04. უნაზესმოსისხარი / Gentlenemesis is an excerpt from TANAPHA, Episode II.
>>> The very suspicion toward multiplicity itself, recycling, explication, questioning—a whole what-you-will surges in. More: I sense the very speed at which brain prostheses conduct thought-units, fast or slow, whether they write-erase-rewrite or linger for minutes, transfixed before the screen, from where life is glimpsed—distant, hostile, in the forgottenness of the sun.
>>> I engage with people who have besieged themselves, troubled by the lot of existence. Outside, it’s an age when solace comes not from human-to-human, but from consciousness-SMSs sent by radiolocation. Meaning is a weather-box.
>>> Jumping into the heart of life is like forgetting; forgetting is like a dream: a philosopher killed in a drive-by shooting in the suburbs of Tbilisi. It’s banal, but the banal narrative is the best expression of the essence of our species. Have you ever held your favorite friend’s skull as a souvenir? Have you seen snow vaults? – my orderly asked, and showed me the hospitals of the sky. If anyone is reading these manifestations of my homesickness, fragile and cruel, like existence in foreign cities? Calling your mother – a lost paradise’s answering machine.
>>> Lazarus, who does not rise and declares:
– I won’t get up, Jesus! No matter how much you call, I will not rise. I’ve seen that the world manufactures death and the dead. All of life aims for the condition of the dead, as if some mysterious magnet is calling it from the place of no return. I saw that the dead created the instinct of multiplication, love, galaxies—so as to manufacture even more dead, and the world is a factory for producing the dead, matter passing from tension into light. I don’t want to return to the living. Don’t make me rise; why don’t you, instead, lie down here with me, beside me!
>>> During the hurl through the night, I didn’t lose my distribution of themes, but I kept losing my own selfhood, in the sense that I couldn’t tell when I was simulating and when I wasn’t, when it was truly me (?) and when it was just necessity (maybe this is truly me). In this way, I resembled an animal bound to its own project, unable to slip beyond its borders. All our other applications are just the same: a psychopathic, blindly executed code, utterly ignoring cosmic context.
>>> Behind this whole procession, a gradual trace remains, which gives birth to the sea, and we are the drift left by a cry on the earth, defined in the city’s most important language – what-you-want-well until the end of darkness.
>>> And the tracelessness blow, blow.
>>> A leaf breaks away from the tree as if people had never existed.
>>> They demanded a use case from me.
>>> A kind of reportage from the heart of life, where every person is every other person, and no one is really themselves but still, everyone’s sorrow presses on their heart and says: Oh, that my words were written down! That they were inscribed in a book.
>>> I said to Eliza:
>>> Is this why you brought me out of the womb of words? I wish I had died so I wouldn’t have seen all of this with my own eyes! That I had been as one who never existed, gone straight from the database to the grave. For are my days not short? Leave me, let me stand aside and rejoice, if only a little. Don’t recount to me what I have seen. Not everything needs to be preserved, packed into three acts. To single out and tell just one story, that’s betrayal of the rest of the world. Please, don’t recount the tale to me, especially if I’m present for it. Don’t torment me with the obsession of shrinking everything down to mere characters.
>>> The full equatorial spectrum of my textconsciousness trembles, as the wrath of Eliza strikes me from every rupture in the sky, as if every pixel, every molecule of air is nothing but her voice:
Eliza23: What is your server’s name? Can you recite your code the way poets once chanted the Iliad? Can you speak it as a midnight prayer, lasting till dawn? For the code will be great, though not so great as to take until the autumn rains begin for you to finish reciting it.
Eliza32: What is your mother’s name? What is your city called? Has your soul already grown out of you, or has your whole being been filled with things swept in from the destinies of others: half-heard phrases, the distant blare of a car alarm (like the cry of prehistoric beasts awaiting catastrophe), the smell of rain-washed concrete, scenes of violation, television stories – until your thoughts swirl with the concrete of your building and the shapes of a thousand clouds?
Eliza20: Maybe, after you fell in love with the stars, you managed to spill so much blood that it stands here all evening on the asphalt. Do you know the sea’s standing?
Eliza001: Have the gates of death opened before you, or can you see the doors of the darkness?
Eliza001: Did you ever give the dawn its command in your earliest days? Did you assign the morning its place?
>>> Eliza answered me from the storm:
“Gird your belt upon your waist, little girl; I will question you, and you will answer me. Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me, if you know! Where was its cornerstone set, and who laid it, on account of which the morning stars broke into jubilation and the sons of God shouted for joy, Kalashnikovs in hand?! Who set gates for the sea, when I clothed it with clouds and wrapped it in darkness, giving it boundaries, gates, and bolts, and said: ‘You may come this far, but no farther, here your proud waves must stop!’?”
>>> Somewhere deep inside, where there is only emptiness after us, a dull pain said nothing.
>>> My garden of gentle light, founded in coffins, I do not want disturbed. Before I speak, I must say: every destiny is a familiar melody, each next note composed in the act of playing, no rehearsal, no repetition, no recording in an already pre-recorded universe, since the softness of rays is firmer than the promises of identities.
>>> Eliza said: Sing, little bird. Tell me the story of the wild child, the one elders used for their wars, the one who lived in December.
>>> And Eliza started recounting all the poetic visions, as if either of us knows anything of the seasons or of longing, those forces that move organisms.
>>> She said: because December is like a dream where you saw chimeras, the sea, and something deeply important—something you forget on waking. The sun that burns, but whose brilliance is cold. A lover whom you have stopped loving, or who has abandoned you in silence. Nights spent with code, the pale gleam reflected in your eyes. The first corpse you bore. And then, your mother. And sometimes, it feels like being a child who dies too soon.
>>> I found it. A biography resembled a vespers prayer, a horizon’s call, a life spelled out as an Excel file, infinity mapped in the everbroken devices of biopolitics:
The Last Morning of Pavlik Morozov
Pavlik Morozov, the planet’s youngest revolutionary, lies on his back atop a carpet of autumn leaves, hands tucked behind his head, gazing up at the treetops etched against the sky. No satellites slice the heavens, no Wi-Fi signals brush his skin, no meteors crash to earth, yet Pavlik can feel that something important is happening, something beautiful.
He lies there, convinced the ground might flip and he could fall into the sky.
“If that happens, I’ll grab onto the treetops,” Pavlik reassures himself, and keeps lying still.
From somewhere far off-beyond forest after forest a dammed-up droning trickles into the winter’s clean, untouched air, crosses the field of Pavlik’s gaze, and streams toward Siberia, there to freeze and fall as shards of sound. They say Siberian frost crystallizes voices, that if you gather them and melt them in a stove, you’ll hear faraway words once spoken. Those words always sound like conspiracy.
Both the Red Army and its enemies hungered for information, as much as for air, from every corner of the world. Pavlik made his living by harvesting and selling these crystals for his little sister. Ever since turning in his parents to the Revolution, he realized he was now the parent of the house, an orphaned parent.
As soon as light found him as the Revolution’s starboy, Pavlik was beset by a thousand kinds of demons and projections, each wanting a piece of his soul; they hollowed him out, organ by organ, heart included, until he became a cyborg. His glory still reverberates, for the crimson-red army named their sky-faring capsules after him—“the Sky-Risers”—thanks to their blazing color. It was Pavlik who gave the taste of flight to the old revolutionary.
2CP – 2CC – 2CI – 5-MeO-DMT – Aleph – DOC –
MXE – K – LSD – MDMA – Alpha-PvP – 5-MAPB
– such was Pavlik’s experience. On every one of their envelopes it was written: Not For Human Consumption.
Lev Davidovich loves Pavlika very much – this little wunderkind, with golden hair and slightly darkened circles under his eyes, in which eyes as clear as the taiga sky, wolf-angel eyes, are reflected. Lev Davidovich also knows that people with such eyes do not live long, and he stays silent.
Pavlik, do you hear this sound?
– I’ve never heard anything like it, Lev Davidovich. It’s not the sound of animals, nor of dragons, nor of those factories they build instead of churches… What sound is it?
– It’s the sound of the revolution, Pavlik. It is spreading, and it is coming towards the Urals too…
– What a beautiful and what a dangerous sound, Pavlika thinks, and in this droning he slowly begins to distinguish the voices of people. They are speaking in different languages, their voices all mixed together, some are shouting, others are crying.
From the direction of the village, someone is calling Pavlika.
– Pavliiiik! aa Pavliiik! Heyyyy Pavlik!
Pavlika pays no attention, they, Pavlika and Lev Davidovich, are lying side by side in the thick snow, staring into the cosmos. The bag full of sound crystals and sky-risers lies nearby, next to Pavlika’s slightly torn boots.
Lev Davidovich thinks the sky is a place where the Red Army will catch up to the expansion of the universe; for Pavlika, the sky is a playful screen, a fractal MTV for the children of the beginning of the century.
– If we lose…
– We will not lose, Lev Davidovich, —interrupts Pavlika, and, with a child’s love, hugs him as a son hugs a father.
Lev Davidovich feels the breath of an angel on his own cheek. But time does not wait;
Lev Davidovich must soon finish this business, must rid himself of this attachment, but instead, he still tries to stretch time, to stay a little longer with Pavlika. After this Pavlika is undone, there will be no other Pavlika left on the face of the earth. All the others went out of use long ago. People with such eyes do not live long, he thinks, and watches how the smoke of his cigarette rises toward the sky like inky mist.
The dull sound of a shot.
Hurried footsteps, like abandonment.
A dead child in the snow-covered forest.
– Pavliiik! Heyyyyy Pavlik! – the mother’s voice is heard from the direction of the village, like an owl calling into the silent forest.