Not even the most vomitous language of the most vomitous era, even the most absurd method for describing reality, the most exquisite pen craft, can change anything in the relationship between someone writing in Russian and the six-winged, who themselves have been sent by someone.
One can think only of how words taste, but no matter how hard you try, you cannot violate the job description. Thus, nature has thought of everything: man thinks about the delightful rubbing of genitalia and the result is children. A prophet thinks about the delightful turning of the tongue and a seraph gives Cyrillic its essence, meaning, spirit, and depth. Kharms wrote about old women falling out of windows and the result was the end of the world and the sole possibility for salvation: to love and repent.
But horizontal communications are impossible even within a single language. Even speaking Russian, there is no understanding one another. Yurovsky reads out the sentence in the Ekaterinburg basement where the tsar’s family has been assembled, but Dr. Botkin doesn’t understand, just as Pasternak and Khrushchev misunderstood each other—or the person standing outside with a sign against the Chechen war and the general populace. And what about on a crowded bus? Or in a marital bed grown cold?
How does one give language the purity and clarity needed for understanding? This has nothing to do with being tongue-tied.
A tied tongue, starting with “she sells seashells,” proceeding through a lead article on enemies of the people, and moving on to Brodsky, is actually language’s sole possible form of existence. Refined literature is just another way to be tongue-tied.
One simply has to find a tongue tied in just the right way to explain something. To say something and be understood.
How correct the reception is depends on how correct the code. But everything in language is necessarily aimed at confusing the code and complicating understanding; from the beginning, language has put up an infinite number of boundaries and limitations and introduced utter mayhem.
The search for a code of understanding ties the tongue on a whole new level. Boundaries narrow and walls rise swiftly. The space for understanding collapses and leads to its logical conclusion.
For whom was Finnegan’s Wake actually written? Robert Walser spent his last writing decade on novel after novel, his handwriting tinier and tinier, as he and his letters moved off into infinity.
If the point of language is still communication, then communication between whom?
In what language did St. Francis and the birds communicate? Or rather, better to ask: with whom was the barefoot man from Assisi whistling back and forth?
Intel’s boss once said that he could never outdo the Creator and man would always be the universe’s best chip.
A processor is dead without animating code. A user has to have software to establish contact with the hardware.
A human being released into the world is given a tongue so that he can have vertical communication.
Something has to transform the burning thickets of thorns—every summer forests do burn—into a burning bush.
For mortals, language is the User’s sole form of existence. Thus, it represents both creature and Creator simultaneously.
Walser would have been surprised at the reproach over the indecipherability of the letters he wrote, letters which toward the end of his life shrank to the size of a period. Joyce had no doubt about the intelligibility of Finnegan’s Wake. Both said what they wanted to say purely and clearly, and they were understood.
“And then they did take the hermit priest, the monk ascetic, Epiphanius the elder, and did cut his tongue out whole; from his hand they did sever four fingers. And in the beginning he spoke in a nasal voice, and then he did pray to the Virgin Mother of God, and shown to him were both tongues, the one of Moscow and the one of these parts, in the air; and he, taking hold of one, put his own in his mouth and ever since began speaking purely and clearly, and his tongue took root in his mouth and lived.”
Nabokov’s Inkblot
I stood in the arrivals terminal of the Zurich International Airport, holding a sign with the name KOVALEV and feeling happy.
Our son wasn’t even a year old and my wife was at home with him. Meanwhile, I couldn’t seem to find a steady job. Life was hard in those days and we had to scrimp on everything. It was sufficiently demeaning that I couldn’t earn enough money for my family, and on top of that we had two birthdays coming up—first my son’s, then my wife’s. I desperately needed money for gifts. I wanted to buy my loved ones something wonderful and special, or maybe whisk them away on vacation somewhere; do something, in short, to make them happy. But there wasn’t even enough money to pay the rent. And then luck struck: I got a call from the interpreter agency. They needed me to meet a client at the airport, drive him to the hotel, then the bank, then to Montreux. So that’s how I ended up standing in the airport, enjoying life. Aside from the promise of good pay, I was especially excited that the trip would take me to an extremely important place for me—to Nabokov. The client had reserved the very same room at the Montreux Palace where the writer had lived, so even the lowly interpreter would have a chance to visit that sacred place, the dream of any Russian reader. I waited for the delayed flight with my sign and daydreamed about how I would sit at his desk, open the drawer, and finally see the famous inkblot that I’d read so much about. Nabokov’s inkblot! I’d be able to touch it with my fingers! Joy!
Then I saw Kovalev. I recognized him immediately. And he, of course, did not recognize me. I hadn’t even thought that this could be the same Kovalev. Of all the Kovalevs in the world!
My first crazy thought was to thrust the sign into his hands, turn around, and leave.
But his wife and daughter were with him. The girl was around five years old; she smiled at me and handed me a penguin, the stuffed toy she carried with her on the plane. I didn’t know what to do with it, but it turned out that I was only supposed to make his acquaintance. The penguin’s name was Pinga.
So instead of leaving, I shook hands with Kovalev and started saying everything that’s expected in such a situation, things like “Welcome to Zurich! How was your flight?” and so on.
We drove to the Baur-Au-Lac, the hotel where they were staying.
In the taxi, Kovalev kept trying to work out some sort of urgent problems on two cell phones at once and in his short breaks engaged me in conversation.
He had emphatic opinions on every subject.
“Swiss Air has really let itself go! The flight was late and service was horrendous!”
Or, “Those Alps are nothing. You should see our Altai Mountains!”
Or, “The Swiss are so good-natured only because nobody’s kicked their ass in two hundred years!”
As the lowly accompanying interpreter, I didn’t argue. They paid me by the hour.
I remembered Kovalev as a skinny blond kid wearing a Komsomol pin that nobody else bothered to wear, and that he, too, took off when he left the Institute each day. But now, here he was, a “New Russian” in an expensive suit, complete with a stately paunch and premature bald spot.
At one point we were students together at the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute, I in the German department and he in the English department, two grades above me. He was a Komsomol official and gave speeches at faculty meetings and school assemblies. They loved Kovalev in the administration because he announced the decisions of the Party congress in a pleasant voice, as if they were joyful revelations, and we hated him for it. After finishing at the Institute, he stayed on the Komsomol line in the capitol’s district committee. It was clear; a guy like him would go far in that life. I despised him.