The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)

A1 and A2 go on unskilled stabbing at the territorial integrity of each other while R1 goes over to the next level in Securing of Interests and assumes the peace-keeper attitude in the eager contest of two A's. As a result, the conflict between A1 and A2 flourishes for 3 (as of yet) decades and very beneficially for R1. To see how a peace-keeper can by Securing of Interests make profit on war, one should watch it from the book-keeping angle. For a starter, let’s try some finger-counting. Suppose that army of each side to the conflict comprises 100 000 servicemen. (Sure enough, none of the A's' General Staffs reports me the quantity of their armed forces, yet adding up the military clerks and other suchlike chmo the numbers would be way higher. Still and all a manly man keeps to his word, if it was said 100 let it remain 100: keep the change!)

Now, every serviceman wears army boots. For the sake of calculus simplicity, imagine that all the warriors, from privates to generals, put on the same, cheapest, ‘kirza’ boots for $12 a pair. The footwear is worth its price and serves for 2 years (The artificial leather plant named after Kirov always was a reputed producer), thus, one year of the conflict secures peace-keepers' revenue for $ 50 000 by ‘kirza’ alone. But camouflage pants, Velcroed jackets, pea-jackets, belts, helmets?! But Kalashnikov assault-rifles, machine-guns, mortars, artillery, both ground and anti-aircraft?! But the ammo for all of the mentioned and still upcoming equipment?! But military trucks, armor vehicles, tanks?! But the land mines, anti-personnel as well as anti-tank ones?! But choppers, jets, radar and missile installations, night-vision devices?! But… (nearing the third decade of the conflict it dawned even on Jews in Israel what a bonanza it is here and they started to supply drones.)

I am running out of my fingers but we haven’t yet reached the military advisers who help each of the A sides to master the delivered weaponry. They also have to be paid for. In full… As they used to say in the besieged Stepanakert in the winter of 1991-92, ‘The Armenians pay Russians to shoot their artillery while the Turks (in Karabakh, Azeries are handled ‘Turks’ for some reason) pay Russians to miss the target’. Which is a jest, of course, because the military advisers never miss when Securing of Interests demands it. So it was in Khojaloo, so it was in Horadiz – the two key moments that did not allow the conflict to untimely die out. That’s the essence of Securing of Interests on the international arena, stick to it and keep it on.

However, the game is so engaging that it goes on at the internal level as well. Let’s take, for instance, R1. One calls it ‘Russia-Mommy’, another one handles it ‘Russastan’, the popular Lubea band sings ‘Russeaaa!’, I call it Russia but all those discrepancies converge in the same mujik who after his working day throws the earned money in with his pals to buy vodka and gulp it from the bottle’s neck and then he comes home to give his kids a stinging example of a reprimand, fuck you, fucking motherfuckers! Then fucking batters his fucking wife for speaking up fucking too much and falls asleep on the floor next to the cooled away Russian oven covering himself with his padded jacket while his petty Czar soigne gives out bon mots from the TV box above his sleeping head. And that’s the way it should be because State is a multi-functional community of people where each person performs their function. Someone is to make decisions which interests should be secured and in what way, another one executes those decisions, still other glorifies in his carols the decision maker and its executors and so on and so forth because I have no fingers enough for each and every one down to this very mujik who’s snoring now on the floor under his padded jacket and is nothing of a functionary but the material for the internal Securing of Interests.

Now, he’s given up his day pay to the treasury exchanging it for vodka distilled from the mixture of sawdust and oil byproducts and later he’ll give up his son so that they format the boy into a law enforcer who will Secure the Interests against his dad and other mujiks. The sleeper’s daughter will, of her own will, choose the career of a prostitute because someone should entertain the other functionaries in the society at their leisure time.

The hardest lot, of course, is that by those from the highest functional layer. Besides Securing the Interests in the outer and internal space, they have to think about their own interests too and that’s where they can’t allow themselves any slacking. Constant alertness and readiness for anything is the pledge of success. Here 'anything' means anything at all – to kill, to betray, to give in, and to lie under (not only metaphorically)… Securing of Interests demands utter dedication.

People! Humans! Countrymen! Do we really need all that?! What do we gain? Power, money, glorification? Be vigilant, O, neighbors, don’t get hooked with that petty scam! Power-money-glory are nothing but a means and not the aim for a sober-headed member to a human society. No! Our aim is the purest, unalloyed envy. Envy from the rest of society members is all we need. That's the apogee, acme and climax of human existence. Mere survival is not the goal for a Robinson Crusoe, what he really needs is finding an envious man Friday. Because neither nanny-goats no billy-goats can stimulate a normal individual. That’s where lies the foundation corner stone to uphold the working model of the human society. Perpetuum Mobile, with your kind permission, checked by the uncountable millennia of usage. At one pole of the society vertical there is Slave in a state of eternal inebriety while at the opposite pole we see Pharaoh – same shit of an animal only Rollex-ornated…

But why have I slid to expressing myself in such an evasively streamlined manner? Am I afraid to unequivocally disclose the scumbags' identity? Well, firstly, I’d rather avoid soiling my letter with the sewage stinkers’ names and, secondly, I’m far from being sure that Listiev, Mkrtchan, Nemtsoff, Sargsian and countless other executed from behind a corner would not start playing Securing the Interests the same shitty way were they to reach the higher levels in the game itself which is so f..er..yes! fucking addictive. You start to feel yourself kinda Almighty, you start to change the rules and draw new laws… Well, not the laws of Physics, or, say, Biology, like, enhancing longevity, juvenilation and stuff… But the works in that direction are underway, yes…

In short, under the current situation in the world, devaluation of information by means of the Internet, there’s no sense in censorship and strict ideology control. Okay, let’s say I’m pouring out the most subversive stuff, so what? (I can’t do that at Facebook or any other popular social net, they purge such things out automatically) About my indie site on the Internet there are millions buzzing Emelyas, each one in their style, I’m buried by evergrowing avalanche of advice on the best practices in fucking, making pizza, enjoying Tick-Tock, buying Perpetuum Mobile for just $49. That’s why I’m not afraid of telling what I know.

And then again, if talking about cowardice, here we all are on the same ground. Let’s take me, for instance, I do know that Algerian Bay has a bump on his nose but keep myself in check and don’t blare about it from the roof-tops. Because you never know when they gonna pop up and fix you with pissed thru pieces of a torn bedsheet…)

~ ~ ~

Yes, life kept rolling along the same rails, where there was the bath, and the beach, and calls from Twoic. And everywhere I acted my rolled-in role, but somehow I got already split from everything, both from the systematically adjusted way of life and from my part in it. I kinda turned that mujik who, leaning against the fenced bounds of the playing grounds, like, watches the kids messing around in the sandbox… Everyone was busily busy with their business in that sand, and Twoic, and bosses, and helpers, and I myself with my streamlined lifestyle, yet I did not really care about all that fuss…

In spring, Twoic proposed to visit Nezhyn for, like, to kick up a party in the old school style at the Hosty. I remember that it was definitely Thursday, my bath day and, apparently, the eve of some holiday, he would not call me in the middle of the week. So I took a towel and underwear for change and went to Nezhyn because even though there was no steam room in the hostel, yet the shower could still be used…

In the hostel lobby, auntie Dina was sitting on duty, she had not changed a single bit and, of course, she didn't let me go any farther. I asked a passer-by student to check the room where, as arranged, Twoic had already been waiting for me to show up, and tell him about the predicament. He went upstairs and I had a discovery.

A young student entered the lobby from the hostel corridor, wearing a crumpled dressing-gown and a sleepy indifferent face. She did not give me the slightest look, ignoring another of casual visitors who pop up in the hostel lobby, and just came over to the window… I waited for Twoic or a message from him about thru which of the back side windows on the first floor I could climb in. So I was not at all prepared that my body, getting no order from me, nor any permission, would unexpectedly throw my right hand up and behind my head, so that my elbow stick out in the air. What a cheeky kink! Was it triggered by the nearness of the common-looking girl with her face of not so well-kneaded dough? Or was it her crumpled dressing gown to turn me on and out of control? In any case, it was outrageous, moreover without any distinct need! That body of mine got really too far! I, for my part, did not intend no gestures… And the cause of the mutiny aboard, a couple of meters off me, was staring at the absolutely void landscape of the two-story canteen behind the gray glass in the window. Some shocking discovery…

The messenger returned and said the door of the indicated room was locked. Apparently, Twoic had already begun a shake-up in the old-days-style of some complaisant chick… I went out of the hostel. To be back in Konotop before the bath closing hour was just unthinkable. But it was a Thursday! Okay, there remained the lake in the Count's Park, I headed there the shortest way.

A group of student lads in their sportswear were coming up along the same shortcut from the park. They reached the pipe from which Fyodor and Yakov once flopped into the water, yet now there was no water anymore, and the moat turned into a wide sod grown ditch. One of them crossed it walking along the shaky pipe. Wow! It seemed to become a student tradition here!

So what? Drumming myself in the chest and shouting "It's me! I'm the legend! It's been started by me!"?. In the sad, elegiac mood I entered the alley of Elms and strolled to the narrower end of the lake by the thicket in the deserted parts of the park. There I undressed and in the altogether entered the water.

Having rubbed the soap all over myself, I threw it ashore and scrubbed the hand-reachable parts of my body. Then, to wash the foam off, I churned along a little, turning around in a screw-wise twirl before diving back towards the shore. White spits of foam scattered the black ripples. The birth of Aphrodite. The f-f..er..frivolous Little Mermaid, thought I rubbing myself with the towel… No, I'm not a pervert. It simply gets so, somehow all by itself, and then just rolls on in a progressive spiral-wise rotation…

~ ~ ~

Lenochka entered the sewing college in the Sumy city and went to study there. I did not have any reason to go on living at 13 Decemberists, and found a place on the opposite outskirts of Konotop, closer to the "Motordetail" plant.

It was a summer kitchenette of 2 ? 3 meters with a pretty low ceiling, in the yard of a khutta whose owner worked at the wastewater treatment plant, where I once laid individual walls. The kitchenette's brick stove left room only for a bed and a desk by the window, yet it was enough for me to shack up with a couple of books in German and The German-Russian Dictionary of Medical Terms because no other kind of a dictionary in the target language happened on the shelves in the bookstore on Lenin Street. The rent was only 15 rubles but, nevertheless, I finally stopped sending out the already irregular alimony transfers in 2 directions…

The extended interest in German was brought about by training up for the final showdown with that old good Freud. As an attested schizophrenic possessing a considerable store of experience in the field studies, I did not see any plausible reason for his fixation on the symbolism of genitals. Well, yes, a cigar may have penis' looks while an ashtray may be persistently associated with vagina and so on and so forth. But then, what of that? They got transfixed by those interpretations and stuck with no more progress than a stick in the mud.

So I finally consolidated my belief that Freud, in fact, is a storyteller, like, say, Hans Christian Andersen, they differ from each other only by the choice of words they used. Thus, Freud divides the Kingdom of consciousness into four parts (a good fellow Sigmund, that was a step forward from the Hegel's triads):

the Duchy Consciousness;

the March Subconscious;

the Baronetcy Ego; and

the County Super-Ego.

Ah! How nice and pretty! They're so delightfully poetic, them those fairy tales! Thank you, Uncle Ziggy!

Anyone has the right to a scientific theory of their own, however, theories are checked by their application in real life situations. Propped by the theory of personal concoction, Freud cured 12 percent of his patients. And although they might've recovered on their own accord or else got healed by the cruelest, yet most efficient therapist of all – Mr. Time, we'll still will give them to Freud awarding for his merits – he offered at least some foothold, a gaudy oasis, when the subject in question was as bare and empty as the arid desert, which endeavor put the inventor on the map.

Besides, he still inspires slews of artists to portray their individual vision of adventurous cocks and charming fannies in all sorts of disguise and juxtaposition…

Yet, leaving the grounds of the visual Art and turning to my personal case, what cured me?

Cured? Whoa! Slow down! Easy, boy, easy… To be cured, you should get ill first, but was I? Where are the indications?

All my life went without the slightest deviation following, straight as beeline, the blue print from The Bhagavad-Gita. Baby—kid—youth—man—old man, you know. The crazy summer '79…hmm…nah, I won't start a clash about terms… though it is their word against mine: beautiful or crazy – tastes differ… Now, even that period was in precise keeping to normality, one of the necessary stages in the spiritual development as expostulated by Hegel in his Phenomenology of Spirit, the stage of "youthful folly" awaiting any normal man in his development was, in my case, a bit acuter and delayed for 10 years, that's all. But even the postponement was not my fault, I was too busy for follies in the conventional period, marriage, army and stuff, you know.

But then, what's normal? wearing a modish necktie and well-pressed parade-crap when loading a pistol for the suicide?

All my abnormalities are well contained within my dreams. Yes, I hear voices in my dreams, I will not conceal. I’m sleeping, and they read to me—in an impersonal and distanced tone of voice—pieces of prose. I must admit, rather enviable passages of neatly composed and glibly flowing prose they are, somehow resembling a movie screenplay. From time to time the reading voice gets substituted by visual action illustrations, yet when there’s a change in the story-line, it pops up back and starts to mumble again.

I’d rather turn them those voices off, not because of being envious, it’s just that they interfere with my sleep, but I don't know where’s their switch control…

Yet, all that is minor inconveniences when compared to the sheer horror of “Sisyphus’ Reiterations”. By its monstrosity, such reiterations are on a par with the ever switched on bulb above your head to remind that you’re shut in a madhouse only they are directed the other way, not from outside. In the course of such SRs you find yourself in the reality which you’ve lived thru already and because they reiterate themselves, maybe, more than once. Your state though is always the same, ineluctable as weightlessness when orbiting the planet—you are suppressed by a dreary dismay and urges to cry only nothing comes out like from a tube twisted out dry of the last drops—circling in sticky necessity to live anew some stretch in your life which you naively considered left behind but no! All around you flows the same yet already estranged life because you are not that former “I” any more. Graying, brow-wrinkled ignoramus, you’re roaming familiar labyrinth of the hostel and auditoriums to get the lousy diploma you don’t even need but it will save you staying there for another circle in a row… or you’re sitting just like right now on the brown hard stool in the mire of dirty-green lino between the plywood walls beneath the fluorescent tubes, the iron of siderails in the bank bed prop your back and not a single familiar face, your buddies since long demobbed and these around are here to keep me for one more cycle or even dump to stockade.

– Look here, ‘suckers. Put off whatever you’re jerking in your brains right now. It’s Political Study Class here. Today’s topic is the Corporate Imperialism. Clear, ‘suckers?

– Aye-yup! Comrade! Leftenant! Col’nel!

– Good… off we go. You keep a-showing me your ram optics now and think, if only you can at all, OK , Col’nel, push forth your shit. You think—if only you have what to do the trick with—that everything goes on just as it goes without a plan, direction and stuff and here you’re fucking wrong, as always. Because every-fucking-thing one way or another clicks and tags on some other this or that thing and if you can’t see how all the thingamabob hooks on and in and out it’s what we have Political Study Classes in the army for. Fuck… Hey, you, sitting over there by the last koobrik with that your brazen visage. Which draft? ‘73?… A-ha! Sumy, khokhols. You think that ‘73 is a bolide fucked year ‘cause that’s when they raked you up to do your hitch and you don’t get it in any way that in that same year in behind-the-hill they pressed out the Thomas Pynchon’s book about Gravity’s Rainbow and while you, numskulls, don’t even know such words they, over there, pulled it off.

In short, the book is about Them. By Thomas, They are almost immortal, invisible, dwell on the other Side and never lose. And that’s all what he leaked about Them in about 800 pages but you, ‘suckers, should know the book turned out as good as a fucking eager slut, you read it and want more and more…Who mumbled “a behind-the-hill paranoid fool-driver”? Wanna get rotten with fatigues till your last day in the hitch? The masters of Pynchon’s caliber are not the stuff to call in question you have to only check out their handwork and draw your illiterate conclusions. Like about those ballet dancers by Degas which he was drawing till got blind. When they watched the dancers’ skirts long enough and at the right angle, they discovered a whole heap of benzolidol rings of the most cool synthetics because everything click-hook-tags in and out it’s only that you have to know the right dosage to get touched the right way… check out the root! And you’ll see even more than that. OK, it’s not Chemistry break in classes for you here, so now we’ll pull Them out in the clear in a politically refined way.

We’ll start ab ovo… Stop scratching your balls, mudaks, in Latin it means “from the very beginning”. Everything’s started from a fresh leaf after a big washing. The flotsam Noah had 3 sons – Shem, Ham, and Japheth. In regard of his Dad, Ham once behaved as a mean cad and Shem started reasoning that it’s not right. Yet Japheth didn’t waste words, came up and knocked Ham out. Noah watched all that bedlam and he sez, “Shut up you all! Listen to me only!” However, Dad was not for ever and ever and after his R.I.P. someone still had to maintain the order that’s where from originated the byword “Dad is dead! Long live Dad!”. Noah’s successor was named State as all his next in line and so as not to fumble with the in-family handles he just classified them all. Japheth and his heirs became Class 1, aristocrats thanks to the timely punch, Shem who sold himself for being so conversed in morals secured Class 2 for his descendants, Ham and his litter became plowmen. D’you follow? In the beginning, ab ovo, there were 3 Classes and 1 State, one for all. That’s where class struggle takes its roots from.

Gradually, little by little, there sprung out towns too whose populace gemmated from plowmen and became a separate class of town-dwellers named bourgeois, excuse my French. And town slickers are sworn swindlers, you know and, as always, they fucked up country hicks and became Class 3, pushing plowmen into Class 4. Now, we have 4 classes but that’s not for long because there hatched up already Class 5 in those towns-cities who also were drudgers like plowmen but not on land already. For the sake of shortness, they were named proletarians. Ha! They are 5 now! Get lost? Look at you hand, how many fingers? Which is also why you’re here, non-combatant pricks…

So, the classes live on while learning the methods of class struggle. Each one has its place and function under State: Japhethoviches fight, Hamoviches plow, Shemoviches… well, morale check-ups and connection to Almighty is their responsibility, when not busy with the capital problem – how to proliferate under celibacy? Proletarians work, work hard, though without conveyor yet. Bourgeois, those town sons of a gun, who jumped the queue to become Class 3, open factories and look for sales markets both locally and overseas….

The workload grows vertically and horizontally, State gets it there’s the need for an additional, the most necessary for State, class of managers and clerks. Class 6 do not produce, discover or invent anything, no, they are in charge of dividing and distributing of what was produced, discovered or invented. Now, how many classes do we have? How many fingers in your hand? So add to them the offshoot your fingers grab at each day more than once.

Now, leave them Classes alone… Let’s turn to State. The critter’s not too complicated, it can be, basically, one of 2 sorts, either concentrated on keeping the innards in good order or trying to expand its order, as is, beyond its limits up to becoming the owner of the known world. This inflation aiming at world domination turns State into Imperialistic State which does not have fail-back. Empire does not control itself, it just fulfills its designation, without the growth it gets busted – either devoured by the outside critters of the like feather or burst from inside because of unwisely swallowed fodder… Besides, State might have to live thru revolutions, which are periods when the ruling Class hands over its prerogatives to another Class as it happened, for instance, in France.

At first, State there was ruled by Class 1, as the most belligerent of classes, they were not clever enough for anything else besides warring which trade narrows you outlook. Yet, they were fans of dynasty games, liked the glitter of dangling trifles in their tunics, and between the battles got toned up by hopping in minuets. That way minueted themselves to guillotine. “Monsieur Executioner, so this is the Apparatus? Wow, what mighty looks! So I put my head thru this hole? Wow, wha…”, CLANGGZZ!!… That’s how the bourgeoisie of Class 3, came to power in France. (Not that aristocrats there were zapped completely as a class, you still can come across of some, in guarded preserves.)

All the French classes were there and the last, Class 6, draw certain conclusions from that History lesson. If you are a class, they can apply to you the class approach with all subsequent repercussions. That’s why they are so adamantly against being counted for a class, no, no! They are just State attributes, humble officiaries, they are public servants, PS. (Don’t mix with state servants (SS) which role is done by military and other beetle-brow SS-men.) And this way, the class, like, exists but it has no actuality. Here is invisibility for you! What’s next in the list? Being on the other Side? Easy! All those PS arrive in the invisible class of distributors of produced goods and weal coming down/up from the rest 5 classes and leave them on the other Side of invisibility, become aliens to the classes of their origin, extraneous to each other. Whichever way you turn it, they are always from another Side… Never lose? As if anyone can doubt it. They are Distributors, They control the card deck, you enter the casino and They already know what hand you’ll have at Blackjack…

The other matter our Thomas Pynchon is good at is his discourse of Corporate Imperialism. Which means, nowadays Empires are built not on the territorial-national basis but according to association with the right branch of business. Again the bullseye! What is his dope I wonder? Just from pure curiosity, eh? If you consider, for example, all those oil and drug cartels or, taking a step back, the Russian Empire. I be damned if there’s not one-to-one correspondence…