And I saw a house, like winter, diving.
And I saw a swallow signifying a garden
where the shadows of trees like branches make sound,
where the branches of trees are like shadows of the mind.
I heard music’s monotonous gait,
I tried to catch the boat of words.
I tested the word in ice and in fire,
but the hours drew in tighter and tighter.
And the poison reigning inside me
wielded power like an empty dream.
Once upon a time.
◆◆◆
Before every word I put the question: what does it mean, and over every word I place the mark of its tense. Where is my dear soul Masha, and where are her wretched hands, and her eyes and other parts? Where does she wander murdered or alive? I haven’t the strength. Who? I. What? Haven’t the strength. I’m alone as a candle. I’m seven minutes past four alone, 8 minutes past four as, nine minutes past four a candle, 10 minutes past four. A moment is gone as if it had never been. And four o’clock also. The window, also. But everything remains the same.
It gets dark, it gets light, not a dream to be had,
where’s the sea, where’s the shade, the notebook, the word,
one hundred and fifty-five is nearly at hand.
◆◆◆
Svidersky. A road stands before you. And behind you lies the same path. You stood, you stopped for a quick instant, and you, and all of us, saw the road before you. But just then we all went and turned onto our backs, I mean backward, and we saw you, road, and we surveyed you, path, and all of us, all as one, declared it was right. This was a feeling—this was the blue organ of the senses. Now let’s take a minute ago, or estimate a minute ahead. Whether we spin around or look over our shoulder, we can’t see these minutes. One of them, the one that has passed, we remember. The other, a point in the future, we imagine. A tree lies flat, a tree hangs, a tree flies. I cannot determine which. We cannot cross it out, nor can we touch it. I do not trust memory or imagination. Time is the only thing that does not exist outside us. It devours everything that exists outside us. Here falls the night of the mind. Time rises over us like a star. Let’s throw back our mental heads, that is, our minds. Look, time is now visible. It rises over us like zero. It turns everything into zero. (Our last hope is that Christ has Risen.)
That Christ has Risen is our last hope.
◆◆◆
All that I am trying to write here about time is, strictly speaking, untrue. There are two reasons for this. 1) Any person who has in the least bit not understood time—and only one who has not understood it has understood it even a little—must cease to understand everything else that exists. 2) Our human logic and our language do not in any way correspond to time, neither in its elementary nor in its complex understanding. Our logic and our language skid along the surface of time.
And yet, perhaps one can try and write something, if not about time—nor the non-understanding of time—then at the very least to try to fix those few positions of our superficial experience of time, and, on the basis of these, the way into death and broad non-understanding may become clear.
If we experience wild non-understanding, we will know that no one shall counter it with clarity. Woe to us pondering time. But then, with the expansion of this non-understanding, it will become clear to you and me that there is no woe, no us, no pondering, and no time.
I. TIME AND DEATH
It is not once that I have felt and understood or not understood death. Here are three incidents which have firmly remained with me.
1. I was sniffing ether in the bathroom. Suddenly everything changed. Where there had been a door, an exit, the fourth wall appeared, from which my mother hung hanged. I recalled then that this was precisely the death foretold as my own. Never had anybody foretold my death. A miracle becomes possible at the moment of death. It becomes possible because death is the stopping of time.
2. In prison I had a dream. A small courtyard, a field, a platoon of soldiers, they are about to hang someone, a Negro it seems. I experience great fear, horror and despair. I ran. And as I ran down the road I understood that I had nowhere to run. Because time ran with me and stood still with the condemned man. And if we imagine its area, it’s like one big chair on which he and I will sit down simultaneously. Afterward, I’ll stand up and walk on, but he won’t. But still we had been sitting on the same chair.
3. Another dream. I was walking with my father and either he told me or I realized it myself: that today in an hour and 1 ½ they will hang me. I understood, I experienced a stop. And that something arrived, finally and for real. Something that has really occurred, that’s what death is. Everything else is not something that has occurred. It’s not even something that is occurring. It’s a bellybutton, the shadow of a leaf, it’s a skid on the surface.
II. SIMPLE THINGS
Let us think about simple things. We say: tomorrow, today, evening, Thursday, month, year, during the course of the week. We count the hours in a day. We point to their increase. Earlier, we saw only half the day, now we have noticed the movement within the whole of the day. But when the next day comes, we begin counting the hours anew. Of course we do add a one to the number of days. But then 30 or 31 days go by, then quantity turns into quality, it stops growing. The name of the month changes. Still, we do act more honestly as regards the years. Nonetheless, in the case of time, its addition differs from all other addition. You can’t compare three months you lived through to three trees that have grown again. The trees are right there, their leaves glimmer dimly. Of months you can’t say the same with confidence. The names of minutes, seconds, hours, days, weeks, and months distract us from even our superficial understanding of time. All these names are analogous either to objects, or to concepts and measures of space. As a result, a week gone by lies before us like a killed deer. It would be so only if time served to count space, only if this were like double-entry bookkeeping. If time were a mirror image of objects. In reality, objects are feeble mirror images of time. There are no objects. Go on, try and grab them. If you erase the numbers from a clock, if you forget the false names, maybe then time would want to show us its quiet torso, to appear to us in its full glory. Let the mouse run over the stone. Count only its every step. Only forget the word every, only forget the word step. Then each step will seem a new movement. Then, since you rightfully will have lost your ability to perceive a series of movements as something whole, which you had wrongly called step (you were confusing movement and time with space, you erred in superimposing them one over the other), movement as you see it will begin to break apart, it will arrive almost at zero. The shimmering will begin. The mouse will start to shimmer. Look around you: the world is shimmering (like a mouse).
III. VERBS
Verbs in our understanding exist as if all by themselves. They are like sabers and rifles piled on top of each other. When we go somewhere, we carry with us the verb to go. Our verbs are triadic. They have time. They have a past, a present, and a future. They are mobile. They are flowing, they resemble something that truly exists. Yet there isn’t a single action that has weight except for murder, suicide, and death by hanging and poison. I would note that the last hour or two before death really deserve the name of hour. That hour is something whole, something stopped, it is like a space, a world, a room, or a garden broken free from time. It can be touched. Victims of suicide and murder, you had a second like that, not an hour? Yes, a second, maybe two, maybe three, but not an hour, they say. Yet were they dense and immutable? Yes, yes.
The era of verbs is ending right in front of our eyes. In art, plot and action are vanishing. Those actions that exist in my poems are illogical and useless, they already can’t be called actions. Of a person who used to put on a hat and walk outside, we used to say: he walked outside. This was meaningless. The word walked, an incomprehensible word. But now: he put on his hat and it was getting light and the (blue) sky took off like an eagle.
Events do not coincide with time. Time has eaten the events. Not even the bones are left.
IV. OBJECTS
For us, the house has no time. For us, the forest has no time. Maybe man instinctually felt the instability, this perhaps momentary density of the material casing of objects. Even the present, that present which has long been known not to exist, its tense too he did not give to the object. It turns out that there are no houses and no skies and no forests to an even greater extent than there is no present.
When one man lived inside his own fingernail he suffered and cried and moaned. But then he noticed that there was no yesterday, no tomorrow, that there was only today. And having lived through today he said: here’s something to talk about. There is none of that today for me, nor for the man who lives in his head, nor for the man who gallops like a lunatic, for the man who drinks and eats, the man who sails on a crate, the man who sleeps on the grave of a friend. All of us have got the same thing going. Here’s something to talk about.
And he began to survey his peaceful surroundings and in the walls of the vessel of time he saw God appear to him.
V. ANIMALS
A shoddy dawn arises. The forest wakes. And in the forest in a tree on a branch, a bird gets up and starts to grumble about the stars it saw in its sleep, and with its beak it knocks on the heads of its silver chicks. And the lion and the wolf and the ferret, irritable and sleepy, lick their silver young. It, the forest, it reminds us of a cupboard filled with silver spoons and forks. Or, or, or we look and see a river flow blue with insubordination. Fish flutter around in the river with their children. They look with godlike eyes at the shining water and hunt for disdainful worms. Does the night lie in wait for them, does the day lie in wait for them? A mite thinks about happiness. The water beetle sulks. Beasts do not make use of alcohol. Beasts are bored without narcotic substances. They surrender to animal debauchery. Beasts, time sits over you. Time thinks about you, and so does God.
Beasts, you are bells. The soundface of the fox looks at its forest. Trees stand as confident as points or as quiet frost. But we will leave the forest alone, we won’t understand anything in the forest. Nature is wilting like the night. Let’s go to sleep. We are very gloomy.
VI. POINTS AND THE SEVENTH HOUR
When we lie down to sleep, we think, we say, we write: the day has passed. And come tomorrow we do not look for the day that has passed. But before we lie down we approach the day as though it hasn’t passed yet, as if it still exists, as if the day is a road we walked down, we came to the end of it and we’re tired. But we could walk back if we wanted to. All our division of time, all our art treats time in such a way as though it didn’t matter when something happened, is happening, or will happen. I felt and for the first time did not understand time in prison. I always thought that at least five days ahead is the same as about five days back. It’s like a room in which you stand in the middle, where some dog is looking into your window. You wanted to turn around and you saw a door or if not a door then a window. But if in a room there are four smooth walls, then the most you will see is death on one of the walls. I thought to test time in prison. I wanted to propose, and even proposed to my cellmate, to try to repeat the previous day exactly; in prison this should have been easy, there were no events. What there was, was time. I received my punishment in time as well. Points fly about the world, these are points of time. They settle on leaves, they descend on foreheads, they make bugs happy. A dying eighty-year-old and a dying ten-year-old, each has only a second of death. They have nothing but that. Mayflies are hundred-year-old dogs compared to them. The difference lies only in that the eighty-year-old has no future while the ten-year-old does. But even that is untrue because the future breaks apart. Because, before every new second is added, the old one vanishes. This can be depicted so:
Only the zeros shouldn’t be crossed out, but erased. And, dying, both of them have just such a momentary instantaneous future, or none of them has it, neither will nor can have it, since they are dying. Our calendar is made in such a way that we don’t feel the newness of each second. But in prison the newness of each second and, at the same time, the insignificance of this newness became clear to me. I can’t understand now, if I had been released two days earlier or later, if it would have made any difference. It becomes impossible to understand what earlier and later mean, everything becomes impossible to understand. And still the roosters crow every night. But you can’t trust your memory, witnesses get confused and make mistakes. It is never 3 o’clock twice in one night. The dead man lying here now—was he killed a minute ago and will he remain killed the day after tomorrow. Our imagination is unstable. Every hour, at least, if not every minute, should get its own number, which, with every additional unit, either increases or remains the same. Let’s say it’s the seventh hour and let it last. Then, to begin with, we must at least abolish days, weeks, and months. Then the roosters will crow at different times. The equality of the gaps between them doesn’t exist, because that which exists cannot be compared with that which no longer exists, or maybe has never existed. How do we know? We do not see the points of time, the seventh hour descends upon everything.
VII. THE SAD REMAINS OF EVENTS
Everything breaks down to its final mortal parts. Time swallows the world. I do not un
1932–1933
[M.Y.]
Stomach Rumbling During
Confession of Love
This interests me: When I am confessing my love to a fresh new woman, almost always, or rather often, my stomach starts to rumble or I get a stuffy nose. When this happens, I consider it a good omen. It means that everything is going to go well. When the rumbling begins, it’s important to cough on time. It seems best not to sigh, because then the rumbling will reach her ears. A stuffy nose also often results in characteristic noises. This is probably the consequence of nervous excitement. Why the nervous excitement? The sex act, or something like it, is an event. An event is something new, and to us otherworldly. It is of two worlds. Entering the event, it’s as if we are entering infinity. But then we quickly exit it, running. We therefore experience the event as life. And its ending as death. After it ends, everything is back in order, there’s no life and no death either. That means the nervous excitement before the event, and the resulting rumbling in the stomach or stuffy nose, happen in anticipation of promised life. Yet there’s another, specific aspect to it. Yes, the thing is that here you also have another participant, the woman. There are two of you. Otherwise, apart from this episode, you’re always alone. Actually, you’re alone here, too, but it seems at that moment, rather, before that moment, there are two of you. It seems that with a woman you won’t die, that in her there is eternal life.
1932–1933
[M.Y.]
Contracting Syphilis,
Amputated Leg, Extracted Tooth
Why am I so afraid of contracting syphilis or getting a tooth pulled? Aside from the pain and troubles, there’s also this. First of all, it brings the number sequence into your life. At this point a counting system begins. It is a more frightening counting system than the one that begins at birth. With birth you can’t remember, it happened to everyone, no one experiences the frightfulness of it, everyone celebrates it (birthdays and name-days). My stay in pretrial detention was frightening in the same way. And secondly, there’s something bad in the way that it was something unquestionably final and singular, something that occurred, something present. And that, in my understanding, also turns into a number. It can be encompassed by the number one. And one, I think, is a person’s whole life from start to finish, and normally we should only experience this one in our final moment. But here it suddenly enters within your life. This is an irremediable tragedy. A pulled tooth. At this point the external event coincides with time. You sit down in the chair. And while he’s boiling the tongs, and then taking them out, time, time, time begins to advance on you, and here comes the word suddenly, and then comes the event, filled with
foreign content. And the tooth is gone.
All this frightens me. At this point enters the word never.
1932–1933
[M.Y.]
Guest on a Horse
Horse of the steppe
runs tired,
froth drips down the equine lip.
Guest of the night,
you expired,
you suddenly vanished mid-gallop.
There was evening.
I can’t remember,
everything was black and proud.
I forgot
the existence
of words, beasts, water, and stars.
Evening was at a distance
from me, of many miles.
I heard the hoofbeat of a horse,
I didn’t understand this hoarse
message, I thought it was a test
run of an object’s transformation
from iron into word, into noise,
dream, drop of light, disaster, loss.
The door opened,
the guest entered alone.
Pain pierced
my bone.
A man bends my way
out of a man,
stares at me like an echo,
has a medal pinned on his back.
He showed me with his inverse arm:
above the river in the dark
a fish upon its legs did pass,
reflected as if in a glass.
I heard the wardrobe and the door
clearly say:
a horse’s snort.
I was sitting and I went
like a plant onto a table,
like a concept void of life,
like a feather
or a beetle
to the universal congress
of all sciences and insects,
mountains, forests,
cliffs and demons,
birds and night,
words and day.
I am glad, O guest,
Alexander Vvedensky Page 7