39.3.2. Something wild
Carefree voices and a nice, easy strum of a guitar – that’s what I am hearing. The lights fall smoothly on the dim furniture and walls filled with pictures of people and places. I order a coke at the bar. My friend Jason orders a beer. His long dark hair is perched shortly above a tweed shirt he is wearing with a tang of self-consciousness.
“It’s nice, huh?” – he asks with a pleasant smile.
“Yeah,” – I answer and sip from my cold glass some dark, sizzling liquid.
Jason’s friend, a relatively short wiggly blonde who feels surprisingly alive, and his girlfriend approach us by the bar counter. They both play in Jason’s little-known band: the drums and the acoustic guitar. The band is called “Psychedelic Horseshit,” but don’t get confused by the name – it’s nice alternative rock. Jason plays bass and writes all the songs. Jason is the real maestro of this decentralized group, where they all sing. I met them before at the band’s concerts in small bars around Columbus, Ohio.
“Hey, you got a buzz cut?!” – the drummer says.
“Oh, yeah,” – I reply indifferently.
“That’s cool.” He is watching me, and there are wicked sparks in his eyes.
After a moment, he puts out an offer, waving at the musicians on the small stage: “You wanna sit over there?”
“Sure… why not?” So we have some fun, listen to music, enjoy our drinks, talk about music… and Russia.
It was a nice, cozy bar, not too big or too small, and not very crowded. Slow-paced rock lasciviously stroked our senses, so it was all right. We had a break from our Electrical Engineering homework with Jason. We were chilling, hanging out. This was not a time to be burdened by a worry in the world, so I tried not to think of what lay ahead for me.
After it was getting too late, I approached Jason and told him: “I am leaving, bud.”
“All right, man, take care.” We pat each other on the back and let go. It’s like any other day. We meet and we bid each other’s farewell. Except, today – we both knew – wasn’t like any other day. I wasn’t going to return, and I will never return to whom I was before. We weren’t going to see each other anymore. We parted outside. My Chevy Cobalt was patiently waiting for me, parked. It was my manila-colored sailboat; how many waves we tested together and how much is left for our share. My beautiful sailboat will carry me and protect me through any storm. Its shell may get damaged, but its essence will save me. I took the seat and grasped the steering wheel, started the engine, waved to my friend for one last time, looked ahead, and was gone…
I never went to bars before I met Jason. He was the closest friend I had at the OSU. But I only got closer to him after I realized that I had to leave – in fact, the closest I had ever been to anyone in America. And he was the only person who knew at the time what was going on inside of me. He was the only one who knew everything that I wished to share. He was a good friend – the second generation Filipino who was similarly disenchanted with the American dream. We were lost together. I remember a day when we went out to a Mexican restaurant where we ordered some extraordinary dish – Paella, his favorite, – and while we were conversing he told me: “Silence is the greatest of music.” I still like to remember what he said.
I had a long road ahead. I left after midnight. All night, in silence, I drove to Indiana and then to Illinois. It happened straight from the bar, just as I planned it. I was hungry for a novelty, so I accepted Jason’s recommendation to try Wolfy’s fast food restaurant in Chicago. I visited it early in the morning and enjoyed one of their large and delicious hot dogs. In Chicago suburbs I met with my dad and my step-parents and told them goodbye. I did not expect to see them again, but they did not know this. I even brought them some parting gifts.
Then it was a kaleidoscope of American wayside: Springfield, St. Louis, Oklahoma City, and beyond. Hey, look out of the window – it’s the Gateway Arch! I only stopped to refill the gas tank. The state of Oklahoma was particularly strange. There were ancient derelict cars, all rusted, stranded on the wayside amidst empty farmlands. And there were black ground beetles everywhere, but what did you expect? – it was hot, and it was the beginning of June. This is when I was supposed to have been preparing for exams. Instead, I drove endlessly, tirelessly through roads that had no seeming end – two lines ahead and two side ones against me – with the white and yellow stripes framing my view. I remember how I got lost in Texas when it was a sunny 92-degrees day. I stopped at a gas station called “Git N’ Go.” The gentlemen there were nice enough to help me with directions. My eyes were closing as I drove, but I did not want to stay outside, and no motels attracted me because I had set myself a destination that was my only goal. However, I had to stop for a 30-minute break and also get some coffee to keep me awake. It worked. And then it was a glorious natural landscape of New Mexico. One sees those mountains that greet you in a warm embrace, those great horizons under light blue airspace, and there is nobody else anywhere to either side in chaparral except those lazy tumbleweeds that remind of westerns, and there is only you at 80 miles per hour and that blue stripe disappearing in the highway mirage just ahead. And finally my heart increases its revolutions at the sight of the deserts of Arizona with the convoluted canyons and red rocky formations that seem greater, like shriveled giants cringing from mysterious cold. Being here is like being a part of a fable, and I am plunging into it in the head of the wind behind my shoulders. This is where I wanted to come. I drive by Indian reservations – they sell dreamcatchers, rugs, cigars, and other self-made things. But my favorite city that I wish to visit first and where I shall stay is the city of Flagstaff – the heart of the desert. And here it is! – a small but nice and friendly town. I pay for a room, climb the stairs to the second floor, and after entering I collapse, exhausted after the 32-hour road trip, into the bed that greets me with a blindingly white smile.
…
At night I had fires all surrounding me, consuming me, flames licking my consciousness. This had continued for many nights before. I was drawn to fire.
…
The next day I am on a look around as I drive north. I pick up a hitchhiker. He is 39 years old, and his car didn’t start when he had to go to work. He talks excitingly to me like a man in bliss, yet he tells me openly how his wife left him for another man and how he works as a waiter in a hotel’s restaurant. I am driving him to work and ask him whether he had seen the Canyon. He looks at me with eyes that never knew unhappiness and tells me that, no, he had never been to it, that in fact he had never been much away from his cherished city of Flagstaff. How could a man be so happy without ever seeing the greatest that his state has to offer or any other states or countries in the world? If ignorance is bliss, is invincible ignorance a permanent bliss? Is happiness really self-contained and self-sufficient as if it is the only reality? I do not understand. Of course, I understand that his ignorance is mere naïveté of a man with a common consciousness.
I arrive at a gas station and fill a 5-gallon container with gasoline. It’s in the trunk, let alone in the dark for now. At the Visitor and Information Center on the South Rim I learn that the Phantom Ranch and the campgrounds are fully occupied and reserved for months. If you want to stay in the depths of the Canyon overnight, you got to reserve a room a year in advance. It’s all right – I didn’t expect to stay there anyway. I will walk. On my way back, I meet hitchhikers from the Netherlands who are on a road trip across the United States. They are vacationing straight after high school, starting their trip in California and ending it in New York. I drop them off at a hostel in Flagstaff and also stop at my favorite fast food place called “Jack in the Box.” Having ordered some of their famous tacos and hamburgers with special sauce I return to the motel. Next day, I will get up at 5 AM. On my back there will be a rucksack with two apples, some energy bars, a 2-gallon water bottle, and a sweatshirt. I later realized that something was still lacking.
I didn’t have a camera, so pictures were exclusively imprinted and preserved only in my own mind – those are the best pictures you can ever take. You can’t capture the fleeting moment anyway, and you got to enjoy it with your own eyes. I wanted to see the great chasm before I left this country. It was the symbol of the land for me – the great chasm that means America with its infinite cities luring you into its sprawling cracks. It wasn’t just a snapshot but a motion picture of constant, never-ending movement pulling one’s sight into the curves in the shape of a river that originally bred it and is now waiting for a wary wanderer to discover it six thousand feet down. And the wind! – it’s constantly gripping and trying to pull out your heart. I was into it with the rest of the travelers who came here from Japan, China, Canada, Europe. Their equipment might have shown that they were prepared, but internally you really cannot prepare yourself enough for this.
The Bright Angel Trail. Once you look at it – once you walk its zigzag paths, its open vistas and falls of 300 feet to a lower slope just a foot away from your foot, its chiseled stairs that take your feet away from you as you find wings, its tunnels and cottages, its hungry squirrels and lizards and birds and its sandy rocks under the shades of lonely juniper trees gradually fading into awesome foliage and waterfalls – you never forget. I hurried so fast down and down and down and never looking back – always forward into the future, into what could be waiting down the shape of a newly discovered path. And the farther you go, the less people you find until you reach the very bottom with not a living soul.
I noticed the gradual change in the environment, but once inside, there is some threshold reached, when you become aware that patterned, billion-year old walls enclose you from all sides and cut away from the sky. And this is the moment when I stand firm, alone in my seeming dream, and scream my breath away into them: “GOD!!! You are God!..”
Yet further, the great overhanging rock is above me, I am in a natural alcove, and, a short distance down the hill, the crystal blue of the Colorado River is washing in the soft white sand. The ford across the river is so shallow that it can be crossed without wetting your knees. Some young couple is enjoying themselves there, dipping their feet, running, splashing, laughing, frolicking. I turn away and walk around another bend of the trail. I walk across the 70-foot Silver Bridge connecting to the other side with the traveler’s lodge called the Phantom Ranch. There are some ancient Indian ruins, their baths and remains. I keep walking by the river relatively fast. At some intervals, I stop shortly just to breathe in the view of the sweetly flowing river and the mountain walls of the canyon. I walk up to a sign that warns travelers of heart attacks and sunstrokes and of not returning back in one day. I continue my passage and my climb as I realize that my feet are not the same as they were before. My limbs are getting tired, my back is begging for rest, and the merciless sun is at its peak, scorning at my weakness. I cross the Black Bridge and take the South Kaibab trail, which is level two – medium after the easy Bright Angel. Its plains are vulnerable and continuously scorched by the sun, shades – inexistent, steps are round wooden logs. As a layer of salt crystallizes from perspiration on my face, I beg for mercy and sit on a square rock looking straight down at the short black line of the bridge in a patch of blue-green amidst the interlinking, gigantic canyon slopes. The Colorado River gradually disappears, but this moment’s rest is enough to inspire me to continue my passage higher.
Yet, my stops were getting too frequent, and I had to force myself to continue the ascent. It was so difficult and slow – I was dying from the lack of breath as my heart beat faster than I could manage. I drank most of the water, and my rucksack was nearly empty. A group of tourists from Canada helped me pick up the pace as I talked to them forgetting my tiredness. In their passing, they gave me a piece of salty beef-jerky to save me for a few more miles ahead. By the time I got out to the Rim Trail, it was getting dark and windily cold. Painfully I drove after the 15-hour, 27-mile walking stint to the nearest McDonalds where I asked a man at the counter for a shot of life-saving salt, but he only looked at me strangely and did not understand, so I had to find it myself and swallow it, performing the necessary “injection.” A bag of salt wasn’t enough, so I purchased three packs of beef-jerky at the nearest gas station. The town saved me. That night I slept dreamlessly, and when I got up the following morning – I was a changed man.
I was the tip of an arrow while driving to the Phoenix International Airport. I parked once I got there and left my keys inside the car, knowing that it will belong to the airport in 60 days. The rest of my journey was alone. At 6 AM was my scheduled flight to Moscow.
Before my eyes there is a picture – it’s the last reverie before returning home; it was the view from the bottom of the Grand Canyon. The view was most breathtaking and inspiring, and this place was more impressive than any I had ever visited. If only I sit on the edge of the precipice before descending, if I enjoy the quiet view while pouring some gasoline on myself, and if I strike the lighter, catch a blazing flame, and fall there black as coal – who knows? It was a fantasy I didn’t believe, but it occupied my mind. It was too late; there was a change in plans. I understood that there is something better than a momentary, and thus too easy, suicide. I had to save myself for a slow prolongation of suffering. Now I grew confident after living through this dramatic change. I was missing something wild.
39.3.3. He just snapped
Does a flower only need water to survive? And if that flower is in a dark basement thriving, is it the same flower? The second question will be answered positively by people who do not believe that people need faith. These people think that faith is irrational and thus second-rate. You know who you are, and, in turn, I know myself. What I want to stress is that there is no religion necessary, but belief or faith is fundamental to a human being. Instead, we have greed eating people alive here. Greed that people consider to be their primal motivation. They are not reaching for water but for materialistic values that won’t save their souls.
The world in which we find ourselves uses Aristotelian two-valued logic, and in front of our eyes the essential nature is coming apart and the whole is assimilating into a heartless and soulless machine, a merciless factory. You do not allow a dimension for a belief in this system, and, even if you do, that belief can either be good or evil. You see the world in white and black. And if you are an Objectivist, a transhumanist, or an anti-environmentalist, you live only in the white and thus you are one-dimensional, like a molecule vibrating in a crystal prison. Now, imagine how painful it would be for me and my mind to exist in the low-dimensional reality that is being propagated here. I believe in all dimensions and in many-valued logic, that is, in possibility, probability, necessity, and in the balanced dialectic of inseparable distinctions, the meanings of which are only lost when viewed separately from each other. And in order to stay whole and save my wisdom, I have to find a way to escape before it’s too late and I lose myself in a whirl of the fragmenting reality. Welcome to my life.
39.3.3.1
I am at the orientation for the Electrical Engineering students at the Ohio State University. There are eight subfields each directed by a senior professor. These professors now are giving their presentations to entice our interests in the fields of their work and research. Each of them stands proudly, but I don’t see their spirits reflected in their bodies. Most of them are middle-aged and poorly nourished, one professor from France who teaches microcircuits is yellow-skinned, another of computer engineering feels fake while wearing a red skirt, having a pony tail, and winking at male students, another who teaches solid state engineering is stooping permanently, speaking in front of us now, and showing his graphs:
“The new operation that we are developing is going to increase efficiency of the current generation of solar panels by ten percent and…” I break my attention and look around at the mesmerized audience. He continues: “Here is my assistant and my best student” – he says his name. “I see him more often than my wife.” He laughs with an air of self-righteousness.
We must obsessively think only of our engineering projects, robots, and computers. We do not care that we are people who breathe air or whether there are animate others who exist around us. We live in our own self-sufficient realities, like in self-contained cases. The true reality where we all exist must be seen by us like a shell without meaning, a shell to be dissected in order to find a function of some of its parts. The leftovers can always be thrown out and deemed unnecessary. I loved math and expected a challenge, but I never knew that I had to give up my soul in order to succeed in this.
In our engineering and programming classes we are taught how to create robots and automated systems. The pace is hectic: differential equations for finding temperature gradients of metal rods, math with complex numbers to find voltages in linear circuits, quantum physics with changing masses and probabilities of electrons penetrating nanometer walls and being trapped in finite wells. The hair-pulling and merciless classes with the unfeeling professors and students. I remember the linear algebra class where I quietly sobbed on the last row, unnoticed in the back of the class and too far from sight to be sensed by any other lowly perception that is possible in this reality. But in the beginning we are taught Boolean algebra with binary logic: only zeroes and ones without a touch upon the qualitative side. Still, at home I read articles by Michael Kosok, a doctor of philosophy and physics at Columbia University, about his dialectical phenomenology. And he tells me things I thought I knew before, such as nonlinear logic and how systems judged isolated are actually affected by fields that constantly surround us and produce consequences that sciences do not yet know. But the data in sciences is considered to be incorruptible. It’s a contradiction. I believe myself, and so I believe Dr. Kosok is right.
39.3.3.2
“What is the truth?” I ask my mom at the dinner table at the only time I see her during the day. She usually talks about her management of alterations and tailor shop job, but I beat her this time. She gets irritated at my philosophical quandaries, which are really disguises of my cries for help. I eat but continue discussions with myself now, having my question left unanswered. She escapes to the sofa to watch TV after calling me an impossible nudnik and downer.
I develop my ultralogical model of realities that no one understands or wishes to understand, including my mother. When I mention to my mother while she is standing in the kitchen that everything is balance, she looks at a plump tomato and shows me a lobule that she asymmetrically cut out of it and snidely remarks: “And I like imbalance.” In the model, imbalance means emptiness.
39.3.3.3
Before I started my first semester at the OSU, I so eagerly sought to join the student philosophy club. I hoped to find an environment conducive to my interests and people who liked to think about life in general. The first time when I drove to the campus and walked in search of the philosophy club room was before the university even opened. I aspired so much to meet my fellow philosophers that I forgot that I was a month too soon. At least I knew how to get there and was happy for that.
The first meeting of the semester started with an argument about thoughts. I was the only one who defended thoughts as being contextual, and the rest of the philosophers including the president said that thoughts were mere words, that a linguistic apparatus in our brains created those. The second meeting had to do with a denial of many-valued logic elements for the sake of argument. They also said that all our feelings and thoughts are products of neurological synapses firing off in our brains and that, when we die, the death is absolute. The next and my final meeting was when the philosophers argued against my ideas of the spiritual evolution of humankind by arguing for a possible world where what I said could not be true. Thus, I was defeated. The philosophy club president was studying to become a lawyer. I realized that none of them were true philosophers. They did not love wisdom; they worshipped science and rhetoric as ends in themselves.
Many people ask me why I decided to return to my homeland, and they listen to many of my confusing explanations afterwards. But nothing would explain my feelings better than what I imagined as I walked in the dark evening among the few, cloistered by asphalt and borders trees and as I thought of people who, during the day, never looked you in the eye but only went toward their solemn destinations, each to their own, randomly and seemingly chaotically, a sum of bodies, a market of traded goods and knowledge, an ideologically disconnected collective. And so I stood there on the sidewalk waiting for the bus and losing myself, completely disappointed after the last visit to the student philosophy club. I stood with a broken heart and tears that were transparent and thus nonexistent to those cold others who surrounded me, and I lucidly saw:
The black head of an ant. The ant crawls out of a chink. The chink in a wall stretches down. A stalk is rising from under the stones. Nearby lies a broken bathtub. The roots emerge out of the synthetic debris. In the wall there is a hole, and the branches penetrate into it. The young leaves are revealing themselves to the open air. Clearly visible is the gloomy sky and the dirty asphalted pavement. It’s everywhere, and only occasionally break through the sight the protecting borders. In the small fences are the stumps. In some places the asphalt is cracked, and water oozes there. Nature sheds tears, washing over her perception of people and offering to cleanse those who know about it. Away in the distance are dilapidated buildings. Through the broken walls peep out green capsules with people. Did not meet a single person who breathes free air. Self is sorry… Why exist and endure? And why should there be a tree?
– Homesick for Russian birch trees, are you? – I will be snobbily asked by a woman in the army commissariat.