Void

*

You lost freewriting, for example, a long time ago. The more your public intellectual exhorted everyone to do it, the more . . . and that’s why you haven’t made coffee for two or three years—for several years now, buying it, instead, in colorful little cups. And the time you’re saving at someone else’s expense? You’re supposed to have channeled that time in the right direction. But there isn’t one. There is a deep void between you and time; between you and speech; but whenever the void is material (the void between you and the referent)—then, quite the contrary, you sense an affinity. You buy your coffee so you can head out into the city and wait for a taxi while the sky, most likely, grows dark in anticipation of spring, when your flame will wash it out, and then you’re too embarrassed to ask the driver to move the seat during your ride to the train stations. This discomfort also appertains to the expectation, it’s the natural extension of your adventure; and as well as the Oxford Press notebook you use as a travel diary, with its blank pages, there’s also a glass jar in your bag. Used to use them for jam, but you have no idea what people use them for today. You were disconcerted as you paid for it with PayPass, displacing, as it were, the anachronism of the entire procedure, not least the actual purpose of your trip, along with the glass jar you’ll use on said trip, which symbolizes the stupidity of its purpose. First of all, the jar wasn’t as cheap as you might think, because they don’t make them anymore, so the price keeps rising (every morning), and secondly, it’s not just that you’re afraid of commuter trains, you’re also afraid the jar will break. But the purpose of your trip might break when it comes into contact with the commuter train. And then you’re also afraid that the train-travelers hate you, because of what’s written all over you (for your own safety, you never leave the Zamoskvorechye neighborhood); that they could somehow divine the purpose of your trip, or that you have your glass jar with you; or there’s also your scarf—it’s not that expensive, but in a commuter train you feel like fifty euros is more than fifty euros, and on top of that, all these sensations are not without a whiff of snobbery, or rather, it’s the chronic dread of a message going unanswered, unrequited; the dread of THAT. Yes, of THAT, probably, and of worse, even; you’re not suited to it . . . but then you’re not capable of the other, either, truth be told.

Time (a time of movement by inertia) is on your side, so you’re in transit, and then, after the train, you’re in a town 102 kilometers away from Moscow and nothing has happened: stifling isolation, a dubious decision, a darkening horizon that hasn’t the slightest means of making things right. You slop through the well-worn path’s soggy snow. You smoke, to put it off. If all this felt like the kind of thing that, once you got back home, you’d refuse to repeat the next day, then it’s possible that you’d consider it in precisely this perspective. You try to add up your assets. Her messages, for example: so, how’s it going? Can these be written off as the disturbing process (or necessity) of writing when you have an unlimited data plan and no obligation to pay for or expect a reply? Can you simply not reply to her messages, severed from solicitude by their very banality? You chose the town 102 kilometers away from Moscow due to simple arithmetic, something that people (your kind of people) don’t like to talk about. Meaning, they don’t give voice to sensitivity: voices should be reserved for low-wage workers, women in the clutches of the patriarchy, and so forth. At one point or another you’re added to the list of minorities protected by migration services, but that point is too far away for you to allow yourself to speak out about the most important subject of all: “personal problems as a factor eclipsing (for example) political indifference.” This town is (by your standards) at a considerable distance; similarly, your desire to make sense of the phenomenon of “personal problems” is at a considerable distance from your actual personal problems and from your Facebook feed’s permission to talk about them. Well, unless it’s a family member’s pathology report flanked by hospital bills and pleas for donations, of course; unless it’s an attempt to crowdfund a Marxist lesbian separatist anthology. And so you reply to her that everything’s really shitty, by which you mean that the town he lives in looks like him, and that right now you are walking around the neighborhood of the guy at the epicenter of . . .of what? Well, of your personal problems, for one. That is to say, you do not write her that you’ve brought a glass jar to the town of the man you love, due to the fact that a kind of nimbus of meanings is making the expression “the man I love” too overloaded; due to the fact that it’s not all as simple as that; is it “man” as in his body, or “man” as in the political construct, and so forth; and also, what is this “I,” and what is this “love,” and does that word say more about the referent than about you; and so forth; all of this is unclear, which is why you can’t (won’t) say things like that. You will use more evasive strategies, even for yourself.

Still, all the same, that’s precisely what you did: you brought a glass jar to a provincial town, so that your heart would pound in your throat. You’ll wander the suburbs of your searches, and then, in danger’s grey illumination, you’ll race to catch the last train back home, so that you can patch up the holes. Tender affection for the defects of other people’s buildings; attempts to blame slipshod Soviet construction for whatever didn’t work out in life; shambling rambles of trembling anxiety; all these lay out a path past the slimy (in summer) pond with a dirty crust of ice, past happy children, past parents who are happy to have children . . . but the main thing is that both children and parents have been severed from the defects of buildings and slipshod Soviet construction, and also from the fact that in fifteen years somebody’s going to bring a glass jar to the dirty ice so he can make an offering of snow and clotted venous blood to the new generation. It would be more correct (to the people from the commuter train) to call and ask to see him, to say that you got lost in the general vicinity of his childhood and that you need—maybe not the misericord of a curt consignment back to the colored blurs of the train to Moscow, but a chance to exchange speech flow with each other, as though the two of you had something to talk about. But only if you thought your feelings were enough of a reason to talk. Or if there were some kind of hypothetical scenario in which you had inhabited this location, undergone your formation, by the dirty pond of his childhood, where he probably aimed to land himself an ear infection in that grey knit cap of his. Or maybe if you could explain clearly why your feelings are more significant than other feelings, so it’s worth talking about them . . . like the way that herpetologists, for example, are always rushing off into the reeds to get to know each other better, as they check for the fluorescent patches on a tiny grass snake’s skull. But everything’s ludicrous here, and there’s this twilight, too, and also fifty euros is way more than it used to be, and you’re ready to just leave the scarf on a snowman made of pissed-on snow, but even that won’t help. There’s nothing more humiliating than being in love, except maybe a story about being in love, but that has nothing to do with the message in your ear during lunch—guess what? I’m in love—or the small, passing spark, the pissed-on snow, the first tulip, the profit margin that gets hard every time a body walks by. Some things are a lot worse: losing your virginity (meaning to give something to somebody that you can’t ever give away again, something you can’t disparage when, later, you want to—and you will inevitably want to), volunteering to fight in the Donbass (because nobody from your reference group will ever love you, and basically, none of those other safe words everybody talks about will work; getting experience with actual talking is what works; but your speech has flowed into and filled that void so easily that nobody needs you over there, on the far bank of your speech, either; your words are rejected as defective; so you’d better not volunteer to go fight in the Donbass; but even so, you know that only there will your guts get so frozen with fear that your instinctual reactions will make you stop talking in such a convoluted way; when you’re soaked to the skin in a barrage of hail, your personal problems will dwindle away, they’ll be shot, they’ll be crucified—or it’ll look like they were crucified . . . luscious arousal without an erection, and then the dim light, too . . . you know everything will end badly, like as not, but soon, very soon, and this allows you to delete your Facebook profile, cut off your toxic obligations to your mother, try to reaffix some integrity, slap a self together out of pissed-on snow), gay love in a provincial high school at the end of the 1990s . . . but the problem you’ve already got is more than enough. You don’t have the money to talk about your feelings, the way you would about breathing normally. What’s easy is to dial it up talking about when your skull was cracked in 2004 or how skinheads beat Sh. up right in front of you.

Because you do not have a clear goal in mind (you won’t be informing anyone of your location), but you do run the risk of encountering your referent, you are experiencing anxiety. It pours into your veins. Or it’s like that sensation of an alarm bell going off, too, that you feel whenever a fashionable intellectual from the capital likes your post. You’d do well, for example, to think about the following important issues:

a) where to publish a few of your pieces (“the myth of antiquity as an allusion to the rusting speech of a new Middle Ages,” “between ressentiment and abuse: life in modern (Putin’s) Russia,” “discursive practices of pro-feminist rhetoric”), for the simple reason that their existence might provide that vital jolt to the atmosphere, especially in terms of quantity of views and an increase in your own social stock; maybe where the painful shyness of a taunted child is forgotten between the wave-crests, where dirty weeds transform into the 14,000 characters (without spaces) of an essay, “the poetics of **** as a stable construct of the conservative consensus,” which you want to publish on Colta.ru, because in the potentiality of publication, in that privileged space of confluence, you can forget the pathetic shivering and head-spinning purulence of your diagnosis when you were fifteen, which before long will knit inseparably with the fact that somebody breaks your nose because you’re in love with a man, and then, a little after that, the fact that due to your “complex chemical emotion” you will greet the onset of evening 102 kilometers from home. You sidestep the egregore and find yourself once more in the twice-trod truth that your old man’s not coming home for the weekend; then, that he’s just plain not coming. Ever again. But you can call him. If you want. There won’t be any incoming calls.

b) how to avoid further encounters with R., who is stressing out over your endless blather about him, and whose feelings for you—the reflecting surface—are, you are certain, analogous to your own desires. (A potential encounter with depth: of his venous blood, of your ignorance—not only of the exposition, but— actually, if you look at things as they are—of just the whole biography, except for several traces of childish cuts running in a ragged train down his wrists, and also, of course, his words, which could, in point of fact, turn out to be untrue.)

c) how to compel yourself to write, since it’s not only that you’re not emancipating your words, it’s that you genuinely like keeping them locked up; you’d like to unleash your writing, that engine of torture, on the fibers of your anxiety (namely, of unfreedom of expression), so that it weaves them together, the way the fibers of the skull knit together, forming something like a citadel, the way tendrils of old and dank and mildew rise up in the air from the shallow panting of your childhood pet (a dog converted into patches of fur on a Zhiguli’s bumper) and from the hot field where your father lost his way, so you saw May beetles for the first time, a colossal number of May beetles flying around the field while your father’s car stereo kept on playing and replaying Zemfira’s first album.

d) and the main thing—which is why it’s the last one—is how you are supposed to go on when nothing’s going to end in any way, in that it will never formally end, because the people from the trains, and the people who are getting to Moscow on the train, and, more than likely, the people in Moscow, will not ask questions; their lives aren’t woven together from multitudes of variations of the course of events and clumsy attempts at analysis. Once you’ve done the thing that the glass jar in your bag is for, what happens then . . . afterwards . . . You call it “the end,” but when no formal ending takes place, what happens after that?

You watch the innocence of the main square; the sheared, curled slabs of snow; the mantle filling the fountain. You get the jar out of your bag, warm it in your hands, and smoke with your eyes closed. This you know about him (although you don’t know a great deal of what many of his friends might know about him, the friends that write those messages like “how are you?” from the banal inertia of writing, of messaging, of asking): he has walked past this square any number of times. Insofar as this landscape is meaningless, he has to pass through it, to get to the train station (and continue on from there), or when he comes out of a shop; therefore, one way or another, a colossal number of his memories are grounded in this square, because he’s been stuck with it, some architect’s idiot testament, ever since he was a kid. This is where he has the highest chance of running into you, so your anxiety grows. But this is precisely what the jar needs. It has to absorb you—rather, him—and the humming of provincial power lines. The physical mechanisms and the onset of the freezing night (so he’s hardly likely to go out to the store, etc.) are reminiscent of the summer night when your mother threw a blanket over your head and said “pretend mama died,” and you haven’t been able to make your way back out of that darkness for—how many years now? But that hardly sets you apart from everybody else; in all likelihood, it knits you closer together to them. You are sitting on the ledge of the cold fountain because that summer night brought you here.

You do not see him. You are going back home. Disappointment at the failure to see him. Disappointment because the mechanisms are moving, but the gears aren’t engaging. The physical sensation that nothing is happening, that nothing ever will happen, except the autobiographical abstract “automatic writing as the flip side of the Putin regime,” which you don’t bother starting, because the writing is so automatic that it doesn’t even make you yourself cry. A morning discharge, like lubrication (in the engineering sense), and compulsive hygiene.

Alistair Crowley advised people to quit smoking as an exercise in discipline. To let it go temporarily, so the remaining energy could be saturated with desire. You’re suggesting the theory in hindsight; still—it’s two, three years, maybe more, that you haven’t been making coffee. Just the colorful little cups. But one time she said that if you mix two phenobarbital pills, blood from a vein, and plain old instant coffee, then pour it over broken glass that has absorbed the memory of the Other, you can reverse the course of sepsis of the speech. She said it the same way she explained that she’s translating your image into his prostate every morning, and so at some point—which means soon—he will come back. She always talked about anything that wasn’t useful for charting the right course. But eventually you hit a point when nothing’s left but the soggy corners of your soul, a dark canopy dividing before and after, and also . . . something else, too, that sadly screws itself in, deeper and deeper, until you aren’t afraid of venous blood anymore. The thing that’s supposed to dwindle away inside you has surged, and after this latest wave you decided you should inform him of your feelings. In written, non-violent form.

It’s almost morning, but the sky is still black when you cut your forearm from the soft equivocation of a vein up toward the wrist and direct the flow into the weakly-brewed coffee. You pour the blood, the weakly-brewed coffee, and the pills, which disintegrated in the hot liquid, through the broken glass of the jar that travelled 204 kilometers there and back in your bag. It scrapes your throat as you drink it, but the pain from that’s no worse than from your completely shredded expectations, plans that never coalesced, works that weren’t written, the self-destructing prophecies of your liver, and love inside a fist’s aperture. You’re sick to your stomach from this adventure, or from the very fact that you have reasons (delusions of reasons) to go on this adventure; but not from the taste of coffee, blood, and glass. From a clean account you set up just for this, you write:

Hello,

I………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

………………………………………………………………………………………………………

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Your letter works remotely, far from the clots, far from the bank of your speech, far from the source of your power. She said that you absolutely have to add your own blood, because you need to reboot your brain; clean off your windshield; you need to make him think about what you are constantly thinking about already, but at a different speed. It’s not magic, it’s psychophysiology.

…………………………………………………………………

…………………………………………………………………………………………….

………………………………………………………….. with the utmost respect, I hope

…………………………………………………………………………..…………..……………….

……..

..

You send it. She said that the pain in your elbows, which you rest on top of the wooden counter at the Starbucks every day when you ask for your latte, is part of the reason you can’t write a sincere love letter. It is precisely this (because actually a coffeeshop as a workplace is exploitative and cruel) that is rendering your speech nontransparent to its addressee.

This, and nothing else.

She also used to talk about how she bought some water blessed by the Dalai Lama on eBay and inserts it into her vagina with a pipette to increase her sensuality. That is not what you wanted to hear. But, she said, the broken glass with the memory of the Other will allow you to speak, not with words that are comfortable for you, but with speech the addressee is ready to hear. She said that coffee made with blood and broken glass has long been used in propaganda by leading campaign managers. You just need to say what they want to hear. But it’s not always that easy. Glass is brought in from Siberia, the Urals, and Chechnya at night, because that’s how it’s done. Speechwriters drink coffee made with blood from the president and glass from all across Russia. And as you can see, she said, they can do anything. Just try it. Can’t make it any worse.

There’s nothing worse—you are rereading it sober—than saying, out loud,  ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

……………………………………………………………………………………………………..

You don’t know what’s going to happen now. You know what’s going to happen now. Nothing. Failure. Speech can be agglutinated, but two people’s speech can’t French kiss. Or he’ll answer you ……………………………………

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

………………………………………………………………………………………………………

And you don’t know what to do with that.

She advises you to try translating your image into his prostate. You could try not preventing slit wrists. Or keeping the night from beginning. Or getting a job on the invisible night train that brings glass from Surgut to the Kremlin. Or . . .