I(s)
Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, a Russian/Ukrainian poet who lived in St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad), was one of the foremost writers of the late- and post-Soviet periods. In the 1980s, two Soviet avant-garde movements became known in the West, both containing aspects of language-centered writing. Conceptualism involved the direct importation of language and imagery from Soviet political culture and everyday life, often in an unmediated manner; Dmitrii Prigov and Lev Rubinshtein represent this tendency. Metarealism, a term coined by critic Mikhail Epstein, complicates the representation of reality in poetic language; its key figures are Dragomoshchenko, Alexei Parshchikov, and Ilya Kutik. In the 1980s and early 1990s, these poets encountered like-minded writers from the West, and a productive literary exchange took place that resulted in a series of translations published in Poetics Journal (PJ 8–10). Given their relative isolation and different political cultures, however, parallels between late- and post-Soviet and Western avant-gardes are not exact. Soviet conceptualism depended on the absence of the commodity in the Soviet Union and has a different relation to objects than in the West. Metarealism, on the other hand, often draws from premodern, religious sources; it is open to metaphysical speculation in ways that Western avant-gardes, especially after the “turn to language,” may not be. Dragomoshchenko’s poetry is a site of radical metaphysical inquiry, evidencing the intensity of alternative belief in the period. Arkadii Dragomoshchenko died on 12 September 2012.
O, the delusion of our thoughts
You, the human I …
—Fyodor Tiutchev
In the digressions and convergings of significations which seem—which seem what? Already here at the beginning we need the word mirage, in which undoubtedly (or, more precisely, predoubtedly) consciousness foresees a self-replicating doubling. And it is delightful, as well as desirable, rising out of the depths of reality and geographic folios, with the heliographic boundless luminescence of the world, standing at the edge of vision, turned within (as the later meaning of the Latin word mirare suggests),1 glimmering faintly in a fixed mirror of immutable wonder as if enraptured by a mira-ge.2
“I understand” threatens us by protracting an endless tautology. The Penrose triangle, the Klein bottle,3 and so forth are decorations in a spectacle, aspiring to the role of mirrors. It’s possible that somewhere in the very beginning the mirror was broken. A prolonged flash, gradually crossing the limits of power and continuing its extension into time. Perhaps it was then that the atomized “I” settled into some kind of pattern, which subsequently with my blind fingers I would read as a possibility for reconnecting “things and words,” fingers and thoughts. Or more precisely, I would grope with the intention of intersecting the “lines of invention,” or rather the features of “reality” (but at this point a concomitant question arises: How can the respective territories of one thing and another be determined independently of their interwoven transmutations?)—“I understand I” or “I teach I”—whose functioning extends the area of some completely transparent membrane, which during the course of observation acquires depth (or more correctly, volume) in an ornamental design of familiar Freudian toponymics.
But even in the coordinates of this system the three gunas enter into the composition of prakrti, nonexistent but in all their immutability revealing themselves in interrelationship: sattva, the guna of pleasure and rejoicing; rajas, the desire that puts everything in motion; and tamas, the guna of inertia, darkness, death, nondifferentiation.4 But even in the coordinates of this system “I” turns out to be nothing more than a dynamic variable similar to the glimmer in the formation of meaning in the figure of an ellipsis, in the endlessly shifting space of meaning’s absence, in the preconceiving of some meaning. It is possible, even likely, that “I” is connected with what is circumscribed by the concept of finitude, the point at which all perspective lines diverge. Turn around; regardless of your position there is always an opposite “point” (in this shiver created by accumulation, like a word): I, the point of interference, the knot of parallax, which slips away from definition. Moreover there behind you, turning on its axis, the most tender dance of things is taking place, in which they attach themselves to the possibility of a world, revealed in the pollen of digressions and convergings, as pure as bee-bread, sliding on parchment, or a calculation process directed toward an expansion of time, weaving times, just as a letter swaddles its abstract foundations, the page, the substance of anticipation, layer by layer in absence. “But in joining the body be beautiful, pleasurable to the Gods in their loftiest domain” (Rig-Veda, 10.56).
The imagination populates the other. The other is imagination, or the other is the possibility of understanding oneself (from the fairy tale of the invisible cap to Husserl, Benveniste, Bakhtin, etc.). I don’t have dreams. Possibility is the mediastinum that creates all territories. A maple leaf from the area around Chernobyl can reach more than a meter in width. What size do I reach coming from that same area? Or, where have they stored these sites in space—or in time—which are evidently exceeding normal dimensions? And as for dreams, I do have them, but I have forgotten everything and I continue to forget everything—isn’t this my consciousness coinciding with a world which excludes itself from “co-”—hour by hour acquiring what was only a moment ago forgotten—by me? All my past is seeping through the pores of non-memory. Probably the mirror was broken (forgotten), dis-I-ed into real-I-ty. And instead, in order to meet eye to eye, someone with the natural right to affirm that he is he, having come to believe forever in “I teach I,” in uttering I randomly prefers something else. And hence in a letter, in merging with anticipation or “In joining the body be beautiful, pleasurable to the Gods in their loftiest domain.”
Nonetheless, one can’t manage to forget the most insignificant thing in dreams—namely, that the continual basis of “dreaming,” being the unassailable repetition of some excessive and empty element, is the possibility of taking a reading on the origin of distance and space, rolling themselves into a cocoon (I don’t understand what I am writing or saying at this moment, but the fascination of this flickering net of sequences and divergences in disappearances’ bends is becoming incredibly strong). It is something incontrovertible—I, presented to myself as some kind of corporeal periphery, an incompleteness (like the shoulder, like part of the cheek or nose, like the movement of the hand “past the eyes”), melting away near the threshold of its realization, like multitudes in the web of time—are these the characteristics of a fantasy (my body is “social” right up to its brain of bones, my body is tattooed into me with a certain congealing blossom of promise, the body is the promise of sending me through it toward what in that particular instant will surpass me—I, revolving around an axis, encompassing a single point free of the most precise dance of things, a point of anticipation, and isn’t it in that point, obliged to reiterate by its presence the wholeness of its surroundings, that all connections come together?)? It is like something which belongs to me, i.e., to what slips between me and a set of defined (as if predefined) “images and appearances,” slipping by completely without a trace like ice in water. It is the eroticism of disembodiment, opened into the magnetic winds of a desert in whose sources even the sun turns black from solitude, blessing the betrothal of dead children.
I is always situated between me (like the reflexive pronoun, re-revolving “I” on the point where without exception all perspective lines disconnect) and “him,” which is also I, even as it doesn’t seem to be. But the problem isn’t worth an eaten egg.5 I suppose that if you or I were alone together, or alone with somebody else, or if I, let’s say, happened to be with her—and I must admit I’m curious then to imagine her name (no, not the face, faces are all the same, just as bodies, male or female, are like memories, images with which we are doomed, but only the senseless name is incapable of telling me anything with its idiotic attachment and repetition)—there would be nothing for me to say, either to the name or to him/her. Cigarette? Coffee? Wine? Food? Justice? The fly on the windowpane is my infinite I—here is the never broken mirare. And so on.
But sometimes in dreams I am dreamed. This interpretation of my phenomena depresses me. Dreams search out metaphysical residue. Sometimes their fury is shattering and indescribable. Dreams form a procession like forgotten worm-eaten gods carrying their heads in their hands with the skin torn from their faces. But sometimes it seems to me that I might be able to understand, that is, to return through what’s going on, like the infamous (or better, blind) bee returning to the hive.
A needle without thread.
There is no hive. It disappears at the very moment when understanding comes close to being embodied in itself and its “things,” which to all appearances is really the “hive.” We wander through a civilization of destroyed metaphors: road, home, language, a man on a bicycle, embraces, Tarkovsky’s films, moisture, “I,” memories, history, and so forth. And we shouldn’t forget the fact that “I” remains for the present the last possibility for metadiscourse, the sole protagonist of what in the current situation there is. The problem of subjectivization is tautological.
However, nature/culture or all that is “I” come from the same code. On the surface of a cup of tea the blue-gray smoke floats. Evaporation—the line begins here. Sometimes I’m prepared to ask if it is possible that someone could think, could conceive his or her own “I,” as some continuous given without the thought process itself, or, conversely, that “I” (my selfness, my ness, the axis of my beingness, my presence) is a certain definitively unsplintered unity, arising in a conscious process as a collective volitional act. What does such thinking about it propose by way of terminus and goal or “description”?
However, “my birth and death cannot serve me as the object of my thought.”6
But then, reading his/her poetic “work” (or simply hearing about the amazing strangeness of the everyday), I create exactly his/her “I” (producing myself in their activity which is directed at me—interference—and departing further, through, there, to where, I guess, having drained away—evaporated—all the crookedness from the constant distancing, the desert luminescence of the anticipation of things is made possible—but this doesn’t concern me either, any more than Paradise does), as themselves. In other words, their “I” is the product of my collective-volitional effort.
These are aspects of commonsense logic, controlled by a real inexplicable urge to utter “I” (isn’t this what constitutes desire?). What does it mean to me, taking pleasure in a body flowing and slipping over me and through me in all directions? But posing the question in this way is generally misleading, even if only because it supposes a certain me as the question, existing before the eyes, perception, memory, sensation, the ability to follow certain generally accepted rules (provoking, I should note, growing bewilderment with the passing years) combine into what it is easier to call the impulse to transgress the limits of oneself (but where do the limits lie? what remains?—believe me, if we stayed alone together I’m more than certain that I would have nothing to tell you, but then undoubtedly you know all this, and all the questions that come to me are pursuing only one goal, to keep me from sleep, to keep me from surrendering again to dreams, that dumb tribunal of the anatomical theater, incapable of distinguishing yesterday from space, in which light collapses toward the eyes, bringing them mountains, empty scorching roads whose whiteness removes me from the scene of soundless inquiry: but whom am I addressing?)—but it is the “self” from which the impulse should emanate, being absent or present as the constant incompleteness of meaning.
More than anything I like impersonal sentences. If I’m not mistaken Kleist says: “Only puppets are free.” […]
—Translated by Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova
The translators wish to thank Martin Schwartz for inestimable help.
NOTES
1 The imperative form of the verb mirari, “to wonder, be astonished at; to admire, look on with admiration.” Here it could be translated as “behold!” (All notes are those of the translators unless otherwise indicated.)
2 The author is playing with the Russian word mir (in the possessive case, mira) which means “world” (and also “peace”).
3 The Penrose triangle and the Klein bottle are examples of tautologies of the same order as the Moebius strip.
4 “According to the classic Indian view, matter (prakrti) is characterized by the three qualities (gunas) of inertia (tamas), activity (rajas), and tension or harmony (sattva). These are not merely qualities, but the very substance of the matter of the universe, which is said to be constituted of the gunas, as a rope of three twisted strands” (Heinrich Zimmer, Philosophies of India [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1951], 230n).
5 An idiom equivalent to something like the English “not worth a brass farthing.”
6 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), 364.
PUBLICATION: Excerpted from The Person (1991), 9:127–37.
KEYWORDS: Russian poetics; avant-garde; subjectivity; metaphysics.
LINKS: Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, “The Eroticism of Forgetting” (PJ 10), “Syn/Opsis/Taxis” (PJ 8); Barbara Guest, “Shifting Persona” (PJ 9); Lyn Hejinian, “Strangeness” (PJ 8); Ilya Kutik, “The Tormentor of Life” (PJ 10); Jackson Mac Low, “Pieces o’ Six—XII and XXIII” (PJ 6); Duncan McNaughton, “From the Empty Quarter” (PJ 7); Alexei Parshchikov, “New Poetry” (PJ 8); Dmitrii Prigov, “Conceptualism and the West” (PJ 8); Viktor Shklovsky, “Plotless Literature: Vasily Rozanov” (Guide; PJ 1).
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY: Dust: Collected Prose in English Translation (Evanston, Ill.: Dalkey Archive, 2008); Description, trans. Lyn Hejinian (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1990); Xenia, trans. Lyn Hejinian (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1993); Chinese Sun, trans. Evgeny Pavlov (New York: Ugly Duckling, 2006).