True Sadness

“To kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.”

Marcel Proust

Editor Kristina Golovko

Translator Evgeny Teterin

Illustrator Alexey Dmitriev

© Denis Nushtaev, 2022

© Evgeny Teterin, translation, 2022

© Alexey Dmitriev, illustrations, 2022

ISBN 978-5-0056-5355-0

Created with Ridero smart publishing system

Hoici

Some minutes ago I made myself a coffee and instantly started working on the book. It is only the book that helps me to concentrate after what happened here, in this very room. Every object here inadvertently conjures my memories but even this yellow cup of coffee doesn’t help me untwine the lines of this intricate fate made of strong memory fibers. When this feeling flooded me again, I quickly tried to find a foothold for my further narration. And suddenly I remembered a childhood story – “Hoici’s True Sadness”.

Hoici could create incredibly beautiful poems full of heavenly airiness, lightness of fertile pollen, depth of blue sky seen from a mountain ridge – his rhymes were flowers, his poetry was nature, all his passion was put into mellifluent angels and they hailed him around the towns and villages. Even the Emperor of the Earth was made jealous of these poems, which were his only comfort: he left the palace and after a long time in the densest forests found errant Hoici.

Out of endless anguish, the Emperor stopped eating, his feverish mind couldn’t stand any thoughts and so he barred his contemplations in every way, he inflicted punishment on himself exhausting his very being. “Don’t, – said Hoici. – If my poems make you suffer, then they are bad poems and I will not write them again”. “I beg, write one more or I will blame myself on Earth and in Heaven for shattering your inspiration”. And Hoici wrote his last creation – a poem of true sadness of falling leaves, opening chrysalis, passionate heart, awakening spring and all the basic reality, as well as the poem of his only love which encased all his art with vacuum, making this art unearthly. And Hoici said: “My poem is now going to Heavens to settle in the realms of Izanami. But my beloved will be reborn and she will sing this poem, and I will meet her in my new flesh, and our souls will live in this world forever because we beheld the true sadness.” The Emperor saw Hoici’s soul divide into a plenty of souls and Hoici’s poems turn into four woman’s hairs, of which the Emperor made a musical instrument. He tried to reproduce the melody of the poem to tell Hoici’s story but failed to find a proper tune – this way he spent twenty years in this forest until he despaired and told his story. It was different, it had a different tune but only it could comfort the Emperor’s anguish – it made him almost happy.

Hoici’s story is very long and I will return to it because it was this story that helped me feel the irony of what had happened, dive into the deep and sweet and rich incomprehension. And now I also want to tell my story of “true sadness”, genuine for all possible worlds; but having poor imagination and no poetic talent, I am able to present it only in the form of a short essay, made of stories, opinions and fantasies of other people, from the past and the present, and my own notes where I have been trying to find the answers to three questions that scrape my soul. The first one definitely tortures every resident of our island from the very childhood – do we have to go beyond the borders of the island, and are we complete idiots when we try to answer this question? The second one is my naïve hypothesis – is human imagination the only reality? Maybe, we must seek the answers in it? The third one is a part of my personal story – what happened to my friend? The answer to it will give the clue to understand the first two to the full extent, as its mystery lies in a real and tragic life of my friend who tried to go beyond the border but couldn’t handle the inconstancy of his nature, plopped on the banality of reality and in the end couldn’t stand the prosaism of human spirit.

I never noticed Alan’s sufferings. Our friendship was built on endless dialogues, due to which we found the way to other spheres, ornamented our own mindset and in which Alan always went further than me, usually forgetting where he started. But now his sufferings mystically cut the fabric of my perception to different individual realities, forcefully tore the alive and full-blooded organism into several parts, and the new wholesome perception of the man who – as I thought I knew well – came to me only through the interpretations of memory free of impression.

Through the weeping canopy of a tree, into my room comes the morning ray of light. Sizzling all the trifles on my desk as if it wants to seize the cup which Alan presented to me. If there is anything that can return Alan into this world by some mystic ceremony, this china cup is the best gangway between the worlds. Its round stumpy shape creates the vacuum within, its elegant handle connects this vacuum with our world and a coffee bean image on its bottom reminds me of the unstoppable force of human fantasy. Please stay with me in this room for some time so that I can’t feel so miserable – the thought of this text being read warms my human nature incredibly.

My room is in a mental hospital where I have been living and working since my childhood, and which in large part reflects the spirit of our island, measuring its years of existence in the form of stories ingrained in its units. The wonderful world in which we found ourselves created a much more fertile soil for insanity that it had been in the previous ages – here we are always surrounded by incomprehension. It is ironic that people with such a science development as ours have self-awareness of ancient tribes: we don’t even always know why it rains here. Our island’s story confirms the theory that for people there is no scarier a devil than incomprehension, which is always with us – even when we feel enjoyment, a thought will definitely cross our minds: this will (and soon) be over, so we try our best to extend any enjoyment with the things we start associate our pleasant moments of our life with. If your arm is cut off, you will know the source of pain, and despite the fear, your soul will immediately start its painstaking work to restore your delusive self-awareness, but incomprehension is insidious – coming from outside, it settles in our soul and infects it with dangerous ideas. It is “incomprehension” with which I explain the fact that so many people are trying to escape the island knowing about the grave perils beyond its borders, and I became convinced in that when Alan decided to leave it.

I recall one patient in our hospital who lost a baby. Dismissing the fact of what had happened she tried to kill a person. She wanted to prove that people don’t die and a soul can be seen in a material form. When she was brought here, she demanded to see a scientist. As an experiment we complied with her request and she met one university professor. She started to ask him to show her a soul and offered any money for that, to which the professor courteously admitted his incompetence.

– Scientists know everything, – she was shouting, – I will not believe that they have never seen a soul. Then what do they know?

– They know a lot about our world but there are things that you cannot comprehend.

– There’s nothing good in our world. Why know about it? Give me people’s souls, I want to see people’s souls!

The hospital itself, hidden in the thick of the forest is a building of the past ages, much older that other buildings on the island. It is a real exhibit of our cosy place – it looks untouched by the global changes. Over the trees soars its geometrical bizarrerie which always reminds me of a spaceship with its crew ready to be launched to find life on distant planets – although now we are not even sure about the life on our own, but I am totally sure that I will not fly with the others because my house is surrounded by a forest charming in its mystical depth. My room overlooks its densest part, so in my childhood I slept much less than my peers: my dreams were substituted by contemplating blueberry skies, plain green matter and occasionally delightful owls, which even now fascinate me with their intense look. I sometimes was afraid of it, and so I climbed up to the hospital roof to become the master of all living beings. As if with this gesture I rose vertically above them, sitting with my knees embraced on a red tattered couch – which came from nowhere. This couch is still there, each year becoming more and more tattered but not losing its qualities and my childhood impressions. It was on this sofa that I first heard the story of Hoici, and so I started to live on different islands, each of which was inhabited by only my residents having conservative views and so not willing to appear in other realms of my inner empire. That might have been the reason why I was never attracted to go abroad: I always knew how to find at least fleeting happiness in a limited space.

I ended up in the hospital because of my strange childhood behaviour, but in fact, my parents sent me here tired of their own relationship and affairs – the story being so banal that it is not worth telling. I always thought that I could read people’s thoughts but in another way than in science fiction. I could rather catch a person’s mood so quickly that a meaningless set of things, symbols and colours started to whirl around me. Making a more or less understandable and logical chain of these symbols, I could precisely describe the person’s thoughts in the past few days. On some days, with my eyes closed, I could see rays stretching through the Universe. They never crossed but influenced each other. Shining brightly, they filled a person’s soul and in this case I understood that the person made some decision. He found a thread to God but doesn’t know about it, rather, he thought: “That’s a great idea to paint the house”. These ideas mix with a person’s routine and he doesn’t see anything unique in them. But I know that as soon as a new idea is born God appears instantly. God exists because these rays spoke to me – now “the rays” disappeared but the idea of God permeated deeper than the place of imagination. I might have looked like a zombie in my childhood but when my parents decided to send me here I saw these rays, so I was never offended by them. They did what God told them to do. Many would consider their action immoral but my parents made the best decision in my life finding me a real home. Of course, later I understood that my unique ability was nothing but childish impressionability, which was the base for our strong friendship with Alan.

Being a fascination of sweet fantasies at night, the forest around our hospital becomes a wonderful cosy park in daylight where city-dwellers always have picnics. On that sunny day there were exceptionally many people because of another anniversary of our statehood and I was walking in this park with thoughts far from society but close to social base – first infatuation, which was obvious by my slouching back and my eyes down. Familiar and favourite forest irritated me at that time but not as much as people – infatuation didn’t seem unknown to me and I understood that everybody around is aware of it, which made me feel even more uneasy, but these thoughts were unknown. I was thinking that my dreams spirit, having moved into this unpleasant person by mistake, will pay attention to me. To do this I addressed the Universe creator with the effort of my thought and asked him to make the events in a way unpleasant but desirable to me, which will help me show my heroic nature, my commitment, which – as I learned later – was called “male idiocy”. And when I save the hated yet beloved girl – a tree branch might be falling on her and I will rush to push her away and save her or some rascal insults her with his careless attitude and – in my noble rage – I will blood his face but get hurt in return, so that my pain could become her suffering. Or I might spend twenty years in my silent fidelity to her, which she might guess on our chance meetings but which she will understand only years later and her heart will not stand the depth of my feeling. Optimistic scenarios were totally erased from my mind and so I didn’t even think about presenting her flowers, though I wanted to shower her with flowers but the banality of this thought caused another stage of my rage. Occasionally, to distract from these depressing thoughts of chivalry, I was also pondering on receiving Honorary Doctorate at our university.

I don’t know what impression I had on my face but as I was walking over our little stream bridge, a girl of about seven ran in front of me, shouted “turkey” and then ran away to her parents. Loud and intense laughter broke right behind me after the girl’s conclusion, and I was furious that my sweet fantasy of sufferings was interrupted by this sheer impudence and banality. Looking around I saw Alan who tried to soften his spontaneous reaction: “This girl – I know her. Her name’s Veronica. Strange name, right?”. My eyes were glued to his binoculars hanging from his neck. We were in that age when children, often consciously, decide if it’s time to grow up or not. Alan with all his look showed that he was not going to grow up, but later, the originality of his thoughts impressed me – these were the thoughts I wanted to hear from adults in my age.

Inconspicuously for both of us Alan became my spiritual advisor – more useful that any enlightened recluse monk and more interesting than any sophisticated philosopher because he gave me answers to my concrete questions and he also had binoculars which could distract me from my thoughts about infatuation. We often spent time in my room and in varied streams of thoughts discussed the main ideas of our time. Surrendering to Alan’s extraordinary reverie, I submerged into his ideas on complexity of the world and on the possibility to escape the island where we could have ended up in only two ways – by God’s will or by influence of gravity. I was always inclined to the first one whereas Alan totally believed in the other one, so our lines of discussions ramified and went on two parallel ways. Once, when we were arguing about the borders of our island, constantly resorting to the resources of our child fantasy in order to create the arguments supporting our viewpoints, our academic dialogue drew attention of the head doctor. He looked into my room to give some new books which he had always supplied me with. A small mahogany bookcase, which is still here, was full of children’s literature. His figure in a white gown was so majestic to our children’s impression and his face mottled with tiny sandy wrinkles pushed the plastic space of my room to the ceiling and his peculiar and expressive timbre of voice pushed it even further – beyond the room’s walls. On this day when I got a bit offended by Alan’s inability to listen to my ponderings, he sat on the edge of my bed next to Alan and noisily slurped his black coffee.

– Our world was different. All the Earth belonged to us and we were starting to move to the space. We thought we knew a lot about it. Many theories made us a genius to understand how the world is designed. We already started to spend more time on research than on new discoveries. And at the moment of complete confidence in our scientific methods happened something that jolted us down the abyss of contradiction. Remember: the number of scientific discoveries always equals to the number of contradictions which are born with it. When we were sure in the distance to the Sun and the scale of our Universe, we suddenly started to notice the contraction of the Universe. Everything was happening very fast – during a month. It seemed that the Universe border is far from us and we would feel the contraction millions of years later. But the Space is not vacuum with some balls as it appeared. It is as homogeneous as nobody could imagine. We were afraid of solitude in this limitless space where you should fly eighteen thousand years to the nearest star. Indeed, a long distance separated us from the geographical edge of the Universe, but this month showed that one can easily reach this edge abolishing space, leaving time and adding “Bowie’s effect” – by the name of the scientist who described it in our times. The common manifestation of this effect is gravity, but it appears to have only one formula. Elaborating, Bowie showed that interrelations in our world happen before the appearance of the objects of interrelation. In the “chicken-egg problem” first was birth, around which shaped a shell and feathers – with equal lack of right to originality. In some sense, there is a clash first and then these two stones hit each other. This interrelation energy, which works beyond time and space, appeared to be a physically measurable value with material qualities.

But it can be registered only in the moments of large-scale interrelation – for example, the Universe contraction. Gravity starts to work in a different way. All the world got mixed when the contraction started to manifest itself more and more. Initially, only a large number of stars was noticed near the Earth. It seemed like a dream. And we do not know if we are the only left living on the Earth or there are other regions where people also live but are unable to reach our island through the surrounding desert. It is funny, that we call this desert oasis an island.

At that time I was impressed by this story but now I think that this theory was largely created under the influence of impressions, making the mistake which forces people to always feel the uniqueness of their epoch. It is in the periods of total chaos that we most easily create myths, which distinguish your time from a variety of epochs – we even invented “modern era” – but these are the motives that make our time just like any other. As for the island, we know nothing, and the story of the Universe contraction now seems very doubtful – I am even sure that people thought so in that very historic month (if it was a month – it might have been a decade). The only thing that does not raise any questions about its inexplicability and mystery is still gravity.

Listening to the story about our island I was thinking that Alan was going home really soon. Having no family of my own I had always been envious of Alan with his strong and traditional family structure, where he was growing under the keen supervision of his mother, who – with a truly feminine perseverance – fetishized the fundamentals of a happy social unit and saw the family as a project with its aims, tasks and budget. It might be why he had never heard his parents’ quarrels. His father came from a village on the edge of the island which was created by the people who saw the island as a possibility to return to natural roots. Graduating from our university he set up his small business of roasting and selling coffee beans. He was one of the few who went to the dangerous journey to collect these beans at the border – this is where they grew, though in a previous epoch they never did there. The father’s business had been living like this up to the moment when coffee quality started to be measured by the adequacy to capitalist spirit, i.e., advertisement. And as his customers had the same confusing values as the society itself, the slogan “we make quality” was a sign of a better product for them that their own eyes. Finally, his father started civil service as a border surveillance specialist – such a job, according to the mother, could save him from stress. Although after this his health started to deteriorate. The mother all her life worked as a teacher for the mentally challenged. Her pupils were mostly children from the slums. Alan liked to accompany his mother to their homes to learn about their social condition, which was significantly different from his own incredibly cosy home, and so Alan considered himself a fortunate boy from the very childhood.

The doctor still continued his long story about the island’s history and my look went to a scratchboard drawing, squeezed between books in the bookcase, depicting a one-armed astronaut. This drawing was presented to me by Alan. It refers to a remarkable dream which Alan used to see in his childhood, and which always fostered some inexpressible feeling in me, strange as it was not my dream but the dream somehow very close to my soul. It was this dream that first made me think that inexpressible soul forms have rather stable and material nature, which can be transmitted outside. In his dream but in different plots Alan saw a one-armed astronaut. He first saw the dream when he learned about the difference between “the past” and the present world. Lying in bed and thinking about the varied ways of wanderers to tread their paths in the desert, he imagined that they stumbled on the abandoned space station – as he knew from his mother, that year more spacecrafts were launched than in all the time of space exploration. Almost all countries joined the research of the unknown phenomenon, so it was not difficult to stumble on a ready-to-launch rocket. Having learned all the skills of rocket-launching, five of the wanderers left the Earth and soon were rotating on the orbit. They thought they would see other parts of the Earth but at one moment an air crash happened – the rocket was obviously not so ready. At that moment one astronaut went into open space and the shock wave tore his arm away and he himself flew towards the Earth. Alan often drew this astronaut, finding new meanings to the torn arm, spacesuit and floating in the open space. The arm sometimes personified a cruel battle, intergalactic wars and an exploded star. Then the arm became the part of an unsuccessful experiment, a woman was inside the spacesuit and the space acquired subsidiary meaning just like a gangway between the plots. By the time of growing-up, the arm became a symbol of lost hopes, the spacesuit had “Space agency MD” lettering, and the space became what exists beyond the thin wall of the spacecraft. But the imagination didn’t stop there: the final version was a mystic story of a self-cut arm, as a sacrifice to all humane, the spacesuit became a supernatural being, and the space showed itself as a living creature, engulfing those who couldn’t leave their material nature.

Alan’s image, which I painted to you with vivid brushstrokes, cut into my memory after all what happened, but Alan’s real impression was not always so homogeneous, which apparently happens to all the people on whom we focus our spiritual attention – from conglomerations of matter they turn into spheres which store illustrations to our impressions of a person. These impressions intertwine by the laws of our – not their – mind, and so our soul delivers a person’s equivalent who is an intermediary to communicate with real Alan. And this intermediary keeps our real sensations – he himself is a sensation, with which we perceive a familiar face and behaviour. The details fade away, we forget the elements of a face, clothes and behaviour but the sensation is more stable – it always stores its history, that is why, when we meet an old friend in the street who we don’t recognize, just before it, our soul in the form of impressions will transfer to us our attitude to this person and will focus our memory on the real context – not where we met this person but where we formed our sensation towards him. And we will suddenly remember why this person is unpleasant to us. On the contrary, person’s material life divides him into different personas which live in different places and times – they are the compilation of facts, characters of a book where the author decided to put into an insane man’s mind some imaginary people to whom he supposedly communicates. These people appear to be one sensation of denial of one’s own sensations, which makes rational people become insane creating a multifaced monster inside. If we compare all Alans with each context trying to abstract from our feelings, we will see totally different creatures – not people – who are born and die in a fast forward motion, they decay before our eyes, because every new impression takes away character features of this creature. With only an artificial effort (i.e., effort of deep consciousness) we mix different people in one persona. To recognize one Alan among many, not appealing to our perceptions, we will have to conduct an investigation to match different features of a face shown in any one moment, and we won’t be able to say that we discovered that very Alan but not his twin-brother or clone, or our illusion. Moreover, we won’t be able to say in the future that we see Alan. The sensation of a person is much more important than a person themselves, and Alan’s evolution happens in all people who know him, and each person infinitely draws his portrait from the number of pieces scattered in the space. Proverbial art of “realism” makes us study people as if we look at their “objective” portrait, but a much finer art brings up sensations and makes us think which museum we are really in. We would become confused in the arduous work of perceiving different people if we didn’t have a stable sensation – that very gravity which recognizes character conglomerations of matter and attracts them. Evolution does not make it possible to create two identical people, and so it gave us sensations which don’t perceive, or we wouldn’t have any spare room in our soul, but they create each person – life lives while it delivers sensations in any other living being. A person dies when we stop seeing them, when one actually dies, we fix the sensation of their complete life perception. If we learn a new fact of a person’s life, which will make us recreate a new persona, then this person revives to die again but being different – isn’t it why people try to achieve the depth in their works, the depth which can be renewed endlessly?

When I try to take my look away from the monument I created myself, I recall one unflattering detail of my sensation to Alan. I recall my childhood turquoise blanket which was a witness to the sufferings tearing my childhood soul apart because a spirit from another world settled there – love which, with its sharp blade, separated platonic passion from carnal, and sensation from vice. Alan’s sensation gave birth to intimacy that was immediately joined by vice, which made me dream of Alan and I was scared of my thoughts. My appetence to Alan didn’t stop my appetence to girls, in fact, it didn’t distinguish between these appetences. Separating different beings, “the sensation” presents each of them with freshness of perception and happiness – my separation to men and women happened just because of the knowledge of vice which is stored in a man and lack of the knowledge of a vice which lives in a woman; it makes me behave correspondingly and forms a different attitude to those. Dreaming of sensual pleasures, first, my soul was in the field of sensation, and so, it dreamed of a woman but the further my soul took me, the further I went from the sensation and the more I dreamed of Alan – the deeper I gave in to vice. This work is done by every soul of each person, and the ways are quite definite. You can separate vice into two parts, throwing away one of them, and so, you will be dreaming of women as you would about men. You can deny vice, and it – due to its nature, and everything natural is very resilient – will evolve into other forms and will start to manifest itself in your activities. You can surrender to vice but then the sensations will disappear. You can always coordinate sensations and vice but then you will be dependent of love which gave birth to this contradiction. Can we comprehend vice? My appetence later was forgotten but the thought of it came back to me after what had happened.

From aside, Alan might have triggered completely different feelings that I had. I sometimes understood that I had never seen such a combination of obtusity and originality. He actually could infuriate with his stupidity but his unique outlook made him attractive. I think he himself realized his worthlessness and with all his effort was trying to become better, seeing the only one way to this – to be original. When he was not allowed to be himself, he immediately started a conflict: usually a calm person, he burst out becoming a brainless bull or a hysterical little girl. While growing up, Alan was dreaming of different ways of his development. Having learned about the past era, he wanted to escape “the island” and study the whole planet finding other places of life. Later, like the majority of other residents, he dreamed of building a perfect society on “the island”. Having read utopian literature, he thought that the problem of a perfect society had always been in the scale of this project realization – everything seemed too abstract. In our case the problem of the scale was solved naturally.

In the moments of loneliness Alan strived for going to the desert and wandering there until his remnants of memory disappear together with the sensation of time. He used to recall that in his childhood science attracted him because imagination didn’t aspire to comprehend the truth – it aspired to invent it. Later, Alan took up more practical ways of comprehension, this is how he could directly influence the truth and get a feedback. But the limits of such comprehension made him bored quite fast, because his imagination couldn’t find any life in it. He admired electricity, which fascinated his imagination, but household devices which depended on it, made him frustrated. All these ways joined in Alan by the time of his growing-up, and he always had to jump from one concept to another, producing an impression of a reserved but curious young man with a bit of a wild look. The idea to organize the trip abroad came to him in the moment of the deepest self-identification crisis: after a number of obsessive aspirations to do whatever but not to halt at one thing. He studied the motions of ants in an anthill, took up ornithology, arduously tried to understand the relativity theory and ecstatically went through cookbooks.