Mart Gorski

Sch’dy (Sk’dee)

2001

To

Contents

NOTEBOOK I

NOTEBOOK II

The Author’s Explication

NOTEBOOK I

Possession and Nothingness

11/11/95

Of furniture, I have a blue metal chair, a desk-light and a pull-out couch bought from the previous landlady during the move, a large spoon and a small one, a glass, a cup and a coffee-pot, a wall phone laid on the floor, a knife (a sting of a disputable bee from the hive of sense), a black-and-white TV set procured in T. in 1978 (brought out, it catches only one channel - PBS; taken in, it keeps silent between the immobile goods of cotton), a transistor radio acquired in T. in 1973 and tuned to 90.3 MHz (at other settings it gives static and at the one at which it works, turned off for days, it transmits irrevocability), a tray (a gift from R.,B.,S. and M.), a typewriter Smith Corona XL1900 which, when I type, I mechanically pay court to, a dish, a jar, a two-legged (meaning collegial) relationship with all that, but also some boxes (empty), a number of books, a view through the window and (unpardonable inaudible) thoughts. (In time, even that which is not furniture begins resembling it: it presents itself in the same, obstinate way).

Through the radiator slowly goes the water, flowing in a circle - only that is heard. There is no other force to interfere in this current of things. As if it, the circumference of objects, at last has won: its triumph in its roundness is swaying.

(Since to those three protagonists of a nominal anecdote about chiefs, therefore here its hearty supporters, the past weekend was the first encounter with the emptiness of the province of this land - Dayton, OH - then, to shorten the day for himself (to thoroughly reason through it), the deal maker, the primary banker, S.M., during the second move went to J.C.Penney (a department store chain) and purchased a pair of good (solid!) shoes; a talentless aspiring author (a book-keeper) of certain (even declarative!) stupidities, A.I., wearing a trench coat with a lifted collar, appeared at the local game of American football and, pompously gaping at a foreign sport and an uninteresting landscape, he spent a miserable afternoon, while another book-keeper, of some other (even trackless!) senselessnesses, F.T., carved his doubtlessly gander-like trail into the last third of the day, full of nothing but mostly shameful obedience of all three pupils. Because the day was so trifling, amidst Capitalism, even these "reformers" of Communism were speechless, and their skilled brows of dryness were raised a bit higher).

The delirious world is crumbling into a different perspective, this arrangement belongs only to me, neither possession nor liking threaten to demolish it. Who knows how long this situation will continue? In fact, it is known, it can be seen from every corner of this sterile room: this will all proceed with unbearable elasticity until, with its (red?) sign, it summons and, like a wedge in a wheel, jumps into this world order and crushes it a New Revolution - the lyrical double-verse of reductionist assault from the prose-like drifts of holism.

The thing about that is, assuming the above even happens, our quest for purpose only then begins. Yet the entire meaning will never come to hand. Alone, a man will finish his time or it will finish him. For now, a winner has not been declared although it is very well known.

* * *

11/12-15/95

The Elements: In the room, there is a smaller rather than larger coiled iron radiator, painted white, unambigously powerful. Its heating is controlled by a valve. At night I turn it off, and during the day I adjust it. Since warm water is circling through it, its flow is heard, leaking and dripping. It means that even though I am not finding my bearings in it in the best possible way yet, the three elements have already been brought into a connection: (through iron) earth, water and (through its heat) fire. With the fourth element, according to Heraclitus (540-475 B.C.), the air, the room is filled up by definition so that, living in it (the room) with all four elements in concert, that is compliably coated with them, within myself there is only the tumbling of the fifth one - the soul. (From the ancient Greece to the present, it is only the manner of residential heating which has changed). Since, however, the soul is neither a classified element nor does it fit with those four, there is nothing for it but to wrap itself around this radiator (from which it all started), to warm (fire), to steel (earth), to enter its blood stream (water), to move into the air (air). As, on the other side, this observation originated from, no matter which, the warmth of the room, it fails the exam of those who are freezing or have already frozen and, thus, themselves became the elements reaching their, ultimate degree of resolution. For them, the earth, water, fire and air are a former pastime of their icy soul. I stand up, turn off the heat by means of the valve, the cooled iron returns to the earth through ore, motionless like indispensable air in the not filled lungs of a lone man the water sensitive to cold stops without the fire in itself, the time is for a solitary dream.

* * *

Apparition and Essence: If all of this is tasked for thinking - the thoughts, accumulated, decant beyond the world and age: neither one will ponder over its self. Nonetheless, if all of this is thought of to deceive - even there a larger benefit will not arise: then, it has also fooled that which has conceived all of this.

For when I arrived here on that last day of April, Springtime had since then advanced daily and overheated all of a sudden (overnight) into Summertime which afterwards melted for a long time so that it would also suddenly soften into Fall. Autumn is now (a mid-November of leafless and darkened trees whipped with a cold rain and persistent wind), giving in to the wet snow, the short and dull day, the apogean-perigean (supremely rounded off) night through which the desolate Moon (in battle with themselves deserted and yet correct clouds of shade of silk, alleviation of nickel) shines equally coldly, completing the desciption of such prescribed occurences and landscapes.

Thus much persistent changes of seasons are thought of to trick, to have my thoughts about them divert the attention from the more significant and more unsolvable constancy of my presence here, to make me not think about it (my attendance here). Cautiously, consequently crouched, through the so-called changes of the seasons I fall carefully like along a time axis of the eternally lessened bee, having recognized its powdered hatch there before it knew my honied habitation here, however much in the appropriate manner it disguised itself into my essence and I into its apparition.

* * *

11/16-17/95

A new morning, but the sounds [someone is starting a car, a far away bird is cawing (it must be a raven or a crow - November is their season), even further away a plane is in transition from an audible to an inaudible state (as is the water, from the provisional state of the boiler to the inexorableness of the radiator), a peripheral light of a progressively paler lamp that is rustling more and more as it is slowly vanishing, the ticking of a wristwatch taken off the wrist as if it is still on it (time is drizzling from it continuously and in any circumstance)] are stripping the same substance from it as that of the previous morning, and of the one before it.

To look through the window or to not?

In either case the steady scene of the world, the operation sustaining it to present itself levitating in front of us, the spirits of the dead and the unborn and the souls of the live, the rock at sea as a silicon protrusion of inveteracy, the roar of animals through the promising glow on the Southern Continents and the pragmatism of ice on the Northern ones, the emissivity of all (of odds and ends) but, at the most, of the stupidity over the newspapers, television, movies and radio, the despair and hope, the delusion and actuality, the object and dust, the talk and silence, the movement and stillness, the departure and return, the cosmic abyss in which, in the end, all this together, along with the morning, is accomodated, through this window they see me on the inside before I see them on the outside.

* * *

Loneliness strengthens the attitude about civil and political nonsense - by the silence of residing as by the residential confirmation of exertion breaking down the head, gathering in it the smallest sign and movement of disorder and grinding it into the basic/initial dust, it keeps intact: the spine of the universe it, in fact, is.

Thus, in the very backbone of the world, there is loneliness, without doubt.

No jerk or jump of ours, shout or fracture in the soul, the ages of the neatly stacked quietness will be able to leave.

Carefully wrapping around anything which believes into deranging it, the loneliness, as the only cosmic fate, in the end turns out as the ultimate bill.

This loneliness of mine, blending into the generalized one of the universe, by no means is separated from it, its only contrast is that it does not have measure.

For the cosmic loneliness is disturbed by a lizard, bird, grass and history, and mine, between these walls, not even by that.

With Regards to Emil Cioran

11/18-19/95

On Wednesday February 22, 1995, sometime around 9:30 am, having first gone by as an otter (by what he was recognizable), then having returned suddenly (likely having seen me inside), swiftly went into my office cubicle (made of a couple of planks) the department lead F.D. (Desjardins). Approximately, he said (I noticed: agitated), "At two o’clock in the afternoon we should meet". I said O.K. foreboding that, in fact something was wrong but, on the other hand, wanting to believe, and as the hours went by, believing all the more that, nevertheless, it is a question of some new project. (The previous one I’ve just finished and it recently went into production. Therewith I achived a significant cost reduction).

Those few hours from morning until afternoon I spent, therefore, in that sort of contemplation, doing some work along the way.

At 2:00 pm he showed up and said, "Let’s go".

We went into a room, a rather small one, where he took me a couple of years earlier to inform me about laying off one of the engineers from my group, actually the best one in the group, and having recalled that, each next second I was rapidly putting myself in that past moment, feeling the same is prepared for me.

In the room there already was sitting the manager of the Human Resources, W.R. (Roy). As I stepped in and looked where to sit down, I passed by him and some papers on the desk in front of him, and in an instant on one of them I saw a date in February or March, something like that and, as it seemed to me, my name. At that moment it became clear to me that they will let me go. [During the 25 years up to then, I was unemployed a couple of other times and changed jobs on my own several times (due to distance, returning to school, or because of my professional interest) so that I had worked for a number of places].

And that was what happened. W.R. started, with the trained sepulchral voice, to prattle, while F.D., truth to say in proportion with the nature of the event, got fidgety kiddy-like although more in a sense when one is in want. I was looking at them, first at one then at the other, straight in the eyes, not believing to myself that these were those who were announcing this to me - so much their previous and present imbecility was just triumphing.

All in all, they laid me off, instructing me to pick up my belongings and leave the office by Friday, February 24, 4:00 pm. In 50 hours. [Their official explanation was that, on longer terms (until then I worked there for 3 years), my ambitions, strivings and qualifications did not match the needs of the company].

To shorten the story, I had many books and other things which I had to move out, it was a drizlly day, I went to see the foreman down in the manufacturing and borrowed a cart from him (like a sled, but on wheels), it took me many times to carry the belongings over to my car and, in as many times, to take them home.

The moving took from the morning untill the evening of the next day. (My wife was busy, my children were in school).

Having finished moving out my things and before my final departure, I sat down and to all employees (couple of hundreds of people, the first name/address: AGOETZ, the last one: TSCOTT) I sent through e-mail (02/24/95, 10:21 am) a spirit of Emil Cioran which, once earlier, I had let loose from the bottle, typing on the same keyboard "The Letter With Regards to Gorki" which, breaking in the network, they found together with the material which was calling, in general terms, for uprising against the system. I wrote and sent, therefore, the following:

"I, N., took a liberty, ladies and gentlemen, to choose from "The New Gods/Strangled Thoughts", by Emil M. Cioran, The New York Times Book Co., 1974, for this occasion, in descending order:

From page 120: "We are all deep in a hell, each moment of which is a miracle".

From page 107: "Alone, even doing nothing, you do not waste your time. You do, almost always, in company. No encounter with youself can altogether be sterile: something necessarily emerges, even if only the hope of some day meeting yourself again".

From page 92: "Confronted with this bug the size of a comma running across my desk, my first reaction was charitable: to squash it. Then, I decided to abandon the creature to its panic: what was the use of liberating it? Only, I should so much have liked to know where it was going!"

At the end I wrote, this time in Serbian and without the translation provided here, from "The Letter to the Colonel" (the subsequent part of the manuscript "Waterloo Manifestoo"), with the preparatory introduction:

"And…for those of you who understand at least one more language, and in the same order:

"Mi se ogledamo u onom sto nam se cini (We mirror ourselves in what appears to us)", pp.96.

"Nacionalizam je ocajanje obezglavljenog proletarijata (Nationalism is a despair of a headless proletariat)", pp.71.

"Kosmos, sve sto je vise lud, sve je manje (The Universe, the more insane it is, the less it is)", pp.53.

Having started to leave for home, after that one and a few more things done, I met a group of people in which there was a secretary, several engineers and some other personnel.

The secretary said: "I did not understand a bit of that, who was that Cioran, what did you want to say?".

The others kept silent and quickly dispersed.

* * *

(Diagnosis). Sunday morning. Prosit!

There is nothing to come nor has anything been finished. (Oeil de boeuf - a bull’s-eye).

(Outside, a bird is croaking as if it is being skinned. It must be one of those miniscule ones, black as this fall, nasty birds perpetually discontent. As if it does not know: di buona volontà sta pieno l’inferno).

I’ve been asking myself for a long time what other room does this one resemble?

I remembered that, most probably, it looked like a hospital room. Hôtel Dieu, due to several reasons.

First of all, it was very white, so much so that it bordered upon sterility: not only its walls, ceiling and window frames were white - the blinds were white as well (as the Eskimo dogs, Siberian dogs, the canine running to Zeitgeist - the spirit of the age, barking of concealment).

Thereupon - in it there reigned the hush and muteness, characteristic of hopeless circumstances in some hospital room.

(Iüdicium of a form, its inevitability).

Lastly - maybe with my convictions, questions and discords, due to which, after all, I’ve got into this situation, in fact I am sick and, because of that, I was sent here on some holiday, that is a cheap day as this one is, which I dreamt in chromatic white and then threw it away on account of fatigue from the glitter of that composite colour. In bianco. Ut supra. Ut infra.

* * *

11/20-21/95

Before, it was more difficult for me on weekends. It went by like that, several months until two weekends ago when I took a pen and paper and described those two days. (Describing the days, we are not failing the nights: what dazzles - blackens, what whitens - at once crumbles). I hope that this job will sustain me. (Feverish skip of doubtfulness - evangelical remark of anachronistic commissary of meaning).

When, on working days, I return to the room (now, in the late autumn, it’s already dark), I sit down on that (blue) chair, read something, or simply stare at a(n) (un)certain (salutary?) spot - leaving the writing for the next morning. I wake up early anyway (I do not sleep well), then I sit down and write, as I’m doing now. Usually, I don’t know what I’m going to write down, not even at the moment when I am starting to note it down. I put down the date and look at it with disbelief (not trusting it either!). (Of course, I'm reasoning, putting myself into the combat). While doing that, I see how the nothingness is retreating. It is going out through the window but entering back in through the door. (It’s giggling, asking to stay). I stand up and close the door: through the window I see it how, escaping, it thrusts out its tongue a little longer while it expires underneath the pen on the way to a paper full of skilled words of some deserted ancestor or, in general, of an elderly man who had gone through all of this so long ago, judging by the story which is only his, the one out of an abundance of variants, of which this one is mine, which significantly differs from the consents to a convention or disguised reconcilableness.

* * *

In a day, or two, there will be a holiday here - so-called Thanksgiving. The people have become hasty, especially about getting the traditional meal for that festive day, the turkey, and other necessities. [This past weekend (due to business, I found myself at the local airport), I hardly got a parking space. The rush of the passengers before the coming holiday was noticable: some were leaving, the others were coming in, as it happens for holidays].

Tomorrow, I will also be on the road, driving to R., S., and M. I will see if I can leave the office earlier in the afternoon because the trip is long (about 700 km), and night descends fast, so that I can drive at least for a while in daylight. B. will also arrive, for the first time this semester. We’re all rejoicing.

In the situation we’re in, the coming holiday has a larger significance than in more ordinary circumstances, concentrated on preparing a turkey dinner. (I even doubt that R., S. and M. will get it. It doesn’t mean that much to us). Maybe we’ll go to Laurel Creek park (it is not far) - there, we frequently walked for hours before. (We have the opportunity again). Since life (for the third time in the last five years) has stretched us in different directions (while fighting to keep our lives from falling into firm doubt), we will try, during this holiday, to put it together on that (like a grain of sand in the pupil of an eye) porous path through the (quasistructural) forest, as through the spasmodic reminescence full of indescribable intent for a final union according to a deep plan of rough moss between the holiday loneliness and children’s laughter underneath the streaks of a halved countryside.

* * *

11/30-12/95

It’s been ten days that I haven’t had a chance to write anything: I went from one trip to another - I should be going tomorrow too; this morning I’m grabbing the opportunity to write.

Comparing the constancy of the room with the changes of the voyage, what is realized is the fickleness of leaving after sureness of coming back.

(Ought one stay? Where and why?).

For the change of paysage, suddenly visible location of, until then unknown, landscape, dissimilar conceptions and apprehensions of local population (the soft abandonment to the stableness of fixed residence), the surrounding, nicely conceived hills and uncompromised condition of granite, the geological constants of immovable years through which (as through the pearls of a primordial state) cuts through a highway (to Northfield, VT) by a noble incision, the chilled drop of main street on which there wanders (it itself dripping) a small number of vehicles and even fewer people (Saratoga Sp., NY), several wet, left back birds which in these, last days of the actual year try to determine where is the one, once united but for a long time traitorous flock, all that, therefore, made up wrinkle of, in fact, the same scene confirms that all of this is about a Mask: a White Face of Inevitable Essence peeks underneath it (underneath the facade) at each of these accidentally seen places (it grimaces from the unseen ones) while with the White Walls of Infallible Room it victoriously puts the make up on, prepared to remove it before it falls asleep and peacefully dreams of its small and ominous wisdom that there is nothing of a voyage until it comes to be known.

* * *

Upon the (Innumerable) Return: Having returned last night (having arrived here again), and thus this morning crumbled into the mechanism of objects established earlier, there is nothing for me but the consent, however banal - like cat’s dovetailing.

(I pictured that this was, quite surely, a case more general than mine).

If we knew what was, on this day, so quietly awaiting us, we would neither travel nor return. Only one of the two would be sufficient (irreversibility as the choice before recollection).

But, in uncertainty of a result, in illusion of a correction, and mostly, in compulsion by the subsistence (a cellular politeness with the volume of a greyhound) there lies the movement: an agreement to be saved. As much as it is inevitable, it equally puts us in the same, initial situation.

There is no bigger movement, nor a stronger cage. (As though they feed off one another).

That is why, something finally must be done and won, the weapons must be delivered into the hands of unbribable rebels as soon as all of this becomes falsely lighter.

* * *

12/05-06/95

Actuality and Foreboding: The objective reality (actuality) is that in the measure in which it presents itself.

By the density (concentration) of the presentation it is the first one, and actually the only one that is seen.

Everything else can only be foreboded. (Under the crust - the core).

Since, however, the foreboding is most often hazy, disjointed, of a short breath or even instantaneous, its influence and importance are justifiably neglected in comparison with daily pressure of objective reality nearby (a tree, a stone, water, a mountain, a beast, an angel) and far away (smoke, a ship, rememberance, heavenly bodies, sunk hope).

So that to foreboding (the presentiment, exclusion from the world) there is nothing left except the second class role up until the tree rustles, the stone keeps quiet, the water overflows, the mountain obstructs, the beast keeps vigil, the angel sleeps, the smoke covers, the ship distances, the rememberance is more and more indistinct - and heavenly bodies hopelessly hover.

* * *

Finding ourseleves in concrete times and situation, whatever they might be, and facing them more or less, we behave, in fact, in a localized manner, rarely (if that) thinking that all of this, or worse, happened to others, to individuals and groups, in previous times - the History. (Maybe something better was happening as well but, as a rule, not to the majority).

Our momentary condition and that which is at this instant torturing us, seem to have a decisive influence on us.

In that regard we’re instantaneous beings: we permanently ignore the entire, bigger flow of time. As if, as the saying goes, everything begins and ends with us. The feeling of belonging to a longer current (a longer lasting organism?) practically does not exist. [Only historians are somewhat more aware of it but, probably, only because of the professional occupaton with it (the chronology), not in the essence].

Thus, our instantaneity, even if lasting the whole of a human age (which indeed is the case), reduces us to daily figures. One figure this, another that: each one its own. Their sum, the addition of their undergoings and actings will make today’s day. (As if yesterday’s did not exist).

As if in the ephemeral bustle, in the daily confusion, the entire time finds its approval to (still longer) keep quiet.

Not carring about belonging to something more general (and longer), our moment has, somehow barrenly, in a flash, separated from the calcium silence of a tooth of time, without a bigger excuse.

* * *

12/07-09/95

In Between: We are in the perfect middle of the world - distanced equally from both the micro and macro space. Neither closer to one, nor further away from the other. As much as the one is little, the other is big. Staring at one or the other, seeing neither to the end, our position is securing in the middle. Dwelling there, we think not anymore about the extremes of the world. We occupy ourselves with middle things. In no way do we break in somewhere. As if something put us in this box of medium size and let us stroll (only) in it. While it, during that time, stretches itself on one side and contracts on the other.

* * *

First, we wait for them to come, then to go away, that is our relation with the days. (Unfaithfulness is our contract with eternity). Caught in them by the first glimpses of dawn, we’re getting rid of them more cautiously - at midnight. Perhaps tomorrow will change something, we think. But, nothing of it - the time of ascertainment lasts carefully, it does not tolerate different days. (Not being careful - it would gamble away even its hands). It stacks them, one on top of another, the same ones. And, in expectation of the next day, when something different would need to happen, this one is passing by. We fight aginst it or get out of its way - in both cases, with its indifferent flow, it looks like it remembers something else and more important, it touches us only lightly. Upon the setting of the day, yesterday is already forgotten, and tomorrow a miracle is expected. Since it will not happen (and what if it happens?), people turn their lamps off and lay down at the end of yet another day (which betrayed them as the previous one did), everyone into their charming defeat. (For our family this day is more significant: M. is twelve today, although our understanding of time cannot be considered impartial. It would be more proper to say that she passed twelve times through her December of Sun, whitening all freckles of that star, running after an experienced dog).

* * *

(Range of Deliverance). It is Saturday. The fourth since the one, full of Possesion, hungry of Nothingness. (While one thing sharpens, the other blunts). It snowed a lot, and is still snowing. (Like an enchanted guest, just arrived from the province. He would not stop praising the trick, making stocks of it). Through the window, the landscape presents itself as nicer, whiter than it is. (Nothing is at it seems). Falling, the snow covers ugliness, silences sounds, the black, grimly and gray wondrously transit to white. (It means the wonders are possible). In that manner, the snow improves the appearance and acoustics of, an otherwise, depressed surrounding. It changes its colour to whiter, leaves it increasingly breathless. (Is it not strangling it perhaps?). Finally, completely silent, some other universe (arrived to the utmost whiteness) looms in front of the window. (Is that one caught with such a simple beast as well?). Not even a trace of filth, creaking, murky grayness of winter days. (Where were the false parts of a polar fox hidden?). Increasingly thicker, whiter, quieter, at this moment the snow has won. For a while, until it melts. And surely it is in that, in an instant of nicer (ugliness lasts, prettiness flashes), wisely calculated the range of deliverance. If it lasted longer, it would not have been saved on time itself.

A Man With a Harmonica

12/09/95-II

Without having a presentiment that I would be moving here even though I’ve already resided, although for only a few months, in almost the same area, sometime in August returning from work I saw a man who was descending (in fact running)) down the street which I was climbing in my car.

It was a warm, maybe hot day, I remember now recalling that he was wearing pants but not a shirt. He looked like a German, or Norweigan, that type - his hair was blond and wiry. He could have been between 25 and 35 years of age.

As we were passing by each other, he running down the street, I driving up it, he started waving and gesturing, and since the car window was down, I heard him, he shouted that the headlights were on (it was far from dark, that long summer day). At the same time, he was shaking his hands, in a way behaving aguishly, so I imagined that, maybe, he was a lunatic.

(The headlights turn on as soon as the car is started, regardless of time of the day, but he, of course, did not know this. Nor did I, because of that, react on his, in any case well intended admonition).

In the meantime, I forgot him.

A couple of months later, I coincidentally moved right into the area where, it turned out, he lived.

The area consists of residential buildings/pavilions (more or less, a neatness of inhabitant’s scholarliness, permanent larva of unfinished pomposity).

Since then, I was seeing him here and there.

He had a red sporty car (Dodge, Daytona), with a black leather-like mask covering its front, but he did not drive it often, only sometime. (I knew this because we shared the parking lot, that is, I saw him a few times driving his car in or out of the lot).

Also, several times I saw him walking, better said running, likely down to the store, then returning from it at the same fast pace, with a plastic bag filled with groceries in his hand.

Therefore, while walking, he is actually running, skipping, something like that, exactly as I saw him the first time, back in August.

He thrashes his hands while hurrying, throws back his head, wanders.

Meanwhile, again, it seemed he recalled me, too (it meant he wasn’t as foolish as he looked): when he would spot me he would wave to me, the last time I waved back, I felt sorry for him.

All in all, I thought that he was, nevertheless, mad. (Why would anyone sane, on this side of the world, wave to someone, or caution him, or have any exchange with an unknown person?).

But, a few days ago, in the morning, leaving for work I went down to the parking lot, and scraping the first layer of ice and last layer of frost from the windshield, I saw and heard him beside his car.

He had taken his harmonica and was playing it, standing by his car which, having been started earlier, I suppose was warming.

The morning, as usually, was frozen - the day’s horizon was not pointing at anything warmer either. (It’s hardly dawning but is already catching itself in final error).

And he was playing a piece, hopping and hitting, although softly (regardfulness of alleged briskness), with his heel into the asphalt.

I figured that he was not crazy after all, but the rest of the world was, including me, succumbed, at least at some moments, to prejudices and fobias of that world, so deservingly smashed with an ordinary magnificent harmonica, in a prodigally empty saddle of a monotone, practically still morning.

Symbolism and Meaning

12/10-11/95

Today is Sunday and, at the same time, it is twenty two years since I have arrived here, to this continent from, at the time, the SFRY.

Contemplating it (sifting through the elapsed time), one outcome seems more probable to me than the others: neither that undertaking is in any way unique nor the uniqueness is to be attributed to other events which, since then, took place. (The things are constant, at least on a human scale - the same portion of repetition clenches our hand and in the head, groundless, covetous felicitation peers).

On the morning of December 10, 1973, accompanied to the Belgrade airport by my mother, girlfriend, sister, friends and relatives, I left them (and the country). Around eight o’clock in the evening, I arrived in T. (The second part of the night had already come to B.: it was springing up from the first one as a neck from flamingo for full two hours). The cab driver took me to the "Warwick" (probably his favoured hotel, later demolished because of the prostitution and murders which took place in it), at the corner of Dundas E. and Jarvis St. I unpacked one of the two suitcases which were, together with $600, all I brought with me (I didn’t have a secured job, nor did I know anyone), I took the soap and toothpaste and washed my hands and face, brushed my teeth and went outside to look around. At that time of year, in that city, the air is sharply cold (considerably sharper than in B.) but clean (coldness as a first approximation to cleanliness), and having noticed this first difference, I noticed the first similarity: the street car which passed by was alike those in B., called "Belgians" at the time. (Everything else was different - this only similarity was so significant to me that I, therefore, remembered it).

Of course, for further chronology of that time, in this writing there is neither room nor interest (nor justification).

But, if one would have to derive the crown and essence of staying here, including the discovery of an explanation for what happened elsewhere during this period of time (bindingness of notions and objects: feverishness of pearls around the neck of a dangerous beauty), the supreme meanings could be deduced to: regaining consciousness, increasing it and loosing it.

Regaining consciousness in the sense that these people here and those people there are two antipodes of the same, universal ephemerality (until something nicer happens to pain in the soul).

Increasing consciousness in the sense that the ruling class in this place, that is its true beneficiaries, will not stick at nothing to destroy the world, even though with it, and without wanting that, destroying themselves, in case they are brought in danger of being unmasked and finished before the time it would take them to react in their habitual, more crafty (that is their peculiarity) way. (For that destruction they already possess and still acquire means with the parameters and characteristics which the laymen, besides some popular generalities, know almost nothing about).

Loosing consciousness in the sense that the majority of the people from the land I once left, as well as from many other lands, did not, even partially, became aware of all of this but instead, in these times, immature they actualize themselves through various religions, through false, that is not authentic with respect to their interests, political parties (associated with and ranging from the nepotic casteism to direct treason), passively absorbing the twaddlings and theories (here produced by the gruffly austere and overthere by the parrot-like docile quasi-intellectuals and pseudo-elite) which are not describing the true state of the affairs.

So much and too much about the meaning of today’s date while deducing its sum.

With regards to its symbolism, however: from today, this Sunday, there are 109 days until my 50-th birthday which, by itself, would have no symbolic significance if my father, A. L., many years ago, while I still was in the original country, did not die exactly on that Sunday, 109 days before his 50-th birthday. (The excess of an edge at a point).

So that, since each next day (if this continues in the same way) I will be older than his established shadow in a significant walk, my regaining, increasing and, finally, loosing the consciousness will be presented to him there (where he’s so promptly walking, even though it is unknown through what) as all the more experienced and fit lone man’s activity in which he himself suddenly and inexplicably had been gone down while trying to imagine me how I recall him peristently on this day.

* * *

Brook-like, one more weekend expired (it’s Monday morning: already merging while the spring has hardly started) - I talked to myself again.

It is true that this writing is salvaging me, but the question is how long, even that, is going to last.

The most obvious thing that occurs to us is cosmic impartiality, even equanimity.

As if the universe is bothered by bigger worries or as if we are not in it, as far as it is concerned.

And it is likely that we are not, because of the error we’re making all the time: we expect to explain it (and that, in return, it gives a sign back to us) looking at it (during each one of the long-night flashes) - we’re looking to the skies instead to ourselves where the explanation and its (the universe’s) eventually goodwill lie the entire time.

It is no wonder that it (the universe) is not willing to have anything with such unlearned on-lookers.

If they knew what they were doing, they would have recalled that they were conducting the conversation with it thinking that they were speaking to themselves over a desolated weekend in a cosmic room.

* * *

12/12-15/95

(Collaborators). I’ve noticed that they’re missing, but somehow vaguely, keeping the information in subconsciousness. And then, a few days ago, I was unsure why I thought of them right at that moment (probably while looking at the walls upon which they were spinning their web), I had realized that they indeed were not there - those spiders. There were two of them, rather small ones, one was climbing up one wall, the other was coming down another, for me the remaining two walls were sufficient (I didn’t know what to do even with those): I was not chasing them. What they wanted, where they traveled up and down, each one on its wall, whether they were amassing something stacking it inaudibly, I did not know. I thought that they’d come in sight for the first time two months ago, sometime around the season when my residence started to be heated so that, I guess, it was the radiator warmth which attracted them. (Until then they lived, probably, from their memories). Of greenish, two-segmented bodies (like in humans), with their legs like those of flies, only more silky, sometimes of nimble movements but mainly of still ones (as if slow, and because of that, the thorough thought they spin), often motionless - their task significantly differed from mine. I was going out quite often, I went to work, to a grocery store, to a gas station to fill up the gasoline tank, I was battling with the idea, listening to the passing train, walking across the floor (gaping at the planks - instead of relieving them, by the creaking the time was, I could see, pressing them), I shined my shoes, leaned above the abyss when all of a sudden they (there, it meant, in the ritual hole they’d disappeared), who weren’t doing any of that, sparkled their tiny but convincing eyes, leaving me to stand my ground balancing on their web: they were not chasing me.

* * *

(The Exuberance). To someone who only chirps and sings (but is neither child nor bird) these writings must be on the other side of sanity. I do not exactly know how large it is, but a sizeable part of this population behaves similarly to that (chirping, carrying a tune, bursting into laughter, lightheartedly conversing mainly about nothing), without an adequate cause. (There exists such a kind of people elsewhere but it seems that there are more of them here). Of course, all of them need not despair and cry, especially if they do not have a reason for it, that is if their lives unfold more or less flawlessly. However, their over-facilitated and carefree understanding and apprehension of the world is far from its substance and historic experience. Hovering and giggling in all this (while the false peace crumbles like a tower of playing cards and rebels are shot at by depleted U-238), having not sunk into someone’s torment except rarely, superficially and in fact in an advertising manner, without a higher regard for something more general than personal interests and pettiness, all such beings run around on errands like fictitious bells ("surface dwellers", B.L.). In such their behaviour, the religion and its institutions have much influence: the majority of them goes to churches, the easiness of rite bestows them with self-reliance - so disburdened they want to start singing even more. Looking at them and hearing them through all these years (in the beginning, surprised by such a bearing, I thought to myself that it was a new, innocent world), my feelings were tumbling from one end of the spectrum to the other: from the pity for such a sheep-like representation of the world to the indignation. But more and more, both the perception by which a kind of

a pardon was granted to them (God help them, they don’t know what they’re doing), and the indignation are being replaced by a judgement about the incorrigible immaturity of a provincial rapture with itself and its velvety salvation.

* * *

(The Stayed Up Nights). "In decisive moments, a cigarette can help us more than gospel...In a sleepless night, man learns more than in years of sleep", E.C., "History and Utopia". Whether due to myself, or because of all this around, most of the time I do not sleep well, sometimes not sleeping at all. I wake up around midnight, one or two o’ clock, after that I often cannot fall asleep. In the dark, I measure up the thought. (It measures me up). I picture how the universe does not flinch from this night either, on the contrary, devouring each other, they feed themselves mutually. (They’re ascertaining the meal, cosmos to night, night to cosmos). Yet it is only the cover which holds back the thought from getting rid of me. (Wherever it’s gone, it returns bristled, to warm underneath it). It goes, thus, to surreal and real (to alive and dead, captured and freed, whole and halved), it goes to all visible and invisible - but it returns in an instant, reports on the finding, delivers speech. (It keeps turning from side to side, tries to settle, booms as if it falls down the street). I do not wake up (because I haven’t fallen asleep) - but already it’s the morning twilight. Each building is still in its place, the occupants leaving them, encouraged by habit. While I have, last night, made the decision, which they, who slept through, do not have presentiment about. To fall asleep at a wrong time and wake up at a time full of the melted away but also stirred up belief in a miracle.

* * *

On evenings, around six, from the floor below mine (these two are the only ones in the building) a conversation can be heard. (At that time I’m sitting on the chair in the kitchen, thinking about the salutary solution). Downstairs, in two adjacent apartments, two elderly women live: I suppose one of them visits the other for a conversation. In the beginning, this was diverting my train of thought (disturbing the silence). Later on I got used to it. During the conversation, which is not loud, the clinking of a spoon against a cup can be heard - surely, I think, they drink tea while talking. Their words, during this process, cannot be recognized, what they are talking about cannot be understood, their conversation changes into a uniform series of acoustic impulses which evenly, in continuity, increasingly paler, are reaching my kitchen in which, not having progressed away from the beginning, I, myself, am turning pale. After half an hour to an hour, the conversation disappears. (It is likely that the one who was visiting has returned to her apartment).

All of the uninteligible words which constituted the conversation (indifferently, even then, absorbed in the walls), turned back to back at parting (the accent of protoplasm and uncertainty of meaning), left to themselves thay make the return of the kitchen’s silence official - their sense dispersed and, if it ever existed, now it does not.

And in the once agin set silence, the vigilance does not let me doze off again.

The Supermarket

12/16/95

In the area where I live, in order to get the groceries people go to the "Price Chopper" supermarket, located within a small plaza called "Sheridan Mall", at the corner of Rosa and Gerling streets.

I go there too, approximately once a week - very little is needed for one man.

The supermarket, like the most of them here, is one of many of the same ones in a chain. Yet, the supermarkets belonging to the same chain differ between themselves regarding their tidiness, quality of goods and cleanliness of their parking lot. Since this neighborhood is, in social sense, at a borderline between a ruined class (people on welfare) and the lower level of the, so-called, middle class [made up of virtually illiterate but industrious workers (now mainly retired), who succeeded in acquiring and keeping house and estate no matter which], both the interior and exterior of the supermarket in question, besides that they with their gloominess, kitsch, uncleanliness and shabbiness make in one only a desire to, if at all possible, escape from here at once, with their crashing result they also embalm and tame: I have rarely seen so many people anywhere else reconciled with their fate of such a poor appearance (both physical and mental), dull to some bigger stimuli except to satisfying the basic ones.

There are many black people in the supermarket, but there are even more whites. Here and there, a sample of a mid-middle or, even, upper-middle class (obviously strayed, or in passing by) visits the supermarket; they normally do their shopping in cleaner, better supplied and more pompous places.

As the appearance of one determines the measure of another, the sales personnel in the supermarket are messy, blunt-headed and ill-mannered - they procrastinate work as it befits the image and circumstance of the location. (The symptom more general than in this story).

With its, therefore, impassableness towards a goal, this supermarket does not differ from the neighborhood. (Who took on itself to resemble the other is not important).

By its very nature, all this is a habit of a landscape and its doom of course - with these, and much worse scenes, filled is the road upon which all of us, more or less accustomed to, full of experience, wander. ("Travellers destroy what they seek", from B.’s postcard).

The dismay, in this case, is that the existence of both one and another (this area and its supermarket) unwinds completely independently and indifferently with respect to my or anyone else’s presence to, or absence from, here. As if there exists some larger mechanism of things, in which all objects are so firmly built in their places so that they would with it, the irrefutable immutableness, protect the vestibule of the privileged ones, notwithstanding how much even that is illusionary. Because once, when all this snaps, the illusion will disintegrate the most, while the supermarket will only subside.

Dream - 1

12/16/95-II

As if having stepped out from the stage-coach that clearly was sent for, I found myself in a rather larger premises onto whose two edgings [like in a suspicious mirror reflected Greek letter gamma ( )] naturally (unmistakably) there extended another accomodation of about the same size, however raised for a couple of steps over which one was to walk to get into the second area from the first one. Between the rooms there was no wall - there was only a little, no more than a meter tall through overdue handful engraved hope, a wooden fence. (The secret parts of the same ambient, doubtful duality of fibrous singular). In the lower part, where I found myself, there quietly dined some men and women - as if it was to do with a better restaurant. I got a seat at one of the dining tables: without astonishment because I didn’t know any of the people at the table, geometrically proper, dovetailed I was sitting next to them. But on top of the other, lifted part of the common expanse, there were an additional hundred or so men, women and children. The men were dressed in formals (with bow ties), the women were in long, solemn dresses (in front of a white summer-residence a tipsy porch was found, in it a black rose of late soberness), the children were in the same, only smaller, robes, they also washed and clean. The upper group was not dining, it was singing. Truthfully, it was not singing for the people who were dining on the lower level (these two groups of people existed independently from one another - each one was minding its own business), it was rather a singing which was unrolling by itself on the upper premises - on the lower one it was only me who heard it, the others were murmuring uninterested; they were having their supper not caring for this, on the surface courteous but, in fact, ominous concert.

All the people, both upstairs and downstairs, were from this, Anglo-Saxon, side of the world: the singing up there, and the quiet conversation downstairs were in English. However, having paid bigger attention to the melody and words of the song, I realized, upon my surprise (with a fatherland’s shiver), that these, at the first sight ordinary, although aggressively dressed men, women and children, were singing (and indeed nicely, powerfully, with high spirits, as a supreme choir), the traditional (yet urban) song from the other side of the world, "Why My Thoughts Are Struggling". Since the melody and words of the song were a reliable sign of a judicious finale (hardly a cell of sense and yet a full blow of brass cymbals), the expectancy of the catharsis before flash was increasing more as rustle than as lawful, molecular hit of a target. It was especially dear to me that the cited song was already sung by those, from the upper room, in my, Serbian, language, naturally and without additional effort. (Double wording of painless passage of things, sympathy with silence, a quick and consequently feeble death).

But, instead of the crescendo (a cathartic pulverization underneath the powder of the song), at some hour (the song was still going on up there, the people at my table, left to their absentmindedness in a form of temperate chatting, were still dining downstairs), until then hidden, appeared the choir conductor, approaching me and saying, "You, who like this song and are the only one who can hear it, come with me".

Having sensed that the matters were not clear, unwillingly I stood up from the table by which until then I was silently sitting, sagaciously listening to that light-minded song, and went following this man towards an, until then unoccupied, table at which, on his sign, we sat. But while I was reluctantly moving on his order, I noticed how he’d given a sign to those people on the upper level so that they, still singing the nicely conceived song, suddenly started dancing a dance of an increasingly faster rhytm, thrashing with their hands and jumping on their feet: to some men among them the unbuttoned shirts were showing the excessive hair on their perspiring chests, the women were shrieking, the children were giggling - the whole cluster of men, women and children in the upper room suddenly, therefore, started to accelerate, jumping and beating through the air in spite of the calmness of the song which they, in truth, were not singing anymore, they were rather gnashing it. The duality of waves/particles is spreading out in front of me, I later recalled that I had thought of. (L.V.R. Princ de Broglie (1892-?), I saw, was roguishly giggling under the electrons: the elegiac narrowmindedness of poured off signal did not look like a deadly infection to him).

The one who took me away and sat down with me at the other table, presented himself as the Princ’s Orchestrator of Attractiveness (of Trap, in other words): he said that the choir was a snare and that I would have to dream about their singing until it finished me of. Anguished, in a panic, aware of dreaming this (didn’t he, the Orchestrator, even announce the same?), I started opening my mouth in order to vociferate and attract the attention of those at the adjacent tables (they were still dining quietly, as if they themselves were not a part of the same scene although, neither speaking the language nor recognizing the melody of the said song, they did not fall, as I did, into the Trap) or, at least, to wake up. However, my voice in no way could come out of my mouth. At last, I screeched in a two-syllable manner, "Ma-ma" (she, indeed, passed away a long time ago but this, at the time, I didn’t recall, that is, at the time it was not important) - nobody answered. In desperation, I tried to remember the mechanism of waking up. It didn’t help, I forgot how to wake up, I realized and, during that, I felt how the more and more uncovered disguise of those in the upper premises and all the more complete disinterest of those in the lower room were crumbling me into an increasingly filled up spoon of, by now bared, Trap.

I couldn’t even wake up, I determined in the panic. If I could only recall how the waking up was done, what’s happened to me, I knew that, even before I used to dream about all sorts of things but, at the time, I also knew how to wake up. And presently, I couldn’t remember it.

In that dream, this was the most difficult for me - the lack of knowledge of how to wake up. For, the danger was approaching fast (the ladle of the Trap was increasingly unmelodiously snapping), and I forgot what I was supposed to do to wake up.

Even now, I am not sure if I recalled that for the simple reason that the Orchestrator, for both of us and clearly in front of my eyes, had sent for a stage-coach for a concert.

St. Ellis Hospital

12/17/95

In an otherwise unexciting look through the window by my left side, what’s more a long ago prepared and irrevocably framed as the definitive appeasement and surrender of the world (nothing can be seen there except a desolated intersection some hundred yards away, the apartment buildings on the right side of the street and trees dazed by the winter on the left side), the only more noticable object, rising up at about a mile from here, is the chimney and, behind it, the entire construction of the St. Ellis Hospital, made of dark red bricks. (Plentitude of exertion, its true height). With regards to the height, the chimney is like a factory’s: it goes a full thirty yards into the sky (how little is needed to that height); one can presume that it is the one which is in connection with the hospital’s heating system, laundry and kitchen (hospital food preparation). The hospital itself consists of a central pile of several concentrated buildings built of (the mentioned) dark bricks (white hospitals are rare, perhaps that is why the personnel in hospitals wear white, to improve the impression), but in the rear of the pile it can be anticipated (more than seen) a gray-olive (like a deserted pigeon) added unit. (As much as it is tradition it is even more fashionable, in all hospitals, to say that that is a wing, maybe because of the pigeon).

Since I rarely look through the window (through which all that is seen), I seldom think about it. Neither would I now be trying to describe so elementary this hospital if I was not motivated to attribute, no matter how much, firmness to it (the hospital) and carelessness and unwariness to me.

First of all, and according to tarnish of its older and more primary part, it can be seen that this insitution was built much earlier than I knew about this place. [The phenomenon of the existence of something without our information of it, and at once (sudden) presence to it, is bewildering by itself and speaks sufficiently about our incapacity to pretend, regarding anything which we haven't seen (not to mention: experienced), on knowing it].

Furthermore, and even though during the last hundred years, which is approximately the age of this hospital, there was written in it (in a way in which it was pliably undergone and right after that sternly put to death) thousands of novels about the absurdity and sense, it may be that it (the hospital) secretly counts on adding this epilogue to its story.

Finally, and what a coincidence, I was here (in this place), although for different reasons, some fifteen years ago, then staying in a hotel which was, it turned out now, near the St. Ellis Hospital and suddenly extracted picture of that sojourn is unscrupulously reminding me that, at the time, passing by it in a car, I saw it every day, but later I forgot it.

Things over which we crossed so proudly at some time, return to us when we think that we easily got rid of them or had written them off, warning us of our shabbiness and incautiousness.

Tales From the Playground

12/18-19/95

Having reminded myself of the playground (a field) between the streets A. and K. in the early fifties, I also recalled the stories which we were, laying on it after important plays and nibbling each his own blade of grass, communicating to each other convincingly and conspiringly in the middle of a July night, alongside the oath to a secret.

According to those stories, one was a dragon, the other one was sharpening the swords, that one clambered up the sky but got rough by the first star, the other one, again, hanged on a summer streetcar, this one received from his father from South America a letter with the green and yellow stamps and the seal still wet because of the Amazon rain, that one caught in a village the alligator holding it by the throat (truth to say, the best was relaxing), one swam over the Danube contributory called Dunavac, one played the match of his life even though he was still in the junior team, one (turned on his side) kicked out the vampires and now was resting, another said that the ghosts were in action in their place, too, but that his uncle had said that one should still be waiting, the fat one ceremoniously and without a blink of an eye declared how this morning, while the others were still sleeping, he himself dealt with the Almighty whom, he thought, called in his grandma while swearing using his name, one over there said that his father, an army officer, let him fire from a howitzer (and really, there, on the hill Z., there were barracks, and in front of them there were clumsy anti-aircraft guns, although it presently is not known what their use was after what happened but at the time that was being solved differently - an empty shot, like this one, was an exemption), this one returned from his aunt in Sevastopol where the thing could be seen in the deepest way from the submarine base, that one prepared to visit his cousins in New York City even though they wrote to him saying that they worked a lot and possessed a lot not possessing anything else, one said that in the newspaper he read about the Circus, one said that at the entrance to his apartment building a poster was placed informing that, who didn’t want to didn’t have to die since a treatment was discovered - a bunch of Zodiac under the Sun’s Spot, one said how it was possible to fly dashing against the last time, this one creeped through the fire without emotional consequences, one went in where the lion was and the animal did nothing, the grandfather of one had a secret weapon if a force attacked us, some time ago on this same field that one saw two people how they were burying something (a despair or a hope), this one hit a suspicious thought using the air gun (with a bigger calibre he could have demolished a pure idea), one said that he secretly drove his uncle’s heavy truck for half a year already, one had a real soccer ball but he wouldn't take it out before Sunday, one said that the ground beetles liked bitumen because it was full of adhesiveness of the soil’s melancholy, one said he remembered before he was born, a sister of that one drank sodium but was saved in the hospital, one knew how much room was left in the universe, one spent a whole day at the municipal pool without paying for it because he jumped over the fence, one, in his attic, had everything ready in case of the need to be still.

Each one made up his story and everyone knew that but nobody went far from the truth. Every tale was truthful because both the one who made it up and those who listened to believed in it and also because that was normal and possible then.

The difference between then and now is that, the adults, we neither believe in the one who talks, nor does he believe in what he talks about, nor anything that was possible then is possible now.

* * *

It’s dawning but with difficulty: the night is battling the day until one overcomes the other.

Wrapped in fog and darkness (serving itself with a skilled daybreak), the pale face of the universe is winning, even today.

Every morning twilight, it (the cosmos) assumes a new countenance but at noon, already, its old one can be seen.

It (the universe) would like to cheat from the start, but halfway through, already, it starts deceiving itself.

It pretends to separate one day from another, as if they didn’t agree to be the same.

Or the days are, nevertheless, different.

As much as it is necessary for patience (for endurance), for tuft (for armful), for war (for impact), for strength - for weakness even over this day to get to the next one.

Although to some today is a saint day and to others a preparation for a duel, this day took the both from yesterday to deliver into the hands of tomorrow.

Whether they (the days) would still differ amongst themselves, it will be seen when, until they themselves melt away, the remaining footpaths get hoed up.

If a conciliatory attitude grows up from them - it will mean that to the same forces they surrendered, but if on their rim a rose reddens - it will mean that in some of them the rebellion still lasts.

* * *

01/02/96

It is its second morning only, but this year is fortifying itself already.

(So much self-confidence retaliated to many but it obviously does not care).

It holds out, attests since the dawn.

[Building its days into the pyramid of the passed ones, in its basis it (the year) already falls into the tetragonal habit of a Pharaoh].

Returning yesterday (on the first day of the year), driving for hours through fog and misty weather (bifurcation of multiplied drops: the inner discord of watery singular), I was in fact driving, now it is seen clearly, towards this, its second day.

At the time one could only conjecture it, but as a supreme judgment of unavoidableness it came for its, in front of a jury of sense, neatly listed articles.

(Inevitability of next as decree of the same).

No way away from it (the rite of destination). Expanded as air (in all lungs inhaled), it visits every thought.

Even if I drove in another direction, I would not have been able to escape this day. (Short legs are in a lie).

If a day can be judged by its morning, today will again bring us only to tomorrow, and that only if we do not commit a stupid act.

Nothing more provocative than a sane morning, for an hour already, maybe an hour and a half, this day is offering.

Although, from here, it will be advancing for a moment to this, and for another to that side.

To some it will be better, to others worse. It will be the first one for some, for others it will be the last.

It will engrave itself into someone’s memory, others will forget it.

But everyone who will have, insolently, survived it will only be closer to tomorrow and farther from yesterday.

That is all what will happen to him (full of reasoning of pulse, sinchronization of excuse), regardless of the illusions of those who would have thought that in it they achieved a decisive victory, experienced an inexcusable defeat, or made a significant decision.

The Dwarf

01/03/96

At about one hundred and fifty, two hundred yards away from these buildings, in the area in which there are family homes (mainly modest or very modest), there is a house, a little separated from others by an empty and fairly unkept yard, in front of whose main door, facing the street, there sits a dwarf.

He watches the passers-by (meaning, of course, those in the cars because it is the only way of passing by around here), right into their eyes, most of the time pensively although, at a day’s eve, as a dodger.

In fact, it is a small plastic statue, representing the dwarf.

It is painted with pale (probably fluorescent some time ago), in any case elementary colours, it looks pathetic and pitiful so that it does not get through to one’s head that someone, besides a child maybe, would keep something like that in front of the house.

But the astonishment and displeasure of a random walker (brisk fracture of the previous truth, quick occurrence of the next error) are less caused by the obvious, almost infinite kitsch, the lack of a minimum of some harmony and aesthetics, and more by sightlessness of the whole situation which the dwarf, by its placing in front of that, no more harmonious house, emphasized only a bit more.

(This lack of prospect, the worthlessness of the house with the dwarf and the dwarf with house, does not let itself to be erased: it is instituted by their simultaneity and reciprocality and is particularly expressed when the day, having lost yet another battle with the frozen rain, peevishly surrenders to the icy drops by which (allied with them as a loyal dog) the wind finishes off yesterday’s newspapers, throwing them throttled about the street, in front of the scene with the dwarf).

However, before Christmas, the dwarf got company. (Thus, even it for a moment hoped that the delicacy of its situation, if it wouldn’t improve, would distribute itself on more heads, so that it would not be hollowing out only its).

The owner of the house added to the dwarf (on the stage before the main door) the collection which recreates, that is, it displays a Biblical scene.

(This is here, or for that matter everywhere in the West, of course far from a proposed sacredness of a Holy Communion, more or less the custom: such a collection, called a nativity set, can be purchased in a supermarket or department store).

Now, the dwarf finds itself next to a majestic carriage driven by the shiny angels and saints - in any case it is in the domain of impeccable, although somewhat seductive look of the Holy Mother.

The only thing which stands out is its lack of height and paled colors.

Everything else fitted besides that and its irony, the still exhibited silent scepticism.

01/07-10/96

Until now they were here but now they’re gone. The stir, murmur, conversation and hubbub are replaced by the dexterous fixity and indefatigable silence. (Neither the buzz of the fridge can be heard: it turned off achieving the perfect temperature, the Presbyterian equivalent of a thrifty device). Walking from one wall to another, the only thing which is being convened is their absence. (Their presence diluted to such a degree that it couldn’t be found even in the solution). Outside, the same, dirty snow from yesterday, inside also the same (luckily, small enough) number of objects which, however, stubbornly keep silent. Wherever to look (listen) around the room - there is nothing more ingratiating for the next move. (It would be the best to fall asleep now, but it’s only noon). Vanishing behind the corner while looking back (to know how to return), the deficiency makes faces. It lets me know that it itself is what, besides the refrigerator, remains. (Equally cold, neither one would thaw before its time). Having got a chance by the sudden retreat of the inevitable perfection (the deficiency) to the morning class about hasty kindness (behind the wall), the various little events from the memory of this abrupt visit run in. Among them, enters the room their, until a few moments ago, resonant crack (clank of pearls of family neckless), but also its increasingly emphasized absence, at the end ajar for a yawn of a singular. As if having received visit in jail, and all those years yawned from a single cell of a mouth.

* * *

(Complexity and Simplicity). At first sight (according to first impressions, for which it is said that they are the most authentic - the others serve as a habit), all this with and around us is crystal clear, reflecting itself sharply, without shadows. But as the time oozes (down the vein of summer, into deadened salvation), and the initial hit of life crosses over into a cinema reminescence, that which was clear becomes unclear. (Anatomy of crumpled atlas, borderline of the amphitheatre of birthplace). While to the children it is recognizable, simple and logical, to the point that they make a play about it, to all the more mature and older it becomes increasingly fuzzy, there turn out more and more complex laws about the principles of all that, finally a little which is explainable remains. (Sometimes not even a little). Whether the increasing complexity, as the time goes by, produces itself internally or externally - it is not known. If it is produced externally, then the pieces from which the vista consists are true only in the first, original moment - in the next one they already are not what they were, as if they disowned themselves. But if (all of this) is generated internally, the vista is constant, only it collapses more and more in ourselves.

* * *

Yesterday’s late afternoon, in a guarded hesitation before the evening, foretold for the first time, so weakly that, if one didn’t have a thought about it, one would neglect it, a modest prolonging of the daylight. Lonely red (what else is, these days, red?), the Sun’s appearance (it is assumed that it is real) soared above the clear horizon for a few moments longer than in the previous days, upon that it (too) suddenly went down (on the great depth it stumbled upon).

Approximately three weeks after the shortest day, yesterday’s was the first one which stretched if it could only go on a bit longer. (It twisted its neck, sniffed a reason). Emphasizing that advantage over the previous days, this one, a somewhat prolonged day, behaved as if, besides the frost shaking off the impartiality of itself, it decided on change.

Even though the winter will continue for some time, the prolongation of the day, established so unperceptibly but also suddenly yesterday, illuminating the winter more and more, will increasingly jeopardize it. Finally, having nowhere to go, the winter will escape to what has been agreed upon, the periodic place where, fled along with it, all the shorter days and longer nights will brighten it up again. (Every time with it, the winter, it is like that).

While yesterday’s, somewhat longer day will stay in its memory as much as it roused it (the winter) up from the seasonal dream (in front of the ice an outline of bed, in the outline an eye of persistent patience) and forced it to the longlasting and capacious preparations for the new migration, on the old road.

* * *

It is difficult describing days if they are the same. On their surface, they indeed are. (Isotropy of a whole day’s crust, truthfulness of poultice of the world). The only thing which remains then is to hollow them out. As the agricultural equipment, microorganisms and celestial phenomena that are boring through the earth, drilling a tree, feeding people and overpowering animals’ barking.

Entering the composition of something, its infinite picture is seen. (It is neither known where its beginning is nor where it will shake itself from the final explanation).

Upon that principle, everything which gives a way to doubt can be portrayed. Something always appears there, something gets displaced, that which was thought to have stood petrified suddenly as lizard vivifies, a great substance is being offered for small entries about each of its (belligerent) parts. Even the insignificant things, until then silenced, seeming worthless for the description, attain significance. In that way, in fact, the writing can be done about anything (intolerability as a pedigree of generalized heaven), acclaiming to the proposition that, after Utopia and Arcadia, one crosses to Eden although the proposer (Evan Eisenberg, in "Ecology of Eden") even there does not take out live species from conflict.

(Even a greyhound turns into an arrow, wouldn’t the thought in despondency?).

The only thing is that, while the thing is drilled and whetted to be described, the one who does that dissolves himself. Getting into the subject of attention, the describer enters the description. Describing the subject as much as the subject describes him, he is not loosing the battle nor is he winning it. He postpones, in fact, even such a small description of the world, from St. Benedict to Henry Ford.

* * *

01/11-12/96

Although a while ago it could have been anticipated that the amount of daylight lengthened, it is far from summer -winter is persisting like a forgotten soldier on the frozen front. (Because of that, the anticipation is an unreliable sign). As much as summer is far away, so much the imprisoment by winter is the most obvious obstacle to any disturbance of the things, and at the same time the most logical excuse not to change anything. (The enslavement by the thought is, for distinction, steady - even if summer comes, the same, icy, hush shines). We’re justifying ourselves that we’re not able to even pull out from this coldness (nor is the snow from the civilization’s finale, under the tons of the industrial salt), not to mention our inability to, so benumbed (see the Freud’s description of a Prothetic God in "Civilization and its Discontents"), put into disorder something more significant (overthrow the government, for example). Without a sign of revolt, we’re carrying out our duties - even if it existed, in this winter the insurrection’s been killed. Such automatism threatens to demolish us even theoretically; that we’re practically destroyed can be seen from every corner of this (falsely-cathedralic) pseudo-monastic room. Neither are we any longer as we were, nor are we as we were ought to be. It is better and easier to say to ourselves that this is not happening to us but to a stranger which we temporarily turned into, and this winter, unfortunately, froze. (Consolidation of small things, compromise of crossed arms). As if we are in a bigger, certain tera-organism, waiting all the time to pack ourselves up and return to our self from before, carrying the same, original suitcase.

* * *

On account of what can someone spend a lifetime in a place like this? Because of habit, fear of change or ignorance of other, possibly better places? A whole life can be washed by the habit; many give in before the apprehension from change, including the voluntary change of employment - it is best to be in the ignorance then: nothing forces you to make the comparison and do the questioning because it is not known that to which the comparison is to be made. (There are, in the world, places of still bigger misery, in the sense of poverty and despondency, but they’re without their inhabitants - instead in them, they each live in their own, like a poppy squandering Pandemonium). The population of places like this one, appeased in one of the above mentioned ways, spend their days fittingly, without ups and downs, stoically evenly, almost melanchonically, without immoderate glow but still with a minute of contentment: the pragmatic beneficiaries of the computed order, with the morning evened out according to the loyalty at noon, they are based on the axiom of a daylight fullness. That such days are (unbearably) unperceptible and dull, to them is not being shown. That these streets and houses are a simple rationalized collection of piled and stacked objects, in such a manner and as much that one can enter, exit, perform, join (the so-called Democrats or Republicans) and that all of them spend each day in that way - to them it is not strange. (Similar or the same, with the exemption of worse, is applicable to other places, in other parts of the world, but there nobody speaks of superiority of such a life, which is being emphasized here; as a matter of fact, the situation there is criticized, often with the exaggerated irony and complaint). While in places like this the purposefulness is shining underneath the lamp shade hemmed with the aim, their inhabitants, with easiness of a dough expanded over other possibilities and circumstances, live for a long time, up until unwillingly meeting the conditions for that, inevitable and last metamorphosis. Having risen up (having anticipated it, the ultimate change), they (in a form of a melted away, although possibly reddened personage) start pondering, soon however returning to the rocking chair in an indurated porch of a white painted home from the last century.

Broken Window

01/13/96

It was an old-fashioned house on the outskirts of the city, more precisely on the hilltop of a dyke with reference to the level of street A. and the apartment buildings across the street, on the lower side of the dike.

At that time, in the early fifties, regarding the civil constructions and habitation on the city periphery, B. was twofold: in the case in question, on one side of the dug up streets (those dikes originated from that - throwing out the dirt into Prosaic Side, during the excavation of the Central Idea) there were rows of pavillions built (a phrase was going around - shockingly fast, which did not affect the truth, i.e., it was true) in less than six months; from the other side the pavillions were watched (with awkwardly concealed underrating, that is, with a barren disdain, attributable everywhere to the autochthonous feeling of primitive superiority) by the pre-war houses, more precisely by their inmates.

The house (under the scrutinization here) was a yellowish colour. [Whether its former, and more probable, white color in time slid down and finally disappeared under the moist times of autumns and winters because, since the then current war and up to that point, the house owner shrank and kept quiet, that is, did not paint it again, or it nevertheless was its original (so roguish?) colour, we did not know even though we (from the pavillions) were running around that house whenever our playing would bring us there].

I cannot clearly recall the owners of the house (probably a shrivelled man and a clumsy woman), but I remember that they had a son and daughter: their daughter was fat and because of that she had her own world; their son, on the other hand, was slender (frail) and significantly older than us, still then he was a college student and, because of that, he did not (either) associate with us. With a briefcase of black leather (fairly chopped up or, at least, such as even it, like his parents I suppose, whined that it had seen better days), he could have been seen only briefly, usually when, characteristically leaping away, he would be coming in or out of the house. (He was walking jumping off: maybe still then he saw where all that was leading to and was getting rid of it or, maybe, he also had a world of his own in which was jumped in such a sharp manner). It was rumoured that in his briefcase he carried books and notes from the complex subjects he studied, which to us, occupied with more important things, was unclear but about which we did not rack our minds.

(Easiness of approximation, false measure of complex solution).

Nevertheless, the most impactfull distinction of the house, besides its run down facade and relatively strange, or at least insufficiently known tenants (although, by itself, the existence of them all was impactfull in the lustrous, new era, when the ultimate simplicity and friendly directness of cleansed and to all, except to them, unambiguous pith was stretching up to the breaking), was in that it, between its walls made of brick, had a black wrought fence with, in it, the same kind of gate which was opening and closing with an unavoidable creaking, and that, perhaps to offer a comfort amidst the grating noise (of condensed time, firm equity larva), over all the iron, imperfection of the mechanism and taciturn bricks in the fence, much of the flowers and fruits was toppling as if it decided that right there, on the locksmith-derived metal glade, it should have made the seething burst into the fermentation.

A whole rose-garden, lilac and accacia, and of fruit trees a cherry, an apricot and a sour cherry.

(The abundance of unnecessary memories, bold evidence of typical growth).

All this was planted (and foreseen to increase) inside the house yard but, in those years, the yield was copious, the ripeness unstopable, the wasps and bumblebees diligent the entire summer (waxen calm from the reader of a saint), so that the (although forged) fence could not hold up the toppling of so much significance over itself.

And I would have forgotten both the house and its dwellers [even though a short while ago, in a ringing fear, I’ve dreamt about them by the cherry tree, that is by the creaking of the overheated gate (while it was closing before the falsely embelished memento) - which actually led me to this doubtful testifying], if I didn’t remember that, on an August day, responding to the rocks attack by the adversary’s army from the street K. (for a difference with the previous and present war, the foregoing fighting was conducted using rocks although the regime of the time long ago had been proclaimed, in a miraculous way, that is with the plenty of imperfection, as having been worse than the former and later ones whose wars, thus, turned out more acceptable and more perfect), my rock missed the one who was my target and struck the centre of the house’s main window which, therefore, broke into pieces.

Of course, I ran away and hid in the basement of my pavillion.

It never became known who broke the window but that troubled me for a long time. More than 40 years passed by since then and I would still offer that the window be repaired at my expense if only I could buy myself off of this secret and, with that, once more run through the, overturned across the fence, rose-garden and fruit trees, but not being afraid in a herbarium-like, almost herbivorous dream.

* * *

01/14-15/96

(Settlement With Banishment). During the banishment (as this one is), the only thing which remains is to keep describing it.

One ought to, by describing it, set up the same bone in its throat which it set up in ours. To disclose it, examine its structure, find out in its composition (it must consist of something, too) a sign with which it, in (as it is said) a quaint manner, tore us off from there and placed here. One ought to establish in writing that, by exchanging the masks, it (the exile) poorly masked itself. It must be described such that it gets sick of it. Parting with the original on account of the left over imputation, transplanting the subsequent into the center of the original sense: the history indeed consists of that, without our doom dissociating it. Since it is the way it is, it is necessary to enter the banishment’s jaws (move appart its jaw-bones), to crush its teeth, come out of its head. To stop retreating, conduct the fight. In the fight, one ought to finish it (the exile) before it finishes us.

Finished off, one ought to shake it out in a big river such as the Amazon, to sit down in a punt and come down to the bank of ours, in the jungle.

* * *

"All that was, and is not again, it happened only, till the first rain." For the first time this winter, a southern wind was blowing last night: it divulged itself by (and by what else could it?) the dubious warmth. (At this time of year, it blows from the north or northwest, it warns who the boss is).

If this wind were from the south, it could be felt more through the wall than through presentiment. It had a shiny horse on which it rode galloping around (and which, itself, was sniffing it), running (on its crupper) around the solitary building, rearing (on its hind legs) up to the dumbfounded (resigned) tree crowns - it warmed them a bit so that, forgotten from both God and people, they could withstand the winter without breakage. It gave me a hope, too, for something warmer, at some time.

(The quant foam of Copernicus’s cross, phenomenalistic growth of brandy’s fermentation).

With its southern scent and classical origin (a layer of iodine, a slice of lavender) it reminded me of amphora’s immaturity which, under the jar’s handle, matured in the south (and now, mellowed, it’s filtering itself like an empty sleeve of the contemporary moment). It took out all that fruit, opened it up (sliced it in half) in order that (only in that state it is possible) a support would again start flying to the South. But not to the present one, defeated and broken, but to the one, forgotten, however by this wind from the south (as by the unearthed wine) preciously revived.

Enlivened, though, for no longer than the lasting of this very southern wind which, here it is, with its first incautiousness fletches the rain that, ungrateful (which resembles it), increasingly but not all the way extinguishes it in the state of being premature, like when a small glow with large tongs is being lowered down in a still possible flight.

Momentary Lackeys and Callous Masters

01/16/96

The entire pretension of theirs is conceived on nothing. It is comprehensible with difficulty (and only with the world’s lassitude explainable) that, still, the earth (that is, its "civilized" part) is full of them. (The "uncivilized" part hasn’t gotten to that point yet, the wrapped gappings are not on sale there, rather, for a long time already, in it there cooks that which both will taste at some time except that those which are counted as "savages" will not decrease on a worse broth).

Pretentious, what’s more strutting, there teem the advisers, theorize the experts (pouring from the hollow to the empty, inside the cordial institutes and golden temples), the state journalists and (cable) anchormen tap each other on their backs, the smart ones multiply - all together keeping the dance of the ruling ones, in both the "freed" East and the "free" West. ("Sharks Have No Bones", Trefil, James). [Today, only domestic animals are not free - excellently comprehended, they are in some sort of (veterinarian) check; already those anthropomorphic/ anthropoid/humanoid/human-like (in a word, all those little animals from the nursery rhymes), because of such similarity with humans "free" as much as them, according to that supposition still fly, rout, sniff a romanticized call while, in fact, like their "higher" examples, they dismember each other silently: the incertitude of the universe is the goal of free hunters]. While those up there intimidate with hell, redeem with paradise, packing both products into docility. (That all of them together, in a pack, tell opposite things, for now escapes the tired attention, but this will not be able to continue indefinetely). Tightened in their stern shirts and even more austere collars, they moralize without scrupulousness about justified bombardment and unjustified insubordination. (Without a blink, they polute History like their soulmates, the clones before them). With a fat bank account they are - not many of them will die of hunger. They even have solutions and, thank the Lord, advise for the unpretentious as well as the poor. As if they were on the right, or they’re ostensibly on the left, as if they’re not shining cemented in their own centre. While talking nonsense they act seriously, that one does not believe oneself. They speak about knowing bigger and more complex things but do not know about smaller and simpler things. They can explain both sense and nonsense, engage into large subjects, but don’t know how the TV set, from which they bubble so much, works. (The pert they are, and hasty, they want to execute you if you’re disobedient).

And their masters lead the countries and religions since the beginning of time. (At the state and church positions they are - isn’t it that, through the ages, they help each other by that?). They singe the wars, after that (as if nothing happened) they create peace. Meanwhile, they are bored with their momentary lackeys.

All of them do to all of us whatever they like until, due to so much tattle and crime, they choke when those who were listening to them with disbelief and disgust raise the hand to ask them the right question. And, in their hand, sharpened by the reverberation, lit up by the uprising, there shines the Gubec’s sickle.

* * *

01/17-19/96

We pity something in a cage as if we’re somewhere else. As if on the firmly carved, foreseen road we ourselves are not moving. Thoughtfulness of neatness: voyage to strictness through tenderness of details, reality of a flag at an imaginary destination, habituation of track. Judicious behaviour: irreproachableness of the voting mechanism, proclamation of congressional truth, official correctness. Dutifulness: from morning to evening, from day to day, over the years - it is not easy to sustain oneself on the list of followers of loyalty. In the morning, crowded transportation means going in one direction, in the evening - going in the other. (In them, only unemployed are not taking the ride - those who’re taking it anticipate frightened, tinier than the smallest fleck of dust. Truth to say, in the trains, buses and street cars neither are taking the ride those who are going to, today again, take the profit, that is order the bombardment - they’re driven around by a chauffeur. But that’s another story, even though this one originates from it). The day sheared, as much of the coldness as of the effort to, alone, accept all of this. The same which, in the crowd, is going to fit in today’s day (in its overloaded wagon), came out of yesterday’s and will enter tomorrow’s day. (The present, in this case, serves more as a figure of conveyance). That the day (today’s, yesterday’s, tomorrow’s) serves here as a convenient cage is not necessary to prove to anybody, it is sufficient to keep him inside, in the vitreous dogma of equanimity of skillful orderers of out precious labours and the corresponding lives - up to the breaking point of yet another mass calisthenics.

* * *

Yesterday was the first day which smelled like spring. (The scent of an instant in which, before it will be reaped, the trefoil comes to think of the fourth leaflet and then, dissoluted, it draws in nostrils of the reaper). As much as it came early, the day was fictional - it could have not been believed to for a longer than that instant. (And to what could it?). All of a sudden, the piles of accumulated snow were gone: through yesterday’s day almost all weeks of recent coldness melted (and leaked out in streamlets), together with the useless parts of our lives, frozen in them during that time. Even a Carbonic bird (the flying piece of zeroth coal) croaking clambered up the roof of the building across the street and hurriedly shook off its wings its portion of the winter. The mild air replaced the sharp, for a short while (we know), but even that brevity was sufficient attestation of the change. Although all this with seasons is not a change in the true sense of the word - it rather deals with periodicity. Inconstancy as a proposition for permanency. Caprice of departing and whim of returning. To the one of them, at a given instant too spread out, the approach (first unnoticable, afterwards all the more expressed) of the other one, dethroning until the next alternation.

The seasons contest, too; like in us - it is the war which rules in them. Lurking each other, they wait for each other’s cautiousness to relax as it happened yesterday to this winter (it knew that it would arrive next year again) - proclaiming the victory they are going to celebrate it for a month or two, until falling in the same, negligent yawn of the cycle.

Displaying Family Photographs at Work

It is a custom here to display photographs of family members at work. (This is done by the highest officials of the state, too, up to the President, probably to give an example and support the ritual, increasingly the tradition). At my present work, this is indirectly but clearly helped by providing the employees with free picture frames, both smaller and larger, for framing the photographs. That is respected by almost all: thus the images of their wives and children look at them from the tops of their working desks. (The female employees exhibit the pictures of their corresponding family members although, it is noticable, not as much assiduously or in the number of the men).

Therefore, while the employee works, types on the computer keyboard, reads a memo or goes through the piles of papers, phones or answers the phone, in front of him there are coloured figures (I haven’t seen anyone keeping black and white photos) of family members. (The labs are without the pictures, to everything there is a measure).

At first sight, there is nothing in this which is not right, even the first, reflexive, thought how this is, actually, healthy and moral deed, seems right. The integrity of the family, as a fundamental institution of society, vibrates before the eyes like the first and most important goal, the vigilance and notion about the family members do not fall behind at any moment: the family connectivity is being stressed by the golden reflection of a studio - such harmony, it is supposed and with this suggested, is present in the employee’s household too. Taking into account the incontestable (traditional) inheritance of the protestant/catholic system of values and way of thinking of the predominant portion of the population here, by which, surely, this custom is positively valued, that is, according to which this whole show with the photographs is all right, although all that may look like (and it does) as being imposed (overly insisted on) in the sense that the (more intimate) parts of the employee’s life are being framed up at a public (inconvenient) place (something like a snapshot of sudden amiability in an overcrowded subway at 5:30 pm), one cannot tear oneself away from the impression that this is a question of another, more important subject.

It seems, namely, that the main meaning and object of the display of family photographs at work is not so much the exposure of the family members to the sight of others in the work place (to, eventually, enhance the seriousness and worthiness of the employee in the sphere as important as the company’s business itself), as to, at every moment, make known to the employee that for keeping prosperity and happy hours of family life, whose protagonists (permanently smiling) from these fair-like photographs are watching him right now (with a justified moodiness - the first second of thoughtfulness amalgamated at a draught), he is supposed to, in return, keep quiet, work more, endure and tolerate rather than to derange.

Perhaps that is why, in some other parts of the world, family pictures are displayed on the kitchen or family room walls although often in shoe boxes, as well. And perhaps because of that, the commotions are bigger there.

In the Library

01/20-21/96

Whoever plunges himself into an (usually big) effort to explain a little, everything large surpasses him by during that time. And if one does not occupy oneself with the smaller and comes to know it well, neither will he know the larger because it consists of the smaller. Only, and with a significant effort, something small or smaller can be established and, so determined, placed in yet another box, more often a tiny box, of knowledge. This is done by scientists and such, toilsome, job of theirs makes the science. (It is true that, at the same time, it is them who discovered the nuclear bomb and, together with the, so-called, technical intelligentsia, perfected other weapons, including the present ones, used in the "surgical strikes" on the remnants of the rebellious honour, but that is a theme for a particular, planetary description although, even so weakly started, it devaluates the utility and usage of other useful inventions). The scientists, however, deal with the tinier and the lesser, which is the only way to deal with the voluminous and the considerable, although they do not even come close to pretending the latter, if they do that at all in comparison to liars, quasi-experts, clergy and charlatans. [Politicians are not included in the list on purpose: even all of the above (the ultimate mixture of their composition) is not enough to cause shame on them. Whilst an honest ignoramus, as if leprous, is ashamed of his ignorance or, at least, hides it, they make honour and virtue of even the more fundamental categories (than it is ignorance), the disgrace and infamy, at the same time raising their entire nose up]. Contrary to the circus-like performance of the aforesaid "interpreters" of the big, even the tiniest minuteness of anything small is so complex that laymen are simply not aware of that, and if confronted with the description of even such a minuscule detail they would not apprehend it again. (In the laymen, in this case, belong also those who are specialists, but for other little parts).

The things are, simply, (for us) construed minutely, although it is possible, but more improbable than probable, that to all, to the collection of everything, the outcome is simple.

Having found ourselves in a remarkable library such as this one is, named "Whitney IC" (within the temple of the GE R&D, in Niskayuna, NY, the informal neighbour of the company in which I work), featuring perfectly stacked tens of thousands of titles including books, journals, transactions and proceedings of works in theoretical and applied physics, chemistry, medicine, astronomy, biology, mechanical and electrical engineering (from this country and other countries of the world whereby, it is seen even in passing, the political criterion does not play any role before the scientific one), one can only feel tinier than a poppy seed and, at the same time, pay respect to a man in principle (rare are such moments, of course).

Such volumes of (magnificent) knowledge (about small parts), such a penetration into the material (the only one on this side) construction of the world, such descriptions of cosmic particles, such a brisk (persistently analytical) silence of the used paper on the petrified shelves of offered sense (although, in this libray, the CD ROMs are increasingly in use) from which (the meaning), almost unpleasantly, the corrobation of a doubt pliably leers at the same instant - all that directs at least a little taciturnity and homage to that part of a man. Cast out in Nothing, he does not give up; in Nothingness he constructs himself. There is no greater bravery nor is there a stronger being. And all the other (profane, political, religious, circus-like, trivial (trivialized), propagandistic, stupid, fickle, unworthy, boorishly jocular, sly, kitsch, gluttonous, low and selfish) in one, in this library can only be abashed and gone away not to be found. At least until one steps out of it. Because, this other, outside, does exist so that the inexplicable part of the Universe, being reduced, would ridicule the explained one which looks like it is, at the dismay of the first one, increasing.

* * *

It’s Sunday. I don’t have to do anything nor must I go anywhere. (In the Holy Books, besides going to church, that is even recommended). The building is (by the act of a commission) approved for lodging, there is no need for a ramble (besides, it’s all the same). The only thing that I’m consuming today is this light bulb. (Although the reason is being consumed as well but, at the same time, restored with a lot of talent). With trained senses I am able to find out when a ghost entered the room and when it left. It came in when, because of it, the bulb was no longer visible (dead, it materialized enough); it went out when, because of the bulb, it was no longer visible (alive, it dispersed enough). There is neither a hymn nor a solemn choir to, at the last moment, before the pompeous void, from the fête-tower of the nation (it’s almost time for the Sunday supper), be listened to: a lively hush only (the incorruptibility of early stillness, incompleteness of a stitchwork) embroiders its silent embroidery between the sleepy alloy of a late comprehended bell (the inertial mass of Sunday’s exaltation) and an amnion of reverberation (the suborder of sonorous dragon). And what if something (suddenly) happens? If something puts itself into disorder, the equilibrium stays away, the orientation is lost or, in amazement, one is beheaded. (In those, sacral books, nothing is written about that, nor is even administrative instruction issued - it is counted on the tranquility of conviction as on the clause of salvation). If a jump must be made, a sudden adversary be defeated in the beginning of the attack. (The stupidity is in assault continually, it is not necessary to jump because of it, it is sufficient to turn to the other side). If it dares to show up (all that which plagues me). (Perhaps, today is its birthday or yet another, favourable opportunity misguided it). If it starts bringing in the weaponry and distributing it behind the hills of tranquility. Attacks, at last. [Instead of the DOD (Department Of Defense) becomes the DOA (Department Of Aggression): the W.K.Röentgen’s snapshot of the Ministry of this place. Truth to say, by the convertibleness above the conversion (by the offence as the best defence), the DOD does not fence itself from the DOA, it only perfects its bomber uniform for the new portrayal at the old fair of the world]. Even then, I do not have to do anything nor must I go anywhere. It’ll be enough to again drive it (all that which grieves me) out of my head (like a half an hour ago) or to, if it still refuses to go, denounce it to the reckless commission which signed off the reception of the building.

Dream - 2

01/22-23/96

As if I lie with my head down in a vaulted (archives-like arched) basement (sleep on the couch in its central room) when, at some time, I look around and see that where the furnace used to be - it’s not there anymore. I stand up and look more carefully, there is no furnace, I gape at everything around me, neither are the other things in their places: altered, the basement’s toxicity snarls insolently while it salutes on purpose cordially. I go towards the (basement’s) bathroom, when there some men, women and children move in a haste, arrange something, do some work including laundry. Nor is in a couple of other rooms (in the basement) "that which used to be" [and by such a pledge of the Populism (the people on the run) was recognizable]: in each of the rooms there is someone on his own and in some a multitude of lone ones. Sweated (by the wool of space, crack of duvet), I think how (again) I dream all this, I tell myself that this is a bad dream (by what, pragmatically, it is assumed that the reality is nicer), I force myself as much as I can (I remember well that effort) to wake up. Thus, I wake up. Quickly, I look around, jump to the room where the furnace is, but it is missing again. I run to the bathroom, but in it R., S. and M. comb their hair (with lightheadedness), place their finger on the mouth (of height), signal to me to keep quiet (to not make a noise). I start to run up the stairs, but there sits a child because of whom I cannot get through (to the viaduct-like redemption). I think of how this is not possible, I’m awake but the outcome does not differ from the one from the dream: the furnace is missing (the reduction to ashes in the brooch of soot - through the instict of old, a new ambient yawns), the polynomial composition of people and things is in the basis of the world: science + art = religion of the dug in foundation of the house. (Wer Wissenschaft und Kunst besitzt, hat auch Religion; Wer jene beide nicht besitzt, der habe Religion - He who possesses science and art also has religion; but he who possesses neither of those two, let him have religion", Göethe). I remember, thus, that I am not (sufficiently) woken up (from the point of the first order, the collineation of beginning) and, trying to (sufficiently) wake up, I realize: like in the previous dream, and in spite of the great effort, this (again) does not come easily to me. (The return burrowed from the memento of leaving; from the coming upon of a being: the multitude as an obstacle to escape - out of so many variants it cannot make up its mind which way to take). As in the previous (Dream - 1), in this dream this was the most difficult for me again: in the cube of the bed, to the ear of the pillow (appalled by my repeated incapability to wake up - to fawn upon myself) I started to spell those same ones, two-syllable words (from Dream - 1). So, I felt for them, until then gambled away, the keys (in the critical situation, spelling the natural commencement, they nervously clanked: from the two-syllabism to the sputtering meaning the journey was completed by the abandoned ideals, as if it would not be by them as well). With their help (the help of the keys) I succeed, I wake up (unlock myself), this time really. Awakened, I see that I did not sleep in that but in this place, on this and not that couch. (In such a confusion I am, I notice, that I no longer know where I am: whether in this or that place, confirming the truth about the ruins of other places with regards to my expectations).

Contemplating (irrevocably awakened) about both this one and the

previous, a month ago barely managed waking up, I concluded that, without the excessive manirism, it was supposed that in neither of these dreams I wake up, but that (by the throwing onto the scene at the right time a janitor character, that is the locksmith of waking up who estimated that, once more, the lock is to be unlocked, that is that I ought to wake up) I was allowed to, in spite of everything that befell me, wake up and return, although to the solitude.

I thought that it would have been better that, because I cannot count on goodwill, that is the subsequent estimation of that, after all, unreliable witness (uncertain character) of excessive dreams (who is only nominally, due to his trade, responsible for waking up, while practically he acts according to his indiscretion), I leave the apartment entrance door unlocked so that if I remain there (in a lone dream about the overpopulated basement of the world), I can return here (to the proper attentiveness of its desolated building), lie down and fall asleep again, without the worries about otherwise necessary keys, everlastingly somewhere gambled away.

* * *

Behind everyone’s residence - a desert.

Although even the conventional motley-like upholstery of the furniture (or the beneficial ideas) does not draw one’s attention off, one conjectures aguishly, the sandy care of allotropy (the existence in two forms: outside and inside, veiled by the same cracking - the powder of glycerine), one still insists on it.

Having come into it (the residence), having locked the door one does not think (one reasons) any longer about it (the desert). He looks around the apartment (sets the chair), lights up the fatal cigarette. He goes from one window to the other - it boils in him, notwithstanding room-like, the escape. However, he just returned, he doesn’t have where to go. (Except to the honourably lost war, even if killed by the dishonourable peace, but, besides the copiousness of the latter, in no way can he find the former). He looks into his soul, he sees that even it, having been contemptuous of him during the uplifting, abandoned him, he lights up another cigarette. (Spell does not flinch from the limits, he comforts himself). He leans against the wall, cools down his forehead, but in fact he measures them: how much they (the one and the other) protect from that which is outside, how much they explain this which is inside. He moves away six to seven steps (not more), dashes against - flies through the wall but also through the head. (Still) unprotected from the outside, (still) not articulated from the inside, he figures to himself how (again) he did not take the measure right.

Yet, he opposed, he concludes, true without necessary considerateness for the complexities of the world - its offended motley, the conceit of the white and yellow flowers in the not striking vase on the hyperbolic table of cosmic alliance which, he thinks, his situation has nothing to do with.

Žika

01/24/96

That Žika, from Switzerland, he died. (How, does one pass away in Switzerland too?).

Žika was somewhat older than us, before us he attended the same schools in B., graduated, worked for a year or two, and then he left for S. It’s been about 30 years since then.

But, a while ago he died over there. (In addition to our foggy memory of him, there now comes this gloomy darkness). No salvation is in prospect, as soon as the next year he’ll be forgotten. (I think that he never got married, that is, never founded a family).

But I remembered him at this moment, incidentally, contemplating about everything. (Picking out the remains of that life, from that time).

Until he went there (where, accordingly, he died), he lived on the hill Z., on, elevated by it, the periphery of the city. It must have been that he was, every day, climbing up the steep street, from the last stop of street cars 6 and 7, and coming down it, with the doggedness which, later on, took him from there (but also, it turned out, from over there although, with reference to the latter taking, the persistence does not present a significant opponent, it rather fits into its plan).

Shrunk and bent (with his back broken since his childhood), his hunch opposed to the fundamental cosmic slope in the form of that, still then metaphoric, peripheral street (concealed significance of redemption and its bee-like fall), he bore up who knows what with.

One of those days, a turntable belonging to one of us (in the company) malfunctioned. (It was rare to have that device then, in the first place). Not knowing how and where else to fix it, we decided to climb the hill and see Žika. (He just graduated, started to work, we counted on this).

One enters through a small gate in a rickety (from uncertain memory) fence, overgrown with the reticent brushwood as with the ultimate elaboration of verity, then passes by the obstinate trunks of high noon [chestnut, poplar (murmur of the world) and pine] on the way to a small dwelling (a room, a kitchen, something unsurpassable like that, czar’s) of a single-story and through time a whitish house, once painted white.

(It was possibly then, when we saw for the first time where he lived - it was always him who was coming to the company).

He takes the turntable and fixes it. (Returns the importance to the mechanism through the emendation, embelishes our, probably full of habit, day).

That was our biggest affair with Žika, with the exemption of the following one.

A few years after repairing the gramophone [Žika had already set off to S., "to live and work" (since to the dicoverers of this euphemism its causality (logical conditioning), overturned to even such a degree (it should be said "to work and live" - to placate the time axis of assiduity of loneliness), is not redundant, they would, all the chances are, set out to a more reassuring place (or replace the babbling with something more remarkable), if only they could stand up and leave the bistro): he worked, as a very good engineer, in a large firm such as "B.B" or something similar, anational and proportionally important], when all of a sudden here he is, coming for those few days of his vacation (with regards to those who occupied their seats in the restaurant garden debating about meaning).

The accident wanted it, all of us were up on the hill, at Lj’s and G’s place, when to the old spot there arrived Žika.

Where’ve you been, how are ’ya?

G. pours brandy, Lj. cognac, we stare (glistening) at Žika, Žika stares (glimmering) at us.

We, (still) rebellious (the majority of us was already working but some, of course, were still students), watch for the first opportunity to shoot at the System and in Žika, a cosmopolite, find support for our bitter and irate attitude.

Thus, after the first remote story, we fired off.

And this is not good, and that is not good, and you were right when you left (since you left, it became even worse!), and all in that sense. Žika stares, winks (rather blinks), he lets us recover our breath (all kinds of things he learned over there - we momentarily see, certain in a favourable settlement of our worry by his single move). It is true that he watches us somehow like a mom watches her kids (she sees that they go recklessly and embarrass her, but mom is mom, she has to take care of them, the benignity prevails in her), however, we ourselves realize as well the justifiableness of his seriousness approaching such an issue (it is not a joke to solve it, the world actually revolves around it).

In Lord’s name we frothed (along with the cognac), Žika glittered from the yellow brandy even more.

This is going towards its climax, we felt.

It’s going to go off now.

Žika’s got to say his word.

And he said, "Stop shitting!".

He added, "Pour another one for me, I ought to go back".

As he went back he did not return. Nor will he.

A Sign On the Door

01/25/96

Compressed in this (ready, as always, for a perfect reason) frame (not having where to go for now), it is seen (what time again?) that it is possible to write about anything, any speck: even the smallest explained (unmasked) particle of false perfection contributes to the escape from the (above) squeeze.

Thus, also this sign on the door, having suddenly appeared for a description, is annexing the move of the release. (Is it? It would, possibly, contribute to the breach if it was something else, not this panic-stricken head).

Exactly on the door of that prosaic room (closet) where the shirts, pullovers and, indistinct in the twilight, boxes are kept, there is a sign.

The door is, as always in such cases, intensively brown (its contrast to the white walls is understandable, but it is like that even when it is preliminary): it, therefore, appropriately shines due to the standard varnish for that kind of wood. With that, it is located three and a half meters away from the observer leaned against the opposite wall of the room (where, fortified like a successfully thrown insect, he waits for the solution to buzz).

And because it’s made of suddenly cut, aged trunks, on the door’s surface (at the crossing of two worlds, of which one is consumed and another branched out by the same thought) the higher order functions are visible, mainly parabolic lines but also a multitude of deterministically stochastic signs and pictures of variable density, they only need to be descrambled, that is, seen.

(What do those which are unseen feel - that is the question which bothers the invisible part of the universe, cheered up by such an easy identification even though, it turned out, only this door succumbed to it).

Starring at its upper left quadrant, it seems improbable to one that he discovered this sign only now. (If he detected it earlier, at least he would have some company, even in the same distress).

Sealed up without defiance (instantaneously imprinted by an incision of a circular deuce) - in a probably expressionless and thus statistical morning suddenly uncovered by a strong traversing of motorized saw, varnished afterwards and finally by this door in this wall installed, the quadrant (full of the fresco of a scream, the sent away spume), unable to move or change its shape, had petrified in what (full of pathos?) it represents.

And that is something like a head: from the profile, besides the neck, chin and the lower part of nose (the brain has not been reached), before all else one can see the frightened mouth opened as much as needed for a shriek ensued by working out the tree by larva originated from cutting the azure woods in practice scattered in a sea of signs out of which this one separated in this way, sealing its truth.

The Pupils

01/26-31/96

While I still was, from the beginning of the summer through its end and in the early fall, residing in another area (a few blocks away from this one), leaving for work in the mornings I noticed some schoolboys. (They probably attended summer school; then the regular one). I saw that there were three pupils: (by their age) one of them was an elementary school student, the other two (who were always together) were high school students. The first one would wait at the corner for a city bus while the other two would walk (their school was probably close). The two would just pass by when I was driving my car down the driveway; after a hundred yards of driving I would pass by the one waiting for the bus. All three were clean, their hair combed; however, they were from the poor rather than the better standing families. That could be seen by their shortened slacks and frayed (of lost flare) dresses and shoes, as well as by their long ago washed out (of sometime more lively colors) backpacks. The older two who walked together, and the yonger one who waited for the bus, did not know each other. (When the two would pass by the third, they wouldn’t exchange greetings, not a word). But they’re of the same origin, the same race: somewhere from Asia. Whether they were from Korea or, perhaps, Tailand, Burma, Laos or Indo-China were the countries in which their origins could have been anticipated, I didn’t know. In any case, they were rather from one of the smaller ones, and by so much more mysterious countries (of a foggy conception, in them even a wolf must have presented itself as a handful of rice), than from some of the larger ones, about which is talked more when the subject is the countries on that continent (and on which is counted more, up to the Security Council, although they, even at the peak of a bombing campaign, prudently abstain, similar to saffron and silk). In the beginning, I did not notice the pupils enough to make me think about them (and, as now, write about them) but, as with everything of that nature, the repetition of the scene (their leaving for school at the time of my leaving for work) was slowly but surely imposing, and later emphasizing itself in the morning routine. Having noticed them and, consequently, having paid a greater attention to them, I saw that their origin was from over there; I also observed their modesty and inconspicuousness (in comparison with more spoiled children, both here and elsewhere, from the families of middle and higher social status, as it usually goes). That is, they, judging by everything and in the best case, had only so much to peacefully and quietly do their school work (although, of course, in the world there are too many situations where even that cannot be done, in spite of all the silence), while the two older ones, besides attending the school, likely worked part time (that’s how it is here, how it’s understood). Gone were, so, those months: for them in school, for me at work. (Dry fig of pine, scragginess of pith: "For reevaluation of all values!!!", Friedrich Nietzsche). Then I moved here and didn’t see them since. ["Some are born posthumously (postmortem, post-obit, post-obituary)", F.N., "The Antichrist", I recalled, frozen by the simple outcome of migration, the inverse likelihood of its result]. But, even then it bothered me, as it’s happened now, a thought about the meaning which they (and, of course, me) came here to look for (although, I suppose, their parents were those who made the decision), in this actually monotonous, that is, uniformly dutiful surrounding, which does not assume derailing out of the tasked and identified (by the Lutheran salvation, the Congressional edifice of oval upper lip and Gallery of lower), with the clearly defined route and, more or less, unchangeable contents. (Down the dead end street there descends the pain threshold of a disc thrown towards the east: the only sky walker of January’s break of the day; all delusion and propaganda, of course, with such an argument do not have what to cover up, except their own mouth). For they could (these pupils, and so simply) draw themselves into the moisture, insects, rustle, contortion, outcry, beasts of prey, prehistory (including a primeval forest) of those, there, obscure countries. And even if laughter divulges them (tranquility of misery, spasm of neck veins of inspiration) underneath the swinging huts of brushwood, so what? (The wearing out of wind, its uncivil end: the feeling at home of return to the infinite zero of breeze). For these schoolboys, in the course of these months, never laughed. On the contrary. The younger one was, every morning, unhappily waiting for the bus; the older ones were, more silent than chatty, (passively) conquering the road to school, all three more serious than that, at their age, should be. [Given up before the orchestral opening of the (nationalistic) purpose - "Finlandia" (1899), Op. 27, Sibelius, Jean (1865-1957), to them (the pupils) it was left to collect it by the silence instead by ovations]. Certainly, a laughter could not have been easily heard from me, either. (A chess-like closing of the circle, completion of the 64th, the same). Regarding that, there was no difference between us. Having arrived, them from over there, me from there, the same happened to us. Only, they’re going to school (to learn about bigger); I’m sitting down occupied with what I learned (about all that is smaller).

* * *

Vermin, Dust: I’ve not been here for two, three days, and some dust already collected, some small, empty shell of a vermin beneath one’s notice. (And in me not even a grain, it rusts like an empty haystack). As if the time, in absence of unreliable observer, without opposition peels off into certain final practicability, (for the conditions) politely quieted: yet only a sharp "r" of forgotten September delves under January’s "r": such a big snow and it still digs the ruined fame of one the same meta-state. (It’s January and I talk about September: the humble days of September, burnt out as recently as last summer, last night left without the urn). This is, it means, all that is offered in the absence: insects, dust. (As soon as we’re not present, it’s them whose crust leaves sediment, spills on the floor). A permanent presence is necessary (at the first line of the front) to achieve the equilibrium: a bluff of adaptability and good intention. (Even the want of knowledge does not free from the duty of presence at the collision of the two worlds - ours and the enemy’s; the ignorance does not excuse one: in the best case it humbles/ashames, in the worse it takes out to account). The balance: ascertainment of presence to the dramatic act of apocalypse, the after-war bits without too much ravage. (Our walk echoes around the room, if only a voice could be heard). Appeasement: it lurks when we’re going to go to war. (To war! Yes, for a war of words indeed is not a real war: it differs from it by command from dead, not alive mouth). Seemingly imperial time but it watches how to extricate itself from the jealous curls of drapery, to stealthily arrange itself upon the hardened void, by the shy folds of notion frames, to cut off in foundations the inflow of the (so understood) world, allowing only the kitchen triumph when, not escaped, we again return to it (the kitchen). Peeling off into the overripen thoughtfulness (the faucet turned off to the last drop), the time wraps us, including the insects (their dust), by the rim of beheld beginning. Whether the small vacant shells of a couple of vermin (remnants of preceding shift - attentively settled arsenal of endeavours of small proportions) need to be swept off the floor or, perhaps, in such a state, they should be picked up in hand and left in it as the only witnesses of our stay here, I’m thinking not hearing myself.

* * *

(Plan of Movement). Everywhere, a smaller body revolves around a larger one: in the universe, atom, outside, inside, full, empty, wherever one looks (and easily suspects), something circles around something (one sniffs the other persistently, never carefully), it is in a permanent, neither faster nor slower movement. ("Do not hurry, do not rest", look how Göethe’s ashes through the years of inevitability have a mammalian sniff of primatial brittle whirlpool of bones of perpetual vein of the world - the hades). It turns around in order to not fall. (By the circling it stays in orbit). The unfavourable forces nullify, the distance to descent is maintained - the necessary (minimal) separation from the (sudden) zero contributes to the cautiousness of every object and particle: cautious, they don’t stop rotating. But, during the circling, the distance to that around which the turning is kept does not increase either: it’s not possible to escape, only to stay the same (until that melts away, too). (Apostasy of an instant, trepidation of the first dog - into the final range of pendulum, dog number two is lodged). And because there is always larger than large and smaller than small, the circling is made around the next in size but, due to the explained limitation, nothing escapes anything despite of so much running away. (A world sufficient to itself, in love with itself - with other, so dim although provocative possibilities, even if given them, it wouldn’t know what to do). This is how it all exists, otherwise it would fall down. (But it is imprisoned, otherwise it would fly away). It’s neither freed (except in hyperbola), nor is it caught (except in ellipse): being on such an uncertain road and (still) ecstatically treading upon the (destination) throne! As if it does not know that while it is on the journey (on the aimless voyage while it is) - it exists, when it stops travelling (at destination when it is) - it will not exist. (Moral calculations: debility of chastely purpose, "Moral Calculations", Mero, Laszlo). In so far, accordingly, the world presents itself as created, all that has been, until then, with all other amalgamated (and, as Lythraceæ, fell in Pomegranate, bathed in a Sea of Punica granatum), pulled off and went away to its (formic modest but also persistent) journey. Joining all that travels, walking upon, in the so-called peacefulness walled in, (pseudodynamic) reflection of the world, in the cosmic performance we come in sight (at the right moment), too. And, in as much as the world presents itself as not created, it doesn’t mean that all is (still) not circling but that, with what is turning, we no longer associate (on subconsciously impressive, consciously banal road) - silenced by experience (shot at star, hit on the forehead, wounded at noon only a yawn of nitrogen falls down), we resigned (some time ago rebellious) ourselves. Thus the question whether the world is created or not is a matter of state and judgement of the observer: in as much he concludes that the world’s been created - he lives from memories from the (bird-like spied, eagle-like conquered) road; in so far in his memory there is no more fire

(cold, his decorations freeze), the world for him presents itself as not created. Embryology - a construct of a bewildered organism. Neither one nor the other has anything to do with the world, but with the movement of the observer: whether he’s distancing along the embryological path or jumping back to his embryo.

* * *

02/01-02/96

February like the choice of January. (As much as the one protracted, the other is going to talk about itself). With head bent and movements sensitive to cold, June, even May, from January looked far out of reach, from February they already seem as a more realistic possibility. But, one need not be kidding oneself. The road through the winter is only half way completed. Back stayed all the unskillfully described days, there remains the same number of identical ones. (Contemporaneity: every age whiter than the previous by armful of scars). Conversible periodicity: to keep hidden 11 of 12 times, only in the 12th, when everything got forgotten, to jump out from the bushes of infirmity, resin of Juniperus communis, avalanche of recollection. (From the Game Theory, via Logic, to the Physical Weakness: the fragility of abacus of a perfect organism). And whatever number of years we live, our memory is short, we keep being surprised by the old, attaching importance to the repeating situation. (Kelvin’s zero: the tiptoeing of a monumental ballerina full of conflagration). The seconds, minutes, hours, days, months and years are a local convention: in the universe they mean nothing, they have no sense. (The time units are derived and valid in domain in which a planet revolves around a star 12 times slower than the planet’s satellite around it, the rest is inference and division). A gentlemen’s agreement, a conventional séance of relaxation with uncorruptible permanency, Methodist vindication for judiciousness, John von Neumann’s noon on the wall clock in the living room of altruism, competitive spirit and daily politics. (Caprice of rising early: classical cherries of certain Captain - as far as to there, that Prussian rank, although a guardian of civil conceptions, that cheerful loafer, mustached and half drunk of elasticity of apprehension, had reached - the fruits we were stealing like all those days, to exchange them, now, for these).

* * *

The second day of the second month. That’s how it turned out today, once a month there is such a day, today is one of them. As soon as there is a bit more unusual texture of numbers (singular duality, its refined work) we’re inclined to attribute more significance to it: we strenghten irrationality. (Insisting on rationality: courting the mouth escaping the spring). All different signs (around us), the occurrence of even a small miracle, the uncertainty of outcome - as much as we don’t know we think that we have a presentiment about it. The secret systematization of the world - not even a robust thought is breaking it up while the precision of the test tube is alchemically falling to pieces: during the fall of one, look how the other paradigm’s climbing up the crutches of rhetorical art! [We’re justified because we’re correct", and "Everything that’s apparent now, is actually true", B.L. (his informality of form), in spite of such vulgar, tautological echo, with full force falls into the civilization’s jade. For "How do you convince a vulgar man that he is vulgar?", F.N., from B’s continuation of the afternoon. Reduced to the ultimate vulgarity: as if any authority, by its very existence, is not a terror of, for the ruling interested, active minority, over the uninterested majority and, for the resistance interested, but inactive minority?]. We suspect, we say, that in something there is something - but what if there is not? In unclear signs we seek support, from the clear ones it (vindicated) leaked out long ago. We reduce the importance of the unreliable part - stressing the reliable part (as if it is not a matter of relation of a squid with its tentacles). If we agree that the reliable part is bigger, we’ll sleep through this night, too. If the unreliable part prevails, we are not going to know whether in the morning we’ll wake up in another world even though, terrified, we see that we are not in this one.

The Decisive Encounter

02/03-06/96

While I was escorting Senka (lit. Shadow) that evening, walking with her down the left side of the hilly Boulevard of O.R., more exactly down the narrow path on that, (when descending) left side, from which the woods widened, it was quiet. (Perhaps by chance) it happened that, during the descent, only a few vehicles passed by us - such that, in fact, we were going down the road in silence, not disturbing it with much talk either. That’s why we could hear, until then listening to (on the left side) the mentioned forest, someone’s soft running behind us, more transparent than audible. That was how, running, she (almost an antelope) joined us. She wore a sandy, long coat with black collars - in it she came gasping for air. (When, later, we arrived at the place where, it turned out, we all were going to, and when she took the coat off, she appeared in a black skirt and a white blouse and, with her feet in dark brown, small boots, she looked as if she stepped on stage in front of her school choir ready for the season’s festivity in, it’s being presently interpreted, some sort of unfavourable regime). Joining us on the hilly road, amidst the silence, near the woods (its softer part), inaudibly although a chime-like audibly, by another spread of this same world, she presented herself. Her name was R., after the first few words. (She knew Senka through Senka’s sister, with whom she was attending a 12th grade class in the high school up on the hill, and whose birthday party this evening we all were going to, down the hill, to a common friend’s place). I’ve heard about her in the group of friends, but under name (rather nickname) C., however I forgot it, neither did I know who it pertained to. And now here she is, C. that is R., walking next to me, talking cheerfully, (after first disallowing her, her father just let her go, she could stay as late as ten o’ clock, and so on), Senka, from her side, mentions similar things, I was wandering why I didn’t discover this road earlier. The walk is, otherwise, not long - going down the hill it doesn’t take more than 15 to 20 minutes to the place where we’re going, to the common friend, G. Having caught the echo of her running first, then her joining with a ringing joy of not picked alt, her sparkling spirit followed by her tameness as soon as she found us, I started examining her hair, eyes, body and cleanliness of her voice. Her hair was long, on the blonde side of brown (her restlessness was falling in cascade along with her hair), her eyes were daringly green (disconsent of a cat), her body (under the sandy coat with black collars) was holding its posture as in a story about it. And her voice spilled down the road like a sparkler. (Since until then she was running to catch up with us, following directions of Senka’s father, the breath of the haste presented her as a youthful gift to the evening of the city over there. Neither the city nor the evening, of course, exist anymore - still then they crossed over into this or similar story). And all of that which was her, here it was, walking alongside me, even though I didn’t know about it up to then. (To know about something, whether it exists or not - to drink it up while it pours out in drops, or to let it leak out). Of white face and pouted lips thirsty for wine, she was showing how to drink it off. In laughter only, her attitude was in irony to the world. (In those years we were wiser than today when we’re being killed by that which we’re not laughing at). Beautiful, small, whitened, chiming, scented, light, she was differing from both History and Experience. That is, she was stepping on them (it turned out - with righteousness). As much as she came down the road with me and Senka, she got absorbed in me. That is, me in her who (the holographic Shadow) sent me down that path so that she could say that, looking for an even reflection, she found me. (The decisive encounter: as much as her appearance was sudden, I went after her. Everything was so much dependent on a bold shout of her predisposition to my confrontation with such an impetuous being - as when, swiftly, a good news is proclaimed). Today is twenty seven years since then and I (with R.) have three grown up children. Down what roads will they go, we ask ourselves as we’re going (like the fathers in this story) to let them descend by themselves. But, those will be their stories.

* * *

(Going to the Mountain and the Sea). When on the horizon we see an edge of remote hills, we still don’t know whether it is not an offing. At that distance both look the same (blue), although one’s towering, the other’s filling up the bottom. Hills (mountains) and seas are the two halves of a single passion: to look at the world from sheer rock, to listen to it rustling. (From the bottom shells - to the world’s summit). Since we do not succeed at that (besides the walls of this room, nothing surrounds us so carefully and expertly), we intensify our steps on the apartment’s floor - gaudiness of sagging beneath the lively march. (Overstepping nothing, having a reasonable duel with every spot of the parquetry, we’re waiting for a sign to storm at something bigger). The structure of the real world, the mythological overthrow - from lightened mountains to weighty sea as from Olympus to Poseidon: neither the raving walk atop the room’s generatio æquivoca (spontaneous formation), nor the cut on the rind of apotheosis of sense will make a seaman from a mountaineer - from the plainness of animism to the complexity of cosmogony both will, hand in hand, arrive only to Hades, the ruler of the underworld, their basis. In a moment we’re on a cliff, in another in the depths of the water. On the seashore the sun warms us, on the observation peak it freezes us. Proverbially whipped by the wind on the standard tower (from which we blamefully observe the world as if we’re not participating in it), we do not transgress anything, nor do we rapture with something beyond a measure. (In order to make a stride towards something, we ought to amplify passions). Far away are all our mountains and seas, but close is to imagine them (to run away from the plains of the room, drilling it hydraulically with thoughts, like a fugitive does the prison). In that war we conquer a mountain and a sea. From now on for half of our lives we’ll be at one, and during the other half at the other place. That we’ve so far been here will not count, we’ll start from a new beginning, until we climb on the top or sink to the bottom, only to not be in the middle.

* * *

Away from something larger, I catch myself walking in the kitchen. (From wall to wall, two to three steps, not more). During my walk, I stop at the point where the fridge and oven are, I bend over, look in the cleft between the devices and the wall: only it didn’t betray any of the sides - full of classical faithfulness in early afternoon, it’s still yawning. Getting further sight of it (confirming the dogma), it seems like I hear a serious fight. I research every detail to get to know what state I’m in. What state am I in? Peering, I see: there is no smaller field nor is there a more possessed war! There nothingness and reason fight each other. (Who’s going to domicile the essence). They stretch me from wall to wall in order to, each one on its end, pay court to me - I hear the case today, again. One of them (today, again) I will proclaim the winner, the other I’ll throw out of the apartment. (Before quitting a work, the knitting is put away). I determine which of the two (that are battling) seems stronger, then judge that the other wins. (It is a custom and a chivalrous propriety). If I passed a different judgement, the nothingness wouldn’t stop at that (the victory). Although today it lost again, I throw it out once more (for every eventuality) through the door, down the stairs, to hell.

* * *

B.: Today, B. is 19 years old. (Time makes the children increasingly older, then continues to do the same with the grown-ups - the age by itself becomes inadequate for such an oldness). [When he was born, he was unaware of himself and now he’s studying nonlinear differential equations, solving them by the Rounge-Kutta (numerical) method /approximation (an improved Euler method)]. And from this day on he’ll be all the more older again, and he’ll learn even more. Until asking himself about things about him. Although he, as it’s been said, already questions them more than I did in his years. In other words, it seems to me that I was, then, younger. But it is also a reflection of the times in which the years happen and the times then, judging by everything, were more settled, defined, well-balanced. For, these years, the pendulum from the one-time equilibrium threatens to burst at the point of extreme. That’s why it’s more difficult for young people now. Our time was more easy in mind. [The only problem in such assertation is that it is more or less eternal - the same has been claimed (written) in the ancient scribblings, although without such a polite reminescence]. If things continue to develop this way, what will the times of their children be like? Whatever they be, and surely they will be different, it would do good that, during them, all who are going to be listening to their own placability, leave in reserve an instant or occasion lost long ago, to smoulder, to not go out, at the right moment to blaze up into the original play, on the promising trapeze....From the (subsequent) letter from August 4, 1996, to D.A., mentioning B. (then in Mineapp.), "...Our son’s coming back in two weeks [over there, this summer, he got acquainted with a girl, E., and fell in love for the first time, even though he was, it seemed to me, so firm, full of the impolished fire of Strelnikov relative to the missed and inadequate Dr. Zhivago as well as to the, by a measure of avidity, unfaithful Lara (disloyal as much as the song about her), almost scornful to such a weakness, infinitely convinced in the rationalis of Revolution]..." In the meantime, as if the revolutions really failed, some even call on the world "to be saved through beauty" [like, for example, suddenly (since 1987) spiritual Parisian, otherwise

Russian, A.M., the expert, therefore, on the "progression" Stalin-Brezhnev-Gorbachev, who, like the last one, hums a tune about the "progress" more overjoyed than the Gauls themselves], hardly anyone cares for uprising, as if the golden (healing) silence of speculative head of cattle in salutary shade of voluntary humbleness before (and dense concordance with) the aggressor is coming true.

* * *

02/07/96

(The Snail). I wake up early (I don’t sleep well), I try to catch these months by surprise, describing them while they are drowsy too. But, often, I sit down for a long time with no word to begin to run. [I stare at the idleness (an empty gait) of the proper pronunciation of the beginning]. In such a situation neither something’s heard nor seen. Enclosed and still like a drawn in snail. (By which, it knows what it is doing). But, as soon as it starts moving, loses its sense of reason and departs for somewhere, the snail (or something like it, in principle slow) draws out the first, most often small, word. (Although with difficulty as if, instead of its house, hauling it on itself). Afterwards, they pour out in drops, one after the other, until that (which represents the snail) becomes again limp, in the afternoon’s blank space, at the end of the voyage covered in wax. Therefore, its husk - house (full of this words) either dissolves into the surrounding or walks towards the sense extricated from a cocoon, I think while I follow it through the false prudence of dawn. [The same one which, last summer, was present at Princeton’s morning reception, full of formal and real authorities, where there also was a real one, a researcher with over 1000 papers/patents, in any case a mountain of results, and although his eccentricity, except from that, was not conjecturable from anything else (that he, together with his suit, put on his running shoes, here is more a sign of sanity of haste than the subject of European derisive smile and doubt), even that suggestion (of eventual peculiarity of his) he was instantly annuling by his brilliant smile (full of white teeth), shaking hands with anyone approaching him and, in a tenor voice, with the indestructible accent from his former country (India), almost yelling he was penetrating the other party’s ears, "Hi, my name is Rakit" (without, of course, mentioning Dr., M.Sc., Phill., Ecc., Hon., and all that which, in that same Europe, without running shoes but with its nose pointing upwards, goes along with introducing oneself of that caliber), as if around him there was nothing but lilies and daisies, that is, as if the majority of the guests at the reception, including him, were not in direct connection with lasnex, the computer MHD-code, classified top-secret and developed in the area of "target physics", sub-area of Magneto-Hydrodynamics (MHD), in which the target medium is considered a fluid in magnetic field wherein the code is used to perfect the thermonuclear weapons by calculating "how even the blast is"].... Having returned to the shell after the described regularity of the crack (having entered, unassumingly, the subject of interest of the snail), I see: in the same way in which it carries away all that is its - nothing remains of me, either. And when (this time through the lasnex code of immobile transitoriness in ram’s eyes) it stops at the first hindrance, the taciturnity in me doesn’t know for the former humbleness either. But, I reckon, it knows where it goes, such persistence sustained even weaker beings (while, in silence, they wait to move afresh). In that way we surmount the morning - its prevailing slow pace divides the day for us on its, here it is said, radiant start. [And if I went after something faster (a greyhound, condor, or wolf) - having made from morning to evening in an instant, I wouldn’t know which one of them to describe in haste]. To enter a thing (to describe it) is possible only when it’s resting: when in its entirety (in front of our eyes) it consists only of itself. Until there, through its board-bottom (window of its house), (with the effort of describing it) having slowly entered we place ourselves too, immodestly disappeared from there (modestly fallen to here), covered at least by such a roof from all the others, so fundamentally ruined.

* * *

02/08-09/96

We have, of course, moments of weakness, then of strength. At times we think that all of this isn’t going anywhere, at other times we strengthen as much as we need to go on. Wondering why we have an idea about all of this (because, if we didn’t have it - it would still be in its place), we struggle from day to day; at night, during the moments when we’re not awaken, we dream all kinds of things. (We dream how we’re unable to wake up from a difficult situation: a standard trap for the laymen-like professionals). But, even though each night something decides that, for now, we nevertheless wake up, ready for a new day we’re sharpening it with an old blade.

Having made a couple of steps atop ourselves, we judge our strength (in the same way as when a scale is put under a weight): if we can withstand it again this time - we’ll make it until tomorrow, if we throw it off - it’s time for a temporal rest.

* * *

What’s that train doing in the distance (besides being so impressively heard?). The locomotive: animal electrized aggregately, the cars: phalanges of boxed up freight, the train: the result of a mineral experience. Liberation from the contemplation of a goal: although slowly, still all of that moves toward a solution - it is the stand of the Railroad Authority.

Since from the room in which I hear the train to the tracks on which it leaves (but does not disappear) there is at least three miles, the sound which is heard is far enough for the embelished reminiscence about those trains over there, but is not far enough for the false calm of that day. The heaviness of the wet (still dark) morning: increasingly farther from this and closer to that target, this train dominates like a hypothetical hill in proved plains. Reaching like the unsteadiness of purpose: all other stopped being heard long ago, here and there only a bit of something royaly drops. (The whole night it was raining and it is still drizzling a little - rain must finish its dripping too).

Riding along the rails towards possible happiness, it looks like this train has a hard time going uphill - it vanishes in the same, synoptic way. As earlier trains (the trains before this one) died away there, in which we were awakening up on other tracks, on other mornings, before other cities, and as the coming trains are going to complete their rails without us.

* * *

02/12-13/96

Having been gone for 36 hours (having arrived at ten o’clock in the evening and staying until ten o’ clock in the morning after the second night), we walked through those woods for at least two of the hours. (We took our dog with us, too, and in the forest we let him off the leash). It snowed so much that it covered the snow’s own, in the stillness, interruption - only a paramount, masterly modeled anxiety of whitened trees was heard. The air was milder than it could’ve been expected during this season - no wind, the main reason of its coldness, was blowing. In the woods there was a great many paths and points which we had, according to everything, sufficiently precisely (because we often went there) entered into the topography of this return (to that, almost a touchingly reliable place): we found them the same as we left them. Certain in the stableness of the woods, hushed in its winter as in ours, having dislocated none of its trails from the map of the past years - there they were, all those former days, waiting for us. Were they? Having hastily come out of them at a time (I see, all three children are more grown and yet, like a greyhound, vivacious, only the dog and myself are older - a kind of regular conspiracy between barking and a sonata), we actually came to the remaining constant: not as much to the woods as to a satyr’s rememberance of snow, ajar a state of polyvalence, fogginess of ideological clarity - having jumped on the neck of each of the steps before. Like the dog, all of that sniffed us at first, then, resembling him again, it became enraptured with care about persistence and confidence: while we thought we walked in it, the forest there served only as an excuse.

* * *

Whatever situation we’re brought into, we have two ways out: to oversleep everything, or to resist it.

So far we sleep in, we’re going to be participants for a long time, without scars but without fire either.

In what we resist, we’ll burn away or overtake the flame.

In either case, from the outside (globularly) nothing will change, only inside (in the so-called soul) our bell is going to be extinguished in the first case, that is to continue ringing in the second. But even that (which is still ringing) has its end: it is included in the break of the bell itself due to the ominous rust of solipsism (only a self/alone/singular exists, that is, it can come to be known).

Still, by its hindering in front of the breaker, that which resists takes away peace of mind of that which sleeps (makes its dream awkward).

To resolve for one or the other (to go to one or the other side), to acquire a bronze echo but then to melt in the solipsist way (to perish from the self-rust), doesn’t everything, throughout time, consist only of that? So that the first one (the initial pose of hydra, its last tentacle and its first shortcoming), on each of the two ends, would continue to divide itself in the same parts, while something in the universe is soundly sleeping, and something else is roaring and growling.

* * *

02/14-15/96

Repeated awakening, in the mirror of the previous one. The morning was not even anticipated, still the vigilance came for its part. (Lucky is the one who can sleep, or react with delay). Examining the foundations, form and apologetics of this day as well (it’s so early and yet the apology offers the overdue services to it), its mechanical contents is seen: swung by the mass of sense, it drops down the inertial nonsense and accelerates the experiment of fall (in the moment of take-off of a finch) not getting dislodged from the gnome: a little spectre which lives on Earth. (I stand up, prepare tea, while it cools down I make a few steps inside the prospect of such a chaste, approved sedative. An initial point like a result of the final). Overturned from its back to its chest, the day is faintly seen as increasingly clear, the virtue of awakening is waking it up, too. (Without support, without fall, on the scene of automatic ant - it is eclectically stretching, choosing freely from the prospective of a leader or a priest). On the basis of Skadar (a lake) walled in, in the form of Bojana (a river) pulled down, apologetically full of Skadar on Bojana, with its all the more sudden appearance (all the more impudent will), it engages into a risk: from insignificant contents it makes the significant. Thrown headlong into the contesting altruism, from the oportunistic it (the day) crosses over into an offensive attitude, it covers with drifts both the street and the window, moves into an intuitive action (to some it will bring a bomb, to others it will bring honour, shame or neither), and when it’s done with all of that (as it was yesterday and it will tomorrow), from the battlefield it drags out the ideal (theoretical) glory, stretches the formal into a real head, with the apology sets forth the reasons for peace - it sells the former contents as the new (the same?). It climbs up - keeps half hidden, half-sniffs tommorow.

* * *

Only one eighth of the year has gone by, although it looks as if it started a century ago. So much of everything thickened in it (although most of it is ozone dust) that its proportions look many times bigger than it’s appropriate for only one eighth. (Or our impatience became unbearable. The anchorets and monks judge differently, having rinsed their eyes in the length of time). And it’s not only the condensing of those, practically empty, parts which the time consists of, which is in question - it is a matter of a non-palpable state of everything which made every day of this one eighth, and with each one of them justifiably dissapeared through Hans C. von Baeyer’s explanation/passage of Maxwell’s Demon, "Why Warmth Disperses and Time Passes". Like a small, medium, large and horrid collection for each such, orangutan-like balanced day. ("Oft expectation fails and most oft there / Where most it promises", William Shakespeare). So much of insomnia (with a little bit of melancholy) is a true proportion of that which has flown by until now. Still, it ought to flow by seven times that in order for the (glucose) sum of this year to give way to the lollipop of the next one. (Like on the picture by Alexis Smith from 1982, with the photographic insert showing Admiral fridge, manufactured by the Rockwell International, with a suddenly opened door, "It ripped the bolt out of the wood and flew open"). Of Parliamentary History and Anarchist Hope, our situating reached from a cave to these four, flatter walls. Neither the cave man who gaped at the skies, nor us who are gaping into ourselves, each one during his portion of an eighth of a year, drove out things to a clear. On it (the clear), still lone, we are. (A circadian rhythm of melodramatics, without orchestral accompaniment). Indeed, he has the stone, and we have the nuclear bomb, but that’s all what happened and from which neither the one eighth of this year diverged.

* * *

02/16-20/96

What Else Is To Be Done: To write down each moment, to describe it when it flashes and when it hushes up, to encircle oneself with it (until the next moment), to make out our opinion to it like a dining bill, to start unstitching it as if no outcome is known (as it, maybe, is not known). To not apostatize (to not fall away), to slowly creak open oneself at dawn, to predict better days on the basis of doubting these, by own fall to inspirit the fallen, to strike the enemy’s centre - to win (for some time). To differentiate recommendation from instruction, to suspect both school and reason, to collect smaller rocks on a river bank. To climb by chamois atop a glacier, with a supreme sight to go over the frozen progenitors, to bring an apple as a gift. To increase the disbelief, to hide from the rabble, to start running to one’s own race (the one that was). To have on mind the impassable, obtained by stretching out the passable, to enlarge the bird from July’s wheat (to focus oneself in front of a sunflower). To be revolutionary, in the sense of to not be in peace with the condition (the concavity of the avantgarde to twist convexly). To weigh the opposite side, to stay on this side, to wait for a favourable moment, to position one’s head like in a movie, to listen to the cosmos once more, to pull the trigger from nonsense to sense.

* * *

How many things (both thrown away and piled up, or still useful), houses (together with some new, mainly run down and undistinctive, even poor) and conceptual Februarys rushed past by me on that (the same) road while I drove, without a map, in the opposite direction? ("The map is not the territory", c/o P. G. Brown). That is, even though they were being left behind, they stayed nowhere, they were still being created (because of something they nevertheless were multiplying), those thrown out parts of everything, of the construction/farm origins: delapidated or old, once majestic now ruined homes, or the mobile, although also more solid, or even the new ones - all that which is still running behind this car and, like this February day, hung on it, not loosening grip. (When a season is nicer, the road is nicer too, but now it’s like this). How many times I drove my car by all this hardened and, subsequently, melted away into a cinnabar by the steelworks in H., encircled by the ships bearing the Algonquian names (the names with Ojibva dialect), and loaded with the frozen ore, which all the other travellers also drive by, embalmed in their vehicles like I in mine (by appearance strangers - in fact back-goers), passing by the signs of places in which all of that constantly goes on only in this way, squints through the expanded dough in kitchen windows of encyclopaedic dusk (saturation of bread), and nobody finds anything unusual, not to mention absurd, in that, because nobody utters a scream anywhere - everyone in their places immovably stand all that. Driving in that way the whole day, I neither came anywhere nor was it unusual to me. ("A man-made organism / Will be man’s unmaking", W. McCarthy). Here, where I came, this room is from before, and the kitchen and the wall and the window (the parts of the carrying structure of the, so-called, indestructibleness of destination): they look at me carefully, expecting news from the journey (shaking down their own glaze in a static manner when I opened the door - they, too, know the conduct). Having arrived to the last crust (the enamel of the world), therefore, I sit down on the bed’s edge (I perhaps cough a bit), I lay down, cover myself, try to get asleep, think a little, afterwards not even that - brought into the feeling at home, I probably cede myself to the solitude.

Paraguay

02/21-22/96

There is not a line on the paper even though I’ve already spent half an hour bent over it.

Absence of the first line - a shot in an empty warehouse.

And how to call it in when it requires a ruler which not even hidden can be anticipated for the last thirty minutes.

Still, pretending on the straight-line solution, one can write about that which (already) gives its consent: about that country over there, Paraguay.

How is it there (when here it’s like this)? Is it sunnier (if nothing else)? And, do the people in that country (in the south) sing more than the people here (in the north)?

[Having answered the three questions, one stops, as usual, at the fourth, "There’s always a prime between N and 2N", Chebychev].

That in Paraguay there exists deprivation, poverty and despair, sufficiently is being claimed and presented exactly from this north - such a picture about each of those countries is officialy additionaly strengthened, becoming a conditional reflex whenever one mentions them with a (mostly unreal) hope of crossing over from this ice-berg to that liquefaction (the thorough boiling?). Isn’t such a reaction being implanted to crush the mentioned hope, whenever it presents itself, and to stay here. (Although, really, nobody prevents anybody to move, including to Paraguay).

There, in W., on a couple of MHS records (not the CDs but the LP records) I have music from Paraguay, the songs of the Indians. Judging by them, by how, therefore, those people sing their songs and play their instruments, my habitation in the room, in the morning in which, again, the most recent rain subsides but never fully stops, the tooth of winter is loose but it won’t budge, a raven brisks itself up (in order to hoot, however crackling), the industry smokes (what is useful now being made?), the mediation is in progress (the lapse is forgiven), the horror is monitored, the profit is taken, a thread is made through the string of beauty (and right away collapsed, through the needle hole), the belonging is emphasized (with a sign of affected reconcilableness towards the aggressor), the world is ruled (even though someone has to rule, not everyone has to listen), the last-night shift rests (who innocent, in it, did again keeep vigil?), the unquestionability caresses the altar of Christianity (the priests count over with the beeds of fear as with the assumptive omniscience), the National Guard C-130 plane takes off from the nearby field to transport democracy in form of cassette bombs, the angel is thrown in front of the beast’s sympathy, the life settles on today’s shoulders - my presence, therefore, to all that here has been as much left without acceptable finale as the described music finally enhanced the song of Paraguay and its (statistical) inhabitants, up to these music notes.

And what is it if not our weakness and defeat, that at this moment in our pocket we do not have a ticket for Asunción (or any of the stops down the 1500-mile long Paraguay river, from the Mato Grosso plateau to the Paraná river).

As much as that fact is being justified by a reasonable behaviour, it parts from the quality of the leap.

Until the things, once, burst to the end and the southern music starts riding the northern wind. But then the tickets will be gone: the decision is made at this moment.

* * *

The purpose of the difficult periods (like this one) is to better understand things - every learning is laborious. (What did those who are, all the time, giggling understand? Of course, one ought to laugh too, but rarely without reason, if possible in anger). Proportional to the process of comprehension is the difficulty of a situation, inversely proportional to it is its easiness. Alone in night, in day, alone on the river one flows out with it through its consternated mouth. (If, at least, an animal would run out to the clear, he thinks). Barred in himself, he walks through that only. He hearkens outside, looks inside, turns over from one side to the other (stares at the soul, like a wolf at a lair). He cuts through a path (the one through thoughts). He doesn’t remember anything clearly: a very pale colour of that which (it turned out: unnecessary) used to be - is paler still. He doesn’t even know what tomorrow’s going to be like (even though he knows that, until then, he’ll hold this, which is now, in contempt too). He lives in a difficult period, the world’s representation swings before his eyes, as if he cares. He moves away down the street as if reading a psalm: his pace echoes empty. Wherever to go today - a new lesson is waiting for him. At the end of the difficult period he will know as much more as he will laugh less.

..."April is the cruellest, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering / Earth in forgetful snow, feeding / A little life with dried tubers. Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee / With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade / And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, and drank coffee, and talked for an hour: Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch", T. S. Eliot, "The Waste Land", 1922.

The Straightforward And Concealed Side of These Writings

02/23-25/96

Talking to myself: that is each of these writings (due to that, there are so many parentheses: they guard the shadow - the original spilled, or it walks upon the room, or upon the soloist, speaker). In each of the writings there is a pile of despondency and a speck of hope, and although it (each of the writings) does not resent either one, to the hope it looks like it is neglected (a syndrome of a more spoiled child of the same parents). Actually, it itself (the hope) gave in, having kept hidden before the open side of the writings. For a mainly general (timeless) tone of theirs, which makes their plain side, is supported and confirmed by the concrete facts, of which there is little in the public domain and which are, by the concurrence of events, a part of my every day life. In front of these facts (before such a reality), all those (politically) softened protagonists and directions sound silly (turn out being stupid), and leading them are the ones who pretend on an intellectualism, liberalism, that is those who babble about democracy, a civil (peaceful) option (as if besides the graveyard’s one the history knows of any other), or operate through heartbreaking exposals of Western religious sects of cheap names like "The Bread of Life". What would all these types say (unless they conspired with the devil) if, for a day only, they could see what I see every day? Although it is more likely that, even then, not a smaller absurdity would fly out of their mouth.

Still, and satisfying their "intellectuality", here are the words of the historian of science, Stephen Toulmin, with which that worthy intellectual, in Wim Kayzer’s book "A Glorious Accident", characterizes (in his, rational/pragmatic/ephemeral way) the break-up of the former USSR, in a heartfelt manner praising "the emancipatory effect of technological development...due to which...few things did more to bring about the disintegration of the Soviet Union than the computer and electronic mail"!!! Skipping even such a miserable (comparable only to the anatomy of frog) analytical endeavour of the jubilant scientist (what did, then, Sputnik emancipate; was it not, perhaps, the present unemployment, disgrace and kitsch?), the unpolishedness of such a meta-structure of a schism ("Even if of gold it is, the worthless it is") is what makes the eyesore. Without stopping, S.T. rolls the song of the "free and worthy": "I have friends who’ve worked for...’International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War’ and other such organizations, and...they’ve been having e-mail contact with...colleagues in Moscow and Tajikistan, and...organized peace demonstrations in the S. Union..."!!! Does S.T. really not know, or is he acting ignorant, who was (so far, the only one) throwing these bombs on other people (including the launching of the comparably benign depleted U-238 projectiles in the hilly Balkans), so that perhaps the ones on that side of the world should have been exclusively demonstrating. As with regards to the "colleagues in M. and T." - one who works towards self-destruction cannot be helped.

But, these writings don’t deal with this either. They’re concerned with, only and utterly, the deliverance of essence of words, in both the straightforward and concealed side of them, as well as with the bold valour, the target of final catharsis.

* * *

Cosmos: From one anvil to the other (forging itself doctrinally), in oscillatory dogma (swinging itself insolently): from a nice word to the bomb - from the delicacy of abyss to the chaos of crack, (measuring the temperature): from zero to a million - from the flux of thoughts to the clinic of forehead, (smoothing out the implosion): from the automatic nothing to the spray-like everything - from the black hole to a white completion, (squeezing the vessels in splitting): from incontestable to unbearable - from the isotropy of a bee to the functionality of honey; echoed - not echoed, seen - unseen, gauged - undetermined (caught as hair - heavy as fog), in a polyvalent way unravelled - like a proton ravelled; before us - behind us - in us; purring like a cat - barking like a dog; gently thinking - bones crushing; occupied by a convenient purpose of protocol’s justice, poured out of the hermeneutics of interpretation, six-headed like Hexapoda (a six-legged insect), taken away by a ferry - brought in by water; detonated (due to heuristic alignment), trembling as horror, thrown out as trepidation, climbed on a bull; mountain ridge of Asiphonata (a bi-valve mollusk broken off of a hill), shrieked (almost screamed), screamed, charcoal of smelting furnace; won the battles (got the diseases, coagulated), stuffed with prey (craving for a statement), with a bell on a head (with a choir in a palm), with Dextrose star in Dilleniaceous pallet (with a fibrous, crater-like rescue): with a stretched tail it smoothly restores itself waiting for Hebe, the emancipation of Zeus and Hera from the jar of Hercules and Ganymede under the sign of hebephrenia (dementia praecox) before the eyes put out to sea in a night tossed under the feet of simplicity as under the tongue of Miltonian fathom* from one anvil to the other. {* "Necessity or chance / Approach not me / And what I will is fate"}.

* * *

(It’s Sunday again, who knows which one in order, and until when). A wind was howling the whole night, throwing about broken branches on the (local) bottom of the world, until it blew them away from there as well (where to?); it finally broke something significant, cutting off the electrical power to the entire town. A practical detail of much larger picture. (Its bear-like frame). The fact that the power outage is going to cause difficulties of this and that kind will be remembered more than the rage and fury (the essence) of the wind, more than its jumping out with an attendant’s easiness and ruling the air in which, it seems, it finds something heavier. And always, it is like that, the immediate is more important than the fundamental, useful than academic, obvious than hidden, the dullness of afternoon than the roar of one sentenced to wave from it, the twisted tongue of a cheater than the two-part frankness of Dagon - god of Philistines and Phoenicians, with the upper part of a man and the lower of a fish. The chased animal, therefore, the Andes’ Ursus ornatus with eyes full of wind and the wings spread out last night (the wings of hope), brought in this morning (a moment of soberness), made heavy at noon (caravan of fulfillment) before the wall between roaring and circumstance, it (the blow of the carnivorous crown of the world), hanged by a bough on the evening reared to the idealized height of co-operation, finally settled in the same cave which, hoping for a better outcome, impatiently (insufficiently wisely) it stepped out last night to do work in which again, in spite of being whipped by a storm of ideas and using the whirlpool of gravitation, it didn’t get rid of its weightlessness.

Summer Poems, Written In Winter

02/25/96-II

* * *

(07/10/95)

Energy, then Dust: all is assembled from that (like a dot)

(For instance, these beings: a contemporary part of Gott

Anticipating infeasible move or in a bizarre way mere

Do they pray? Does their seemingness clear, or is it sheer?).

To live now, or yesterday (or tomorrow to own)

What multitude of choices! As if there will be a change

Of obstacle (of concession) in the forehead of dawn

In protein steepness of fermentation exchange.

This evening I’m sitting on the back porch of the unknown

Still illuminated as, there, through aghast expectation

I see: in the world’s end - it fades first, makes known:

During the downfall, it is we who get hold of each other’s salvation.

* * *

(08/22/95)

Before the lame eyes summer is passing by

The convolute Sun is swaying all the sinuously lower

Far away is all that is holy: To fly

Is to escape the ashes vertically slower.

Behind every stamen (like behind the wind)

That is amplifying (still modestly warm)

We remain lone (astray like a limb)

Melted light forever in a vacant dorm.

While we thought lastingly about duration

Stretching over years, including the century

There steps on the edge of refrigeration

Freon: ice rehearsal, now and eventually.

Who, in there, softens or possibly hardens

(From the Mesmerism departing for Buddha)

His thoughts - bundle, his twig - Gardens

Bursting with distinction: magna cum laude.

This is the last summer (consider the twilight)

That which looked as, once, exclusively blue

It was not like that: Bite

Of anathema turned us into former, nonadhesive glue.

* * *

(07/26/95)

Nothing can be remade

All happened as it happened

One who intended change

Ought to have acted earlier.

* * *

(07/26/95-II)

Even though our clock is falling down (through us - time is flowing)

Our neck is raising up (although veins are bowing)

As if (in the height) it won’t bluntly reach

Sky laid in dismay - every and each.

* * *

(05/24/95)

Was it the nothingness, that took you after all

Or did your (profane) reason blossom into stone

Neither will I, on earth, know it nor will your fall

Below me, underground, unveil The Gone.

Knowing ahead the order of dull things

Tricked by nothing except myself, yet watching

How That swings from the back of my head, and brings

Me to pronounce Nothing, I fall to zero of matching.

* * *

(06/05/95)

Killing oneself decisively, firing when the guns yield

Shooting, therefore, where both of temples met

One would secure the death from a far field

Which no bird flew away from as of yet.

Anticipating the bluff of the dangerous condition

(As if, until now, nothing’s been killed when captured)

I turn the barrels to a simpler (as omission)

Target: freed, the defeat hovers fully enraptured.

Panic-stricken with Ernesto Galarza’s definition of migration

Nevertheless settled by righteous use of weapons (in the cenotaph)

The opposition of mine to the omni-situation

Notches amidst surrounding, acts tough.

* * *

(06/20/95)

While the universe is inertial (always-forever), longitudinal (left-right) and latitudinal (up-down), the human (humanus), animal (anima), and plant (planta: photosynthesis of an easily gambled away afternoon), besides being instantaneous are also without orientation (they’re up or down, right or left). Still, in the universe there is: Plouton or Hades or Orcus or Tartarus or Dis with a pierced serpent on a two-pronged fork, the god ruling over the lower world, an old man with a dignified but severe aspect, son of Chrones and Rhea, brother of Jupiter and Neptune, and husband of Persephone (Proserpine), the daugher of Zeus and Demeter (Ceres), and, in it, the ninth planet (discovered in 1930) of the same name, a diameter of 7,600 miles and the year of 246 Earth years, and, on the last one, the rule and control by the wealthy, plutocracy (ploutos - wealth, kratein - to rule), and, in it, plutocrats, members of the wealthy ruling class, and, in them, plutology, the science of wealth, and, in it, plutologists, students of plutology, and, in them, plutomania (ploutos - wealth, mania - madness), madness for wealth, and, underneath them, Plutonis (below the crust of all of that), combined to cover by this very act.

Extent and Thought

02/26-28/96

Knowing, in fact, a negligible number of people in comparison with the total (world’s) number, mainly from the country of origin (and from the country where one lives, if they’re different), and, also, being aware of only a small number of things as compared to the number of objects in nature, we’re not shrinking from making conclusions which are much more general in relation to the quantity, that is the sum of that which we know. (Although, for a ‘statistical cross section’, as it is said in an institutional/dry/scribbling-like way, a cut-out piece is often typical for the whole, but rarely anyone established an end to that piece or determined its composition either).

One lives his whole life here, the other has, maybe, stirred a bit, the third one, in the Lord’s name, set off to the other side of the world; in the mind of each one there is a proportional number of pictures, encounters, faces and things which is, even when large, still small and none of them cares: each one presents his interpretation (cerebrum/ cerebellum of the cortex of self) and offers it as the final judgment and knowledge about the world. (A suspicious lightness of Sasin, the Indian black buck - Antilope cervicapra in a sarcophagus without terminal satin). Right there, in such attitude, there lies the initial error. Or, perhaps, there is no error? That which each one of them learned is, perhaps, enough. (Because of the statistics which has been, like Satyagraha, the doctrine of M. K. Ghandi, passively thrown over the Sanskrit truth (satya) and its doctrinal grasp (grapha), with ingredients of Saturnalia, the orgiastic conclusions about life under occupation). It may be that the heterogeneousness seems larger than it is as it, actually, periodically renews itself, handling a relatively small number of dissimilarities, gently varying them. But, what are we going to do with that which we conjecture (but don’t see): what are we to do with the sudden run of the Gargantuan, Rabelais’ lizard towards its prey, with the summer tempest in a conceptual, unbearable forest, with the condor fall from calcification of circling onto the rim of the Holy Grail (in the cup of Wagner’s Parsifal), with the flying of cruise missiles from the Adriatic (pardon me, the Nato) Sea in the civil war of the Balkan Inn and changing the "peace architecture" in favor of the humble, quisling patrons (of the interventionists) by tearing to pieces the remaining ideals of the faithful abbonerés of the tavern-keeper, what are we to do with the magnetic storm between the Great (Ursa Major) and Little Bear (Ursa Minor) (with the carnivorous flash of family Ursidæ), what with the People’s Revolution, with acquiescence of atoms at zero degrees of (equally resting now) Baron W. T. Kelvin - the transition to mahogany’s ghastliness, mineral shiver of Magnesia, Thessaly’s word of false encouragement.

The extent to which we can write, think and deduct bigger and more lasting conclusions about someone or something, binds us to modesty and scepticism. But it does not free us from bringing clear conclusions in clear situations in which life, in either a fierce or a hidden way, presents itself in the flare and not in a shell of evaporated incompletenesses. Our extent and our thought ought to be in accord with our inconsequentiality, but not with the unintelligible effect of all kinds of forms of various possibilities.

* * *

To write about concrete or general things? These writings deal with the latter in order to avoid the inexorable state (unbearable presence) of the former, making the facts of the true order of things relative. (Dispossessing a deltoid leaf of its third side, depositing cement by a respectable spatula over the bricks of spirit, spreading the wings of triptych into triptychos of a room-like cube of a lone man). Writing about concrete instead of general things, the one who does that is threatened with ending up in a duel with everything - so much real rubbish is all over the place. [In the circumstance, not even a sin eater (a person at a funeral, who, for a small compensation, eats a piece of bread and drinks some water, thereby assuming the sins of the deceased) would know what to do with such a high salary]. Although their turn (the turn of the concrete things) is coming up too, however not so often. It’s coming under the pen, leaking on the paper like an insect which, buzzing, sneers from a hatch - the world-wide gloom. There - a frenzy for profit, control and power is boiling in it. From there - it’s sowing democracy: an ancient dogma. (An eternal sinecure, ecclesiastical beneficium, without a cure of souls). It heats to a red-hot, lights a fire, kills. (It shoots with Uranium). It, also, attends the church service. [It bows to Urania: she (the Ourania, Muse of Astronomy, epithet of Aphrodite, daughter of Zeus and Mnemosyne - the goddess of Memory and mother, with Zeus, of all muses) takes it in the same, left hand in which she holds the globe under the authority of its, ecclesiastical evil]. Of weapons, it manufactures both what is known and what is not. In doing that, it doesn’t allow others to produce the same. (The defeated ones agree, a few, not yet defeated, do not agree). It blocks the seas and roads (prevents the disobedient ones from passing through). An octopus, a hydra with a hundred faces - it always puts on the most deceptive one. It does not accept the other thinking - it itself doesn’t have it, except the one about profit and ownership. It whips (punishes), sanctions hunger for entire countries. (The inquisition is nothing compared to it - it plays with all people while the priests played with the single persons). It rules the world increasingly. (It maintains the status quo for, with that, it keeps the power over the obedient magma - a palliative care of death rattle, until the next paradise). Nevertheless, since the world has a breaking point in case of honour (or a melting point in case of its volcanic origin), this which rules over it is going to go to the bottom along with it when, together, they swoon. [It (the world) is swooned all the time, but the times are the same]. Although, it could turn out that this (which rules the world) be defeated before then - when the time comes for our soul to be filled up too. (As its soul is full - at a time with deuce, at other times with emptiness).

* * *

(A Circus/Curtain). This was a real circus even though it was unreal for it did not alleviate itself through a nominal humour. There, on the field between the apartment buildings for the working class, on the suburbs (B.B.) of that city (B.), in the country which no longer (not even pathetically) exists, in those years (which don’t exist anymore either - more than a quarter of a century passed since then), one lazy afternoon (it must have been a summer Sunday afternoon), coming across by accident into such an apotheosis of anticipation (having walked across the field as across an early aquarelle of apostates), we saw them finishing setting up up their tent, displaying proclamation about the Show, shamelessly making noise (shouting pertly in front of sleepy people, woken up from their sleep in a bison-like protracted hour of the afternoon’s plane - massiveness of state), beating their hammer and drilling, pulling tight the rope, bringing a horse and two dogs in and acting as if they’re benefiting more, trying the costumes starting with tying kerchiefs over their foreheads (the female athletes working on a heliographic shine of their dimmed, bibliographic sparkles, the male fitting their tight black underskirts), smoking cheap cigarettes and drinking warm beer and in the crowd of freshly arrived people judging whether the tent is ready or something’s still missing, enticing the visitors to get the tickets and go in, ushering them, hanging the trapeze, however looking for the clown [finally finding him in the nearby market’s tavern - he has just become something (a character) by Shakespeare, Hamlet or Othello, something in any case so fatal even though he never heard of any of the three], energetically taking him back, and, postponing the eve, and, with it, the beginning of the show, these showmen finally started it. We went in, too. But, it was visible from the very beginning that this was not the circus of those slightly solid ones, not to mention an ultimate, supreme circus which, after all, given the unexpectedness of the situation, could not have been expected: it was rather, not to use the conventional word for such occasions - provincial, a circus at the end of its performances. And, mainly gathered while sleepy, stretching in their boredom, the spectators started, as the show was progressing, to dwindle. [Some went to the market to bye watermelon, others went for a walk, still others went without hurrying (in principle, no one cared to hurry up at those times, or at least that’s how it looked) towards their apartments in the buildings, turning the lights on (night was already falling) and, from their balconies, looking down at the tent, yawning. One more proof that a Permanent Revolution is never too late]. All in all, in the tent there stayed only a fraction of the audience, chiefly some Roms (gypsies, otherwise) in the first row [they were, in fact, still sincerely rejoicing to a bit more successful move (a little bothers them or they’re, more likely, less spoiled), showing without hesitation their white teeth, emphasized by their joyous and candid laughter, moved into a victory of a two-headed state: bicephalous of extorted sense] - including ourselves there remained, therefore, only a small number of spectators, scattered on the benches, primarily held back by melancholy, the uneasiness which by leaving the tent would only be increased. (Worshipping a trembling weakness of canons, bibliolatreia of 14 books of Septuagint). And, in front of us, themselves aware of everything too, the male artist, the horse rider and the female artist take all that’s left in them - he, breathless, performs excersise which, however, looks like the one at a school performance, the other rides the horse but he, too, unskillfully (he, again, almost fell), the madame with the beaten hoops secretly draws her stomach in and watches to imperceptibly correct the one-time new, now worn out costume, the clown wipes the sweat of his forehead instead of cracking a joke (although, in his eye there flashed the mentioned drama), and the one on the trapeze hardly made it, jumping off and staggering and suddenly having bowed (to mask the poor jump) to the already completely rarefied audience, at which point the two dogs ran away and outside the tent while someone in the third row almost killed himself laughing (he comprehended it that way). Nevertheless, we rewarded the circus performers with a final applause and while they, aware themselves that their time was definitely gone this evening, gasping for breath and becoming serious by the realization, quietly started to leave with their requisites, we (the night was in its peak) went over that (B.B.) and a few more hills, towards our part of the city (even then it was behind some hills - behind which ones is it now, it occured to me, when it is not ours anymore?). About the poor circus performance, the melancholy of the performers who were getting old, the play when its time is gone, we kept quiet along the way. Perhaps because we felt that even more successful shows, of some better companies and troupes, including the big, world renowned circuses, finally the activities of ourselves, were only shifted in time, which for them, too, has a ready curtain.

The Fiancé

02/29-03/01/96

At the end of the working hours, at 4:00 pm, on October 18, 22 years ago, without a better idea where else to go, I chose to go to the Bramalea Mall - although I don’t like such places, this was the nearest, I would have had to wait somewhere anyway, and here, at this time of year, it was already late for bigger enterprises. Having found a seat in an artificial garden of an artificial restaurant with artificial ("fast") food, next to the imitation of Primula Auricula, in normal circumstances of Alps’ origin, I spent the next couple of hours, then around 6 I set out towards the airport. The airplane was scheduled to arrive between 7 and 8. (It meant that, then, it was above the land, no longer above the sea). (Crossing by flight of aueroch, a wild ox of Europe, once of strong will but now extinct, an airplane’s realization of destination: Eos’s reception of morning). Driving down Dixie Rd., I remember that this was occupying my mind - the coordinates of the plane, even they were unclear. I supposed the plane was getting closer (I, myself, was going towards it), but I couldn’t imagine its angle and direction (its instantaneous vector), even less could I project her in that apparatus, after a year. (A ten-armed Doorga, her letters were arriving only). That’s why I started considering the practical (visible), immediate and conceivable details by the road sides - a forest (at a field’s rim), a suddenly emerged flock of, until then, quiet birds in the woods, a dot-like farm in distance (in the barrel of dusk, from the dull light through its main, kitchen window, there vibrates a life of a whole family which passed through all of this so long ago, I thought impartially). I also think that the air was mild. (Anas obscura, a silenced flight of eve of the world).

I parked my car at the airport parking, get out into the terminal. In there - crowds of people, multitude of races. It was not only me who was in anticipation, I could see, I imagined how the expectations of others were as much unknown to me as mine were to them, I kept my waiting to myself, walking through the crowd towards the unchanged flight information display, the electromechanical testimony of the increasingly closer and real arrival. Thus, by that plane, she came. Twenty minutes later, the first passengers started to come out. (Insignificant to me, significant to others). What was she going to be in (how was she going to look like?). Was she going to behave haughty - in such situations she did that unwillingly even though it suited her well. Who was going to spot whom first? (Was she going to recognize me, bearded?). It was likely that I would notice her first: the one who’s waiting has a better overview, as much as he’s uncollected he is still more settled - the one who’s arrived is still carried away a bit, examining the ground after smelling the air. Little and fragile she was, someone would have to help her with her luggage. (Although she could manage herself as well, she was like a top). And what was she going to say, now when she could talk, when she, a Siva’s Durga, didn’t have to write letters anymore.

I saw her, she didn’t see me yet. A football legend, D.Š., in a cavalier style took airs around her, helped her with her backpack. (He even bought her a beer in the airplane, she said later, an old school that was, from that part of the world). Having seen me as well, she pretended that that was normal; her hair betrayed her: it waved as she twitched her head into confidence. In her long, blue-and-black skirt with patches (gipsy-, that is, vagabond-like, that was fashionable then), fickle as promise, steady as migration, appearing to have been walking assuredly but, in fact, getting to my (uncertain, nomad) tent, wearing a dark blue silk blouse (in her eyes - the same one, maybe a bit more greenish sand), ennobled by the past year as by an understandable phenomenon - a continuous passion, of a calm movement up to the solemn silence of complement, curiously, of quivering nostrils (smelling a bigger journey), she acceded like a little of radiance forever, faithfully (like a fiancé), since then until now without circumlocutory hesitation affianced with the voyage (axiomatically), a deserved preciousness amidst the bewilderment.

"Škoda"

I inherited "Škoda" from my father. The car model was 1000-MB, color red, licence plate BG-98500.

During the first winter, after he bought it, he kept it at the Stadium, under the platforms, not paying much for the spot, waiting for spring to revive his driving skills which he acquired long before that, as an Army officer, on military trucks. (The car itself he purchased on a bank loan, it had cost 2 million dinars that fall, 1968). Thus, once a week, we would go to the Stadium to start the engine, let it work. I remember that we walked through the snow (it creaked under our feet, fresh and clean), having in front of us a concrete goal: to pay a visit to the car, start the motor and let it warm up (let it determine its operating point), to check the fluid levels, to judge the looks of the chassis and engine (to lean with our elbows against the complaisant glare of paint) - with all of that we would have been usefully occupied for a half an hour, maybe an hour.

When, a couple of years later, my father died, "Škoda" was left with me and my mother (my sister got married before that), so I drove the car. In it, I was taking my mother to the cemetery, here and there I’d take her to visit her relatives and friends [once we went to Đerdap, a Danube gorge]. In “Škoda”, I took my girlfriend and our company to Novi Sad, Požarevac, Valjevo, Šabac, Pančevo, Obrenovac, Avala (a mountain), Grocka, Smederevo, and, the following summer, via T. Užice, Zlatibor (another mountain) and Montenegro, to the (Adriatic) coast: from Kotor to Dubrovnik and back. All that was travelled by the car while I drove it, this lasted about a year and a half, the car itself entered its fifth year of age. I also often took the car to various repair shops (my uncle fixed it a few times, too), many things needed repair, something was always missing. The car saw the mechanic, electrical, body, paint and tire shop, and whenever the repair was done (I was working and paying the bills myself), both the "Škoda" and me would leave the shop ready for a new trip. (What perfection we thought of, then?).

We were often sitting in "Škoda" (especially in the winter, without having where to go), talking, kissing, R. and I. We went to Ada (a peninsula made of an island in the river Sava), watched the river (it was sufficient to do that, then), went down the river with our thoughts (it was allowed to do that, then), by stepping on the gravel we testified about a simple solution, we picked a wild flower when it was the most yellow, sat on a terrace of restaurant there, I don’t remember what we talked about. [Provocation of flabellum in front of the engine block, a fan made of feathers, ivory and metal, carried before the Pope and Dignitaries of Mechanism of Spirit (papal flabellum or liturgical flabellum), spreading of movement as homological determinant of destination - a fully honest travel through twofold space and suspicious time].

And then I sold "Škoda" to pay for the air fare to this side of the world. Afterwards, on that side of the world, through the years we changed several automobiles: more reliable, spacious and faster ones. But none of them took us on the roads which the "Škoda" rode on. With them, we were mainly fullfilling our obligations, including everyday trips to and from work, although we went to some picnics and made larger trips but only when our jobs would allow them and it didn’t leave strong impressions - most of those trips we don’t remember anymore. (Alto-rilievo of a late plane, sculptor’s liberation of early words, and their aphasia).

In all of that, it would probably be closest to the truth to say that the "Škoda" was only a synonym for a period of time. (Such periods, of course, are not limited to that car, in that country, and in that time: their universalness is something like a measurelessness of a much larger, why not justifiable, melancholy - homophylia of return, identity of race with tribal origin, pliantness of the sprout of journey into the cave of departure).

It is popularly assumed (with as much illiteracy as ignorance) that such a synonym was pulling such times backwards (in comparison to, for example, better cars on this side of the world), but, of course, such an assumption is just other evidence of our immodesty and proportional nullity, hydria full of a perfect ride to a tidy gesture.

Les Solitaires

03/02/96

I heard the name for the first time one summer in the late fifties: a row of these (high-rise) buildings was rising into the air from the concrete, gigantic foundations (although, in childhood, everything is gigantic, as immense as the empty space of Corvus corax, articulation of the raven’s truth, "Quoth the raven, Nevermore!", Edgar Allan Poe).

(We called them les solitaires - lit. ‘lone ones’ in French, from which language we took the name. How appropriately, it will turn out).

At the same time, news spread that the foundations were built to also serve as the atomic bomb shelters, which to us, elementary school students, was as impressive as unclear, that is, as it anticipated physics and chemistry (the subjects whose names, impressive themselves, we heard from older students), in any case that was something which was called with respect.

This was on hill Z. Thereafter, we moved to T. Hill, and, it turned out, although we moved into other buildings - they were also the high-rises.

(Nothing could be planted there, nor could it be picked, nor, for that matter, cultivated - a pure city-like, why not proletarian, at any rate a story of that kind, regardless of all others. Pleonasmus of rumours, superfluous weight of lies).

There were five of them, three-pronged from a bird’s perspective. (A three-handed appearance of Hermes Trismegistos, alias Thoth, besides with science occupied with eloquence and skillfulness, escorting souls to a tidy lift).

(An identical set of such buildings was built in Mostar: I saw them, many years ago, on a photograph - whether they remained intact or ended up in the ruins like the bridge of that place did, I don’t know).

In the high-rises on T. Hill, we lived more than ten years (this was long ago, more than twice that time we’ve been out of there - lying in the impluvium of eruptive constant, finding ourselves under the compluvium of its little rain).

And so, in the phase of life in which that is normally done, the younger among us were formed, it turned out - in les solitaires.

In the crowd of the same-age persons, or a bit older or younger, the male portion of the youth was running after the soccer ball over a recently finished but practically empty parking lot, between the third and the fourth high-rise building (rarely anyone had a car at the time, and those who had cars took them away to make a room for us, or to protect them from the ball).

We were running with the ball from morning to evening, that is until our exhaustion, we played it very well, at moments excellently. (The whole summers passed in our football virtuosity: megalomania of direct happiness, a run accelerated into shoot).

Of course, we were noticing the school girls, later on, college girls.

Those of us who were classified as the "holders of the supermarket", spent a great deal of time leaning against the main window of the store, in the basement of the central building, not missing a chance (that’s why they stood there) to, spitting a bit and paying a court to, comment on each girl coming in and out of the store, complimenting them.

(Meanwhile, they played cards).

All that was going on, as always in such time and space, smoothly: the life in the high-rises could have been solidly predicted, including going to the seaside in the summer, with the scouts or other youth organizations.

(Lyrical passages of immortality, regulation of cells before the therapy with sense, Ben Bova and his rationalis rationalitas).

Each holiday was marked, it was known that there was no uncertainty.

That is, so it was thought, until it (the uncertainty) started.

[It is probable that in the lives of most of the people there exist such periods - oases; it’s even more probable that the "predicability" and "determinableness" of such situations are phonetically produced by a secretion (like the impatient cheese or cream-cheese - from the patient milk) as one more inexperience of youth. After all, because of that the latter exists, otherwise there would be no cream-cheese nor cheese].

The elder ones, our parents, started to die, we younger - to leave.

The high-rises started to become lone. (The actualization of les solitaires, a case when the name cannot escape the meaning).

Another wind roars over their roofs now, even though it is still coming from the direction of Zemun, that is Ušće, that is from where another same story, a vessel full of the daily effort, spills over the Trisagion planes into the Triton rivers.

Les solitaires (each one of them) now resemble the most antique (huge) villa, long ago ruined by so many memories (and so much passion), although not depressive, rather not sonorous.

As when one enters an old, known garden, and from each of its statues (next to the dried up fish pond), and from each of its willows (besides the wormy bench), in a word from the decline of the façade of any of the buildings (healed in a nursery of brownish, white and native ermine) - one is watched by only the reflection and echo of the foundations of the first high-rises (where, as we know from childhood, everything reduced to the atoms), these once significant, now unnecessary buildings, once shaken now indifferent to who knows which one disappearance, that is escape.

Smederevo Road

03/03/96

We picked up hitchhikers from New York City at Dušanovac (a suburb of Belgrade). They were a young man and his girlfriend, in my car I was with my girlfriend.

It was January, or February, I don’t remember exactly, the winter was in an advanced stage of ensnaring (with a porous indigo of serpens/ ophidion) the wet and murky streets of Dušanovac: freezing rain was falling - the only thing it could metamorphose in was the snow. (Nature’s co-operation down to the static force of the bottom: a geometrical universality of variants of a tie, quasi-crystallogeny of fragmentary essence).

It has been about 25 years since then.

His name was Jeff or Joe or Jerry, something universal like that, her name was Jenny or Jane or Joyce, universal again. J&J - as in a commercial for something prosaic. Each one of them carried their luggage on their shoulders with a care, he in inevitable jeans (probably bearded and with long hair), she in a long flowery skirt (although it was far from the spring), with long hair, too.

The popular bands then were "Jefferson Airplane" or "Pacific Gas & Electric" or "Van Der Graff Generator" or "Vanilla Fudge", something like that, quite loud but of a relatively poor sound in comparison with, for instance, the virtuosi of "Ten Years After" or more energetic "Iron Buterrfly" or more misty "Toothy Spook" or more melodic "Deep Purple" (even now, there exist dilemmas about the eventual message of that sort of expressiveness), Woodstock, NY, had happened before that, as well as all those things of the late sixties, still trendily so that their appearance, jumped out from somewhere over there, with their raised hands, asking for ride, at the exit of one of the toppled down hilly streets of Dušanovac for the Higway to South, in the wet (not even through the magnifying droplets comprehensive) phenotypic obscurity, was as much out of space and time as obligatory to stop and offer help.

Together with them there went in, to the rear seats of the car, ice, frost and the storm, the car windows got wet while they were unbuttoning their winter jackets and placing their luggage by their feet. They sat in the back, my girlfriend was by me in the front, she knew their language better than me, a conversation started, we were more struggling to articulate something than we fully comprehended each other, still it could be understood that they were going to Athens via Niš and Skoplje, and that their train could depart from Smederevo if we were already going toward the Smederevo Road. It was not quite true that we were going towards that road, but then we decided to go there, to do a good deed and further increase the reputation of our country and its hospitality. Besides, those young people, about our age, were interesting to us - we decided, because of that too, to spend the evening on them. Neither is Smederevo so far, if nothing else, once back in our company, we’d have what to talk about for a day or two, after we took them to their train.

During the ride, it became clear [until then, the increasingly larger areas of the car windows started to dry as I turned the heat up, warmed up they relaxed, instead of a car radio (which I didn’t have) I had a small transitor receiver hooked up to the cigarette-lighter receptacle, which they liked very much; the receiver was able to catch a station or two, mixing the music with our talk sensibly], therefore it became clear who they were, where from and, as already said, where they were going.

I cannot remember why they were going there, but it happened that B. was on their way (how did they find themselves in Dušanovac and why didn’t they go to B.’s railway station, from where they could leave for their destination as well, I cannot remember either).

All in all, well warmed and thus in a better mood, our fellow-travellers (peers) spoke about themselves and their country both conventional and unconventional stories, and because we asked more questions than they did, we didn’t say much about us.

By then Smederevo got closer, we entered the town, from somewhere they gathered by gleaning the train schedule (I remember that it was a motorized train), it was still two to three hours left before its departure, we felt uncomfortable to leave them just like that and right in the middle of the growing talk (besides, the train wasn’t yet assembled at the railway station). Thus, I steered the car to Smederevo downtown (I remember that it consisted of a market, a main street, a square and a church - what else could it consist of?), I parked the car, we all got out of it and went into a real, of that place, tavern. (Philosophy of Biology: Earth’s worm Cerion between a spotty balance and phyletic gradualness of glass).

In the tavern as in any tavern - smoke, liquor smell, mostly men [in this one mainly those dressed in fur coverings (peasant furcoats)], noise, Balkan tranquility (from today to tomorrow). (I see: our fellow-travellers, blinking repeatedly, sniff the other world).

We sat down on the side, a hundred suspicious glances fell on us, the tavern patrons reduced their hubbub a little but quickly restored and continued it. (Physica of Phyllodes, a fern leaf of a crowd in a cube).

There came the waiter - what do they want, what do we want. They don’t want anything, perhaps only tea with lemon - the place is out of tea, out of lemon too; I asked the waiter to give us a few minutes, until we came up with something.

We asked them if they were hungry, they were not. During the time, they turned around, moved in their seats, looked at the crowd through the smoke and evaporations accumulated in the tavern room, from whose one wall there blasted local music from the radio long ago mounted there and thus removed from inventory - all that they compared to the bass of Brooklyn and the tenor of Bronx, in vain. Then, they said they would like a drink. Here came the waiter right a way, I ordered a drink for each one of us. But, there looked at us, stared almost, a company behind our table towards the center of the room, listening carefully, trying to gather our conversation. They were pulling the sleeves of their massive dresses over their sweaty foreheads (our peasants not even in a tavern take their heavy warmings away: coats, wool and, chiefly, sheep fur - a result of eternal distrust, even to the obvious heat), whispering to each other their doubts with regards to the language which they didn’t understand, until one of them stood up and asked, "Where did they come from?". We told him. A minute had hardly passed, there came the waiter, carrying some dishes, drinks. We didn’t order all that, we said. You didn’t but these people did, he said pointing at the men behind us. At that point, they raised their glasses: cheers, cheers - what could we do, we cheered back. We told our fellow-travellers what all of this (the food, the drinks) was about. They turned their heads to the people behind us, nodded at them, thanked them in English. In turn, one or two people from the crowd in the tavern knocked their glasses with ours, patted the young travellers from the other side of the world on their backs, and wished them a nice trip. And while the food and drinks were disappearing at our table, those who ordered and paid for it looked very pleased.

The train departure time got close, we said good bye to the tavern patrons, thanking them once again. We saw the passengers to their train, they phoned us from Athens. Since then we didn’t hear from them. (A dumb-founded wrinkle of a palm-tree, Brasil’s Copernicia cerifera - even at a distance it extracts itself like an enlarged candle).

Having remembered them now, after it happened what happened, we think how Jeff or Joe or Jerry and his Jenny or Jane or Joyce are on our side, that is how they, in disgust, reject the one supported by the country from which they went to Athens via Smederevo. Or, perhaps, they don’t think about it at all, perhaps about the bombardment, cruise missiles and uranium war-heads (forbidden by some conventions, though - but who ever blocked a tyrant by a Geneva convention instead of by counter-force), which their country dropped on the people (its western part, for now) which, long ago (without pathos), opened their hearts to them - they don’t have an opinion. That wouldn’t be a surprise, although it would be (which one in the order) a disappointment. For, the Smederevo Road was a road of their lives. Not because of the food and drinks, nor because of the ride in the (universally) cold night, but because of the hope which, escaping, they found in it. (Four-armed Yama and Gyak, faced at the entrance to spirit, to the Schrödinger Machine - full of the physics of golf as of the protocol of Gaea-Gaia-Ge pathway, a Tellus-like final round of the Earth). If we wanted to trust them (J&J, to give them a chance), we would have allowed that they didn’t go to the B.’s railway station, making their judgment about the city still then (predicting its behaviour in 25 years), set apart for the highlander’s lane of the world - appearing far from its main street. Unfortunately, it’s much more likely that these people again (J&J is, of course, only the prosaic advertisement) will not raise their voice against the insolence, crime and barbarism inflicted by the weapons of their country on one of three sides in the civil war (by which, effectively, it became the weapons of the other two sides) in the country through which they went out of eclipse - because of that, there is no anymore room for them in the Smederevo downtown tavern.

* * *

03/04-06/96

Let’s go from the beginning. (Prima facie Primianist, the follower of Donatus for sixteen centuries, at first sight a schismatic, however the head of the whole week since then). (Even that is better than the speechless Sunday afternoon, from which only a virus of stillness lowered itself down the thread of a throat).

The (Monday) morning woke up covered (again) with snow. [In a little while, people will start to shovel it off their cars or the street, all the same, it’s always on their way].

Although, the elongated face of the morning (all the more white) offers other possibilities as well. To pour itself over the epitome (to pull out a dreamer from the dream), to let the two flocks continue their flights to better lands (as usual, in opposite directions), and, having shaken down the frost of complaisant Erato, the lyrical musa amatorius, to topple over into a solid working day.

Being seized myself by such a general moment, too, all that (what?) flew through my mind at the initial instant but, still, I couldn’t fully, without reserve (with approbation), join it (at once) in this March, because I dreamed that I had died in the previous May.

As if I came to the market (to buy what’s needed), and the shopman, his hands (in gloves) entangled in a pile of suddenly caught and impudently thrown fish (written off itself by that act, too) said to me, "Well, the other day you died, do you really care about the purchase?". (Leitourgia of the fish end, a curve full of drama of serpentine of a shop).

With scepticism and distrust, thus, I got up, poured sugar into my tea, acted as if drinking it: I watched myself being busy in the kitchen as if that really was me and not someone else.

My Father

Today has been 24 years since my father died - what else as drastic needs to happen so that the same amount of time so quietly passes away?

Everything that happened (from then on), overfilled all these years exactly with that (the wild repose of approved picking: the first strawberries of Bergman under the seventh seal of von Sydov) - so much so that they (the years, made additionally heavy by the salvo’s echo) rolled as empty barrels down the steep street of patriotic prose (down the hymn-like insomnia of a protein membrane of hearing the requies of a fatherland fighter: Gloria Patri, introitus of stanza of the last psalm of modern Patria is, still, on his mute mouth).

If he knew what happened. (How the electrical raia pierced itself with a current). But, different is the knowledge there. About this one, here, it doesn’t care much. If he knew that there is nothing of that (of what?) which used to be, and that there is so much of that (of what?) which didn’t used to be.

And, would the knowledge about (all of) that somewhat improve or additionally deteriorate his impression of the world? It is possible that his descendants (the grandchildren), by the nature of things, would improve his impressions but, then, most of the other things would be unfavourable. It is to my regret that he didn’t see the first, but I don’t feel sorry for he does not see the rest.

This morning, too, everything that gets caught into its net are the declined years, the remainder is gone along with the first couple of months of this year. As when we were, in those, falsely different mornings, in May or June, walking by the edge of T. forest, he to the military headquarters (to work), I to my school (for knowledge), and all of that which was disguised in the woods presented itself as true. (It was even bringing into our conversation, with a sense of limit, the seistron-like foreboding of pretty Isis: the photo-elastic fertility of the civilization of focus). As if, ahead of time, something was acquiring information about the present state (his and mine): that’s why nothing surprises it - neither the unfinished work nor the obsolete knowledge.

* * *

(The Letters). Returning in the afternoon (in the winter, at night), first from a job search, later from work, I was looking forward to see the letter - the landlady would put it by the telephone, at the foot of the stairs for the upper floor, where I rented a room. The same evening, I’d write my letter. (On the weekends, I’d write it in the morning and take it to the mail box - how could I go alone to the deserted street, otherwise?). I’d receive her letter, then send mine. Her breath, that is, I’d receive on the paper (at a critical moment also her hair, eyes, hands, body). Instantaneously, I’d send the same to her. The letters were (besides that they were the only thing that remained that year) the most suitable for such a transportation. I’d send her a ton of carnalis, she’d send me the other ton of it. (I was asking myself how an airplane could carry so much). I’d send her a relief of barium, from her a silver clear would arrive, I’d put (in the envelope, silently) the emptied day, from her letter I’d take out its whole content, I’d improve my writing with summer colors (paying court to her), from her consent would arrive (although from spite), the autumn would come (in her letters or in mine) - I’d put her under my umbrella, neither the January snow nor Argos (Hera’s giant with a hundred eyes, Io’s guardian, Hermes’ fan converted into a hundred-eye tail of peacock) were treated better in our letters, and when April came (the irresponsible bell of Ariadne, the saviour of Theseus from the Minotaur labyrinth), I wrote her about the daybreak’s green, she replied writing about a short afternoon from which she returned to her yellow room, the one in which I kissed her, the Harmony, while she, Harmonia, the daughter of Aphrodite and Ares, the wife of me, Cadmus, parted with yellow in the green hour of things.

And since our lives that year were delivered in such a way, through the letters, their contents has naturally continued in these, significantly longer times, essential in the sense of putting children through school, of new provisioning of the old letters, the rescue which we got infected with writing the meaning in two.

The Century

03/07-18/96

Lonely days, lonely century, lonely History of the hour. ("If you have but an hour, will you improve / That hour instead of idling it away", Chesterfield).

(Idiosynkrasia of shortened reality in the mirror of an elongated descent).

What else can happen today which didn’t happen to the century and history sickly drank (both of them), taking them with Labrador tea (Ledum palustre) as a teaspoon of medicine?

All three (each one a unit of its measure), for longer or shorter, cherish hopes to a revulsion.

But, it is not happening today either, the millions killed during the century (only so many?) are ending up in their tidy loneliness (the deprived ones do not count, they still have a chance), and history still hesitates, occupied only with significant dates.

There is nothing to notice us (why should it?), to whisper something (like what?).

Nothing to take us to another (better?) way (besides this one, so unobtrusive, mindful upon barley and heather).

Waiting of Idrialite (an opaque, greenish or brownish-black quicksilver of Idria, Yugoslavia): crossing from anticipation to fact.

At the end of this century as well, at its elephant-like height (although an elephant is a noble animal and a precious vase in relation to a century), there sways the algorithm of its days: carefully stretched, then neatly returned accordion of three harpyiæ (Aëllo, Ocypete, Celeno) - with the head and trunk of a woman and the tail, legs, and talons of a bird, carrying off the souls of the dead (their food) - it waits to be placed in the case of taciturnity.

Impartial days of indifference, they dig in to set up a position for the final stratum of hippokampos, a creature, half horse, half dolphin, pulled out vertically on the forbidden beach of wholeness, with a raised sign: ‘A point of footing for the rebellion by means of a naked substance is wanted’.

* * *

(C-14). (By assenting to it) here we are, in another fluffy day. All of the preceeding ones - both the first-lettering: arabeska, and the fourth: delta - stayed behind us, while this one presents itself as if nothing happened.

(To prepare for a jump: To leave a trace in human affairs? To roll over on a side: To drink a gulp of loneliness under subtitles of pairs?

I get up early (like a regent, sericulus chrysocephalus), look through the window (the conspicuous correctness has just hanged itself on the outer side of sense), I think: how do prisoners feel when here, in the so-called freedom, the innocent thought is followed in stride at a moment by the state’s and at the next by one’s own suspicion.

The time, in any case, elapses (so steeply, I think) - it drags with itself Carbon, C-14 (Carbo: an organic bind, a diamond-like graphite of tackiness; Carbonaro: an Italian revolutionary group of 1811, fighting to establish a republican Italy), diminishing it in the one whom it leaks from, leaving him ashy, of burnt out balance.

C-14 is produced in the upper layers of the atmosphere (while the lower are falling in the afternoon nap) by bombarding the nitrogen (N-14) by the gamma rays {[( )+(N-14)] = (C-14)}.

Emitting a positive beta radiation, C-14 is, however, unstable so that, in the one who stops breathing, the carbon increasingly reduces.

Still, its (total) quantity doesn’t change: as much as it decays and, through carbon dioxide, gets inhaled, it’s newly being created.

But, when we stop breathing (underneath the water of time when we are - Cephalopoda, Nautilus and Argonauta), that which (with the last breath) happened to be in everyone - becomes sunken, burns out like a strand in a seaman, leaves like a broken anchor leaves a boat.

Depending on how much carbon remains in us, our age will be determined. And that is all by which we will be measured, when they start digging it out of us, the pulillanimous discoverers of our, carbonic, virtues, Thanatos and S. F. B. Morse, Mors and Samuel’s signs for /d/e/a/t/h/: /-.././.-/-/…./ .

* * *

(The Angle of Descent). Again by myself: it’s always like that when the things in the room (although in this one there are none) cover themselves in the old, known way. (Like a panther with a freckled leap).

A result of a room: a sum of miniscule days and immense nights.

All the time impudently the same, the minutes differ by their angle of descent - some (disappointed by failure) accelerate into a tick of perpendicularity, others (motivated by hopefulness) hold themselves, falsely cut off (like Dahomey from Africa), suspended by the facticius of apostolic air, until the sudden wind (through the open window) throws them about under, mainly obtuse, angles.

In that way, the one who was checking them (the minutes) - in a planktonic resonance of a canorus-like (melodious) ceiling under the conopeum-like (mosquito-net-like) cover - becomes ferocitas but in the opposite phase to the savageness of the barbaric imperialistic kind, so to, at least in geometry, let the things start getting better, while still keeping the indispensable abstraction of breaking the enemy line.

* * *

03/19-21/96

What can be found in all of this which will differ (from it)? (Obprobrum of a status, a written page - riveting the back of a head into benefit). Pages of polemic text (the confronted leaves of the same plant - Veronica chamaedrys), neatly set on the cosmic table, offered as early as the apéritif? ("It seems very senseless for a union to oppose piecework", John Graham Brooks). A Holy Supper (satiety dressed up by the Biblical scene), after a poor dinner on the lower floor (and the noise of dishes poured into the Milky Way), the feuilles de menthe (herbal) tea at five in the morning (the constancy evaporating from the strychnic table before each one of us), the occupation with alkaloids, colourless and odourless, intertextus of state and orbit, narrowness down to the hydrogencarbonnitrogenoxygen.

Feeding on elements, we drink daybreak - a provisional expectation. There shines through it, usually early in the morning, here and there, a chance to jump out - after that, again, there re-establishes itself the order (the official position of the Government).

The differences between the past and present express themselves less and less (as the day progresses, they become unperceptible: they’re more emphasized until a sparrow starts pecking in the old way). Turning over in the air, the oratio flashes its blade beneath elegia - it makes a room for today’s settling (drives out beasts for the next brutality): "The time had not yet come when eloquence was to be gagged and reason to be hoodwinked", Macaulay.

To remind one of the quick penetration of a short-lived victory? To emphasize white teeth in an unclear way?

Or, to crush a second into a millimicropico - as necessary to stretch the dough of hope for today too, for tomorrow’s cake eaten yesterday.

* * *

6:05 - They’re late in their cawing, all the morning’s birds. (So big, and so immodestly tawny). Last night’s rain dries up. [It was raining, therefore, from the quadruplicity of a fancy, adjusted like casteria (rowers’ quarters), down the lower part of the brain (the trembling roof of the spine: Medulla Oblongata), down the waterspout of the building, until it poured out quadruply]. The flash of the newest orderliness, the fascination of recently awakened people and their glow along the edges of their altaria-like beds so as to let something take them, one by one, out of the bordering parts of the beds and stack into ama, a large vessel for thankfulness, the eucharistia of symbolic bread and metaphoric wine. As the day advances, its order cannot be deceived (even the night, full of nightmares, has to retreat), in the paled morning (the disappeared larva of the grass): the (fatal) arrangement of a cubic state, readiness as canephora for Dionysia and Panathenaea - it brings the gifts in the basket on its head, too. Something which tidies up the sky (that’s why it’s all the more blue), puts back to their beds only the sick ones (in a family manner taps the healed ones on the days given as gifts), writes down for today (on the classroom board, in the pupils’ notebooks) the same rules of yesterday, executes democratic manoeuvre - levitas of militaristic relief (something which, with a frivolous tank, steps on disobedience), something which, at the ones caught in love, looks indifferently, at an angle ("Ah, Casca, tell us what hath chanced today", W. Shak.), reverberates between speechlessness and stupendousness, caresses with flattering words while keeping on ruling, adjusts the control (although sure in the state of the things, it still has an eye on them), desists from dubious places (postpones the arms delivery between a half an hour and an hour), then promptly bombards (buzzing like a bee for the purposes of propaganda), arrives decisively at the very honey-comb of sense (coming across the lucrative honey, it licks it, not forgetting its advantages), puts both you and me in the position in which we were yesterday, the unfathomable order and its vermins: Ephemera, Genera and Genus of the high-noon’s shot in the head.

* * *

At the same (predetermined) time, an identical sound (noise) is heard. Something turns on every six to seven minutes (and lasts, approximately, for five seconds), probably a sump pump: from the basement, the sound is, uniformly, carried over through mesoderm (the rotor hydraulics), endoderm (the pipe of infallibleness), and ectoderm (the building walls); however, a weak (screeching) sound, produced on behalf of a mechanical bird, is permanently present, too, coming also from somewhere underneath (it must be from a faucet or a valve used to regulate something steady: the flow of thoughts?); then, there can be heard the same rain (not having poured out yet all the sensibility of Kalliope, the Muse of heroic poetry, the obsoleteness, that is, disgrace of the world) on the roof pulled tight between St. Georgius and Dragon (with current insignia of the Order of the Garter); there can be, finally, heard the noise of deceased insects, accustomed dust and valent electrons - rounding it up.

The noise of the world.

In the deepest silence: something throbs or tings. (Although rolling towards its destination, it booms in such a way as to retaliate).

And when nothing is heard: look, a quick flight of a heavy bird to a relinquished land (why did it, so heavy, so easily leave?).

A description of the first picture with remaining strength.

It’s heard (left and right, up and down) how something gathers in itself, sobs, something like that.

Cut into pieces like eleutheria - the freedom of a pomegranate, of seeds scattered along the stanza of that which (up to then) was quietly singing and because of which, like Gemara, the second part of Talmud, it now bifurcates from the first part, Mishna, seed by seed.

Something which can be systematized into a large (common) sound of sterile expectations of justice of ignored masses and which, after being struck by Bacchus' hammer on Bacchante’s gong, bursts in the cosmic room alongside its unfulfilled promises but, in reverberation, it reconstructs into acceptable noise.

* * *

03/22-23/96

(Two Kinds of Words). Finishing walking upon the untidiness of sleeplessness, I tidy the bed by straightening the cover on its edge - where from, otherwise, to pull out the words for orderly description of vigil? (Brachiopoda of shells, their two armlike parts seen through their bivalve mollusk mouth, their mouth seen through their dorsal valve as two words: in each hand a word, one true, the other false). Since they do not divide, only the true words remain - each one a basic minimum: while keeping silent, they glare, while speeking up, they keep silent. (They have nothing to say which has not been said, going through a dry run a hundred times, they get heavy). But, besides these difficult (true) words, there exist those words which divide all the time (in everyday’s talk - profusion of the world), reduced, almost, to the well-intended habit of facility - they neither join the ring of the true ones, nor are they stopped by the obstacles on both ends of the road (ahead and behind), before which the true words jump into themselves, as only then, stacking atop each other, they can climb up to their heights. The everyday words (easy at going to bed and at getting up; the shower of aqua vitae serving as their aqua tofana) do not communicate with the true words, the latter don’t disturb the peace of the former, rather, like two columns of antagonized soldiers under the rain, they all cool down without mentioning the unbearable humidity. While, under the true words (aqua pura), there rolls over the foundation (multitudinousness) of the world, without asking for a price of description. And while those, true words, have described what exists and what does not exist, for the other, everyday words, there does not exist anything which they didn’t describe because that, which they didn’t describe, for them does not exist.

* * *

"Memories: a yellow star’s greed / Power larger than ex-life itself / A whole life - a turbid / Animal that remembers self", A. Vukadinović. For an hour, maybe two, the benumbed evening doesn’t anticipate anything more hazardous: only the wrapper of the rain (its, all the more opaque, intention) increases the advantage (emphasizes the shield) over the other, left to themselves, things and occurences from the frivolously expired day, when a bark has been heard. First from one dog, then from two more. (Like humans, the dogs associate too, until they get dismembered, or decide for a joint hunt). Up to then a sleepy moment, taken care of under the cover of habit, has been suddenly cut, therefore, by the barking - the inner workings of a grape sugar (dextrose) transitioning to a palate. (Neither a dog knows how to resign, not to mention this wet evening). Like in the evenings, both summer and winter, long ago at a place as unimportant as cornum-like, under the white cherry cornelian, since then magnetic, like the barking then heard, like the people’s talk resembling comfort in a hearthstone being put out in the centre of the kitchen, like in January or June when lava as yellow as the day’s heat fell in the ironmongery, like in a barking a thousand nights long [too large for its (the barking’s) star-like forehead (as proposed by Miljković B.)], like crushing the howling beneath the basilica of a roof sprinkled with classical heaven of the same (obliging) sky over a street full of flexible state machines remembering self from before, barking their mutiny from mouth outside, their calm of brood, their soundness of salt of memento of caninus annus: both Canis Minor and Canis Major and in the Lesser Dog Gemini and Procyon and in the Greater Dog Orion and Sirius - the open mouth of any race under the barking of canis’ base.

A Minimal Treatise About Morality

03/24/96

The difference between "a purposive universe and a universe of sound and fury, signifying nothing", as Macbeth has been cited by F. Hoyle in the prologue of his paper "Is the Universe Fundamentally Biological?", presented at a conference held in Venice on May 5-7, 1987, marking the 60^th birthday of H.C.Arp (pp. 5-7 in the Conference Proceedings), is the difference between the deliverer and the recipient of teaching about morality, at which point the first one is to be announcing himself from the first, and the second one redeeming himself from the second of the two universes.

As the things, however, stand, the case is rather that the deliverer and the recipient of moral teachings are in reversed spaces.

This, nevertheless, does not change the fact that no moral (the conspicuous embellishing of krypton) exists, but that, instead, it is a matter of Elysium fields used to cover the shadow of its (the moral’s) absence, but it justifies even less the moralistic professors, on the contrary, it takes the masks off their faces, tracks down the elastic interpretation of crime, unmasks their explanation of the world.

Their fall, predicted by the promising although nonexistent justice, in which, in such a (boggy, elongated like a sugar-cane, upright like a stork) form, there still believes only diodon from the muddy bottom and rebels at the corresponding heights, is always and only postponed (according to these believers, again).

In a white room of black thinking there is more hope than in the woods of plundered money - the pillaged landscapes of marketing - they think (the insurgents and the poor), as if Stephen Jay Gould didn’t tell them that "in nature: nonmoral...you cannot lay moral blame on the wasp".

A thirst for power, and the ruling itself, is a superposition of small, miserable and worthless learnings about contentment: "He took the hugest pains to adorn his big person", Thackeray, in his reply to John Stuart Mill, who stated that "it is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied".

Over the sky there spread inky clouds, from the clouds, using the ink, the war road is being completed, down the road there return the crusaders from the Eastern Crusade.

On their spear they bring oraculum ordinatim, give the benediction to it in their tribe’s temple, their moral glitters while it drops from the pupils of their eyes turned to the headquarters’ priest - partially tearful due to the great victory over immorality.

The entire history - the description of its first day. ("Fear attends her not", W. Shak.).

Neither we pointed at something better, nor something better pointed at us.

Neither sarcasm nor farce unmasks better than the false beauty.

From the (accidental) papers of yesterday (more exactly: of always - all these newspapers are of then), "The Daily Gazette - Independent Voice of the Capital Region"?! - both exclamation marks wonder (in vain) about such an untroubled belief about an independence - over the upper half of the front page it says: "Car chase ends with shooting, officer kills Albany man". Included are the color photographs (the quality of the graphics itself is high) and the map, helping the reader to orient himself.

While at the lower half of the same, front page, it says: "Schenectady drug dealer slain in Mont Pleasant".

Both reports continue on the following pages.

In the first case, it was to do with a type who escaped - he didn’t want to stop at a routine traffic checking spot, instead he drove his car to his mother’s house, opened the garage door with a remote control, flew in as did they after him. Squeezed, he shifted into the rear gear, started backing up and, in doing so, he jammed one of the run out policemen, between the rear of his car and front of the policeman’s - taking him, so pressed, about ten yards, down to the street. Then another policeman, with his feet stretched at a point about five feet away (taking a pose of Neptunus, son of Saturn and Rhea, brother of Jupiter and Pluto, the god of a long ago dried up, reduced to the garage floor, sea), took the person’s life with three shots, in the chest, neck and head, from the 0.45" caliber gun (about the distribution, that is, the time sequence - which of the bullets hit where - the paper doesn’t say anything). The jammed colleague was taken away with his legs injured but not broken. From their computer, the policemen took the history of the killed man - from it, they (with their humour regained) figured that he had a problematic past; however, a next-door neighbour, having found himself accidentally on the scene, said for the (cited) paper that the killed person was "a quiet man, who kept to himself". From their side, nevertheless, the lawyers (isn’t it, maybe, that they were representing the municipality, that is, its police force) said that the killing was OK, "Deadly force within law, experts say".

In the second case, a Jamaican immigrant (why did he leave his island, I can question him as much as he can me, although mine doesn’t exist anymore) was killed in early hours (around 1 a.m.) in his apartment that he started renting at the beginning of the week, in a place at the address 641 Crane St. [The house is in the picture: it looks like the one, although all of them (as the newspapers) are the same, which I went through a couple of months earlier, looking for a place to rent in a portion of the upper floor. Of course, I never went back]. It was to do with a settling between the drug gangs, however it is characteristic that the killed man was judged to have additionaly been guilty because his apartment was found to have been a "flop, the only furnishings were a bed and pillow". This was stated by the sheriff’s deputy, P.T.Smith. Of course, such a criterion is worthless because it is, actually, opposed to someone’s possible fault, but from the named deputy, the mountain-spur of such monstruous thinking (although it is rather a mental state than a thinking), nothing better could have been expected.

Both the Big and Little Dipper on one side of the sky, our conception about travel to Ursa (both Major and Minor) - on the other. ("There is no favourable wind for a rudderless ship" c/o H. Yeaton).

We flow out in the direction from which the wind flows in - our resistance, like a powder-house, turns us to the guns of both the East and the West. ("Foreign states have endeavored to heighten our confusion", Addison).

Which reaction in physics/chemistry is more lethal than the occurence of a tearing thought - the one with which only a step on this street brings a Super Nova into doubt.

A moral, it turns out, falls down from such explained heavens on wretched people caught in faults of desperate persons, but there is nothing of it when it comes to the immeasurable bigger faults (sins) of its interpreters.

When on a much larger scale (in a bigger proportion) there rules lawlessness and crime: the bombings of entire nations, because of their insubordination, by a country or a group of countries, that it is to do with immorality - it is absurd to have to prove.

Such (bombing) group, of course, is always "civilized", and always an "alliance", some sort of a concluding cake from Brookings Institution, London School of Economics, Institute for Strategic Studies, The Gorbachev Foundation and other such, monosodium-like, institutions, the improvers of taste of fast food of voters’ body with the white dust C₅H₈O₄NaN, while the bombed ones, according to that intelect, are "uncivilized", heretics/refuse/pariah, a kind of oriental kite of opossum: Milvulus govinda.

Since those who make decisions on behalf of such a Holy (and, by all means, at least a thousand years old) Alliance, ordering the bombardments of Tamilian paraiyan by the clinically (sickly) fetishistic weapons, are bigger malefactors than any individual criminal (because they deal with larger numbers and because they talk one thing and do the other), what is the morality on the basis of which the laws of the countries, which they lead and represent, are applied to the individuals?

Of course, both should be brought to justice.

But, how to do that with those who do more and deal with larger numbers, when it is them who are the judges?

It can only be done through a People’s Revolution, winning it and establishing a People’s Court.

And the stories about immorality of such a metamorphosis, according to which, allegedly, such a winner is not any better than the previous one, are to be thrown into water together with other stories about morality.

The Russians

03/25/96

Some Russians moved in here. Two or three complete families - as the weather warms up a bit, they come out in front of their buliding. (They imagine it’s one of their dwellings in Kaliningrad, or under the Irvas, at times when, in seasons like this, one would come out in front of an apartment building. In fact, they don’t imagine, they remember).

I heard them for the first time about a month ago: detractio was snowing over its track through the evening hemmed with a sleepy spiral while I was returning from work, a pile of snow was growing, a child was climbing up on it in order to, after reaching its peak, slide down those three yards, it was becoming increasingly unclear because of the (how journalists like to say) "disappearance of daylight" (its abashed withdrawal before the advancing dough of dusk, followed by the eagerness of night), and, intending to keep her eye on him (the child), a young woman in a fur coat, standing across the street, using a melody rather than a column of words, told him not to go far, to come closer. She, therefore, said to him, "Sašenjka".

Having got used, through all these years, to listening to one language (English), and, here and there, besides Spanish, to some of the languages from the Middle or Far East, one involuntarily looses sight of oneself marveling about hearing this language too (although it also stretches itself to that, farther, East).

As the weather, since then, has improved (the Sun sent its farewells to the days with a more sunny afternoon or a calmer evening a few times already), I saw or heard the Russians, through the open window, a few more times. There were two, three young men (in their thirties), with their wives and children, but also with one or two elderly couples, probably the children’s grandparents. Since there are significant research institutions and a high tech industry around here, perhaps these young people came for a year or two, in connection with some co-operation, taking their families with themselves, but it also was possible that they completely left the land which they came from and, for now, moved in these buildings. Neither did I know, nor was it important.

Two other things were interesting, if not really important. The first one was already mentioned, the one dealing with the sudden occurence of the language long ago stored into, as it goes, a differently interpreted earlier life, school, readings, at the time of an (by all means then proper), almost harmonious, idea about the world. (One could even reduce such a representation to the neutrality of the result, if not to the indifference of the neutral participants, by far more despised then than now, if they existed at all. "Damn’d neuters in their middle way of steering / Are neither fish, nor flesh, nor good red herring", Dryden).

The other thing has been mentioned, too: their coming out and chatting in front of the building. All of them would come out, the kids chasing each other, the grandparents taking a seat on a bench, the young men and women standing up around them, dressed more in a (former) European way - (still) not wearing winter sports jackets nor running shoes, but rather coats and fur coats, winter shoes and boots; on a windy day they’d put fur hats on their heads.

It could be seen, that is, felt, that they were not without an origin - more exactly, without a quality in a sense of schooling, that is, reading. While day was transiting into night, to them, it seemed, their apartments looked tight, the urge for fresh air and talk drove them to get out. There additionally drove them, possibly, a thought about the difference which thy were experiencing, coming to this obscure landscape from a, long ago, perhaps wider and nicer and now more sad landscape, a need to argue about it (the difference), thus neutralizing it more or less, "expertly" analyzing it while, in fact, dividing it and crumbling into habit. [It choked them, therefore, their Cronium mare, Saturnian Sea of theirs, the unfaithful Cressida in Troy called Russia, in Troilus a centre of Criseyde, a pledged grief of Nereis, the fiftieth daughter of Nereus, a sea god, and Doris, the mother of Nereis and of Amphitrite (the wife of Neptune), and of Thetis (the mother of Achilles), and of Galateia, and of Doto - it strangled them in such a way as to elevate them onto the wave of staggering].

For now, it’s only them who stand in front of the building, and only them who can be heard. (To say the truth, calmly and mildly, while conversing they have a limit). (The traditional inhabitants in this part of the world mainly sit in their residences, and when they go out it is towards their cars. But among them, too, there are differences: it seems that these, who live in the apartment bulidings, are more sociable than those who own houses. In summer they, too, go out and sit on the bench).

And to those already on the bench and around, the conversation is fading away, the set sun is not heating anymore, they’re gathering their children, helping the grandparents to get up from the bench, entering the hallway of the still, decently kept building, wishing good night to each other before they close the doors of their apartments painted white, lying down in their beds with hesitation, dreaming the triumph and the fall, their eyes quickly loosing the minute particle of the glare accumulated during the conversation outside, but look how through the next dream a cavalry from the Don river comes to their help, takes them in a single move on the victorious crupper: ‘There sputters the kick of hoofs in the plains, rejects the hundredth despair in a mile / Returning home they go through (in their dream) the immemorial fence, A tile / dried up by the description of landscape stummbled for only a while’.

* * *

03/26-28/96

Someone, at first dusk, starts singing an aria (the voice sounds like mature woman’s). (The synoptic Gospels by Matthew, Mark and Luke - one would think, not having heard the narrative and conversation of St. John, his seeing of denique). Since this is, whenever heard, the same aria, and it always lasts for two or three minutes before, galavanically like fabella, disappears, and since it is indeterminable whether anything in the tone of voice is different from one time to another, it is possible to imagine that the melody comes from a record: maybe, at the hour of the evening, the one from whose apartment the voice arrives is listening to that record only (it may be that person’s only record) - in any case, only that song is heard. This is not frequent, it happens approximately once in a week or two, ordinarily during a milder evening (or it is more likely to hear it then, through the wide open windows). It was heard last night, too, for two or three minutes (as said), the voice from an opera or something like that, weak but still strong enough. Listening to it with increased attention, it seems probable that the singing is alive: maybe someone, dressed in tabardus, rehearses for the permanent part of (her)self, getting ready for a local performance in this accidental place. Whatever it is, the singing, extorted by itself [(first reflecting from the walls of the desolated building, then entering its old fashioned yet adequate interior through open windows), without pausing in that which, like a pipe, it passes through during neither a short nor a long time - dragging itself through the small hallways and even smaller rooms], looks for listeners who, pygmaean, by themselves, each under his/her (impartial) ceiling, keep silent like a talk ended long ago, and, left to the mercy (crushed by heavenly bodies) of the Moors’ night (poured over like Saracenical Alhambra is poured over dome-like Granada), listen with an arch-like (horse-shoe-like) attention to the well-known song, recognizing in it domicilium domabilis - a domesticated roar of habitation from the peace-time lesson of artistic singing in an attentive studio amidst the war of thoughts.

* * *

(The Similarity and Difference Between Two Untouchable Places). In no way is the winter over: purified with handy tools of februum, it maintains itself at zero - the morning dawned like a frozen chain too, not as much because of the cold as much because of the repetitiveness of the situation, the links between the riddle of the Sphinx and solution of Oedipus. In truth, after several Gorgon-like days (under whose look, as under the electromagnetism of Medusa, even the dry air of lungs converted to a bog), this morning a little bit of snow covered the streets and the roofs of cars but, in this place without surprises (Sch’dy), nobody got surprised with that either.

On this day, 55 years ago, however, in the other place (B.), on a morning like this, people went out to the streets, there was a rebellion. But, today is a different time there too, it’s even in accord with the time here, wintery only in figure. Before - the one whom they raised against, didn’t bomb them yet, now - they peacefully register how the one, who ordered the (uranium) bombing of their countrymen, along with his family strolls in front of their (newest) borders, after the solidly done job.

Either way, there disappear differences between B. and Sch’dy. Only the untouchability of their silences, after the sigh of boredom, glares under their street lights. Placed at such a distance, primarily from themselves, in none of the two places people ask themselves questions in order to not have to deal with disturbing answers. These people here - why did they bomb, those people there - why did they keep quiet. (The similarity and difference between two untouchable places depends on how much in each one of them one examines oneself).

With their heads drawn in erratio erratum, the excuse for their lassitude is equally offered to them from any of the two places. Properly stacked into one more day of confirmed beauty, silently (perfectly) breathing in today’s limits, they know: they will not step over it.

Anagrammatic tangram of cut solvableness: due to so much talent for sleep, one of the places shines for the other, and vice versa, using the shell of television congruity - from the bigger square there comes the smaller one, plus five triangles, plus a rhomboid, it only remains to combine them into an apology of silence. Although appearing to be incomparable with each other (because of the geography, possibly), they are identical (because of not reacting). The untroubled ascertainment of state touches them, both, with its cold forehead of convinction about the misfortune and fortune - during that, one of them pours to the other the tenant’s code, the other conforms to it. (It is known who to whom). Until the metropolitan one regains the brains in its head and revolt in its heart to be able to differ again from the provincial one.

Dream - 3

You see, here we plant all of that, then eat what grows, there spoke a woman from the part of the last century’s house as from the corner of Cassiopeia, while her daughter, Andromeda, in a circular way climbed, that is grew, through ropes of plants and moves of her hands, towards Dicte, a mountain of Crete, to the top of, in this way designed, state, from droplets reduced to lungs. In a crowd of people, both in and out of the house, whose faces were unknowingly known, starting from two of the uncles and an aunt, who couldn’t be approached while they were walking up and down, sideways and straight, causing a lot of uniaxial insects to fly by spreading wings in a wide notion, there was Богомил the priest, founder of the X century Bulgarian sect holding that God had two sons, the rebellious Satan and the obedient Jesus - so warm was the day. Just when I wanted to ask if there happened a flood of thoughts, as the river of sense was no more than five to ten units away from us, they informed us that the plane was ready and that we should strap ourselves with the belts of purpose. By itself, the flight inaudibility (certain black aureolus) at the bottom of the beginning, at the top of the end, came instantly (without suspicion) down the stairs like down the pieces which were the parts of a building cracked behind a window behind which a child (in catonium’s cellula) checked the documents of the passengers (typing argumentum adfirmatio on the keyboard of a Korean clerk sharing the office with one of ours) at an airport of darker glass and a higher ground level and hallways for nicely dressed and well behaved people meeting themselves and their relatives in that order full of arrivals and departures of sensationalistic concepts in the work of la bohème Tao Yang et al ‘linguistic flow in fuzzy discrete time cellular neural networks and its stability’, ritually letting (through the hands of a head) a dish of tissue catillus lupus of Niobe, the daughter of Tantalus, the wife of Amphion, the king of Thebes and pupil of Sonya Russian Kovaleskaya, the last century mathematician who, like a woodpecker, an ibis-like bird, came out of the part of house as from the corner of Cassiopeia, saying, ‘you see, here we plant all of that, then eat what grows’.

* * *

03/29/-04/01/96

(A Zeroth Section). Either we thought of all of this, or it thought of us - we depend so much on each other. Timeless - we wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves, our time would, like rain in a desert, fly by without stopping: it would not like talking to itself either.

Only in union [it with us, us with it (the time)], we both have justification: the time - for spreading beyond measure, we - for smaller, yet fair pieces. (Hiatus of Jupiter’s blend: even parting, the parts hold to each other, not even during the break they let hands go). It (the time) doesn’t have anybody else to wind its clock, as we don’t have a better border stone for bounding one rudeness with another. (Aeneas and Hector - a heroic beginning and the end of heroes, heroarchy - the obsoleteness of cowardish subjects). Its (the time’s) registration is that of the imperfection of things, ours - of the ambiguity of the message (the red whisper of white cells). (The pulsation of an unfinished voyage - Hippopotamus amphibius of dried up marsh).

The crossing of hands (of the clock) before a zeroth section: if they cross outside of the zero - the remaining section is available, if they cross at the zero - it’s finished with it, too.

* * *

Arriving to this point too - it’s April. (Even the discus thrower, discobolus, a statue sculptured by Myron about 450 B.C., wouldn’t throw farther and quieter).

In this month’s name something quietly rings, rises from grass to additionaly cheer, to prevent the fall by rescuing itself. (It thaws, its look traversing over promises). The morning doesn’t hesitate as the mornings before. Even after the hard, not slept well night, it (the morning) broke out, it didn’t give in. (Sufficient for the occurrence of fresh thoughts, an almost old fluency of state). When the right time comes (as today) - we cross from one season to the other, until then - we change only hours, days, at most months.

Perhaps the whole world is thought of (although that’s nothing new either - sure it’s thought of, is it maybe that it is not thought of?) and we, because of that, do not succeed waking up in something else.

Now, in April, the advancing of plants and birds will accelerate until it converts to running. ("And the ostrich layeth her eggs under sand, where the heat of the sun discloseth them", Bacon).

A flutter of a vermin ready for anything (even though it’s only a ladybug), whitening into green, in preparation for a new performance. (Until now, the old show was presenting itself - whitening into the white). In it (the representation of things), bright roads will come into sight too, one should only recognize them on time. Like the antelucanus nightmare (the nightmare of the last night), unmasked by this first April morning, here they come: the antemeridianus change of conception, the constancy of presence, and the scene of this modest battle, with their gentle features of ingratitude.

* * *

04/02-03/96

(The Use of Words and Consequences). Not a word has been written, and it’s still absent. (That one, the first one, is the least catchable. Writing it down, the second one is secretly offering itself). Right until dawn (during the manoeuvring), all the words represent an army wing made heavy by the elegiac digging in, when day breaks they disperse flying, they’re not here. (They have to be collected from the beginning, laboriously and patiently). One at a time, they start to descend at last. This morning, they descended by the recently stopped rain. Washed, clean for the day. But, at its end, made dirty by their use (by the labellum-like rigidity of large-mouthed agitators), wherever to look or listen, they will start searching for a new rain, to not go dirty to hush. So much used by everyone and everything (for all and each), nothing else remains for them except to hide. The seclusion works for the (intricate and complex) majority of them - the everyday’s (sweet-talking) users of words have only the remaining (small) number of them at their disposal. These are always the same, simple-minded words, unable to escape: freedom, democracy, the free market, human rights and, as needed, Astraea’s bombardment - cirrus-like undressing of the Goddess of Justice. But, as nothing is certain with these (so suspicious) words, their counterparts, from a mirror, are looking at them, eye to eye, as the answer: modern slavery, layoffs, expiring (rather than living), computerized filings of state investigators, and revolution. Assailed at each other (through the mirror’s glass), they confront each other, each word against its adversary. (A catapult string of cenotaphium between the emptiness of interment and honour of a stranger: tension of crypt of idealism in Westminster Abbey). Due to the pressure, at the moment of the mirror break, it is known which words will run away, and which will be their expulsers, the cause of the taste of silent glass in the mouths of notorious users of the first ones, their muteness as a merciless consequence of their misery of expression.

* * *

(A Proposition For a Different Journey). Do thoughts swarm (are they generated of their own free will) or something forces them out of the head? (In either case, where do they go to lodge?). How far do they reach when extinguished? (Not extinguished - how far, again, do they reach?). With them, who crossed a mountain, reaped a field, sailed a sea, knowing that, in fact, he was running away from them? (To run away, of course, he could not). For how long are they going to strangle us, keeping quiet afterwards, as if nothing happened? (In Cerberian way, like Cerberus, a dog as the result of Typhaon and ophidion-like Echidna, the gate keeper in Pluto (Dis), sometimes with three, sometimes fifty, and sometimes with a hundred heads and the snake tail around its neck). And why are they (the thoughts) so categorical - even that which is left is thrown to Ceres, in the orbit between Jupiter and Mars, into the hands of the first asteroid (G.Piazzi’s babe of 1801, of Sicilian Palermo), as a transparency of the instant, as if, from everything, there breeds too little of subsequentness and none of sameness. Still, neither my thoughts nor yours will get our heads as long as we keep them up. (The saying goes like this, and it is like this). Neither will Charon (son of Erebus and Nox, ferrying the souls of the dead over the Styx, into its subterraneous part) ferry them (the thoughts of ours) thirsty over water. There is, on this voyage, also a shiny, victorious thought about going on a true journey. A journey of straw hats, sugar-canes and bare feet across a plantation of a primus-like shower of Caribbean rhythm, in which it shines more than it is expected, and towards which one goes from beneath - from a bee-like blue garden pot of praemolestia over praemonitus of a modern crystal on an imagined chandelier in the center of the mute ceiling.

* * *

04/04-05/96

(Leskovac). I have no idea of how the place looks like - is it indifferent, whimsical or it yields to the gentle rain (from Pallas, the asteroid). But I remember that we went to visit those people over there - in Leskovac. I could not have been older than a child, I vaguely recall the fact of going there, before my eyes there undulates a couple of slowly fading pictures, dissolved from my mind but, by a miracle, not entirely extinct. [It is possible that the pictures of all that happened (what’s with that which didn’t happen?) find their bearings in that way - getting hold of a smile of the Pharaoh, in a portal manner vibrating in the candle of the basilica, mandarin’s pagoda, feeding itself with Pallasite, the iron meteor fallen on Siberia in 1772, turned into a corresponding vitamin by now]. Why did we visit those people, what were they to us (or us to them), were purpose and justification of that journey (unimportant now as the water evaporated during that patient summer under the folds of August toga) in that its importance should not have been looked for and found - it cannot be known from this distance. Like each such journey, long ago forgotten, placed between uncertain reason and desired goal, this trip too, confused by the past (the pioneer’s glory), only hangs in memory about it. (We even slept over night there, at their place in L., after we sat late in the long (classic) evening on their verandah supported by white wooden beams, fenced by white tiny boards through which the vine buzzing was drawing in and aggregation of drops from watered roses was increasingly dissolving the (by now fallen into an oblivion) talk of seated people - after which, cooled in a well, a watermelon was cut and eaten in silence. (Like the three-body Geryon who, in spite of such an advantage, was defeated and killed by Hercules, neither this happening survived the meaning of the three respectabilities: encounter, meal, sleep). The importance of all of this is in that it settled in the whole story too, in the toboggan-like series of nights and days of so comprehended participants and objects in the meeting characterized by the disappearance of all of that, according to the same, logical order.

* * *

(Piling Up the Pages). Only by a persistent, patient writing on each page of this notebook, a larger piece (of what?) is put together. (By devotion of each of its parts, this building will be supported by the poetic foundations too, thinks the poet, proverbially diligent in destroying by poetry, "Nay, answer me; stand and unfold yourself", W. Shak.). Page after page (of unbearable whiteness) are the constituent parts of this diary of the world as well: all that is written in them - there it does not live, all that is not - through ourais peers out. (A finished painting looks from its integral parts while we think that we look at it whole, "When Greeks joined Greeks, then was the tug of war", Lee). Agitated, then calmed thought about all of this: is this all?

(Presumptuous by nature, always dissatisfied, here it is, it climbs up the foolishness). Expecting a mouth as something at the hand’s reach, the thought, ready for the jump, postpones itself, sharpens: neither the trinity of Trimurti - Brahma in the middle, Vishnu at the right, Siva at the left, the principles of creating, preserving, and destroying, respectively - will help it (the thought) in Clélie’s swimming the Tiber. And yet, having acquiesced itself (such a heap of proper lives), it can make a hundred years (although rarely more). (Lightly gambled away - the despair has not succeeded there, seriously apprehended - hope built its nest instead). The despondency and hopefulness meet, unpleasantly for both, on each of these pages which increase clinging to each other as if Varuna (Sanskrit and Vedic god of cosmos, four-armed like in a hymn, riding on a sea animal) is chasing them out of the privilege of antipius-like symbols (impius-like letters) with a deus-like move of a pencil this morning again.

* * *

04/06-07/96

Quietude of nothing and disquietude of everything else. The mornings are increasingly nicer but torn by the quick transition of a songster to the enemy side. (It sings so much and only flies off at that, without a feeling of treachery). (Outside, someone warms up a car with devotion and for a long time, as if going from April for stuff left in January). I sit down, put on my glasses, however I take them off because I cannot see the purpose, but, nevertheless, I put them back on to have a better look when I see it. (I squeeze lemon into my tea, coating my hands with it too: at least in that way they smell like a warm desert). What is small, what is big? The bombing in April (since the equivalent morning, 55 years ago) when Vera (my mother), with her parents, sister, and two brothers were running to the hospital where there was the youngest one, the seventh, to pick him up and run away from the city - what is that? And what is that which is throbbing in our heads all the time - with what tone of the whole song will our encounter be decisive? Besides the most decisive one (with ourselves, the personal silence of conclave), perhaps with the equanimity of pastoricius-like combined things, on the earth and in the sky. Or, maybe, with the second one, stronger and more attractive (falsely blamed for brutality) - the fortissimo of a sudden and brilliant revulsion, undergone by those left at the mercy of just solution of Agnus Dei - the lamb-like, talismanical interpretation of this world’s charms. As when the world consisted of improved representation of itself (of Scythian Lamb, Agnus Scythicus, disguised Dicksonia Barometz of Tartarean origin) and when, having come to this point, it rapidly shakes (rejects the praying wool), marching in a stiff manner from then on.

* * *

(Awakening Every Time With a Thought). Morning by morning - pearls dropped of antiquity of a lute, fermentation of a pillow, felluca under the Mediterranean. (Curiously strung on the beginning of a daily necklace, mornings leave to the pearls of days and nights the room at its chasm). This is Sunday morning - a church bell rings, informs while embalms. (Primus primulus of the past error, fibula for its landing, sextant of sailing to a light death). What is planned for today world wide? (What in the universe?). European football in Europe, here baseball and golf - and the same, hysterical, barking at the few disobedient, epileptical (sic!) countries. (As with regards to the universe, the question is late: there today happened earlier - it did not wait for Godot; Beckett’s assumption about waiting does not make sense in the negative resolution of time by which today is pulled back, and ahead repeats, like Vivaldi through a violoncello). This morning as well, who’s going to say a nice word to whom and who to target whom? In all these churches - who is going to free a sin from whom? ("The leech will hardly fasten on a fish", Brown). Arcadian state of bell tower of automatus: awakening every time with a thought, like barbatus we search a new bell, of a cup (calyx) of zinc from Lyraid [a meteor accelerated from the heavens where Lyra (the northern constellation of the white star of magnitude Alpha) decelerates to an anatomical arch of the brain - fibrous harp of a hominoid-like harmony of a lynx], of the mass of a cycloidal spoon, the reconcilableness of castanets (the intensity of a tympani), without swaggering, even then, with an excessive self-assurance of revolutionary teaching about the ultimate blow to the rigidity of the world: rather - singing one’s own, full of organic flash of inorganic dawn, aura as a song.

* * *

04/08-09/96

Sharpened like an ant while digging (strained like a jaguar while laying down), the outer impression about the world vanishes underneath the inner - regardless that outside everything becomes settled, and inside it collapses. (The new presence in no way departs the old - everlastingness is a temporary salvation, too). I wake up, but they’re awake already: those small animals and birds - they’re always on their guard. We look at each other silently, until they rush forward to a deposit of the bottom (alluvium of dried delta), or to the walnut-tree surrendering to the wind. (On our side this is called ‘dealing with the unknown’, on theirs - instinct, alarius as an eagle’s mutilation, in the sense of wings pushed downwards). They turn inside out while disappearing through a trimming on the wall (a heraldic balm of pomp as etymological favouritism), while brandishing - jumping into the amphora of Eris, the goddess of strife and discord, into ceramics at the night table of a restless spirit of Astronomy. Still, they neither bounced nor flew away (those small animals and birds) - we’re wrestling with the same, from the same neighbourhood, understanding each other while, on the same mat, deceasing each other by the same, backyard’s ethane.

* * *

(Apartment - 1). This apartment (Apartment - 1), existed while I was not aware of it. And now I’m in it - already that closes the curtains before a bigger explanation. (The unclear cause of flood and strict consequence of the one who drowned). Small room, kitchen, bathroom - and the capacious silence of a barathrum: having waited for my move in, it was that which extricated itself from the design of a monument of the Atlas, the giant who holds the motionless sky and, in the alley of suspicion, got glued to the feet of the first promenader (me). It was, in any case, known that I would move in (that’s why all of this was built so many years ago, even though, calmed by my presence, all these rooms already peek at the next tenant), only I didn’t know anything about it. (Chimaera monstrosa, half snake half fish, and that in which it inhabits - a northern sea, and that through which it swims - a south gallery: as much as it is more transparent than Axenus, the Black Sea, it is more murky than Avernus, a lake near Cumae, the entrance to the underworld). It was, therefore, indiscreetly let known to the former occupant of the apartment to move out - so that I’d move in. (This apartment was planned for me all the time, it was only a question of the right moment). Paying my dues on time (the rent, electrical and water bills), in a word: looking through the window at the engagingly perfected loneliness, it seemed to me like an important (in terms of the building construction - inevitable) element of this (proper) chamber for habitation, from that corner over there, not emptier than others - winked at me. As if it said to stay here where I am, to not depart, to remember that this, seen between the carefully painted plains, is the most I can expect, that, after all (on the basis of the rental contract signed in the landlord’s office), my moving in this apartment was officially expected - that, finally, this is an ambient for which sympathy can only increase through the growing fixity of its walls, the catamaran placed up.

* * *

04/10-12/96

(The State of Things and Splitting). All that happens to us is neither too small nor too large. (At that, to each its own seems big). The happenings, on the other hand, are not identical either. To each, something else happens - to one, possibly, there happens more better things, to the other more worse things. (Not even the natural laws are the same for everyone, not to mention the laws of chance). While to the poor the gravitation or some other principle of classical physics (too cold, too hot), counts as the principle of misery (neither can they pull themselves out of it nor can they adjust its bearing), the profit is, without scruples, being promoted to a fetish, flowing into always the same pockets: here, the gravitation counts as the principle of (although only earthly) wealth. The sum of everything happened (and learned) determines our attitude towards the world. One is bitter and cynical, the other fluffy. The third varies in between. (Like alba, the white nerve tissue in doubt - whether to come down the brain, or to climb up the spinal cord). While those imprisoned by their jobs keep quiet in fear (not laid off yet), the fired get to resignation, giving up without rising. (Many of them think themselves that being laid off from work is normal). They behave exactly as they’re told by the "independent" newspapers and TV networks, the propagators of the convention about maintaining the status quo and the infeasibility of change, the conveyers of thoughts of their gurus, employed by some "think-tank" centers, the contemporary museums of mediocrists hierarchically reporting to the plutocracy at the top. ("Power: being the natural appetite of princes", Swift). A bird-like, aide-de-camp series: not even Ciconia argala, the adjutant bird, would open its beak at a better moment. ("A fine violin must be the best adjutant to a fine voice", W. Mason). Whether and when will the excited voices and muffled thunder of the world come to its senses discern through the felix-like silence of the czar’s room, depends on the tuning of its piano accompaniment: from everyday’s étude of facilitas, as the prescribed (mere) piano lesson (excersise), to Revolutionary étude of fatalis, the state of things and splitting is a question about the discontinuation or the blow of Chopin’s crescendo - by its abolition satisfied is the state, by its amplification - the splitting of the piano.

* * *

(Cosmos - 2). What does it collect while it expands, the cosmos? (The force of doubledealing, the fickleness of a chameleon, the bluff of potassium permanganate: in distance even the colourless dyes blue). Overloaded, unloaded, locked, unlocked, its jaws closed, its mouth full - what does it contemplate about, hope for? ("The relations are so uncertain as they require a great deal of examination", Bacon). Thrown out/in, swung, accommodated in an inn : it gave in. From the forgotten house for the forgotten guests in the forgotten garden under the forgotten tree by the forgotten well escaping - it’s growing, in the well’s water snowing. Where is it? In the head’s centre. What is it? The back of the forehead. What does it do? It thinks of a thought of which it withers looking for comfort before a new phase. In the head’s centre the back of the forehead thinks of a thought of which it withers looking for comfort before a new phase above which hanged it hangs over itself. In the head’s centre the back of the forehead thinks of a thought of which it withers looking for comfort before a new phase above which hanged it hangs over itself above which hanged it hangs over yourself. In the head’s centre the back of the forehead thinks of a thought of which it withers looking for comfort before a new phase above which hanged it hangs over itself above which hanged it hangs over yourself above which hanged it hangs over myself. In the head’s centre the back of the forehead thinks of a thought of which it withers looking for comfort before a new phase above which hanged it hangs over itself above which hanged it hangs over yourself above which hanged it hangs over myself above which hanged it hangs over everything. In the head’s centre the back of the forehead thinks of a thought of which it withers looking for comfort before a new phase above which hanged it hangs over itself above which hanged it hangs over yourself above which hanged it hangs over myself above which hanged it hangs over everything in the head’s centre the back of the forehead thinks of a thought of which it withers looking for comfort before a new phase above which hanged it hangs over itself above which hanged it hangs over yourself above which hanged it hangs over myself above which hanged it hangs over nothing. Neither Anubis (half human, half jackal) can do anything to it, nor Hermes (of the same two made), nor Anthemion (a flower ornament): neither an entire man nor animal nor plant can wake it up from the hugeness but neither do they miss to get even - having turned on their backs tonight, they look at it (the cosmos) as it’s coming out for a walk on the path towards a throne (of infanthood of a symbiotic psyche), the poker grown from the crown witnesses of howl, roar and pose, the spectacle of sting into exsisto of sown sacrifice.

* * *

(The Checkmate of the Unknown). Neither one saw the unknown (even less he learned it), nor did he measure up with it farther than at zero - but a bigger battle he will not have. ("An empty, 5-dimensional universe induces matter in the 4-dimensional universe", Caluza cylinder condition, c/o B.L.). Fighting the invisible. (It is everywhere where we are - but cannot be found anywhere). In soil - a mole (it routs with a pole, supposedly), in water - a centipede (with its hundredth submerged - it oscillates), and condor in the air (its eye on prey) - while, awakened, we wait for it, sitting on the chair in a modern kitchen flooded by obsolete thoughts. ("Local properties of matter are geometrically derived from the global", Ernst Mach’s principle, c/o B.L. It follows from it that flowers in the garden of Ancus Marcius, the fourth king of Rome, owes its looks to the influence of the twelve constellations of the Zodiac on the Orion nebula). Since it doesn’t change: once not seen - it is never seen (the unknown). Various stories about the unknown are rumoured, mainly far from the truth. Its sudden occurence and words of explanation are being awaited too easily, as if this is not to do with a contract according to which its task is to not show up. Although it (the unknown) is that which we only have business with, but masked into the known. By this the unknown, but as known, at a laus reception in honour of Amphion, the musician and the builder of Thebes, acts adequately outside but inside it changes its cape, the direction and plan about instantaneous blow to the person it’s talking to, so to confirm the stories representing it as known, even at the price of such a transaparent game in which a checkmate is waiting for it in the kitchen of the originally sleepy but expertly awakened player playing for the head of the surrounding mystery.

A Postcard or Inspiring Subject for a Postcard or

A Call for Revolution By Means of a Postcard

04/13/96

Not only in a postcard - it cannot be said much in a letter either which would not damage even the lesser part of life. Trying to exchange (by a paper filled through the fist of a postcard, the hand of a letter) more significance than (the cellulose’s) insignificance - as on a blank paper we only send to our correspondent zeal and the care of empty lines of banal purification. ("The indiscriminate defense of right and wrong", Junius). Exactly by as much the noiselessness which he portrays makes an eyesore to the artist, our confrontation with the self-portrait of seclusion differs from giving up and is in accord with the rise in revolt.

Long live the refuse to all of this - falsely proclaimed for only possible!

Forward the roseate state of snow, paleness of primrose, infeasibility of salvation!

Down with the bloated rigidity of conservatism, the provincial theory of the high noon of rite - the zenith of the house rules of night!

Support Indra - the four-armed elephant rider through Vedic period of Pantheon shell, down Eucharistia - the bread, wine and dinner beneath the deadening bell!

Sing Euterpe, do not forget the coronal notes of the scattered eras of innovation, the light years of Claudius Ptolemy’s Almagest compilation, the hour glass of Che Guevara in grandeur which matters - the protozoic parallax transporting quantum letters.

* * *

04/13/96-II

The Significance of Taciturnity and the Blank Space of an Echo: In its essence, this (the Cassiopeia’s constitution, the Cepheus’ order of the world, the astrological distrust with respect to the outcasts) is so untouchable that one feels like getting rid of it exactly because of that, but, at that, he only burns out another load of compassion in himself, straightens the cover (mother’s embroidery) spread over the furniture made of seaweed, looks back at a fly - he does not know what he’s up to. (Did Anna Perenna, the goddess of the mob of Rome, know - he’s asking himself, while washing his hands off from the world).

Carrying a state of being trained, he goes from one room to the other, opens the window wide, the cold region strengthens him for the altus’ degree of alloy. (For every day so far, he was able to find an appropriate gradation, in that way he turned all those days over his head).

He figures to himself how he no longer can afford the moments of weakness. ("Brevity is the soul of wit", c/o B.L.).

Steeled (healed up), he laughs at himself. ["By a little study and a great conceit of himself, he has lost (sic!) his religion", Bentley; wouldn’t the word ‘gained’ instead of the word ‘lost’ fit Bentley’s proposition better?].

Little is needed for metamorphosis, no more than for violent fondness, he speculates, feeling as Amulius, the king of the province of Alba Longa, the grandfather of Romulus, now silent. ("Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one remains silent", Ludwig Witkenstein, c/o B.L.).

He stands up, walks around the room, tries not to think at all, or, if he really has to, he lets himself recall only the fly of a moment ago, and its (dramatical) reaction to the change of its situation: while buzzing outside, it did not have a presentiment that there exists an inside, into which, taken by a sudden (and short) increase of the air stream, it landed, thus materializing a small but proportional panic. ["A (trivial) reduction of the unknown to the known is the laziness of spirit, futile and perishable business, equally damaging to those on whose behalf it’s being conducted and those who’re doing it", Danilo Kiš].

("Detroit, the place where weak are killed and eaten", it says on the "Bif Naked" lead guitarist’s T-shirt, c/o S.L., whereby a beef (steak) has already been one-quarter eaten, that is, digested down as well as distorted to the bif, as if the universe has a sense of humour allowing, after all, for irregularities to make their case, too, in addition to the regular confrontation as its mode of operation).

In spite of his effort, the thoughts as thoughts - the more he ravingly tames them in himself, the more they swarm. Finally, they come out of his head, through his eyes, his ears, his mouth, and he does not see, hear, or tell anything which he did not see, hear, or tell in the hour of design of deliverance in the room of empty quarters of the Greek astronomer Conon, the Athen’s commandant of the silenced things, of truculence of the unending moment.

The Consequences of Breaking the SFRY and USSR

By Means of Domestic Traitors and Foreign Enemies

04/14/96

Returning home through an immemorial fence (of the original slot)

Reared by the description of a fragile memory of a landscape

Of which beautiful Platysma came by as a skull atop a neck

In front of it - SFRY, in front of King Arthur - Camelot

In front of Strelnikov - USSR breaks, splits like the escape

Of Orbicularis oculi of universal forehead wrapped in black.

There disappeared the days on a transfigured seaside

So large - The Sun did not surrender either

By a fine urgency (as something slowly died)

We enclosed its ego, maybe slightly milder.

And now - assuming the victory (of what?)

There comes in sight (before us) the entire old news

Fruits of Hydra, lasciviousness of Vega: both

The feast and the pomp - the sistrum of Cignus.

Our notions, findings (and our will too)

We do not exchange nor do we take the blame

For not being able to rescue the blue

World from the embellishment founded on shame.

Having sketched the country from demolished fortune

In the frame of words: misfortune misfortune

Ignoring the Headquarters (its apathetic state)

Proposing an attack - offensive feels great

For our ammunition (like victory) is knotty

To us and Strelnikov while Arthur is haughty.

Welcome to the Magician’s Residence

04/14/96-II

The rain is pouring, as they’re falling the drops increase in size until, when too large, they burst asunder hitting the target. (In the big business of falling, they’re the only ones who’re doing it discretionarily, only a ringing laughter in a soothed ascension divulges them).

Having finally purchased the small red chairs and table, and having arranged them in the middle of the room, I don’t dare take a seat by the set all by myself. I look at the arrangement, therefore, from the edge, planning to add to it white or light blue flowers to keep it company while I’m at work.

It would also be good, I think, to hoist a small, ceremonious sign, saying, "Welcome to the Magician’s Residence" - at least I owe that much to a nicer possibility of each of these writings, so that the other one, the medius fidius possibility, does not begin to imagine, stretching atop the pile of laconically/acrimoniously portrayed days, that it is on some sort of throne.

Perhaps the set, then, should be warmed by details depicting the Little Red Ridinghood, Hansel and Gretel, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and the Three Little Pigs, in that corner over there, while the inconvenient silence should be thrown out into oblivion. (In the same way as when, in a better restaurant, awaiting important guests, the personnel gets rid of a drunkard).

Letting, afterwards, everything to spin as a flavus-like adventure - being, at least for a while, irresponsible. To yelp and ring, to bark, to throw litle rocks from big promise into the low height of this room, to land elastically as if made of rubber [the last degree of caoutchouc/India rubber/Siphonia elastica] while it turns over into a childrens’ story, the Arcadian protection. At one, the southern part of the room, to line up the lead soldiers of President Centaur (half man half horse, in a hunter pose with his arch tightened) for the parade on the occasion of Democratic Republic of Sagittarius (DRS) Day, on the ninth sign of Zodiac, into which the Sun enters on that day, full of a chromatic aberration of Ruthenium (Ru), while on the other, northern side of the room, to have the little pigs sink into Magellanic Cloud on the second thought of inertial rain, including today’s.

To take a stand about a cricket, dragon fly, something which in full reality periodically announces itself through the window open into an unreliable memory of modest games. To paint everything in multiple colours, to let the bright one prevail.

And then, to invite all of the good children to such a residence, and let them play before they grow up over night (as it is said and as it is), and get the idea of describing all of this in the same way, with a certain amount of moodiness, disbelief and unfullfilled promises, on the remaining side of one and the same world, which consists of dialectical doubleness and a series of sweet and small (notorious) toys of fairy tale purpose in complicated clinking between the plain rise and the simple fall.

The Furniture

04/15/96

I bought plastic furniture, made for children, in "Grand Union" supermarket while getting milk and bread. I figured: one gets older, becomes more modest, in the end he will again be able to use furniture made for children, as in the beginning. If he cannot, he is somewhere in between, that state is the least permanent, a more serious purchase wouldn’t be justified then, either. Besides, collapsed in ovatio (crumbled in otium), all those large pieces of furniture sailed away into the ex-representation of eternity - then, that is, it was contemplated that the eternity actually consists of such firm construction and solid finish.

Not eaten up by unnecessary (redundant) experience, on Sundays we would take our seats around the dining table (squared like a Procrustes bed; cited similarity, however, was terminated by the geometrical design - on this square the meals were served and eaten) - at dinner time, before leaving for the Stadium, into an already filled life we would be adding only the plates, cups and glasses from the credenza of a yellowish, pigeon-like colour (like an immature lemon), pulling out our warmings from the dark brown wardrobe chest (a monumentality of a carpenter’s severity, bordering of reason by a consequential chisel) - the coats, gloves, memories of two oranges and three candies from a past New Year’s anticipation, which, ungrateful, right after an arrival melted into the old one, while on the hanger (covered by ocher vinyl and placed by the entrance door), the hat, scarf and umbrella were available from autumn to spring, for going out into daily activities and duties, probably important then, now academic.

The parent’s master bed (pratum pratulum of died out basis of the world), two pull-out beds, china in the cupboard and in the closet shelves for putting off fruits, vegetables and pristinus silence - the principium of the present analysis, disappeared together with their users, laid back into the coil of zero.

The one-time collecting of all of that (on a bank loan, mainly), and arranging it upon the life and functional utilization of a brilliant fiction, from this distance seems unjustifiably passionate, and proportionally fruitless. ("Proceed, Solinus, to procure my fall", W. Shak.).

The parts of the furniture now: their levitation above the address of ritus, their scattering into the final uselessness of boards, negligibility of joining, permissibleness of the indistinct fence between rememberance and oblivion?

Contemplating about them taught us, if nothing else, to approach those kind of things more guardedly, tip-toeing, to almost avoid them, running away from furniture shop windows (of a specific weight of uprightness of transitoriness), to not disturb their spontaneous stillness.

Only a little, practically useless, children’s furniture of plastic we ceremoniously bring into the apartment, so that it wouldn’t be totally empty.

* * *

04/16-17/96

Dream - 4: Due to so much rain, the night ferried itself across the water like an old-fashioned ship across reminiscence - a pale lantern on its stern (and windlass of time on its bow, an engraved anchor on its chain) fades in a pale bay of air (of sufficiently washed nitrogen, in olive after a storm in your tent).

The world exults in piquant mïlieu not leaving any job for doubt - the small cubes from which today’s mosaic is going to consist again, are real, unpolished like youth. ("In youth I had twelve fellows like myself", Ascham).

So, I dream (I recall while the remaining drops peacefully conflate down the window glass into the felis of clasped recollection of the dream packed in occipital): a journey was made to somewhere, a knocking on a door followed, someone opened it and said something (in a sense that the man who was looked for, that is, whom this was about, would be running down the stairs soon), reminding us as well that in this visit (which much was expected from) everything was seen more clearly than the description of the dream could have conjured up, ended as a liturgy anyway. ("If you can’t do the math, you don’t understand it", Niels Bohr). (Even the birthday of yours was marked with just a possible and already calmed day of fatalis in April in that place, you said Niš). (Fatality of junction, throwing into encounter, "These things are fatal and necessary", Tillotson; "Our acts our angels are, or good or ill / Our fatal shadows that walk by us still", Fletcher).

While a man of approximately my age (whom this is to do with) is already here: nicely dressed, he hastily goes down the winding stairs, properly holding onto a superb banister (the ophidion riveted at proper intervals on wooden posts of German politeness) which brings him (varnished by archeology) to the foyer of the actor’s pose from where he said, lifting his head a bit up towards (unknown) person in the upper room, that the journey is to be postponed and a new ticket issued on name N.L. alias M.G., having looked at me with the collateralness of a seal, which stayed by the base of the stairs at a place at which, instead of me, there was him who was me who was that beast of the prey.

Research Circle

Approaching it from any of the three sides, it is arrived to that circle up the hill - from the height, with its unambiguous name "Research Circle" [this country is a champion in the number of such, direct names, given to the streets, buildings and even populated places (Mechanicsville lays at about ten miles from here), not caring about the complete absence of pondering or, at least, mindful shadowiness over such large (and absolute) functionality of such created concepts], with its name, therefore, this in fact a traffic circle (into which one arrives by any of the three incoming roads, and then drives to the right in order to go out on any of the remaining ones) perhaps symbolizes the activities of two research institutions located in the immediate neighbourhood, on two of the three roads. By themselves, these institutions are relatively significant, there goes a work of large proportions in them, beyond this one, already a large country.

And so - by a direct transcension of the mentioned activities, the traffic circle got its name. There is neither a bigger cause-and-effect connection, nor is there less doubt in the order and solidity of things. There is neither a more direct motivation, nor is there a more remote reflection. A bare cosmic principle, not hidden by anything. (Who knows, maybe in the future, if it is made up to there, notions will be given such names and called so: what’s in mind, it’s on the road - except with the electrically charged facts of profundus, what milder remains to be handled with on an ion ship transporting ore from the abysmal Capricornus to the flotation in Eridanus?).

Whatever it is, giving the names, as in the case here, is a reflection of those who give them, of their haste and practicality. The more practical comprehension of life, as much as it is pulled off from the blabbering about nothing and drowning in pseudo-intellectualism (so characteristic of the older continent), is limited by itself. In the final sum, and to the same extent as the other one, pretending on a quasi-addition, this thinking has also spilled into the impatient syllogism: both the particular affirmative and particular negative look like they’ve overgrown their universal counterparts - neither this nor the other understanding went into the thing from the side from which it is entered by the third road.

The third road, coming to/from the Research Circle, passes by a few houses and a small drugstore/convenience-store, located in certain woods of unceasingness (of serene weasels of calcium fur, the manufactures of the light spleen of Ingeborg), from which, on each of these still cold mornings (universal replacements for frosts), there makes his appearance an older gentleman in a classic murky coat, with a dark brown fur hat on his head, and in his perfectly cleaned and shined black shoes resolutely stepping down the third road towards the circle, following the roundness along its edge, walking carefully on it (a sidewalk does not exist), in the direction opposite to the oncoming traffic (walking therefore to the left), thus reducing the circumference of the circle to one third relative to the remaining two thirds which he would have, if he was in his car, to drive through in order to get to the road located left from his - he then descends a bit down that, left road, carrying firmly his briefcase made of good quality leather, and fervidly fixing his scarf (the last wrapper of his lungs), pushing it deeper under the coat and wrapping it more strongly around his neck, so that his mainly red tie is not vissible any more (it can only be anticipated in his obsolete bringing up), finally he suddenly cuts the road (which, until then, he descended for only a short period of time) and enters the back gate of one of the two institutes for developing weapons from a pin to a locomotive melanchonically, without a bigger interest, no longer watching with the concentrativeness with which, until a few moments ago, he looked at the holographic crowns of the projected trees, with a vigilance of a certain strong understanding, while he was presenting himself from all that on the road towards the circle which, who knows when and why, he cut out in this way, even though so shortlived, by his as much rebellious as victorious walking, in the direction opposite to the set one, for one third, at the very height.

* * *

04/18/96

A thought (about all of this): it unravels (then shrinks), enraptures (then flattens), becomes obstinate (then calms down, recuperates) - only to it nobody can do anything, it concludes, concentrating on lasting.

(If it lasts sufficiently - it will come up with something, if it breaks off - it will not even achieve that).

It’s only thought which swiftly agrees to co-operation.

Having sent it from here to there, or from there to here (from one doubt to the other), it travels over during the moment of their change, as if it is to do with a space with only it (the thought) in itself, a transfer without dimensions different from zero.

The entire thinking in a sphere of a dot.

Generated in the center, decomposed on walls, it quiets, falls asleep: the shell of a worrisome solution of mare nostrum in solution of mare interum in solution of mare superum.

In the morning it gets rid of the false feet, stands up on the true ones, crawls up to the arcade of Ianus, the god of the arched gate and beginning, at dusk, having gained on cautiousness and self-denial, it subsides into Hybla, a mountain famous for bees, buzzing it passes through the perimeter of Apis (nectar, pollen, wax - in that order, to the early morning of a firework honeycomb).

...(" ‘Salvation of the soul’ - in plain words: ‘The world revolves around me’...The poison of the doctrine ‘equal rights for all’ - this has been more thoroughly sowed by Christianity than by anything else; from the most secret recesses of base insticts, Christianity has waged a war...against every feeling of reverence and distance between man and man, against, that is, the precondition of every elevation, every increase in culture - it has forged out of the ressentiment of the masses its chief weapon against us, against everything noble, joyful, high-spirited on earth...", F. Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ).

* * *

04/19-22/96

Every memory - a slice on the plate of wholeness. Rememberance as a way of coming to ourselves, so that that which gave up wouldn’t prevail over that which got forgotten confirming the giving in of capitulum, a creature of a small head and large desires.

We do not anticipate, we recall, transit into resumption - Castor from Pollux (the electrical fire of St. Elmo), the eyes of Gemini for the night of twins of Leda and Zeus, the protector of memory of vanished sailors.

Recollection: the idealization of a one-time solution or painful discovery? The description of something which, hiding, keeps quiet - dressed up, it only ought to be recalled, undressing it afterwards and washing in a drop of ink on the current page of notebook.

To sit or lay down (or walk in a circle), or let go (from this room) into the search for rigorous details of indefiniteness, skipping a methodological obstacle (not giving up lexically) - to unveil the beginning at the last moment.

To hunt the molecule of the world in smoke of a late summer (to stare at a quiet song around the fingers of fixity).

To descend (with a boat sailed out into a dim possibility) through the eve of the garden of Hyphaene thebaica.

(Drops of reticency tumbled down the cheek of horrible silence).

All of this is nothing new - it only ought to be grabbed at the moment in which it is lasting forever, to expose it to portraying to make it get to its senses. One ought to remind oneself to open, then close the door after all of this, in a little victory over another hour.

* * *

(The Tea). To take a cup out, to prepare it. To put water to boil. (To look through the window at all that is not rinsed). When boiled, to pour it out of habit, to add the sugar by a teaspoon and lemon by tomorrow’s yellowishness. (Not even a grammatical tense will return it to the past). To leave it to cool (to steam from the cup to the generalness, to build into the mechanism of the spill). To notice how innumerable particles participate in such a small process - what’s with larger things and happenings? (What’s with their interpreters?). To drink a gulp (of solemn emptiness). (Of something, at first glance not of a tea nature, even though, in the window, there glares the same cause and origin of it). To not make even one exaggerated, superfluous conclusion.

As it still evaporates a bit before the eyes, it covers itself with the magnus veil of Maia, the mother of Mercury, the first derivative of heat radiation. (The uncertainty of warmth in experience of paradise, the heaviness of emptying by drinking in a tea grain).

To take a cup - to wash it out, to look through the window at everything else - prepared, then rinsed.

* * *

04/23/96

Each day - a story for itself (by a hundred years lengthened century), causa prima of the bewitched story teller.

("His spirit is always finding reasons for being contended and even grateful; and now and then he verges on the cheerful transcendence of that worthy gentleman who, returning from an amorous rendezvous..., said gratefully, ‘Ut desint vires, tamen est laudanda voluptas - Although it’s powerless, lustfulness is worth a praise’", F.N., About Emerson, from A-C).

At work without a word, in the apartment without a word, day by day is being curved by the ultimate peacemaking as by the approved strike.

Days full of themselves - our participation is noticeable only in outgoing (in the mornings) and incoming (in the evenings) steps to the proper spots of ingressus: practical obstacles for a bigger jump.

Wakeups very similar to one another: like vigils - they are remembered for a short time.

To make it through the season, to burn it on the ashes of the previous ones, to hold out the state of the firing pin by the mechanism of seasons.

("The general aspect of life is not hunger and distress, but rather wealth, luxury...absurd prodigality: where there is struggle it is struggle for power", F.N., Anti-Darwin, from A-C).

To overcome divisions (to think in choir with the self), to advance civilly and peacefully.

Besides these (routine) expectations, a devotedness to stupidity and obedience is expected. (There expect it the politicians and clergymen).

More exactly, expected is nothing, it is rather offered, it’s up to us to decide.

("Yo me sucedo a mi mismo - It is myself whom I inherit", Lope de Vega).

To surmount only this day more in order to be riding free, we think sitting on the chair in the kitchen.

[We figure that even this cannot last forever, holding (at that) onto the opposite eternity - the permanent break with the constancy].

Desirable behaviour in an undesirable century we perpetuate by its close end, by the description of medals from a hundred wars of thoughts, two hundreds of loneliness.

The Grandfather

04/26/96

All of a sudden - gone was the grandfather, that is, returned to where he, before all of these years, came from. (We wrote this to him, but didn’t send it, until it’s determined where to - between sphenoid, mastoid and frontal). (The parts of a larger state, between the occipital and temporal bone, after they leave they return to it, the parietal. "The parts are not discrete or dissentany", Milton).

There we go, the grandfather and me, to the football match - audacia sputters. We watch the game, finish the beer from the paper cups, while returning we describe the action. (Although I couldn’t describe the one which the grandfather built into his masterly move during all these years, silently).

[Only when we forced him, he dressed in his dark blue suit, took away his gun, imagined his May Fields from the balcony on the eighth floor before lining up his words into a military column (unlike the present - the real one), each with a ready weapon in hand (trigger tightened in a handful), targeting the false truce report].

(Not even the war enemy did the grandfather blame - he personally defeated it sufficiently. And, when "Partizan" wins, he shouts from his balcony, waves the victrix Victoriola).

There we go, the grandfather and me, seated down on a bench, listen to the day (the fragments of obstinated abundance in the field of the element Xe, the sluggishness of eternal an afternoon of Augeas, the king of Elis, whose horses were cleaned by Hercules); he says that all of the objects are arranged in the order in which the summer disguise is approved - until they move to a deeper shade (like the one now).

There comes the grandfather out of his residence, neither hastily nor slowly - at the pace necessary only to respond to the duties of the day. Returning (his work done) - underneath the cosmic hand he strings up one more second. (Even now it’s heard: the last sixtieth of his minute).

There we looked for, the grandfather and I, a true word for the false deliverance, but we couldn’t find it at all. Well, grandfather, it must be that in the search for it (the true word) (on that path, through those woods, towards the grammar school’s fanum) you stumbled into it, making arrangements now how to say it not betraying it.

Before us, it, the Latin Silence, the Silentium Latin, hides in the Cyrillic alphabet, but you wrote it in Mute, placed in the box, put in the chest. There, assured in the thriftiness of the cube (structuralism of rhomb, derivative of fall), it shines next to the Kosovo brandy Kosovka - the welcome displayed from the kitchen table, by the cleared away gulp of the completed journey.

On it you are (I see?), operarius, departing through the forest, by the school, over the railway tracks, towards the hill of ceremonious granite - the traditional kind of ultimate dealing with tidy passages of a jerked-back sense.

* * *

04/29-30/96

The Soul: It tumbled down, murmured away briskly, through the left side of the head somehow, like when fingers snap or a gun with a silencer fires, and having noticed that it exposed itself - it consolidated before the next move, keeping quiet judiciously. I really felt when it clanked on the pillow, but I’m not sure anymore if it was not an outside noise, or a bone break, or maybe someone hit the window with a small stone, roguishly. It doesn’t matter - the materialness was (at least that’s for sure) instantaneously disturbed, while it (the soul), aware of its incautiousness, became appeased. Docile, it curled up somewhere, while it was still wild. ("Fancy, like the finger of a clock / Runs the great circuit, and is still at home", Cowper). It may have recalled the old song of a sufficient minimum and, having slipped its mind of the unwariness of a moment ago, it’s singing it quietly now (taking off of itself the unnecessary homage, crown of Memnononius, the king of Ethiopia, killed in Troy). Or, it (the canicula) climbs up the wall, enters the crack, attentively pokes the dust. And then it vertically descends: an obsolete hymn - it presses the avant-garde bottom. With one leg it wraps around the crupper of a horse, with the other hand it squeezes the story’s neck. Where it becomes known - there it is not (an old concealment it is). It moves into a turbid eye deeper than in clear, it dives through a crag (leaks out from a look). ("Mordecai was an eyesore to Haman", L’Estrange). Rolled in the hay of the body, it murmurs away through the left side of the head in a malar way, snaps its fingers (fires the silenced gun) thinking that it made me weep, while my eye was tearful only because of the dust.

* * *

(Where Are You, What Are You Up To?). The other day was the first, today was the last day of April. Lawfully, without haste (even in its last day), this month is giving up with no more easiness than the others. (As they did, it testifies about the battle by the false withdrawal - it’ll come back next year).

Where are you, what are you up to?

Over there - how tall is the grass according to you? (And how strong the passions?). Climbed up on the hill, does the view open before your eyes? ("The places of fastness are laid open", Davies).

What are you sorting out through your memory (what through knowledge?). Are you exchanging the Aluminum from your Diploma Work about Alcinous, the king of the Phaeacians according to ‘Odyssey’, for the weight of the suddenly emptied day? (Here, it dawned wet and albidus, albesco albidus that is, overloaded with the persistent branches of elm, the Ulmus-like awakening into theatricality, the irremediable daybreak of the moderately northern zone).

Repeating: where are you, what are you up to?

In front of the ramp across Pioneer street you’re waiting for the yellow and green train to pass by, and the northern constellation Draco in the air pressure, and Draco volans in the vertebrae of the cars, and a man in a car with the reasons because of which it pays off to fight again - the loss to abstain from him, noon over midnight to beam.

May 1st

05/01/96

"Between the capitalist and communist systems of society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. This corresponds to a political transition period, whose state can be nothing else but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat", Karl Marx, ‘The Gotha Program’, 1875.

1996, May 1st: Workers - bravo, you’re still alive!

Alive you are, but how is work, home, society? Now, you have all of that functioning as it has been explained to you recently, that is, better than before. (The "reformers" and the "transition" - the ushers and the transit to the crook’s fortune).

The capital did grind you, nevertheless? And if it didn’t, not milled therefore, what are you being asked while obediently keeping quiet at work, afterwards reading the same papers, watching the same television, listening to the same radio, and believing the same bosses more than anyone else before you? You even choose, once from one, the other time from the "other" party. (For you - that is choice). Furthermore, you have returned to church. (A desperate person does anything). The share plan is also offered to you - something will become yours, too. (What?). A while ago, triumph was yours, but now it is not - so scared you don’t even have your parade anymore. What parade, what nonsense - you will book this day in according to the rule, too. (Instead of breaking the ruler’s neck).

You had a beautiful time in this century, you were even believers: you believed in your own idea, unlike presently - in the owner’s ("reformer’s") idea. Although, along the way, in the two world wars you mutually brought yourselves to exactly the number which now dutifully toils and moils. Neither did you disappoint hopes in smaller wars - that is seen as your rulers, bosses and clergy, satisfied rub their hands all the time (already a century, good Lord): the things are still breaking over your backs while they mindfully counsel you how to bear them quietly. (They even pull out the International Monetary Fund to "help" you). And so, you do not believe any longer in that in which you believed the entire century - finding an excuse in that it is nearing its end. How then, without a belief, do you live? It couldn’t be that it has to be like that (even though you’re told so). Nothing is a must, except to die.

And that’s it, that’s what happened: you’ve died more than the dead, forget about the alive, forget such stories.

Until, as in the tale about two ends of the same thing, the apokryphos-like adage of Ecclesiasticus of a suspiciously canonical Solomon in the fourteen books of Septuagint and the three volumes of Das Kapital, you resurrect and not Iesus, the soul of yours will not come to light. An old and unpredictable cosmic reserve you are, waiting for your five minutes to victoriously forge out of the forge bellows of Hercules’ lungs ‘Workers Of All Countries - Unite!’ across the gates of Stymphalus, the Arcadian district of the sacrificed birds of the lapsed creed, because of which I forgive you everything, on this day, sending to you my only bow.

* * *

05/02-08/96

Why does one live here, what rivets him down? (And what about me?). On the other hand, one should not go out of the centre, every point to itself is a centre, the one there is not centre for this one here, one ought to stay in the centre. To go to neither large nor small, forward nor backward, left nor right - to stay here, to process the center. ["The English marched toward the river Eske, intending to possess a hill called Under-Eske (a hill underneath the river?! - contradictio in adjecto, the observer’s remark)", Hayward]. In the middle: neither the large things (on one end of the scale), nor the small (on the other) are the match to the things in the middle. Bristled due to the central ascertainment, a thing in the middle holds to itself as much as the other two hold to their extremes, leaving the center to the middle one, in natural size - one too big, the other too little. It is the most difficult, but only possible, to settle the accounts at equal distance from everything and nothing. [Analysis of error - covariance of the epic poet Varius with his fellow associates Vergil and Horace, a correlation of an executive bureaucrat, praetor Verres, with the Roman persecutor Cicero, rejection of the information provided by the State Service, determination of happiness ("Formula of my happiness: A Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal", F. Nietzsche), squaring as the cancellation of a square root, a binomial (like Poisson’s) distribution of the remainder - the lucrative business (profitability) as a vertigo of a lone man]. All by himself - in the geometric middle - a man leans with his head against the wall, building himself into it like a full brick in an empty thought. He doesn’t know what’s going on with the stars (that which is seen there, there it is not), neither does he know the state of the xenium while already larger questions roll through his head: he cools it (the vultus vulticulus covered by the face) on the wall. He then sits down, unpacks his suitcase, smells the lemon (eats it, too), gets the soap to wash his hands (and face), clean as desert he looks in the mirror: he sees himself of a million years ago taking him a million years to see himself.

* * *

(Two Little Warriors). You remember the two little warriors. (The ones set atop the alarm clock, as if I am not awake, as if my seven cervix, twelve dorsum, and five lumbus vertebrae do not hold my head between coccyx and os sacrum all the time: there transits into the bone one more, additional vertebra). At that, one of them, the first one [the enthusiastic (high-spirited) one] - is two times closer to reality than the second, more reflexive one. You now recall: the figures painted in the false bronze, taken from the machine at the supermarket entrance, by placing 25¢ into the slot. (Spring of a cheap suspension - an expensive repetition of History). Well, the two Roman soldiers (only now in the other, Doudo empire - the Didus Ineptus of Mauritius, short of expressiveness instead of having the short neck and legs, but with the same, useless wings of earlier or later disappearance) just the other night started talking about all of this, until one of them, the first one, with his sword, shield and helmet, tumbled and fell down, making me to have had to look for him in the dark, at which point the second one fell down too (perhaps, I grazed him while searching for the first one). (They’ve lost the war, or they’ve won it but lost the peace, I thought). Eventually, I found them on the floor, returned them to their place. Still, I would have forgotten them if they didn’t keep on discussing. The first soldier: "While I was falling down, I felt like my head was flying away". The second soldier: "Nothing of that happened to me because I’ve been, actually, cut in two halves". The first: "And then, in that battle, as well as now, in this one, it is my head which suffers". The second: "This is because you haven’t been cut in half". The first: "Even beheaded - I will win, at any time". The second: "You’ll win a half". The first: "Look around, all over the world: victory is possible, as it was in our time". The second: "He who victor becomes, he’ll get cut in half". The first: "Even with his head lost, a vanquisher is a vanquisher". The second: "It is not the head which is lost but the soul - it is cut in half, the first half is thrown down the wind coming from the front, the nonexistent guilt is wrapped with the second half, the affront is thrown at the adversary, the victory is celebrated on national television but mistakenly taken one step further - to the state-sponsored feast motivated by the direct hit into the remaining half of the soul kept in the shelter of sleeplessness so that it (the second half of the soul), too, goes where the first half already did - to the post-modernistic barracks in search of the burned overcoat made of the perfect defense and faultless weaving". And, since the first warrior didn’t recede from his synthetic prejudice and the second one from his analytical moral of the story, I have exchanged their places on top of the clock: now the headless one is placed at a half, and the one cut in half at a full hour from the head - in that way the first one will get back to its senses before the second one comes back to himself and sees that today, again, he signed a false truce.

* * *

The Unbribable Happening: After everything which (it looks to us - in a flash) went on, it (the uncorruptable occurence), like the silicium completed on outside, does not give itself up even symbiotically - it’s not moving from the fixed spot (the room, the head). [Loud inexpressiveness: having started murmuring the lie and having said the truth, the anthropomorphic fortune-teller of the riffraff frightened by the countenance of imperfection, with its fair-like festivity of tribal lamenting of Ceo’s poetess Simonides, the irreproachable war according to the rules of the flock - the cosmic mockery in the herd’s practice of sorcery - it becomes ardent, emphasizing on its bill: "Dirige, Domine, Deus meus, in conspectu tuo, viam meam - Direct, Oh Lord, my God, my path into your view", Vulgate, psalm v.8]. All that is to be withstood - increases all by itself. Both the objects and people like all the more remote mementos: in a temperate confusion of nymphē, they move onto the bed of seirēn. Who knows what this is all about? (Even the final rest holds on to the representation of the necessity of a terminal flash, why wouldn’t the afternoon’s nap?). All that is remembered becomes a little bit more important - there stayed back so many forgotten things, scattered all over the past significance, like indispensability over purpose. What is it to be said without increasing the mystery (without uncovering the known with scourge)? After the ignominious happening with the words, the big noise of the nothing moans under the stethoscope of the Holy Book. Subsided before the summer beginning, we find our ways through the (still possible) end of the heat radiation - as it has been expected, and as in the twilight, around 8 p.m., the world regardfully and forever cools.

* * *

05/09/96

Word by word, they struggle against, not giving up, toppling over on the side on which it (its partitionment) breaks on the story’s nightfall: even the parts fight between each other - why wouldn’t fabula with a fable teller: who wants to utilize it, he cannot except to get killed in it.

Both large and small parts of the world, describable and undescribable [scattered over buffoonery (rarely something bigger)], lay down the pillows beneath his indiscretion - to prevent him (the story teller) from an accidental awakening in time for the true description. ["If you want to multiply yourself by 100 (have followers) - Suche Nullen (line up worthless fellows) behind you!", F.N.].

The already known, smaller depictions (not representing more than a civilized fight with a self-portrait), properly serve themselves with a spoon and fork inside, within themselves, examining the appropriateness of the dish of a formal doubt. (How can we describe something which is so skillfully pulled out from the alliance with words?).

An eventual account of a daring state, the polishedness of a cube or the stoppage of a river underneath a boat at the expiry of summer into the early report about the usual boons of a spa - alone, it retreats before itself down the rigid channels of paper, like the rain down the zinc waterspout. ("How little is needed for happiness! The note of a bagpipe. The German even thinks of God as singing songs" F.N.). To set one at ease, nevertheless, the so-called daily news (description of the war zone / eternity of a lie / shamelessness of rulers) pale themselves (in the seclusion of a rose-garden?) - they topple down by the kitchen wall edge worn out by irony, on the left side of the fridge. ("From a doctorate exam: ‘What is the task of all higher education?’ - To turn a man into a machine. ‘By what means?’ - He has to learn how to feel bored. ‘How is that achieved?’ - Through the concept of duty. ‘Who is his model?’ - The philologist: he teaches how to grind (ochsen). ‘Who is the perfect man?’ - The civil servant. ‘Which philosophy provides the best formula for the civil servant?’ - Kant’s: the civil servant as thing in itself set as judge over the civil servant as appearance", F.N.).

Offerings of unnecessariness, profitably delineated, (like a citadel) packed in self-congratulatory exultation with the lack of necessary and sufficient reason (the self-congratulatory chauvinism), they spill over from all of the dishes at this market - in a free transalation, too.

The merchants and buyers, customers and sellers, the world’s transaction for masking the actual state of affairs.

Paraphrased as liberation, undescribed there leaks, drop by drop, state-church deceit into a history pot, it collects into the quantity necessary for the newest cooking.

Boiled (steamed), exploded (changed from one valency to the other), cooled by the zero of idiotic words, there drops from a unique morning to a routine evening the critical mass of an easily comprehended and described signification.

* * *

05/10-11/96

(The Justifiableness of Dust). (What is wilting, and where?). They think they arrived imperceptibly (all these sounds from outside), skillfully (and stealthily) coming upon the unconvincing morning in diapers of literature, as if they didn’t ring at that door the previous morning (and the morning before), poured in kistë of remainder (cista), in a reconstructed clanking of unserviceableness of the heavens. Whatever it is, that which wilts is met by an earlier awakened observer, in an established and verified way. None of the noises escapes him, he does not reject any breach of silence, he eavesdrops (like a dog does ultrasound). (His leg tightening into a jump: femur, patella and tarsus transiting to metatarsus and phalanges, fibula hanging on his hip). The workings of the inner things is heard, quiet - yet still distinct. (The workings of the inner organs of solid bodies of classical scenography of existence - the window frame, the light in the corner and the wall projected into the rim of a form, the furniture scattered through the layman’s interpretation of falling of dust, the profitableness of the components which this dwelling consists of in reality). The wilting of the selfconsciousness of the epic hero by means of an interesting but late intention of Putsch, the flapping of the gold-plating of a timeless instant. The fall of things, almost sympathetic, maintaining in the interspace of exclusiveness, by floating as if in levitation it finds something milder.

To get up, to go, to return, to sit down (or freeze) - to hearken the same as before. As it rides on horseback, tumbles down, backs up, climbs by the synthesis of the elements of sport fortune (the wrestling hold over the opponent playing dead) and the fundamental dust of presence, the peerless justifiableness at the moment of scrupulous removal of faultless flare from the kitchen table of an engineer of the soul.

* * *

With a bigger or smaller thought to stream up through the day (to not have a middle). The bigger one will not even touch it before eating it up, the smaller will calm it by the buzzing of a fly. (The day, being inaudible, is unimportant here). The bigger looks at it from vastitas, the smaller lurks beneath vastus. (Like manes, the shadow and spirit of an aardvark, nocturnus of nice looks). The bigger - enclosure, the smaller - grain. Two thoughts: one bigger, the other smaller, one formal, the other symbolic, one - transition into rind, the other - mantle of a nut, one - mouth of a shell, the other - break of an almond. Here already, at the first test - neither is one bigger nor is the other smaller, they just looked like that while they were two, but it is actually one. (Pomerania, a make believe divided between Germany and Poland, actually a drop in the Baltic Sea).

A thought (about all of this): the small lights of the milling of June, the confusing signals of resoluteness, the ringing of a whisper from the silence of a voice. (The South African gazelle, Gazella euchore, with white and brown spots in the sense of disguising it, but betrayed by a wine blush). The balance of the shot bird, the fall in the corner between the wall and parquetage, the conversation with tradesmen from bricklayer to parquetry decorator inside the geometrically proper and well-proportioned abode, the battle-field of extinct trades.

* * *

05/11-12/96-II

(Message (n)). (Message to R., then in B., from W./Sch’dy). It already got late there; here - it’s only morning: Hour (Hōra). But we battled with the same: Battle (Committere). (Went through the same gate, dreamed the same Comedy: "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here", ‘The Majestic Comedy’, Durante Alighieri). Fried the eggs: (Ōvum). Ate the familiar meal: Meal (Diaeta). (Served Lapiths, the mythical people of Thessaly). The washed dishes are very clean: (Ipse mundus lanx). There (where?), in Erymanthus (the mountain range of Arcadia, where Hercules killed a bear), the hunting blossomed on time: Blossom (Flōrēre). Here fell the rain that one ought to get accustomed to: Fall (Cadere). After Fall there comes Uprising: Uprising (Motūs). Get the weapons at once: Weapons (Tēlum). And come only with it: With it only come (Adventus).

* * *

(Message (n+1)). Message (n) was sent to you yesterday. Today - it crossed into violet, or into azure (you know that I don’t distinguish colours, although arranging them masterfully), the small blue flowers on the True Left Side (from the right, you know that too, we’re not as far as from the falsified left - the initial error of a plebeian association of a compromitted idea) of a decorative fireplace in the small room in which you like to be because elsewhere you’re cold. The question, you say, is: are things going to change for better? The answer: things don’t change by themselves - it’s us who change them (including shades). (Like a jury seat which became available to Servius, the sixth king of Rome, when he, in his thoughts, sentenced Cicero to death). [Religion as an official, approved Mythology: the formalization of Zeus by the rejection of Jupiter. Religious sects - the methodicalness of patients infected by Ramnes, the original tribe of Rome, and by the freckledness of a collectivistic rid of sins. What is the difference between religion, Mythology and religious sects? None (exempting the numbers of followers). Only, all are honoured by Mythology - so many Gods couldn’t be fed by all of the sects together, while the official religion would make them quarrel too - and, because of sentimentality, that is, a proper upbringing, it suits only Mythology to blush, ashamed]. I’m about to travel back, in a falf an hour or an hour (at the last sign of lateness). I’m postponing it but it darkens as the road from Ljubljana to Skoplje, unless both of them and the places between them {and because of some musically-mystical reasons [Laibach, Leb & Sol (Bread & Salt), and Marš Na Drinu (March On the Drina River) which, silly, through the Trumpet, acquired fame for them all], disciplined like the foreign armies which they breathlessly surrendered to (and whose alliance they humbly beg membership for)} still exist. You know what this travel is about - not the "intellectuals" over there, the residents of the mental leeward of a poodle: the only possible field of action of the useful idiots, the quisling relays of the occupiers and their instructions about the proper behaviour in the irreproachably comprehended universe - rather in it, the satiated kind of lee, those iconoclasts of the East are dying from their poor English and the proportional mother tongue (although with a correct squirrel’s) instead of gambling away their mouldy positions of warm trenches of affectionate conceptions. But, everyone is spread on his own letter: the only thing I’m expecting from mine is to wave to me during passing it by, I - driving towards mine, it - going towards its place in the meaning of assured things: the eternal icons of dishonourableness and a few crumbles of honour.

* * *

05/12/96-II

If I only realized that I’m sitting in a point.

(Pünctum of a moment of the turning of a head, hit into obtuseness of an acute angle).

Is that so?

Fastened in it, first of all by the gravitational, then with the other (more prosaic) forces, without moving out of it - I’m present elsewhere as well, but secretly.

(Occultus-occulto-occultator: concealedness of the revolving of the handler of a secret, gymnastic hold of suspiciousness of ego).

[A device has not been discovered yet which can prevent that. If they could, they (their Service) would invent that gadget too - an eye should be kept on everything that’s beating its chest, there reads the State Post’s rule of the satellite detection of sense].

Secretly present: in the remnants of a once real, now imagined state in all the smaller circles above all the more content prey, in the yellow vase on the red table for the green of your eyes (I feel like getting ready to go to shop to purchase such a set, but there is no such shop around here).

(Déjeuner à la fourchette - Breakfast with a fork, that’s all which is left, post cibum).

Ante cibum: with all the people’s solitariness of polite sensibility to enoble the aggregation Brotherhood & Unity, to prioritize heavenly proposals under the hellish ones, to mark with a patriotic essay the fall of a NATO aircraft into the hands of mountaineers (the authentic ones, not sold out except on their own, plain market), the aristocratically worrisome loners of a strange, once ecstatical country, to articulate the cerebralism of a thirsty organism (the fugue thirsty for Bach), with a beheadal to wear out the forehead of the Universe, to hang a detail from a fair (the fragmentariness like a sentence about an affordable meal) above the faucet in the kitchen of a modest family, to go from the unpleasant to the not-beloved and return the same way.

Gratia placendi.

To determine how many troops need to be assembled for what is intended (guerre à outrance), to first conquer one’s own and then the alien’s heart, to shoot disgrace at monstrosity, to choose the flag for entrance to and exit from the self, having left for triumph to not overdo it, to blame the unavoidable conditions - with the other to aim at the self (guerre à mort).

The vengeance (guerra cominciata, inferno scatenato): to issue orders for a drilled assault of the cells of sense on the body of a whale of professional movements, amateurish exultancy.

The Voyage

05/13/96

I get up around five, partially close the window, turn on the heat (it’s cold again), look around from one wall to the other, but there is still the same load of stillness. [If the floor didn’t creak, not even agents would have found out that here (it’s been reduced to that) one lived decently].

This is not feasible any more, I think while putting away the spoon, plate and cup, all washed last night, then walk from the kitchen to the room.

I sit down on the edge of the pull-out bed (so much accustomed to be unfolded that in that form it expresses the indifference of the most faithful object), I move towards the middle because the supporting metal leg (the upholsterer’s support of reason) is in it, so I sink in less, I recall that water for the tea has boiled, I get up and pour it over the frozen thought.

Calmed by the logic of things (ich dien, hombre de un libro), I focus in the position of the opposite side, wait for the adversary to make an error first. But, he keeps hidden as well (we smell the morning with the same nostrils, hic et ubique) - only an official translator, in the absence of words, is seen there.

Split in half (impari Marte), one half here the other there, one ascends while falling the other’s being demolished while ascending - I prepare the next move. Before playing it, I go to the kitchen to smell the lemon halved on time, but there - a whole yellow flower. I ask myself how come it’s there, I remember that in a desert tradition anything grows, but still I haven’t expected to have looked it up without the bound heat radiance.

I put vitamin C over my hands (I see: the satiety filters down its hunger), through the rocks I make my way to the shore, there I step into a boat, in it I cross to the other side. Mali principii malus finis. (Dead, Latin is harmless. The live languages are not, but they’re on their way).

On the other side, I pass by a lizard (black/yellow/brown): neither it was on my way nor was I on its - even firmer we stretched through each other’s antiqueness, measuring it by a particular experience of Arachne (the marriageable girl whom Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, born from the forehead of Jupiter that is Jōv, having lost a weaving contest, turned into a spider), I jump over three steps and enter a white palace, it was just getting dark, one ought to lay down and fall asleep.

I lay down and fall asleep on the permanent pull-out bed (so much accustomed to be unfolded that in that form it was expressing the indifference of the most faithful object).

I get up around five, partially close the window, turn on the heat (it’s cold again), look around from one wall to the other, but there is still the same load of stillness.

The Toy Figures

05/14/96

One toy figure shows the process of selling ice cream and lemonade: the mottled vendor rides the same (yellow, red and blue) tricycle, on whose front installed is a fridge-box with the mentioned refreshments; the other toy figure is a swan, of a harmonius white neck and pink wings of Baal, the protector of agriculture.

Both figures are a cheap kitsch, made of plastic, the size of a small fist. (Worthless as those warriors, they too are taken from the supermarket machine for 25¢ and left with me accidentally: a discreet gift). Laid down carefully on the bottom board of the window frame (painted with oily paint as with impermeableness of undertaking), they accentuate both the left and right angle of the carpenter’s building-in, the adamant of impregnability.

That is how there ride around the ice cream and lemonade and, stiff, lands the swan - something, after all, is going on. (And if I didn’t set them up there, even that wouldn’t be happening). (Like Candide, Voltaire’s optimistic hero who, too, after calamitous misadventures, settled down to the practical and modest project of cultivating his garden).

What’s important, and what is not (what assumes an air of importance, and what tames itself)? (Dichtung und Wahrheit - fiction and fact; poetry and truth).

The phenomenon of the existence of these figures enjoys the same rights as the phenomenon of the existence of antique sculptures: the sense or nonsense of one or the other is a result of a concealed agreement - a soft, almost sympathetic convention. Both, organized in acceptable and recognizable form (the amorphousness of an incident through the malediction of mud), fit into a desirable and expected reflection of the world or, in the case of seditiousness, they oppose it. (Abstract forms are a part of the same code, only, by empty theorizing, they are disguised in, so-called, style).

Neither one nor the other escapes before the herd of the dust into which, whenever, they will dissipate. Disjecta membra.

One and the other: a figurative construct of the world, the immovability of sculptor’s story, a statue that from a run (from sudden despair) has seen through.

Trivial figures and significant sculptures (the common tone of silence) as soon as tommorow are going to, regardfully, burst: the swan already breaks in its neck, the tricycle in doubt of the voyage; the other, more significant figures (of recognized and founded artistic value), all the more lonely now count with only the archival cast of prothetic artisan. Dieu est toujours pour les plus gros bataillons.

The product of man’s panic, they are his indignant search (with more or less talent) for an anonymous mastership of chance, the short-lived warming of gypsum, CaSO₄2H₂O, the petrification of tea, Adonis and the wild boar around his neck - in one stroke.

* * *

05/15-16/96

(A Strengthened Trumpet (Abstraction, Reality)). All of this: a strengthened trumpet of a deep, impressive sound of Bel (one of the chief gods of Babylon, and a somewhat secondary Phoenician Baal), a vertebral cosmos aimed across the ambiguous Acheron (a docile river through Hell’s jurisdiction), a foolhardy act without kneeling down, a hymn between a canine (tooth) and lungs as the last gown. (To choke them with severe or gentle rain?). In utroque fidelis - faithfully in both cases, and in single ones). Today - a warm shower in the afternoon, tomorrow - the old weariness of the heavens. A favour from one solution to the other thrown over a domesticated field of a particular result over which the dim forces of explicableness are cutting down each other with the staccato sound of Syrinx, the nymph respected by Pan. Massiveness of a wind instrument, sheer rock of a weak side, the loins of a pipe: all 3 - a modest sustaining of acceleration of 1g. De l’audace, encore de l’audace, et toujours de l’audace - audacity, more audacity, and always audacity. All of this: a rightlessness of abstraction, a tin-trumpet of yearning for the lay-man explanation (neither the eloquence nor the brilliant start took him away from the final hairsplitting with crucifix - the sum of the article/interview with Yu-anthropologist J.S.), a sudddenly strident tone of the hit on the wall in the side of a general crust - the presumed housing for a sagacious and tame finale.

* * *

A Fine Fence of the World [2-9]: The first bird: 2, the second: 9 - I just counted that, the number of times they made their presence known to each other, and yet I saw nobody to have wondered, or at least paused. First, this one here chirped twice (each twitter lasted a small eternity), at the end of the second singing the other one announced itself with a rapid fire of nine discrete parts of a higher tone and indulgent rhythm. [Lusus naturæ - a sport, (as) a freak of nature]. A secret sign of theirs or, perhaps, one of them, gone mad, talks to itself? Or, maybe, other forces - anonymous beings - confer in disguise, the birds being their opportune pretext only. I wouldn’t be, therefore, surprised if, besides me, a section of the Service eavesdrops them. Whatever it is, whenever danger threatens - they stop cawing: they can be found nowhere. (Illusiveness - the assured ingredient of intangibleness, is a part of their ceremony. Labitur et labetur in omne volubilis aevum). Whoever listens to them stays on that: neither he learns anything sensible from them, nor does he exchange any information with them - he still finds himself on this side of the fence, regardless of how much he pricks his ears. For, they’re on that side, and we’re on this side of the fence. A fine fence of the world. (This one is [2-9]). Through it can be heard, seen, almost touched, there thinks one to whom it looks like that, but something permanently escapes him, that which later is missing to complete an explanation. (Like an absence of the eastern wind in case of Zephyr, the personification of the western wind). Seen, heard, palpated on the clow of consolation as if touched on the hand of sorrowfulness - from the other side of the fence it exhibits itself to the one on this side, it casts over his head (backwards, acrobatic) - the northern principle of Tyr (the Norse God of war, the son of Odin and brother of Thor), full of the felicity of the unknown hero in the trench between the coagulation of an event and the diluteness of an interpretation.

* * *

05/17-22/96

The Chronicle: And so, like Чичиков’s off-hand sprung up Dead Souls (Gogol’s trophies even though their bodies, the serfs, have not been officially proclaimed dead yet), in this chronicle there throng days, nights, (especially ritual mornings) and a proper judgement about them - because of so many everyday things it already bursts along its seams, it should rest. (To complete this one, to feverishly start another). It saw and experienced all sorts of things, not moving away from this obscure place where, no more and no less, the canonicalness of beginning blossoms in the doubt of a conclusion. But it (the ascertainment of certainty) today suddenly breaks (somewhere around the middle), with understandable considerateness: having blasted out (spat out) the anguish from the chair in the kitchen - it transits to a whisper. (Risum teneatis, amici?). Having shouted through all its mouths, then opened jaws in desolation. Having jumped from the corner light on Yama (an Indian deity, lord of hell, fierce and terrible). Having caught deceitfulness by its neck, while in return (and whining) it (the lie) holding that (the sureness), by its feet. (Like a Wandering Jew, condemned to wander the world until His second soming). Having not agreed on anything that is half-way, then taken in bad part entirely on itself. (Half Ulysses, half Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, husband of Penelope, father of Telemachus: not having found an end to the war adventure in the Trojan war either). Having dismissed beauty, then passed on deliverance to it. Tomava la por rosa mas devenia cardo. Having cleared the road, then decayed on it. Kein Kreuzer, kein Schweizer. Having smelled the lemon, then grieved down the Mediterranean. (Vedi Napoli e poi muori). Having broken off with everything, then filled up the Auditory canal with a glass of cold water by being all ears to the fridge compressor. Having waddled behind the wall to get testudo, the shield above the head of Mercury, the lyre fashioned from the shell of a tortoise, the immovable-offensive verse. (Having remembered your hair washed in the sunshine - by the south wind that climbed onto a pine: jus et norma loquendi - the law and rule of speech). Having crushed the capital and church, then returned to learning and holding. (Vox Dei, vox populi instead of vox populi, vox Dei). Having ferried the thirsty over water, then sunk into the well with them. Il vaut mieux tâcher d’oublier ses malheurs, que d’en parler. Having understood nothing which didn’t resist, having understood that which resisted. Facies non omnibus una. Having jangled in the center of the self, simply having shivered from that. Pricked by a blackberry, written by its thorn - having tumbled over and fell asleep. Ad rem.

* * *

It’s to do with a turning around an imagined axis - a warm shower reminds one who hoped that this day too, until then dry as gun powder, he safely turned over his head (like a jazz vibration over a nonchalant xylophone). An acceptable arrangement in a geometrically identical apartment - tinkling of the residential belongings from the lower floor (ceramic torrent of the unknown laughter), the plates, drapes, unnecessary microwave oven (sociableness of participation in phenomenological fragments): the generalized assembly of parts which make the inhabitants’ days. (Stringing up days - assembling the usual paradise with assured hell). Nulla nuova, buona nuova. To emerge, to float, to plunge into a prescribed sense. (Like Abaris, a Scythian, a priest of Apollo, who gave him a golden arrow on which he could ride through the air, and by which he worked miracles). Transitoriness as tameness, overlastingness of sweetened water - eau sucrée. Eheu! Fugaces labuntur anni. (Washing with pseudo-shrewdness). Days: portions from a cauldron of a phlegmatic army, a whirlpool of a river-god Alpheus who mingled his waters with those of nymph Nereid Arethusa, the daughter of Nereus, changed by Artemis into a fountain near Syracuse, to free her from the pursuit of Alpheus. The fountain Arethusa from the subterranean river of Alpheus: the price of an irregular and thrilling presence to the essence of things.

* * *

05/23-29/96

(The Cöup). A lone paper and pen. (I only supervise them, not getting involved. As a guard does the runaway prisoners, caught at last, mute. Eventus stultorum magister - Fools must be taught by the result). It (the writing set) neither talks nor conffeses - my duty is suspicious to it. (As to the deaf hour is Thor, the God of thunderstorms, past Norse lightning, present passion of movies’ Annas). There glares the paper (blackens the pen), I’m weighing in my mind (promoting inutility of the élite): the top renews from the bottom, facilis descensus Averni - the road to evil is easy. I take the pen, write down the chapped word on the nursed paper - it opens an eye but flips the page (the book looked through but closed down, ex abrupto: Ewigkeit!) (Suddenly: eternity!). I sew up page by page of refined emptiness with the comprehensive tread of intolerableness - to prevent them from flying away it is necessary to find the cover and publisher, to bring them in by the disguised gallop of Equus caballus, that is Xanthus, Achilles’ horse that could speak with a human voice. Smoothly bound (the ex cathedra pages of the authoritativeness of a hyperbolic furnace), they hang over the morning of everlasting holiday of Vertumnus, the God of crops and orchards. Instead of throwing away the pen and starting to read something worthy, I jump on my feet, down the wind, I shorten the word, shorten the sentence (disappearing Titania, the queen of the fairies and wife of Oberon, takes final care of it), I reject the proposition about today’s consent to the political and clerical lie, whereby having executed a small and private, specific cöup, with the early morning, late self-portrait.

* * *

The Attack: To put asside the doubt, to fire a torch, to inspect the guard. (Aurora and Tithonus, the Goddess of dawn and the one who confused her with Eos, preparing for the ball). To pull out despair, to shout "hurrah", to storm. (Titans against Saturn and Jupiter, on the road to Tartarus). To step on regard, to reach the trench, to throw in a smile [through the teeth of Tisiphone, the middle of the three Furies (Erinyes, Eumenides), until Alecto and Megaera fly in on a double word]. To overlook the cause, to aim higher, to let a whole mountain shake. (Etna and Olimpys, and underneath them the forges of Vulcan, the Roman deity presiding over fire and the working of metals, and in them the Cyclops, his workmen). To request reinforcement, to yell into the microphone, then to doze. To ask for the justification (counting on Triptolemus, the patron of agriculture, inventor of the plow, a favourite of Demeter). To haul in a gun, to keep hidden, to target the betraying pliability (of Thyrsis, the herdsman, leaked out from the conciliatory writings of Virgil and Theocritus). To activate all of that, to let it explode, to let the head (of Thyestes, the brother of Atreus, whose wife he seduced and, in revenge, Atreus killed three sons of Thyestes and served them to the father, Pelops, at a banquet on the occasion of duality of Thoth, the Egyptian god of magic and wisdom, patron of the arts and of learning, represented with the head of an Ibis and a human body) fly away. To cancel everything that can be interpreted doubly (the festivities, exhibitions, concerts), to throw the head over the shoulders (of the characters from the 1001 nights, Ali Baba, Sinbad, and Alladin, whom Scheherazade did not tell the sultan what they, on their shoulders, carried). To increase the doubt, to extinguish the torch, to dismiss the guard. (The romantic Madame Bovary couldn’t have been saved by anything: not even the partnership of Boreas, the personification of the north wind, with Gustave Flaubert, her biographer, would have wiped out her plodding husband from his work). (By the cablegram) to reschedule the attack for tomorrow, it was difficult today, one was left headless, beheaded on itself beheaded, before the attack on it even started, Yggdrasill, the tree of the universe.

* * *

(Apartment #1 as a Headquarters Residence). Back in apartment #1 there waited for me the humming of the refrigerator (the assuredness of freon), the completeness of the afternoon through the window opened ajar (the inter-phase grounding of the cube of the sky, a snowball rising upwards), and unwatered flowers. In the old way there whizzes the inevitability - even its pause leaks out like a worthy content. (Terpsichore, the Muse of dancing and coral songs, does not stop the chanting).

During my absence from the dwelling nothing happened that would cause suspicion, not to mention surprise. (Even for Stentor, a herald with a loud voice, who took part in the siege of Troy with the lightness of a bird, it would have been difficult to sit down by the wall here). The doubtless existence of the building in which this apartment is located does not allow for evil’s doubt - although the presence of Set, the Egyptian god of evil, is not bigger in the heavens than it is on earth, the entrance hallway doesn’t smell on deceit, it rather infuses into equanimity.

A residence as a box on the gun barrel, rooms as compartments of eternal doubt, a residential evening bordered with incontestableness - the inured shelter of a sudden sojourn of the obsolete patriot Pygmalion, a sculptor whose statue of a prosperous country shattered after a half-century animation, while he moved out of it long before, having been unable to fall in love with it.

The plan for maintaining the comprehended life with the expressed ingredients of sense crystallizes (in apartment #1) in two phases.

In the first phase, one starts from that the life, protected from the rain and wind (although overheated in the summer afternoon), partitioned to the points sewed by essence (like buttons of the remaining coat), spreads over the walls, ceiling, floor - by the useful area of a simple tent.

In the second phase, one starts from that an even bigger gathering (a comfortable congress, ineffectual assembly) of an emigrant (philosophical, grammatical) spraining in the so-called dissemination, that is of the (metamorphosed) party in power in the so-called (and maternal) base, did not create a national program which is, in apartment #1, created in an average reverie.

The decisive step of the people’s revival: a deaf hour of assault on an unjust solution (resulted from civilized talks between domestic representatives and bombing emissaries) on the road between the blue chair, white telephone and red frame of the reconnoissance window in the headquarters residence number 1.

* * *

05/30-31/06/01-03/96

By the strike of an insect (of a generalized size of Coleoptera, the four-winged Cicindela campestris, its head first and then its thorax, abdomen, elytra, down to the wings and antennae), the revulsion (the disturbance of the kitchen silence by an arabesque, a short, brilliant composition in rondo form) transfers with a measure of easily discontinued repose; the bigger forces keep in balance facing bigger effects of its interruption: already a Chiroptera, the bat as proof of a flying mammal, refrains from a hit on the brick below the window frame - in a radar manner, it only rustles by it. [In a well measured and tuned surrounding (in the apartment’s centre), the subversion of ideas occurs over night - with the appearance of Phosphor, the morning star of a guerrilla, there cracks the regard of the insurgents between the walls of their apartments. The pressure and temperature, produced by releasing the tenants’ solitariness up in the air, shift from one end of the building to the other gradually: the abruptness would (there, too) lead to the spattering in all directions, the foolish scattering of strategic materials - too numerous and motley (opportunistic, careerist-like) membership sooner or later compromits every Movement, a babe of an extinct avant-garde]. In the arrangement of the world, the basic rule is a fine, constant adjustment of the antagonized forces and a sudden victory of one of them at a favourable moment. ("It is a great error to take facility for good nature", L’Estragne). (Supporting itself by the air, that which flies leans on the rarefied molecularity - its flight is only its pretext for falling into the structure. But, if it flies into tumbling - it sinks, instead of to cross onto the opponent’s half of the filed, from the offensive players to the goalkeeper, to lob the ball over them). Weighed and leveled up, the world’s glamours keep hidden behind the drapes in the furnished apartment of the stranger - his, always handy, bait. (Both the facial index - the ratio of the length to the width of the face, multiplied by a hundred, and the facial angle - the angle between the horizontal line and the line drawn from the base of the nostrils to the most prominent part of the forehead, pass over into his habit, into a walk without him, by the appliances: the stove, the fridge, and the room temperature). While he bends over to look at the politely organized strike of the workers in the West, the drapes enrapture him with the profusion of training - he peevishly sits down at the desk (the unfolded pull-out bed), resolutely discontinuing further analysis of the disarrangement of the connection between the things connected by the zero error, full of the variance of the observer.

* * *

The Double-Faced: In separation between things, there dominates enduring symmetry (until one grabs the other by its neck and shakes it out, down the wind): the more the first differs from the second - the more the second is similar to the first; but also: the more the first is clear - the more the second is murky (swinging in itself), while one trembles already - the other hasn’t even bristled up, and while one in handfuls postpones until tomorrow - the other spreads under the ethics of assiduity. Pretending to work on separate jobs, they, in fact, hew the same beam, each one on its end. Ogni bottega ha la sua malizia. ("Our little lives are kept in equipoise, by opposite attractions and desires", Longfellow). They measure (one inside, the other outside) the carrying capacity of hopelessness and hope, then change into a relativistic scarlet, faultlessly withdrawing into themselves even though considering the suspicion in the savannah as a dubious beginning of the world, sitting on the two ends of the bar as if that keeps them in the middle. (A horn in the two crowns of autlers on the head of an elk, Cervus alces, a mooslike deer of northern Europe and Asia, a wapiti of North America, an extinct Irish deer, mixed with peat in peat bogs; a flapping for the two wings of a wild European swan, Cygnus ferus). They attach importance (one in theory, the other in practice) to the story about (by the poison revitalized) the mushroom of Anu, an Assyro-Babylonian deity, father of the universe. Ofrecer mucho especie es de negar. Accurate in the interspace between the fabricated reality and pseudo-egalitarian principles, they speak in favour of the objective rules of their own interests - they hold on to their role of the International Observer and Commissioner stubbornly as Apis, the sacred bull of ancient Egypt, the animal animator of Osiris (in the end slain by his brother Set), the God of the Nile, the husband of Isis (the Goddess of the moon, often represented as veiled), and the father of Horus. Their difference (the difference between the two, the first and the second) is their weapon, the dialectics is their last defense - even in a day full of vanity, there waits for them a philantropic trench of Namtar, the Babylonian God of plague and arbiter of human destiny, servant of Nergal. The large and small, warm and cold, horrid and yellow, light blue and dark green, the militaristic rage of a provincial primitive in USAF flying fortress, consecrated/deified in the Academy’s cathedral in Co. Springs, the repose of the lamp above the head of an elderly gentleman occupied with a routine perusal of the local newspapers, a voyage to the last port equal to the separation between the hands of the foreshadowing, the poor and rich, blackbird and hawk, general and remnants of a zealous soldier in the form of an independent spirit carefully aimed through the barrel of an unnecessary rifle (officially approved by the military headquarters), the completion of the flight after the jump, the tranquility and disquietude as linguistical appeasements of the truculency of essence - it is the double-faced god Janus laying in ambush for his second face to outwit the first one on time.

* * *

From May to June - such change brings summer in, we are required to get rid of scepticism. (Like Berenice did of her hair, cutting it and suspending in the temple of the God of war in order for him to ensure that her husband, Ptolemy III, returns safely from the war in Syria, but her hair transferred to the skies and became the constellation Coma Berenices, still seen today).

In spite of that, we behave with diffidence: didn’t we already see all of that, didn’t the same changes, in previous years, in a feline manner stalk that light lime-tree to falsely make it heavy with the gold of Bilfrost, the rainbow bridge connecting Asgard and Midgard, Scandinavian heaven and earth? Neverthless, this month has started its song as self-confidently as if it had a diploma from the assured advances of Базаров, a young radical from Turgenev’s "Fathers and Sons", who, vainly of course, tried to bridge the gap between the generations and win his father to his social views. Although it’s early, the first rays of June are swimming over the stirring side of the senses with the relief of the eve of an event (who knows - even something good could happen before night falls). (Like when the Gods, Jupiter and Mercury, after being hospitably entertained by an aged and affectionate couple, Baucis and Philemon, had their humble abode changed into a splendid temple and them into two trees, fullfilling their wish that they might die together). All the more blue by the help of yellow (a promising fair), aware of the shades of behaviour, this nice month moves in at the last moment: it even pertly (and, for the sake of a paradox, tamely) and innocently increases like Atalanta, a huntress who agreed to marry the one who could outrun her (the penalty of failure being death to the wooer), and she was vanguished by Hippomenes, who dropped successively three golden apples as he ran, which she stopped to pick from the ground. It (this month) is going to widen its pupils, play the pipe, wave from the carousel, pose in front of an elephant together with two soldiers on a regular stay away from the troops. Corps d’armée, coram populo. Still, kept hidden in imagined willow-woods, eternity flies out in the form of several birds at the first wave of unbribable thoughts, originated from Ma, the Goddess of Truth and Justice. Within hand’s reach is the season of cherries between the well and the rose, on trees whose lower half is painted white, and yet - something else is hiding the kernel in itself. À couvert. It’s encircling it (the essence) with a bearable measure of duty and acceptability (the good-intentioned advices it puts aside), breaking it from the fact into the approximativeness of a trick, a beak of the rest without hunger. Ab extra.

* * *

From somewhere (through the wall), there can be heard a big clock (must be a wall clock): even bared, the calm drops with full lungs - tick tock. (Who measures whom here, and what’s expected from the result - it is unknown). The essence of time under conditions of timelessness - a clock on the bordering plane of loneliness, the boundary measurement which, by definition, lasts forever. (Glycol in the corners of the sky, cooling of the window’s picture with the antifreeze like with the anti-thesis of alcohol and glycerin, shot after the dazzlement sans façon C₂H₄(OH)₂, a return to the phosphate simplicity, re vera). Sunday, the second morning of June - a day like from the Bible. Even a prophet can relax: here is, finally, such a day (at the end of all troubles). [The Supreme Deity Odinn (Othin, the Teutonic Woden), in charge of art, war, culture and the dead, squats behind the sunflower]. The nice possibilities of paradise (as soon as in the temples of rubber, of elasticity equal to the elastic deformation of salvation, is done with the neo-classical ennoblement of the cosmic lair) favour the running out from the hell, first of Niobe of the light heart and crimson cheek (that is, before she started crying and Zeus turned her to stone from which tears continued to flow), the daughter of Tantalus and wife of Amphion, king of Thebes, but after her also of her enemies, Artemis and Apollo.

That in the world which has been conquered will keep belonging to the conquerers today too: to the new colonists all the more, to the old all the less, to the colonies (as always) not even that. (Even the African antelope, gnu that is nju, with an ox-like head and horns and a horse-like mane and tail, will have to go through the trouble of understanding the etymology of the remainder, the flies in the head, between the ears and forehead). The revolutionary movements will be joined by expeditions upon the causes of social discontents in the forests full of abandoned deer, the usual streams of desperados will pour into the seas of equanimity, the vassal régimes will host receptions for the correct diplomatic corps and a military attaché from the family of the wild boar, the spectators will go to a sport event instead of to a historical one, not even the vain theorizing, pseudo-constructivism, and loquacity of the, so-called, intellectuals will prevent a bison’s foam in a cage of a provincial zoo (Hicksville, IO) - crouched, that is, in the head of the stupefied beast, the logical depression bursts through Beethoven’s cantata for an orchestra and horn, hanging on its snout only a slobber of freedom.

* * *

Short news: everything starts from the beginning! ("We but teach, Bloody instructions, which, being taught, Return, To plague the inventor", W. Shakespeare). Whatever meanings have been attached to the previous days (big or small or Latin sweet and flattering), the following morning reduces them to the fitting extent and, scattering them into a reflection of chance, establishes the actual moment of importance. Ore rotundo. Only change is inevitable: that which as recently as yesterday seemed the only thing possible and, at that instant, eternal, no longer looms under either this one or under the sky's ceiling - its time is (not only in the phrase) gone. (Facies Hippocratica, the peculiar appearance of the face immediately before death, described by Hippocrates, sometimes lasting a bit longer, perhaps a second or two - the concordance of the new expressiveness and the old inertia). ("Sir, to tell you plain, I’ll find a fairer face not washed today", W. Shak.). Rolling one after the other, the events rid their worries already tomorrow. (Like Rhea did of Cybele, her second name). What happened - happened, there mutters into its beard the morning, throwing its rain coat over yesterday’s rain: no time is left for a subsequent crack of dawn. Shabby simplicity (from the chaste primer of "behaviorism") of the Seven Virtues (faith, hope, charity, prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance) and Seven Vices (pride, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, avarice, and sloth) dovetails only to O! si sic omnia.

Into the heights there rises up the blueness from the asphodel garden (an ether for the atlas of a complex judgement), the jerk of the thoughtfulness of the only possible hour - the rooster’s crest of poultry’s wrath before the destiny of the unrealized bird.

Creating Backwards

06/04/96

Even prosaically, it was raining the whole night: while drying up, the last drops (the remnants of the gravitational contract) change their colour - from that of a pigeon (the colour of heights) they transit to a dark red (grass sprayed by sour cherry). The morning in question is an ordinary morning, a premature heaviness of a conclusion does not bother it. [The so-called spring waters, boasted (exclusively described) in piles of books, serve for the additional pouring of a glass of empty words into the ewer of fickleness, after the shower of false purification]. Time increases like the reticency of troops in retreat (even the enemy’s position lost the meaning of the target): the only thing which shouldn’t have been missed from sight is not even on the horizon. If someone imagined all of this so clearly while awake, he didn’t know what he was doing in the first dream already. Having set the sky on shaky feet, having hoisted instructions in the corners of doubt, having decorated himself with orthodoxy serving the deuce, he thought that he crossed from the everyday’s room to the cabinet of curiosities. But he didn’t, he only threw himself away from the bilateral symmetry of him - having found the reversal of his position, his situs inversus, in the spread of the ideals with an alibi. As when something rolls down someone’s innocent cheek, with a detonation of creating backwards.

...From the Unmaned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) Conference, Washington, DC: "UAVs are proving their merit in Bosnia (Predator), and the...HAE programs are now in test flight. UAV performance during recent Joint Warfighting exercises (JWID) prompted one military planner to state, ‘If I were a Division Commander, I would trade a battalion of tanks for a UAV’ ". Putting aside the oratorical bravado of the boastive planner, his corpus of words, the rhythm of the affirmative intelligibleness, the undoubtful working of his brain within the circumference of a full ten inches, and, before all, such a clear structure of the conditional exchange of one mental state for another, the same one (only a little shifted in the sentence), cannot be erased by anything. Usque ad nauseam. (Author’s remark: See Glossary for the words/phrases/idioms not translated in the text).

From the Conference Program, the key words are: Battlelab, Warfighting Lab, Intelligence, Surveillance & Reconnaissance (ISR), Distributed Engagement, Dark Star, NATO, The Cooperative Aggregate Mission Management System (CAMMS), Multiple Connectivity for ISR UAVs, Mission Critical Connectivity, Intense RF Battlefield Environment, Interoperability.

Sesquipedalia verba.

The sponsors are: The American Institute of Engineers (AIE) and Society for Computer Simulation International - phantom organizations, the institutions of government. AIE (founded in 1990), does not keep it secret: "AIE is promoting representation before political organizations", there it reads. Finally, although that is, in fact, the first: "The market for UAVs is $3 billion", also reads the Program.

06/05/96

Is the sound of the world dulled or resonating?

(Is it climbing up into the heights while falling down to suspicion, sinking in doubt of disguised Timon, a misanthropic Athenian, the dexter-like misanthrop caught in the sinister-like philanthropy?).

What is the colour of the undescribable paysage and what is the description of that colour?

How much longer before our eyes is the one and same going to change (from where it shows itself as the mother-of-pearl)?

[Who is Thwackum and who Square, the first with the moral system based upon the ‘divine power of grace’, the second with the claim that morality is derived from ‘the natural beauty of virtue, and the eternal fitness of things’, as if they didn’t sweeten each other with such a colossal (the same) beauty, passing on the common lollipop].

Doesn’t defense deserve attack?

(By leaps - Di salto).

All of these questions have their limitations/drawbacks - the answers to them, therefore, are not necessarily unfavourable.

The sound of the world is neither dulled nor resonating - it is deceptively solemn; from the heights there fall their advantages; the undescribable paysage is of the colour of a blank paper, the blank paper is of a description of the undescribable paysage; the sameness will be changing with itself until changed by a different; the attack and defense deserve each other - like the poor devil Jean Valjean does the operetta’s fan made of the authenticated attributes of a sword.

[To answer the question, to look at the wall (the self), to go with a finger over the world like over the relinquished reason for its description. Vive la bagatelle].

* * *

06/06/96

Triple six, one reversed - we snatch symbolism in numbers, not finding it in days. (As, likewise, the soul cannot be found without Psyche, its allegoric personification).

And yet (as it periodically happens), once days were full of symbols: Dawn, Movement, Army, Five-Year Plan, Republic, disappeared like a centipede - when that one goes away, it takes a hundred legs to return.

Now, the more modern are Cruciferous, Manager’s, Nato-Pentagon’s (Bombing’s), IMF’s (arriving right after the bombing ones), Democratic-Liberal’s, and Christian-Green’s symbols - under the watchful eye of Helsinki Watch and the programmed amnesia of Amnesty International.

The symbols of the change which is being, after it has been (so passionately) reached, interpreted by the same ones who were interpreting the previous changes (scoundrels always remain to explain the darkness to the blind, the men of honour shoot at themselves in the first dream - walking by naturally-induced inexcusableness).

Everything changed because, as usual for that kind of thing, its time comes. (There are neither old days nor is there anything new). Le roi et l’état. [That is why, having estimated the "change" still then, Modest Musorgsky and Joseph Conrad stepped from the deck directly into the sound and pen, respectively (without making stops among the civil protagonists), being seamen they poured over - the first one into Хованщчйна, the second into the Heart of Darkness (the subconscious state of Marlow, the unattainableness of Kurtz), predicting, by the instict of a lengthy sail, the modernism of the Apocalypse Now, the contemporary version of the book, and the incompleteness of the opera - Хованщчйна’s Nikolai Andreevich Rimsky-Korsakov, the change as the aftermath supplement of silence, the irremediableness of returning to the old].

On the fair of the wantonness, the n-th change of the n-th time disguised ones rolls down the ditch to the same dung-hill. The notorious interpreters of the change exercise their miserable vocabulary on the speechless masses, there grunt the advisers/analysts from the cloned economic/strategic institutes and "independent" media, there whinny the defeated officers in their newest uniforms of rhinoceros, writing memoirs: along with the charred driver, permanently 20 years old, from the armored personnel carrier they pull out a thousand year old lapsus memoriae.

Shortened is the life time of sanity, compromitted is Idea, completed is the one thousand nine hundred eighty fourth fable of Eric Blair (popularly more acceptable as George Orwell) on the other side of the circle, by the actual state of things displaced by  radians relative to the one whose source the named author attributed to the, it is known which one, part of the world, fed by the data from spy satellites there grow red-hot the VLSI processors in the parallel architecture of the Deep (Pacific) Blue computers of the materialistically-religious boss - the obedient and well behaved pupils are being paternally watched.

Until this one (the newest) change is cut open too, along its belly to bring forth the next eternal infant - of a permanence of a few generations and ephemerality of one.

* * *

06/07-11/96

Retyping the writings from the beginning of this log, the record of the progress of time [loading them onto the disk of Canon’s StarWriter 30 word processor, bending them (at that) to their exocrine brittleness and, exceeding it, crumbling them into a hesitant surrender], bringing to additional tartness each moment of my suspicious participation in their humbleness, with a taste of a bitter victory (paraphrasing the pathetic journalism of a speedy epoch, the provincial pathos of the urban scribblers, college graduates in the swing of inspiration) I’ve noticed that the (remaining) words of the original entries were triumphantly petrified (that’s how they were left over), that they were suitable for the description of the present situation, as if nothing has changed (although, really, it did not), as if by a concurrence of events I fell into a mine of salt, of something unchangeable in colour, taste and smell, and that describing that I describe the last [impregnated by the cocoon of titanium (Ti)] degree of a picture of a constancy: a nuclear submarine in the eyes of heavy water.

The same: inexorableness of the ripeness of the mentioned Ti over the bridge of an SSN vessel in Ohio/Trident class, enviously (acoustically) lurking the same, but triple, skin of an SSN vessel in Typhoon class, the clambering of each of the moments (both past and present) upon the indiscreet offer of a sense pickled into cylinders/wrappers of rare people of worm-like movements and tranquility of the street on which there exists up and down and plays drums the doubledealing of the rain in such a manner as to fall with a splash and then stop (someone, probably, started something, then finished), having filled up two or three flower pots on the lower protrusion of the middle window in the apartment on the lower floor, otherwise orderly watered by an older woman, a widow of a battleship captain about what, through the mentioned window, there testifies a framed photograph hanged on a clean wall, painted with a vibrant, yet solemn silence of a calcium of her dismals. In other words, nothing occurred which would have brought the writings from before and their current remnants (qualis ab incepto) to a burdensome difference of a new explanation, larger than the present one. All the time describing the same (nulla dies sine linea), including the attack variation on the ballistic (SSN) theme (the Los Angeles versus Alpha class), described is the intransigence of a monolith, the crown of a daily flare of permanency, wrapper of constancy, the smoothness of the walls of his and her room - the ballroom for the dance of the loneliness and lone man.

* * *

(The Pot). Encircled by the given surrounding, one is in a pot. Multum in parvo. The trees, street, building, since early morning the air sticky like a resin from prey drawing near. (The one by which the rooted-up vermin are pulled out, from the vapour of the hole, drops of the underworld). Here and there a disturbance (the ungrateful croaking of the bigger, and accelerated yelping of the smaller bird) completes the description of the pot here, puts its cover on it, de retour.

But, miraculously enough, the majority of the people give in inside such one (everyone inside his own) vessel, sometimes because of that having boiled, more often - cooling down. That is, getting rid of the ideals - while keeping silent they thaw, after all change the shirt, after that the skin (of their palm, then face), at the end (unrecognizable to themselves) they do not find anything in their thoughts either, they stare at the standstill of the (it seems to them) only possible situation and, when necessary, go to and return from the supermarket, durante vita. This is how the walls and contents of the pot look like here, at other places they possibly look different, that is with more or less pretentiousness, but that is not important - what matters is the roundness of such a spindle-like container, the impossibility of the break into the light-mindedness bereaved of the self-seeking of Astraea, the classical Goddess of Justice, who left the Earth last, at the end of the Golden Age. In that way, practically everyone is in the pot: in the necessary volume for manoeuvring as one gets up, lays down, leaves, returns, pours, refines, drives, becomes ill (feeling better soon after, until the last time), crystallizes (into raconteur), discusses, dreams, laughs, keeps quiet (ex-railleur), sorts out, cheers, shoots (with his look), asphalts (with scepticism), freezes (warms up soon after, until the last summer), puts a hat on (ladies a veil), protects from mosquitos instead from the enemy’s airforce, patches up, rips apart, accepts a desperate solution of Alastor, an avenging deity, Shelley’s Spirit of Solitude. Until he contemptuously rejects all of that [in such a way as to tilt the pot and pour the life out into the hold of a gladiator (the pompous part of the self, the tenant in nubibus) over the metaphorical beast (by the habitation as by the encirclement with the bricks)], he won’t enter the main battle (between rain and desert): all of this so far (he reckons) is a skirmish of archangel Uriel, regent of the Sun (and the sharpest-sighted of all the angels), with unworthy circumstances in the jug of humbleness with a spice of passion, an overwhelming state of a trap of the real cage, often full of unbased hastiness.

* * *

It’s cloudy but warm - it stretched itself in expectation of something happening (notwithstanding a miracle), in that way it warmed itself, that which until then was only cloudy and looked like the Ugly Dutchess Margarete, the heiress of Tyrol and Carinthia of 14^th-century Central Europe, in the book of the same name by Lion Feuchtwanger about the aristocrat whose life was a series of frustrations, plots and counterplots, and whose all associates met violent deaths while she herself was forced to give her country to Austria, and live in exile. [A sort of a female Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, with the exemption that the latter, instead of the Duchess’ lands, had left the Soviets’, but unfortunately not also the naivety with which he moved to here and, having eventually spent it (la naïveté), returned to where, in the past, it was the way which it was and now it is as it is, and, while escaping from the first he thought he described it, not daring, because of the original error, to describe the second with the proportional intensity]. Raison d’état, a timeless arena of stupidity and fault.

Down the street there goes no one (those who went, did it on time) - this moment hangs by itself, like a false bell in the true cathedral of Penthesilea, a queen of the Amazons, in Homeric and Virgil’s commentaries.

What is alarming is that from this moderately cloudy (insatiable warm) morning, the mechanism of the world is going to establish itself in only a moment or two - as soon as it turns to the other side. As if it (the power train, the flywheel for raison d’être), in a lightly comprehended workshop of Lotus-Eaters (a dreamy, indolent race which was visited by Odyssey on one of his voyages, and about whom Tennyson had written a poem so named), taken apart for a check, repair, unassembled, was somewhere out of all of this (on a vacation, in a duel, in the night shift in a hospital) and now, in full battle gear, risen straight so as to look like a normally understood duty, it tests itself a bit, engrosses with itself although that might look like being preoccupied with absurdities or, in a better case, with justified endeavours to, even in such a dubious way, soothe the aimlessness of expecting a miracle, of which so much is expected.

* * *

06/13-16/96

(Hydrogen). One goes through the first, second, and then third gate, he is checked (to satisfy the entry conditions) before he gets there. There: a thing of a big interest and not less significance - a few mortals pass through the last lock, smell the zeroth point. En cueros. Looking from any angle, one cannot help the fact that that indeed is put together here - in spite of the green hills scattered around, next to the profuse deceit of Butler Rhett (Scarlett O’Hara’s third husband and the first who saw through her) that everything is Gone With the Wind in this federal state (T.), of the name, therefore, identical with the playwriter’s name (T. Williams), as if in the cages of The Glass Menagerie, in A Streetcar Named Desire, and in the jump of the Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, he did not already throw all the decadence, nostalgia, and sensuality - the signs of the late 40’s and early 50’s, when all of this (in terms of physics) in Oak Ridge started being made, while the élite, as usual, dealt with the spiritual advantages of art. In omnia paratus. [The DOE’s NWP (Nuclear Weapons Plant of the ostensible/ euphemistic boss - the Department Of Energy): a creased silence of a precise enterprise rises from the ammoniacal mask, goes over the roof of building Y-12, sinks into the concrete of the toolroom of Iblis, a master of devilish angels]. The trails between the dark red buildings are deserted (dark red: a blank space of the outside panelling, congealment of an aesthetical remainder), the workers are practically not seen (the ones who pass by leave themselves, go to the library, consult Index Prohibitorius, check out Encyclopedia of Gardening, lean back into an armchair and turn into rosemary). As with reference to the buildings/silos themselves - their inside is mixed with their outside, arranged in such a way to leave the impression that this which is made here - actually is not. (Like Endymion, a beautiful shepherd who did not know that he was kissed by Diana while laying asleep on Mount Latmus). But it is made: the armed security patrol drives by in their jeep, from the speakers mounted on the poles there periodically is heard the instruction regarding what to do in case somethign (this which is made here) starts to go wrong, about the cold tone of the farewell letter there testifies a couple of silenced birds - landed on the roof of the south pavilion, they turn to the north. (It waits for them, they know, l’étoile du nord). Here and there, someone with a smile of astounded justification says something (sharpens the trigger of a defined and immovable representation of the target, tunes the metronome to the rhythm of a rumba, ticks even though by that he enters his own ticking). Wahrheit gegen Freund und Feind. Carefully packed, a dressed up structure of the most widely spread element, dazed by elementariness, waits for a polished chance. Sans tache. If it gets it, it will strike with the institutional power (the power figured out in the institute), it will break the lid (the crust), demolish the tectonic plate (like Enceladus, a giant overthrown by the thunderbolts of Jove under Etna from where, by having turned from one side to the other, he shook the whole island), it will throw the mouth out from the lungs, the palate from the mouth, the tongue from the palate of the state of a prosperity and happiness as a derivative of hydrogen: as if from spite - nothing else, lighter in presence and heavier in blow, is present in it.

* * *

In whatever direction to look (at a tree, grass, falsehood), an animal like a squirrel sees grains (split rigueur, rigorousness kept hidden before the significance of pea), and while bending its look towards the fragile and unimportant ground floor - rez-de-chausée, it increases the significance of the upper floors, goes up without an elevator - au revoir.

Until the moment when the importance of geographic locations, dusty roads and, in general, solidity of a paysage, covers itself with the secondary activities of Sciurus Sciuridae (with unfaithful descriptions of the incidentalness of a tail, its expeditious delay), it seems that there is no room for bigger conclusions, but, a moment ago, the foundation startled, having lightly hit the wall.

Something, therefore, dashed against (the coarseness of a gracious settling), uncovered both the composition and shadow - not missing to enlarge itself at such a moment. [Strombus tricornis moans under the clock that sings, (A shell with mouth stretched into the spiral wings), Whole - it flew out of a talk (in front of the words), Like quietude - it fell into everything that was].

(The world behind its mask - contrivance as a conductor’s scene of Lorin Maazel for the Symphonic Battle Scenes by Tchaikovsky (Capriccio italen, Ouverture solennelle 1812), Beethoven (Wellington’s Victory) and Liszt (Battle of the Huns). To make war with music instead of with weapons: hurtar para dar por Dios - to steal for the purpose of giving to God). A theoretical setting of the essence of nothing in nothingness, the run of a squirrel through a thought about it, tranquility caused by defiance - in an agreement and silently, they divided the territory for today: the gall-nut from the tree branch is (again) going to belong to the rodent, the humbleness of its tree to my insurrection, the tree’s shadow to Mithras, Persian’s God of Sun, the benefactor of mankind and supporter of Ormuzd. Besides its righteousness, such distribution is forced by the need for a peaceful solution in the setting of accounts with significance, and by retreating for tea at noon, full of the loyalty of Sir Bedivere, the last knight of King Arthur, and the one who threw his sword Excalibur, presented to the King by Vivian, Lady of the Lake, into the mere, while he himself went for a walk by the catafalque as by the finished sleeplessness of his boss, the end of the process lasting for quite a few years, and the intonation of the end.

* * *

In the sea of explanations, through piles of teachings, there threads through the interpretation that, because "the quantity turns into quality", at a certain level "a highly organized matter turns into a consciousness". Ad gustum. The uncompromising statements like this one, (besides the relative) full of the absolute indistinctness of (one more) trivial solution of anthropology as the study of mankind [anthropology = physical anthropology + archeology + ethnology + the science of language (linguistics)], do not stop at that - they’re stopped, however (and fortunately), by the second law of thermodynamics (the entropy law), the definition of deorganizing matter. [It is not difficult to assume that the entropy, in its drudgery against matter, organized so much to separate the consciousness, has to work hard in order to present to such a yeast an obstacle at least as big as that presented to an invader by a mountain or river - isolated systems in configuration of a balance (of the maximum entropy), not subject to further changes (which would lead to a reduction of entropy, contrary to the said law)].

That a man (a cold glass of warm rain) does not benefit from any of these and similar explanations, can be seen from a picture in the mirror: it is nowhere except at the moment of mirroring an older person of unquestionable experience, with an old-fashioned hat but in a fitting coat, walking by the mirror’s center through which, look, it passes now, having nodded with his head to something which has split, whereby, together with him, it transferred to that same, other side, as through the fold of a singular picture of an increasingly diluted walker/ original: his last document and proof.

...Not even Gertrud Margaret Zelle (1876-1917), otherwise known as Mata Hari, for the audience - an Indian dancer in Paris, for the victor’s history - a German spy (for the Germans - a patriot), was keen to accept that her consciousness could have been created from her body - while with it she was calling in the sensuality. For her, too, the question of organization of matter was colloquial: if it, sterile, becomes complex - it does not warrant its existence; if however, even simple, it gives results - it does.

"The failure of a civilization to survive is the result of its inability to respond to moral and religious challenges, rather than to physical or environmental challenges", Toynbee, Arnold Joseph, Study of History, 1934-61, a 12-volume comparative study of 26 civilizations in the history of the world. Toynbee’s inclination toward a generalization and his emphasis on the renewal through religion, have made his contribution to explaining the history relative, after everything that happened in this century alone - he has been silenced, in the Balkans - killed.

[Max Ernst, "A Woman, Old Man and Flower", a two-year long delivery of the painting (1923-24) fortified the collective of three, breathed the psychiatry and philosophy into the commune, rid the painter of the formal schooling and the painted ones of loneliness. Ad finem].

* * *

(The Flowers). I’ve bought flowers in the supermarket, in a pot of baked earth. [A bit of fire, a bit of clay (between red and green) / Terra cotta in the wrapping of the world / (In whitening: only virtue and its sin) / A bit of snow in a bee: no more than an error’s gold]. I put it on the small, red table - it’s there when I return from work (it keeps me company, without hesitation or double intentions). Thus, the setting established itself in a manner of an elementary, necessary in small (different from zero, though) quantities, a tripled triple: cobalt-copper-iodine-manganese-selenium-zinc-chromium-fluorine-molybdenum - by the vitamin bust of a petal with toxicology of its recommendation in a two-room abode (one room: the doubleness of the vacancy). In the twilight, as expected, it glows white, in the morning it surrenders (as a guitar does to fingers) to the Sun - it almost, like a main, glows yellow. (Or it, perhaps, wilts? Ad majorem Dei gloriam). With one consent, we let our shortcomings go: I - its placability, it - my bellicosity. We only wave away (I with my hand, it with its leaf) when the other one starts to exaggerate. (Every one to his taste - Chacun à son goût). We go on a journey without moving out of the room: it - for the smell of a solution, I - for the scenery of inevitability for the stage of the senses [the curtains for the scene of rougish èlites (cheaters) of the former socialist countries, the cover of a velvet act of the unmasking of their parrot-like blabbing about the "inevitability" of the "transition" (in fact - return) to capitalism, as if that kind of a social system cures a lier from the lie, garbage from the rubbish-heap, and believer from the faith]. And, when it gets back to its senses and climbs to the crest of the world, I pat its back (the slouched tendon of its branch), water it with the lesson about inadequate tenderness while bombs are falling. And although it already has begun to dry and wither (and, in my thoughts, I’m already taking it out of the room) - I had a sensible companion, I reckon, wiping off from its incurableness a couple of little drops of melancholy. Amar y saber no puede ser.

What Exists And What Does Not Exist - I

06/17/96

What does it do and where is it - that which does not exist? (Giovine santo, diavolo vecchio). (It, too, has to exist somewhere, as this one exists, which did not exist either - it was drawn into something, somewhere). Eo nomine. While its life is at stake. (Gitano). If it decides to exist - it will pass through which there passes this which exists (glückliche Reise!), if it desists - it won’t do even that. In the first case - out of everything nothing waits for it, in the second - out of nothing there waits for it the epilepsy of Мишкин, a sincere and gentle Prince (from Dostoevski’s "The Idiot"). If it takes a heart for an ascension - in front of it is the fall (into Naraka, a hell with twenty-eight divisions designed for the punishment of different degrees of wickedness), if it ventures not - it will neither fall nor will it rise (from Niflheim, a region of darkness and cold). If it makes bold exist - it will have to go to a war, if it decides otherwise - with the buried hatchet its head is interred too. (Esse quam videri? - To be, rather than to seem?). If it jumps on its head (neck, nose) - it will land wondering what made it do all of that (it was possible for it to only not be, to keep silent like Harpocrates, the God of silence). So that it itself is in doubt of what to do. Badaud. That is why that (which does not exist) is in concert with that which exists - they confer about making the room for both this which exists and that which does not exist, determining which one is going to make which step (and which not to make). (Standing one behind another - en queue, en rapport). And, because the last step of everything which exists is always wrong, then, according to the agreement, that does not exist any more - there comes the turn of that which until then did not exist: in the afternoon walk through the same park it now struts, muttering gli assenti hanno torto.

The End of the First Notebook

06/18/96

The first notebook is nearing its end - two blank pages are left. (Two rear wheels on a velocipede - the weight on the front one: d’accord). Having noticed that, I acquired a new notebook yesterday. It is identical to the first one, only it is more empty - its pages keep quiet, not knowing what in store is for them (coating themselves with a zero). The unwritten pages of the second handbook lie with scepticism on the filled pages of the first one [one notebook rests on another - in that way stacked they occupy less space (besides that their numbness is closer to them), squeezing the rigidity of change]. It will be difficult with them as it was with these which were giving up so long. They will be pulling out from the portrayal of nothing, as if someone skins them alive, as if something more significant is being described. Because of that, perhaps they should be first listened to, to not be caught by surprise as it was the case with the pages of the first notebook, now on its last breath. (It, maybe, passes away due to that). Possibly, it is necessary to have a more gradual (milder) approach. To explain everything beforehand and to the last detail (not bringing up, however, the conclusion into a question) - to quiet down the new notebook, to win it over for the collaboration. To carefully take it and put away (to not slam it, as the old one, against the first despair). To have a nice word for it (the new notebook), to be a cavalier. De bonne grâce. To take it, sometimes, into yellow (to put the cinnabar’s hand, HgS, under the zinc’s head, Zn), to let go, at last, the murky speculations, to show sympathy. To change the style, to become receptive for the warm-hearted show of a realtor, to understand practicalness of the red-faced interpreters of the newest old political system: the rawness of the outsider’s dialect and seminarian’s fluency in domestic waters, and humbleness as fidgeting of stuttering in other languages (in foreign waters). (To understand the political pragmatism, populist hedonism and stock exchange as a modern haste of body, to not complicate that too, as usual. Recoje tu heno mientras que el sol luziere). To join useful with nice (to enroll in an interesting association of the emigration here, concretely - the branch of hunters and fishermen, why not? Post nubila Phoebus. To buy for it (the new notebook) a bunch of hopes, to flip a new page in the life (with its old, in fever). Post nubila jubila. And with the old notebook: what happened happened. Neither something can be ameliorated there, nor should one feel sorry about something. After all, there are worse things - it didn't go through the worst. Post cineres gloria venit. Still, with this, the last sentence in the old notebook, let me at least let it know that it taught me how to (contrary to the Pope, Dalai Lama and Patriarch) sparsely sow gentleness until, with the first sentence in the new notebook, the same, prosaic harvest is picked - and, with that, in the same, old way is continued.

NOTEBOOK II >>

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