Белинский, Тимофей Викторович. White, Black Requiem: Poeme in Two Parts

WHITE/BLACK REQUIEM

A Poeme in Two Parts

I.WHITE

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FOREWORD

Colors of the living.

Introitus: Requiem aeternam

REQUIEM

A clear white road,

Two ivory projection boards, that clasp the sky.

With pale, irradiant ribbon of the sun - a hue of gold.

Brushed-in calligraphy,

And installation works in blinding luminance exposed,

To a flowering bed of opium leaves.

Paint cannot be tossed, dialects of Japanese,

Heard within the executive crowd,

Now faded and lost, and faces grow dim,

In quiet work and barrister abound.

Kyrie eleison

WALL STREET

Grey dust blends in rows of stone and column,

Luminous spirits in wondersome rush,

Supereminence, glow of white collar,

Leveled tone-brush.

Streams of silver, shine past belvedere lines,

Pixilated gloss in bright parterre,

Behind colored swathes of smattered prattle, drained in sound -

Of moving white-rimmed china,

From checkered squares of terraced tier.

Each Supereminence, the Word of honesty,

Falling locks of long, stray blonde hair,

From reaching, elevated balcony above,

On Zegna glove, in trimmed cashmere maroon,

And passing coats of black cocoon.

Sequentia: Dies Irae

THE BLONDE ON THE BALCONY

*Hotel, New York City.

A serving-man, proud in heart and
mind; that curled my hair; wore gloves in my cap;
served the lust of my mistress's heart.
and did the act of darkness with her.
King Lear.

Dies irФ, dies illa.

You're lying on white sheets,

Tall, thin, haggard with liqueur.

From shoulder blade and bow of arm,

Red fabric corseted, with blackened beads cascade.

A series of images, photo collage,

As if massaged, against the swell of skin over the bone,

Bright tomb stones, in tapes of blue,

Motion, 16 Mm K-3 camera,

Distressed over-exposures of tailored, black-suited figure,

In delusional view.

In the beginning there was sex, mulling over unkemptly -

The purpose of a woman, fucked violently,

Allowing the odd gasps of air,

Disheveled, jerking movement of bronzed hair,

And ashen eyes, fall, on shaken imagery of orange lines,

Pink unlaced peignoir, red hosiery slovenly damp,

Tramped, vaginal gauche,

In heavy unction, crackling smarm of tissue,

Against her rib cage.

Last trumpet and trochee,

In a puddle of vaginal juice.

Tuba mirum

SYLVIA

My Ann,

White cotton, layered white,

Supple angles, abrasive curves of body in viscose threads,

Posed in tinted satin, visions of draped silk,

In shadows of white garments, verdant waterfall, over foisted cornice.

Standing leavened, her inflected figure,

In the foreground of a mounted black, wall paper sheet,

Crystal lustre, a marble body wrapped in black translucent veil,

And silver chandelier, as in cascade, smells of pear.

The frippery cleft of black wooden legs, that tangle wildly,

With red hosiery on bare,

Legs with knees of downward stare,

Buttressed by passive hands, and swollen tones of sculpted figure.

II.

*Brooklyn, a scene of 20 years by a floor-mounted mirror.

- A lurid, foul morning - an age of old, a grave, has dusted the stretching lines of crinkled streets, it seemed, hued beyond the white light pouring in densely through the lateral shutters of the kitchen window just above the slightly steepened terrace. A cold dampened breeze hazed and danced through the room, mixing wildly with the derelict shadows left standing in remote corners from the night before, like the last waning garrisons of Napoleon's army. The entire, quite theatrical display was indescribable and could only be collected to render a stage of perfectly arranged sensations streaming like the personalities of Moliere, the organic palpitations of Tolstoy; coiling and percolating soundly through the watered, alluvial carnival of Schumann's impressions of the 19th century. The complexity of feelings taking place that morning could only be professed true, through a simplicity of a certain loneliness, a loneliness of a just peace...a kind that does not wilt away rather, the corpus of being; but blossoms gardens, orchards, vineyards and the satisfactory notions and satiation of the fires of those timeless days, when rolling in the gables of `Esenian' grass and kissing the girls was not a scholarly practice of objectivism and personal vainglory.

"When opalescent canvas of white in triptych,
Is hued and stained in blackened orange,
Presto agitatissimo e molto accentuate,
And your breast sweat-soaked,
Baroque in motions of purple,
The ecstasy of my corpus,
Composed betwixt your legs."

ii.

That morning the invective rays of memory pierced my consciousness prior to my body's wake. The fleeting afternoons of listless activity, want of opprobrium, the spastic, ruddy colors of Russian breakfasts - caviar, sometimes salmon and eggs, weaved by the instantaneous flash of my grandmother's restless hands, while the clank and clatter of dishes enliven and vivify the kitchen, embroiled in the fresco of variegated but slowly dissipating, morning lights and shadows, reflecting through the grace and incessant activity of the trees beyond the heavy atmosphere of boiling water, laden steam and the resultant colonies of moisture on table-side, that surmount in a faux tapestry of a stained glass window, evocative of the plaintive and ruminative ode's of those transplanted American mornings of strictly Soviet families.

"Blood runs in velvet streaks,
With deepest shades of roses and pale lips,
Intoxicated by your gaze,
And Blok in golden shadow, runs wildly lit."

iii.

Her laugh is an almost sexual incendiary. She has never looked more beautiful. Her eyes have never bordered on such earnestness -the vaguely unremitting guise of a broken spirit. A candid joy and a real sense of self, which had grown interminably dim, like the myriad of buildings lighting the night sky and effacing the fabric of the firmament in a blinding sweep - through a self-conscious, daily partaking in degradation -a rare wasting away. She mutters in a faint, trembling voice through her fingers, as she attempts to bite her hand to muffle severe involuntary sobs that seem to be deeply set, and physically difficult to control. She stands motionless for some time.

-- Fuck his blue books!

"Your body in this livid light, the Eleatic bust beneath acacia,
Seems welcoming to death, and I would die -
Beneath exotic plants, archaic Greek spoken amid red-figure,
Embraced in garments of marble, and Rilke's voice,
To be with you.
To penetrate your red lips in eternal youth,
Molding the world of hardened stone,
And sending it awash in waters for our pleasure."

Transeunt.

Rex tremendae majestatis

SATYAGRAHA

Tall windows line the wall, in quiet form one after the other,

Painted mesh of leaves in quiet tones, past the Christian glass in early morning.

No visible dimension in the still, the calloused branches, to the glass seem affix'd,

Flooded with clear water, from the nearby ponds.

Clear, piercing sky, the back-drop for the arbor in the Fall,

Feminine figure in white, a virile posture, convexly shaped by sunken face,

In blackened, beastly coat, and even blacker, laminated fur,

Behind, three silent oaks,

That seem, as if forever there,

And she in silent den, of the universe.

The candelabrum torchieres, the webbing trees in morning,

That clutch and weather in the distance, like long, wet hair.

And in her hand, last night from Christie's,

An auctioned sketch, in black and white,

A clutching girl. Her shivering eyes, in strokes of ragged cloth,

Expressionless - knowing as the plain,

And always.

Recordare

ST. PETERSBURG

Cast-iron vines and lines of intricate marble, movements of her eyes,

Carefully placed circular lanterns in mellow glows of light, on the floor,

Step by step, in brooding corridor,

Winded plume panache, cleavage of the curtains, near oval, carpeted hall -

An echoing sound of laughter hangs in amplitude from wall-to-wall.

Later in the day, divided space set in bluish-gray,

Fragments of overgrown dining room, set table and chairs,

To the left, a grated heating battery,

White crescent paint aligned, by blistered shades, and blinding,

Window, in streaming negatives, penetrates the floor-boards, and spiral stair.

And in the center, fallen plastered wall, a bed of chrysanthemums is set,

All thrashed in golden lace of hair, burned collar of white shirt,

The life of serious photographers in pictures, chrestomathy,

Wrapped in blankets, together with naked feet,

And left forgotten,

A draped mess of upholstered cloth, of sullen skin and satin sheets,

A canopied drawbridge, a running faucet,

In endless light.

Confutatis maledictis

CHRYSANTHEME

* A residence in New York City.

Proslogion, eternal imagery,

Hot breath of shrouded air,

On 50^th floor, as cold skin, golden by wet hair,

Pressed against the blue,

Clear glass like dew, melts against the breast.

In solemn pleasure, a question posed,

Amid the clouds, for time itself to fold, in sheets of ice.

Like ice which falls, below at night.

"He has it in his understanding,

But he does not yet understand it to be."

The spectral lighting of the evening cast;

And golden chrysanthemum morose,

In crystal vase, is not the same,

With every minute closed.

II.BLACK

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Lost. As highlighted text is visible when standing fore in contrast with the background.

Lacrimosa dies illa

SEBASTIAN'S SUICIDE

The skyline bronze, and thoughts in mist,

Locks of hair in twilled yellow strands twinned -

In chest pocket. On the surface of bleached sheep skin,

A white Piana, wraps the neck.

Two black willows stretch about, in poisonous pose,

In haphazard motion in the shade, as if not clothes,

The caves of reason, in purple sinew of velvet rope.

"In my infinite nonbeing, truth must exist?

What fool had said, in light of truth we see truth?

Whence the titans will think..."

A gun-shot is heard fading into obscurity.

II.

MORPHINE/NOTES ON RUSSIAN LITERATURE

*Evidence discarded as inconclusive and mostly illegible by the authorities.

*Beginning of Sebastian's Notes:

RERUM NOVARUM/ETHICS THROUGH MORAL CONTRADICTIONS

STROPHE

(The contradictions of repelling injustice and knowledge)

In candlelight vapour, trodden in snow had fallen,

From warring disharmony and tribal siege from the East,

As other emerging nations like that of the Germanic world rose to prominence,

After a period of subjugation and conquest,

Absorbing the empirical and intellectual datum of the scepters of Rome,

When Luther deigned to send tremors down the spine of Catholicism.

As Невский had been summoned to do centuries before, perhaps on an immaterial basis.

Sleep summer wind, down there, in the snow - kiss the moist summer dirt, to efflorescence.

Russian culture remained monosemous with relation to the acquisition of knowledge,

Limited to its native cultural base and the side-swept byways of civilization,

One of the few nations successfully repelling external conquest,

And prolonged colonization by a superior civilized entity;

As had been conducted in England under Roman rule, as well as the Roman suzerains in Germania.

Whilst the Roman wellsprings of civilization, pronate to the lands of Xenophon and Thucydides lay.

Though with the onset of rapid accumulation of supranational empirical knowledge,

During the rise of the Romanov dynasty, because of Russia's militant, defiant past,

And the eventual purification of cultural tradition,

Cultural renaissance, molding of a cultural philosophy had its commencement.

ANTISTROPHE

(Orthodoxy in the spirit of the rise of a nation and materialist contradictions of necessity and higher ethics)

The collective humanism of Orthodoxy do to the harsh environment of post-pagan Russia had been adopted,

By the people, by selection through vital naturalism.

Through the dearth and penury of the last three centuries of the Rurikid Era.

Orthodoxy remolded through natural necessity of the people,

Through the instinctive, recrudescent need to subsist;

Became the corpuscles of the mind and body. -had been reinvented.

Where the rudimentary Christian philosophical tracts,

Had bound with the elemental needs of the human condition,

Weaving a social heteroglossia which approximates the good,

To become the very idea of a cultural birth.

With the stoic and socialistic traditions of Christian Orthodoxy in hypostasis -- always in contravention,

To the traditions of deifying, theocratic, hegemony of Catholicism in the Germanic world,

Prior to the rise of Luther, Bohme and Erasmus.

STROPHE

(The grammatical 'etics' of a separate philosophical culture)

"The Socratic Soul's lyre, in its principle highest, the essence of truth.

Beyond the Gods tempest, incorruptible stage of the ethics of good.

Is then the etiological truth the last wretched stone?

Or superseded by virtue of ethics patently,

By the paradoxes of causation between nature and man,

As tenderly as that to which Greek philosophy its ribs lent?

To first acquire a measure to deviate whither?"

As Beethoven prescribed to the quiet grandeur and noble simplicity of Joachim Winckelmann,

Jacobi's struggle with his times or the ethical burden of the Enlightenment,

First illustrated by Rousseau -led to Fichte's pluralism.

By narrowing the proximity of natural demarcations and social phenomena.

The era in its cultural ephemeralism in allegiance notwithstanding remained,

Grossly barnacled under the looming tractates of Eleatic antiquity,

Which interminably transgress, henceforth, from one epiphenomenon to obsolescence?

The effigy of classical precedence shadowed the leavened passages of Gottsched.

Whence, Russian intellectual thought its life attested,

Becoming the reflective prism, transeunt of an emic structure,

The socio-cultural psychology of the perpetual poverty of phenomenological reality,

Incipit, to the parturition in bloom,

Of the eventual corruption of idealism through immobile stratification.

ANTISTROPHE

(Contradictions of Orthodoxy and ethics)

The rapid pace of development in Russian civilization,

Requiring unremitting experiential pragmatism, and resolute, unwavering practicum,

Diluted the intellectual Organon,

From aspiring a heedful ear to the enquiries of an abstract and social nature -

In favour of a mechanistic formulism.

A formulism which yields swift, utilitarian results -

However transient and limpid.

Thus explaining the relative philosophical silence,

During the early stages of the Enlightenment,

When Enlightenment had in the West shone, as well as that of the Notus.

The strychnine ampoule Socrates held forth in state tribute,

For the Eschatos to consopite.

Thence, the golden thread, explaining the gargantuan life of philosophy,

In the thought of Russian literature,

Which in its epistasis had in evanescence dwelled,

In the caverns of societal un-officialdom.

PICTURES OF MARBLE BUSTS OR METANYMS TO THOUGHT

The Histories of the forested shroud and gable in sagacity hold,

Epodes to resplendency of the charred and wrinkled,

The beatitude of the young civil culture.

Objective egalitarianism in philosophy knelt,

To the garments enrobing the striated skin of her feet.

Over catechumens; sacristies of mono-tapestry, her legs triumph thus,

The white vessel did purvey supine, through green seas feline.

EPILOGUE

The triumph of infancy

Lyudmilla through solstice of spring,

Sweet apples, Swiss abricosine,

Rogneda through winter,

And as Isolde sings,

The golden wreaths of the village.

Vivace, come forth, the resounding trombones,

For Apollonian virile doth pierce the stars of old age.

Mimnerumus of Smyrna had sung, of flowers of youth and dark earth,

A hundred years before Heraclitus' birth.

Deepest summer murals in silver shade,

Reflect on canvases of Fragonard in white array,

And clear-eyed I stare as the night lay still, the scent of her hair,

Her body -a circle, opaque,

My body -a triangle, all is in shape.

*End of Sebastian's notes.

Offertorium: Domine Jesu Christe

???/THE DEAD SEA

Our Image, in the early light of day,

The final tare of passing night, as sacred oil,

Embalms the wood, in the house of Filomen and Bauci -

The rest are in eclipse.

As I lay late, transposing theologoumena; condemning Urantia, Calvin,

And the history of man - proselytized Greek Demons;

Luzitania, Principia.

The English sons of Adam, basking in the wildlife gardens,

Computer works and general heteroglossia,

Of privet, hawthorn, oleander, barberry,

AndrИ Le NТtre, and continental Northern beauty.

Love-drunk and lulled to sleep like a wanton child,

While Belgian factories ran wild.

Of Plebeian Republic, Young Peru and Dios Olivorio.

What at once is, what else have we come up?

But sheets of rain in clear gradients,

Through rustic windows only wild-berry darker.

Like children - run when struck by sudden rain.

Radiance of spirit - Qaa, Den and Semerkhet;

Djet, by the wayside of funerary rites, stelae -

Djer and Merneith,

The people live here, and so they die - cleaned in the waters,

In the land's glitter, where lies the Palace of the Leaves,

Partially flooded, as the chotts by the side-swept sands.

And the high dunes of Bas Sahara, the Ahaggar massif in the West,

The long valley of Saoura,

Disappearing into the stretches of the Tanzrouft.

My conscientious dance, with frogs, toads -Reptilia;

Squamata, Crocodilia,

Worm lizards, extant Testudines,

Cryptodira of green sea, and fish of kind,

In feigned temperament, beneath the passing trains -half-heartedly,

As the newspapers fizzle with envy and blood-lust,

And language of prismatic meaning.

A high gentlemen's fling - Wien Classicist's Ball,

The Narcissist - aristocratic gaff of mistaken century.

A gamme from Tcherepnin.

Audient clade at a pronounced antique escort,

A blithe under-current of passing women,

Snazz up, so ungentlemanly.

versus: Hostias et Preces

PRAYER

A landscape of an evening, the lake of tapered cellophane,

A bereaved voice of a man, in flashing flame,

Sauntering, in the black woods' square,

The bare, symphony of a moment's stare,

Of glinting things close-by and almost human-like,

The scent of extirpated earthy tree-root,

And still reflections in half-light.

I see them here as they wonder through the forest,

Beneath the hanging cliffs,

And bathe in open fields beneath the hanging sun,

The men who shake the trees,

To please the children, who play in the rain till sunset?

Our fathers and mothers, the passing,

Early days of our society, cultural attachИ,

The drowning rain of coming morning. A hint of winter,

Judging by the ease of breathing patterns, in the stairwell,

And density of air by the reception's desk. Swinging past security,

Imperturbable in their comport - the haystacks in the snow.

II.

SACRIFICE

A shadow passed, from black to white,

Transfix'd in the atmosphere of early Spring.

The White - Ruins, historicism and marble robes.

The Black - the Mare, or aesthete's hooves and bones.

A prayer said for humankind,

The seasons merge, as days behind,

The desk, leave yet a long, long way to go -

Before I rest.

Sanctus Dominus Deus Sabaoth

DEMOCRITUS

Скажу открыто: ненавижу всех богов.
Мне за добро они воздали пытками.
Prometheus.

Resounding fricatives in constant flux,

As the visibility of plankton underwater,

The question of the good and old - the aged,

In flight, from painted seas, and schematic skies of white,

In northern slopes; the foundered ships, the brooding sonar.

In the depths - the grey beasts, that hide and moan.

"And so I've seen the skier shift,

In the neutral beauty of the Arctic,

Where our wisdom ends."

In a cadence.

"And so I've learned of objectivity.

Playing with fire and fruit.

I am Minus. Negative.

And I exist in everything."

DИfilИ carnavalesque - martiniquais et guadeloupИen.

The human sentiment in prose,
An exposИ of positivism on the nose,
Of constructs in the atomic world,
That bear no meaning on the Word.
When all is nothing, Sebastian deigns,
To find that glow - lost in the evening crowd,
Grey ships, the Earth, the Sea,
And all the shades,
From black to white.

Benedictus

SONG OF ZECHARIACH

Middle aged woman in Tokyo,

Raises her elbow and smiles,

In a blue blazer and white top,

Her day is clear.

Splash of burnt colour,

A thin daguerreotype from water to horizon,

Through orange tones so deathly dim,

A hanging garden lounges the room.

Through marble faces lit by lamp fire,

Black secretary stands, beneath arched doorway in red wood,

Like ancient diptych, Madonna,

Kimono dress in orchid-print,

Leaning against mounted frames of strange tones,

And cornered oft, by swooning passersby,

In swirling laughter changing shape, and spill into the halls.

By rocks on the water, now turned a dark bronze,

Highly intelligent glass facility, in the warm glow of nature.

And I see sultry black feet,

In soft, spectral flower dresses,

Resting on arid ground,

With a color television,

And a sand-stone house, crowned by canister light,

And the taste of nightly air.

Agnus Dei

UNIVERSE

The old tree alleys, showered in vestige of ruby-gold,

A revel, preparation for the dance of witches Sabbath,

To stir the warmth this autumn night.

The evening rays of sun in saturated blur,

The transcendental play of light,

Misshape, the objects of the promenade,

And those in contiguous view -

Of patchy spaces set to films, surrounding Indian carinata;

The solid horizontals of South African gardenias,

Off-set by pictures, in black and white,

And whorls of anapetes by interlacing streets.

In the park cubically spaced, a stretched painting,

Of restive figures, in blotches of blue and red,

That change and come to life,

Like canvases in the wash-basin,

In varying shades of natural light.

II.

* A busy office in a corporate setting.

Sebastian:

- I am consistently irritated by everything that happens around me. In a looming migraine of self-excoriation I fall into the abyss of abject stupidity and emptiness, wrapped in a constant sarcasm ceaselessly twirling before me. I am not a Browning. No matter how much I learn, I am afflicted with the fear of intellectual inadequacy. Either the fear of not knowing anything at all, or that my knowledge, in question, is never quite enough - where knowledge itself, in a nightmare of delusion appears before me as a grain of sand, concealed away in a fragile pillar of base emotion and personal pride. Who, may I ask is the great artist then? ...When I cannot even determine the role occupied by the subject, of which art is the spoken word? Yes, a doleful, repulsive simplicity of words, "...only artists themselves come and go, yet art itself never changes..." -I find difficulty in understanding such things, just as I find humility in the existence of Utopias. There is an inexplicable beauty in the well-nursed notion of everything coming to an end: A lecherous fire igniting my soul - the shudder, thinking of an unforeseen catastrophe. I am sick, but everything seems brighter - the swell from this newly found excitement spreading through my body, making me feel like a school-boy, a sloshed child, in all of my infantilism and diffidence, in the darker shades of a blushing virgin.

Sebastian: (continues)

-I think art justifies the continuation of life, that is why we invent new trends and movements, human beings need a rebirth, they need a theatrically organized novelty, a staged newness of sorts which purges their conscience.

Mr. A:

-You probably want to know what happens when the theatre ends?

Sebastian:

-No, I do not. I just contend myself with the hope that it doesn't.

Mr. A:

-Studying phenomena like art, involving the physiognomy of the human being as its conduit, is not like incubating bacteria or implanting sperm, one cannot expect nature to function according to the recesses of our personal ideologies. Just observe the jocular cretinism of attempting to use socio-Marxist theories as a priori for a theory on human psychology, where functional psychology deems itself unworthy not demonstratively or empirically but on the basis of it being bourgeois. I think our irascible compulsion to infect the natural purity of investigative science with our insular, egomaniacal convictions is bourgeois.

Mr. A: (with a lush smile)

-A social ichthyology. No, really. You don't understand socialism.

Sebastian:

-It's not a question of socialism, but an old adage of sorts, how theory doesn't reconcile with practice, especially throughout the course of a revolution.

Mr. A:

- Every idea is in every idea, like in an atom. If you are referring to an old trodden ground of ours, it's more a matter of ideals not reconciling with life, that's why discourse on progress is difficult, because the intellect, no matter how infantile, if there notwithstanding, struggles to amend reality in all its impulsive, parenthetical departures, a classic philosophical problem. Remember Homer? I know it's not fashionable to read poetry, though now and again you hear those ancient names, grafted once more, exhumed corpses - usually, in a quest presaging an acrobatic atonement with a recent contention of some kind, in a journal perhaps, seeking desperate approval for the same unsolidarities and congealables of our time -Hesiod rescuing Keynes from the serpent's nest.

Sebastian: (lackadaisically)

- The world should be governed by philharmonic orchestras and symphony musicians, what have they ever done but make beautiful music? I think people capable of such music are incapable of injustice.

Mr. A:

- Like Heydrich? Then again, he was hardly a musician. Who knows. You pluck anyone from their disposed vocation and they cease to believe what they once believed, until they cease recognizing themselves all together.

Sebastian: (continuing thought now gleefully and with incipit sarcasm),

- Atleast, anyone who is anyone and doing it with conviction these days, would be the `Meyerholds', `Karsavinas' and `Cunninghams' of the world! I think if I could see people as innocent children, I would learn to love them more than I can admit to.

Mr. A: (ironically)

- Sometimes I find your sycophantic portmanteaus, aspiring to philistinism, but deep down even as such, you have your own reason for being - I would defend you to the death, naturally.

(Unintentionally mote, intrusive smile, gushing with a broad flatulence)

-Though the individual conception of Being and justice can be transformed beyond recognition, from that of the general or collective conception, of what at once was a visibly obvious thing to most.

Sebastian:

-The human being is both aggression and beauty; one cannot exist without the other. A harmony between, destitution, misery and art -as true art emerges out of destitution, so humanity does out of misery. A gross inconsistency, wouldn't you say -our relationship with death?

Mr. A: (drawing a bЙtise, almost uneasy smile, and very evidently taken aback, by the penchant, mannerly innocence observably present in the uncustomary logic of his business partner.)

-You are a votive Christian after all, it seems - Bourgeois bohemian in the flesh.

His obliquely arrogant smile, so self-imposed, that he and many others of his profession often wear, for reasons that they themselves wouldn't dare delve into or dissect; like the deleterious, unbridled ease, with which they would gregariously dissect so many others - has turned solemn and resolute.

Mr. A:

-But listen to me...

Sebastian: (tersely)

- If you know yourself, you are doomed.

Sebastian pauses for a moment, only to continue again as if overcome by a jolt of caprice, incapacitating his usual discretion.

- Remember Fellini, and the depicted irony of human relationships which are built not out of necessity but a sort of laziness...

(Smiles, exposing full set of immaculate teeth, from an equally immaculate mouth. Continues.)

-Strange. Being mostly in the company of the - "Why are you wearing that? I don't know ask the designer" - type. You'd think I would have learned to live with vanity.

Mr. A: (An invective simplicity and clarity about his face, completely disregarding Sebastian's last comments in a rather noticeable pejorative manner.)

- The question then is obvious. Should we be willing to sacrifice ourselves, for the sake of ethics? Who is willing to take that responsibility? It's an interesting corollary.

The salubrious way in which his compliments prevaricated, almost seemed to confound, as to whether they were directed towards Sebastian or himself. Sebastian meanwhile, completely absorbed in his own thoughts, responded only with a comfortable silence.

Sebastian: (Mockingly)

- To be or not to be, should we perish for the sake of ethics, that is the question...

Mr. A:

- Think of Le Coq d'Or, where the greatest attention must be paid to every scenic detail, to disrobe the character of the work, in spite of its apparent simplicity. We can juxtapose these ideas of the predominance of the detail -where there is no delight without - to poetry. Because, as the difference between a play and a novel, is the former's emancipation of the character, it is in the characters themselves, given tremendous freedom of detail and freedom from the banality of the chronotope, that find the greatest sympathy in others. It is these details and the indefeasibly absorptive human personality which confer unto us the greatest impression.

Sebastian: (pedantry in vain)

- I think it's necessary to seriously understand the posterior analytic of language and its formalities, in order to grasp the full meaning of a work of art; the modalities e.g., the straight line as lyric, the zigzag as conflict and drama... But then again we have always planted mountains of illusion wherever we live, in places rather occupied by patent grasslands. Why do you think Plato is so great, in spite of the latter achievements of civilization? -Because he was a poet, without ever knowing it. In spite of his aversion to poets -as they told lies, so he claimed. Indeed we begin to understand that they have told us the truth - and so has the bible for that very matter.

(Continues)

- I mean, why is it that even the most distinguished figures in literature cannot free themselves from the burden of references? If we were to take the greatest classics of world thought and attempt to extract passages of any real value to us or any true novelty, there probably wouldn't be enough to fill one tome let alone a library.

Mr. A: (pedantry lost, pedantry regained)

- Observation, experience, unconscious meaning of intent, internal dialogue, and the proportions of each, determine the answer to your question- everything that fits into the modern theory of literature.

Sebastian: (An elevated, punctual irony)

- So, a formula, for a work of art, that's what you're saying then? And then, naturally it would follow that estimation is hardly possible and you have a work, emerging by chance, like a chemical reaction, a Nobel Prize or Coca-Cola?

Mr. A:

"One has to take several different shots of a subject, from different points of view and in different situations, as if one examined it in the round rather than looked through the same key-hole again and again."

Sebastian:

- Those are not your words are they, you're paraphrasing.

Mr. A:

- As it happens, yes, how very perceptive. I didn't think you'd pick up on it. But I have to admit though, that the notion of the prodigious share of our society, as elephants with a paint-brush, strangely sits well with me.

Sebastian:

- Well, naturally, as in any developed civilization, our theories have long surpassed us, or our ability to understand them, it's obvious.

Mr. A: (kowtowing)

- It's no wonder we are in such a rush to break the lead. We can easily release ourselves from any incumbent responsibility, since we console each other with having no apparent control over what happens.

Sebastian:

- When I can't fall asleep at night sometimes I look overhead through my balcony window. I often hear the concierge and the tireless elevator, the warm sonorous glow of the building lobby, the instantaneous splash of color as vehicles leave their parking spaces on the other side. More and more I think that beyond all this, all of our marble and gold - what is left is the somnolent, naked reflection of ourselves, as imprints, except with thinly tapered heads and corded white bodies, staring through these windows similar to mine, where we hide from the rest of the world. -A phalange of bystanders gazing emptily, with mild curiosity, at the passage of an elusive defilement of Discovery and Greatness, which chooses irreverently, to abscond from contact. -"Not just yet" -it says to us, in an anthropomorphic call, not in a voice rather, but as something emanating slowly, as if from afar. -"Let us soak-up the dream of our microcosms, let our thoughts drift comfortably, like the ribbons they are, ensconced ribbons that caress us and come to us in sleep." Why do you think every person has the almost ritualistic tendentiousness to hide oneself? What needs do these rituals satisfy, what is that faculty that takes us over, in times of staid rumination in complete solitude? As if the inherent need to be alone is a factor of evolution, a distinction of the species - an evolution of intellectual matter, essentially. Maybe herein lies the answer to your question on ethics; the most ethical are those that are alone? - Their going-into-hiding rituals and inertness thereof, being a fear of the inconsolable burden of the unethical act. Like the romantic poets - escaping into their own forests, a Tulgey Wood, where everything is not exactly what it seems.

Mr. A: (veering off)

- Dark green theophanies aside, the school of physicians understood it best - life, ask not where it came from, but where it's going - simple. Maybe Wittgenstein could be merited. We constructed a whole world of anisotropic ideas which we scarcely know how to use let alone live with; as we laboriously preoccupy ourselves with expansion, cringing evasively to make good use of what is already in our possession. Seeing how much we can get away with, without having to suffer for it - what we call luck. Those rare moments of inspiration have always stumped me, my intellectual fancy - a mind-fuck. Something at once distant and incomprehensible, all of a sudden pellucid, then the abstraction and finally the ecstatic release, and then it's gone, and you are either satisfied or left wanting.

Transeunt.

Communio: Lux aeterna

SEBASTIAN AND AIKO

To warm my hands by homeless graves,

Procession of torches, in vaulted citadels,

Easter ritual in East Jerusalem.

Circular Byzantium, in streaming light,

Like light that plays amidst impressions,

Preppy, boarding-school children in a forested shade,

Bergamot, faces in silhouetted mosaic,

Assyrian stone, in soundly masquerade.

In her white panama, asleep,

Like Russian swans by cherry-blossoms,

I spread her thighs, and ate, from her Japanese garden,

And she bloomed, leaving behind,

A last song, and a basket of weaved straw,

That complements her well-heeled summer collection.

Author: Timothy Viktor Belinsky
This work utilizes Kazimir Malevich (1879-1935).

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