Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
Having rubbed the soap all over myself, I threw it ashore and scrubbed the hand-reachable parts of my body. Then, to wash the foam off, I churned along a little, turning around in a screw-wise twirl before diving back towards the shore. White spits of foam scattered the black ripples. The birth of Aphrodite. The f-f..er..frivolous Little Mermaid, thought I rubbing myself with the towel… No, I'm not a pervert. It simply gets so, somehow all by itself, and then just rolls on in a progressive spiral-wise rotation…
~ ~ ~
Lenochka entered the sewing college in the Sumy city and went to study there. I did not have any reason to go on living at 13 Decemberists, and found a place on the opposite outskirts of Konotop, closer to the "Motordetail" plant.
It was a summer kitchenette of 2 × 3 meters with a pretty low ceiling, in the yard of a khutta whose owner worked at the wastewater treatment plant, where I once laid individual walls. The kitchenette's brick stove left room only for a bed and a desk by the window, yet it was enough for me to shack up with a couple of books in German and The German-Russian Dictionary of Medical Terms because no other kind of a dictionary in the target language happened on the shelves in the bookstore on Lenin Street. The rent was only 15 rubles but, nevertheless, I finally stopped sending out the already irregular alimony transfers in 2 directions…
The extended interest in German was brought about by training up for the final showdown with that old good Freud. As an attested schizophrenic possessing a considerable store of experience in the field studies, I did not see any plausible reason for his fixation on the symbolism of genitals. Well, yes, a cigar may have penis' looks while an ashtray may be persistently associated with vagina and so on and so forth. But then, what of that? They got transfixed by those interpretations and stuck with no more progress than a stick in the mud.
So I finally consolidated my belief that Freud, in fact, is a storyteller, like, say, Hans Christian Andersen, they differ from each other only by the choice of words they used. Thus, Freud divides the Kingdom of consciousness into four parts (a good fellow Sigmund, that was a step forward from the Hegel's triads):
the Duchy Consciousness;
the March Subconscious;
the Baronetcy Ego; and
the County Super-Ego.
Ah! How nice and pretty! They're so delightfully poetic, them those fairy tales! Thank you, Uncle Ziggy!
Anyone has the right to a scientific theory of their own, however, theories are checked by their application in real life situations. Propped by the theory of personal concoction, Freud cured 12 percent of his patients. And although they might've recovered on their own accord or else got healed by the cruelest, yet most efficient therapist of all – Mr. Time, we'll still will give them to Freud awarding for his merits – he offered at least some foothold, a gaudy oasis, when the subject in question was as bare and empty as the arid desert, which endeavor put the inventor on the map.
Besides, he still inspires slews of artists to portray their individual vision of adventurous cocks and charming fannies in all sorts of disguise and juxtaposition…
Yet, leaving the grounds of the visual Art and turning to my personal case, what cured me?
Cured? Whoa! Slow down! Easy, boy, easy… To be cured, you should get ill first, but was I? Where are the indications?
All my life went without the slightest deviation following, straight as beeline, the blue print from The Bhagavad-Gita. Baby—kid—youth—man—old man, you know. The crazy summer '79…hmm…nah, I won't start a clash about terms… though it is their word against mine: beautiful or crazy – tastes differ… Now, even that period was in precise keeping to normality, one of the necessary stages in the spiritual development as expostulated by Hegel in his Phenomenology of Spirit, the stage of "youthful folly" awaiting any normal man in his development was, in my case, a bit acuter and delayed for 10 years, that's all. But even the postponement was not my fault, I was too busy for follies in the conventional period, marriage, army and stuff, you know.
But then, what's normal? wearing a modish necktie and well-pressed parade-crap when loading a pistol for the suicide?
All my abnormalities are well contained within my dreams. Yes, I hear voices in my dreams, I will not conceal. I’m sleeping, and they read to me—in an impersonal and distanced tone of voice—pieces of prose. I must admit, rather enviable passages of neatly composed and glibly flowing prose they are, somehow resembling a movie screenplay. From time to time the reading voice gets substituted by visual action illustrations, yet when there’s a change in the story-line, it pops up back and starts to mumble again.
I’d rather turn them those voices off, not because of being envious, it’s just that they interfere with my sleep, but I don't know where’s their switch control…
Yet, all that is minor inconveniences when compared to the sheer horror of “Sisyphus’ Reiterations”. By its monstrosity, such reiterations are on a par with the ever switched on bulb above your head to remind that you’re shut in a madhouse only they are directed the other way, not from outside. In the course of such SRs you find yourself in the reality which you’ve lived thru already and because they reiterate themselves, maybe, more than once. Your state though is always the same, ineluctable as weightlessness when orbiting the planet—you are suppressed by a dreary dismay and urges to cry only nothing comes out like from a tube twisted out dry of the last drops—circling in sticky necessity to live anew some stretch in your life which you naively considered left behind but no! All around you flows the same yet already estranged life because you are not that former “I” any more. Graying, brow-wrinkled ignoramus, you’re roaming familiar labyrinth of the hostel and auditoriums to get the lousy diploma you don’t even need but it will save you staying there for another circle in a row… or you’re sitting just like right now on the brown hard stool in the mire of dirty-green lino between the plywood walls beneath the fluorescent tubes, the iron of siderails in the bank bed prop your back and not a single familiar face, your buddies since long demobbed and these around are here to keep me for one more cycle or even dump to stockade.
– Look here, ‘suckers. Put off whatever you’re jerking in your brains right now. It’s Political Study Class here. Today’s topic is the Corporate Imperialism. Clear, ‘suckers?
– Aye-yup! Comrade! Leftenant! Col’nel!
– Good… off we go. You keep a-showing me your ram optics now and think, if only you can at all, OK , Col’nel, push forth your shit. You think—if only you have what to do the trick with—that everything goes on just as it goes without a plan, direction and stuff and here you’re fucking wrong, as always. Because every-fucking-thing one way or another clicks and tags on some other this or that thing and if you can’t see how all the thingamabob hooks on and in and out it’s what we have Political Study Classes in the army for. Fuck… Hey, you, sitting over there by the last koobrik with that your brazen visage. Which draft? ‘73?… A-ha! Sumy, khokhols. You think that ‘73 is a bolide fucked year ‘cause that’s when they raked you up to do your hitch and you don’t get it in any way that in that same year in behind-the-hill they pressed out the Thomas Pynchon’s book about Gravity’s Rainbow and while you, numskulls, don’t even know such words they, over there, pulled it off.
In short, the book is about Them. By Thomas, They are almost immortal, invisible, dwell on the other Side and never lose. And that’s all what he leaked about Them in about 800 pages but you, ‘suckers, should know the book turned out as good as a fucking eager slut, you read it and want more and more…Who mumbled “a behind-the-hill paranoid fool-driver”? Wanna get rotten with fatigues till your last day in the hitch? The masters of Pynchon’s caliber are not the stuff to call in question you have to only check out their handwork and draw your illiterate conclusions. Like about those ballet dancers by Degas which he was drawing till got blind. When they watched the dancers’ skirts long enough and at the right angle, they discovered a whole heap of benzolidol rings of the most cool synthetics because everything click-hook-tags in and out it’s only that you have to know the right dosage to get touched the right way… check out the root! And you’ll see even more than that. OK, it’s not Chemistry break in classes for you here, so now we’ll pull Them out in the clear in a politically refined way.
We’ll start ab ovo… Stop scratching your balls, mudaks, in Latin it means “from the very beginning”. Everything’s started from a fresh leaf after a big washing. The flotsam Noah had 3 sons – Shem, Ham, and Japheth. In regard of his Dad, Ham once behaved as a mean cad and Shem started reasoning that it’s not right. Yet Japheth didn’t waste words, came up and knocked Ham out. Noah watched all that bedlam and he sez, “Shut up you all! Listen to me only!” However, Dad was not for ever and ever and after his R.I.P. someone still had to maintain the order that’s where from originated the byword “Dad is dead! Long live Dad!”. Noah’s successor was named State as all his next in line and so as not to fumble with the in-family handles he just classified them all. Japheth and his heirs became Class 1, aristocrats thanks to the timely punch, Shem who sold himself for being so conversed in morals secured Class 2 for his descendants, Ham and his litter became plowmen. D’you follow? In the beginning, ab ovo, there were 3 Classes and 1 State, one for all. That’s where class struggle takes its roots from.
Gradually, little by little, there sprung out towns too whose populace gemmated from plowmen and became a separate class of town-dwellers named bourgeois, excuse my French. And town slickers are sworn swindlers, you know and, as always, they fucked up country hicks and became Class 3, pushing plowmen into Class 4. Now, we have 4 classes but that’s not for long because there hatched up already Class 5 in those towns-cities who also were drudgers like plowmen but not on land already. For the sake of shortness, they were named proletarians. Ha! They are 5 now! Get lost? Look at you hand, how many fingers? Which is also why you’re here, non-combatant pricks…
So, the classes live on while learning the methods of class struggle. Each one has its place and function under State: Japhethoviches fight, Hamoviches plow, Shemoviches… well, morale check-ups and connection to Almighty is their responsibility, when not busy with the capital problem – how to proliferate under celibacy? Proletarians work, work hard, though without conveyor yet. Bourgeois, those town sons of a gun, who jumped the queue to become Class 3, open factories and look for sales markets both locally and overseas….
The workload grows vertically and horizontally, State gets it there’s the need for an additional, the most necessary for State, class of managers and clerks. Class 6 do not produce, discover or invent anything, no, they are in charge of dividing and distributing of what was produced, discovered or invented. Now, how many classes do we have? How many fingers in your hand? So add to them the offshoot your fingers grab at each day more than once.
Now, leave them Classes alone… Let’s turn to State. The critter’s not too complicated, it can be, basically, one of 2 sorts, either concentrated on keeping the innards in good order or trying to expand its order, as is, beyond its limits up to becoming the owner of the known world. This inflation aiming at world domination turns State into Imperialistic State which does not have fail-back. Empire does not control itself, it just fulfills its designation, without the growth it gets busted – either devoured by the outside critters of the like feather or burst from inside because of unwisely swallowed fodder… Besides, State might have to live thru revolutions, which are periods when the ruling Class hands over its prerogatives to another Class as it happened, for instance, in France.
At first, State there was ruled by Class 1, as the most belligerent of classes, they were not clever enough for anything else besides warring which trade narrows you outlook. Yet, they were fans of dynasty games, liked the glitter of dangling trifles in their tunics, and between the battles got toned up by hopping in minuets. That way minueted themselves to guillotine. “Monsieur Executioner, so this is the Apparatus? Wow, what mighty looks! So I put my head thru this hole? Wow, wha…”, CLANGGZZ!!… That’s how the bourgeoisie of Class 3, came to power in France. (Not that aristocrats there were zapped completely as a class, you still can come across of some, in guarded preserves.)
All the French classes were there and the last, Class 6, draw certain conclusions from that History lesson. If you are a class, they can apply to you the class approach with all subsequent repercussions. That’s why they are so adamantly against being counted for a class, no, no! They are just State attributes, humble officiaries, they are public servants, PS. (Don’t mix with state servants (SS) which role is done by military and other beetle-brow SS-men.) And this way, the class, like, exists but it has no actuality. Here is invisibility for you! What’s next in the list? Being on the other Side? Easy! All those PS arrive in the invisible class of distributors of produced goods and weal coming down/up from the rest 5 classes and leave them on the other Side of invisibility, become aliens to the classes of their origin, extraneous to each other. Whichever way you turn it, they are always from another Side… Never lose? As if anyone can doubt it. They are Distributors, They control the card deck, you enter the casino and They already know what hand you’ll have at Blackjack…
The other matter our Thomas Pynchon is good at is his discourse of Corporate Imperialism. Which means, nowadays Empires are built not on the territorial-national basis but according to association with the right branch of business. Again the bullseye! What is his dope I wonder? Just from pure curiosity, eh? If you consider, for example, all those oil and drug cartels or, taking a step back, the Russian Empire. I be damned if there’s not one-to-one correspondence…
Almost half of its Imperial standing, Russia managed to avoid revolutions. Yes, riots, pretenders, peasant wars took place, as anywhere, yet only after the French Revolution the revolutionary virus expanded globally penetrating not only politics but other areas as well, hence industrial revolution, sexual revolution, revolution of… well let it wait till next Political Study Classes.
The germination of revolutionary activities in Russia is dated as early as 1825. Russian military who visited France in the course of the international campaign to rout the Napoleonic Empire got exposed there to the contemporary revolutionary virus. On the return to their unsuspecting Homeland, they started arrange revolutionary parties – to play cards, drink wine, and recollect those whores from Mullen Rouge. «They know how enjoy their lives there! Eh, bro?—Yea, bro.—And here, bro?—Green blues, bro.—Ew! Rassea-a…”
And suddenly, as if responding to an online order, the Emperor kicked the bucket on the Azov sea shores, an unmistakable revolutionary situation. The infection mixed with hangover, abusing their status of SS officers, the aristocratic dunces ordered the subordinate personnel out to the Senate Square of the Northern Capital. The soldiers were kept all day exposed to the December frost. The general who rode his white horse to the square with admonishments was shot at and killed by a civilian revolutionary. In the dusk of approaching night the government forces brought a cannon, fired it, the soldiers ran to their barracks to get warm at last before the lights-out.
In short, 5 Decemberists were hanged (13? what 13? I tell, you 5 Decemberists got capital punishment!), the frostbitten soldiers got their whipping to feel warmer, the infected taken to the Siberia, like, to do hard labor, yet allowed to hire houses and live with their wives coming from Russia. That way the Spook of Revolution began to roam not Europe alone. After the aforesaid kick-off those subjects to the Russian Empire prone to blues and having nothing better to amuse themselves with got a modish plaything – the struggle for bringing nearer the just bright future without any oppressed and suffering individuals but with immense compulsory happiness instead.
By the end of the 2nd century its acting on the stage of History, Russian Empire obviously fell short of breath selling a sizable swathe of its territories in Northern America to the USA for 9 million rubles, some transaction incongruent with the Empire rank. And when even the toy state of Japan won the day in the war against the giant Russia, Messrs. Obolensky, Rzhevsky and scions of divers other aristocratic families were faced with oncoming Great October Revolution (GOR), to wit, stepping down and giving up the job of hegemonic class and subsequent obliteration at hands of uncouth masses of plowmen headed by fiery revolutionaries from the Jewish national minority.
On the 4th year of the WWI, in February 1917, the concluding Emperor of Russia abdicates his throne. The power passes to the Interim Government which at ones get in the coma of parliamentary bickering between a whole bunch of political parties old and new. The IG announces that Russia still will keep loyal to its allies in the war. “The War Till the Victorious End!” was not good news for German Empire fighting against the alliance of Russia, Great Britain and France. Even under the burden of war efforts, German leadership finds time and means to contact V. I. Lenin in the neutral Switzerland and offer him a long tourist trip in a special “sealed” train by the route thru all of Germany, neutral states of Scandinavia, then via Finland to the destination railway station in Petrograd (previously St. Petersburg). Why? Well, another example of German notorious propensity to philanthropy, they saw a man who pines away in Zurich, Switzerland, could those sentimentalists not take him over to his Homeland, eh?
A nondescript before Lenin’s arrival to Petrograd, the party of Bolsheviks gets notably energized, he makes speeches calling for the Global Revolution, writes his famous April Theses of practical instructions how to do the job. There appear means by the party to purchase the necessary equipment for holding armed demonstrations in July. Yet, whenever they kick up shooting, Lenin happens to be in some other place due to his health conditions and he even is late for the Great October Revolution so that it has to be headed by Trotsky, aka Bronstein.
Busy as he is, Leo Davidovich still finds a spare room for Lenin in the Smolny Institution of Noble Maidens (the seat of the putsch coordinators, hired because of…well, yes, maidenhead might incite weird wishes and reactions, it’s hard to propose a wholesome explanation here, no, you never can tell what urges to expect because of the membrane) teeming with lice-peckered crowd of hitmen full of revolutionary enthusiasm. The forked out room has a window presenting a view on the adjacent alleys in the park and truckloads of departing mission groups to seize Telegraph, Telephone or another Railway station. Yes, the State Bank is already secured (as advised in April Theses). Then the Interim Government gets arrested and the historical round of decree-promises—Land to Peasants! Factories to Workers! Peace to Peoples!—fired off. Russia enters 5 years of the most atrocious Civil War.
The revolutionary government (multi-partied as of yet, each of the parties split by internal frictions) moves to Moscow. Trotsky boards an iron-clad train and choo-chooes off to command (strategically) divers fronts of the flaring up war (“Peace to Peoples!»). Lenin stays back to tune up paper work in the newly created bureaucratic apparatus (the 58 volumes of Complete Works still not amassed.)
Some young and full of revolutionary romanticism hit-girl, a certain Kaplan (what’s in the name? nothing until you learn to read the names) from the especially unsatisfied fraction of the Social-Revolutionary party (SRs), visits a meeting where Lenin makes another of his speeches. She shoots and hits his shoulder. SRs had enough grounds for dissatisfaction, their party was always there before the Bolshies’ maiden making their bones. The royal family was SR’s traditional hunting grounds, a Czar or 2 scored, not to mention a slew of ministers. How not to be jealous of the green horns whose main, if not the only, asset is close connections among the criminal world? In the beginning of their political career, so as to keep the party’s accounts well balanced, Bolsheviks specialized in robbing banks by hands-on instructions from the underground advisors (young Stalin, freshly from the Tiflis seminary, was notably proficient in that line). The activity grew obsolete because of the huge grant from an anonymous friend by the end of the WWI but the connections remained.
The shot by Kaplan marked the start of establishing one-party political system in the country taking course towards building of Socialism with Human Face. She was arrested at the crime scene and taken to the Kremlin, put against the fortress wall of ancient brickwork and executed. The case of Kaplan indicated the end to soft czarist times of prolonged court sessions and talk-work of attorneys at their competitions in eloquence. Technically, it took 2 slobs, 1 shot fired thru her head and 1 barrel full of lime to dump the body into. Not what you call gentlemanly attitude, however, the act (and many other of the sort) efficiently prevented appearance of any revolutionary-minded clandestine groupings in the oncoming USSR, with proper timely repetition of the proceedings.
Who won in the GOR? An interesting question, yet, given the invisibility of some parts it’s easier to see who lost. Gentry and bourgeoisie were wiped away as classes, the church never managed to built non-secular state in Russia, they always were a go-between, not builders. 6 – 1 – 1 – 1 = 3. Yes, Classes 4 thru 6 remained of whom They announced workers and peasants the winners (much later the formula was added with “working intelligentsia” all sorts of doctor-engineer-writer-composers, you know, which never were considered a class but inter-layer between classes).
But what was then? Regaining their senses after the bloodbath in the Civil War, the plowmen saw that the land still did not belong to those who worked on it. They tried at uprising a couple of times, however, without the hereditary military around (gentry were wiped out already) what could they do against the regular Red Army, eh? The uprisings were quenched with poison gas stockpiled at the WWI times and nobody wanted any more to go up against the collectivization, the people were fettered to land by the workingmen sons donned in the Red Army uniform. That way the winning class (invisible) neutralized the basic force that secured the GOR victory.
As for the revolutionary ferment, all those commissars and the rest of heroes of other nationality affiliation they were an easy crack. Great Purge was set off. The peasant-proletarian fists were deforming the arrested, crushing teeth, beating out the ear drums and, eventually confessions of collaborating with 3 different imperialistic intelligent services as minimum, while the officiary kept his hands clean piling up another file of documents. Because you cannot go against the nature and execution is not so painful… Anything still live and thinking was systematically taken, in millions, to the camps within the Polar Circle where the Arctic Nature conditions did their job with no less efficiency but cheaper, than gas chambers. The class of workers, naturally absolutely forgot that factories were theirs…
Now, below the disguising red placards about the victory of workers and peasants They gained absolute power. What secured the victory of Class 6? Subtle calculations and flawless execution of strategical planning? Fuck, no! Do not make yourself an idol. Class 6 is just a class having as many idiots as any other, they hang on an elementary plagiarism. Even such Genius of Strategy as I. V. Stalin needed an instructive master-class-for-dummies “Night of Long Knives” from advanced Germany to aid him in planning the assassination of S. M. Kirov before the New Year night.
Now, after 7 decades of keeping people at the level of mental activities framed by turnkey-prisoner relations, the great nation turned into the 1/6 alcoholic part of the world where master-thieves and ministers are corporately doing their mutual business while those who can understand it dream of fleeing behind-the-hill. But it does not work. It won’t work because over there the power is in hands of invisible, invincible other-Siders and They since long pushed forward the slogan “Bureaucrats of the World get Globalized!”… Your read your Pynchon more attentively, not only passages about generative orgies and scatological excesses…
– Comrade Lieutenant-Colonel, and what’s the meaning of “excesses”?
– Fuck you! You’re still here? On-duty detail! Take the motherfucker to the clink!
~ ~ ~
My the small kitchenette provided a lofty crow’s nest of a good vantage point to observe the big-big world about it. And in that same kitchenette, I felt the need for some sort of a plan to say my gentle “good-bye” to Konotop…
~~~~~
