THE COLD BODY OF TEXT

I regret that I’ve not always chosen my expressions well.

To beg forgiveness, to forgive, to forsake. The coldness of words and texts helps, for, remaining in an event and its boundaries (boundaries of war are always blurred, even when wars end, and the world starts anew), these outlines are always penetrable, war’s semantic field absorbs and engulfs new meanings. It is at that time, i.e., now, some cold analysis of a bodily sensuality and passionate descriptions of abstract musings may bring some reasonable quiet that would allow one to get up in the morning, brush one’s teeth, and make cereal for the kids, while there is shooting and blowing up somewhere not here, and you can’t comprehend it but still feel the malaise from that faraway, corrosive horror. The horror has many faces, its eyes look out of you with fear, with sadness that tears you apart, with guilt that can’t be mitigated, and shame, with unrealized responsibility and black woe of others, which has sprouted from your stomach into your heart and everywhere.

Sweaty palms are sticky, the white official clothing (last fall, all Moscow medical personnel were issued uniforms) dry your hands if you wipe them on your trousers or your snow-white robes frequently and impatiently, driving your sweat back into pores. The drops branch out, swell, and hang like massive sacks on dry twigs, they are gathered into bags like cancer lymph nodes along an aorta or in neck tissues. Trees have become ferns, they’ve spread out like horsetails with knee joints between their segments. Drops stick out from each joint, they melt into a crust that you can’t wash away from your hands. I’ve relocated to the washbasin in our old morgue in the Sklifosovsky Institute, located in our small kitchen where we have tea in the morning all together, and eat out lunches catch as catch can.

The time is crumpled, the silence is hardened. Let’s take it point by point, Jaspers broke the text up conveniently, the intervals in my pirated downloaded file are random, the lines run together inconsistently, and the numbers are repeated, 1, 2, 3, 4, then 1 again, 5 is somewhere—it’s an endless multiplying spiral with each sub-segment divided, its last part is also divided, and the process is forcibly broken off by the last page. A rhizome involved with a hierarchy closes up in the end like a net, like a string bag with handles on both sides to be picked up from any position.

Cut the deck, pick a card.

Cardinal numbers are written black on black, separated with wavy intervals, so you can’t figure out whether they’re connected with each other, those numbers spelled out, including the class of thousands and the class of ones, they’re represented by four decades—it’s the math for second-graders—and contain, left to right, four ones, two tens; two ones; two ones, two tens, zero hundreds, and two thousands.

“Our situation is such at the moment that we don’t have a need, at least for now, and this prevents us from fully embracing the feeling of guilt, because there are no external factors that could be taken as a punishment and thus as a redemption. Redemption is possible sometime in the future, when already defined by need, poverty, and various physical burdens that can be seen and understood in any language, any space, and any discourse and standard of living. Our internal suffering is not seen, and now, although it’s always been this way but especially now, it is devalued by threats to other people’s lives, by other people’s deaths, by losses of faraway houses that don’t belong to us, by decline of someone’s health and livelihoods. Confession and atonement are killed by other people’s hunger, cold, unburied dead, and frozen fear. (Speaking is conceited and egocentric even without it, and I don’t reject irony, not as a way to speak that now looks cynical and amoral but as a way to allow oneself to put words together as a form of liberation from an attack of muteness.)”

My iPhone calendar lists webinars that I’m supposed to turn on, turn off, and then post those recordings on an educational platform, as well as my holidays, two tickets, for my daughter and me, to St. Petersburg for her spring break, I also should pick up a certificate in the psychiatric center for children, and get cat food delivered. There are dates and times, up to minutes, yet the calendar breaks down, there are gray dots under dates, daily reminders, they flow out with colorless streams with the two hours’ priority, and mean nothing. Days have stopped dividing, and now they unroll like a shortened ribbon, time has lost its people-imposed separators and now stands still in one clot. Spring has come, and now it’s almost the end of March. Revealed days have moved from the class of ones to the class of tens, and now one waits for the countdown to reset, as it’s always the way with calendars, but we won’t recognize it again. The inability to know months, minutes, and seasons that has caught us dead is not considered to be a punishment but is a deficiency of our worldview, so be it.

In Moscow, one can hear the grass grow. The earth strains, melting the snow, waiting for the next, late March snowfall, expecting rains, asking for water and sunshine, and it was given to us in abundance, either as a lesson or as a consolation. The moon is full, it makes a circle through our house, going around it in the night, it shines through the latticework of old window-frames in our factory-built apartment house. On Friday, at the Chistoprudny Boulevard, there are sparrows, there are young women in their black coats with white roses in their hands, and in the window of a basement consignment clothing store, small Mexican Day of the Dead dolls hang by their threads, and the water trickles down to the pavement from a wall, running through the seams between bricks. Weekdays differ by only one sign for those who have their regular jobs, there are workdays and weekends, and we don’t need to know anything else. Each spring we grow with the grass, yet we have applied the brakes voluntarily in the present <cardinal number consisting of ones, tens, an empty young hundred not yet filled in, and thousands, see above>; however, the growth will continue all by itself even without us, although in us, although in the middle of the war, and someone will be consoled by it, but someone else will be angered and infuriated.

In the name of this growth, I proclaim and allow keeping silent, crying, hysterics, those who go, and those who stay, musing, writing, not writing, not reading a single book, going into the dark, going for keeps, losing trust, losing faith, homilies, hatred, malice, fight and jail, anger, resistance, bitterness, and fear. I plead guilty, I accept all charges, even those that blame me for the emptiness of my useless words. I overcome the ban on utterance while I’m alive and healthy, but there are those murdered, torn into pieces forever, robbed of their graves, of their last refuge in the ground, those who have not and will not be able to be born, those who starve, are sick and cold, those who hadn’t washed for days. I’m not speaking to them, they don’t need my words, I speak here.

It’s our common guilt, let each one partake of it, it won’t wash away in the dirty snow of March but it will be strengthened by tears, it will unite its streams. Here, every voluntary and understood “I” is in place of “we.” The collectivity is important in order to join it and find your own in it, yet this collectivity can’t be denunciative for everyone. One can enter it only from one’s self, admit one’s own, without denouncing a neighbor. My verdict is for myself only, and there are many of us, I am inside of “we,” and in this sense, my guilt and my responsibility are collective, together with others who are in the same spot. I only have myself to offer to the collective, and everyone can enter the totality of guilt only on one’s own, without coercing others. This may work.

Leaving the text, the words that initially didn’t feel possible at all but now sift out like some whispering sand, leaving the petitions, leaving myself, I manage to record and analyze—everything in negation. I haven’t escaped the rhetoric of sloganeering although I don’t have a right to it. The realization comes with the departing fear when it becomes habitual, and it’s the eternal pain of a simple witness in the corner. One wants to hold on to that fear in order to live when one can’t live—I note it as a repetition on the margin, see above—and the fear is suddenly the only working battery of life (an inversion in meaning demands an observation and a description), and it also destroys it in the creative endless love. I sacrifice the fear cowardly, I shove it into the pantry in order to think and speak. I justify myself—to speak about everything, even about things that seem unimportant or impossible. The betrayal, with words, of those who are being killed, the disloyalty to the murdered from all over. Some extra self-derogation that can’t be justified, for every justification needs a next one, and there’s no end to it, the borders of war are permeable and they pull in the chain of words and meanings.

Sweaty hands chase the clothes and the body, they stick to the skin in the shower, they keep the keyboard motionless, the fingers fall through the symmetrical hollows along the spine. I gather glass with the palms of my hands, the shards bite and stick in the wounds, the quiet pale blood is diluted by water and mars the floor with wide tracks. Those shards are transparent, invisible, and covered with regular everyday dust, as though household dust may still exist somewhere without ashes or rot. The gray, torn meat is filled with glass and will be eaten. The blood short-circuits the keys, for we’re to live in the brokenness come true, where the fear instigates frenzy in the system of stress and the adrenaline is depleted, the hypothalamus and the adrenal glands are disengaged from each other. Chambers of words are packed with junk, and where could one look for the edges to connect them.

The right to pick three cards from a deck, one has already been read, give me the other two. White on white, the perforation dots are combined in numbers and words, we read with our fingers, probing with our skin, turn your body on, it’s your experience now. The setting: a hair salon at Gilyarovsky Street, a five-window room at Marat Street. The shifts through the streets, from one city to another, involve no steps, no participation, and no effort in movement, as if you’re being transported, and you find yourself in the correct coordinates, yet the effort of deciding to make that shift is so great that it’s burnt out of your body, and only the phantom pain remains, of physical action you hadn’t performed. The memory of physical actions. Muscles ache, joints are stiff, eyelids are filled with unrestrained weeping, they are meaty and so swollen you can hardly open your eyes. Morning impressions of leaves on white curtains through the quiet sunlight, and now the light has moved to the corner, leaving off-white slanted gleams in the windows. Half of the Arctic Museum has moved into shadows. In the salon there’s music from one’s childhood, it’s Sunday morning, and one’s body is ready for a home celebration when the house is scrubbed clean and there are pies in the kitchen. Collapse, you’ve been misled. Only the old lonely mother is in the house, there’s no one else, everyone died or moved away, the oven has long stood broken with no one to repair it, black birds dig the black subsided snow with their beaks, and the sun will be here without us. Internal organs of your body are stilled, there’s no heart, the breathing’s ceased, the fat has slimmed, you urinate regularly with no urine, and your bowels don’t move, you don’t go.

“There’s no way to assign all the guilt to the state, to the president you never voted for, and there’s no way to assign all the blame to yourself in a fit of arrogance. No one belonging to a people can assign to one’s tribesmen a guilt bigger than one’s own, but he must be prepared to accept blame from those he has wronged.”

The language forms appeals and necessities—yet we’ve been looking for humility and prayer. The words crumbled and inverted their meaning, which isn’t there. Those topsy-turvy words, the entire phrases of murderers. People come out following dehumanized and aggressive verbs. TV says, in their fierce and severe fight, our warriors have bombed millions of units—and here’s the escalation of mathematical orders and classes—of military equipment, and destroyed ten personnel of Nazis. Perverse faint-hearted tears are for the destroyed ones, and they commiserate with those living “Nazis” who had been dehumanized by fire and text. Dead so-called “enemies” fill the sectioned tables of our morgues, they freeze in our freezers, they lie on the floors in the corridors, in the cars, and there are more of them, they arrive filling windows and falling from doors. Similar dead “ours” mix with the bodies, they’ve exchanged their bodies and gave themselves to the living. There are strangers’ fragments and parts inside of me, their hands walk like feet, the liver trembles in its paroxysm of cardiac fibrillation, an alien brain with a gunshot wound drives a coma inside of me, and that coma is not mine, it’s someone else’s coma, it’s been taken away from someone and alienated, I take away my own right to it from myself.

TV speaks about Nazis who kill intruders on their own land, and the vortex of transformations eats you up forever, without letting you focus on the single meaning and previous intentions and connotations. The same anchorwoman, without changing her tone, announces that now we’ll talk of our heroes, and the previous context that bursts into phrases changes the essence of the utterance for the third time. Heroes where and who?

And the third card is now revealed, gray, weightless, unseemly, undefinable, a colorless palette in the mixture of all hues that destroys the notion of color.

“All of us are sunk into idle attempts, even without stopping the war, without surrendering to the mercies of the victors whom we don’t have yet in our situation. And we have no hope that we’d ever have them. The futility and vanity are necessary here in order to segregate all forms of guilt and the simultaneous generalization of them in a string bag with two handles on different sides of it, our mantra and our refuge. The role of a fellow traveler takes on a submissive weakness and emaciation—I accept stones, I write words, I have no warmth to warm, I give away the cold body, I cool texts down, cold texts are cooling, I cut frozen bodies open, I return souls, I beg forgiveness with cold words.”