/shushan and the elders/

And all of this came to pass in the days of shashlik, harissa and shushan, right after the cook’s exploits, right after the bathhouse.¹

The elders are watching, but I’m not. I’m just not interested in any of that—that’s how you put it. I taught them many things: not fit for a cunt or the Red Army, eat a fish and fuck a cock, suffocunting, dilly-fucking-dallying. They can take it from here.

The party’s over, so too the feast of the eyes, and only the mountain, as usual, protrudes decently enough.²

Something’s been interpellated in my gut and will need treatment for quite some time.

_______________

The elders are watching, but I’m not. I would watch if it were possible to watch the other way––to wrap the gaze around the neck.

“I greet laboring Soviet Armenia liberated from the yoke of imperialism Lenin” was burned onto the hair of some anonymous by the violinist Kazarian. You come at it this way and that and then you see it.

Having thoroughly palpated a good fifty shaggy dogs, I was schooled again in forgotten eros. is this a feeling? asked my buddy T. I answered them: no fucking clue.

But I would probably have liked to read your hair.

_______________

Queer manifesto, marriage certificate, restaurant menu, fragments cut by righteous left-liberal censorship, other stuff: I greedily consume these potencies.

Doesn’t a person become food when you write out your words up against them? How is this better than malegaze-gawping, as the elders do? Fuck if it’s better. Might even be worse.

_______________

So it was in the days of wild sorrel, kebab and whitefish.

Some anonymous medieval Armenian painted Christ’s baptism on the skull of a catfish. Holy writ on weird bullshit is evidently a tradition here. A real gesamtkunstwerk catfish, noted my buddy T.³

Yerevan has the tenderest Stalinism in the world, kenosis of the grand style, my beloved ruins. Are you good now? you asked, when you’d climbed them.

Yeah, I’m good now. I’m really good.

_______________

/a cinematic interlude for Polina Barskova/⁴

Since I’ve already brought you into the text, an indexical shift is a bit untoward, but hunkered down beneath new (now Parisian) ruins, we’ve come to agree that both of us are metonymy people; and so I write this chapter for you, Polina.

Remember that poppyseed cake? Afterwards we talked about this for the first time, and recently we started talking about it again. The subject was prophecy.

Prophecy is a meaty thing, splashing its flesh around. He pulled it off well.⁵ At the movies you usually feast your eyes, here you puke with them (wiseass Pasolini, fruitcake Ferreri—roll over).

What did the Judaeans say when their temple was finally destroyed?—well motherfucker. Or more precisely, “wlmthrfckr.” That’s about what we said too. The Hegelian ravings of the shestidesyatniks,⁶ the senile delirium of the grand squabbler—suddenly it all came to pass. The main thing is that everything in his world is just as pathetic as in ours. Just as pathetic as Nebuchadnezzar and his gang of sorry-ass shashlik-grillers.⁷

Having puked our guts out, we saw, at last, face to face—

Meanwhile, I’m writing this to you from the banks of the Oise. Our Gor had a planet with that name in one of his books. He too knew a thing or two about food.⁸

_______________

/genosse gemüse/

Vegetable comrades—good title for a Russian novel. Really it’s Verochka’s joke, but I liked it so much I decided I would make it my own.

Vegetables, herbs, mushrooms. Let this chapter be meatless. The holy patrons of veganism, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. They’ll give me aid.

Like hunting for mushrooms I’ve been coming here to suffer for twenty years now.

Now I’m here and am waiting for you.

In Moscow the grayhairs S. and S. dropped by for a neighborly visit with a flagrant tallboy.⁹ Oksana said: while you’re on the road you should write your own “Zoo.”¹⁰ I worry it would come out as cosplay. And the fact I’ve taken you on as the heroine makes it just a full-blown parody—as flagrant as the S. spouses’ tallboy.

Recently, though, you said yourself that for me you’re the laying-bare of the device. That’s how I feel too. Everything is obvious and therefore funny. Having accumulated experience, you can turn unhappy passion into parody even while it’s happening. Then the gravity is lost, the gesture remains.

I caught sight of you and my fuckstration lifted. Infatuation is aesthetics. With a messenger’s hand it strips away every necessity, the body loses its purposiveness, intentions burst in a kiss.

Auf Aufhebung—yesterday we were drinking in Montmartre at M.’s place, she’s gotten over Rancière and fallen for Badiou.

_______________

Stirlitz writes down the coded message, pours himself a shot and reaches for his Montaigne.¹¹

That’s why I love prophets: the very same Daniel-Balthazar, the holy mole in Babylon—everything he tells us can mean anything at all. All those beasts from the taxidermy shop with ten horns, three teeth, four wings, and other random little fucking details. The very existence of a code lends meaning to the lunacy of history, no need to understand it.

Handsome Stirlitz builds a hedgehog out of matches, and a half-century later a bug-eyed stuffed-and-mounted descendant shows the kids its cat ass and starts shitting out freaks in its own image.¹² Kingdom rises against kingdom, the facebook analysts unsheathe their dusty Umberto.¹³

You like the futurists more than the symbolists, you say that for them the word has consequences. I’m the opposite. I’m bewitched by the sheer effort of the chase, the futility of decoding. And then there’s the eternal feminine—that’s a dame not easy to forget.¹⁴

_______________

The hand of the messenger writes out the verdict, but the sentence could be provisional. You’ve been found too light. No big deal. I finished off four pelmeni and—yoo haf tu eet mor er ay’ll keel yoo—is what, with unbearable tenderness, you said.

That very evening I tossed the chicken bones of my fate into the Seine (a shame, of course, that it wasn’t from the Mirabeau) and decided I would no longer be fucked by the foreordained.

The hand of the messenger writes out the verdict, the prophet translates it.

Maybe I am not writing this text for you at all. Showing you the beginning was a mistake. You’re not into high anguish.

I’m writing this text to be translated. I’ll pronounce my own verdict, while the lovely Ainsley and T., my buddy, will try to make sense of it, to disinter the little dog of guilt.

In translation the truth of the text is revealed, the text itself lies.

I am always erring, losing the main thread, giving myself over to the game too much and equivocating. The translation loses again what was already lost, lays bare the fact of insufficiency. This is why translation gets closer to the action—to the language of things and parts. Things, parts, and occurrences.

Translation lets the name take place.

I toss the round letter out of you and there you’ll be (that is, not how it was with God and Abraham, in fact just the opposite)¹⁵. A little rainy-day joke—it only works in English.

_______________

At the beginning of this text а mountain was looming, but now a fox might dart through.

Could there be such a thing as a language-kiss that gave away nothing but itself? No intentions, no vain desires.

You, to all appearances, don’t believe in God, but in the set of your shoulder he hints to me of himself.

I would have liked to trace my tongue along it, but even more I would have liked to translate its language.

Thinking about the upcoming chapters, I mentally translate them from English. The original and the translation don’t change places, they go in circles like painted ponies. Head spinning, you can almost touch Benjamin’s pure language. It renders impossible any lover’s discourse, there is no place for ennui—only naming and recognition.

Afterward—toppling into a ditch by a hungover Coriolis force, in keeping with the eternal dynamic of passion for the eternal feminine.

A few years ago Vanya Boldyrev told a Tamil Hegelian that the German rot [red] is the Russian rot [mouth]; the Tamil guy wrote about it in his novel about love and cannibalism, Vanya read it and told me the whole story, and I realized immediately that I’d write it down, starting a whole new cycle of the recursive carousel.

Ever since that conversation I started reading your nails. Last time they were red.

Notes

1. shushan – a pickled wild herb (Chaerophyllum sylvestre), served warm as a side dish with lavash (flatbread); the cook’s exploits – a reference to the June 2023 attempted coup by Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of the mercenary military formation Wagner Group, previously known as “Putin’s cook” (because of his catering business which held contracts with the Kremlin).
2. the mountain – Mt. Ararat, visible from Yerevan.
3. gesamtkunstwerk catfish – refers to a 2014 piece by Gulin, which in turn refers to the seminal art-historical work by Boris Groys, Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin (in English, The Total Art of Stalinism).
4. Polina Barskova – (b.1976) a Leningrad-born, US-based Russophone poet and literary scholar. She has written extensively on the literature and culture of the 1941-44 Siege of Leningrad.
5. He – here refers to the Soviet filmmaker Alexei German (1938-2013), director of films including Checkpoint on the Road, My Friend Ivan Lapshin, Hard to Be a God, etc. He is referred to again below as the “grand squabbler.”
6. shestidesyatniks (literally, sixty-ers) – the designation for the Soviet baby-boomers, a large and influential generation associated with the relative liberalism of the post-war Khrushchev Thaw.
7. Nebuchadnezzar – the King of Babylon in the Book of Daniel (a collection of folktales written in 5th–3rd century BCE). He reigned during the first period of Hebrew exile.
8. our Gor – refers to Gennady Gor (1907-1981), a Soviet ethnographer and science fiction writer and more recently revealed as the author of phantasmagorical poems written during the Siege of Leningrad.
9. flagrant tallboy – our version of vopiushei sis’koi (literally: flagrant tit), with “tit” a slang term for a plastic bottle of beer.
10. your own “Zoo” – refers to Viktor Shklovsky’s epistolary novel Zoo: Or Letters Not About Love (1923), which is a kind of ghost-text to this one.
11. Stirlitz – the iconic hero of the wildly popular late-Soviet television series “Seventeen Moments of Spring” (1973, dir. Tatiana Lioznova). Stirlitz is a Soviet spy embedded in Nazi Germany. It has been suggested that Putin, who spent several years in East Germany working for the KGB in his youth, models himself on Stirlitz.
12. cat ass – during his ritual first-day-of-school visit in 2013, Vladimir Putin drew a rear-view of a cat on the class whiteboard, spawning an entire industry of memes [for image see: https://wikireality.ru/wiki/Кошка_Путина].
13. Umberto Eco – Italian postmodernist theorist, author of, among other works, a 1995 essay called “Ur-fascism,” which lays out fourteen elements that point toward the development of fascism.
14. eternal feminine – first articulated by Goethe in Faust, the idea of the eternal feminine was further developed by late-nineteenth/early twentieth-century Russian philosophers and symbolists including Vladimir Solovyov, Sergei Bulgakov, Father Pavel Floresnsky, and others.
15. God & Abraham – refers to Genesis 17, in which God changes Abram’s name to Abraham to reflect their covenant—the extra syllable shifts the meaning of the name from “exalted father” to “father of multitudes,” guaranteeing the “countless descendants” promised in the covenant.