Look around you

"And then I began to notice that at all the entire time of our seemingly relaxed and confidential conversation, Mr. Jingles from time to time exchanged with his companion with short expressive views and, as it seemed to me, with the help of his hands sent him some secret signs."

Well, something like this we all had to read. Especially in childhood.

Secret signs, in general. But without any Mr. Jingles, we all live surrounded by secret signs, sometimes not noticing them at all. The secret signs that “exchange” are not secret at least for two people - for the one who sends them, and for the one who is their addressee. But how many secret signs around us are not obvious to anyone. And never. And do not even try to decipher them. All the same, we won’t understand anything, but only finally shaking ourselves the already shaken nerves, we will acquire completely unusual imagination and - God forbid, of course, is a conspiracy view of the surrounding reality.

The best and correct thing we can do with secret signs is to prescribe them on the territory of art, which, as you know, is a space of unlimited interpretative opportunities.

There are secret signs, so to speak, simpler. Although, if you take into account the context (and not take it into account), then our imagination still begins its boiling, although clearly unproductive work.

A close example. Just yesterday, next to the Riga market, my gaze was hooked by the inscription on the window of one of the stalls that were heard there. The inscription was this: "There is no beer on sale." We, the townspeople and guests of our city, of course, understand what is about. The fact that "there is no beer and will not be." But the obscure, flickering syntax of this purely applied message cannot but provoke mockery speculations such as “yeah, if there is no beer on sale, does this not mean that it is still, but only free?”

Of course, no one sent us any secret sign, but we ourselves fished it out of the muddy stream of street information and almost mechanically determined it in the artistic department. Just as we do this whenever we find that something written on the door of the institution or we heard in city transport turns out to be a poetic line. It seems that I once, passing almost daily along the same street and stumbled upon an ad “The Glass Point”, in addition to his own will, tried to continue this captivating four-foot iambic since school childhood. Somehow it seems: "The receiving point of the glass and the windows! How much is connected with you!" And so on.

But there are signs so secret that with any, even the most timid attempt to decrypt them, you discouragedly stumble upon a rough concrete wall.

Also just the other day I left the Schelkovskaya metro station. There, some people are always crowded at the exit, some of whom offer you to buy a Siamese kitten from them, others quite annoyingly invite you to go directly to the bus to the city of Ivanovo right, the others stick in your hands an advertisement for a new salon of eternal beauty.

This time, between a tall black man who distributed advertising is unknown to what, and a sad old woman who held three or four drooping tulips in his hands, I noticed a very, I must say, a strange person. His face was completely motionless and, I would even say some dead. His eyes were also motionless and did not express anything special. With two fingers, he held a matchbox.

A matchbox, in fact, is for a person of my generation or for those who are older, in itself is a source of the most powerful beam of various associations.

Two May bugs were located there at one time, brought by you to school and at the first opportunity sent for the scruff of a piercingly screeching classmate. There, a small piece of feces could shyly stuck there, which was ordered from time to time to drag into the medical office for quite probable worms.

Of several empty boxes, trains were built, which, mercilessly buzzing and thundering, followed the table from point A to point B, that is, from sugar to the salt shaker.

Do not forget about the popular game in the "box". It was necessary to dashing him at the table and, if he fell with a narrow short side, then you earned fifty points, if a narrow long - twenty, flat label - ten, flat, but an empty blue piece of paper - zero.

It is impossible to forget about the fact that there were sometimes matches in the boxes of these, those that are "not a toy for children." Well, of course! Even like even a toy.

And for some reason I asked this strange person how much the goods he proposed. Looking past me and not grinding my teeth, he rustled: "Twenty -five rubles."

And for some reason I bought this box from him.

Coming to the surface, I am familiar, although with a half -forgotten gesture I energetically shook the box, hoping to hear a chemical heating sound. No, the boxes were silent.

And I opened it. There were not a single match in it, but in it there was a tightly folded piece of white paper. And I began to slowly and excitedly turn it up. Hope for an adventure? The children of Captain Grant popped up on the surface of the memory? Waiting for a happy surprise? “That's it, now, now,” my heart fell into childhood.

No, friends. A detailed piece of paper was unequivocally empty. And I clearly understood that it was a sign. Secret. So secret that I did not even began to make obviously barren attempts to interpret it.

But on the other hand, I realized that this strange, not amenable to interpretation of the episode I will not forget.

And I will tell him from time to time, each time coloring him with new small, but bright details. And I will from time to time to think about him, slowly and concentratedly peering inside myself. And this, by the way, is not as little as it might seem to someone.