Paragraph

Talking about words with words is a strange thing, and yet - although wait, what’s strange - you’ll excuse me for stopping at this, but this is a special kind of thing, here it’s necessary (what kind of guy is this, I’m tired of it, meandering and meandering between the lines) - here you need all the secrets to come out, that is, to immediately agree, as the proverb says, seven times and once: rrr-time! - it’s not even strange at all, in a word, not to catch words in brackets of formulas, not to look for them (and what a disappointment it was, he said, squinting and muttering through his teeth, when the multi-story mansion of the fraction, which towered remarkably above all the other buildings in the area and occupied the entire width of the page at the unforgettable address Ex. 12, b), suddenly reduced the staff of servants, kicked out the guests from the ball, hiding behind slyness carnival masks (a, b, c...), and then, having outlived its golden age, it was completely divided into nineteen inherited shares) - so I take my words back, yes, I want to return it, well, in other words, I want to issue a refund, what are you saying, where is the check, how come, how come, they didn’t give it to me, girl, listen to me, I - wait, the feeling as if - really didn’t extinguish the ultimatum samovar, mother-in-law's gift, - I was just with you, and you told me verbatim that - so that I could forget this - he knocks on his pockets, - verbatim: you, that is, I, can, that is, I can, return the goods within - a large checkered handkerchief, a broken, crumpled cigarette, a nut and a French franc, - yes, stop calling me a man, but man, you yourself did not name yourself, what, what are you now - call yourself - Lord, Mr. author, you didn’t name me at all, and the page has already been started, and already, chick, I burst out like I was just born, now I’ll take a new sheet and, ah, ah, why are you biting my hand, come on, what, what are you saying, I don’t understand, stop biting me and tell me with words - apart: apparently, there’s no way without words - damn, how difficult it is to write cursing, leave me alone, I have to write with my left hand ruksslytylytyytyryy, okay, I won’t, I won’t start over again, I promise, just let me go, oh, I’m no longer a bob-oo-oo, I scream in a thin, crying voice - and you, why are you laughing, laughing at yourself - and where did you get your teeth from, oh, I remembered, and you don’t remember the name, here it is (again damn it, you see, and it will bite - but after all I don’t remember - but how do you know, he’s literary, drinks mirror milk) you can’t remember, I remember I didn’t have time to choose, but the options were: “Amalgam scraping”, “Give the word to words!” and “But the garden was silent, the garden was dumb” - well, the first you scraped up from Brodsky’s bottom, the second is T. S. Mayakovsky, the poem “Ash Subbotnik” (“April is the cruellest month, giving // birth to Theses by Vladimir // Lenin”), and the third, and the third, my son, from a lost poem of a genius forgotten by everyone (names, I admit, I come up with badly, but you’ll figure out in accordance with the image), well, no, no, as you might think, this garden is not mine, oh leave me, I was offended, what is it, what is it, this is a mistake, they have misrepresented, again journalists are making words, words, words out of a molehill, although “Hamlet” is often misunderstood, viewed in the distorting mirrors of translations, in the distorting mirrors of their views (however, this is stupidity - mirrors of views - need to be corrected later), they even say that in their instructions actors: overzealousness is contrary to the essence of the performance, the purpose of which - before and now, was and is - to hold something like a mirror in front of nature - what is there, between, you see, the lines, Shakespeare called art imitation, but what further in the text, in yours or in mine, in Shakespeare's, and, and then: the goal, then, of a dramatic play is to show the virtues of its features, vice its essence - and so on, really, really about imitation, they say, art copies the reality of etsetera, and so I ask you: who are you copying, oh, who are you imitating, here I am, well aware of my knees and the white marks of nails on tanned skin, I, who so loved the sweet-inky taste of those licorice sticks, I, who played with a mustachioed beetle and then crushed it with a stone for a long time, trying to repeat the initial buttery crunch, I, moving his upper lip, causing the platinum wire on his front teeth to freely move up and down, I, who had learned so early what kind of rolling thing was - I almost let it slip, I should have been more careful - I, whose thought (my, my thought!) returns again and again to the area of my childhood - what actually happened to him, where did it go, where did the veranda float away, where did the familiar paths crawl away, rustling in the bushes - tell me who I’m copying, what kind of akimbo, sideways god I’m copying from the side, you don’t know, you don’t remember, but, okay, it’s just me, it’s just a funny trick with its harmony, castling and nothing more, but on their part it’s a real substitution, a prop: for imitation is a reflection, and Hamlet didn’t say a word about how, what the mirror is made of, he didn’t break the glass, he didn’t scrape the amalgam, because Narcissus is stupid, who, convinced that his circumcised double lives in the river near the mill, jealously beats on the water, not wanting to share his beauty - because specularity is a property, not an essence, even though Alice desperately wanted to see the dark piece of the room just behind the fireplace, to find out whether mirror people drown in winter, by the way, we all sometimes flirting with mirrors - when a Greek saw our games - oh, you’re right more than ever, take my word for it, Plato would have introduced a fee for puns (although he himself, the sly one, also used them), I know what I’m talking about, they once wanted to throw me in prison for verbal fraud, for illegal, you know, verbal circulation, the pricipal in court even hinted that I was involved in falsification - something they, you see, did not agree with Rosendahl’s accounting books - and after all, this verbal denunciation came from somewhere with a demand for a conditionally wordless punishment - but I, you know, dodged it, baked a diagnosis for them: a simple recipe, part of this, two parts of another - and a terrible disease, chasoto, appeared, the only case, by the way, in all the time, all the time, you know, one is tempted to check the time, has it run away, has not disappeared or if there is no clock, then - then the writing is lost, the writing has run away - time has stood up and fled! - then you start coughing - and it’s like your heart itches, you start to itch - and you cough like a chair being pushed back - or like a neighbor’s castle in the middle of the night, a castle or a castle, otherwise there’s no emphasis here, well, of course the castle, how do you think the castle will cough, and in general: the emphasis cannot stand, as you imagine it, the emphasis falls on the heads of the letters, like, you know, a brick on Sherlock Holmes, is thrown down, like a punishment from heaven - it points from heaven, like the finger of God, and a dash - it ties together hopelessly scattering sentences with the threads of fate, and sometimes replaces, cancels words, displaces what is not the future of being (a crooked smile of crookedly tailored English) expressed - you know, like a lost chance, like a street, a chance meeting, first sight, love, mutual and without a hitch, and now you are running towards each other - but something is in the way, something is holding you tightly, suffocatingly - you try again, try to break free, jump, freeze in the air - but leather leashes, these threads of fate, squeeze your spotted necks, and, under the reproaches of “fu, Richie, fu” and “fi, Fifi, fi, this is a boor, this is not a person, but God knows what, and he probably has a Soviet passport, a Bolshevik, just a Bolshevik, but what a face, what a face, phi,” they’re making you look - brr, the interlocutor made his lips, it’s just amazing - yes, yes, and this happens, and then they take you to some tower, and put you in some kind of cell, and force you to be silent, and colleague Pavlov - in one school textbook there is a special chapter about Pavlov, you, of course, remember this book, like, you don’t remember, well, that means this textbook was used only in our school for fools - colleague Pavlov, hiding behind the wall, rings his bell, that is, you, of course, and you definitely, definitely must put as much saliva in your mouth as possible, almost choke on it, otherwise you won’t get meat - so we used to say - and when I remember this, it seems to me that words are also the bells of a million sounds, that the ringing voices of the words being read divinely, physiologically call out to us for that the very, necessary, meaning, as if they themselves are telling us this meaning, calling out, whispering to us (as colleague Pavlov whispered to his students after the experiment: but who would have thought that there is so much saliva in a dog), although, it would seem, there is no connection between the word and its meaning, as well as between the bell and the meat - but some colleague like Pavlov (either Leo Tolstoy, or gray-haired Karabas) throws his float, his fell into the backwater of our consciousness, and something inside us pecked, and there were circles in the water, and such a wonderful garden, and the plants stretched out their lips, folded their tongues into tubes, sent air kisses, applauded, bowed, fanned themselves - hairy dandelions, raising their heads, sunbathed - their cancer-sick brothers stick out desperately - yellow ones look around and blink, with increased anxiety, flowers - they all gossip, whisper, and the white wine of the sky splashes until cloudy foam in the glasses of the trees, and it’s so good, and the weather whispers: walk, walk around the garden - wait, wait with the weather, at least complete the sentence, get to the point - and that’s right, the main thing is not to the handle, oh, it still hurts, but let’s leave the mysterious tuner who touched the ears, put sting, and let's go back to Adam, why should he name the creatures of the earth and the birds of the sky: to show virtue its features, and vice its essence - that's what they think, but come on, I'll call you, I forgot, I forgot the word what I wanted to say, oh, here it is: even though this is not an easy job to drag from a swamp puddle - yes, I'll call you a hippopotamus, and well, no, nothing, I'm left the same as it was, why did you stop, I want you to grasp the full importance of what is happening, continue, I already caught you at the word, ah, what are you doing with the Russian language, you wanted to say that you took me at my word, although this is not at all relevant, to the point: why would Adam call what he has, what he will always have, how can you call paradise paradise, without knowing, without knowing Paradise, again your heavy jokes with a crooked smile, let’s leave it, he left paradise, you understand, he lost it (wasn’t he expelled because he was not so holy as to become the word “holiness”), the word is necessary only in case of loss, in all other cases it can be easily sacrificed to the gambit, replaced by a castling click, and it turns out that by calling paradise, Adam already knew that he would be expelled, he was preparing, as we prepare, naming things, listing them, counting them, so that after our death the notary I checked the list: country autumn, drizzling on the asters; spruce trunks covered here and there with a bright red ray; dull cottony air; swallows whose flight resembles the movement of scissors; a long and resentfully ringing buffet - everything that I saved from the dear dark, clear days of the past (yes, you, of course, really like to show off quotes) - plus Leonid Petrovich brought a bottle of liqueur, and where did it all go, olives, I don’t know, listen, Antosha, Sashenka - a mistake, a mistake, yes, my memory is bad - maybe our memory is a lesbian - uh, what - oh my God, forgive me, ha-ha-ha-ha-ha, Sashenka, oh, damn, what did I say, these are all newspapers and magazines, ha-ha-ha: I wanted to say kleptomaniac, it’s all on nerves, with these failures in her personal life - where did everything go that the kleptomaniac-memory hastily grabbed - grabbed so that nothing gets lost, doesn’t roll under the closet, doesn’t crumble a butterfly in a handful, where the word is the thought of a thing, we are the thing itself, I got lost in the thought of what to do, let’s do this: look around - there is no end to the words, like God’s dear Rus', stop joking, you won’t understand a word, so, if you’re going to pose the question with your hip, then it’s better to put it in a bucket of ice, that’s it, more attentively, more attentively, look left, right, stop in the middle of the line - groves, thickets, jungles of words - the world of shadows, for the word is a general outline, as if, well, imagine, for example, trees - all the trees in the world - with many points, then, if you draw direct meanings through them, they will all converge at the point of the word “tree”: so the cathedrals of supervital crystals, a conscientious light-spider, spreading out on its edges, collects them again into a single bundle, excuse me, here Petrishchev begs you to explain to him why we know that straight lines converge, ah Petrishchev, don’t worry, don’t walk around the room, stop machine, now I’ll explain everything, we know this because a word is an idea, it’s a thought about an object: after reading the word “chair”, we imagine not Viennese, not wicker, not coughing and not a child’s (I had a sister, but not for very long), but some kind of average chair, ideal chair - here Mnemosyne tells me the word “eidos” - and the phrase “Viennese chair” makes us think about the eidos of the Viennese chair, and so on, and so on, eins-zwei-dray, eins-zwei-drei, you see, words are much more closely connected with ideas, not with objects, and there is nothing strange here insofar as only a first-grader thinks that he is solving a problem about diligent pioneers, about the school shyness of apple trees, about the scarlet literacy of cherries, about two travelers coming from A and from B - he has not yet connected the Arabic zyugogulin numbers with elegant manifestations of mathematical thought, with the bizarre behavior of numbers, with the lawless play of geometric lines, with that impudent world on the other side of his first-class brain, where is the flowering beach, where is the Sugar of the sugar bowl, where are the somersaults of puns, where are they walking flimsy blinkers, by the way, if you are still in doubt, show me the blinkers, I’m talking to you now, come here, yes, you, you, come here, you, come here, yes, here, in a whisper: come here, come here, impatiently: well, come here, you, come here, I’m telling you, well, you, you, yes, yes, well, come here, here, you, you, you, come on, come on, come, come, come, here, come, languidly: oh, briskly: come on, come on, come on, sit down, yes sit down here, you want to eat, you want to eat, that is, ugh (as if someone else’s voice is spitting) - you, reader, show me the blinkers, because Alexander Ivanovich and I see them, there they are, nibbling grass, frolicking by the river and they chatter in an incomprehensible dialect, we see them, because here is a flowering shore behind the black darkness (therefore, on all words, like black ice, the Stygian memory of the ringing burns), and you - I don’t even see you, so, I assume, so go on your way, dear reader, don’t cross the river, it’s not necessary, for the transition from one world to another, in whatever direction it takes place, is like death, therefore, by the way, we have a permanent population here, since we don’t have enough words, we can’t invent them: it hums on its own, rings the bell of nighttime unconsciousness, that’s why we select words, or rather, we remember, because the idea is the word, and not “maybe poetry itself is one magnificent quotation,” but for sure, and not only poetry, but literature, moreover, language is a quotation, your language is what you snitched on Aesopian bazaar, picked it up by the path - choosing words without saying a word - which, by the way, is very convenient: the concept of theft disappears, I steal something every day - what - who said - what said - who said what - who said what - yes what, what who said - what are you talking about - what are you, who are you, what are you, a nit - hey, what are you - but it’s not him - stop, but who is it - yes it’s me, me, the saleswoman - how, are you still with us - but where should I be - really, okay, wait - what did you say about the thefts - and who said anything, unless someone said something - come on, give back the word, it’s ours - what about yours - no, not yours, but ours - well, you see, you yourself said that the word is ours, so I don’t know anything, there’s no receipt, and you’re not there either: poof - where did she disappear - yeah, it doesn’t matter, let’s continue: the grid of words is ours coordinate system: street, trees, children - and the children do not copy the trees, but scribble some kind of head image, hardly connected with the horny mantle of the bark, the wound of the hollow - but these are words again (how did you and I end up here then, in these words, you want to know, I really want to, well, okay, are you definitely ready, yes, yes, are you sure that you are absolutely definitely ready to hear, yes, yes, yes, speak up, don’t delay, ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta, or rather, I have no right to say), and although the reader believes everything that is not told to him, choosing words on his own, putting them together, pushing them together, he certainly begins to feel their otherness: words that play with words, words that reveal their convention, like, you know, in one film, when he paints her lips - and kisses them, paints - and kisses, paints - and kisses, words in general are great cheaters, boobies and mugs, I should give them a slap in the face - for example, everyone knows that Nabokov was relatively faithful to Vera, but the words are tricksters, look what they have done: and now I’m sitting in my apartment and drinking, I’m tormented by my thoughts - in Davos the butterflies ruined, the moths ruined Nabokov - I’m drinking alone, like this you’re drinking alone, here I am, besides, I won’t let you drink, otherwise you’ll be a squelch-squish - and then who will write, you’re right, but, cough-cough, what did you do here, and while you’re speaking so smoothly, measuredly dictating to simple minds, walking back and forth in the classroom, I decided to smoke a small Gogol cigar, it’s like, this can’t be given, unless someone smokes in the classrooms, and I have to return you intact, otherwise I won’t receive a ransom, are you now, like me, betrothed, no, we’re more like mummers, forget it, here’s better for you, sweets, I know you love sweets, hold the box and read what’s written, “kor-ku-noff”, thank you very much, I hope we get paid for advertising capitalist scams, which, as I already said, are not in the world of words it happens, here everyone steals from everyone, as they say, the word is in the wind - and the dog barks, well, mm, no one could, mm, steal me, I’m so fat, it’s you, Sasha, ha-ha, you’re very mistaken, of course, I had to drag a lifeless, heavy body into a car with sha - checkers on the door, but crossing the border is quite simple, once - and you’re already in the kings, and an egg, a duck, a hare, a camel, an eye of a needle, a haystack - there is nothing of that, and you are far from a man, not a Muzhin, but just a wet place, a puddle, oh, look how strangely you feasted on sweets, ate half of them, and laid out the rest so that the box is now like a chess set - and then I caught myself, muttered: I wanted to say “Akhmatova Board”, that is: “oh my mother melancholy,” but my interlocutor turned red, swelled, grew, and burst, so much so that I found myself in the middle of a huge puddle, and from behind, rustling among the lizards and snakes, snakes began to catch up with me, hissing: “here comes our snake.” I swam faster to the shore, the river became narrower and narrower, and now I’m running into some door as if stung, slamming it faster her, I look around in search of chairs for the barricade, but I see only a checkered handkerchief, a broken cigarette, a sign “Nizhulaya apartment” on the inside of the door, a samovar, a walnut and a French franc, in the glare - an olacrese, and in it I read a sign (“and ya ..."), I grab my head, somewhere - dogs are breaking free - from the chains, suddenly a pebble, very deftly thrown, hits me in the left shovel, I gasp and turn around: no one, “I’ll kill you, Judas,” he says for some reason in German, and I walk faster through the telescope of rooms, trying to wiggle, as people do (I read somewhere) who are afraid of being shot in the back, I quickly open the first door I come across, lean with my whole body, the latch clicks, the key coughs in the lock, and the stones collapse again like an ellipsis, and a stone word fell on my still living chest, I groan, I repeat out loud: well, son, I gave birth to you, I am breathing heavily, I am weakening - there, there, to the end of the paragraph - a waterfall roars below me, and although I do not have a ardent imagination, I swear to you, it seems to me that from the abyss the voice of the slipped Professor Nabokov is coming to me, I feel stuffy, I take off my jacket and I notice that my hands are covered in blood, the front of my shirt is stained red, finally I’m on the chest of drawers, the chest of drawers is cracking under my weight, a huge piece of rock flies past me with a roar, I understand that Nabokov did not act alone, his accomplice remained, I drag a chair onto the chest of drawers, and then, balancing with difficulty, I climb to the bottom edge of the black night, breathing so loudly, hitting the keys so often that I deafen myself, after After many efforts, I find myself in a strange and painful position, one leg hanging outside, square windows, semicircular arches, Colonel Moran in the empty house opposite is aiming at his amazing target, at me, his finger presses on the pawl, a strange buzzing sound is heard, then the silvery crack of broken glass, a million, million, million scarlet roses, out of the window, out of the window, out of the window I fell, deep, deep, deep below something tender it rang and crumbled, and - like a blot, a puddle, a bullet wound - a dot spreads out.