How the United States is arranged. My America

The cycle "How America is arranged" tried to re -open America, visiting a variety of states. In the last episode of the podcast, we will “move on to personalities”: I will tell you about my America.

The United States of America: through the territory - the third country in the world (about 10 million square meters), in the population - also the third (about 336 million). Date of independence: July 4, 1776. The capital is Washington. The largest city is New York. The symbol is a white -headed eagle. The motto: "We trust in God." Traditional motto: e Pluribus unum, "of many - one."

Well, now I will answer approximately the same questions that I asked my friends in previous episodes of the cycle "How America works."

Is it still possible to consider America a new light? How much is this poetic name justified today?

Jules Verne is America - a country of passionate eccentric

You can, if you do not describe it, as Jules Verne did. He exaggerated the national features until they became funny cartoons, usually harmless. America has a country of passionate eccentrics. They were not inferior to the extravagance of the British, but retained the natural uncouthness due to the textbook thesis about the inappropriateness of the continent - the truly of the New World.

There is something in this. As often happens, the caricature is pronounced that it hides a portrait. The fact is that today, as always, the American is surrounded by wild nature in all respects. It is worth turning from Hyveya to any of the side roads, as it begins to narrow, the forest will approach the side of the road, the deer, moose, and even the bear strive to leave the thickets. I myself know in the near the surroundings of New York not a very high, but a steep mountain (from modesty, her name is a turkey hill), climbing into which you will find a panorama without the slightest signs of civilization-they are not visible even in binoculars.

Living in a tamed, seemingly New York, I know that here the elements are fierce, especially in winter. Snowfall here is equated with a universal strike. Life, ordinary, labor, stops and begins a nightmare, inseparable with delight. Children are walking school, adults, unable to get home, flirt at workplaces, cars hide in snowdrifts, and skiers roll along Broadway.

Well, and, of course, hurricanes, which are no longer enough female names. The most memorable was Sandy. He left us without electricity, and my wife and I spent a wonderful week with Mandelstam, who was read aloud in turn, saving on a candle. My parents were worse: they lived on the ocean, which often visited them at home. Salt water poisoned a Christmas tree planted for Christmas and poured the first floor. In the second, the old people were waiting for trouble, clutching the most expensive in their hands: American passports and wedding photos.

Hurricane Sandy near

Unrestrained cataclysms of the local climate are scolded by everyone who gets from him, but somehow not entirely sincere. And no risk reduces the temptation and prices of coastal real estate.

It seems to me that the Americans in the soul consider it honest to give nature a chance to take revenge for our violence against it. The revenge scattered by the colonialists of nature finds expression in excesses, which, as travelers always believed, explain a lot in the American character. After all, he developed in a very new light, to which the man had not yet managed to really get sick.

However, Oscar Wilde said, the youth of America is the oldest news. In the age of education, they believed in the omnipotence of the universal mind. It was he who gave rise to philosophers, America, like Zeus Athena: from his head, adult and armed. It must be admitted that the Americans who grew out of the Constitution are still stuck in the 18th century with its faith in the general law, which will inevitably turn into happiness-for everyone and forever.

Given your profession, what literary impressions did America share with you?

I go everywhere with books written in those parts that I am going to visit. Most often they are located in the north, which I, like a compass, prefer to all other cardinal points. I'm not alone. In the golden age of the third wave of emigration, all its whales - Solzhenitsyn, Brodsky, Aleshkovsky and many others lived here.

Sasha Sokolova can be understood: from the top a view of the green mountains of Vermont was opened

Once I came here to get acquainted with Sasha Sokolov. Instead of the address, he dictated a landscape sketch. This happens in these parts. Lev Losev, for the first time inviting to visit, lost his list of roads and trips to groves, streams and horseshoes. Listening to him, I felt like a red hat. Sokolov, however, was concise: calling the mountain, he ordered to get to its top. There I found him. In the tent stood a log instead of a chair and a bucket with paraffin. Here, looking into the corner so as not to be distracted, he composed. Sokolov can be understood: from the top a view of the green mountains of Vermont was opened.

In this state, I was most interested in one person, but he, unfortunately, died. But the “path of Frost” remained - a monument to the poet, who loved to walk on it, of course, composing poetry. Wooden shields with quotes are convinced of this. Context offers nature. Signs with a botanical, but also poetic nomenclature help to get acquainted with her: “Interrupted Fern”, “Fern, Singing hay” (DO NOT LIVE), as well as “Birch yellow”, “Gray birch”, “Birch Birch”.

Frost path in Vermont

Starting the road paved for wheelchairs, the trail soon narrows, winds, hides in tall grass, dives into the swamp, looks at the mountains and freezes with a glade on the hill, from where Frost’s farm is visible. Before her, everything is a mile, but an empty and thick forest resembles the one with whom we meet in his famous verses. Frost spoke with trees on equal terms, avoiding those allusions that turn the poetic landscape of the Old World into a dialogue with the past. Frost (despite the fact that he taught schoolchildren of Latin) the only story is natural. Nature served him as a mine allegory, and he himself considered himself a symbolist. One thing means another, but not quite. The gap between what is said, and what is implied, came to life, and he guarded it at the root. Metaphysics, like a meteorite, crashes into the ground, and the poet never knows how the collision that has become a poem will end. And if he knows, then he is not a poet. Frost said:

"You can’t shift thoughts into poems, like poems - into music. In the process of writing, the author, like the reader, should not know what will be in the next line. Actually, for that, the poet writes to find out."

Poetry is a kind of sport that allows the fans to follow whether the author will be able to raise the declared weight. Frost could. But his poems, like Pushkin, whose role, he, perhaps, plays in America, is too simple and indistinguishable. But they can be visited at his house.

In what staff did you manage to find the most unique attractions of America?

Darkness plunged the world into a trance, and I drove a car by a hunch

In Arizona! Miracles there begin immediately abroad and turn around, as I found out on the road, dusty storm. The steady pressure of the wind lifted the landscape behind the scruff of the neck and shaken it on the highway. Earth and heaven disappeared in red dust. Darkness plunged the world into a trance, and I drove a car by a hunch. By the evening, which already seemed eternal to me, the road rushed into the mountains, moving into a familiar climate. I met the first pine tree like Shukshin - a birch, because of the trees in the desert only telegraphic pillars.

As always, the approach of the mountains gave birth to a thirst for spiritual experiments. In this particular town, Sidon’s soul is seriously engaged in the soul. On a gas station, rejecting the proposal to photograph my aura, I bought a map of the blessed “funnels”, for which the pilgrims of the curly sect New Age flow here, which announced the advance of the new century and compromised it.

Sidona, mystical capital of America

To the well of faith, my wife and I wandered with a goose and silently, leaving sandwiches in the trunk out of piety. According to the map, the path to spiritual treasures was simple: to go until it passes. Indeed, the trail ended with a river fraction, which was decorated with pebbles pyramids, composed of our grateful predecessors. Under the scarlet, like a banner, we sat down to wait for the discharge of spiritual energy.

Honestly, I do not believe the charlatans, but I know that they are right. There are points in the world where people, or maybe animals, feel better than everywhere. In such places they arrange temples, build churches, and base monasteries. In Sidon, a "metaphysical supermarket" was discovered.

Hence the path leads to an indisputable star of all the attractions of the United States-to the Grand Canyon. Politically correct guides explain its origin in two. Geologists argue that a half -kilometer abyss of millions of years snouted the River Colorado. Those who, as is often found in America, do not believe in evolution, consider the canyon a consequence of the biblical flood.

Looking from the cliff, you understand where the religion comes from

I like the second version more. Looking from the cliff, you understand where the religion comes from. Each weathered cliff has its own name comparing the mountain either with Christian, then with the Buddhist, then with a pagan temple. But it is worth sinking to the sun, and the canyon becomes nameless, like Tao.

At the entrance, multi -colored cliffs arrange optical dance. Declaring vision, laughing at the prospect, they move inaudibly, canceling the space, not to mention time. The canyon lives in sunsets and dawn, aging in front of the eyes of one god, in which it is easier to believe here: such a spectacle should have an author.

What is the most unusual meeting in America?

It was a meeting with the Buddha.

It all started with the fact that at forty years old, having become infected with a fashionable crisis of maturity, I went to treatment in Zen-Buddhist monastery.

He doesn’t care where to sit. Actually, his teaching is reduced to this

There is nothing frightening in it, but there are enough oddities. The rise is at 3.30 in the morning, in winter, however, at four. The monks (and nuns) shave their heads, go in robes, call themselves Japanese names, touches smoking, make bouquets and respect their abbot. Their life is difficult to call the recluse, because all the forces go to the thick stream of pilgrims. A disheveled crowd is greeted by a small gypsum Buddha under a large American flag. He doesn’t care where to sit. Actually, his teaching is reduced to this. After all, the Buddha does not answer the question that torments us: is there God, and if not, why? He does not say that it will be with us in the next world or even on that. The Buddha is not at all interested in the particular, he has the overall picture, but nothing definitely can be said about it.

Rather, you can. In the monastery - myriad of books explaining the Buddhist truths in all languages with pictures. But for a beginner they are quite useless, and the library is locked from guests, so as not to introduce intellectual binge into the temptation. You have to study in the monastery yourself - how to walk or swim.

The monks say to beginners:

“If you met the Buddha, kill him,” because even he will not help you. Buddhism is not a theory, but a practice in which from the supernatural is one zeal. "

This is what the abbot John Daido Luri taught. The first American, who headed the Zen-Buddhist monastery, he wandered around the yard in jeans, rude shoes and a baseball cap. Tall, bony, tanned, he seemed his own among local fishermen, hunters and veterans. When the abbot was lighting, I saw an ink anchor on his wrist. At the age of 16, having forged the year of birth, Lury escaped from the house (boring city of Jersey City) to the marine infantrymen. Then he became a physicist, was engaged in spectral analysis, then left science in art, photographed, exhibited in museums, again left, this time in Buddhism, and, finally, founded the monastery on the slope of Mount Tremper. But the tattoo remained. She almost prevented Luri from becoming a rector.

Daido Luri

In Japan, where Luri was examined by Zen authorities, only bandits from Yakuza wear tattoos. Since then, coming east, Daido (as everyone called him in the monastery) sealed the blue anchor with a plaster.

In the meditation hall, he looked different. Barefoot, all in black, with a huge, like Shklovsky, shaved skull, he sat in a lotus pose on a platform wrapped with silk. In one hand there is a ritual cup of tea, in the other - a special flyboy, an ancient symbol of the monastery power. The heir to the 25-century tradition, he answered questions from the suffering.

- Who taught you Buddhism? I asked.

- Camera. I never looked for what to shoot. It finds me itself. And then I sit next to the model - a stone, a person or frog - will not recognize me. The light is constantly changing, and sooner or later the only point comes that reveals itself. It lasts - with a suitable shutter speed - only one sixty of a second. This is the present.

- And the future? Is there a religion without it?

"Are you Buddha?" - "Certainly"

- It is called Buddhism. Buddha taught 47 years and did not say a word about the otherworldly. He only talked about what is happening today, for only here and now you can become a Buddha. This is not a name, not a title, but a condition that everyone can return to.

- Are you a Buddha?

- Certainly. Buddha passed the path, Dharma, his follower of Kashyepa, he-Anande and so on, until in the 84th generation I received the teachings from my mentor in order to convey it to my students.

- You teach how to become a Buddha?

- Only this. Each year, five thousand people pass through the monastery.

- How many of your students have reached the goal?

- Two.

We must add that I know both. He was a New York mathematician, she was a Japanese ballerina.

What the most extravagant settlement did you find on the map of Russian America?

The city of Hankok in the state of New York. However, only a flexible American map can call Hankok a city. Main Street exhausted three stores. In the first, they sold salsi and fishing rods, in the second - spinners and worms, the third was closed, but the window was decorated with a stuffed black bear. A bar with lame billiards and a clumsy floor lurked around the corner.

Henkok, the city of Russian bohemia

The city looked peaceful, and most importantly - unnecessary: prices like in Mexico, taxes too. For this, Hankock was loved by retired firefighters and bohemia in retirement, first of all, ours, compatriots. Having reliably isolating himself from America, the Russian Hankok lives there as a lost knee of the Soviet people.

I have not seen many of its abode from the first years of emigration-since the heroic times when Non-Conform artists fought with the homeless for the most dangerous quarters of wild Brooklyn. Having won Pirrov to win, they achieved that the district ennobled by their vernissages was not affordable for them.

I was the first to meet Oleg Sokhanevich, the legendary sculptor on a tense metal that connects the rails with knots with a bow.

“In his youth,” eyewitnesses say, “this Zaporozhets, beautiful, like Andriy, and bold, like Ostap, made a rack on the roof of the Academy of Arts.”

A little later, when he left his homeland, crossing the sea in a rubber boat, songs were composed about him and novels wrote.

- How are you? I asked, not knowing what they were talking about with the heroes.

“Muse torments,” he chopped off, so that I understood: nothing changes.

Others were no worse. Singers-cosmists, chroniclers of the unknown, the thinkers of the otherworldly, they built anything. Some are a bathhouse, others - a gallery, the third is a cellar, the fourth is a tower to the sky.

A barn -sized picture hung in his good house: a fire -breathing beast against the background of the Peter and Paul Fortress

Most of all I liked the artist who built a bathing, chapel and an exemplary garden on the banks of the Delover River. Having greeted, he confidently, like in a wallet, climbed into the garden to pull out a radish that we ate, brushing away fluently. A barn -sized picture hung in his firm house: a fire -breathing beast against the backdrop of the Peter and Paul Fortress.

Well, and, of course, in Hankoka there was a holy fool - a poet with clear eyes and boundless memory. Sticking, she and his wife went naked, which terribly annoyed the neighbors who attended Sunday service in the methodist church standing right there. In my opinion, it was only by the way. The Russian couple resembled Adam and Eve, who descended from the hardships of exile.

“Of course, the neighbors are idiots,” the poet cursed, “but what to take from them if three quarters of the Americans believe that the government is hiding contacts with flying saucers.”

“And they do the right thing,” I thought, but I did not say, “it seems that we have arrived at them.”

Which dish is best to taste the traveler in the USA?

Many will say: a steak, which is supposedly worshiped by American cuisine, but this is not all true. Another America, especially Argentina, and the old light, are most famous for steaks, most of all in Florence. But nowhere and never will give you such an amazing dish as Omar in the northeast of the country.

Omar is a diet of kings, but only democrats know how to cook it (they rarely vote for the Republicans in New England). The perfect recipe takes into account the circumstances of the place and time. The latter is connected with the calendar. Like all the gifts of the sea, Omara is good in those months in the name of which there is a letter "P". In other words, not in the summer.

The top of the American feast is Omar from Maine

The place is even more difficult. The best of all of all are obtained where they are found - in the cold sea, part of which is poured into a cemented puddle and called Lobster Pit. From early spring, water boils without seasonings here, except for minerals that the Atlantic Ocean dissolved in it. Choosing a wallet and appetite (best in a kilogram and a half) for a beast for lunch, you wait for a second deadline until it is cooked in the broth that remained from all previous lobsters. To be thoroughly, experts come at the end of the season.

Sometimes a cash of corn boiled with milk is served, often molten oil, I prefer napkins, and better - apron, and special cutlery resembling a surgical set from the Skillful Hands store. Omar has so many limbs that only forceps and hooks can get to the meat. Only by overcoming the resistance of the shell, which, incidentally, in an interpreted form goes to the Lobster Chowder soup, you find yourself alone with a sweet, slightly rubber flesh that you need to eat without distracting sauces, conversations, even champagne.

Autocrat of American cuisine and, undoubtedly, its main pride, New English Omar does not tolerate outsiders

The autocrat of American cuisine and, undoubtedly, its main pride, New English Omar does not tolerate outsiders. Remembering this, you, well -fed and dirty, end the food with immense gratitude for managing to divide the feast with him near the successfully tired Omarovo puddle.

What place related to Ukraine in America is especially interesting?

Today, all of America, one way or another, empathizes with Ukraine in its bloody war with the Putin regime. In this struggle, the United States again became the Arsenal of Democracy. So it was called back in those days when England, like Ukraine today, fought with the aggressor with the help of American weapons. The war was reflected even on the appearance of America. It seems to me that there are no more places left where you meet with a yellow-blue flag. He may peek out of the skyscraper window, decorate the lawn, hang from the bridge on the road or be a sticker on the bumper of the car. Now it’s hard for me to imagine an American who, as it happened before the war, could not find Ukraine on the map.

In New York, the Diaspora Center is located in the southeast of Manhattan, where Ukrainian restaurants, shops, a marvelous museum and, of course, churches were bought. On Sundays, they are very crowded in them: parishioners, kneeling, pray for the victory of Ukraine.

But Ukrainian life boils in the provinces. My favorite place is in the near mountains, an hour and a half drive from New York. This is the "Soyuzivka" - the Ukrainian cultural center and the old resort. Actually, we are the same age with him, but he has survived better and leads a lively life. Especially now, when the war has aggravated interest in everything Ukrainian.

Located in the picturesque mountain region, the Soyuzivka imitates the Carpathians with their characteristic sharp -hearted architecture. The visitors are met by the sculpture of Gutsul in a folk suit. Monuments to famous Ukrainians stand everywhere: Mazepa, Lesya Ukrainka, of course, Taras Shevchenko. The latter is the work of a native of Ukraine Alexander Arkhipenko. The outstanding master, who was the first to let the void into his sculpture, he lived for a long time and held the workshop nearby - in the mountain town of Bervil.

Ukrainian resort in the vicinity of New York

The meaning of "Soyuzivka" is in continuity, to preserve in America the traditional culture of Ukraine in its entirety - from suit and kitchen to dancing and songs. Every summer there is a large music festival, collecting Ukrainian musicians from all over the New World. Last time, the Ukrainian group "Dahabrah", the most original ensemble that I have ever heard, performed here.

But first of all, the purpose of the Soyuzivka is to convey to children the native language of their ancestors. In exile, this is a very difficult and very important task. In order to fulfill it, Soyuzivka arranges intensive seminars for teachers of the Ukrainian language. I know about how this system works because I have familiar peers, hereditary New Yorkers who went here in a summer camp as a child. They still speak Ukrainian perfectly, although they have never been in Ukraine.

This place is especially expensive for me, because it resembles my favorite Carpathians in everything. In my youth, I went on these mountains, climbed onto the highest peak of Goverla, ate a barbecue in a shepherd’s coat, enjoyed the wild raspberry on the pass (where I met a brown bear) and fell in love with this ancient and well -groomed land, where they spoke four languages and seemed to not notice the Soviet regime.

The author of the cycle at the end of the trip

And the "American Carpathians" in Soyuzivka remind me of one of the main films that I watched in my life. This is the "shadows of the forgotten ancestors" of Sergei Parajanov. Although this film was shot almost 60 years ago at the Dovzhenko studio, the picture was not at all outdated. Rather - vice versa. She shows where the will came from in Ukraine, the identity, confidence in the value of her culture. To understand why Kyiv was not taken in three days, we must see the “shadows of forgotten ancestors”, the history of the Hutsul Romeo and Juliet, free and brave people who live passions.

I saw Parajanov in New York when he came here after he was released from the camp. The director was met as they did not meet the president. And if we want to find the historical and emotional sources of the Maidan, it is important for us to watch this film. In any case, I myself do this, returning from Soyuzivka.