Rose thorns punctured kerchiefs, and the tame bear cub with the grey snout of some ancient Russian, of some dunce-capped Ivan the Fool, squealed, and his squeal cut through glass. Brand-new automobiles kept rolling up straight from the sea, and their tires sliced up the eternally green mountain . . . From underneath the bark of the palm tree they extracted a grey fiber from which they made theatrical wigs, and in the park the flowering agave plants, like candles weighing six poods, shot up a couple of inches every day.
Lei gave sermons on the mount on the danger of smoking and issued fatherly reproofs to the gardener. He once asked me a question that struck me profoundly: “What was the mood of the petty bourgeoisie in Kiev in 1919?”
I think his dream was to quote Karl Marx’s Capital in the hut of Paul and Virginie.
In my twenty-verst strolls, accompanied by silent Latvians, I developed a certain feeling for the lay of the land.
Theme: a race to the sea of gently sloping volcanic hills, joined together by a little chain—for the pedestrian.
Variation: the little green key of altitude is passed from height to height, and each new slope puts the hollow under lock.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
I visited Beria, the president of the Society of the Friends of Caucasian Letters, and was close to giving him greetings for Tartarin and the gunsmith Costecalde.
A marvelous figure from Provence!
He complained of the difficulties involved in working out the Abkhazian alphabet, and spoke with respect about that Petersburg clown, Evreinov, who had been seduced in Abkhazia by the cult of the goat, and complained about not being able to obtain any serious scientific studies because of the distance from Tiflis.
The hardheaded knocking together of billiard balls is just as pleasant to men as the clicking of ivory knitting needles is to women. The bandit-cue would devastate the pyramid, and a quartet of epic heroes from Blücher’s army, resembling each other like brothers, serving on the duty roster, with an air of precision about them and a bulb of laughter in their chests, exclaimed with pleasure over the charm of the game.
And the old men, Party members, didn’t lag behind them.
From the balcony, through army binoculars, you could get a clear view of the track and the stands on a swampy parade ground the color of billiard cloth. Once a year there are great horse races to test the endurance of anyone who wants to compete.
A cavalcade of biblical elders would follow the boy who won.
Relatives scattered around the many versts of the ellipse would deftly pass wet towels on the end of poles to the flushed horsemen.
In a distant swamp meadow a lighthouse would keep turning like the Tate diamond.
And somehow I saw the dance of death, the wedding dance of phosphorescent insects. At first it seemed as if the tips of very thin little cigarettes that kept wandering about were being puffed to a glow, but their flourishes were too daring, free, and bold.
The devil knows where they were heading!
Coming closer: insane electrified ephemera, twitching, tracing, devouring the black hack-work in print at the present moment.
Our heavy fleshly body decays in just the same way, and our activity will turn into just such a pandemonium of signals gone amuck, if we do not leave behind us substantial proof of our existence.
It is frightening to live in a world that consists only of exclamations and interjections!
Bezymensky,12 strong man lifting cardboard weights; round-headed, gentle, inkstained blacksmith—no, not blacksmith, bird-vender—no, not even birds—the balloons of RAPP—he was forever stooping, humming, and swacking people with his blue eyes.
An inexhaustible operatic repertoire gurgled in his throat. His open-air-concert, mineral-water heartiness never left him. A lounger, with a mandolin in his soul, he lived on the string of a ballad, and his heart’s core sang under a phonograph needle.
THE FRENCH
And here I stretched my vision and sank my eye into the wide goblet of the sea, so that every mote and tear should come out of it.
I stretched my vision like a kid glove, stretched it on a board,13 out onto the blue neighborhood of the sea.
I swiftly and rapaciously and with a feudal frenzy inspected the demesnes of my eye’s measure.
In such a way one puts one’s eye into a wide goblet full to the brim so that a mote will come out.
And I began to understand the binding force of color—the fervor of sky-blue and orange T-shirts—and that color is nothing other than a sense of the start of a race, a sense tinged by distance and locked into its size.
Time circulated in the museum according to the hourglass. A brick-colored trickle ran, the goblet was emptied, but then the same golden stream of a dust storm from the upper part of the glass into the lower.
Hello, Cézanne! Good old grandfather! Marvelous worker. Best acorn of the forests of France.
His painting was certified on the oak table of a village notary. He is incontestable, like a will made in sound mind and firm memory.
But what captivated me was the old man’s still life. Roses that must have been cut in the morning, full-fleshed and rolled tight, unusually young tea roses. Exactly like scoops of rich vanilla ice cream.
On the other hand, I took a dislike to Matisse, an artist for the rich. The red paint of his canvases fizzes like soda. He is not privy to the joy of ripening fruits. His powerful brush does not heal the vision, but gives it the strength of an ox, so that the eyes become bloodshot.14
I’ve had enough of this carpet chess and these odalisques!
Persian whimseys of a Parisian maître!
The cheap vegetable pigments of Van Gogh were bought by calamitous accident for twenty sous.
Van Gogh spits blood like a suicide in a cheap hotel. The floorboards in the night café are tilted and stream like a gutter in their electric madness. And the narrow trough of the billiard table looks like the trough of a coffin.
I never saw such barking colors!
And his streetcar-conductor’s vegetable-garden landscapes! The soot of suburban trains has just been wiped from them with a wet rag.
His canvases, smeared with the omelette of catastrophe, are as clear as visual aids, as the charts in a Berlitz school.
The visitors move about with little steps as though in church.
Each room has its own climate. In Claude Monet’s room there is river air. Looking at the water painted by Renoir, you feel blisters on your palm as if you’d been rowing.
Signac invented the corn-colored sun.
The woman who explains the pictures leads the culture and education officials behind her.
To look at them, you’d say a magnet was attracting a duck.
Ozenfant worked out something surprising by using red chalk and slate-grey squirrels on a black slate background and modulating the forms of glass blowing and fragile laboratory equipment.
You would also be greeted by Picasso’s dark-blue Jew and Pissarro’s raspberry-grey boulevards, flowing like the wheels of an immense lottery with their little boxes of hansom cabs, their fishing-pole-whips pitched on their shoulders, and the shreds of splashed brain on the kiosks and chestnut trees.
But perhaps you’ve had enough?
Generalization is already waiting, bored, at the door.
To anyone recuperating from the harmless plague of naïve realism I would recommend the following method of looking at pictures.
Under no circumstances go in as if into a chapel. Don’t be thrilled or chilled, and don’t get glued to the canvas . . .
With a stroller’s stride, as on a boulevard—straight on!
Cut through the large heat waves of the space of oil painting.
Calmly, without getting excited—the way Tatar children bathe their horses in Alushta—lower your eye into what will be for it a new material environment—and remember that the eye is a noble, but stubborn, animal.
Standing before a picture to which the body heat of your vision has still not a
djusted itself, for which the crystalline lens has not yet found the single suitable accommodation, is exactly like singing a serenade in a fur coat behind a double set of windows.
When that equilibrium has been attained, and only then, begin the second stage of restoring the picture, the washing of it, removing its old peel, its outer and most recent barbaric layer, the stage that links it, as it does every work of art, to a sunny, solid reality.
With its extremely subtle acidic reactions, the eye, an organ that possesses its own acoustics, augmenting the value of the image, exaggerating its own achievements to a degree that offends the senses and then making a great fuss over it, raises the picture to its own level; for painting is much more a matter of internal secretion than of apperception, that is, of external perceiving.
The material of painting is organized in such a way that nobody altogether loses, and that is its distinction from nature. But the probability of a lottery is inversely proportional to its feasibility.
And it is only here that the third and final stage of entering a picture begins—confronting the intention behind it.
And that traveler, the eye, presents his ambassadorial credentials to the consciousness. And then a cold agreement is reached between the viewer and the picture, something rather like a state secret.
From the embassy of painting I went out into the street.
Right after having left the Frenchmen, the light seemed to me the phase of a waning eclipse, while the sun itself was wrapped in silver foil.
At the entrance of the cooperative stood a mother with her son. The boy was emaciated, respectful. Both were in mourning. The woman was sticking a bunch of radishes into her reticule.
The end of the street, as if crushed by a pair of binoculars, swerved off into a squinting lump; and all of this—distant and deceptive [lipovyi]15—was stuffed into a string bag.
AROUND THE NATURALISTS
Lamarck fought sword in hand for the honor of living nature. Do you think he reconciled himself to evolution as easily as did the scientific barbarians of the nineteenth century? But I think embarrassment for nature burnt the swarthy cheeks of Lamarck. He could not forgive nature for a trifle called the variability of species.
Forward! Aux armes! Let us wash ourselves clean of the dishonor of evolution.
Reading the taxonomists (Linnaeus, Buffon, Pallas) has a soothing effect on the disposition, straightens out the eye, and communicates to the soul a mineral quartz tranquillity.
Russia as depicted by that remarkable naturalist Pallas: peasant women distill the dye “mariona” from a mixture of birchleaves and alum; the bark of the linden tree peels off on its own to become bast, to be woven into shoes and baskets; the peasants use a thick petroleum as medicinal oil; the Chuvash girls jingle with trinkets in their tresses.
Whoever does not love Haydn, Gluck, and Mozart will never understand a thing in Pallas.
He transformed the corporeal roundness and graciousness of German music to the Russian plains. With the white hands of a Konzertmeister he collects Russian mushrooms. Damp chamoisskin, decayed velvet, but when you break it open, it’s a pure, deep blue.
Let us speak of the physiology of reading. It is a rich, inexhaustible, and, it would seem, forbidden theme. Out of everything material, of all physical bodies, a book is the object that inspires man with the greatest confidence. A book established on a reading stand is like a canvas stretched on a frame.
When we are completely rapt in the activity of reading, we mainly admire our generic properties, we feel a kind of exaltation at the classification of our own various stages.
But if Linnaeus, Buffon, and Pallas colored my mature years, it is the whale I thank for having awakened in me a childish astonishment at science.
In the zoological museum: drip . . . drip . . . drip . . . Practically nothing in the way of empirical experience.
Time to turn off that tap!
Enough!
I have concluded a truce with Darwin and placed him on my imaginary bookstand next to Dickens. If they should happen to dine together, Mr. Pickwick would join them as a third. One can’t help being taken by Darwin’s good nature. He is an unintentional humorist. The humor of situation is habitual to him, accompanies him wherever he goes.
But is good nature a method of creative cognition, a worthy means of life-probing?
In Lamarck’s reversed, descending movement down the ladder of living creatures, there is a greatness worthy of Dante. The lower forms of organic existence are the hell of humanity.
The long grey antennae of this butterfly had a bristly structure and looked just like the little branches on a French academician’s collar or like the silver palm fronds placed on a coffin. The powerful thorax is shaped like a little boat. The slight head is like a kitten’s.
Its wings with their big eyes were made of the fine old silk of an admiral who had been both at Cesme and Trafalgar.
And suddenly I caught myself wildly desiring to have a look at nature through the painted eyes of that monster.
Lamarck feels the gaps between species. He hears the pauses and the syncopation in the evolutionary series.
Lamarck wept his eyes out over his magnifying glass. In natural science he is the only Shakespearean figure.
Look—that blushing, semirespectable old man goes running down the staircase of living creatures like a young man who has just been treated kindly at an audience with a government minister or made happy by his mistress.
No one, not even the most inveterate mechanist, regards the growth of an organism as resulting from the variability of the external environment. That would be entirely too presumptuous. The environment merely invites the organism to grow. Its functions are expressed in a certain benevolence which is gradually and continually canceled by the severity that holds the living body together and finally rewards it with death.
So, for the environment, the organism is probability, desire, and expectancy. For the organism, the environment is a force that invites. Not so much a surrounding cover as a challenge.
When the conductor draws a theme out of the orchestra with his baton, he is not the physical cause of the sound. The sound is already there in the score of the symphony, in the spontaneous collusion of the performers, in the crowdedness of the auditorium, and in the structure of the musical instruments.
Lamarck’s animals are out of fables. They adapt themselves to the conditions of life. In the manner of La Fontaine. The legs of the heron, the neck of the duck and the swan, the tongue of the anteater, the asymmetrical or symmetrical structure of the eyes in certain fish.
It was La Fontaine, if you wish, who prepared the way for Lamarck’s doctrine. His overly clever, moralizing, judicious beasts made splendid living material for evolution. They had already apportioned its mandates among themselves.
The artiodactylous reasoning of the mammals clothes their fingers with rounded horn.
The kangaroo moves with the leaps of his logic.
This marsupial in Lamarck’s description of weak forelimbs (i.e., limbs that have reconciled themselves to their own uselessness); strongly developed hind extremities (i.e., convinced of their own importance); and a powerful thesis called the tail.
Children have already settled down to play in the sand at the pedestal of the evolutionary theory of Grandfather Krylov, that is, so to speak, Lamarck-La Fontaine. Once having found a refuge in the Luxembourg Gardens, Lamarck’s theory grew cluttered with balls and shuttlecocks.
And I love it when Lamarck deigns to be angry and smashes to smithereens all that Swiss pedagogical boredom. Into the concept of “nature” there bursts the Marseillaise!
Male ruminants butt foreheads. They have no horns as yet.
But an inner feeling, born of anger, directs “fluids” to the forehead, which aid in forming a substance of horn and bone.
I take off my hat. I let the teacher go first. May the youthful thunder of his eloquence never fade!
“Still” and “already” are the t
wo bright points of Lamarckian thought, the throbbings of evolutionary glory and emblazoning, the signalmen and advance scouts of morphology. He was one of that breed of old piano-tuners who jingle with bony fingers in other people’s mansions. He was permitted only chromatic notes and childish arpeggios.
Napoleon allowed him to tune up nature, because he regarded it as imperial property.
In Linnaeus’ zoological descriptions, one can’t miss the successive relationship to, and a certain dependence on, the menagerie of the county fair. The proprietor of the wandering show booth or the hired barker tried to show their merchandise at its best. These barkers never dreamed they would play a certain role in the origin of the style of classical natural science. There they were, lying all out, talking rot on an empty stomach; yet at the same time they couldn’t resist being carried away by their own art. Some demon would save them, but also their professional experience, and the lasting tradition of their craft.
As a child in small-town Uppsala, Linnaeus could not have failed to visit the fair or listen with delight to the line of patter offered in the wandering menagerie. Like boys everywhere, he went numb and melted before the savvy bloke with the jackboots and whip, that doctor of fabulous zoology, who would shower praises on the puma as he brandished his huge red fists.
In linking the important accomplishments of the Swedish naturalist to the eloquence of the carnival loudmouth, I have not the least intention of belittling Linnaeus. I wish only to remind my reader that the naturalist, too, was a professional storyteller, a public demonstrator of new and interesting species.
The colorful portraits of animals in Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae might well hang beside pictures of the Seven Years’ War or an oleograph of the Prodigal Son.
Linnaeus painted his monkeys in the tenderest colonial colors. He would dip his brush in Chinese lacquers, and he would paint with brown and red pepper, with saffron, olive oil, and cherry juice. And he managed his task with dexterity and gaiety, like a barber shaving the Bürgermeister, or a Dutch housewife grinding coffee on her lap in a big-bellied coffee mill.
Osip Mandelstam Page 24