INTRODUCTION, TWO STORIES AND THE FOOTNOTES
INTRODUCTION
With regard to our superior knowledge of physical laws it would not be blasphemous to say that no particle of the infinite Universe can be at two places at the same time.
An ordinary dead-man, limited by general physical laws and particular features of his posthumous being could rest in the same place for years. That very same body as a physical entity in the broadest sense could not lie simultaneously in thirty religious establishments, as the case may be with certain remarkable saints.
Our dear God, who is omnipresent and has the power of overlooking the Universal landscape thanks to his unique substance which he has possessed since the day time immemorial along with the ability to be present at millions of places simultaneously and to carry out millions of heterogeneous tasks and mutually conflicting activities at the same time.
Knowing this old hierarchy we understand that a small dead-man, a so-called mors minor, is at the bottom lowest grade and thus most negligent; his negligence gives him the opportunity of fast decay, and as regards saints, an advantage in time in their incessant race for speedily reach the gaseous condition. As the above-mentioned rules are clear to everyone and present the truth for which no evidence is necessary the reader could accept them as an axiom, or God’s thought which is beyond questioning.
However, the undeniable existence of the “world paradox” where the famous Unsuspecting is the generator of all suspicion a door opens for doubt leading us to conclude that with a neat combination of moral principles along with general physical laws one could easily deny the exactness of the mentioned axiom. In short: in space of the general axiological causation of the Universe we claim that all the answers to secrets of nature lie in our belief, and by no means in supernatural phenomena.
SIR MORGAN
If, for instance, Sir Joseph Morgan come home late and tipsy, his wife Lady Morgan will immediately ask where he was. Sir Morgan will tell her that he was at the cinema. He will tell her that he got drunk at the cinema while he was watching a melodrama in which the director tried hard to accurately represent historical facts.
If you ask Amalie fon Leithner, Sir Morgan’s lover, where Sir Morgan could spend that evening, she will at once swear on the Bible that that particular night between nine and eleven thirty Joseph was at her apartment (Bassett Rd. 7), or more precisely, in her bed. She will also confirm that they listened to the second broadcast of the Coronation of Elizabeth of Windsor, drinking beer that Joseph had bought on the corner in KPH (Kensington Park Hotel) while a little later they moved on to her reserves of gin, but these minor details go beyond the borders of our topic.
Every impartial, mature and reasonable person, someone who is not affected by Sir Morgan’s sexual adventures, and even less by the immeasurable wealth of the ugly and bonny Lady Morgan, cold as Swedish iron, will understand that the honorable Sir Morgan was on that night simultaneously in two far away London quarters. That person will remind you, just to prove that she is educated as Mr. Umberto Ecco – that in that respect the United Kingdom and the Anglican Church are not an exception. She will point to the case of Lenin’s Arc about which once there were numerous accounts in Petrograd papers before that Revolution in Russia. Many people saw Lenin flying like a bird in cabin of a ship, which was one of the famous dreadnaughts. Witnesses saw two Lenin’s, it was most probably double-acting, and one of them had the mitra from Constantinople on his head and a shepherd rod in his teeth, while the other Lenin, the one who was closer to the crowd brandished with an axe as if he was fighting with a bear.
Everything is clear now. While Sir Morgan was rolling in bed with Amalie fon Leithner, that same Sir Morgan, his integral version, an existence no less self-aware and revered than the Sir Morgan who indulged in Amalia’s charming body was comfortably sitting during that same two hours and thirty minutes in a red plush seat of the cinema “Rex” (tenth row, middle, seat no. 5) and drinking old English gin (swallowing the liquid directly from the bottle) was shedding bitter tears over the destiny of the heroine in the movie “The orphan-girl from Lowood”.
LENIN’S BOAT
Sir Morgan’s simultaneous entertainment at a number of places (Sex, movie, alcohol) and an unpleasant home argument (Lady Morgan) still remain and disperse inside the distinct boundaries of his family life without any obvious consequence on the environment, class dynamics, political system, economic growth, or finally, the place of Britain in the post-war Europe. This is a story about, as you have correctly guessed, respectable high class people, Joseph’s infidelity, and a banal triangle, a situation to which even the stale charm of an aristocrat ambience could not add importance.
In the next example, the case of the double existence of a Solomon Rozenquist where we witness an unmerciful battle for the “power at any cost”, where the intellectual discourse and religious fanaticism have descended to the underground and sewerage becoming a rude hooligan jargon of mad peasants, double existence has turned into mortal danger, something which muddles reason, stops the clock and induces millions of spirits to fight until extinction.
A declaration of an anonymous patriot who announced in front of the grocery shop “Beca”, “I do not need either a pistol or a gun I like breaking their necks with axe” serves as a very accurate illustration of this sub-human darkness.
Let us put things in order. Contemporary historians tend for unknown reasons to either neglect or hush or lump together with unimportant, decorous trifles and unconfirmed adventures the little known Petrograd anecdote from the life of Vladimir Ilič Lenin, recorded in books under a confusing heading Lenin’s Arc.
The main characters of this story are the already mentioned journalist Solomon Rozenquist, his boss and the editor of the Petrograd Gazette, Petar Ivanovič Jež (Hedgehog), and certainly Vladimir Ilič Lenin, the angry Vlad, the nasty Simbirsk tongue, a revolutionary, economist, sociologist, philosopher, prophet, inspirer, pioneer, leader, Messiah, road sign and the cultural hero of the October Revolution, the personality which many people consider even today to be the true God of the deprived proletariat.
According to Solomon’s account recorded thirteen years later on the occasion of his police hearing during May and June 1927 it happened as follows:
“At twenty to eight on the morning of January 12th, 1915 a handsome young man unexpectedly came to our office carrying a white coat over one arm and a letter from comrade Vladimir Ilič. I knew comrade Vladimir Ilič from before. Vladimir Ilič liked the company of artists and could sing very nicely gipsy songs in the journalists club. He promised the gypsies an Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic of the Gypsies, naturally only after the beheading of Nikolaj and the other Romanovs. He even showed me in confidence a small American razor with which he could carry out with his own tender, feminine hand this bloody deed. I clenched my teeth, looked him in the eyes and said: “Let us make a toast!”
Comrade Lenin informed me in the letter that he was going to make a performance for masses at ten o clock, “at the familiar place”, by the Neva, so that it would have been nice if I could have come along and make the account of the event for my newspaper. I offered tea and a roll to the courier. He put the roll into his pocket and left the tea untouched.
Knowing that Vladimir is a universal figure, somebody like Carrucci, I went to the indicated place at the mentioned time. I told Sejmon Pavlovič that I would not be back in the office before twelve. It was snowing but I gave up the idea of hiring a fiacre because I was very poor in these days. When I got there I saw comrade Lenin standing a little away from the mob and feverishly explaining something to the gathered crowd. In spite of the fact that it was quite cold outside, fifty degrees below zero, a little more than seven hundred thousand people, mainly from the working class and peasant descent, gathered there. Vlad (as Solomon called Vladimir Ilič) stood with his back towards the crowd. It seemed to me that he was wriggling his bottom while pointing with his right hand at a barge which was anchored right by the bank. Next to me the famous Vladimir Vladimirovič Majakovski was standing, or, to be accurate hopping. It was not Vladimir Vladimirovič Majakovski, the poet, but Vladimir Vladimirovič Majakovski, a prose writer and an agriculturist, in his own person.
Then the comrade Vladimir Ilič walked slowly and carefully the narrow and slippery plank, previously scattered with ashes, holding hands on his hips like a Spanish dancer and stepped into the boat. Some people applauded. He stood on the deck for exactly two minutes. I consulted the big watch on the wall that futurists brought from somewhere. They carried that watch about as a coffin. “Inside this watch lies the old time”, said one of them, “so I am going to bury it. When the new time arrives you can suck my cock.” He put weights between his legs and started moving them as if they were testicles. I think that that man was that crop eared Vladimir Vladimirovič Majakovski, the poet.
Ilič turned to us calling out that he would enter trough one door and go out alive and unhurt trough other. All noises died down but for a hushed cough which occasionally broke the silence during which fear crept into everyone’s heart while above our heads several ominous ravens went on flying in the gray sky of the Russian Empire. Then comrade Lenin, head bent, entered the front door, and an hour later went out on the back door, joyful and unhurt. I saw everything with my own eyes since I pushed trough the crowd right to the front row using my journalist pass. Everybody was dumbfounded. The guy left the cabin alive and well. Someone shouted, and I am now certain that that person was comrade Zinovlev: “A miracle! Have you seen the miracle, men?! Can’t you see? Comrade Lenin brings miracles!” There was pushing and tossing, an unbearable din and dangerous squabble, but the police was nowhere to be seen. Noticing that there was no one on the barge while the horrified people were still on the bank, taking the advantage of a general confusion, a real futuristic pun, comrade Lenin started to fill a big sack with small pieces of coal as if it was pure gold.
To make a resume: I am strongly convinced that what happened was a real, actual miracle, not a trick or illusion. I saw comrade Lenin entering trough the front door and leaving trough the opposite one, on the river side. I saw him smiling and stroking his beard. He was obviously satisfied by the outcome of the drama. I also saw two police agents dressed in white angel’s robes, but the devils, as they were, quickly disappeared in the mist.
I did not dare think at that time what could have happened if comrade Lenin had not left that black hole of the ship. A bloody revolution would break out, or the Doomsday would come. Russians would start killing their brothers. The Revolution and, consequently the creation of the Soviet Union would not be possible without comrade Lenin. I think only that the name of the ship that was at that time owned by Aleksandar Aleksandrovič Remizov was not “The Arc” but simply the barge no. 17. I worked for three years in the company Remizov and that is why I knew very well how his barges looked like. The old Remizov instructed his men to paint all the barges in blue, the Greek style…”
Contrary to Solomonov’s sharp eye for detail and brilliant writing skill comrade Hedgehog, whom his collaborators called Fat Hedgehog, claimed before the investigator at a separate hearing concerning the same event, that on that particular morning Solomon had not moved his lazy journalistic ass from the office before twelve and for this reason he justly doubted everything what Solomon had said. Ivanovič was convinced that Solomon was an incorrigible liar. Nevertheless, Petar Ivanovič did not doubt that what had happened with comrade Lenin was the truth, or that it had happened just as Solomon said. He was sure that Solomon told only the truth, from the beginning to the end, but he knew that Solomon Rozenquist lied whenever he opened his mouth. Ivanovič said that Solomon was not an eye witness since he did not see the event with his own eyes because at the time of Lenin’s brave endeavor he dozed by the stove, complaining about the headache and hangover. Petar Ivanovič expressed the opinion that every story would lose some of its authenticity by retelling. First, all those events happened in August, not in January and the steamer did not belong to old Remzov but to Šiškin. Second, Solomon mentioned some seven hundred thousand people. That was not true either. Ivanovič was certain that there had been much more, perhaps two million. Third, the police massacred people by sabers, the fact which Solomon had hushed up mentioning some angels and some squabble in his article.
As for himself, Solomon declared in writing that it was not a surprise that Fat Hedgehog said what he said because on January 12th, 1915 he was away on a dacha of a late Andrej Hitrov, which was, in fact the dacha of Andrej’s brother in law Aleksey, and for this reason the fellow could not know who among the employees were leaving the premises on that particular morning. Solomon added that he never celebrated Christmas nor had the habit of getting drunk on religious holidays like comrade Hedgehog.
***
The essential meaning of this document, which is a text full of insertions, upside-down images, anachronisms and inventions, whose unrefined seams and thick, clumsily woven treads reflect someone’s haste and the work of a slovenly and careless mind, warns that one should stop and carefully separate a bunch of awkward falsifications from the original spirit of the message. Perhaps someone considered it important to lead the reader to conclude that Solomon, whoever he was, managed by his pace through the time/space disorder to bring from there (God knows where from) a grain of sense, a red hot particle of truth while the stout Hedgehog, who was not at all inclined towards poetry, lying as he would, vanished in this muddle.
Petar Ivanovič put the hand on his chest swearing that what he said was true. Petar Ivanovič drank the stale water from a green glass rubbing the dandruff on the crown of his head with his fingers and sniveling so as to persuade the police interrogator that he was an honest Soviet citizen because he did not and would not have other country apart from this. Why would he change all this beauty for some Finland? Ivanovič swore that he had seen comrade Lenin hovering above the Neva. He was convincing the interrogator that he was innocent as an unborn child and for this reason he would not like, for his children’s sake, his name being dragged about Courts of Law.
While Solomon Rozenkquist who was certainly unaware of his supernatural powers, was dozily sitting by the stove and while at the same fatal hour that same Solomon was pacing along the icy river with empty pockets there came our second Lenin drinking vodka on the deck of Leonid Surikov’s red yacht biting pickled cucumbers, singing patriotic songs, peering trough the window and bringing about inconceivable miracles. Millions of USSR people could say the same starting from that hesitant Grigorije Jefesejevič who declared for Pravda that he was not sure if he himself was on that particular day in Leningrad, or even in Russia, for that matter, but he was certain that comrade Vladimir Ilič traveled a lot and was in Geneva on that day, and then briefly stopped at Zimmervald and perhaps he was, why not, secretly in Petrograd about which every curious reader of Pravda could find information in every local encyclopedia.
FOOTNOTES
1) A real and outstanding record in multitudinousness of simultaneously dwellings at different locations beat an already diseased virgin and martyr Philomena. Not so long ago, in the fifties, the fact was revealed that St. Philomena rested in fifty places. Some people said she succeeded in beating the record due to the hard labor and great diligence of a certain prior, while others said, perhaps justly, that the prior’s archeological amateurishness, in fact the early stage of the archeological science of that time, along with the unforgivable scanty knowledge about complex symbolism of the Western Christianity were fundamental for Philomena’s record.
According to the available records, which we can only partly rely on, Miss. Philomena’s tomb was found in the catacombs of St. Priscilla in 1802. Philomena’s miraculousness, full of attractive details, was first known in the parish Nole and from there it quickly spread worldwide. One could not blame the mentioned prior; he was deeply and truly convinced that Philomena deserved to be proclaimed Saint because he believed in the reputation of his own faith about which he could not say that it was in any way better than faith in general.
So, according to the legend, if the prior’s daydreams could be called a legend, Philomena was a Christian and a virgin who Roman soldiers, threw into the Tiber river because of her conviction that Jesus Christ was the only God, which was not a rear case among the religiously fanaticized Romans. If those same Romans were, God forbid, a little more broad minded in matters of faith, and allowed Philomena to believe what she would she would never become a saint nor would the prior have a reason to create the story about her unhappy life. Philomena was portrayed in art works as a young girl by the river holding several lilies, an anchor and three arrows. Her cult was officially confirmed and approved in 1838.
Exactly one hundred and twenty years later several independent research groups found that a great number of books had been published in various languages about her pious life. It was finally confirmed that St, Philomena had never existed and that her sacred life story, full of exciting details about the religious persistency of the first Christians, was an entirely invented creation brought great and very concrete benefits to the monastery of Mugnano.
When the Pope Paul VI learned about this case of doubtful sacredness, or, to put it diplomatically, for the blunders of others on the papal throne, he issued a decree by which Philomena, along with two hundred more names, was to be erased from the list of the acknowledged saints of the Roman Catholic Church. How did it all happen? The Pope publicly announced that previous Popes had occasionally made a mistake which was contrary to the dogma about the Papal sinlessness. Consequently we are all sinless until the reverse is proved. Contrary to us, mortals Papal purity can be questioned only posthumously since during his lifetime he would not and could not accept a judge other than God. By a single gesture the Pope annulled the former sacred substance of the nonexistent Philomena, leaving the total of eighty ordinary remains of anonymous women of unknown descent and biography behind. The power of a Pope, as the outcome of the reputations of all previous Popes as far back as St. Peter, had enough magic to turn eighty simultaneous existences of St. Philomena into eighty secular deceased women who were less important for the foundations of the Church and the Christian religion in general. The act of faith created and elevated St. Philomena. Her sacredness was abolished by that same act of faith, without hesitation and she was “personally” returned into nonexistence by the Pope’s magic where she had come from. The case of Philomena in which only one word could create and annul someone’s sacredness is fairly clear, although it is not clear who will give the money back to the worshipers who were investing it for a hundred and thirty years in the vain hope to be healed. Blind men gave money in order to have their sight back, sterile women in order to conceive and the crippled in order to walk again while Philomena did not even existed. If one counts the money and adds the one-century interest to the total sum one can get a really big amount of reputation. Some call it faith, some call it patriotism and the money goes to someone else’s purse.
However something has to be done quickly so as to protect St. Nicola and Marcel Duchamp from the irresponsible Popes, Roman curia and Russian Masons.
If 50% of Orthodox Serbs and twenty millions Orthodox Russians celebrate even today St. Nicola’s day regardless of the fact that he prosecuted those nasty restaurant owners who, for money’s sake served for dinner children roasts instead of expensive lamb to their customers we should keep in mind that the superintendent of one of the four pillars of the Vatican intelligence service called Pro Deo was a man called Giovanni Battista Montini, the archbishop of Milan and later the Pope Paul VI, who, building a sacred protective wall before the Communist advance, the so-called Peter’s wall, a contemporary equivalent to the Great Wall, denied on his own free will the sacredness of Nicola of Bari, that is, our St. Nicola. From the bucket of true faith the Pope threw, along with the dirty water of unfaith, also our St. Nicola. Since the Orthodox people who were on the other side of that virtual wall thought that the Pope’s battle against the Communism and the Communist dictatorship was in fact the battle against the Orthodox religion it would be interesting to discover where that conclusion had come from.
Now the bishop of Mire, the late Nicola, is for some people an ordinary mortal man although once a high-ranking church official, and for others he is still a saint, the protector of sailors, chauffeurs, travelers and roasted children.
A Mr. X, an old man and a scientist, the writer of the multi-volumes European History, a man of the world, a sworn bachelor, a lonely, almost isolated man in his vain belief in humanity and the honesty of advertising, bought at the market in his native Lourdes, the most recent Polish invention, a magical powder for washing carpets.
As soon as the next day Mr. X realized that the box with the inscription “Magical powder” written on it contained ordinary washing powder not an inch better than the one which you could buy in any profane Polish supermarket. He, a man from Lourdes, of all people should have known what miracles and wonders were. The miracle and the faith lasted as long as an old carpet by its irrefutably proved dirtiness did not in an instant dispersed the miraculous reputation of the Polish washing powder and along with it our old dream about an easy and quick road to purity. That was all about M. Duchamp.
2) In the Russian Empire as far back as the Kiev times and the age of old dukes it was a common habit among the Orthodox people to be simultaneously at a number of distant locations.
The Federal Republic of Serbia is also full of examples, seasoned by the special Balkan charm, of those multiple existences.
A gentlemen known by his pseudonym Zeppelin, an ex-high ranking official of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, claims that he, along with about two million of the like-minded people was a victim of criminal activities of the members of the Communist Party that he also belonged to. As time went by he was all the more convinced in his martyrized as well as tyrannical past; in fact, Mr. Zeppelin thinks that he existed simultaneously at two physically, spiritually, legally and politically different places. This is the reason why Mr. Zeppelin has two pasts today, which is to say, two life stories, two biographies, two reputations that he can use at will. He uses one of them in order to emphasize his unmerciful battle against tyranny, and the other to remind people that there has never been and never will be more a worthier guardian of Socialistic values than him.
While in Russia, due to its immense Eurasian areas, a person can simultaneously be in Moscow and a hundred kilometers away, which clears every doubt about the double existence in the victim/tyrant, or notorious case of Mr. Zeppelin one deals with moderate, centimeter distances. This is a matter of bars and their thickness. A hairsplitter would worn you that in case of double existing one should not worry if the person is duplicated at a ten-centimeter or ten thousand kilometers distance. He or she would argue that the act of duplication is what matters not the empty space between those ideally made duplications.
There are certain Balkan particularities. Contrary to the Russians who can stand beyond their own horizons due to the excessively wide bosom of their mother-Russia, and that due to natural curves of the planets everyone could be on the other side of the horizon, Mr. Zeppelin who has been indispensably squeezed by the spiritual/geographical limits of the small Serbia has always been forced to look himself in the eyes from the viewpoint of a victim and from the throne of a cop at the same time.
According to Mr. Zeppelin theories, not far away from the most recent scientific learning, every political program that does not pay enough attention to the celestial laws is inevitably sentenced to failure. To prove his observations Mr. Zeppelin points to gravitation – the force of mutual attraction between people in - and its fatal effects on our sociopolitical situation.
3) “at ten o’clock, by the Neva, ‘at the familiar place’… Here we deal with the almost classical problem of the complexity of temporary-symbolical coincidences. In the radio broadcast “On Sunday at ten” on the first channel of Radio Belgrade (June 1997), listeners could hear an interesting one-hour scientific-political reportage about sixty frogs of the artificial lakes near Bela Crkva. (Village White Church) According to the accounts of an anonymous reporter, those sixty frogs of Bela Crkva submitted a request in the written form for membership in the Serbian Socialist Party. Amphibians (Rana esculenta) referred to Lenin and his famous Ark in which, as in the Noah’s there was enough space for all kinds of beings, even for their distant Russian relatives. No one believed in that pseudoscientific invention, here where like in a fable some green frogs allegedly speak Serbian, write in Cyrillic alphabet, have political opinions and even refer to important historical precedents.
But, there were those shrewder listeners who knew from the experience that they dealt here with the case of a hidden meaning of an encoded message. The confusion was due to the similarity in names between the Russian river Neva and the shallow river Nera which crosses the Serbian-Rumanian border in the vicinity of Bela Crkva. (White Church) As the Nera is not a navigable river and that could be forded in summer months it served as a common crossing for political dissidents during the occasional disputes between the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Later the Nera proved to be a popular smugglers point of the political heirs of the two Communist Parties – of Romania and of Yugoslavia.
The assembly of the presented documentation narrows the space for suppositions and leads to the conclusion that the encoded message of the story in the radio broadcast “on Sunday at ten” could mean a panicky call for a so-called frog’s jump, or, which would be equally probable, “an agreed smugglers sign with the following meaning: “At ten o’ clock by the Nera, at the familiar place, we are taking across sixty trunks with Frogs1!” To remove every possibly doubt about the meaning we would add that the word “Frog” or “Frogy” in the Serbian political jargon mean a kind of low Italian shoes.
1 A Frog – an Italian
Beograd, September 2nd, 1997 R.Todosijević
Нема коментара:
Постави коментар