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K onstantin K edrov T chelitchew
—
THE CULMINATION
METAMETAPHOR
Light and shadow
have long
since lost
each other
Defying all
laws,
write only
with light
INSIDE OUT
INSIDE
GROM PUBLISHING HOUSE
CALIFORNIA, USFront cover: Collage with a picture of artist Pavel Tchelitchew
(1898-1957) by Roman Gosin
Copyright©2017 Konstantin Kedrov-Tchelitchew
Literary editor and translator Anna Krasnovsky-Quinard
Translators:
Anatoly Kudryavitsky
Alexandra Zabolotskaya
Alexandra Narizhnaya
Marina Rozanova
Consultant and Translator: Professor of English at the City College of
San Francisco Sophia Manukova
Illustrations:
Pavel Tchelitchew
Konstantin Kedrov-Tchelitchew
Pavel Ryzhenko
Margarita Syurina
All rights reserved.
ISBN 978-1-387-36349-0
ISBN 978-1-387-36349-13
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3101 Hillsborough St, Raleigh, NCTHE CULMINATION
METAMETAPHOR
INSIDE OUT
by K onstantin K edrov- T chelitchewContents
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Introduction
2
Chapter one:
Period I The Birth of Angels
8
Period II The Gallery of my monotypes 20
Period III The Theory of parallel worlds 34
Period IV Inside out 45
Period V Metametaphor
50
Period VI Four poetic Manifestes metametaphfor
Computer of love 1-2-3-4
Error! Bookmark not defined.1
Period VII In the distant 20 t h century
82Acknowledgements
I would like to thank all the translators and editors of
my poems and texts from Russian into English: Anna
Krasnovsky-Quinard, Anatoly Kudryavitsky, Alexandra
Zabolotskaya, Alexandra Narizhnaya, Marina Rozanova, and
artist Margarita Syurina.
I thank the literary editor and translator Anna Krasnovsky-
Quinard.
I extend my special gratitude to GROM Publishing
House Chief Editor Roman Gosin for publishing this book.
Konstantin Kedrov-TchelitchewForeword
This book, which the author entitled The Culmination, is the
first English-language publication of essays and unique monotype
illustrations by a Russian literary figure, writer, philosopher, theorist,
scholar, and poet of the avant-garde era in Russian literature,
Konstantin Kedrov-Tchelitchew.
His poetry is beyond the grasp of many. It is difficult to
translate. Nevertheless, his body of work will leave no curious mind
unmoved. The search for new forms, images and associations of
concepts that seem far from reality are a source of sudden revelation
to the reader. Having read his books, you start to see words in a
different light, as though peering out from the inside your conception
of the surrounding world. Kedrov-Tchelitchew coined the terms
"metametaphorical” and "inside out” to describe this phenomenon.
He studies the birth of images in the human consciousness, just like
researchers study the fields of physics and mathematics. He believes
that Einstein’s formula,
, is the highest achievement in
poetry.
The term "metaphor” comes from the ancient Greek philosopher
Aristotle and is related to his understanding of art as an imitation of
life. Aristotle’s metaphor is practically indistinguishable from
hyperbole (exaggeration), synecdoche, simple comparison,
personification, or simile. In these devices, there is a transfer of
meaning from one word to another.
In metaphor, there are four distinguishable "elements.”
À) Category or context.
B) An object within the specific category,
C) The process whereby that object carries out a function,
D) The application of that process to real situations or in intersecting
with them.
In lexicology, the foundation of metaphor is the semantic link
between the meanings of one polysemic word, based on the existence
of similarities (structural, apparent and functional) with other,
comparable definitions.
The metaphor often becomes an aesthetic goal in and of itself,
displacing the original, initial meaning of the word. In Shakespeare’s
work, for example, what matters is often not the initial, commonplace
meaning of an expression but its unexpected metaphoricalconnotation—a new meaning. This puzzled Lev Tolstoy, who was
raised in the spirit of Aristotelian realism. Simply put, metaphor not
only reflects life, but also creates it.
Once theorists and writers in linguistics recognized the
metaphor, they isolated it from a series of other linguistic phenomena
and gave it a description. Its dual essence immediately emerged.
Metaphor is simultaneously an instrument of language and a poetic
device. The distinguished Swiss linguist Charles Bally (1865-1947)
was the first to compare poetic metaphor and linguistic substance.
He demonstrated the universal metaphoricalness of all the languages
of the world.
The sciences studying humans, their psychology, philosophy,
thought process and the meaning of language as a means of
communication and creating images, have never stood still and
fossilized. They have always evolved. From time to time, pioneers
emerge among the researchers studying those fields. One of those
pioneers is Konstantin Kedrov-Tchelitchew, creator of the term
metametaphor in the theory and practice of thought and language,
along with the term inside out. Combining these two phenomena, he
created a new type of poetry and prose.
Konstantin Kedrov-Tchelitchew was born to theater director
Alexander Berdichevsky (1910-1991) and stage actress Nadezhda
Yumatova (1917-1991) in the USSR, in the city of Rybinsk in the
Yaroslavl region. The family moved to that city on the Volga River
during WWII and lived there temporarily until 1945. As a schoolboy,
Kedrov-Tchelitchew showed a gift for poetry.
His earliest poems were first published in a youth newspaper
in 1958, accompanied by an encouraging article by the future
international chess arbiter Yakov Damsky, friend of chess champions
Mikhail Tal and Boris Spassky. "Konstantin Kedrov’s poetry delights
and amazes all those who read it. It is hard to believe that these
mature thoughts, these vivid images flow from the pen of a 15-year-
old student.”
The most quotable lines from his poetry became aphorisms:
"Each country speaks of freedom.
Free France calls for the death of Algeria’s freedom.
But does freedom have a homeland,
Liberty-homeland of the whole world?Give me the only freedom=
Not to kill...freedom!”
No less popular was the young poet’s lyric poetry.
"You are vital inspiration for the heart
Vital as the final stroke on a work of art,
Necessary as perpetual motion
To Paganini’s motionless violin”
Soon afterwards, the persecution of abstractionists and other
artists outside the realm of socialist realism began. Kedrov-
Tchelitchew’s poem "Endless” sparked the dissatisfaction of the
authorities. "I will never come closer to you than a flower
approaches the sun.”
Publication of the poem ceased; furthermore, the authorities
"did not recommend publication,” which meant the poet was banned
from his profession. He took a detour, suffered through persecution
and exclusion at the Universities of Moscow and Kazan, but
nevertheless managed to earn his diploma with academic honors for
his thesis on Khlebnikov, 1 Lobachevsky 2 and Albert Einstein.
This paper earned him acceptance into the doctoral program
of the Literary Institute of the Union of Soviet Writers of the USSR,
where, after earning his PhD in 1973, he started working as a senior
lecturer. A secret circle of poets formed around Kedrov: Alexei
Parschikov (1954–2009), Alexander Yeremenko, Ilya Kutik, Ivan
Zhdanov. In 1978, Konstantin Kedrov-Tchelitchew first introduced
these poets to the public at the Central House of Arts in Moscow,
opening a path for them. Kedrov’s own poetry was only published for
the first time in 1988.
His major poems were published in the book Impulse:
"Endless” (1960), the first Russian anagram poem, "Antediluvian
Gospel,” the metametaphorical manifesto "Computer of Love”
(1983), the first Russian poem without a subject, "Partant.” In 1983,
along with his students and his wife, he created the poetry society
1
Viktor Vladimirovich Khlebnikov, better known by the pen name Velimir Khlebnikov
was a Russian poet and playwright, a central part of the Russian Futurist.
2 Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky (1792 –1856) was a Russian mathematician and
geometer, known primarily for his work on hyperbolic geometry, otherwise known as
Lobachevskian geometry.DOOS (Russian acronym for "Voluntary Society for the Protection of
Dragonflies”) and they published the journal PoEtry Poet.
Although he was banned from teaching at the Literary
Institute at the demand of the KGB in 1986 for "anti-Soviet
propaganda and agitation with statements of a revisionist nature,” he
published his monograph "Poetic Universe” in 1989 and his first
collection of poetry, Computer of Love, in 1990 with a preface by the
world-renowned, celebrated Soviet poet, Andrei Voznesenski, who
wrote, "Konstantin Kedrov-Tchelitchew can assuredly be called John
the Baptist of the new metametaphorical wave in poetry.”
Voznesensky dedicated his poem "Demonstration of Language” to
Konstantin Kedrov-Tchelitchew, as well as "Atmospheric Stanzas,” a
couplet he wrote in India by the Bodhi Tree:
"Will come the Lada Credova
Of Ñînstanta Kedrova.”
On the first UNESCO World Poetry Day on March 21, 2000
at the Yury Liubimov Taganka Theater, Andrei Voznesensky said,
"Each era has its poetic mouthpiece. It is not a person, but an organ;
an organ of poetry. Before, it was Yesenin. Today’s organ of poetry
is Konstantin Kedrov.”
Genrikh Sapgir called Kedrov-Tchelitchew’s poetry
"Authentic Stellar Liturgy.” Sapgir dedicated his poem, "Light of the
Earth,” to Kedrov. Evgeni Yevtushenko, in his anthology, Verses of
the Century, called Kedrov-Tchelitchew’s poetry "unique, unlike any
other.” Konstantin Kedrov-Tchelitchew was a participant in the
International Avant-Garde Poetry Festivals in Finland and France
and worked as a literary columnist for the newspapers "Izvestia” and
"Novye Izvestia.” He is also the Editor-in-chief of the publication,
Poets’ Journal. He was elected President of the Federation of
International Poetry Associations of UNESCO (FIPA).
He has been awarded prizes for his literary and social work.
He is a laureate of the international Manhae prize in South Korea in
the category "Literature and Art.” Konstantin Kedrov-Tchelitchew is
the first Russian and the first European poet laureate of this prize,
which was awarded near Seoul on August 11, 2013. He is a laureate
of the German prize DOMINANTA 2014 for outstanding
achievements in poetry and philosophy and for founding new
principles of esthetics. The prize was awarded in Munich. He won theVoloshinsky prize in September 2015 and the Top Prize of the First
All-Russian Literary Festival of Festivals, LiFFt in 2016: the gold
medal (for creating a new school of poetry and unveiling new
horizons in literature). The awards ceremony took place on May 30
in the city of Alushta, Republic of Crimea. He is a laureate of the
David Burliuk international prize and silver medal, which was
awarded in 2013 in the Moscow Museum at the 120 th anniversary
celebration of the birth of Vladimir Mayakovsky. He is also the
winner of the international Grigory Skovoroda Diploma and Medal in
2012 for humanism and humanity in art. He was awarded the 2014
VYS (Summit) Prize by the Electronic Cosmic Digest, nominated for
"Poetry of the Year” (December 30, 2014). He is a laureate of the
Grammy.ru prize and since 2008, he has been proposed by various
groups as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Since 2001, Kedrov has been the Dean of the Academy of
Poets and Philosophers of the Natalia Nesterova University.
©By Roman Gosin.
US, San Mateo, California.Introduction
The only reliable way to gain knowledge of the world is through
scientific studies, whose results are interpreted with the help of
scientific theories. Theories can be accurate, nearly accurate, or
relatively accurate. The objects of our studies do not depend on our
intellect. Scientific theories are sound in relationship to the external
(objective) world. One of the many theories in the science of
philosophy is scientific realism. Sometimes, scientific realism is
interpreted in different ways, which creates some difficulties in
understanding it. Nevertheless, the goal of scientific realism is to
formulate true assertions about reality. This requires scientific
theories. One of the principal theories among them is metaphysical
realism. It assumes the existence of reality independently of our
knowledge. Theory must satisfy our "metaphysical representations.”
The metaphysical realist proposes that we accept a certain image of
the world as if it were self-explanatory. In this case, we are not
dealing with fantasy but with objective phenomena, or a type of
reality. I am using the word "metaphysical” in a very broad sense. I
think that if realism is not metaphysical, it is not realism at all.
Realism, as we understand it in the spirit of Tolstoy and
Dostoevsky, penetrates the depths of the human soul, but it always
has a metaphysical meaning and quest. Tolstoy’s novels War and
Peace and Anna Karenina are the author’s literary invention in all of
their details, with no exceptions. However, the characters and images
he created are perceived by the reader as real people in real
circumstances. The principal means of creating literary images is the
metaphor. In it, metaphysical realism is sublimated and reprocessed
in our awareness into metaphorical realism.
In my study of metaphorical realism as philosophical theory, I
coined another term: metacode. What does it mean? Just like there is
genetic code for all living things on Earth, there is a single universal
code for the part of reality that is called inorganic matter. Although
its name is not very elegant, a similar code permeates our spiritual,
inner life. I called this code metacode. It is purely mystical and yet
has a clear shape. In the DNA molecule, there is a helix, and the
outline of the fundamental acids that are present in it. In the same
way, metacode has its clear outline. That outline, amazingly, is
2present in varying forms on different levels. On the biological level,
it is like the left-handed helix of twisted DNA, and in the universe it is
present in the form of many galaxies.
Vernadsky pondered a question that he could not answer. It was,
indeed, a sacramental question: why did all galactic vortexes, from
our point of view, swirl to the left? On the other hand, he asked a
question that Kant also asked. What is "left” and what is "right”? If
we remove man, who has a left and right hand, from the galaxy, will
we be able to tell which way the galactic vortexes spin? No, we will
not. Perhaps Kant, raised in the spirit of traditional European
rationalism, did not have the courage to say that this applies not only
to the notions of "right” and "left,” but also to "up” and "down”, and
also "interior” and "exterior.” In other words, all of this exists
because we exist.
On Kant’s grave in Konigsberg, one can read the following:
"Two things have amazed and delighted me from a young age: the
starry sky above my head and the categorical imperative.” The
categorical imperative is Kant’s universal moral directive. In his
consciousness and moral directive, he associated the stars, the sky and
moral law, or the will of the Universe as the will of God. This was
surprising, and was noted by many, including Jung. But the
conundrum had no resolution, since the magnificence of the
constellations revealed to our gaze exists only because, firstly, they
are projected upon our vision and only upon our vision, and secondly,
only because we connect the stars that way. Hypothetically, it is
possible to connect them in another way. But here, another
interesting issue arises. Is it possible to redraw those very
constellations that are before our eyes, whose outlines are so familiar,
to create a different shape? In theory, why not? In looking at a
person and his anatomy, why not take off his head and place it
somewhere else? Or why not connect an arm to his back, and so on?
It is possible, but in doing so, we destroy something. We destroy a
sort of integrity: the integrity that is present in the outlines of
constellations. It is not physical. But destroying it would mean
destroying the connection of the universe, and thus the "physical”
outline of the Universe.
The Universe would be torn apart, similarly to the way Osiris was
torn into many pieces. It turned out later that those were the parts of
the Egyptian zodiac. When Isis seeks the body parts of Osiris to
3create a single universal body, she puts together the ancient Egyptian
zodiac part by part. The recreation of that zodiac is the recreation of
Osiris. When the zodiac is recreated, Osiris rises. Osiris is
resurrected.
In ancient Egypt, the resurrection of Osiris is
accompanied by the song, "Osiris rises, Egypt rejoices. Osiris rises
and the Nile overflows. Osiris rises and the wheat sprouts...”
This is interesting for the preservation of metacode. Here is how
metacode is preserved. Code is always stable. It is always tempting
to break that stability because there is nothing more fragile than, say,
life. That thin membrane on the surface of the earth seems made to be
broken. Yet, for some reason, no one can break it, although both the
military and politicians deploy great efforts towards that goal.
Throughout history, there are many examples: Tsar Ivan the Terrible,
Lenin, Stalin and Hitler all toiled to destroy the code. Yet, they did
not succeed, for the task was too difficult. The same amount of effort
was deployed to destroy spiritual metacode. The biggest and most
formidable transgression in the systems of Hitler, Stalin and Lenin
was the fight against the belief in resurrection. Resurrection made
them especially angry. Why? Shouldn’t the ideologies of fascism or
communism be indifferent to whether or not Christ was resurrected?
It does not seem to be a fundamental or crucial issue. Yet, it
provoked a visceral rage. There was instinctive desire for the
resurrection not to be, under any circumstances. The number of years
that have passed since the resurrection is insignificant. What is 2000,
1900, 1800 years since the return of Christ? Human memory spans
ten millennia, at least five of them clearly documented. But those
events take place in the most civilized realm of the largest
civilization, Ancient Rome, where events were recorded, not just by
old wives and grandmothers, but by great scholars. In particular, the
historian Flavius Josephus recorded events that took place in Ancient
Judaea (Israel), which was part of the Roman Empire, not just on a
daily basis, but hour by hour. We can learn exactly what time the
plumbing broke and what time it was repaired. Every event was
recorded. In this system, in the great cultural center that was
Jerusalem, imagine telling the story of a resurrection. And having
everyone believe it! This is impossible. You would need proof. And
after this event, if a whole series of people writes books about it, and
you see those books, and the people writing are eyewitnesses or
second-hand witnesses? Those books will be brilliant, of course, so
4how can anyone argue? And yet, this very obvious fact of what
happened provoked terrible rage. People wanted for it not to have
happened. And since that was their desire, they did everything within
their power to fulfill it.
Most frequently, in art, metacode is present on a subconscious
level, just like a person is not consciously aware of his genetic code:
why his eyes are a certain color or his head is a certain shape. Yet,
that code functions within him, creating him, making up his
personality and, in the end, his soul. Many literary works deal with
this topic in numerous ways.
"Once I was wandering among the wild valley...” wrote a poet in
one of his later poems, in 1835. "As I walked through the wilderness
of this world...” begins The Pilgrim’s Progress, an allegorical tale by
John Bunyan, an English writer and preacher of the 17th century.
Less than two years before his death, the great Russian poet, Pushkin,
adapted the first chapter of that book.
Bunyan started his book in jail, where he landed several times for
his tireless preaching: with the restoration of the monarchy under
Charles II, the Anglican church ruled again and Puritan religious
meetings were outlawed. Having converted as an adult, Bunyan
portrayed his own religious path in The Pilgrim’s Progress. Hence
the popularity of the book: its allegories and the realities it portrays
come from his own experience and daily life. The Wicket-Gate,
which the repentant hero desperately strives to reach, is probably the
gate of the church in Elstow, the birthplace of the author. The Slough
of Despond is a swampy bog not far from the author’s home in
Harrowden; the Delectable Mountains are an image of the Chiltern
Hills surrounding Bedfordshire, where Bunyan moved with his wife
and children. The Evangelist in the first chapter is a reflection of
Bunyan’s mentor, the Baptist minister John Gifford. Anyone who has
ever confronted his own sinfulness can fully appreciate the weight of
the burden that Christian, the main character, carries on his back.
Anyone who has ever come face to face with his dark side knows how
easy it was to slip into the Slough of Despond, and the heavier the
burden of sins on one’s back, the stronger the pull to the bottom.
Anyone who has undertaken a difficult task that requires risk and
much discipline has probably met with the Worldly Wiseman, be it
their kind parents who turn off the alarm clock so that their offspring
can catch up on sleep on Sunday instead of going to service, or any
5other kind person, offering a "Plain of Ease” and a "Village of
Morality.”
This is only the beginning of Pilgrim’s Progress. In its
importance for the Protestant world, this book is comparable only to
the Ladder of Divine Ascent by Saint John Climacus, perhaps the
most famous ascetic Orthodox work. Both books are a guide to
saving one’s soul: Ladder is an ascent to heaven in the footsteps of the
virtuous and battling passions; Pilgrim’s Progress is the way to the
Celestial City through many obstacles and temptations. It is no
surprise that protestant preachers translated Bunyan’s book second
after the Bible. The book was read and loved in Protestant families in
America, as we can see in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, it was
in the "background” for even the youngest Christians. In Little
Women, the four sisters reminisce on how they used to play Pilgrim’s
Progress as children, going from the City of Destruction in the cellar
to the Celestial City in the attic of their home. In Little Women, some
of the chapter names and corresponding events involving the March
sisters are allusions to Bunyan’s book: "Valley of Humiliation,”
"Vanity Fair,” and "The Delectable Mountains.” As an aside,
William Thackeray also titled his book Vanity Fair, while Charles
Dickens, Mark Twain and C.S. Lewis used the name of the book, The
Pilgrim’s Progress, in titles and subtitles of their books: Oliver Twist
or The Parish Boy’s Progress, The Innocents Abroad: The New
Pilgrims’ Progress; The Pilgrim’s Regress.
What did Pushkin take from Bunyan? The first chapter of
Bunyan’s book is the beginning of a person’s dialog with God.
Bunyan’s Christian is tormented by the weight of his sins; he finds
out that the City of Destruction will be burned and that all of its
inhabitants will die. He tells his family about this, but receives no
support: nobody believes him and everyone thinks he has gone mad.
When Christian wanders alone along a broad plain, reading and
praying, he meets Evangelist, who shows him the way to Wicket-
Gate, where he can unburden himself.
In Pushkin, instead of Evangelist, a lyrical hero notices a "youth
reading a book”—a somewhat angelical image. Evangelist and the
youth with the book show Christian the "shining light” (Bunyan)
visible in the distance. That light shows the hero where the Wicket-
Gate is. Neither Bunyan’s nor Pushkin’s heroes clearly see the light.
6"I see a certain light,” says Pushkin’s protagonist. That is the
culmination of the poem. The protagonist flees towards that light.
The last line is about the chaotic effect his flight had on the city.
Some discussed it and mocked him, others wanted to bring him back
and chased him, but the poet does not dwell on this. The poem ends
with a description of the main character’s actions:
"Hurried to cross the field around the city,
In order to glimpse more quickly—having left those places
The true path of salvation and the narrow gates.”
Pushkin did not plan to write a sequel. The poem seems
complete. Everything has been said. Having borrowed the characters
of the protestant author, Pushkin created his own parable. Bunyan’s
first chapter is just the beginning of Pilgrim’s Progress, his first steps
in the protagonist’s conversion to a virtuous life. Pushkin describes
an event that has already happened or is happening. What is that
event? "I see a certain light...”
This is how metacode "functions” in poetry.
7The Birth of Angels
"The
Battle of Kulikovo is rightfully called a masterpiece of
military art. The unpleasant surprise for Mamai came from the Patrol
Regiment, a significant part of which was composed of Tatars who
had crossed over to Moscow’s side. It was assigned the objective not
to allow enemy archers to shoot at the main Russian forces from a
safe distance. Russian commanders placed the Horde’s Front Line
militiamen under fire while safeguarding the most seasoned
professionals. The Right-Hand Regiment, almost as big as the Large
Regiment, defeated the opposing forces. The Left-Hand Regiment
not only held up in the face of the enemy’s substantial cavalry but
also executed a magnificent maneuver of retreat (even the Russians
believed that the left flank faltered!), thus luring the Tatars into the
line of fire of the Ambush Regiment, manned by "armored men”—
men on horseback, "covered in metal from head to toe.”
Since nothing like this has ever been found in the annals of
Russian military art, it is likely that the brilliant Russian commander
who developed the battle plan in Kulikovo was killed in the action.
Here, a new figure emerges to the forefront of history, heretofore
overshadowed by the great princes.
Although Mikhail Andreevich Brenok was not a descendant of
the legendary Varangian Prince Rurik, his lineage is almost as
impressive as that of the Rurikid dynasty princes. One legend states
that he was a descendant of the Knight Crusader William Luneburg, a
"good man” who left Germany for Lithuania in 1237, then went to
Novgorod the Great, where he was baptized and christened Leontiy.
He was a boyar serving Prince Alexander Yaroslavich and fought in
the battle of the Neva.
His parents were the godson and
granddaughter (Maria Uglitskaya) of Ivan Kalita (Ivan I of Moscow).
Much less is known about Mikhail Brenok. Historians call him
either the bodyguard of the grand Prince of Moscow, or a "confidant”
and "childhood friend” of Dmitry, or his closest boyar. It has been
noted that Brenok bore an uncanny resemblance to Dmitry (which is
not surprising if he was the prince's nephew). In "The Tale of the
Massacre of Mamai,” Mikhail Brenok is named as the military
general at the head of the Large Regiment during the gathering of
8troops in Kolomna. This means he had a reputation as a seasoned
military commander. We can assume that Mikhail Brenok was the
one who developed the battle plan, which was approved at the
military council. Hence, he commanded the Russian troops on the
battlefield. "The Tale of the Massacre of Mamai” describes how,
shortly before the fighting started, Dmitry changed into the armor of
an ordinary combatant. Mikhail Brenok, who stood under the purple
grand-ducal coat of arms depicting the face of Christ the Savior, wore
Prince Dmitry’s scarlet cloak and golden armor.
The point, however, was not the armor. In the Middle Ages,
commands were given using banners of arms. Every historian agrees
that the Russian army in Kulikovo acted in unison, as one body,
operating extremely well. Yet, they could not have been led by the
renowned war chief Dmitry Bobrok-Volynsky or by Prince Vladimir
Andreevich of Serpukhov, who were waiting in ambush in the forest
and able to see only the left flank of the Russian troops. The
command was not in the hands of the Yagailo brothers, Princes
Andrei and Dmitry Olgerdovich, who had crossed over to Prince
Dmitry’s side and were in the Vanguard Regiment.
Mikhail Brenok followed the Gospel commandment that states
"Lay down thy life for thy friend,” but this selfless death also
deprived him of the acclaim he deserved as a great military
commander.
Before the battle, Brenok exchanged armor with Prince Dmitry
Donskoy and stood under the prince’s coat of arms, disguised as the
prince to lure the enemy. Prince Dmitry Donskoy fought as an
ordinary soldier in the thick of the action. Their assumption that the
enemy would attempt to decapitate the Russian forces proved correct.
The first blow struck Donskoy’s command post. Mikhail Brenok and
the other princes and boyars were slaughtered first, while Dmitry
survived despite his heavy wounds. His horse was killed under him
twice. Ordinary soldiers found him under a tree after the battle. Did
Brenok know what he was risking? I think he did. This makes his
heroic act all the more significant. He died from a split forehead, or,
in the language of the time, "brow.” From the Russian word for
brow, "chelo,” came his posthumous alias, Tchelitchew. Thus, all of
his descendants were named Tchelitchew, including myself.
9.
Pavel Ryzhenko, Kulikovo field.
Oil on canvas,150x230 cm. 2005. Private collection
I found out about all of this in 1954, sitting on the porch of a
house in the historic Russian town of Uglich, which I was visiting
from Rybinsk during my summer vacation.
10Pavel Tchelitchev 1948, by George Platt Lynes.
Born in 1898 to an aristocratic family, Pavel Tchelitchew was
raised in Moscow until the Russian Revolution forced his family to
flee. From 1918 to 1920, he studied at the Kiev Academy under
Alexandra Exeter (a former pupil of Fernand Léger). In 1920,
Tchelitchew moved to Odessa, where he worked on stage sets for
local theaters, and in 1921, he moved to Germany. Settling in Berlin,
Tchelitchew continued designing for theater productions including Le
coq d’or at the Berlin State opera. In 1923, Tchelitchew moved to
Paris, where he turned away from the influence of futurism and
constructivism toward "a more realistic representation of objects
treated as symbols of cosmic order: eggs, cab bags and constellations
of stars.” [ As Stephen Prokopoff explains, in Paris, Tchelitchew
11"became the ideologue of a small band of artists, known in France by
the term Néo-Humanisme, who specialized in dream-like landscapes
and figures in somber, usually blue, tonalities; they included Eugene
Berman and his brother Leonid Berman, Christian Bérard and André
Lanskoy. Such work was greatly indebted to Russian Symbolist
painting at the turn of the century and enriched by Tchelitchew’s very
personal elaboration of the simultaneous perspectives of Cubism.”
In 1925, he exhibited an oil painting at the Salon d’Automne
titled Basket of Strawberries, which aroused the interest of Gertrude
Stein, and he soon became her protégé. More importantly, his use of
the basket in this composition marked the beginning of his interest in
visual analysis of the underlying structures within a variety of forms.
In the mid-1920s, Tchelitchew limited his palette to earth tones and
continually pared it down until it consisted only of grays and whites.
He used heavy impasto and sometimes incorporated coffee grounds
and house paint. In 1926, he participated in a group exhibition at the
Galerie Drouet with Bérard, the Berman brothers, and Kristians
Tonny. Their shared emphasis on the human figure and its placement
in romantic and melancholy environments led to their being
collectively labeled neo-romantic. As he began creating metamorphic
compositions—in which a particular image would be created out of
thematically relevant forms (for example: clowns whose faces and
bodies are comprised of circus figures)—Tchelitchew’s art became
more closely associated with surrealism. However, while it shares
surrealism’s unsettling quality reminiscent of a churning unconscious
mind, Tchelitchew eschewed automatism as a technique. Instead, like
the post-surrealists of the American West Coast, Tchelitchew chose
his subject matter and composed his images with conscious
deliberation. In the late 1920s, multiple images increasingly became
the focus of his art. In these works, Tchelitchew sought to reveal the
organic substructure of an object as well as its place in space and
time. Through a synthesis of these components, he intended to reveal
"not just the illusion of [an] object as seen by [the] normal eye but the
sum of inner knowledge as well.” In other words, memory and
imagination form a visual field that an artist can reproduce just like he
or she would an external, objective landscape, figure, or still life. As
the 1930s progressed, Tchelitchew expanded his color palette and
complicated his use of space.
12By the mid-1930s, he was creating compositions based on
triple perspective and foreshortening. In 1934, he came to the United
States for the first time and had his first US one-man show at the
Julian Levy Gallery. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, he continued
designing sets for ballets, most notably those in association with
George Balanchine and Igor Stravinsky. His most celebrated
painting, Hide-and-Seek, was completed in 1942 and was
immediately acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York,
where he also had a large retrospective the same year. In 1943,
merging his interest in alchemy with "the anatomical illustrations of
the [sixteenth century] Flemish anatomist and physician Andreas
Vesalius,” Tchelitchew began his first "interior landscapes,” noted for
their depiction of "the human body, with its veins and arteries, as
transparent, in order to suggest the transcendence of the spirit over
material substance.” As these figures evolved over the following
years, he increasingly returned to the simplicity of his original wire
basket idea so that his "overlapping forms would not seem clogged.”
The use of clean spiral lines became increasingly pervasive, and by
1950 his images were composed completely of rhythmic spiraled lines
with all volumes entirely transparent.
Believing that these works approached the fourth dimension—
that of time—Tchelitchew intended them to reveal a sense of unity
through
diversity and continuity in the face of change. Throughout his
professional career, Tchelitchew exhibited frequently in London,
Paris, Rome, and cities all over the United States.
Once Pavel Fyodorovich Tchelitchew was asked, "Why did
you draw an angel with wings growing out of his chest? Where did
you see an angel with wings growing like that?”
Pavel Tchelitchew replied, "Have you seen many angels?” He
personally saw angels in people. Shortly before his death, he
produced an entire series of "portraits of angels,” where a person
shines through the stars. Among the few who understood and
appreciated the mystical surrealism of my great-uncle were: the poet
Edith Sitwell, the writer Gertrude Stein, and the art critic Parker
Tyler, who wrote The Divine Comedy of Pavel Tchelitchew: A
Biography. Tchelitchew emigrated to Europe to escape communism,
and from there to the US to escape fascism. He lived in the US
surrounded by a small circle of admirers and patrons, in horror of the
13encroaching materialism. His painting, Cache-cache (Hide-and-
Seek), is now on view in the Guggenheim Museum in New York. In
the 1940s, people crowded in front of it and spent hours studying the
incomprehensible, enticing artwork.
Cache-cache is a reminiscence on an untroubled childhood in
the domain of my great-grandfather, Fyodor Sergeevitch Tchelitchew.
The village of Dubrovka in the province of Kaluga is the birthplace of
this branch of the Tchelitchew family. Pavel Tchelitchew loved to go
into the forest with his sisters, and there, in a clearing, he first
experienced religion. "I worship the trees!” he said to his sister
Maria, a future prisoner of Stalin’s concentration camps.
After the fateful year of 1917, our family continued to live on
the ancestral estate. The peasants sent a delegation to Lenin, asking
him to leave my great-grandfather, with his large family, in Dubrovka
as a forester. Pavel Tchelitchew's father, my grandfather Fyodor
Tchelitchew, had forested the entire province of Kaluga. The revenue
from his estate was seven million rubles, which was an enormous sum
of money at the time. All the trees have since been chopped down
and the land is now bare. Not a trace is left of the lush fruit orchard.
Lenin received the delegation and gave the order: "Evict
everyone in 24 hours.” The large family barely fit in the wagon. My
great-grandfather with his wife and Pavel with his sisters Natalya,
Varvara, Maria, Sofia and Alexandra were laughing. A compassionate
peasant asked, "Why are you laughing? You know what suffering
awaits you.” Only three sisters survived, as in Chekhov's famous play:
Maria in Stalin's concentration camp, Alexandra who emigrated to
Paris, and Varvara, the most successful; her husband was shot but she
lived in Moscow and taught literature in a Kremlin school. One of
her pupils was Stalin's daughter, Svetlana.
Pavel sent his sister Varvara packages from Europe and then
from America, containing food for their sister Maria, who languished
in exile in Siberia. I have kept Pavel Tchelitchew's letters to his sister
Varvara, in which he tries to explain that his artwork is not madness
but a new spiritual vision. He saw people in a mystical, spherical
perspective, which Russian philosopher Pavel Florensky called
"Reverse perspective.” Pavel Tchelitchew, in faraway America, knew
nothing about the work of Pavel Florensky. Nor did he know about
the existence of Florensky, imprisoned in the Solovki special camp.
But he came to the same conclusions as Florensky.
14Pavel Tchelitchew spent the last years of his life in Italy, near an
orthodox monastery, living the secluded life of a recluse. Yet, Pavel
Tchelitchew was seeking an exit to the invisible fourth dimension.
His paintings became even more mystical. He thought a great deal
about Orthodox icons and, in the end, came to the conclusion that the
image of the almond-shaped halo used in medieval Christian art to
highlight the figure of Christ rising to the heavens, and sometimes the
figures of rising saints, was a diagram of the entire universe.
In mysticism, Vesica Piscis or "almond” ("mandorla” in
Italian) is a symbol of purity and virtue. The mandorla, due to its oval
shape, was, in ancient times, a symbol of the vulva. It is also a
graphic depiction of the flame, a symbol of spirituality. On the other
hand, it symbolizes the dualistic unity of Sky and Earth, depicted as
two intersecting arcs.
In connection with that symbolism, Pavel Tchelitchew's
paintings became more refined, liberated of all substance. First, the
human body became transparent to him, like an X-ray photograph.
Then the anatomical outline disappeared and a shining diagram of the
human soul emerged, like a web of starlight. In Moscow’s Donskoy
Cemetery, Pavel's sisters, Natalya, Maria and Varvara, repose in the
family tomb. We do not know where my grandmother Sofia is
buried, and Pavel Fyodorovich died and was buried in 1957 in Rome,
Italy—the motherland of all artists.
Let us contemplate his illustration of the painting Hide-and-
Seek, which hangs now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York: a
tree, a road, a womb, a hand, a foot. What does it mean?
It is the cosmic body of an immortal person, merged with
everything living. The crown-hand points to the heavens and the
root-foot disappears into the ground. Heads of angel-children, like
leaves, cover the crown in a circle from winter to summer and an
infant flies out at us head first from a womb-like hollow in the trunk.
This is the death of an artist and the birth of angels.
15Detail of the painting Hide-and-Seek.
When I first saw this painting, on a postcard sent to my
parents from New York, I, like my parents, was filled with the
awareness that it illustrates my birth as the succession of the
Tchelitchew lineage. Pavel Tchelitchew had no children. He later
sent me paints and paintbrushes and I started drawing. Since then,
this mystical phenomenon has entered my consciousness and has in
many ways defined my worldview and attitude towards the impact of
figurative art on man.
16Artist Pavel Tchelitchew, Hide-and-Seek Derby, Vermont and New
York, June 1940 - June 1942. Museum of Modern Art in New York
(MoMA).
Pavel Tchelitchew’s father, Fyodor Sergeevich Tchelitchew,
died in 1942. I was born on November 12th of the same year. Pavel
Tchelitchew was unmarried and had no children. In his letters to
Russia, he wrote about how his painting, Cache-Cache, was a
depiction of me as the successor of our ancient lineage. It is not
surprising that reproductions of this painting made a great impression
on me when I saw them in 1956.
17Looking at them, I came to understand that chaos and
coincidence are always fraught with the highest significance. In this
painting, I saw a metametaphor. The world is divided by man, yet
multiplied by everything else. No matter how you break down the
world with the scalpel of reason, perception is impossible without
man, and man is that first atom that we "multiply” by everything else.
I could say that we can look into the blade of a knife as into a mirror,
and we can cut with a mirror; that a mirror is ultimately a cross
section of vision and the reflecting plane can be narrowed to the
thickness of a knife blade. A metametaphor is a metaphor in which
each object is the universe. No such metaphor existed before.
Before, everything was compared. The poet as the sun, or as a river,
or as a streetcar. Man is, in fact, everything he writes about. There is
no tree separate from the earth, no earth separate from the sky, no sky
separate from the universe, no universe separate from man. That is the
vision of the man-universe. A metametaphor differs from a metaphor
in the same way that a metagalaxy differs from a galaxy. Become
accustomed to metametaphorical vision, and your eye will see a
thousand times more than it saw before. That is why I relate so well
to monotyping. A monotype is a unique print made by painting
directly onto a metal plate and then pressing paper against it. The
resulting image will be in reverse. Since the plate is not permanently
marked, it can only be printed once. I learned about the genre from
two artists: my friends Alexander Lozovoy and Nikolai Gritsanchuk.
Nikolai brought me acrylic paints, glass and paper and showed me
how to make a monotype. He did it out of appreciation for my poetry
and for my great-uncle Pavel Tchelitchew’s art. The most interesting
thing in monotyping is the unexpected result in the print. But it
becomes even more interesting when it turns out you have predicted
the result. A premonition that the print will turn out exactly as you
have guessed it would. Equally important is the freedom of
perception. Each person imagines what he or she wants to see in the
image. It is even more noteworthy when the freely imagined result
coincides in some way with the author’s intention. It can be said that
the monotypes illustrate my poetry. However, the contrary is also
true, even though poetry cannot be an illustration of anything. The
sound in poetry is the equivalent of color in art and in any figurative
genre. Poetry is the ultimate expression of human freedom, and
monotyping is one of the freest genres.
18The cover of the magazine "Poets” with the monotype Kedrov-
Tchelitchew
19The Gallery of my monotypes
Kedrov-Tchelitchew, Window into the Fourth Dimension, paper,
acrylic, 50õ70, 2013
20Kedrov-Tchelitchew, Human Genome, paper, acrylic, 50õ70, 2013
21Kedrov-Tchelitchew, Ice and Fire, paper, acrylic, 50õ70, 2013
22Kedrov-Tchelitchew, Many Worlds of Penrose 3 , paper, acrylic,
50õ70, 2013
3 Sir Roger Penrose OM FRS (born 8 August 1931) is an English mathematical
physicist, mathematician and philosopher of science. He is the Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor
of Mathematics at the Mathematical Institute of the University of Oxford, as well as an
Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College.
Penrose is known for his work in mathematical physics, for his contributions to general
relativity and cosmology. He has received several prizes and awards, including the 1988
Wolf Prize for physics, which he shared with Stephen Hawking for their contribution to our
understanding of the universe.
23Kedrov-Tchelitchew, Window into the Fourth Dimension, paper,
acrylic, 50õ70, 2013
24Kedrov-Tchelitchew, Seventh Heaven, paper, acrylic, 50õ70, 2013
25Kedrov-Tchelitchew, Euclid Did Not Know What..., paper, acrylic,
50õ70, 2013
26Kedrov-Tchelitchew, Infinity Everywhere, paper, acrylic, 50õ70, 2013
27Kedrov-Tchelitchew, Flashes in the Sun, paper, acrylic, 50õ70, 2013
28Kedrov-Tchelitchew, Everything Will Come to Light, paper, acrylic,
50õ70, 2013
29Kedrov-Tchelitchew, The Possibility of a Meeting, paper, acrylic,
50õ70, 2013
30Kedrov-Tchelitchew, Spring, paper, acrylic,
50õ70, 2013
31Kedrov-Tchelitchew, Passions OF, paper, acrylic, 50õ70, 2013
3233THE THEORY OF PARALLEL WORLDS
The taste and scent of stars have been familiar to me since
childhood. I perceive them even now. The sweet, slightly bitter taste
of Sirius, the red-blue tart taste of Cassiopeia and the perfumed
fragrance of the Big Dipper. My mother called me the stargazer, but I
was simultaneously an orchestra conductor. Any music I heard on the
radio, I immediately started conducting. I did not distinguish the
melody but conducted some kind of noise and clatter. The chorus of
stars was, for me, not an abstract concept but distinctly audible sound.
It had become my poetry a long time ago. If I were conducting the
music of my own poem, I would have long since been transformed
into a hundred-armed Shiva.
The sky of a thousand mouths and a thousand eyes kissed me
with its light and caressed me with eyelashes of stars. It is not true
that Heaven is invisible; just raise your eyes to the sky and it is before
you. Flammarion said that if the starry sky had been visible in just
one spot of the earth, millions of pilgrims would converge there. But
the invisible sky, discovered by Albert Einstein, is even more
deserving of adoration. The twentieth century, despite all its horrors,
revealed the world on the other side of the universe and bestowed it
upon science. To dash at the speed of light is to see the world through
the eyes of Angels.
The great Albert's angelic view of light is contemporary art and
metametaphor in poetry. No church has taught me as much as
Lobachevsky and Einstein revealed. Unfortunately, physicists and
mathematicians talk about Heaven in the language of hell. Pavel
Florensky was the first to attempt to translate Einstein into the
language of Heaven in his work, The Imaginary in Geometry. Yet
there was not a single book in which I found that endless, intimate
internalizing of the universe that feels innate to me.
"Between the poet and the muse is a solar cord,” said my
colleague, poet Alexei Parshchikov. A cord between oneself and the
universe, or, more precisely, that delicious tug drawing one into other
worlds and an even more delicious tug drawing all worlds into
oneself. Not by a single chakra but by the whole of one's internal and
external, or rather, inner-outer being.
34My world cannot be divided into internal and external, into
cosmos and body, into spirit and substance. Substance is spiritual and
the spirit is corporal. Life is filled with the presence of death, and
death bubbles over with life. Men and women are single-bodied
organisms, separate only in outward appearance. Similarly, we are
only separate from the starry sky in outward appearance. "The stars
are my guts,” said my godson, Andrei Vrady, when he was 6 years
old. By the age of 7, he had forgotten it.
My astral memory extends back to the moment of my birth, when
the delectable cord drew me through constricting space to the present
world. There was also a moment when my inner—maternal—and
outer worlds were not separated by a boundary. In all appearance, it
was one world before the umbilical cord was cut. The trauma of that
cut was so great that I stubbornly refused to live until the wise lady
doctor brought a spoonful of sterlet broth to my mouth. It is a
mystery how she managed to find sterlet in Rybinsk in 1942, under
the continuous bombings.
I later found out that in the forests of Rybinsk in the 18th century,
one of my Tchelitchew ancestors founded a Rosicrucian residence.
He was an artillery commander. In the contradictory history of the
middle ages, there are some mysterious pages that seem encrypted,
and reading them is quite challenging. The classical "Golden Middle
Ages” (11th to early 14th centuries), despite attempted investigation,
remain a mystery, that forge and crucible of alchemy where religious
rites are performed. This is where we should search for the lost
treasure of the Spirit, which crusading knights chased to the seductive
East. West and East flowed into each other, merging into the elixir of
Wisdom, Knowledge and Light.
Mysterious brotherhoods and
orders, the Rosicrucians, whose existence became surrounded by
legends, concealed the Treasure that enriched those who touched it,
even at the cost of their lives, because its possessor gained perfection
and purity. After its tragic culmination in the obviously fake Templar
Trials of 1314, when the Grand Master of the order, Jacques de
Molay, and his associate, Geoffroi de Charney, were burned at the
stake, the sacral era entered a downfall; but what it amassed was not
lost, it was embodied in the search for successors who would strive to
alter the world's imperfection.
Moreover, in the year of my birth, 1942, 90-year-old scientist
Nikolai Alexandrovich Morozov died in Rybinsk. His life story is
35amazing. His great-grandfather was a relative of Peter I. Yet, this
noble birth did not stop the father of the future scientist, Peter
Shchepochkin, to unite in civil matrimony (unrecognized in church)
with a serf woman from his domain in Novgorod, Anna Plaksina. He
freed her and gave her the name «Morozova», registering her as a
citizen of the town of Mologa. Another citizen registered in Mologa
was N. A. Morozov, who took his mother's last name and the
patronymic of his godfather, Mologa landowner A. I. Radozhitsky.
During one of his milestone birthday celebrations, in Borok, Morozov
took the guests to his birthplace and said, "Here, there were baths, and
these linden trees have replaced the ponds. My mother delivered me
in a bath. She did not have a doctor, or even a midwife. She managed
on her own and washed me in the pond here... And I turned out just
fine.”
The anecdote is amusing, but not quite plausible. There is evidence
that Morozov's father truly loved his chosen one, invested in her
education, which was supported by the presence of a well-stocked
library in the manor house. "I have been very interested in science
since my childhood,” wrote N. A. Morozov in his 1926
autobiography, "When I found two astronomy textbooks in my
father's library, I became intrigued and read both books, although I
did not understand the mathematical parts in them.”
He participated in the attempted assassination of emperor
Alexander II. In 1882, he was sentenced to life-long hard labor. He
was incarcerated in the Peter and Paul and Shlisselburg fortresses
until 1905. Upon his liberation, he became a Freemason. From 1918,
he was the director of the Lesgaft Institute of Natural Sciences and
honorary member of the USSR Academy of Sciences. He left behind
many works in various fields of natural and social science. He is also
known as a writer, poet and author of historical literature. He studied
astronomy, combining it with chronology and the determination of
authentic dates in world history. I called him the decipherer of stars.
His soul must have connected with me, and I became a «stargazer»
for life.
It is extraordinary that Morozov saw in the Bible only planets and
stars, but did not notice constellations. Similarly to Russian folklorist
Afanasyev, he often mistook descriptions of constellations for cloud
shapes. This blindness to constellations was quite characteristic of the
solar school. In the 1970s, in the Joy of All Who Sorrow Church on
36Bolshaya Ordynka Street in Moscow, I listen to Archbishop Kiprian’s
sermon. It was in honor of the Day of Our Lady of Kazan. "The
miraculous icon is now lost or hidden somewhere in America. But
look at the starry sky and here She is before you.” Saint Basil the
Great said that wrong are those who say that the countenance of
Christ is concealed from humans until the second coming. Is not the
Sun the Savior’s countenance? Elsewhere, he says that the sun is the
heart of Jesus. The outline of the constellation Cassiopeia can be
clearly seen in the image of Hodegetria with her hands extended in
blessing and the image of the Mother of God holding over us the
honest omophorion of the Milky Way. Only a blind man will not
distinguish Orion’s constellation in the drawing of broad-shouldered
Osiris. The torn Osiris and Dionysus are the Moon falling into its
phases and simultaneously the Sun, setting in the West and rising in
the East. "Thou art the sun, the sun coming down sometimes,” is
sung in the remembrance of The Passion of the Christ. The episode
of the garments of Jesus being ripped to shreds reminds us of the
ripping to shreds of Osiris and Dionysus. "Thou shalt divide my
robes and cast lots for my garments.” The seamless robe of Christ is
the entire starry sky above us. It is also the star-studded cloak of Isis.
"Clad in light as in garments, naked thou standest at the judgment.”
But the sky is not only the garments of Christ; it is also the skin of
the universal being, Adam Kadmon. On the arm of each person, there
is a clear print of the constellation Cassiopeia and the Milky Way
intersecting it.
Adam Kadmon is a phrase in the religious writings of Kabbalah
meaning "original man”. The oldest mainstream rabbinic source for
the term Adam ha-Ḳadmoni is Numbers Rabbah x., where Biblical
Adam is styled, unusually, not Ha-Rishon ("the first”), but "Ha-
Kadmoni” ("the original”). Numbers Rabbah is dated to the 12th
century CE. In Kabbalah, Adam Kadmon ("above”) is the first of the
comprehensive Five Spiritual Worlds in creation, distinguished from
Biblical Adam Ha-Rishon ("below”), who included within himself all
future human souls before the sin of the Tree of Knowledge. The
spiritual realm of Adam Kadmon represents the sephirah (divine
attribute) of Keter ("crown”), the specific divine will and plan for
subsequent creation.
37Everyone remembers the beginning of Dante's Divine Comedy:
"Midway
upon
the
journey
of
our
life
I found myself within a forest dark” This is followed by an event that
forever immortalized the name of this legendary Florentine. Dante
visited Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. The seven circles of Hell that
the poet traversed added nearly nothing to our knowledge of the world
and man. Many think that Dante saw everything. Auschwitz,
Hiroshima, AIDS and many other catastrophes known to man in his
mortal life. The surprising thing for our contemporaries was the
description of the intermediate state between Hell and Heaven, called
Purgatory. Before his time, nobody knew about the existence of this
sort of acclimatization zone between death and immortality. It seems
that this was a discovery even for Dante. The ancients thought that a
person spends his life preparing for death. This contains a grain of
truth in that death is the last trial in this world before we enter the
gates of eternity.
38Even climbing a high mountain, an alpinist requires 2-3 months of
acclimation to the altitude. It takes even longer for future astronauts
to become accustomed to weightlessness, simulated in a soundproof
chamber. Why not suppose that our entire Earth is such a structure,
designed for the acclimation of humanity to immortality. Immortality
is even more unusual than weightlessness. In weightlessness, there is
no top or bottom while in immortality, there is no past, present or
future. Everything exists forever and, in a way, simultaneously. If
you include in this immensity our mortal life, it will no longer be in
the past, future or present, but forever. Here it makes sense to talk
first about Hell, then about Purgatory, and finally about Paradise.
Hell is the constant presence in eternity of the evil committed on
Earth. Purgatory is a similar, eternal juxtaposed presence of good and
evil. Paradise is a sudden and eternal transformation of good and evil
into something completely different. We are not quite ready for this
something different. The problem is that even in our mortal life we
are often unable to rejoice. Yet, we are very much inclined to suffer.
"Live and rejoice,” said Christ. "How can we rejoice, with all that is
going on around us?!” we exclaim in reply. So in our life on Earth,
evil devours good and sorrow kills joy. Physiologists actually talk
about the existence of two areas in the brain: Hell and Paradise. They
switch on in turn and a person feels alternately hot and cold. This
sounds nonsensical. But let’s consider the circumstances in which
one would alternate contrasting conditions. It is the process used to
harden steel. There is no nonsense in nature. Alternating Hell and
Paradise in mortal life serves as a preparation for Purgatory, where
one finally learns not to fall into despair and gloom at the sight of
evil. In eternity, as in mortal life, evil is indestructible but
surmountable. Hell is not destroyed, but passed through, overcome.
The ability to imprison evil in a dungeon, "have no memory of evil”,
"step away from evil and do a good deed,” does not mean capitulating
before the forces of darkness. You just cannot let evil enter inside
you. "Darkness, know where you belong.” Evil should stay in the
outside world, without penetrating into the soul. "Outer darkness” is
Hell, exiled from the soul. Only people of great faith and saints can
"forgive everything and forget evil.” This domain has its own Grand
Masters, record holders and world champions. We plain mortals,
however, can be content with simple gymnastics.
39Our goals must be realistic, so as not to discourage and
disappoint ourselves with unreachable records. If you forgive
someone once per day or stop nurturing a heartache, that is enough to
bring you one hair’s breadth closer to Paradise. Everyone thinks that
eternal life is somewhere far away from us, in the boundless expanse
of the Universe.
In reality, it is not just near us, but inside us. "God’s Kingdom inside
you.” There is no need to go worlds away to get closer to Paradise.
You need simply to get closer to yourself. Remember yourself. If
you want, you can love yourself. Yes! All the talk of loving one’s
neighbor has no meaning if a person does not love himself. It is said,
"Love thy neighbor as thyself.” It is ourselves we do not love. We
torture ourselves with memories, we nurture resentments, we carry
sorrow. Yet we should forget our sorrows, forgive insults and nurture
joy. Let our life be, if not Paradise, at least the Purgatory discovered
by the great Dante. He was exiled from his native Florence. He was
lonely in his personal life and in his views, but he overcame Hell
within himself, passed through Purgatory and earned Paradise. Often,
people say, "I do not believe in God and the afterlife.” You do not
have to believe in it. But you can believe in yourself. Man is a
strange creature. He cannot do many things: see in the dark like a cat,
run at the speed of a kangaroo, hear ultrasound, fly like a bird, live in
water like a fish; yet he can live in eternity in the present, if he wants
to.
For this he has two gifts: the gift of seeing good and evil and a
second, even more important gift, which is to choose good. The first
gift brings man suffering and brings him to Purgatory. The second
gives him Paradise on Earth. Life on Earth is acclimatization to
eternity. Time is an illusion; we are immortal. What people call time
is anything that is combined into a whole, yet invisible, moving,
uniform and expressed in alternating symbols (day, night, morning,
evening, winter, spring, summer, etc.).
To the human mind, the difference between space and time is
movement. Time flows, while space is motionless. Einstein shattered
the traditional perception. First, there is no separate time and space,
there is space-time or chronotope. Secondly, time and space are both
in motion, subject to change, can constrict and expand at speeds close
to 300,000 km/s. Finally, there is null time and null space at the
speed of 300,000 km/s. Unfortunately, in our daily life, everything
40remains the same. Our perception is not based on Einstein, but rather
on Aristotle or Saint Augustine. The past is memory, the present is
feeling and the future is expectation. These three spiritual states
make us dogmatists. We believe that time can pass, or slip away, or
come. It is more difficult to imagine that there is no time, or that it is
null.
People do not have the experience of flying at the speed of light
and they do not know what it is like. Rather, they know it now, but
only theoretically. Zero time is the time of light. The Kingdom of
Heaven, where there is no past or future, is Nirvana stretching into
eternity.
Stop, moment, thou art so fair.
No, continue. Do not stop.
Goethe, Faust
As we can see, Dante Durant Alighieri, author of The Divine Comedy,
and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, author of the tragedy Faust, turn to
the understanding of the interaction between time, space, the divine
spark and human life. This is no coincidence.
It is no coincidence that two great writers and poets, thinkers and
scientists, turn to this and related themes.
Theory of Colors (German: Zur Farbenlehre) is a book by Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe about the poet's views on the nature of colors
and how humans perceive them. Published in 1810, it contains
detailed descriptions of phenomena such as colored shadows,
refraction, and chromatic aberration.
The work originated in Goethe's occupation with painting and mainly
exerted an influence onto the arts (Philipp Otto Runge, J. M. W.
Turner, the Pre-Raphaelites, Wassily Kandinsky).
Although Goethe's work was rejected by physicists, a number of
philosophers and physicists have concerned themselves with it,
including Thomas Johann Seebeck, Arthur Schopenhauer (see:
On Vision and Colors), Hermann von Helmholtz, Rudolf Steiner,
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Werner Heisenberg, Kurt Gödel, and Mitchell
Feigenbaum.
Goethe's book provides a catalog of how color is perceived in a wide
variety of circumstances, and considers Isaac Newton's observations
to be special cases. Unlike Newton, Goethe's concern was not so
41much with the analytic treatment of color, as with the qualities of how
phenomena are perceived. Philosophers have come to understand the
distinction between the optical spectrum, as observed by Newton, and
the phenomenon of human color perception as presented by Goethe—
a subject analyzed at length by Wittgenstein in his comments on
Goethe's theory in Remarks on Color.
All of this convinced me that poetry and poetic works are a more
complicated phenomenon than we admit. Undoubtedly, the word and
the image it generates is the basis of poetry. I started writing poems
as a child. But for decades, government publishers did not publish
them. There were no other publishers in the USSR. For many years,
I taught literature in the only literary university in the world whose
students were Soviet writers and poets. I read their prose and poetry
but did not show my own to anyone except for my wife, Elena
Katsuba, and my closest friends. One of them was a distinguished
poet of the 20th and 21st centuries, Andrei Voznesensky. He was a
friend and honorary member of DOOS (Russian acronym for the
"Voluntary Society for the Protection of Dragonflies.”) He released
Russian poetry from the prison of Socialist Realism into Neo-
futurism. He gave Russian poetry an unprecedented swiftness, visual
quality, and energy. He perpetuated the best traditions of early
Mayakovsky and his teacher, Boris Pasternak, who noted the
appearance of Voznesensky, both in writing and speech, as a
significant event. Nevertheless, we lived in the USSR, where the
government conception of socialist realism in literature and art was
the norm.
My work did not fit that category. So, I gradually
collected my own poems and texts for future books and my scientific
theory of the metametaphor. My wife assisted me in everything,
among other things, with her own poetry and in our joint efforts in
creating an association of poets we called DOOS ("Voluntary Society
for the Protection of Dragonflies”).
My wife, Elena Katsuba, was born in 1946 in Kamensk, near
Rostov, and educated at Kazan State University. She has lived in
Moscow for many years, working as a journalist. Her first poem was
published in 1963.
She was the founding member of the DOOS group of poets
along with me. Since then, she and I have been editing the Samizdat
Journal of POets.
42Samizdat (Russian pronunciation: [səmɨzˈdat]) was a key form of
dissident activity across the Soviet bloc, in which individuals
reproduced censored and underground publications by hand and
passed the documents from reader to reader. This grassroots practice
to evade official Soviet censorship was fraught with danger, as harsh
punishments were meted out to people caught possessing or copying
censored materials.
Elena Katsuba in the studio of artist Margarita Syurina with her
self-portrait, created during a master class given by Syurina.
January 2017
Elena Aleksandrovna Katsuba was a television reviewer for the
newspaper Novye Izvestia and wrote a weekly column called "The
Bookshelf” in the Russian Courier. She is the Executive Secretary of
the Journal of POets and its art designer for almost every issue,
participant in Russian poetry readings at the Sorbonne, at the Leipzig
Book Fair, the Russian Book Fair in Paris (2005), the "Kiev Laurels”
Festival, the "Seminarium hortus humanitati” seminar in Riga, the
first international literature festival "Europe 2008” in Prague,
Laureate of the festival "Others” for her palindrome poetry, Poet
laureate of the journal "Children of Ra” for her selection of poetry
"Stained-glass Sighted Windows” and for her essay, "GRAMMAR
OF VIRTUAL LOVE” (Poetics of love in A. Tolstoy’s novella
"Count Cagliostro” and in the short story "Grammar of Love” by I.
Bunin).
43Elena Katsuba was also the first to use, in her poetry, the technique
of creating a word out of other words by substituting one letter at a
time, calling the effect "Elemental Mutation.” Thus, darkness turns
into light, the sky into the sea and an elephant into a fly. She also
created the "First Dictionary of Palindromes.” Andrei Voznesensky
called these books "the poetic conclusion of centuries XX and XIX”
(palindrome numerals).
Elena Katsuba
44INSIDE OUT
Now I would like to be so bold as to express an idea that will
seem unbelievable to most people. A person is not located inside the
Universe, but simultaneously inside and outside it, embracing it with
his being. We have the impression that we are inside the cosmos, but
this is an illusion, just like that of the Sun’s motion around the Earth.
In fact, it is a question of vantage point. If we direct our mind’s
gaze towards ourselves from the moon or from Mars, or from faraway
galaxies, we will see a tiny creature whose body embraces all of
creation within itself.
Take a small toy rubber ball and throw it into the ocean. Clearly,
the ocean is outside and the ball is inside it. Now try, with your
mind’s eye, to turn the toy ball inside out. As you are turning it inside
out, there will be a moment when the ball encloses the ocean inside it.
Imagine that instead of a ball, there is a person, and instead of the
ocean, there is the universe, and you will understand what happens to
a person when he turns inside out in the cosmos. Not just a person, in
fact, but anything living.
A bud turns inside out in creation:
Thus a leaf and a flower emerge,
A snail crawls out of its shell,
Enveloping it within itself.
And man?
Engulfing the galaxy with my spleen,
I crawled into myself like a stellar snail,
Slowly dragging behind me
The whirling galaxy,
Like a shell.
My astral home became vacant without me.
The point is that we can conceptually crawl out of the shell of
our galaxy and out of the entire universe, while enveloping the world
within us. Since any thought process generates feelings, such
thoughts will not leave us indifferent.
45In an instant, man can embrace not only all of space, but all of
time, including past, future and present.
...And like a startled eagle round me
I gazed and saw the earth surrounded,
Hemmed in by sky... He touched my ear,
Then t'other, and, most marked and clear,
There came to me the gentle flutter
Of angels' wings, I heard the vine...
(The Prophet, A.S. Pushkin)
In the process of turning inside out, a person exits the confines
of time and space. However old the universe may be, man has more
time.
Having twice experienced such cosmic enlightenment, I
realized that the Copernican Revolution must be continued. People
refuted the illusion of a flat Earth, realizing that it is round. In the
same way, we need to dismiss the illusion that we abide inside the
universe and separately from the universe.
The universe is our viscera. It is not even our home; it is our
body. In the universe, there is nothing that does not exist within us
and inside us there is nothing that does not exist in the universe.
The sky is the altitude of our gaze.
The gaze is the depth of the sky.
Pain is the touch of God.
God is the touch of pain.
Man is the inside of the sky.
The sky is the inside of man.
The distance between people is filled with stars.
The distance between stars is filled with people.
At the moment when the body turns inside out, it lights up and
all weight seems lost. It is something like a motionless flight from
oneself and into oneself at the same time. The furthest point of the
universe becomes close. And inversely, one’s body expands to fill the
46universe. There is a distinct feeling that the future is suddenly in the
past and that the past is perceived as the future. In this way, even
one’s own death has already been experienced and we relive our birth,
so to speak.
In a nutshell, turning inside out is something bigger than
immortality. I called this cosmic reversal "Inside out” to emphasize
its universal core. The US astronaut Edgar Mitchell, having stepped
on the moon and glanced at the Earth from far away, suddenly felt
that the entire universe became a part of him. Only a part, because
man is bigger than the universe opening up before his eyes.
I tried many times to describe what happened to me on the
moon, not in space, but here, on Earth, and once I wrote the poem
"Behind the Zodiac”:
Behind the Zodiac
You are hollowed out from the outside,
Here you are, a canoe of ripples.
Behind your eyes there is no horizon.
The charcoal pupil
Trickles from the screw thread.
The sky is the moon’s wrench.
Turn it slowly.
A face will come twisting out of the ridges,
A reverse light will burst forth
In the moon’s path, blushing in each other.
Behind that freedom,
Outlined by nothing,
Undelineated,
Behind those intoxicating contours
Of developing photo paper,
Do not seek sacred signs
Do not encumber
Your imminent march into incompleteness.
And when these stones,
These intoxicating stones,
Dropping away from your body
Fall into emptiness,
47You will go through a field
Full of coolness,
Tearing from the ground
A bouquet of your resonant bodies.
Those who have not experienced their cosmic rebirth from a cosmic
womb, their reversal, or their "inside out” will most likely not
understand what I am talking about here. It is most difficult to
explain to a sightless person the meaning of light and color. Yet, one
blind, deaf and mute girl wrote the following poem:
Though my eyes are sightless,
And my ears can't hear,
Many more sensations
In my space appear.
With flexible, obedient,
Burning inspiration
I have woven life
A pattern full of cheer.
Now every schoolboy and schoolgirl easily sees what the
contemporaries of Copernicus, Galileo and Giordano Bruno could not
imagine: the Earth revolving around the sun. We may need another
two or three decades for people to reorient their feelings and vision
and to perceive the universe as their immortal body. But sooner or
later, that time will come, and I am hoping it is sooner.
In examining the starry sky, we find ourselves in a world of
legends, myths, fairytales, short stories and poems familiar to many.
Since ancient times, people around the world have associated the
heavens, the stars, and the patterns they make in the sky with their
gods and goddesses. I wrote the book The Poetic Universe, published
in Russia. In it, I write in detail about these topics.
48The Flammarion print is a wood engraving by an unknown
artist that first appeared in Camille Flammarion's L'atmosphère:
meteorology popularized (1888). The image shows a man crawling
under the edge of the sky, depicted as if it were a solid hemisphere, to
look at the mysterious empire beyond. The caption translates to "A
medieval missionary tells that he has found the point where heaven
and Earth meet..."
The engraving has been used to represent a medieval
cosmology, including a flat earth bounded by a solid and opaque sky,
or firmament, and also as a metaphorical illustration of either the
scientific or the mystical quests for knowledge.
Curiosity killed the cat, but for humans it is the drive chain
propelling technical progress forward on the basis of scientific
knowledge. One of the links of that chain in the field of astronomy is
cosmology, dealing with the properties and evolution of the Universe
as a whole.
49METAMETAPHOR
Dante's heaven and hell symbolized the astral spheres and their
associated virtues and vices. By Coppo di Marcovaldo (c. 1225 – c.
1276)
Metametaphor, to me, is not a theory but one of the results of
poetic and scientific practice in the field of literature and philosophy.
At its base is Russian poetry of past centuries and the 1970s. Over
these years, the practice and theory of Russian literature developed
with varying intensities. In the 1970s-80s, Metarealism emerged as a
method of creating literary works, particularly in poetry.
The term Metarealism designates a current in Russian
literature and art that was born in the 1970s-80s. The notion
"metarealism” (meta means "through”), philosophically speaking, is
metaphysical realism.
50This means realism of the hyperphysical nature of things. The
main expression of its essence is given with metabola (the contrary of
hyperbole), which means "transfer,” "transition,” opening many
dimensions. Metabola is different from the symbol because it assumes
the interosculation of realities. And metarealism has very little to do
with surrealism, since it appeals to the superconscious and not to the
subconscious, thus opening a many-dimensional perception of the
world.
Based on this notion, I coined, for academic and practical use,
the term metametaphorism. From it, the metametaphor was born.
In the 19 th century, Pushkin’s novel in verse, Eugene Onegin, was
cited as an encyclopedia on Russian life. In the 18 th century, French
Enlightenment philosophers published The French Encyclopedia, a
collective work. I have created a poetic encyclopedia of Russian
thought from the beginning of the century and third millennium. It is
unique in that science is fully subordinate to poetry and poetry is fully
self-sufficient and independent of science. They do not unite but
coexist side-by-side, complementing each other.
I consider religion, particularly Orthodox liturgy and Jesus
Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, the highest form of poetry. For me,
the most brilliant poem of the 20 th century is Einstein’s formula
E=mc2. There is nothing comparable to this genre in philosophy or
poetry to this day. We are metametaphorists! Dante descends to the
depths of Hell, and suddenly the converging circles twist around to
form a Mobius strip and blinding light.
In the profound and shining-clear Existence
Of the deep Light appeared to me three circles
Of one dimension and three different colors.
One seemed to be reflected by the other.
It was as if time had wrapped itself into one endless moment,
like in the first instant of the "creation” of our world out of a mass of
light undistinguishable to the eye.
A single moment makes for me greater oblivion
Than five and twenty centuries...
51This was the "inside out” moment. The internal and the external
switched places:
As the geometer who sets himself
To square the circle and who cannot find,
For all his thought, the principle he needs,
Just so was I on seeing this new vision
I wanted to see how our image fuses
Into the circle and finds its place in it...
The geometric marvel that Dante sees, the fusion of face and
circle, is impossible in regular Euclidian geometry. Pavel Florensky
often spoke of Dante's non-Euclidean vision. This is not surprising,
since Florensky revealed the internal spherical perspective in
Byzantine architecture and Old Russian art. When projected onto a
sphere, the perspective point is not in the depth of the painting but
reverses into the eye. The image seems to embrace you from the right
and left and you find yourself inside an icon. The same sphere
embraces us inside the rounded walls and dome of cathedrals, and this
is also the way a person sees the sky. This inside of a sphere—a
hypersphere, where Lobachevsky’s rules of geometry apply—is the
realm of a special theory of relativity. If you come out of a church
and look at the same domes from the outside, you see the spherical
perspective of the general theory of relativity.
The human eye is a hypersphere from the inside and a sphere
from the outside. If we merge the two projections, we get an inside-
out reflection of the world. Dante sees something like this in the
finale of the Divine Comedy. The image of the face inside three fiery
circles is simultaneously on the outside, while the circles are
interwoven. This means that the curve of the shining sphere is
constantly changing; it is breathing. Inhalation—Riemann sphere;
exhalation—Lobachevsky’s hypersphere and Florensky’s reverse
perspective.
Imagine a breathing mirrored ball and your reflection in it; this
is what Dante saw. Here is the circle "whose center is everywhere
and whose circumference is nowhere.” Here, also, is Borges’s Aleph:
"Its diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was
there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror’s face, let us
52say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of
the universe.”
Internal-external perspective appeared in art at the beginning
of the century. Let us take, for example, A. Lentulov’s painting
"Iverskaya Chapel." The artist turned the interior space of the chapel
to face the outside and depicted its exterior inside the outer image.
By the rules of reverse perspective, you are embraced by the inner
space of the Iverskaya Chapel; you are inside it while standing in
front of the painting and there, inside the painting, you see the very
same chapel from the outside, with the entrance and the domes. The
metametaphor gives us this kind of vision!
It is emerging, ripening inside us, like a seed just starting to
sprout.
The children stand, their muscles tense
Their ears in swollen vats
Toys spill from the sack...
Come out into the light from the corner of the sack...
A mechanical crow, beak agape,
Catching the earth’s sphere with that triangle,
But the sphere doubles, and the crow flies helter-skelter.
A ship smaller than a sword, a sword bigger than a city,
Everything is smaller than I—let alone Swift !
The world is divided by man, and multiplied by everything
else.
(A. Parshchikov)
In the ancient Christian Topography by Cosmas Indicopleustes,
the earth is depicted as a mountain inside the crystal chest of the
heavens. To leave that crystal chest is to gain the space of the entire
universe. Daniil Kharms's character experiences this within the laws
of multi-dimensional geometry.
A thin-necked man climbed into a trunk, shut the lid behind him
and began gasping for breath.
"So,” said the thin-necked man, gasping for breath, "I am gasping
for breath in this trunk because I've got a thin neck. The lid of the
trunk is down and isn't letting any air in. I shall be gasping for
53breath, but all the same I won't open the lid of the trunk. I shall be
gradually dying. I shall see the struggle of life and death. The battle
that takes place will be an unnatural one, with the chances equal,
because under natural conditions death triumphs, and life, doomed to
death, merely struggles in vain with the enemy, clinging until the last
minute to a futile hope. But in the struggle that will take place now,
life will be cognizant of the means of victory: to achieve this, life will
have to force my hands to open the lid of the trunk. We shall see who
wins! Only there's an awful smell of naphthalene. If life triumphs, I
shall powder all the things in the trunk with makhorka tobacco. So, it
has begun: I can't breathe any more. I'm finished, that's clear. There's
no saving me now! And there are no lofty thoughts in my head. I'm
suffocating.
-- Hey! What's that then? Something just happened but I can't make
out exactly what. I saw something or heard something . . .
-- Hey! Something happened again. My God! There's no air to
breathe. It seems I'm dying . . .
-- And now what's that then? Why am I singing? My neck seems to be
hurting . . . But where's the trunk? Why can I see all the things in the
room? And I seem to be lying on the floor. But where's the trunk?”
The thin-necked man said, "So, life triumphs over death by
means unknown to me.”
This type of inversion is fully possible if our three-dimensional
space comes into contact with four-dimensional space. Allow me to
explain by using the example of passing from two dimensions to
three. Let us draw a flat, two-dimensional trunk and put a two-
dimensional paper cutout figure inside it. Naturally, in the flat space,
he cannot get out of the enclosed area, but for us it is easy to take him
out of the flat trunk and place him next to it on the same plane. The
two-dimensional character will not know what happened to him: he
cannot see the third dimension of depth, just like we cannot see the
fourth dimension.
Any description of anthropic inversion in poetry, from Nizami
to Dante, from Avvakum to Chlebnikov, from Chlebnikov to Kharms,
from a poetic point of view is a movement towards metametaphor.
And yet, metametaphor is an offspring of the 20 th century.
The birth of the metametaphor is Pushkin’s Prince Gvidon getting out
54of the barrel of three dimensions into a thousand-dimensional ocean.
It was necessary to take a step, to free oneself of something, perhaps
to overcome a psychological barrier, in order to find the words that, at
least in one’s own mind, would clearly delineate the new reality.
Once I took that mental step and found myself in that space:
Man looked back and saw himself in himself.
It was a long time ago, in the ever so past long ago.
Man was other, and the other was also another,
So they looked back, inquiring of each other.
Somebody asked, but another answered,
And another other listened,
And no one could understand,
Who was past and who was present.
Man looked back and saw himself in himself...
I came out to myself
Through—towards—from
And went under, raising above.
(K. K-T. 1963)
At the time, no one could hear those words. A horizontal
abyss of incomprehension stretched before me, and only in
1975, I met some like-minded fellow thinkers among the
young poets of the new, as yet unknown generation. Aleksei
Parshchikov, Alexander Eremenko, and Ivan Zhdanov did not
adhere to any literary groups or camps. I recognized in them
the citizens of a poetic "state of time,” where Velimir
Khlebnikov was the Chairman of the Globe, even though their
poetry was closer to early Zabolotsky, Pasternak and
Mandelstam in the period of brilliant eight-line stanzas.
Even before the blast, the candles have burned down
And space has opened up a half shoulder’s-width;
In the moon’s shaft, there was no aft,
Just a dog’s constancy on the lips.
(A. Parshchikov)
55Once again, Lobachevsky’s and Einstein’s space was opening
up, though it had seemed forever hidden in the solid, nontransparent
chest of the oft-repeated prosody: "I am lost in admiration in twenty-
seven mirrors. Incongruity and yet congruity of faces...”
Familiar poetic intonations could still be heard, but the
"twenty-seven mirrors” of the future metametaphor were opening up
their sheer perspectives. The "incongruity and yet congruity of faces”
seemed to bring me back to the original point of 1963, when "Man
looked back and saw himself in himself.” It was as if everything
began anew. I do not know where I lectured more at the time: at the
Literary Institute or at my own desk, headquarters of the
metametaphorical trinity. The content of those home seminars will
become known to anyone who reads this book. The following
episode will convey the atmosphere of those conversations.
Once we were discussing an article by a psychologist who
argued that people see the world with depth and in three dimensions
because they have two eyes. If people had only one eye, we would
see the world as a flat image.
Soon after this discussion, Alexander Eremenko left for
Saratov. He soon wrote us a letter, telling us that he had covered one
eye and plugged one ear so as to see the world in two dimensions, or
flat, so that he could then suddenly throw off the covers and "awaken”
to a three-dimensional world again. In creating this analogy with the
passage from two to three dimensions, the poet wanted to experience
what four dimensions would be like.
Of course, this was a joke, but the problem itself is a genuine
one. Passing from flat, two-dimensional vision to three dimensions
was a monumental breakthrough in art. The movie director S.
Eisenstein wrote about it in his book Nonindifferent Nature. The flat
images of ancient Egyptian frescoes, in which people, like
Flatlanders, turned to us their birdlike profiles, suddenly gained
infinite depth of dimension in the frescoes of Michelangelo and
Leonardo. It took 2000 years to pass from flat planes to three
dimensions. How long will it take to transition to four dimensions?
At that time, I wrote two poems, where the passage from
flatness to volume is played out as a sort of rehearsal before entering
the fourth dimension.
56TRAVELER
Oh, purple traveler
it is you it is I
oh flat purple traveler
it is I who answer him
he is a Chinese shadow on the wall of the sunset’s horizon
he is growing in dimension
growing, coming towards me
filling up the whole purple world
through me he passes
I am lost in him
going towards the horizon
while he, growing
fell behind long ago
and now here he is coming towards me
I suddenly realized that I cannot catch up to myself or to him
I must go back to flatness for good
dissolve in myself and stay inside the horizon
Oh, purple traveler, you are infinitely familiar to me,
like scales, a couple of dumb clavicles between right and left
for paper shadows to weigh the flat sunset.
(Ê. Ê-T. 1976)
Again and again, we replayed the idea: is it possible,
while remaining a three-dimensional creature, to reflect within
ourselves the fourth dimension? The question was raised by
Einstein and Velimir Khlebnikov. Einstein, as we recall,
thought that a person could not break the barrier. V.
Khlebnikov, even before Einstein, plunged into
Lobachevskian geometry. That is how I arrived at a two-
dimensional plane into which one can fit infinite volume: a
mirror. I was following Khlebnikov, trying to make my way
into the cosmic core of sound. And this was the first, perhaps
purely experimental solution, where sound reversed itself
along with the reflection at the neck of the mirrored chalice, or
the "re” note, and gave off a symmetrical reflection. Thus, the
text reads the same from the beginning and from the end
57towards the center, where the "re” note is at the neck of the
mirrored light chalice. Interestingly, the gap between the top
and bottom "re” note reflects the real variation in the sound
spectrum; there are no sharps or flats.
|
Looking-glass
The Looking-glass
A template
Of the Sound
Mount
Stay put
Turn up
A tone
You are not
You are all
Mount
Take yourself out
Strike right across
Like a mast
Sss – zzz
A lake of cross-section
A template of reflection
Again the face plane
Smash yourself
There is floor of the ceiling
Eyeless
Darkness
Grey
Red
Re
Do
Si
La
Sol
Fa
Me
Re
Red
58Grey
Darkness
Eyeless
There is floor of the ceiling
Smash yourself
Again the face plane
A template of reflection
A lake of cross-section
Sss – zzz
Like a mast
Strike right across
Take yourself out
Mount
You are all
You are not
A tone
Turn up
Stay put
Mount
Of the Sound
A template
The Looking-glass
(Ê. Ê-T. 1977)
An apple that can hold the entire Milky Way inside it, a universe
surrounded by a sourness that tears the ring from the pupil of the eye,
and the familiar funnel of the gaze, whose cone rises up to the
overturned ant, probing with its legs the unknown abyss of infinity:
all of these are images of anthropic inversion, or metametaphor.
Thus, going through all of the circles of metametaphorical thought,
from the purely rational to the clearly intuitive, it was as if I was
entering the laboratory of metametaphor, striving to be, to the best of
my ability, its objective researcher, combining within myself the
"actor” and the "audience.” Naturally, not I, but the reader will be the
best judge of what took shape as poetry and what remained in the
realm of pure linguistics. Nevertheless, to me, it is a unified whole,
allowing me to gauge the accuracy of my cosmological intuition.
59Allow me to go back to the image of a person inside the universe.
Derzhavin wrote, "I’m king, I’m slave, I’m worm, I’m god.” If the
entire universe is an apple, and man is inside it... And what if the
worm turns inside out and contains the entire apple inside it? After
all, a caterpillar crawls along a leaf and then becomes a chrysalis,
unwraps itself and becomes a butterfly. The Russian words for
"worm” and "womb” ("cherv” and "chrevo”) are anagrams twisting
into each other. This is the origin of the anagrammatic image of
anthropic inversion of man and the universe.
* * *
The worm,
Turning inside out as a womb,
enfolds the apple and the tree.
(Ê. Ê-T.)
Thus emerged the anagram poem, coinciding in form with the
metametaphor. In an anagram poem, the key words cherv (worm) and
chrevo (womb) play out their meanings through the entire space,
becoming the wandering center of the crystal globe.
A key word can be likened to the Alpha point which rises
during an inversion towards the Omega point. Naturally, such a
poem, even in form, is closer in appearance to the light pyramid of
world events than to building blocks.
Was Alexander Eremenko situated on that same mountain
when, in his poem, "To Hieronymus Bosch, Inventor of the
Projector,” he wrote, "I was sitting on a mountain, depicted where the
mountain is.” That image gives a sense of the new reality of
"stratified spaces,” revealed by contemporary cosmology. Sitting on
a mountain depicted where the mountain is, means being in the
universe that is located where there is a stratified version of a
different universe. This is similar to a Japanese woodblock print,
where volume is hidden, transfigured into a flat plane. Alexander
Eremenko’s inversion is a reversal of sorts, across the cosmological
axis of time to the original zero, whence 19 billion years ago the
universe projected itself. To arrive there, one must die many times,
having survived all prior deaths, and delve into the depths of
substance more abysmal than the grave itself.
60I look up at you from tombs so deep,
That my gaze, before reaching you, will double,
We will continually play out a farce so subtle.
You were never there, which means I was not either.
It must be said that the understanding of null-space of
singularity, which is quite popular among young people, is not new
for European culture, not to mention oriental cultures. Nirvana, Zen
Buddhism, apophatic theology, Nagarjuna, the existential world of
Sartre and Camus... Yet here, everything reposes on a world view
that does not involve transfigured vision.
The null-space of visibly engulfed perspectives in the poetry
of Alexander Eremenko is not a world view, but an alternative vision.
Zero is a very tangible reality. There are particles with a rest mass
equal to zero—the photon, or light. The mass of the universe is, on
the average, also equal to zero. In the geometric zero, there are
hidden galaxies of "stratified spaces.” It is therefore unsurprising that
poetic vision, twisting through zero, breaks through to new realities.
In this rubbish flying into my eyes, I will naturally find
A fitting conflict that complies with the given design,
Thus, floating up from the bottom, the triangle to its theorem
Sticks forever. You have yet to be proven.
(A. Eremenko)
It is very important here to note the course of the poetic
"proof” of a new reality when the metametaphor, having reached the
stratified spaces of visual perspective, finds a familiar stratified
meaning in the word "form.” First, having turned inside out, the root
of the word "morpheme” gives its root to the word "form”: "morph—
form,” and then, at their juncture they produce the pain-dulling
meaning of the word "morphine.”
You must be adorned with a collection of morphemes
(Oh, morphine, lost in the dazzling form of a wasp),
So that you can be recognized, each time in due form,
By possessors of bodies. The gaze returns to the first line.
61It is interesting that A. Parshchikov's anagrammatic reversal
appears in the moment of the explosion from non-existence, "zero,”
the vacuum, to the highest point of boiling life—Avvakum.
The air trembled,
Reconciling us with the vacuum
Of Avvakum and Nikon.
"Avvakum” –"vacuum” are two reversed, mutually
antithetical realities, just like Nikon and Avvakum.
Annagrams and their meanings significantly expanded the
horizons of the poetic word. Metametaphorists see the world through
a different lens.
The world is cone-shaped
Standing on its vertex,
The vertex slides along a snake,
All hope is lost.
Freight trains, as if gaining speed,
Dancing in place in a dead end,
And two molecular double helixes
Play people nearby.
(A. Parshchikov)
Admittedly, I realize that all of these cones, double helixes,
and reversing figure eights are starting to seem incessant to the reader.
But they are archetypes of the reality of the universe. This intuitive
realization led me to the creation of this text, which seems unexpected
at first glance:
The bride, shaggy-haired with light,
The weightless staircases prance
she adopts the smooth quiver,
she is weaving door hinges
chipping away at her reflection,
the voice ripped off a tree,
62she holds with her throat—partaking,
or swallowing the white scaffold,
jumping on the worm-eaten trampoline,
widening the veil, shimmering with honey
under the hip of the night axe
she personifies her fingers
slashes the sorrowful violin
drowns in the wooden hole.
The sarcophagus, whirring chatter,
of the choir, hipping the sarcophagus
will choke on heavenly frankincense
hungry grindstones "eight,”
grinding chapels
Why, daughter, are you bare, or are you nobody’s?
Or, ringing nipples, kneading lilac
is a turbo drill of impenetrable light?
In the sleek case of the two-bitted axe
One can only fit oneself.
(Ê. Ê-T.)
I wrote this in 1978, when metametaphoric theory did not exist
yet, but the metametaphor was emerging. The "two-bitted axe” is the
moon, dying and reborn; the bride, shaggy-haired with light, is a
comet and also the star of Venus and the Virgin Mary—"the un-bridal
bride.” In the Akathist hymn, it is sung, "Rejoice, staircase from
earth to heaven,” which explains why "weightless staircases prance.”
The "wooden hole” in the middle of Picasso’s inverted violin
is a black hole into the universe; the sleek case of the two-bitted axe is
the entire universe; the violin is the image of eternal femininity,
dancing on the worm-eaten trampoline symbolizes the trampling of
death.
To weave door hinges, one must turn the "microworld” of
knitting loops inside out to create the "macroworld” of door hinges.
The door itself is also a canonical reference to the Virgin—"The door
of heaven.”
Metametaphor is not a homunculus raised in a laboratory
flask. The entire theory of metacode and metametaphor emerged
63from poetry, and not the other way around. In poetry, anthropic
cosmic inversion is, in itself, a continuation of the metametamorphical
big bang. It is hard to say how close I am to realizing my dream of
putting into words the moment of the creation of the universe.
We feel that man is immeasurably small when seen from the
height of the universe. But what if it is the other way around: seen
from that height, he is actually immense? We know that one instant
in time can expand to infinity if you are moving at the speed of
relativity. The entire universe can shrink to fit into the eye of a
needle, and during this inversion, man will be bigger than the
universe.
Metametaphor, is, of course, a relative term; what matters is
the new spiritual reality that lies behind it, revealed by contemporary
physics, cosmology... and poetry. Perhaps poetry most of all.
Metametaphor occurred in different parts of the earth in poetry.
Parshchikov lived in Donetsk, Ivan Zhdanov lived in Barnaul,
Eremenko lived in a Siberian village and I was teaching in Moscow.
There is a sort of informational field that links like-minded artists into
an imperceptible astral fraternity. It may have been on Alexander
Eremenko’s mind when he wrote, with a smile:
Guileless Moscow fellow flying by,
You will be enlightened, just like Buddha.
You will receive looks of great surprise
From Ramakrishna, Kedrov-Tchelitchew and Gagarin.
Because on the frivolous bandwagon,
Where some people often speak in tongues,
On Madame Blavatsky’s moving ladder
I will occupy the lowest rung.
Kali Yuga force is centrifugal,
On the spinning circle we must stay.
We stand, clinging to each other,
On the outskirts of the Milky Way.
In "Days of Poetry,” where this poem was published in 1983,
my name was changed to Keldysh, since the KGB had already started
the "Forester” operation against me. In 1991, in the secret files of the
KGB, a document was found, dating from 1984, "The Forester is
prohibited from joining the Writer's Union.” In 1986, upon the
64demand of the KGB, I was banned from teaching in the Literary
Institute for "Antisoviet propaganda and agitation.” The alias
"Forester” was probably an association with the meaning of my name,
"Kedrov” (Cedar).
Albert Einstein once said, "In my opinion, math is the easiest
way to pull your own leg.” Any poet and reader lacking a sense of
humor can turn out to be such a hapless mathematician. Ossip
Mandelstam laughed, Khlebnikov laughed, the Futurist writers of the
Association for Real Art laughed. Metametaphor can at times be full
of irony.
We can, of course, think back to our experiments at the end of the
1970s with two-dimensional space, to get a sense of the new, ironic
conception of metametaphor in the following text by A. Parshchikov:
Along the stonework bridge I walked
Playing with visions of star wars,
All of a sudden I sensed the air
Rustling and splitting into layers...
In the doubling swarm of multiplication tables,
Where there is no initial nil,
On the stone bridge I saw from a new angle,
Whence I stepped into three-ruble bill.
We have an intuition and an excess hold
On self. An astral race,
Burning, leaving a snail-like scroll...
They are described in the Diamond Sutra
As an exaggerated shadow of the soul.
While we luxuriate in the pearly disrepute
Of passive being, beneath us they unroll...
The bank notes smell of leather and gasoline,
And if your mouth is open in your sleep, in they will crawl.
Just like Osiris, I walked in their domain,
Deceiving them by walking backwards, as if in withdrawal.
The passage into two-dimensional space of a three-ruble bill
and the wandering over "astral” watermarks and figures of intuition
with a reminiscence on the mysteries of Osiris are an image of "anti-
heaven.” Here, bank notes, as the opposite of the heavens, drive one
65into flatness, into the world of shadow. In other words, it is death, a
sort of anti-reversal, anti-resurrection. The mystery of Osiris "in
reverse.”
My wife, the poet Elena Katsuba, has her own way of
inhabiting the space of tangential spheres. She, like the poets
Parshchikov and Eremenko, are closer to the ironic Futurist poets.
Her "Mole” makes one think of Zabolotsky’s "Mad Wolf.”
A hero of the geodesic map,
Landscape enhancement is his task
A student of Escher
He comes up while going down.
Mathematician of the belly,
He transfers his own matrix into soil.
The earth outside is a mole inside.
Inside the mole is a map
Of all the labyrinths and catacombs.
In the early 1980s, my wife, Elena Katsuba, created a new
anagrammatic-combination poem. In the poem, "The Clockwork
Apple,” the word "apple” goes through 12 anagrammatic inversions,
turning into an "eye,” a "block,” "pain,” on its way through the 12
signs of the zodiac and finally, to full inversion from the core of
creation.
This rejection of Eve's apple in the remote depths of language
brings to mind the work of French psychoanalyst Lacan. Lacan
thinks that on the subconscious level, each word, looped through a
Mobius strip, generates a mass of meanings. In Elena Katsuba's
poem, the Mobius strip is wound backwards from the subconscious to
the conscious level, erasing all 12 zodiacal meanings of the word
"apple.”
The spectrum of metametaphor now arrives at the infrared and
ultraviolet zones indistinguishable to the eye, from the cosmic
inversion of space to the inversion of sound and the very meaning of a
word.
Poetry has its own internal rules of incremental progress. In
the 1930s, the Futurists of the Association for Real Art were no longer
66heard, then Khlebnikov was forgotten. Now the movement has
started up again from the point where it left off back then. The first
stroke of the celestial piston to end its standstill was the poetry of A.
Voznesensky. The mirrored locomotive of metametaphor set off on
its path again.
The mirrored locomotive
was coming from four sides
from four clear perspectives
it refracted at the fifth perspective
went from sky to sky
from earth to earth
Went from itself into itself
from light into light
Along the tracks of light
Into the distance on the the lunar crossties
splitting through the cool expanse of template
entering the tunnel of Ivan Ilyich’s pupil
Seeing the light at the end of the beginning
It brought all the light
And itself with it
The locomotive brought all air, the station
the entire sky to the last ray
It brought
all height
of stars
rounded the bend of the earth
with the ends of the earth
and gleamed like Hector before the battle
with mirrored armor through the sky...
(Ê. Ê-T. 1980)
67Kedrov-Tchelitchew, paper, acrylic, 50õ70, 2013
68Kedrov-Tchelitchew, paper, acrylic, 50õ70, 2013
69Kedrov-Tchelitchew, paper, acrylic, 50õ70, 2013
70FOUR POETIC MANIFESTES
OF METAMETAPHOR
Computer of love 1-2-3-4
1983-2000
===============================================
The front and back covers of Konstantin Kedrov-Tchelitchew's book
"The love computer” in Russian, 1989
71THE SKY IS THE HEIGHT OF A GAZE
A GAZE IS THE DEPTHS OF THE SKY
Computer of Love 1
PAIN IS THE TOUCH OF GOD
GOD IS THE TOUCH OF PAIN
A BREATH OUT IS THE DEPTH OF ONE IN
A BREATH IN IS THE HEIGHT OF ONE OUT
LIGHT IS THE VOICE OF SILENCE
SILENCE IS THE VOICE OF LIGHT
BLACKNESS IS RADIANCE SCREAMING
RADIANCE IS THE SILENCE OF BLACKNESS
A RAINBOW IS THE GLADNESS OF LIGHT
THOUGHTS ARE THE MUTENESS OF SOULS
LIGHT IS THE DEPTH OF KNOWLEDGE
KNOWLEDGE IS THE HEIGHT OF LIGHT
THE STALLION IS A CREATURE OF SPACE
THE HOUSECAT IS A CREATURE OF TIME
TIME IS SPACE CURLED INTO A BALL
SPACE IS THE STALLION UNFURLED
HOUSECATS ARE THE WILD CATS OF SPACE
SPACE IS THE TIME OF WILD CATS
PUSHKIN IS A THIEF OF TIME
PUSHKIN’S VERSE IS THE TIME OF THE THIEF
THE SUN IS THE BODY OF THE MOON
THE BODY IS THE MOON OF LOVE
A STEAMSHIP IS AN IRON WAVE
WATER IS THE STEAMSHIP OF THE WAVE
SORROW IS THE EMPTINESS OF SPACE
JOY IS THE FULLNESS OF TIME
72TIME IS THE SORROW OF SPACE
SPACE IS THE FULLNESS OF TIME
A PERSON IS THE OTHER SIDE OF THE SKY
THE SKY IS THE OTHER SIDE OF A PERSON
A TOUCH IS THE BOUNDARY OF A KISS
A KISS IS TOUCH UNBOUND
A WOMAN IS THE VISCERA OF THE SKY
A MAN IS THE SKY OF VISCERA
A WOMAN IS MAN’S SPACE
THE TIME OF WOMEN IS THE SPACE OF MEN
LOVE IS A BREATH FROM ETERNITY
ETERNAL LIFE IS A MOMENT OF LOVE
A SHIP IS THE COMPUTER OF MEMORY
MEMORY IS THE SHIP OF A COMPUTER
THE SEA IS THE SPACE OF THE MOON
SPACE IS THE SEA OF THE MOON
THE SUN IS THE MOON OF SPACE
THE MOON IS THE TIME OF THE SUN
SPACE IS THE SUN OF THE MOON
TIME IS THE MOON OF SPACE
THE SUN IS THE SPACE OF TIME
STARS ARE THE VOICE OF THE NIGHT
VOICES ARE THE STARS OF THE DAY
THE QUAY OF THE WHOLE SEA IS A SHIP
THE QUAY OF THE WHOLE SHIP IS THE SEA
SKIN IS A CONSTELLATION DRAWN
A CONSTELLATION IS A DRAWING OF SKIN
73CHRIST IS THE SUN OF THE BUDDHA
THE BUDDHA IS THE MOON OF CHRIST
SUN TIME IS MEASURED BY MOON SPACE
MOON SPACE IS SUN TIME
THE HORIZON IS THE WIDTH OF A GAZE
A GAZE IS THE DEPTH OF THE HORIZON
HEIGHT IS THE BORDER OF SIGHT
A PROSTITUTE IS THE BRIDE OF TIME
TIME IS THE PROSTITUTE OF SPACE
THE PALM IS A BOAT FOR A BRIDE
A BRIDE IS A BOAT FOR A PALM
A CAMEL IS THE BOAT OF THE DESERT
THE DESERT IS A BOAT FOR A CAMEL
LOVE IS THE INEVITABILITY OF ETERNITY
ETERNITY IS THE INEVITABILITY OF LOVE
BEAUTY IS THE HATRED OF DEATH
HATRED OF DEATH IS BEAUTY
ORION’S STARS ARE THE BLADE OF LOVE
LOVE IS THE BLADE OF ORION’S STARS
URSA MINOR IS THE SPACE OF URSA MAJOR
URSA MAJOR IS THE TIME OF URSA MINOR
THE NORTH STAR IS THE FOCAL POINT OF A GAZE
A GAZE IS THE WIDTH OF THE SKY
THE SKY IS THE HEIGHT OF A GAZE
A THOUGHT IS THE DEPTH OF NIGHT
NIGHT IS THE WIDTH OF A THOUGHT
74THE MILKY WAY IS THE WAY TO THE MOON
THE MOON IS THE MILKY WAY UNFURLED
EVERY STAR IS A DELIGHT
DELIGHT IS EVERY STAR
THE SPACE BETWEEN THE STARS
IS TIME WITHOUT LOVE
LOVE IS TIME FILLED UP WITH STARS
TIME IS THE SOLID STAR OF LOVE
PEOPLE ARE INTERSTELLAR BRIDGES
BRIDGES ARE INTERSTELLAR PEOPLE
THE DESIRE FOR FUSION IS TRAVEL BY FLIGHT
FLIGHT IS CONTINUOUS FUSION
FUSION IS THE PROPULSION FOR FLIGHT
A VOICE IS SOMETHING TOSSED TO ANOTHER
FEAR IS THE LIFELINE’S END AT THE EDGE OF THE PALM
LACK OF UNDERSTANDING IS LAMENTATION FOR A
FRIEND
A FRIEND IS THE UNDERSTANDING OF LAMENTATION
THE DISTANCE BETWEEN PEOPLE IS FILLED WITH STARS
THE DISTANCE BETWEEN STARS IS FILLED WITH PEOPLE
LOVE IS THE SPEED OF LIGHT
INVERSELY PROPORTIONAL TO THE DISTANCE BETWEEN
US
THE DISTANCE BETWEEN US
INVERSELY PROPORTIONAL TO THE SPEED OF LIGHT
IS LOVE
75I am the conductor of silence
Computer of Love 2
The orchestra is an acoustic frame
Conductor of Silence
The notes, forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge
And all the instruments, variations on the treble key
The stave is an acoustic cage for birds
The birds are notes breaking free
A symphony is a flock of birds
And opera a vault of voices
The five horizons are a line on the stave
And a score, a field sown with budding notes
A piano is an expanse of silence
A harp is a snare for sound
The violin is a wooden treble key
The bow, a wanderer of strings
Fingers are wanderers along piano keys
Piano keys are fissures of silence
Fate is the melody of life
The soul, the space between two skins
The drum is a Christian instrument:
Strike the right cheek, it offers the left
A voice is a cluster of airborne touches
Singing is the soft touch of sound
Strings are a rainbow of sounds
Timpani, drum skins in flight
Classical is music by people for people
Avant-garde is music by angels for gods
Harmony is the logic of sound
The sky is sheet music for stars
Galaxies are treble keys
The Moon and Sun are timpani of light
76The Earth is an orchestra pit
Silence, sheet music full of notes to overflowing
The Milky Way is the line on a palm
Fate, the palm of the heavenly conductor
The night sky is the piano’s lid lifted up
Memory is the past in the present
The present is the past in the future
Computer of Love 3
the past is future today
the future is today in the past
a palindrome is future and past in present
future and past in present is a palindrome
a miracle is the chance of happiness
happiness is the chance of a miracle
a voice is stillness speaking
stillness is a silent voice
christ is a cross on a body
a body is Christ on a cross
the dead are the living in the past
the living are the dead in the present
mortals are immortals in the present
immortals are mortals in the past
an hour is a second in the past
a second is an hour in the present
love is the joy of a dual body
joy is a dual body
shadow is the interior of light
77light is the surface of shadow
with brawn you don’t need brains
with brains you don’t need brawn
the abyss is the music of the shriek
music is a call from the abyss
the mind is thinking water
a thought is a trail on water, left by god
a thought is the joy of imagination
imagination is the joy of thought
god is man in the past present and future
man is god in the future or past
intuition is man’s conjecture on god
a thought is god’s conjecture on man
plato is socrates in the law
socrates is christ in athens
myth is the confession of god
reason is the border of meaning
the past is the present unwillingly left
the future – unexpected, impossible
wisdom is understanding god
god is the possibility of meaning
philosophy is a festival of thinking
a thought is god, smiling
fascism is death in the law
communism, the laws of death
a model of reason is the meaning of sorrow
78the sorrow of reason is the meaning of the model
the devil is a mistake by god
two lovers are the body of god
a sea of lovers is two
the sea is a prayer of sound
sound is the prayer of the sea
a full moon is the sun of thought
polygamy is a panorama of openings
monogamy, the opening of a panorama
a mirror is a reply by light
a line is the border between
the shore is the exterior sea
the sea, the interior shore
the past is yesterday today
the future is today tomorrow
a thermometer is a jack of mercury
mercury, the tears of metal
the brain is a cluster of thoughts from the sea
the sea, an expanse of the brain’s convolutions
a body is a mortal flame
flame is an eternal body
time is today in the past
eternity, always today
79MUSIC IS THE BEGINNING OF MEANING Computer of Love 4
MEANING, THE LAST NOTE OF A SONG
LIFE IS THE OTHER SIDE OF DEATH
DEATH IS THE OTHER SIDE OF LIFE
JOY IS THE FLIGHT OF SORROW
SADNESS, THE SORROW OF FLIGHT
THE SUN IS THE POSSIBILITY OF LIGHT
LIGHT IS THE POSSIBILITY OF SUN
JOY IS A GAME WITH ONE’S SELF
GAMES ARE THE FREEDOM OF HAPPINESS
A HOLIDAY IS ESCAPE FROM MONOTONY
MONOTONY IS A FORGOTTEN HOLIDAY
A CLOUD IS A SOUL MADE OF VAPOR
THE SOUL IS VAPOR IN FLIGHT
TEARS ARE HUMAN SALT
SALT IS CRYSTAL FEELING
PASSION IS THE BARS ON A TIGER’S HIDE
A TIGER IN A CAGE IS THE PASSION OF PASSION
THE SKY IS A NEST FOR FLIGHT
A NEST IS THE SKY FOR INSPIRATION
PEOPLE ARE SILLY CHILDREN
CHILDREN ARE SILLY PEOPLE
THE PENDULUM IS A GAUGE OF PASSION
PASSION IS THE PENDULUM'S DOWNWARD FALL
THE PENDULUM IS LOVE IN FLIGHT
MYSTERY IS THE BEGINNING OF MEANING
MEANING IS THE BEGINNING OF MYSTERY
80THE COSMOS IS AN INFINITE BODY
THE BODY IS A FINITE COSMOS
GOD IS A MIST WITHIN A MIST
VAPOR IS THE SOUL OF THE MIST
PASSION IS THE PENDULUM, FREED
THE AMPLITUDE IS THE FREEDOM OF PASSION
JERUSALEM IS THE TIME OF ROME
ROME IS THE SPACE OF JERUSALEM
81IN THE DISTANT 20 CENURY
t h
1983-2000
====================================
In the distant 20 th century
The malignant KGB
Dogs me, tracking every step
While within myself I remain
In the distant 20th century
I love you like I do today
But here my parents have disappeared
And the hour of death awaits
In the distant 20th century
Beneath the living sky
Abide my mother
and my father
And the life in which I never die
Philosopher Chanyshev
How I’d like to be,
in my non-being,
in my tomorrow
where you are not and will not be,
to be only non-being
The blue sky of non-being
extends, as if it were Chanyshev
on two immense wings:
Being is not – Non-being is
Chanyshev, known as Passerby
Granted me a Diploma at Iodkovsky’s salon
And wrote upon it with a shaking hand:
"Let the reward for your labors be
The divine fate of Mandelshtam...”
82O Chanyshev
O Treatise on Non-being
O Edmund Iodkovsky
felled by a car in the night
for his friendship with Starovoytova,
herself struck down by a machine gun round
"Being is not...”
But Chanyshev is
Night Sun
The sun still shines in darkest night
And death is not life disappeared –
Just, like the sun, for now concealed
beneath the line of light’s horizon
I know they still live, my mother and father
and the horizon lies within my heart
it is within my heart they are hidden;
in my heart alone are they risen
This heart is the grave of the Lord
the myrrh bearers drawing near –
4 Marys
4 Marys stand at the open grave of my heart
not empty at all, but full of life
there my mother and father will never die
there a diamond mountain of love rises high,
peak ascending inward
Ignorance will end
knowledge, never
Hatred will end
love, never
idiocy is finite
the mind is forever
Those who see the midnight sun
See eternity
83Those who see it rise from the down side of sunset
Know it sets from the upside of sunrise
Sunset rushes to sunrise, and sunrise to sunset
Sunrise-sunset are two wings of one light
Sunrise in the west is sunset in the east
Those who see morning in the evening
and evening in the morning
See eternal morning
And evening eternal
For the sun there is no night
For the night there is a sun
The mind of the sun will always shine
Emit always to all the light of thought
The midnight sun will not disappear
The mind is a sun that never sets
THE SWIMMER
let time draw me close
with invisible arms
like the ocean enfolds
the swimmer swimming away
while the swimmer
holds the ocean
there is no more time
and space ceases to be
there is only the endless door
in an endless room
that I open and open
and open
84METAMETAPHOR
a meta-metaphor is an
amphora for new meaning
like a steamship
within one horsepower
like a team of horses in a steamship
the pier has become the ship
the ship has become the pier
a rainbow from all horizons
a honeybee burdened
only by flight
like a cohort of snowflakes
leaving for Gaul
sifting into icy drifts
stepping frozen
into summer
Leto in Lethe alighting
from summer to summer flying
striking the timpani in time with the
tauromachy of Andromache
over an airfield
whose entire fleet
has long since
flown away.
85The Formula of Love
Mayakovsky  Lilya Brik
Lily Brik  many
or to polyandry
where √Khlebnikov = Kruchenykh
and Kruchenykh 2 = Khlebnikov
where Dostoyevsky =(?) Tolstoy
and Tolstoy infinity
where Pushkin × Gogol = 0
while Gogol  Pushkin
and Pushkin  nowhere
or = 0
where the sum of the angles
of Voznesenky’s triangular pear is >/<
2d
and the triangle always curves
and the pear is as sweet
as Adam’s apple
in Eve’s throat
where Adam  Eve, Eve Adam
where Adam × Eve = himself
where Eve/Adam = Adam
Billy Graham, or Exceptions
O seize belief deceit O rein O weight
O childhood years in grammar class
I travel from you towards a different time
That I know will never come to pass
I recite the lists of exceptions
More meaningful than I expect
The same belief within, aflame
And the same hand guiding the reins
But still the grief, deceit, the weight
86The weight of belief the grief of the weight
And the life of animals and of course Brehm
And the weight of life and of course Billy Graham
I spoke with him for two full hours
And the time in passing flew:
God’s word, he says, will lift you up
And by the Bible was his soul made new
O my pious interlocutor
The hero of songs yet unsung
From dawn at his Bible while I slumber on
And always endure, endure, endure
Become, become, begin, begun
Fight and fought, forget, forgot
Fall, fell, take, took,
Lose, lost; withstand, withstood
Christ and Christopher
Christ and Christopher, two holy names
Of Jesus walking on the water
Amid lands unknown Columbus sails
His course a straight line, unaltered
Malevich’s Grave
The Suprematist grave of Malevich
is no place for inhumation –
it is a place for resurrection
87Wings
These wings –
On the right – on the left –
At the front – behind –
They are only one wing
Refracted
In all dimensions
Into which those with an odd number of wings
Fly away,
Their wings turned inwards.
This is a secret, yours and mine,
A secret with an odd number of wings.
In some four-dimensional space
Souls weave,
And perceive with,
Such tentacles of lace.
Speaking for Yourself
To my home
To your sign
To the flame-coloured
pillar of creation –
speaking in the voice
oblivious of pain
shutting yourself off
from the world
and crying bitterly
blazing slowly:
ah, I joined
the chorus –
but it’s not up to you
nor to me
88to choose going round
to each one of us –
his own scream
or a dream
or a bride –
fascinating
transformed
gentle
Hieroglyph for God
Perhaps
God can be found
in middle China
wind hovering
hover flying
Aero Era
All we’ve experienced
we haven really experienced
Our destiny is prearranged
but not predetermined
The era of airports
is becoming a thing of the past
what follows is an era
of aero-
silence
Keel
An oarless bird swims to the East
She is ablaze in the depth, on dead wings
Osiris shines like a faceless basilica
He has become orphaned in the noseless heights
89He looks desirable
and the smell of spice is wafted
from the womb of a virgin
to the interstellar fleece
Osiris is drunk
Dionysus drunk too
he has buried his head at the bottom
Haiku
*
Tired of stargazing,
I look down
puddle full of stars
*
Poets at the pedestal
covering them all,
shadow of the statue
*
Pigeon in the room
flies into the mirror
I reflect off it
The Ship of Prayer
Prayer is a ship
That sails through bareness
The moon is prayerful
And the sun consists of kisses
Prayer is a ship
With babies on board
She sails into love
Kissing the ocean with her back
90World-wide silence can’t drown
Worldly noises.
We believe that we exist
And that life is in abundance.
Shiva has many arms
But he can’t bind sheaves.
God has many legs
But love is bipedal
Two-legged nakedness
Is wide open into the horizon
Every lodging is temporal.
Only the ship of love
Sails through Hellespont
Time and again
The living have been dead for so long
But they are slowly now
Returning to life
The conductor of the butterfly
The conductor of the butterfly is pulling strings skyward
He is either reflecting or glowing
The butterfly is reflected and he is reflected
Who catches who nobody knows
The conductor of the butterfly turns rotund
He’s losing the stand in the midst of the chasm
He’s dropping the stand in the midst of the chasm
He’s emanating light, he’s emanating shadow
The future will be in the middle:
In the silver-faced glowing butterfly;
Inside him falling further than it’s possible to fall
Seeking the flight in the midst of a bird.
91* * *
Pavel Tchelitchew came out into the mirror garden
He loved that word – veranda
At that time his contemporary Jean-Paul Sartre
Was contemporary of Mahatma Gandhi
.
* * *
Through infinity, cracks of rose-petal width
Other worlds unfurl
Where the salt of all tears
Merges into the sound of ‘Sol’
Where seas die from ‘Mi’
And ‘Si’ harkens back to ‘Do’
I am scarred to the membrane by pain
The country of sadness
There is a country of sadness
Where melancholy mammoths swing flexible branches
Where sorrowful monkeys
Weave flexible loops from lianas for them
Flexible branches crowded with monkey’s mugs
I told you - theirs are just stupid snouts
And nothing more,
it is just a sad breeze...it came and went
It will be back; so what, I don’t care
There is a country of world sadness.
I am silent, my love, I will stop it
The mammoths have just cried
But people would never hear them.
The pilgrim
Leaning on the aerial staff, pilgrim is moving horizontally.
Leaning on the horizontal staff, vertical pilgrim is walking.
This is how two staffs create a walking cross
Create the space where Christ acquires completeness.
92Blood is hanging and becoming vertical
From the torn bird falls its void
An angular womb ruptured Maria
She cracked like an egg
The cross is hanging on its umbilical cord
Maria and the frame –
In that window it is only the pilgrim losing staff in a staff
* * *
My mute mouth name...
Anemone
* * *
Freedom doesn’t have motherland, does it?
Freedom is the motherland of the entire world
* * *
Who are you? Light that is reflected by the face
Or the face that is reflected by the light
The rainbow is sinking turning into a bone
The bridge has sung turning into the boardwalk
The monkey has caught the chasm
And then the fetus oozing the light
Crushed on milady
And milady is shoaling the world...
The moment is mind-blowing
The heart is spilling into every star
The apprehensive brain has frozen
The heart is on edge, holding a breath.
* * *
My odd winged angel,
Desert me not
So I could soar by sublime gates
So they could open like folding wings
93The Endless Poem
Every day I hear inside myself your voice
The words sound very strange
And when I close my eyes
I see those shouts which are given birth by silence
And the bright colors which was born by darkness
I am finding myself abandoned by all
Except concepts and words which are so deep
Words we can see disappeared
But I begin to speak
And the words are born again
I string sounds on a naked nerve
I feel the great dissonance
And the rapture of an eminence above the world
Poetry is the supreme state of being
Carriages are connected by iron handshake
Trees – stations – silence
And you in silence of old night
And everything that connects me with you
And millions people sleep as slaves
Nothing understanding in such love
The zero of the worlds rotates in the heaven of stars –
It is a sight comes back to his source
Both dark blue day and a red wave
A green beam has fallen to a parrot
And the parrot has started talking verses
Both dark blue day and a red wave
Where the blue fern has hidden
And at the time of the rivers have stopped century
We have been a meeting of lizards on a stone
On black lake a white swan
94On white lake a black swan
The white swan swims
Also a black swan swims
But if you will stare in reflection
All will be on the contrary –
On white lake the black swan swims
White swan swims on black lake
I ‘m a cemetery of the lost ships
I’m her dream
Her grief and light
I’m a fog and I’m a bell in fog
And I’m nothing for myself
I know I am a cemetery of the lost ships
Near windows flight of flight
And this groan among grey walls
Any passer-by has stepped in space
And has collapsed in a dead faint across centuries
Water flow through concrete and eternity
And the dustman sidewalk cleaned from stars
And are people refracted in wet asphalt
I has left to itself «through – towards – from»
And has left «under» for erecting «above»
95Russian director Yuri Lyubimov dominated Russian theatre for half a
century, working with the greatest artists from the 1930s to the
present and influencing a new generation in post-Soviet Russia.
Lyubimov founded Moscow's Taganka Theatre, which he headed for
50 years, winning worldwide renown for his hugely visual and
inventive shows.
I cannot part from loved Lyubimov
Anything can be, or perhaps not be
I cannot part from loved Lyubimov
Perhaps he cannot part from me.
Our interaction so profound,
Our interaction from back stage,
A wife can never understand
Truly, sincerely cannot gauge.
Like conspirators, we exchange
Ideas of an arcane sort
Akin to shooters in the trenches
Volleying split-second retorts.
From being and non-being
Evolves a life with different meaning
"No one understands you here like I”
"I know,” heartfelt comes his reply.
96Socrates (the Oracle) is the name of a play that premiered
at the Taganka Theater in Moscow. This production was created
by the renowned producer and artistic director of the Taganka
Theater, Yuri Lyubimov. He dedicated it to the brilliant
philosopher, in honor of whom UNESCO officially proclaimed
2001 the Year of Socrates, marking the 2400th anniversary of his
death.
The play was co-written by the producer himself and
Konstantin Kedrov, President of UNESCO’s Association of Poets of
Russia. Yuri Lyubimov defined its genre as a Mystery Play.
"Two events laid the groundwork for the dramatic arts: the
ordaining of Socrates as the wisest man on earth by the priests in
Delphi, and the death sentence of Socrates by the court of Athens,”
said Konstantin Kedrov. "In Socrates’ deathbed vision, these two
events—his ordainment and his death sentence—merged into
one. In his dream, he sees Plato, Aristophanes, Pericles, whose
democracy he defended.”
According to Kedrov, the ancient Greek temple at Delphi
bears the inscription, "Know thyself.” The play is dedicated to
Socrates, without whom there is no freedom and who would not
have existed without freedom. This play is dedicated to Socrates,
for whom the most important things were love, death and
freedom. This play is dedicated to the philosopher who had the
courage to say, "I know that I know nothing.”
The role of Socrates was performed by one of the leading
actors of the Taganka Theater, Felix Antipov. The production was
first shown in Delphi on July 19, 2001 (the play was proposed and
sponsored by the European Cultural Center in Delphi). Then, on
July 21, 2001, it premiered in Athens at the International Theater
Festival dedicated to Socrates.
97US Ambassador to the Russian Federation John Ross Beyrle,
Konstantin Kedrov-Tchelitchew, Soviet and Russian stage actor and
director of the internationally renowned Taganka Theatre Yuri
Lyubimov. 07/15/2001
98Moscow, Taganka Theatre
Andrei Voznesensky, Yuri Lyubimov and Konstantin Kedrov-
Tchelitchew
99

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