’t know: It’s all the same to me. But at the time I gave this phenomenon a special name: psychorrhea. Meaning “soul seepage.”
Sometimes that measured flight—drop by drop—into the emptiness even frightened me. I would turn on the light and shoo both the dusk and the pseudo-sound away. The dusk, the boredoms, the “T,” and the hallucinations would all disappear: It was then that that ultimate loneliness, known to only a few of the living, would begin, when you are left not only without others but without yourself.
There was, however, another, foreign something to disturb my black leisure. From a fairly young age, you see, I had been visited by a strange figment: 0.6 person. This figment arose as follows. One day, while leafing through a geography book, I came across this line: “In the country’s northern latitudes the population per square mile is 0.6 person.” It stuck in my mind’s eye like a splinter. I squinted and saw a flat white field stretching away past the horizon, a field divided into right-angled square miles, snow slowly falling in large, lazy flakes. And in every square, where the diagonals intersect, it, a stooped, thread-paper body bent low to the bare, ice-covered ground: 0.6 person. Exactly 0.6. Not just half, not half a person. No. A small, dissymmetrizing fillip had attached itself to “just.” The incompleteness, contradictory as this may seem, had been infiltrated by a remainder, by an “over and above.”
I tried to banish the image. It would not go. Then suddenly one of those semi-beings (I could clearly see the ones in the squares closest to my eyes) slowly began to turn toward me. I tried to avert my eyes, but I couldn’t: They seemed t
o have fused with the dead empty sockets of 0.6.
And not a blade of grass anywhere, not so much as an ice-covered rock, not a speck; only windless air and snow slowly falling in large, lazy flakes.
From then on, 0.6 person took to visiting me on my empty days. During my black intervals. This was not a ghost, a vision, or a sleepy reverie. No, it was just that: a figment.
Now, when I try to describe the accident that befell my “I” in terms more exact, I am helped by symbols of mathematical logic. A point in space may be found, they say, only by means of intersecting coordinates. But should those coordinates come apart, then . . .space is vast, while a point has no size at all. Evidently my coordinates had come apart, and to find me, a psychic point in infinity, turned out to be impossible.
Or clearer still: The theory of curves knows certain imaginary lines which, when they cross, produce a real point. True, the “reality” of this point is peculiar, out of fictions. That may well be the case with me.
In any event, I did not notify my “friends” and “acquaintances.” I did not ask for the expressions of “sympathy” due me. I did not trouble about a black border for my name. I thought only of how to inscribe that imaginary “psychic point” more firmly and reliably inside the close confines of my room’s square, far from the eyes of all those bad mathematicians incapable of distinguishing the real from the imaginary, the dead from the living. Relations, acquaintances, and even friends have an extremely poor grasp of non-obviousnesses; until a person is served up to them in a coffin as a cadaver vulgaris[3] under a trihedral lid, with two five-kopeck coins over the eyes, they will go on obtusely pestering that person with their condolences, questions, and traditional “how do you dos.”
After graduating from the institute, I moved to Moscow and began studying pure mathematics at the university. I never finished. One day, on my way home from the main library with a four-volume dictionary of philosophy (Gogotsky’s) under my arm, I was passing down a long, vaulted corridor when my path was blocked by a crush of students jamming the entrance to a lecture hall. For a political meeting, evidently. Someone’s head stuck up out of the crowd and screamed in a strange birdlike voice, craning a blue-collared neck: “Anyone who doesn’t belong should leave. Everyone else into the lecture hall.”
The words “doesn’t belong” hobbled my legs. Clutching my dictionary volumes to my chest, I squeezed into the hall. The doors closed. First came long, obscure speeches. Then a short word: police. The dictionary was suddenly unbearably heavy in my arms. They took our names and escorted us—between bayonets—to the Manège. Another door closed. I felt more and more bewildered. The excitement all round me had clearly subsided. Some faces looked almost abject.
I was bored. The minutes crawled by on the wall clock. The door would not open. I opened my dictionary. A sort of bibliographical curiosity from the mid-nineteenth century. My eye immediately fell upon the word ethics.
Then I understood: This old dictionary was an intelligent conversationalist. Well, of course, only old-fashioned and less-than-intelligible ethics could have shut me up inside a manège with all these people for whom I had no use.
Now, on reviewing my memories, I see that my thinking was flawed by a fatal miscalculation, a stubborn mistake that I persisted in making time and again: I considered everything that took place under my frontal bone to be absolutely unique. I conceived of psychorrhea in only one specimen. I never suspected that the process of mental deadening could be creeping—from skull to skull, from an individual to a group, from a group to a class, from a class to an entire social organism. Hiding my half existence behind the opaque walls of my skull, concealing it like a shameful disease, I did not consider the simple fact that the same thing could be occurring under other skullcaps, in other locked rooms.
The other day, while leafing through Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii by Herberstein, who visited Russia in the early sixteenth century, I found this sentence: “Some of them derive the name of their country from the Aramaic word Ressaia or Resissaia, which means: dispersion by drops.”
If those “some” existed so long ago, then, multiplying from century to century, they must gradually have seized hold of all the levers and signaling devices of that “life.” They saw Russia—and forced others to see it—as Ressaia: a spattering of isolated drops. Over long decades of stultifying work, they perfected and refined their technique of splintering society until they had either destroyed or numbed the connective tissue knitting its cells into one. We lived like separated drops. Like waifs. In 1893 a new University Statute tried to break us down into separate “visitors.” A century before that Chelishchev noted the emergence of products of mental dissociation: He wrote about the “stay-in-their-studies.” It is we, members of the last-born generation, who evolved the philosophical principle about someone else’s “I”: The “I” that isn’t mine is seen as foreign and foreign-born, irreducible to you. People-drops know neither channels nor currents. For them, “I” and “we” are separated by gulfs. Gulfs into which successive generations of social waifs have fallen. They need only be buried. And forgotten.
Now I understand: Any “I” not nourished by “we,” not umbilically attached to the maternal organism enveloping its small life, cannot begin to be itself. Even the mollusk hidden inside tight-shut valves, if one helps those valves by binding them with a tight metal band, will die.
But at the time we were unable to fully grasp this thought because our very thinking was deformed; the routes of our logics had been severed.
A thought thought either no further than “I” or no closer than the “cosmos.” On reaching the “threshold of consciousness,” the line between “I” and “we,” it would stop and either turn back or take a monstrous leap into “the starry beyond”—the transcendent—“other worlds.”
Sight had either a microscopic or a telescopic radius: Whatever was too far for the microscope and too close for the telescope was simply lost to sight, and not included in any way by anyone in the field of vision.
It’s nearly dawn. I’m tired. I must stop for now. All around me, both through the walls and out the window, it is particularly quiet and still. My insomnias have taught me to make sense of the movements of nighttime minutes. Long ago I noticed that when the night is nearly gone, when a dark blue glimmer clings to the window and the stars go blind, there is always a particularly profound hush. As now, dimly through the frozen panes (I’ve put out the light), I can see in the dark blue gloom the dark steep slopes of roofs, exactly like the upturned hulls of sunken ships. And below them, rows of mute, black holes. Lower still, the bare, ice-covered branches of stunted city trees. Empty streets. And windless air steeped in deadness and silence. Yes, this is my hour: At such an hour I shall probably . . .
The text broke off in mid-sentence. The next seven lines had been carefully crossed out. Shtamm skipped over the inky parallels and went on reading. Through the wall a clock struck four.
THE SECOND NIGHT
All that playing at peacemaking might have gone on and on if not for the cannons that started to pound. At first the cannons hit somewhere far away, hit those people. Then they began pounding near at hand, pounding these people. And when the cannons had finished pounding, the stamping devices started to pound. The work of muzzles left round black craters around bodies; the stamps hit not people but their names. Even so, around their names, as around the broken bodies, were blue and black circles.
Chance threw me up on a southern beachhead. The city in which I lived changed hands thirteen times. Regimes came. And went. And returned. And left again. And with every regime came cannons and stamping devices.
That’s when it happened, on the eve of another regime change, as I was sifting through a heap of old and new “identity cards,” I noticed that something was missing: my identity.
Of the cards there were quantities. But my identity had disappeared. Not a copy anywhere. I must have overlooked it: That was my first thought.
But after s
orting through all that stamporated junk a second time, paper by paper, I still could not find my “identity.” I had expected this. The more they made certain of my identity, the less certain I became of it myself: My old half-forgotten illness, psychorrhea, jogged by the blows of the stamping devices, was returning. The more often the ragged Remington lines assured me with a number, ornate signatures, and a seal that I really was so-and-so, the more suspicious I became of my “reality,” the more keenly I sensed in myself both this person and that. Little by little I developed a passion, a craving for more and more stamporated forms. But no matter how many I amassed, I still felt uncertain. The nearly staunched process had recommenced; the caverns in my “I” had again begun to yawn. With each new stamp my sense of myself grew weaker. I—and I—half I—barely I—slightly I: it was melting away.
The feeling experienced by me then, poring over that pile of my stamporated names, was not one of despair or grief. Rather it was a sort of bitter joy. “Here lies,” the thought occurred, “my cold and dead name. It was alive. But now, lo and behold, it is riddled with stamp holes. So be it.”
As you, the person in room 24, can see, your predecessor has nothing against a good joke. Even the thought of my impending manipulation of hook and noose cannot keep me from smiling. Yes, I’m smiling and, who knows, perhaps not for the last time. But this is only a sketch: from—to. The material about the war will, of course, require a more detailed and serious exposition. I’ll begin:
One July night in 1914 I was working on an article about “The Axiomatism Crisis” when I suddenly heard a clattering of carts. Our side street, as you’ll soon see, is quiet and deserted. The sound bothered me: I put my manuscript aside, preferring to wait out the noise. But it would not cease. A train of empty wagons, wheels banging against the cobbles, was rattling past below and preventing the silence from closing in. My nerves were slightly ajangle from writing. I didn’t want to sleep. But I couldn’t work. I put on my coat and went out. The nighttime zigzags of our back streets seemed strangely animated. Excited people were bunched on street corners all talking at once. Over and again I heard the word “war.”
Autobiography of a Corpse Page 3