On the other side

On the way to the metro I meet my former classmate. It's spring and things aren't going well. Not very good - this means he refuses to take antipsychotics and hears voices. The voices talk to him about abstract topics, do not give advice, but just reason. This is probably because he reads esoteric literature. Especially the works of one lady with a magnificent name, like in Mexican TV series. I didn't remember, of course. He believes that God is speaking to him. He is a little worried about the lack of a formal criterion by which he could distinguish whether this is definitely a god and not someone else, less sympathetic. I immediately remember the advice of Saint Ignatius Brianchaninov : if someone appears and enters into a conversation, you need to ask him with all determination and severity: Who are you and where are you from? If the interlocutor has something to hide, he will most likely hesitate, become embarrassed and cowardly melt into thin air. Angels and others with impeccable characteristics will readily name the species and present a good resume. I don’t tell him about this wonderful technique, but only advise him to honor one of the Fathers - instead of a lady. The remaining part of the journey I think about the fact that they are scolding Jung, I myself have fallen out of love with him, and come on, religion mediates amazement when encountering the contents of the unconscious.

Voices from the other side. A girl I know talks about how, after talking on her cell phone with her lover (who lives on the other side of the Russian border and even on the other side of the Pillars of Hercules), she leaves a five-star Moscow hotel on the square and sees a huge banner with his name. Against your will, you begin to feel like disheveled Mel Gibson from Conspiracy Theory . Several times a day you remind yourself that with such a density of texts in a big city, it is generally surprising that they do not yet form into a novel with a sequel, but move and crawl from place to place somehow separately, on their own.

The witty academician Siegel , it seems, wrote in one of the popular science books of my childhood that planets and stars are spherical because they are all sections of a four-dimensional sphere. Well, it’s like if you cut pieces from a ball with a knife, then the cross-section turns out to be circles. And if the ball is four-dimensional and the knife also moves in the fourth dimension, then spheres are obtained. Much the same thing happens with these urban texts. All of them are fragments of four-dimensional literature, on the surface of which we live, all of them are extracts from a text - limitless, but not infinite: just as the surface of an apple is limitless, but not infinite, for a two-dimensional ant crawling on it.

Several years ago, all of Moscow was covered in graffiti: Have children in January . No matter how hard we tried, we were unable to come up with any convincing interpretation: primitive astrological ones were immediately discarded. A close friend of mine at the time suggested that we were dealing with an attempt at management in the spirit of the Black Box described by Lem in “The Sum of Technologies.” The output could be anything. You can imagine how many consequences a surge in birth rates in January of a particular year has.

If it really was a PR campaign, then it was carried out at a quite decent level. Among my acquaintances there was not a single person who did not notice these categorical recommendations. I would really like to look at the statistics and see if there was a surge in the birth rate in January of the year the inscriptions appeared and perhaps the next. I’m afraid, however, that the role of public relations events, as always, is exaggerated and these graffiti were just a multiplied replica of one of the four-dimensional characters, an exalted young man in the spirit of Chatsky. Probably, according to the author's plan, he was really passionate about astrology, dreamed of magic, of the opportunity to manipulate the masses - and by the author's grace this opportunity was given to him. Due to the extras, the extras, us. How he used this gift is another question. I would like to get acquainted with the statistical data, but it seems that a couple of years after the events described, the authorities of the State Statistics Committee were just imprisoned. Or, in any case, they were going to imprison him. Trust no one. Truth is out there. Good morning Agent Mulder, don't believe, don't ask, don't be afraid . Have children in January. They won't catch up with you, we promise.

And the Russian nobility rests in the Donskoy Monastery, read the inscription handwritten in chalk on the red iron gates three years ago. What is this if not a line in a dialogue that we do not hear in full? What are they talking about? It’s clear, about the fate of the Motherland, about the Russian revolution with boyish curls , something like that. White Delo, Ice Campaign, Perekop cinema. Outside of such a dialogue, this inscription on the gate in an unnamed lane cannot mean anything. Of course, this apple is just a cross-section of a four-dimensional apple with a stainless country knife, iron to iron, a cold blade to a cold summer, the last one, however, is from this year. But what's the difference? Time in the Pleroma is a convention, an abstract category.

During my years of study at the University, a huge number of inscriptions appeared on transport, handwritten in a rounded child’s handwriting. Kindergarten counting rhymes, rhymes, palindromes. Pencil on gray, small specks, plastic: but the archangel is invisible , the frost lay like a pattern on the temple and it is marvelous . Once upon a time there lived a man with crooked legs . We calculated the height of this man and his routes: it turned out that he lived (and lives, perhaps) somewhere at the southern end of the gray line, Nakhimovsky Prospekt, Chertanovo, Sevastopolskaya. Now I think it was all in vain. If he lived at all in any known place in the world, it was south of any known boundary, west of any Sun. Right now - this is a place where there is no time - right now I enter a frozen bus winding along route # 103, sit down on a lonely seat, the last one before the flexible joint, a crawling circle - and see another nursery rhime from those that I I recognize better in English than in Russian, because as a child I read first Mother Goose , and only then Marshak. Elizabeth, Bessie and Bess went into the forest together. The next stop is the Universitet metro station. Probably written by a child. Only children and Thomas Wolfe write with a simple pencil. Only children and Eugene Gantt have such handwriting. Only a child and an angel, looking at their house, see magic, patterns and snow. Only someone like Cassius, sitting over Berlin, dangling his legs as if on a giant swing, only someone like a child, only they speak to us from that side - the sun came to the west, seeing the evening light , south of the four-dimensional cold summer, very close to the Mexican border.

Voices from the other side. In fact, there are no sides. There are cross-sections of the four-dimensional chatter of various creatures, small, large, black and white, colored, living unknown where, becoming pregnant unknown, assigned to unknown species, families and classes. And, of course, a knife. Cold summer, blade , Taoist butcher. Solingen

Turn away. Close eyes. Get your head in a book. Smile at the girl sitting in the subway car opposite. Do not listen. Don't ask who . Don't ask where . Because you won’t get an answer anyway, there’s no need to play Ulysses and Polyphemus, there’s no point. These are snippets of conversations out of nowhere. Poems that are not heard. The penultimate words, incomprehensible only to the careless.

You are leaving the lobby of the Moscow Marriott, a five-star hotel, shiny with cholesterol-free sterile fat. The phone in my pocket shakes violently. Under the portrait of the American president on a small bill that accidentally survived in your wallet, the inscription Wanted for murder appears . And then you think that you can, of course, deceive all people some of the time and you can deceive some people all the time, but no one, it seems, has ever managed to deceive all people all the time. And then you think that your daughter was born in February, you look over the birthdays of the children of friends and acquaintances, you realize that none of them have a birthday in January, you smile, pushing the heavy door at the entrance to the subway: they didn’t win , we didn't lose.

Voices from the other side, conversations from all sides. In this city, the primer automatically opens on the first page.

Notes:

1 - On the one hand what? On the other side of what?

- What, what... Mushroom, of course.