VDNKh, THE CAPITAL OF THE WORLD: A SCHIZOANALYSIS
”Are they balloons, too?” he asked.
Snowdrop and Cornflower laughed. “They’re water-melons,” they said. “Haven’t you ever seen a water-melon before?”
N. Nosov, THE ADVENTURES OF DUNNO AND HIS FRIENDS, TRANSLATED FROM THE RUSSIAN BY MARGARET WETTLIN.
The Bull on the Roof
BALLET SUITE BY DARIUS MILHAUD
Balalaika, jangle gaily,
The housewife sits under the table,
On the table in furious fight
The devils put the wizard to flight.
CHILDREN’S FOLKLORE, 1986
As I strolled round VDNKh (the Exhibition of Achievements of the National Economy) with my child on a warm September day, we ended up in the rather deserted area of the exhibition where the Golden Ear of Wheat fountain stands. As it happened, although I had lived close to VDNKh and visited it quite often, ever since I became a responsible adult I had never entered this particular section of the exhibition. As I recall, the last time I had been there was as a child, with my own parents. Standing by the pond and gazing at the immense bull on the roof of one of the pavilions (at the age of about seventeen I was very fond of the music to The Bull on the Roof by Darius Milhaud, one of the composers of the French Group of Six) I was swept away by a torrent of nostalgic memories from those distant times when everything was experienced in its immediate sensuous and functional significance, when the world was still only an object of perception and experience and was therefore magical, new and magnificent … when my head was not yet cluttered with any gnostic grids and there was no frozen knowledge of the world, but only the process of its endless (as it seemed at the time) cognition, of getting to know it.
And so, having found myself in this wonderful nostalgic spot, I observed with horror my own present way of viewing everything surrounding me, that continuous schizophrenic scanning of nonexistent worlds. I discovered that I was not surrounded by amusing buildings and vistas, but by symbolic perspectives which immediately combined to form an integral, symbolic picture, the iconographical space of this zone of VDNKh. And this is what I came up with as a result.
The collective unconscious of the Russian-speaking region set out what one might call its “radical” and fundamental sacred essence, i.e. its collective consciousness, in the form of a mandala of government, not on Red Square, as might appear at first glance, but at VDNKh.
It is well known that the communists’ fundamental ideologeme is heaven on earth, and entry to this heaven (‘salvation’) is only possible by means of social and economic transformations to the national economy, transformations in which the whole of society must be mobilized. But, after all, any idea is prone to acquire transcendent significance and metaphysical autonomy, and in conformity with the laws of transcendentalization, it immediately becomes manifested in signs and symbols. ‘The National Economy’ as an idea in the transcendentalization, symbolization and charismatization of Soviet society was arranged at VDNKh into a highly complex constellation of signifiers. This is a mandala of colossal dimensions, an open-air temple in which the place of the god is taken by collective consciousness itself (the communist collective), objectified in the symbol of the Golden Ear of Wheat fountain. This rises up at the very center of a large pond (if the plan of VDNKH is viewed ‘vertically’, it is located at the very highest level of the heavens and rests on cornucopias from which fruits, vegetables and so forth come cascading out). The fountain consists of eleven gold petals with a twelfth in the form of a trefoil. It is curious to note that the boons of heaven come tumbling out of it from below, into the water. But from what ‘heavens’ do they shower down, where are they produced?
The very largest building at VDNKh is the Cosmos pavilion. In general ‘cosmos’ (as order) is a rather complex concept. In polytheistic religions the cosmos is inhabited by gods and humans, while in monotheistic religions a god creates the cosmos while himself remaining unknown. In the sacred space of VDNKh the ‘god’ (as collective consciousness) dwells outside the ‘cosmos’, on the earth (or rather, on the water, but we will come to that a little later), since the ‘cosmos’ is objectified as a separate pavilion.
In the VDNKh mandala, the ‘cosmos’ is represented as the ‘heavens’, which are, moreover dialectical. And this is why. If you stand facing the Cosmos pavilion, to your right and slightly further back there is a complex of animal husbandry pavilions, where they display pigs, cows, horses, sheep and so forth. On top of one of these pavilions a bull of immense proportions has been installed, together with a plaster athlete, a titan, who appears to be subduing it. This is obviously a symbol of nature, which for the local ideology is a ‘workshop’ with which man must work, as he does with chaos, in order to discipline and order it, as he transforms it into cosmos.
Now let us move round to the left of the Cosmos pavilion again, where the Golden Ear of Wheat fountain is located, then stand facing it and look upwards. Directly in front of us we shall see the immense Cosmos dome, with the gigantic plaster bull on its left – they are at almost the same height and on the same scale. If we move along the left bank of the pond, rounding the Golden Ear of Wheat, we shall see the double figure of the Bull and the Titan gradually drifting onto the dome of Cosmos, as if immersing itself in it. In other words, this walk round the pond (the area around the pond is called the Georgian Park) is arranged to provide a visual demonstration of the process of ordering and mastering Chaos with Cosmos; it is itself sacred, symbolizing the path of ‘ordering’, the path of the Tao. It now becomes clear to us where the ‘heavenly boons’ come from as they tumble out below from the horns of plenty of the Golden Ear of Wheat fountain: they tumble out from the ‘dialectical heavens’ and the complex of these four elements – The Golden Ear of Wheat, ‘The Bull on the Roof,’ the Cosmos and the path itself, from which the entire process can be observed – embody the innermost hallowed impulse of the sacred topography of VDNKh – ‘bringing the heavens down to the earth’, that is, the construction of paradise here on earth.
The importance of the concept of ‘cosmos’, notably in the dynamic course of its ‘earthing’, is also emphasized by the fact that VDNKh is surrounded by a kind of diffusion zone, where the energy of this sacred ‘cosmos’ seems to weaken as it makes the transition to mundane everyday reality. For instance, located beside VDNKh are the Cosmos hotel, the Cosmos cinema and numerous streets with connection to the cosmos – Cosmonauts’ Alley with the Rocket obelisk and the monument to Tsiolkovsky, Korolyov Avenue, Kibaldchik Street, Kondratiuk Street, Tsander Street and so on.
But let us return to the sacred pathway to the Georgian Park, which offers such a good view of the entire sacred center of VDNKh. As the observer moves further along it, if he makes a 180-degree turn – precisely at the point where the bull enters the dome of the Cosmos pavilion – he will see in front of him the small Domestic Services pavilion, which stands not far from the pond, on an elevated spot surrounded by trees. In a certain sense it represents the highest point of transcendence of the efforts of the collective unconscious – literally ‘the next world.’ Both the location of the pavilion and its amazing architecture (little houses like this can only be imagined in the land of Dunno and his titchy friends in Nosov’s popular story), together with the fact that for some reason it is not marked on the guide-map of VDNKh, render it an entirely alien body, excluded from the grandiose panorama and topography of the general complex of exhibition pavilions. This feeling is reinforced by the fact that to the right of it, very close by, in the Water Management and Irrigation Works pavilion, the most sacred ‘lower reaches’, so to speak, of the mandala are presented, i.e. the element of water, in which everything arises, the force of Yin and also in a certain sense, chaos, corresponding to the Bull on the Roof. But whereas the Bull on the roof is superior chaos (the force of Yang), Water Management is, as it were, ‘inferior’ chaos (Yin). And the Golden Ear of Wheat fountain is located precisely between these two unbridled forces. Incidentally, this situation of ‘double chaos’ also demonstrates the ‘economic unviability’ of this entire system of ‘god’ in the form of the collective consciousness, which in itself manifests the same shortcoming: for after all, the Golden Ear of Wheat fountain stands in the middle of a pool of water and the ‘boons of heaven’ tumble out of its horns of plenty straight into the water, back into ‘chaos.’ But more about this below, when we shall examine the links between the real sociopolitical system and its mental ‘guide-map’
And so, the Domestic Services pavilion peeps out of the trees like some exceptionally beautiful, magical toy, in which people (like Nosov’s little titches) live eternally and joyfully, performing the most ordinary of tasks: cutting hair, washing laundry, mending things and so on, in short they realize their eternal ‘posthumous’ existence or afterlife, which is symbolized by this Domestic Services pavilion. That is, even though all these dialectical, grandiose hardships of assimilating chaos to cosmos are drowned in the water, in some magical fashion they are finally resolved in this place of ultimate, paradisiacal, toylike existence.
Moreover every element of the sacred complex described here has its own figurative counterpart in one or another religious tradition. The Bull on the roof is from the Zen series of pictures ‘In Search of the Bull,’ the dome of the Cosmos pavilion is built in the style of Catholic church architecture, the Domestic Services pavilion is in the style of a Lamaistic shrine, where the heaven of Amitabha is located, and standing at the entrance to the Water Management pavilion are the immense wheels of an irrigation plant, seeming like the wheels of all-pulverizing samsara. The design of the Golden Ear of Wheat fountain is in the biblical tradition; after all, it is set at the center of a pool, it is, as it were, ‘the spirit of God moving upon the face of the waters’ before chaos has been cosmogonized, but it is presented here in the form of a collective (an ear in which there are many grains).
The guardians and custodians of this entire gigantic mandala are titans – the huge gilded figures of men and women on the Cosmos pavilion, on other pavilions and on the arch of the main entrance and the sculptural group ‘The Worker and the Collective Farm Woman’ (outside the territory of VDNKh, but very close by). As we know, in classical mythology the titans fought the gods of Olympus and one of them, Prometheus (a popular Soviet hero), gave fire to humans, that is, he participated in the act of ‘bringing the heavens to the earth.’1
But the entire complex that I have described is, so to speak, sanctity in action, the transcendence of dialectical materialism as an ongoing process. But before entering this ‘inner sanctum’ of the world process, we first have to pass through the stable ‘principles’ (the Aeropagitical ‘Principles’, so to speak) that have been secured as a result of political and social struggle. In the VDNKh mandala they are represented by two sacred spaces – the central ‘USSR’ pavilion (absolute rule) and the Friendship of Peoples fountain (the unity of the mutual solidarity of the nations making up the USSR).
The back exit from VDNKh is very interesting (not the Northern exit, but the staff entrance, located to the north-east of the central entrance. Incidentally, it is interesting that on the official map of VDNKh – which corresponds to the reality – the southern and northern entrances are located on the same horizontal line, almost on the same line as the central entrance, which is indicative of the possibility of a ‘vertical ‘reading of the space of VDNKh. Beside this western entrance there is a row of enclosures containing various species of deer, and the last of them contains reindeer. This is the edge of the world, the edge of the universe, which coincides, as it were, with the real topography of the Soviet Union (the far north). That is to say, the sacred topography is tied to real geographical topography, and defines very precisely the edges of the collective consciousness of the region. It is obvious that the principle of symbolization and ‘objectification’ of the collective unconscious into consciousness is synergetic. The integrality and harmony of its sacred meanings are built up and change gradually, not at the will of a single person or group of people, but of their own accord, as it were; that is, the schizophrenic guide map (as mentioned in Carlos Castaneda’s book The Eagle’s Gift) is objectified in the process of grafting the collective into goal-oriented socioeconomic structures, the reality of which subsequently unfolds, acting, so to speak, under the control of this sacred ‘guide-map’, by the power of the symbol above the free proliferation of life.
VDNKh is the ‘Koschei’s egg’ of Russia, but unlike the Egyptian pyramids and sphinxes, the ancient Roman temples and similar stable symbols of the ‘Foundations’, under the control of which those cultures stagnated and decomposed (a process which did not occur in China, with its fluid, ‘three-line’ sanctity), at VDNKh there is a Taoist–Buddhist, dynamic sanctity (the complex around the Golden Ear of Wheat) which presupposes a constant changing of structures and a corresponding change in sacred objectness (the actual ‘guide-map’ of the mandala). And so it would seem that in this way a completely closed society bears within it the potential for future changes. Having objectified the collective consciousness (the Golden Ear of Wheat) and presented ‘the next world’ in the form of a completely childish, fairytale little house of ‘domestic services’, the collective unconscious, which inevitably gives rise to the power of the symbol that is essential to stabilize society and preserve culture in a particular period of history, in this case finds itself in constant danger of self-destruction, self-liquidation. It grows weak, collapses into a symbol that indicates itself, gradually freeing up psychological spaces (entirely unknown) for the personal (and not collective) principle, literally casting the individual personality out into a void, where it can either perish or discover new structures and a new objectness. In a certain sense one can say that a society, the sacred dimension of which leaves a man free only in his breathing (although even in that there is a great deal of hyperbole) potentially nurtures a Prajapati (in a real sense – a schizophrenic) in every one of its members, and his breathing engenders reason, reason engenders gods, and gods engender worlds (his own, pathopsychological worlds).
In addition to everything else, the Soviet Union, as an objectified fruit of German classical philosophy, moreover in its Romantic-shamanistic version of Hegelianism, is, firstly, transcendental through and through and secondly (in accordance with the Romantic tradition of nostalgia) its transcendentality tends towards the most ancient, Vedic form, only instead of one Prajapati, as the ancient Hindus had, we have a potential 250 million of them and each one, in the innermost depths of his own soul, feels his own cosmic solitude and marginality and ‘does not know joy.’ He is surrounded by nothing but symbolic objects useless in everyday reality, with no breath or life in them, like the stone women of the Friendship of Nations fountain (who simultaneously express the essential corporality of Soviet men and women) and motionless, like the stalk of the Golden Ear of Wheat fountain (which points out the position of existential manifestations – only on the periphery!) When the ancient Prajapati saw a picture like this surrounding him, he was not delighted (here follows a quotation): “He decided: ‘I shall enter into them, in order to breathe life into them.’ However, being one, he could not do this. He divided himself into five parts, called prana, apana, samana, udana and vyana …”2
After that History began. What will happen next to our Prajapatis? At present almost all of them have split personalities, a psychological illness. But perhaps they are in danger of a five-way split? A perfect match for the number of points on a five-pointed star and the types of breath according to the Vedas? In the tradition of schizoanalysis, one can detect in the Russian word raspyaterenie (‘dividing into five’) the word raspyatie (‘crucifixion’) and draw the conclusion that Russia has always been a sacrifice for the edification of other nations: ‘one commits a stupidity, so that many others will not.’ On the other hand there is complete uncertainty (after all, in the sacred sense the Soviet Union always stands, as it were, at the beginning of History) which can also lead to some kind of palliative resolution, the emergence of new social structures, and the well-worn rule of collective consciousness “social matters first, then personal ones,” which produces a situation in which all the ‘boons of heaven’ somehow disappear (as the Golden Ear of Wheat fountain demonstrates so clearly) or can suddenly change into their opposites.
Having defined VDNKh as the central mandala of the government of Soviet society by the collective unconscious, it is possible to fantasize further on this subject in terms, for instance, of how the sacred and the real intersect in the general system of government of the Soviet Union and in the awareness of Soviet people.
It is no secret that the socioeconomic system of the USSR is absolute state capitalism (a monopoly) of the imperial type. What form does the leading role of the communists take in this system? First and foremost, they perform the ideological management of society, i.e. they are concerned with ideas, the medium for which is their own consciousness and the consciousness of the ‘flock,’ the consciousness of Soviet people. As shepherds and priests, their function consists of an adjusting mediation between the consciousness of the masses and a transcendent consciousness, which in this case is the economy, the reality of which, however, flows and is objectified (especially on the foreign market) in the forms of absolute state capitalism. After all, communism as a real system of socioeconomic relations does not exist. And socialism is simply the abstract generalization of capitalism to the point of absolutization, it is something like the Absolute Spirit of capitalism, which can also be called socialism (a purely linguistic problem). Consequently the communists, as people from ‘out there,’ from the future, communicate with the masses via a phantom, transcendent ‘national economy,’ objectified symbolically in the mandala of VDNKh; they are also under the power of their mandala and follow its ‘guide-map’ in carrying out their own purely conceptual performance. The thought-forms of this mandala also connect the masses and the communist leadership into the single psychological body of the collective consciousness.
For the collective consciousness of the Christian world a separate individual can become ‘conscious’ (‘be saved’) if he or she ‘enters into the Mind of Christ’ (Saint Paul). A special methodology has been developed for this ‘entering in’ or imitation of God, including the nine orders of Dionysius the Aeropagite, in which the human mind ‘ascends,’ as it were, through various psychological levels: angels, archangels, powers, etc. The Taoists have a similar system, and so do the Buddhists (‘The Ten Stages of a Bodhisattva’). But how can a man imitate the collective consciousness? What is the psychological structure (not the structure by category and age, i.e. Little Octobrists, Pioneers, Komsomol members, Communists) of the Soviet collective consciousness, which has to be projected onto every individual personality, and does it contain a hierarchy of ‘ascent’? We are talking here about the sacred ‘orders’ of Soviet consciousness. Probably they should be correlated and defined via the sacred thought-forms of the VDNKh mandala that we have described above. In that case the consciousness of every Soviet person should include five (basic) thought-forms: ‘cosmonaut,’ ‘titan,’ ‘wheat ear,’ ‘titch,’ and … ‘Georgian.’ What Georgian is this? Firstly, as it happens, the pool with the Golden Ear of Wheat is surrounded by a Georgian Garden, and the sacred path – the Tao which offers a view of this entire panorama – runs through this garden. Secondly, in geographical terms Georgia, which is part of our empire, is a land of the elements – sea and mountains – and therefore the ‘Georgian’ consciousness is most immediately and directly connected with reality, in particular with the socioeconomic system of absolute state capitalism. Let us recall Stalin’s ‘absolute statehood’ and the market (i.e. capitalism), in which Georgians play the leading role. And finally the Georgians are the most active opponents of this system and at the same time they define it as an empire. They normally express opposition in their linguistic behavior (and after all, for schizoanalysis only this aspect is important): usually a Georgian traveling to the Russian markets to sell his fruit says that he is going ‘to the USSR.’ Indeed, there have been cases when the following announcement was made at a Georgian railway station: ‘The Georgia–USSR train departs at such-and-such a time from such-and-such a platform.’
The communists are also concerned with these five ‘bodiless orders’ of the collective consciousness, both in themselves and in the people. In this system the order of ‘titches’ is the end product of society, in other words that self-same ‘conscious’ Soviet man that we desire, who seems already to be living ‘in the next world’ like Dunno, Doughnut, Dr Tablet, Tubey and other characters in Nosov’s tale (in accordance with their professional orientation).
It seems that the other four ‘orders’ do not have any hierarchy in relation to each other, they somehow coexist chaotically and, moreover, in each individual one entity or another predominates. The Cosmonauts are the avant-gardists in all areas of science, technology and culture – from Lenin, Tsiolkovksy and Michurin to the contemporary avant-garde artists Sven Gundlach and Sergei Anufriev, who recently declared themselves ‘cosmonauts.’ The Titans are the various different heroes of war and labor and almost all Soviet women. The Wheat Ears are the opposite of the Titches, they are the upper Party leadership and the dissidents. This consciousness (in the individual personality unconscious) is inclined to self-destruction and oblivion, since this is where the actual collective consciousness (the local ‘god’) closes in on itself and collapses: the ‘imitation’ of this ‘god’ is impossible and therefore, in approaching it, the individual personality always feels like a black hole, which is endlessly falling into itself (this tendency to self-destruction is also manifested physically, especially vividly during the 1930s, when one section of the Party ‘ate out’ another section in immense chunks). The ‘Georgians’ are the people (not necessarily of Georgian nationality) who essentially hold everything up. Only they maintain real contact with the real system (people employed in the ministries, trade, communications and so on). Their activity is primarily criminal in nature and in the Soviet sacred order, by analogy with the Christian one, they play the role of ‘devils,’ who have constantly to be reeducated, driven out or actually annihilated. After all, for the Party leadership the national economy is an ideal, transcendental system and the ideal workers in it can only be ‘Titans’ (such as Stakhanov and so on).
Evidently this is the ‘spiritual’ topography of the Soviet five-way-split consciousness with which the communist leadership is concerned: it is not concerned with the real system. In various periods of history it activates one or another ‘order,’ which becomes the leading one. During the period of War Communism it was the ‘Titans,’, during the New Economic Policy it was the ‘Georgians’, at various intervals it has been the ‘Cosmonauts’. The ‘Wheat Ears’ and the ‘Titches’ are beyond the scope of any changes, they are the alpha and omega of the entire sacred system. In the very ‘highest’ sense of sanctity, each Soviet person starts his or her life as a ‘titch’ (childhood) and ends it as a ‘wheat ear’ (old age). After the stage of the ‘wheat ear,’ the stage of the ‘titch’ begins again. The mechanism of Hinayana is clearly detectable here, but without its objectives: eternal existence in a ‘titchy’ paradise, metempsychosis and ‘our immortality is our children’ – the official choice is the final option, but in sacred terms it is the first. This unconscious choice explains in no small measure the lamentable state of the national economy of the USSR. After all, the giant watermelons, melons, grapes, apples – almost even including the pigs – which are displayed as the result, as the highest and targeted eidos of the national economy, come tumbling out of the Golden Ear of Wheat fountain’s horns of plenty and into the water. These are the immense watermelons that Nosov describes in the towns of the titches. In other words, it is the result that is sacralized and not the technology. All the other pavilions display simply technical means (they can be improved) for achieving the same result – a watermelon as big as a house. That is, what should be most important in the economic system – the technology – is exported to the peripheral zone of sanctity, and a curiosity is set at its center, the fruit of the labor of an individual ‘Titan’, not of the activity of society.
In any case, that was how things stood during the charismatic period of Soviet power – from Stalin to Brezhnev. These immense fruits were displayed in the central ‘USSR’ pavilion (while various sorts of ordinary potatoes were displayed in the Agriculture pavilion. The ‘USSR’ pavilion is closed now for a change of exhibition. There is at least some hope that the changes will be in the direction of a national economy that will not be the goal, but the means.
If it is possible to speak of the history of the collective consciousness, of a line of succession of sacred mandalas of government as ideologies and systems change, then we can say that the appearance of the Soviets in an Orthodox Christian region is a kind of ‘revolt of the angels,’ the very lowest ‘bodiless order’ of the Orthodox collective consciousness (and since the theme of this revolt was originally presented in the Christian tradition, why should it not be realized in more palpable forms?) Moreover, this ‘revolt’ was carried out supposedly with ‘good intentions’ (after all, communism in itself, as an abstract idea, does seem like a good idea, although only in its most popular, primitive interpretation, and in general it is also similar to ‘the kingdom of Christ, where there will be no churches, for there is no one to worship’ – also a well-known evangelical topic.) And the fact that this ‘revolt’ could have taken place in Russia (apart from the real, objective causes) can be explained by the highly complex structure of the collective consciousness of the Russian Empire (which was constituted by Orthodox Christianity, which by the nineteenth century was completely ‘museumified’ and whose spirituality had become absolutely apophatic – founded on the complete incomprehension of divine providence). The structures of the collective consciousness were autonomized and the ‘apophatic angels’ – as the stratum of the collective consciousness farthest removed from its ‘concealed center’ (‘God’) and therefore completely free of any ‘spiritual stuff’ (in simple terms, the communists) – were able to carry through the October Revolution as a social experiment. It is interesting that the acronym formed from the surnames of the five major figures of the Land and Freedom party spells out the Russian word PIZDA (’CUNT’), and this group was actually called that in the nineteenth century, and in Orthodox iconography the apophatic symbol is sometimes depicted in the form of a black triangle above the head of the Lord of Hosts). The consistent realization of apophatic sanctity was also responsible for a distinctly necrophilic act which is rather strange for a ‘materialist’ society (that is, one would think, for a society of ‘common sense’) – the public display on Red Square of the corpse of its main leader. This exhibition is, as it were, the objectified ‘node’ of the connection between the old Orthodox (apophatic) mandala – ‘The Ancient of Days Resting from All His Works’ – and the new, communist, communal mandala – an incarnation of the queen bee in the communal hive. But, as in the case of the Golden Ear of Wheat, a symbolic ‘failure’ occurs – a dead queen bee is displayed, and its deadness and nonreality suffuse the entire structure of the communist leadership with the energy of nonreality and futility.
And so, in describing the collective consciousness of Soviet society of the charismatic period we are essentially dealing with the stratigraphy of the ‘apophatic angel,’ which in the apocalyptic movement has become separated into layers – into ‘Cosmonauts’, ‘Titans’, ‘Wheat Ears’ (the bearers, by the way, of apophatic nature), ‘Georgians,’ and ‘Titches’. But each of these layers, in its potential for rebirth, can easily be identified with one of the five parts into which Prajapati divided: prana/breath is the ‘Titans’, apana/exhaling is the ‘Georgians’, samana/internal breathing, which unites all the other forms of breathing, is the ‘Wheat Ears,’ udana/a sigh when dying or in a dreamless sleep, is the ‘Titches,’ and vyana/the intermediate moment between inhaling and exhaling, is the ‘Cosmonauts.’
This hermeneutics translated eschatological spirituality into the beginning of a new history.
Beside the Golden Ear of Wheat fountain, at the edge of the pond, a new building has been constructed, but not opened yet: the architecture is rather strange, perhaps a pavilion,3 perhaps a restaurant, or perhaps something else. It looks quite modern. Attached to it on the pond side is something like an observation tower with an external spiral staircase and viewing platform at its summit. Quite possibly it is only intended for official use by staff. I ought to go there and photograph all these places and try to climb up that tower. From up there I might get a good panoramic photo of the Botanical Gardens, located to the right of this building, outside VDNKh. It might possibly be simply a beautiful view, a landscape, and not a symbolic perspective. Perhaps, through one little window of the gnoseological grid of ‘knowledge,’ which destroys everything that is alive, it is possible to find a loophole for a free view, even if it is free in a specialized sense (like the outlook from the ancient Chinese contemplation towers), deliberately cropped, but nonetheless with an ‘empty,’ desacralized center, where the most precious thing we have is always actually concealed – a recovered sense of the unknown.
September 1986
Notes
1This perspective allows us to understand the phenomenon of Moscow’s ‘best metro in the world’ and why, in the 1930s, the far from rich Soviet society went to the expense of such nonfunctional luxury as the Moscow metro system, with stations decorated in a style reminiscent of the internal design of Orthodox Christian churches. Most likely this is the result of a struggle between two mandalas of management – Orthodoxy’s program of collective consciousness, which had not yet been completely eradicated, and the new, Soviet communality, with ‘paradise on earth’ (the basis of which is the Orthodox ‘sobornost,’ or ‘togetherness,’ while its summit and structural consummation is the GULAG system of camps, where communality is presented in its pure form). After all, if ‘paradise’ is realized (in the symbol) on earth, and not in ‘heaven,’ as it used to be, then naturally the ‘places for prayer meetings have to be moved underground in order somehow to maintain the customary hierarchy. The marble facing of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, which was blown up, also came in handy; it was used to decorate the Mayakovsky metro station, which during the Second World War was the place where Stalin and the Politburo led the celebration of one of the most important sacred rites of the Soviet regime – the anniversary of the revolution.
2Types of breathing (the Maitreya Upanishad).
3When I found out that this strange structure with the tower was the future Fish Industry pavilion, and that virtually the entire huge building was an aquarium, it became clear to me that all the architectural ‘peculiarities’ at VDNKh are primarily the result of the sanctity of this entire space, by the location of a given building in the VDNKh mandala. The Fish Industry pavilion (which, by the way, they started to build when Soviet charisma was approaching its final end, i.e. at the most dangerous moment for ideology) is a symbol of the Great Flood, the waters of the pond, where the Golden Ear of Wheat stands, have, so to speak, risen above the wheat ear – the pavilion stands right on the edge of that pond), and the lookout tower is a symbol of Mount Ararat, where Noah found salvation. The line should be drawn under this ‘eschatological ichthyology,’ without taxing ourselves too greatly with the question of why (as in Alice in Wonderland) sacred spaces so easily merge into the realm of punning.
