On the little balcony you showed me a Persian pen case covered with a lacquer painting the color of blood baked with gold. It was offensively empty. I wanted to sniff its venerable musty little panels which had served sirdar justice and those instantaneous verdicts ordering men to have their eyes put out.
Then you withdrew into the walnut twilight of the Ter-Oganians’ apartment and returned with a test tube and showed me the cochineal. Reddish-brown peas lay on a little wad of cotton.
You had taken that sample from the Tatar village of Sarvanlar, about twenty versts from Erevan. From there, you can see Father Ararat quite clearly, and in that dry borderland atmosphere you can’t help feeling like a smuggler. Laughing, you told me a story about a certain splendid glutton of a girl, member of a friendly Tatar family in Sarvanlar . . . Her sly little face was always smeared with sour milk and her fingers were greasy with mutton fat . . . At dinnertime, you, who do not suffer in any way from undue fastidiousness, nevertheless quietly put aside a sheet of the lavash for yourself, because the little glutton was in the habit of resting her feet on the bread as on a stool.
I would watch as the accordion of infidel wrinkles would come together and draw apart on your forehead; I should think it the most inspired part of your physical appearance. These wrinkles—seemingly rubbed by your lambskin cap—reacted to every significant phrase, and they rambled all over your forehead, staggering and swaggering and stumbling about. There was something Godunov-Tatar10 about you, my friend.
I used to compose similes for your character and grew more and more accustomed to your anti-Darwinian essence; I studied the living language of your long, ungainly arms, created for the sake of a handshake in a moment of peril and for passionate protestations, while walking, against natural selection.
In Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister there is a little man named Jarno, a scoffer and a naturalist. He disappears for weeks at a time into the latifundias of his model world, spends his nights in tower rooms or chilly sheets, and emerges for dinner from the depth of his steadfast castle.
This Jarno belonged to a peculiar order, founded by a large landowner named Lothario for the purpose of educating his contemporaries in the spirit of Faust, Part II. The society had a broad network of secret agents extending all the way to America, a network organized along Jesuit lines. Secret conduct lists were kept, tentacles would stretch out, people would get caught.
It was this Jarno who had the job of keeping Meister under surveillance.
Wilhelm was traveling with his little boy Felix, the son of the unfortunate Marianna. A paragraph of his instructions forbade him to spend more than three days in any one place. The rosy-cheeked Felix—a frisky, didactic child—would herbalize and exclaim, “Sag mir, Vater,” would keep shooting distant questions at his father, breaking off bits of mineral rock, and striking up one-day acquaintances.
Goethe’s well-behaved children are generally a tiresome lot. As Goethe depicts them, children are little Cupids of curiosity, each with a quiver of pointed questions slung over his shoulder . . .
So Meister meets Jarno in the mountains.
Jarno literally tears Meister’s three-day pass out of his hands. Behind them and before them lie years of separation. So much the better! All the more resonant the echo for the geologist’s lecture in that sylvan university!
And that’s why the warm light shed by oral instruction, the clear didacticism of a friendly conversation, greatly surpasses the illuminating and instructive action of books.
I gratefully recall one of those Erevan conversations of ours, which now, after a year or so has passed, have already been aged by the confidence of personal experience and which possess an authenticity that helps us get a sense of ourselves in our commitment. The talk turned around the “theory of the embryonic field,’ proposed by Professor Gurvich.
The rudimentary leaf of the nasturtium has the form of a halberd or of an elongated, twofold purse that begins to resemble a little tongue. Or it looks like a flint arrowhead from the Paleolithic. But the tension in the field of force that rages around the leaf first transforms it into a figure of five segments. The lines of the cave arrowhead get stretched into the shape of an arc.
Take any point and join it by a bunch of coordinates to a straight line. Then extend these coordinates, intersecting the line at various angles, to a section of identical length, then join them together again, and you get convexity!
But later the force field sharply changes its game and drives the form to its geometrical limit, the polygon. A plant is a sound evoked by the wand of a termenvox,11 pulsating in a sphere oversaturated with wave processes. It is the envoy of a living storm that rages permanently in the universe—akin in equal measure to stone and lightning! A plant in the world—that is an event, a happening, an arrow; and not boring, bearded “development”!
Not long ago, B. S., a certain writer repented in public for having been an ornamentalist, or for having been one to the extent of his poor, sinful powers.
I think a place is prepared for him in the seventh circle of Dante’s hell, where the bleeding thornbush grew. And when some tourist or other out of curiosity breaks a twig off that suicide, he will beg in a human voice, like Pier della Vigna: “Don’t touch! You’re hurting me! Or have you not pity in your heart? We were men, who now are trees . . .”
And a drop of black blood will fall . . . [Dante, Inferno, XIII, 32–37]
What Bach, what Mozart, composes variations on the theme of the nasturtium leaf? Finally, a phrase flared up: “the world-record speed of the pod of a bursting nasturtium.”
Who has not felt envious of chess players? You sense in the room a peculiar field of estrangement, from which a chill hostile to non-participants flows.
But these little Persian horses made of ivory are immersed in a power-solvent. The same thing happens to them as happens to the nasturtium of the Moscow biologist E. S. Smirnov and the embryonic field of Professor Gurvich.
The threat of removal hangs over each figure throughout the game, during the whole stormy phenomenon of the tournament. The chessboard swells up from the attention concentrated on it. The chess figures grow, when they fall into the radial focus of a maneuver, like milky-cap mushrooms in Indian summer.
The problem is solved not on paper, and not in the camera obscura of causality, but in a live Impressionist milieu, in Edouard Manet’s and Claude Monet’s temple of air, light, and glory.
Is it true that our blood radiates mitogenetic rays that the Germans have captured on a phonograph disc, rays which, I was told, help to intensify the cell division of tissue?
All of us, without suspecting it, are the carriers of an immense embryological experiment: for even the process of remembering, crowned with the victory of memory’s effort, is amazingly like the phenomenon of growth. In one as well as the other, there is a sprout, an embryo, the rudiment of a face, half a character, half a sound, the ending of a name, something labial or palatal, sweet legume on the tongue, that doesn’t develop out of itself but only responds to an invitation, only stretches out toward, justifying one’s expectation.
With these belated musings, B. S., I hope to repay you, if only in part, for having disturbed your chess game in Erevan.
SUKHUM
At the beginning of April I arrived in Sukhum—a city of mourning, tobacco, and fragrant vegetable oils. Here is where one should begin studying the alphabets of the Caucasus; here every word starts with a. The language of the Abkhazians is powerful and sonorous, but abounds in the upper and lower guttural compound sounds, which make pronunciation difficult; one might say it was torn out of a larynx overgrown with hair . . .