The Cosmology of Vladimir Mayakovsky
THE COSMOLOGY OF VLADIMIR MAYAKOVSKY
Not hubris but the ever self-renewing impulse to play calls new worlds into being. The child throws its toys away from time to time – and starts again, in innocent caprice. But when it does build, it combines and joins and forms its structures regularly, conforming to inner laws…
Agon in Nietzsche’s Thought, Ilgin Yildiz
Let me see now, if I can write clearly on Mayakovsky, after several cups of coffee, and clearly articulate precisely this madness at the root of the giant love of his – the love which sutured together the love of the women in his life, particularly Lilya, and the cosmic love which I have attached as an epilogue to one of my recent essays:
[– “Everything will perish,/ It will all come down to nothing/ And the one who moves life… “…”I stand/ entwined in fire/ on the inextinguishable bonfire/ of inconceivable love.”]{.mark}[^1]
It is Mayakovsky, not Heraclitus, who unites the agape and the personal spheres of love by way of the poem – the Venusian and the Neptunian – rather, here, the poem as a bridge between worlds, dimensions, spheres of representation and dis-representation, where Mayakovsky’s Maria, mother of Christ, moves between the world of his byt (as Ann Charters translates, ‘it means.. ordinary reality, that’s all it means. I mean, that’s all it means, just.. the hardness of things, the grind, the mundane, the trivial, the commonplace. As he says, “love’s boat has crashed against it”’)[^2], and the cosmic orientation, perspective, or view of life as a unified whole, which might also be called the movement of the two lovers into one, again, entwined in fire.
Charters goes on; it is important to hear the words of the Mayakovsky scholar clearly and completely on this topic: ‘Byt, yes. That’s right, against everything that is commonplace, that we couldn’t.. our love was unable to rise above and (this is a very important word. I think it’s the word that Mayakovsky uses most of all. He found this existence incredibly boring and difficult and he really wanted to live on an elevated plane. He felt that the second revolution of 1917 was only the second of at least three and he was heartbroken that the third revolution had not happened. He thought that the Revolution in 1917, the second one, the successful one, the political revolution, had a.. in government, to be fair, but he looked for the third revolution (he called it “the revolution of the spirit” and he kept waiting for it to happen and felt that his job was to help to bring it about, and that this revolution was, in his own experience, forever defeated by byt – B-Y-T “the experience of the mundane, commonplace, running a government, bureaucracy (amazing isn't it)..."’[^3]
We begin and end here with the works of Mayakovsky, one who expressed this bridge of and through the personal and the cosmic in his poetry as a way of seeing and being as the world (take the opening lines of 150,000,000 as an example: ‘150,000,000 is the creator of this poem. / It’s rhythms, bullets, it’s rhymes, fires from buildings /150,000,000 speak with my lips. Who can / tell the name of the earth’s creator? Surely a / genius. And so of this my poem no one is the author,’[^4]) and uses this way of seeing and being as the world as, inextricably (as politics) his revolutionary programme – one which far exceeds the materialisms of Trotsky and Lenin, both of whom were quite familiar with Mayakovsky in his time and held differing (yet both diminu(tui)tive) opinions of the poet, whose love outshone that which their revolutionary programmes were able and willing to offer in their specificity and endless commitment to class struggle by way of its spiritual desire to include all things and no-things.
Here is the difficulty of Mayakovsky’s position as the one who charges headlong into the fray of modernity with the strength and courage of a lion, summoning himself, the entirety of himSelf (and here I mean Mayakovsky as all things, all life; cosmic man; Mayakovsky as no one (who is the author of his poem), Mayakovsky as the one (who moves life) – Mayakovsky as Krishna in visible form – he recognizes this divine spiritual truth of being incarnate as a human being and he realizes this spiritual truth of being through his expressed language throughout his oeuvre, a spiritual truth which finds itself increasingly at odds with a transitional power (between the Tsarist rule of pre-1917 and the coalescing revolutionary powers which move through Lenin and Trotsky into Stalin’s Soviet ‘Union’ by mid-century) – Mayakovsky is a political figure if only that he attempts to translate, in a materialist sense, his political values which can only be described as love that both transcends (as the highest order) the byt of politics and yet in its transcendence imbues politics, the world of the byt, everywhere with its subtle essence as that which composes all things as itself: the Being which imbues beings with its beingness. It is in this way that Mayakovsky weaves and composes with a metaphysics of love which remarks upon, in and through the physis (primarily by way of the personal) – the love poems which Mayakovsky wrote to and with his intimacies; these poems as bridges of fire as being in relationship, ultimately, to itself as another!
It is these love relationships that incite and excite Mayakovsky’s lion heart to form; spring his strength into figuration – which is to say, the sculptor of language into the form of the poem, streaming lines of blood-emboldened energy. For it is rare if not impossible to find lines of inspir(it)ed poetry written with such bare urgency as in Mayakovsky’s I Love cycle - poems that find the divine by way of the ‘commonplace’. Here, from Adulthood:
‘Night.
You wear your best dress.
You rest your soul with wives, with widows.
I
gasped in Moscow’s embraces,
choked in the ring of endless Sadovaya Road.
Into hearts,
into wee hours
mistresses tick.
Ecstatic partners on the bed of love.
I caught
The wild heartbeat of capitals,
lying around like Passion Square.
Unbuttoned—
my heart nearly outside—
I open myself to sun and to puddle.
Enter with your passions!
Climb in with your loves!
From now on I have no power over my heart.
I know where the heart lives in others.
It is in the breast—as everyone knows!
But in me though
anatomy went mad.
An all-encompassing heart—
booms everywhere.
Oh, how many of them,
how many springtimes,
have in twenty years poured into me, inflamed!
Their burden unspent is just unbearable.
Unbearable not
as in verse,
but literally.’[^5]
Particularly, after Mayakovsky sets the scene of the specific, one gets the sense here of a flower bursting open into bloom, a bomb, a child being born, or some massive fertility event which here Mayakovsky remarks as ‘how many of them… springtimes’ – which we might also call revolutions as outpourings of cosmic energy, life force energy in the erotic sense. Mayakovsky himself ‘opens’ himself to sun and puddle, opens the vessel of his intimate being to the inflow and outflow of this changing cosmic energy which we today call the seasons, the cycles of birth and death, and other such revolutions and turnings of the wheel. He does not merely see, but feels this brewing, churning inside him – revolutions which do not just beg or plead, but demand expression unto his bursting, unto his explosion of self: as at one with the universal laws. The within and the without are at on(c)e, and yet, there is still this channel of spirit that calls emergence! ‘Their burden unspent is just unbearable’; here, Mayakovsky breaks the rules of the poem – and must assert himself even beyond the expressive potential of the poem as a litera(l)ary form or device – but as a boombox, a microphone, or a music expressed by the musical form of Mayakovsky’s body struggling for release, or absolute expression. You get the formal equivalent of a scream at the end of this poem, or a movement from the physical landscape of Moscow’s sphere of the social, into the gasping breath of Mayakovsky (explicitly eroticized in the following lines) and the birth of an ‘all-encompassing heart’ which is now the only way we can refer to Mayakovsky, as he makes explicit this changing-of-self in a madness of anatomy which we also experience in Artaud. The reader is slammed with the world heart, the word heart, overpowering the poem and it seems as though every other line the heart is elucidated and called out like a beat, a ticking, a time. It, as the poem, again, booms everywhere. The analysis of the poem falls short, as it must, falls short – in the light of ‘inconceivable love’. Mayakovsky collapses at its feet, its feet which are his own... What does this mean, then, for Mayakovsky the poet and the revolutionary? One who must, surely, if not for himself then for the burgeoning new Russia – conceive?
It means a retreat to the doorstep of Maria to experience and feel this love intimately, to remember and be remembered by it: the touch of the flesh, the appearance of the divine in the physis, the bridge between byt and the cosmic – the bridge which is the lovers entwined in the cosmic fire of their love – a desire met by its equal and opposite force - the force which is the light of physis (by course of force, by force of course!), the matchbox and the tinder which holds the apparent world alight; in vision and in sight, Mayakovsky’s call to Maria, his song for her, to her, with her – to become joined with him as his divine counterpart. It is, again, important to recognize the interdimensional fluidity and significance of the name Maria, particularly in Mayakovsky’s time. Charters (who we will return to later) refers to Maria as both a particular lover of Mayakovsky’s and the mother of Christ. Here, however, we must return to Mayakovsky’s A Cloud in Trousers:
‘And I feel-
“I”
Is too small to fit me.
Someone inside me is getting smothered…
Maria! Maria!
Let me in, Maria!
Don’t leave me out on the street!
You can’t?
My cheeks cave in,
But you wait ruthlessly.
Soon, sampled by everyone,
Stale and pallid,
I’ll come out
And mumble toothlessly
That today I’m
“Remarkably candid.”
Maria,
You see–
My shoulders are drooping again.
In the streets, the men
Prick the fat in their four-story craws.
They show their eyes,
Worn out in the forty years of despair, and restless-
They snicker because
In my teeth,
Again,
I hold the hardened crust of last night’s caresses…
Maria, closer!
Whether naked and shameless,
Or shivering in dismay,
Yield the wonder of your lips, so gentle:
My heart and I have never lived until May,
But in my past,
Hundreds of Aprils assembled.
Maria!
A poet sings praises to Tiana all day,
But I–
I’m made of flesh,
I’m a man, —
I ask for your body,
Like the Christians pray:
“Give us this day
Our daily bread.”
Maria, give it to me!
Maria!
I fear to forget your name
As a poet fears to forget under pressure
A word
He conceived in a restless night,
Equal to God in effect.
Your body
I shall continue to love and treasure
As a soldier
Amputated by war,
Alone
And unwanted,
Cherishes his remaining leg.
Maria, —
You won’t have me?
You won’t!
Ha!
Then gloomy and dismal,
Once more,
I shall carry
My tear-stained heart
Forward,
Like a dog,
Limping,
Carries the paw
That the speeding train had ran over.
With the blood from the heart I cheer the road that I roam,
Flowers cling to my jacket, making it dusty,
The sun will dance a thousand times round the earth,
Like Salome
Danced around the head of the Baptist.
And when my years, at their very end,
Will finish their dance and wrinkle,
A million bloodstains will spread
The path to my Father’s kingdom.’[^6]
For Mayakovsky, Maria’s love is the love of the divine feminine, of for and with the feminine which composes him and the beloved – Maria who is at once:
‘Charters: Privately, he was wooing a girl when he was in Odessa, when he was off the stage, called Maria, who turned him down… As I said the “Cloud in Trousers” was (a) poem to the other loves, the earlier ones, the Marias in his life. Marie also was not the name of the girl but the poem in its attack had attacked religion, obviously to take Maria, the name of Christ’s mother, as the central sexual figure in the poem…’[^7]
And the very force of that which births all things from no things, or the Becoming-passage to and through which Being endlessly finds its form as beings of itself. This cosmic synthesis is beaten half to death by Mayakovsky in his use of Christian symbolism to seal the time of Paradise Lost into the creation of paradise on earth (We’ll bring all the Eves back into Eden); the situation of himself not as a Christian, rather, but as Christ-approximate: ‘Jesus, Himself, may be sniffing / The forget-me-nots of my soul’[^8]. Again, here, Mayakovsky’s soul is a flower in bloom – a flower from the soil of his intimate self into and through the world of the collective physis, or ever-changing body. It is Maria’s ‘body’, the cosmic body of the feminine (both spirit and flesh), that Mayakovsky values above all else – including as and in the aesthetics of the poem. All is birthed and deathed from her and to her, about her, with her; within her womb. It could be said that Mayakovsky is ‘mistaken’ with Maria (who boots him from her doorstep, of course) - but it is that Maria and Maria are at one and at once… mother of Christ and this girl from Odessa. The cosmology of the poem and of Mayakovsky’s oeuvre explodes up against this paradox like violent waves up against a rocky shoreline’s cliffs. The poem is of course to her, about his waiting for her, and his call is directly through her, a song which, too, runs through him. It is incredibly difficult to elucidate this process, as, again, it is (as Mayakovsky calls) love, inconceivable. It is the thread, woven by the Fates, which runs through all things and no things aeterna - gesturing them to and from, in and out, together and apart - in a great cosmic dance of Being. Of course, this very action reveals, in its very dancing nature, the play of new worlds into sight and out of vision; into vision and out of sight: Being hiding and go seeking itself in the guise of another; in shadows and shade and sunlight. Here, by inconceivable, we understand Maria’s rejection (as it must be by not ever truly being, as in death, perfection), and the need for poetry to become the bridge from byt to infinite; to elucidate the caress of lovers and the entwinement perhaps incompletely – as are the lovers, themselves, but for a moment, as dancing lights of the infinite, intercoursed.
The ‘hardened crust of last night’s caresses’ is the poem itself, the scraps of bread from the leavened loaf which is the rising of love, the experience of the erotic in real time; the poem itself is that which is another event, another meal, perhaps ‘leftovers’ if you will, of the inconceivable, irreducible wholeness. It is the language that comes after the ineffable, the fading glow of the horizon line by through and with which the poet remarks on the unremarkable by way of a perceived separation as in the ending of the participation in the event: the moment at which the poet moves from being a participant to a witness. This, itself, is a change in roles as a perceived difference in time. It is the poem itself which holds the scraps of the divinity brought into byt, brought back from ecstasy like the fires of Prometheus, the seductive glow of eternal remembrance emanent from the torso of Apollo in Rilke’s poem of the same name[^9]. For what Prometheus has brought down is the very fire which composes the Heraclitean cosmos (‘an ever living fire; the thunderbolt which stirs all things’)[^10]: the very nature of change and transformation as being in relationship; that which burns the old self conception to ash and the phoenix of renewal as changed perception. It is this love too that, again, runs through Mayakovsky as what can only be called inspiration; it may very well be said that Mayakovsky lives and breathes for love; an outsized love which he describes repeatedly himself in the above lines which does not begin or end at any one person or point – nonetheless that which we might conventionally call ‘Mayakovsky himself’. As such, he inhabits a state of revelation as being in communion with the very force and thrust of all life as it changes and turns over on itself. Here, we find a different definition of the artist, or the creator - one who resides in at with and as the very place of Creation, himSelf. He sits in her mouth like a gate, like a tooth, like a tongue. Thus, we have to return to Charters’ comments on Mayakovsky and byt:
‘Student: Was he also a political revolutionary? a spiritual..
Ann Charters: It’s beyond politics.
AG: Well, they’ve already had the Russian Revolution -
Student: The first two revolutionary attempts are both political?
Ann Charters: Political, yeah – and the second one succeeded.
Student: And the second one succeeded, right, and the third one.. spiritual?
Ann Charters: .. is to come’[^11]
Mayakovsky stands as himSelf one who mediates the worlds of the spirit and the flesh: as not merely a warrior for his own means or pleasure (the poet of Venusian love), nor a warrior for the liberation of the Russian people (the poet of the upheaval of the material). We must come into further understanding of the underlying themes of Mayakovsky’s work as a foremost poet-as-visionary of the spirit; Mayakovsky as a spiritual warrior perhaps akin to Nietzsche in his vision for a total transvaluation of values:
‘Glorify me!
For me the great are no match.
Upon every achievement
I stamp nihil
I never want
to read anything.
Books?
What are books!’[^12]
A transvaluation of values which radically interprets, primarily, without doubling back or reforming or reinterpreting (-re) the way in which the self exists, is formulated primarily, immediately, and is understood as a cosmology of self as in being in making itself. This process based cosmology of Mayakovsky takes place as in the poem as a form of notetaking, like an alchemist or a scientist keeping record of his experimentation: here, a poet-visionary detailing the creative process of being in relation to Being, himSelf. It is no mistake that A Cloud in Trousers and Mayakovsky’s last poem both end in remarks upon the cosmic as being innately within and yet unresolved, or paradoxed, by sight as in perceived separations:
‘I thought that you were the Great God, Almighty
But you’re a miniature idol, — a dunce in a suit,
Bending over, I’m already reaching
For the knife that I’m hiding
At the top of my boot.
You, swindlers with wings,
Huddle in fright!
Ruffle your shuddering feathers, rascals!
You, reeking of incense, I’ll open you wide,
From here all the way to Alaska.
Let me go!
You can’t stop me!
Whether I’m right or wrong
Makes no difference,
I will not be calmer.
Look, —
The stars were beheaded all night long
And the sky is again bloody with slaughter.
Hey you,
Heaven!
Take your hat off,
When you see me near!
Silence.
The universe sleeps.
Placing its paw
Under the black, star-infested ear.’[^13]
&
‘It's after one. You've likely gone to sleep.
The Milky Way streams silver, an Oka through the night.
I don't hurry, I don't need to wake you
Or bother you with lightning telegrams.
Like they say, the incident is closed.
Love's little boat has crashed on daily life.
We're even, you and I. No need to account
For mutual sorrows, mutual pains and wrongs.
Look: How quiet the world is.
Night cloaks the sky with the tribute of the stars.
At times like these, you can rise, stand, and speak
To history, eternity, and all creation.’[^14]
We see quite clearly here that the problem of Mayakovsky himself is resolved in the cosmic – which is to say, the problem of the I (in Mayakovsky’s perspective) is resolved in the cosmic. Here, it is not ‘resolved’ as in a problem with a solution, but rather that it is resolved by a returnless return to the very solution of that which it is; that which it appears to have came from. It is by way of this perspectival bridge in and as the form of the lovers entwined in fire (from ecstasy to emanation, from spirit to the lightning which contacts the ground) that we come into such statements as made in his 150,000,000 and A Cloud in Trousers; without this understanding of the cosmological underpinnings which inform the life and love of Vladimir Mayakovsky as himSelf, we cannot possibly begin to hope to understand his poetry. Furthermore, we cannot begin to hope to understand the struggle undergone by the poet, Jacob wrestling with God til the break of day – to bring together this cosmological framework of seeing and being into the world of the byt as a shattering of it into life as in love as a state of being unshaken by material terms and conditions (which are undergoing the very process of Creation as transformation even now); a breaking and broken world-concept fraught with dualisms and separations informed by a lack of love – which is to say a lack of cosmic love. It is this very misunderstanding of the nature of love that, in Mayakovsky, is revealed to be a much deeper wound than our socialist physicians (which Dostoevsky referred to in his time[^15]; Mayakovsky encounters in his) suppose. Here, we lose Mayakovsky the merely literary figure or merely materia-political revolutionary; come into an understanding of Mayakovsky the mystic; the weight of the undertaking which he describes as being on and as and in his body, moving through it, weighing on his incarnation, meeting him at the crossroads of spirit and flesh – an undertaking which can only be described as, again, Christ-like, or Buddhic in its scope and necessity of life as in-love. This is what it means to be a poet in the order of Mayakovsky; when we sit down to read Mayakovsky and return to his works on days of feeling defeated by byt, it is still possible to hear the heart of the lion’s roar running through it.
Bibliography
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, et al. A Writer's Diary. Northwestern University Press, 1994.
Ginsberg, Allen, and Ann Charters. “Expansive Poetics - (Akhmatova & Mayakovsky).” The Allen Ginsberg Project, 6 Feb. 2020, https://allenginsberg.org/2014/04/expansive-poetics-49-akhmatova-mayakovsky/.
Ginsberg, Allen, and Ann Charters. “Expansive Poetics - (Mayakovsky - 2).” The Allen Ginsberg Project, 6 Feb. 2020, https://allenginsberg.org/2014/04/expansive-poetics-45-mayakovsky-2/.
Ginsberg, Allen, and Ann Charters. “Expansive Poetics - (Mayakovsky - 3).” The Allen Ginsberg Project, 11 Nov. 2019, https://allenginsberg.org/2014/04/expansive-poetics-46-mayakovsky-3/.
Heraclitus. “Fragments: Fire.” Heraclitus, Randy Hoyt - University of Oklahoma, http://heraclitusfragments.com/categories/fire.html.
Mayakovsky, Vladimir. “A Cloud in Trousers.” Russian Futurists, University of Victoria, 2 Mar. 2017, https://russianfuturists.wordpress.com/2017/02/12/vladimir-mayakovsky-a-cloud-in-trousers-english/.
Mayakovsky, Vladimir. “I Love.” Cement: a Translation Collective, 23 Oct. 2012, https://cementcollective.com/dead-poets/mayakovsky-i-love/.
Mayakovsky, Vladimir. “Vladimir Mayakovsky's Last Poem (A Poem Among Papers).” Translated by Larissa Shmailo, Vladimir Mayakovsky's Last Poem, 1 Jan. 1970, http://larissashmailo.blogspot.com/2014/07/vladimir-mayakovskys-last-poem.html.
Rilke, Rainer Maria. “Archaic Torso of Apollo by Rainer Maria Rilke | Academy of American Poets.” Translated by Stephen Mitchell, Poets.org, Academy of American Poets, 1995, https://poets.org/poem/archaic-torso-apollo.
[^1]: Expansive Poetics - (Mayakovsky 3)
[^2]: Expansive Poetics - (Mayakovsky 3)
[^3]: Expansive Poetics - (Mayakovsky 3)
[^4]: Expansive Poetics - (Akhmatova & Mayakovsky)
[^5]: Mayakovsky, I Love
[^6]: Mayakovsky, A Cloud in Trousers
[^7]: Expansive Poetics - (Mayakovsky - 2)
[^8]: Mayakovsky, A Cloud in Trousers
[^9]: Rilke, The Archaic Torso of Apollo
[^10]: Heraclitus, Fragments
[^11]: Expansive Poetics - (Mayakovsky - 3)
[^12]: Mayakovsky, A Cloud in Trousers
[^13]: Mayakovsky, A Cloud in Trousers
[^14]: Mayakovsky, A Poem Among Papers
[^15]: Dostoevsky, A Writer’s Diary