THE LIFE AND LOVES OF YOUNG ANATOLY GORKOV, PHILOSOPHER, MISANTHROPE, DREAMER

Chapter 1

I was a foul man, entranced with the petty fascinations which turn all men’s heads on street corners. Wine and the promise of young women. I myself marched up and down the coastline in an attempt to conjure up something which seemed beyond my fate. From the sea islands to the closed, cramped cabins of the far north.

And there, I found in the women something of a peculiar character. That between birth and death, there was a measure of something scrambling towards the face of the body. The narrow stone through which the soul screams and abates. This could be said to be character.

For it was two women and a third which spurred on the whole course of these events. The first being a woman of my age, but seventeen when we met. And then again, at the age of twenty-four. And then once more, one that spurred me forward, having known her but for moments, and then, in her departure, at the age of thirty years old.

This, then, is the story of youth, squandered, then abolished by time. And the fascination of the eyes of the woman, therein lying, peeling back the abyss and staring into the face of death. That same proclamation she gave to me in the dark forest, or else in tears on some foreign continent. And again, in the astonished smile which set me off on these ventures, which I tell you here today.

The first woman was born of these fates, and I suppose dragged me forth to meet the rest. Of hair both strawberry blonde and brown, and blue eyes flecked with the oceans from which she was born, and spent her childhood running upon the islands, dashed far off the continent, among trees and fruits which those upon the lands would never smell nor see.

And I suppose she was sent here to me, here being the far Northeast, in a small school, by the same force that brought me upon this earth proper, spread me upon it like waste. To leave what I was meant to leave, having brought nothing but an ancient memory.

This woman, somewhere between woman and child, drew me in upon the first glance, standing upon a grassy hill. Not yet autumn. The day upon which our adventures were scarcely included. The two of us in one room, alone, commenced.

And from there, what she was is fragmentary. Like memories and dreams. A billowing curtain. An orange sunset through the blinds, breaking upon the bedside. The witness of her eyes as I laid upon her. The afternoon sun, the crystalline, green-blue river. And the silences. Her notebooks and letters dashed off. Promises, which were at once love and not love.

And to know this truth, one must be young and then be young no longer. And the torment that follows in the wake of these passions. Desperately trying to retain the memory, which fades into the solemnism of days.

And this drew forth the second woman. Blazing red hair. A woman of almost pure passion. Perhaps miseducated. Whom I met almost by careless coincidence, and yes, we know this, too, to be fate. As I strode into the gymnasium, having made a promise that it would be the next woman I saw that would be this coming venture.

And as I met her, I saw, surprisingly, the child which she carried with her, the child within herself. A child which I barely glimpsed in the first woman, in the blanket that she carried to each night. And the fear in her eyes in the face of both love and abandonment, the two being entwined for her so inextricably that love would not be possible.

And then, the third, whose mere glance and meeting, exchanging comments on Tolstoy and the poets Shelley, Sexton, brought forth the necessity of the following measures, which were frantically written in the face of these passions.

Chapter 2

I suppose this novel is not actually about the women at all. It is with sufficient detachment of time and generations that the wars and romances of history are forgotten.

In this way, I was a wandering flâneur, full of vague hunger and appetites, scouring city streets for women. I suppose, outside of these inner projects, which were conducted with a microscope—a sort of confessional sermon, trying to get to the bottom of what exactly produced these affairs—all that I lived was this wandering. And it was interminable. These city streets themselves were like the deserts which I combed, searching for someone with whom I could see eye to eye. In the bedrooms, a compensation for that perennial failure.

And those three women are the particular haunts of this story. And I suppose many stories of men such as myself reached out into the abyss for companionship. Camaraderie in the face of the day-after-day, the marching rite which we conducted and unfolded, too, interminably, into a desert of hours.

And it was that search, on the days when I found myself emboldened by something coursing through me, which may be best described as mania or delirium. But I exhausted the coffers of my energy, my force, and careened out onto those streets, peeled my eyes back in the hopes of the strange encounter which would go on to define my life for however many months, years into the future.

And this, to me, is what great loves are. They are the momentous intersection of two lives which never, in my experience, truly meet, and yet provide an abeyance from the delirium. In that pocket of the mind which we call memory, there lies forgetting in the dream. And time itself, at that moment, splits, diverges into the wondering, both waking and sleeping, of what could have come and what is to come. No one, in this sense, to us, truly exists but as in relationship to the character of the force which is seated within us at birth.

And thus, I walked past strip clubs, burlesques, restaurants, diners, cafés. Seemingly endlessly.

My mouth dry and a cold sweat dripping from my brow, and confusion as the sun beat down overhead. Police parades, street circuses, riots. All of which came and went like a river of time that was buried and forgotten deep in the earth. And all the while I was alive, I searched for this love, not knowing whether or not it was true, possible, and exhausted myself under this fantastic and phantasmal ray.

This is either madness or the sole purpose of man. Either answer is insufficient in the face of the reality.

It was on those walks that I felt the strange and empty creep of time behind each face and each café. Each lone woman, couple, or group in a coffee shop, chattering away a second, as I, walking empty and endlessly, attempted to consume the world with my eyes and order it in such a fashion that it could be understood. And finally, at last, put to rest, put to bed.

So, let me now return to these women. Because within them was something that I may ultimately describe as nothing.

The first, an abyss of the eyes, which was pure feeling, as I would later understand, pure depth of feeling. And as we well know, feeling is depth only in the present moment, is wiped and erased by the lashing of the waves of time, and becomes something else entirely in each new moment.

The second was something similar, but beneath it, a fear that persisted. A fear that was fixed and almost stoic within her. The fear of loss, death, abandonment and betrayal, which haunted her eyes and provided a constancy beneath the tossing and turning of emotion.

And the third, recognition. As she sat reading Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, confessing that it was her favorite book. Recognition of the stakes of what was at hand, that lies between safety and the infinite.

And what I saw in all these women were the claws that were laid upon the tombstone which we call this mortal world in its brief fashion. The claws laid upon culture, propriety, religion. It sunk deeper into the flesh of the earth until it bled. And then I knew, and I understood, the calamity of man and mankind. The calamity that this world, the fear, the loss, which is the bodily death, could not be relinquished by those who could not approach it. We could not turn and face what was beneath the mask.

And for each of these women, the comfort of the river, the duvet, the blanket, was a possession which tethered them, fearful, to the earth. To life itself. And I turned life over like a gold coin to inspect it, and I saw that gold only shone in the sun. It provided nothing more, nothing less than this.

This is what it is to walk through the Valley of the Living. To pick the poinsettia petals from the ground, the high-ceilinged apartments. The tortured gaze. The blonde woman of the theater, with her legs up against the kitchen island. The unpaid bills stamped with red ink. The blind cat.

This horror itself smells cold and damp. And you, too, will know this spell. This being the smell of death.

Chapter 3

You may ask, who was I? Who am I to proclaim such things about these women? About this life, and all the current within it that thrashes the water? The acorns which drop into the lake glitter the illusion. Who am I but nothing? Another totem in the dance. This is true.

But give me at least, in this life, sight and experience. And that I know from the creeping of the age, as it passes and thrashes, year by year, creating twisted new machines which intermingle themselves with the deeper problem. This affair of being, and what’s more, the affair of women to men.

And you may say this is an ancient, insoluble mystery. And I will say, it’s simply a matter of life and death. And all that we see in a woman’s eyes, smile, voice and gaze is but birth and death condensed into the corporeal body, made painfully aware of its own existence.

This is what the revolution of the mind has caused: that the human is no different than the beast, but in the eyes of the mind which creep back upon the insoluble problem of the abyss, which craters out to endless black space. Cold stone of asteroid bodies, and the traces of life fomenting in the stars that brought us here, and will take us back to something which we cannot know and cannot trace.

The sphere of the unknown, the transformation, haunts the garden of the woman’s body and mind, as it does with many of the so-called proud men who march about in their military garments, suits, political gear. Chanting slogans, proclaiming prophets. This is our dance of the cities. Small, yet impossibly wide, inescapable, as it is the nature of man itself, and beneath man, the crawling, one-eyed jelly, up this ladder of time.

And this impenetrable is the haunting of the fear, the tears that I saw in her eyes. The tears of the woods and the tears of the hospital bed. The hotel room, where the illusion breaks, and her eyes filled with water, staring back at me, proclaiming, “You can’t love me.”

For love itself, in the face of something that cannot be salvaged, is surely madness. And to this, strangely, I laugh and gesture to the stream, of which we are nothing, and to nothing we return. And yet I loved these women.

And why was I stricken, even to the point of embarrassment, by anonymity? The beautiful girl on the cusp of womanhood. The woman holding onto her child desperately, as she careened into a time that she could not prevent. That all her words and songs were bound up into all that she could hold in her hands and upon her back. And that was all. That was simply the weight of time, as we spun madly around the stars, and they wrapped us in their brief warmth, which, to us, seemed eternal. And thus we know winter’s cold as death.

It’s in the eyes of the beautiful young woman, her black hair streaming down from her face, as I inquired, and she laughed, clutching her book. That this fear is what reduces us to the smallest sense of clinging to the damp heat of the body as it careens into stone.

And yes, in that moment, I knew her deeper than ten years. How is this possible? It is the character of the shade itself, and the shadow of death which haunts each body and makes it predictable in its movement. The butcher’s lamplight, or the library at dusk.

That which I have seen is the endless thumping. A million heartbeats which must persist, if not to become something impossibly strange. And the fear of that strangeness is dug so deeply into the blood that the mere sight of bleeding turns the stomach.

And I will bring you back to love. That she held me as the one force which might ground her to the earth, and I held her as something beautiful. And this itself tells the tale of time: that I cannot be held by a woman to this earth, but that woman required me to hold her there, in her deepest fear and in her deepest longing. That was all it was.

And this, at the end of the day, could be me or someone else, depending on the force of the gravity that I exerted from the nature of my body, and the consistency of my presence there in that room, or by her side, as we walked through the factory districts or hallways.

And if you know this madness, you understand the nature of the skyscrapers, business, and industry. You understand the nature of women’s hearts and men besides. It is only the strange who efface death, who live anything different.

And this marks us as we stand outside of the bars, the taverns. The laughter and the fire within them, the heat of camaraderie. To stand outside in death. To die while living.

And thus to know the force and consequence of death is that which draws this play to a close. That’s when one asks, what is the point? And then you know yourself as nothing and nobody.

And this is the power of death.

Chapter 4

And I found myself having to ask, was I mad? Was I sane? Was there some sort of corrupt evil seething in the basin of my heart, teething at my soul?

And I inquired as to this force. And what it was, was the force of strength. The indefatigability of my very being, my core, my essence, which sprung like a panther into each day, even as it verged and tilted upon the die of its own life into death. Accepted, laughed at death and fate. Flew directly into the source of the great affair of life.

This is what I was, then, and the place from which I loved, which could be mistaken for carelessness, but was, in truth, a sort of self-certainty. That I was, in the deepest sense, in relationship to death. And that these women, as beautiful, even honest, gentle as they were, must stand there with me and death.

And this, of course, is nothing of what we know or call today the nature of love. The bouquets, the kisses, the smiles, the decisions. Garments and houses and trinkets, which pile up, convincing us of nothing. And persist in shallow graves, as shards of pottery, flecks in the dirt which are picked up by those to come.

I saw this life in such a way that I was not tied to it by the same fears that clutch these women, and they, in turn, clutch themselves, drawing their skin and eyes purple as they glance towards me. And I saw that this, in many ways, was what they loved within me. That they loved me from weakness and fear, clutched towards me with the desperation of one on the verge of something that they did not understand, and yet could not prevent.

And this knowing that was in their eyes reflected in mine: that I saw or had a salve, a balm for this condition, and, at the very least, could briefly shield them from it.

You must understand that when I speak of weakness, I do not speak in a berating or jesting, or even laughing fashion. I speak of it in a sense of gentleness and understanding, seeing the real condition of these women as they tore through their lives like a fruit, to the core of this affair, which they knew and always know, and yet must desperately hide, as we all do.

That her understanding of her body and relation to the forces brought to bear in this world—the jungle and the star—was at risk, as, of course, was mine. But at risk in such an immediate, pressing way, the way of violence, of a predator against prey, that it colored their very eyes, and their very words, and their very way of being.

This is what power is to the powerless. But then, all of life is powerless in the face of death and the churn, which is the stars and the sea of heat and life, which endlessly brings together and recombines the elements which fly from the forge of being.

It was this very look in her eyes which predicated the doom of her affair with me and mine, in that what was required between the two of us were radically different things. That I myself appreciated her character and her beauty, while she herself desired, with a desperation, a sort of protectorate against this storm which beat against her in a brutal fashion.

And for me to understand this, then I understood the silence of the breaking of our accord, which then required her to take her ways and her service to simply another host. And that the love that I experienced within myself towards her was altogether a love of a different kind.

And these two kinds of love could not be reconciled, except, perhaps, in a woman strong enough to face that which I face within my body, my mind, my spirit, and my soul.

Chapter 5

And this was what I searched for desperately in the city streets, or while walking through rivers in the Northeast with new loves. Slight cuts upon the bottom of my bare feet.

What I searched for, with the desperation of a penitent of God, lost in the midst of a hell which was fear, and that all of mankind was, to me, fear. That they themselves could not peer behind the ghost of their longings, which they carved upon their faces. And the smiles, and the experiences, and the trips to the waterfalls. And the stores, filled with bags and clothes. All of these would be left behind in Egyptian graves, where I sweated and hungered, seemingly endlessly, until the thing itself exhausted me beyond the extent of my body.

Which was, I was not crawling about the flesh of this earth to survive, but to find my companion. One who, in many ways, died in the asylum, much like I died in the asylum. And that I went so mad that I became sane.

Understand this: this being driven to the bottom of the core of the body, and to feel the metabolic hearth of the organs, the coals as they blaze and flame within the flesh. To divine the pumping of the heart and the liver. And to know this to be the extent of the thing that powers the being, technology, brief in time, and yet which allows me to see to the core of the darkness, the opacity which haunts man.

Death, transformation, the end of the universe, which to us is simply the cessation of breath. The cooling of the electric veins of the mind and the brain.

And I was, in this way, an Alexander of love. That my terrain was simply a desperate wandering, and a conquering of all that which called towards me, and even the briefest symbology that I made sense of: detours, confusions, flocks of birds, a strange noise in the lizard’s eye. That I made sense of all of these things, and they were my private language of love, towards which I strode with the confidence of a young man. Perhaps not fearing death, but only jousting. Jousting in the confidence of vigor. The red cheeks of youth.

And then I ran myself hundreds, thousands of miles into the depths of my own consequence, which was simply physical, bodily exhaustion.

That I tore into bedrooms, convinced that beneath the void of the glimmer of a smile, the beautiful face and eyes, the curtains of the second-floor apartment and the nightdress. Candelabra. Convinced that when the night turned and the blue shade of winter morning, or perhaps an autumn, came cascading down like sun through a filtered window, that there would be this mystery revealed, and that the depths of my soul would be mirrored in the depths of another.

That I required woman for this is perhaps something more ancient than I can truly understand. The greater force of a binary system of information technology thrusting upward through hundreds and thousands of generations, and through ages long forgotten, only remembered by an excavation of fossils, bones. That this is what called me beyond all callings, even the calling of literature, philosophy, science.

But these were mad stirrings of a heart within a cage, and a mind which battered up against the brick wall of a reality which I could not truly face, a reality which, to me, was a deeper horror than death.

The horror of misunderstanding.

Chapter 6

And so now I wonder if this is death. Standing on the edge of a primordial exhaustion, which perhaps is simply surrender to this deepest dream.

And you will forgive me if I have not given you my name, for simply, it does not matter. What matters is the one thing which haunts this speech. That communion of the eyes and the heart which persists across the seemingly impossible divide of two broken bodies flying in space and time.

And that which I met in the foolishness of youth. The fickle nature of the first love, the undying, yet destructive nature of the second, and the third, which spurred a cycle of works on the creature of woman herself. And I could call that third woman Muse, and in many ways, what she is and was, and what they all were, were incitations of my spirit. Forces which awakened the hammer of my soul into a dialogue of consequence with nature itself.

So I attenuated my body, sitting in chairs upon porches and rocking in a southern night with my guitar, to gaze upon the golden light as it cascaded through the trees. And with the conviction of one who is surely deranged, deranged by the passion and promise of life, I saw the signs which pointed me towards her.

The woman of my fate, the immortal woman, which haunts my dreams and beckons me into the cave of this life, this world, this body, which slowly draws the heat of the sap of the stars down through trees and into my blood. Rimbaud would call this the wound, but I see it as the unbreaking transformation into smaller and smaller caverns and cavities, that which I call compression. We might call this the compression of God.

And nonetheless, there were these two forces drawn within the sketch and script of mankind. Adam and Eve and the eyes which draw her. Her body, which draws me. The promise, however fleeting and flitting, of her soul, equal depth and gravity to mine.

And you will forgive me for lingering here, as I often have, and I suppose I often will, till I am no more but dust and sand. Wind. Perhaps I will be returned to the forge and furnace of the stars.

But then, for now, what I am is someone who lusts, if that is a strong enough word. Perhaps it is more the desire of a magnet to its equal and opposite force, which possesses me beyond all other thoughts. That life outside of this is but a hobby, but a toy. That food, that water, that work, that word, that these themselves are compensations in the face of the true life, which is, and would be, that immortal embrace.

You may scoff at this and say this unreality. But to me, it is the thousands of little moments of possibility which, like mosaic glass, form the window through which I see. That window of promise is something like salvation to me. Salvation from the days that I watch you waste, and that tip, too, from my cup like droplets of blood. And that we feel them leave and relinquish them, as we must.

And that this heat of youth, which I knew at the watering holes, the nakedness, the tire swing, and the wine, turned to this fatigue and exhaustion. But the body has been used up by the greater star, as it thirsts and hungers for more hosts.

And this is what I know draws me towards her. That only my equal and opposite could continue. And could I continue with?

Chapter 7

And I can scarcely say that any of this even existed. It feels like a dream. The memories curl and disperse like smoke. Her body wrapped around mine in the dormitory. An open notebook at the river. The light capturing, like a diamond or an amber, this event which leaves no trace.

And this is the sin of love without artifact. That memory becomes the last precious gem that we turn over in our hands before it leaves us with nothing, or else we leave nothing with it.

Understand what I mean about the breaking away of days. That we hold on to love with an equal and opposite desperation, knowing that loving is occurring on very different terms. One of us screaming to survive, and the other watching the moments pass through a mist. The rays breaking over the body of the sun as it dips, lows, and bellows. And slivers of moons rise.

There were times that I wandered through blue woods with light trickling down. The bare bones of trees stretching their arms towards nothing. Then I wandered and thought nothing of women. That I was madly drunk or out of my mind, or else so immersed in the pure act of being that there was nothing else. And I did not hunger or thirst like a dog to the water, meat, and blood.

This predation of energy is, in many ways, the war it has always been described to be, and that peace beneath it is the solitude and sleep of one who is tired of those battlegrounds.

And I whispered to myself these words, which you now hear, that I tore from the books of memory. Pages ripped, some near indistinguishable, to cobble together something close to something approximating an understanding.

And that, truthfully, I saw and thought these women to be my salvation, just as they thought me to be theirs. This is the absurdity. The almost laughable carnival of our desires, that our salvations were two very different things. That my salvation was something like an absolution, and theirs was to remain in this garden.

I understand why Baudelaire remarked upon the flowers of evil, just as I understand how the impermanence of forms almost requires us, in our childish fear, to cling to them, even as they slip from our fingertips.

Sometimes I wish that I did not have this understanding, and that I could parade among all of you and enjoy the fruits which rot between your lips and teeth. And your desperation for pleasures. The well to which you return again and again.

Because each night that well runs dry, and the terror appears from the corner of your eyes.

Chapter 8

Who am I, narrator? I am the one who has escarped to the depths of hell and clung to nothing, and then drove back only to see the light as it always was. And you, as you always were, lazing in a chair in a park or upon a bench before the fountain. Reading your book, lost in a reverie of memory mingled with the chatter of street corners. And your own mind, the voice within that cries, obscured by the sound of traffic.

I knew you in your plaid skirt. Your black eyes, your red lips. And I saw, beneath it all, the despair.

So who am I? The one wherein the bottom has dropped out of life, and I stand in a place with no ground. And I peer through the blackness and the abyss, and I see you, a perennial child, holding your coin, holding your toy. Clutching your suit of business, propriety. Clutching your dress of power and authority, as this world spins and dribbles away the last of its blood into space.

And here, I laugh, and for a moment, I grieve, and then I want rest. A tombless sleep, which gifts me the greatest of all art: the dreams which emerge spontaneously, bubbling up from all the things seen and unseen in this life. And the crevasse which produces it. The body within which I walk, that carries countless eons of attempts.

And that within me are thousands upon thousands of the marching dead. And I turn to them and I laugh, an unknowing laugh. Knowing that they walked where I walk and shall walk again still. And that my loves, just as I, are specters in this strange march up a mountain covered in clouds and fog, to an end which we know not. Perhaps endlessly.

And that I march and I perform my primordial, sacred duty of loving the beautiful woman as she steps out in her raincoat and her boots. Or her mittens that remain with me from a snow which I cannot recover nor recall. And yet a snow that fell and is caught between memories and dreams.

I knew her at the moment she blamed. And met life in the agony, crippled, that died, and these are the flowers of evil.

I sometimes wish he had not been so precise in knowing the corruption and the hunger for beauty. The thirst for beauty within me, which drove me out with a stick. Out into the world. Not even for the feigned amusement of power or gain, but the recognition beneath beauty’s face, beauty’s mask.

Chapter 9

Fine. I will tell you my name. My name is Anatoly Gorkov. I am from a small wooded province on the border of Yugoslavia.

The women whom I mentioned are, for the most part, fictional women. Women whom I may have brushed up against in my time upon this earth. Quickly forgotten, but in fragments I reassembled them. The redheaded washwoman, whose sister died young, addicted to drink. Or the first love which I described, torn from the pages of Goethe’s Werther, mingled with my experiences as a schoolboy. The third girl, something strange, which I must have dreamed.

And you will tell me, “Anatoly, you’ve told me nothing of any of these women. They’re specters in your play. In your metaphysic.”

And I will say, yes, this is true. For I was sent here in a dream, on a dream’s wings, into a dream’s end. And as I sit now and reflect, write these pages with my voice, I am aware, with the stunning awareness, the light that only rises to the mind long after the experience has dulled to cool embers, that it was but a joke or a play among those who gave me nothing and were meant to give me nothing but to spur me onward into an awakening of which I am still currently uncertain.

What direction shall this take me? And why would I write these memoirs? Why would I bother to surface these graves? It is because they’re not real, and yet they must be. Because they will give some even minor validity and sanctity to this life, my life, which has passed in the dirt of years, shovel atop a crucifix, and forgotten.

I did not know any of these women. Thus, it begs the question: did I know myself enough to know them? And did they know themselves enough to know me? And the answer is most certainly no.

For what I acquired in the sleepless, dank nights which awaited me long after their departures, which amounted to years, even decades, of solitude, and small rooms as I scribbled over the furnace of my heart, was something that amounted to an understanding that I had not found anywhere else nor seen. The transparency of my own self. The laughable illusion of my ardors, and the situations which I merely manufactured for personal amusement and distraction from the real circumstance and consequences of life.

And I knew then that this was exactly what these women had done. That what I was, or that what love was, was something between despair and an amusement. Something to pass the time between the waking days that none of us had forced nor created. That we had been thrust here upon this earth, either to copulate or find another strange amusement.

And I found this in literature, which is precisely why I write to you today. Perhaps a meager attempt to replicate the same storm that came over me in reading that book by Camus, The Fall, on a train. A sultry winter night, as snow poured over the long, snaking river which the tracks tailed. With a rolled cigarette behind my ear, and the short book finished, it was as if my eye had turned towards something hitherto unseen.

And I give you these women today, not because I knew them, or because they knew me, but to show you perhaps something deeper in the consequence of love, at least young love. And that what it is, is a hard glass mirror towards which each lover faces and stares at themselves until the mirror breaks, or simply gets up and leaves.

And these girls, the washwoman who descended into depravity, the violence of scars inflicted by the underbelly of madnesses which lurk upon our streets and in the dungeons of our cars. I saw her fall. Just as first love turns to despair, confusion, and consolidation, as the years tip into shadow.

And the third woman, faced with the crossroads of something beautiful and crazed, and something controlled and safe. She herself, a spitting image of Anna. And what I mean to suggest is, these are no coincidences. These are the real stakes of life which haunt us in each waking moment, and as we attempt to fall into dreams.

But these are the consequences of a time, however limited, we do not know. But perhaps in some strange predestination, that we take this leave here upon earth and are faced with the possibilities of knowing ourselves and loving.

And what I fear to reveal is that without self-knowledge, love is simply impossible. And this is what I meant in the eyes of the three women.

Chapter 10

Oh, I must get rid of Anatoly. Because, like you, I despise him. I’ve grown tired of Anatoly. The mask and the polis, scripted on identity cards, thrown into the fray of conversation, thrust into the faces of these women. In a wondering sense, is it you who will meet my eye?

Anatoly is the body, the cast I took to be thrown into this world, and there is a darker source, a stranger one, which cannot be reduced to the play and drama of men and women upon this dusky earth. It is a deeper play, something of pure fire, which burns in an unadulterated passion. Ungraspable, and thus we know the true nature of love within it.

But we are thrown spiraling into this maze. And the moment I grasp her hand, any lover, any beloved, she reveals to me the same fear that I confronted as a child in the puppet theater. The mask of the beast, the monstrosity.

And this long was who I was, who went with saber into darknesses and pulled the head of the Minotaur from hell, and held it aloft, gleaming in the sun, to the horror of the brunch-going crowd. The society ladies dropping their wine glasses to the ground. Perhaps only a Salome would understand, or a Lilith. Someone beneath the mud, immersed in horrible prostitution, or else inured in death parades.

The mask of Anatoly was long since discarded, and yet I held it aloft for your pleasure, reader. The same pleasure afforded to anyone who pretends on this stage of the world that they are something. That they are a piece that will be retained, that will be remembered, that must not be forgotten in the dirge of sedimentality which dribbles from the mouth of culture and civilization.

Even our tribes fought to be remembered among the stars, crafting the myths of gestation and creation which we sung amongst great fires. I wore that same mask as I swung the incense and screamed. This was many years ago. The mask of the butterfly wearing the monkey’s face upon the wings of its skin.

And I was torn from the fabric of this, forcibly, by peering too deeply into something towards which my curiosity was inextricably drawn.

So Gorkov, the family name and crest, the shepherds, the forests at the border. These are lost to me. They are dead items of a cloak which I shed, like the sheep’s skin or the lion’s skin.

In my world, there is no predator nor prey. And yet what remains of the stamp of man is my appreciation for the beautiful woman. And all else, to me, is but mist and dust.

I either smear the mud upon my face, or else trudge through it. It is inedible and indigestible.

Chapter 11

If you take this with you, this makes us the undead. You and I, in this way, are alike, at least I hope we are. That we have walked through the great disguises of this earth and emerged truly empty-handed. Maybe, but as desperate skeletons dancing, fuming, with what’s left of the programs of our copulation. The Tibetans dance like this. It is the dance of death and the living.

And yet, it seems I cannot shed this last instinct, this last impulse. For as long as I live, there’s something of a rage of war mingled with this appreciation for beauty, which in bare moments verges on lust, and then, of course, the nothing which parades through the streets, scouring them for opportunity. And what is opportunity but opportunity for communion?

I stand upon the balcony of this high and large room and look out and down upon the streets, as women walk with strollers, their young babies. Men with their briefcases, stumbling to work. It is that which I have seen, and returns again, no different. No stranger. No less ordinary.

And it is this ordinariness which tortures me. Perhaps it is the depth at which I shed my identity, out of pure agony and despair and isolation. For it is no gift, reader, to see the ordinary nature of human life. For it is almost unbearable to hold in one’s hand for too long. It becomes a madness-making device.

That over and over again, the species itself stumbles over ancient blocks, repeating the same mistakes of inconsequence, tearing apart its civilizations, stumbling into mad desires, all of which abate and leave only the cold, stony face of withdrawal.

What happens when all of our carnivals and dances are over? The water and the wine no longer flow. The blood no longer heated by the passions of glances. We become cold like stone. Settled and set in our ways. Slowed, configured devices.

And so this was my first rebellion, the rebellion that truly marks youth. Far and long before first love. The rebellion which is to turn away from the world and condemn it for being too small, not enough, not outside, to match the cosmological condition of being.

It was this pettiness of the years which I saw marked in the newspapers. And only in books did I see glimpses of the true mark of the human condition. So it was to books I went, like you.

This flight is definitional. It is the flight of the circumstances of my life shifted into something which can no longer retrieve the memory of being held within this world.

And as such, this is precisely my predicament. I love something that I cannot return to.

Chapter 12

Forgive me, for I have drifted, and in drifting, I’ve lost my thread. Sometimes, I forget that I’m still speaking to you, man, woman, otherwise. And in this way, my mask slips, and I betray the nature which I have stepped into. It is neither here nor there. And that is precisely the problem.

For my consciousness drifts and flits in shades. That I rise and fall between revolutions and starscapes. And these reveries are something of a profound exhaustion. Almost untethered from the body.

And this is where I stand, and you will revile this speech and find it hard to hear. The speech of someone whose eyes and mind no longer rest in the materiality which consumes you in the affairs of this world. And that life and death are but a toss in the air, which my body remembers, but my soul endlessly drifts between, in nonchalance and inconsequence.

So when I return to speak of these women or these streets, these cement-marked balustrades carved with lions’ faces. Atlases, gargoyles. And I stroll among them. The lanterns. The promenade. They appear to me as nothing but brevities. I put my hand out before them and I pass through them equally in the night. For one and all are the same to me in this night.

The women alone which I have described to you mark for me what remains of history and mankind. And you will fear this, I know, for I am untethered in this way. And perhaps this is what makes me mad. And my madness being that which never allowed me to truly commune with these women that I supposedly loved, and who supposedly loved me. For I heard those words, and I spoke them, and yet they did not truly reach me.

Perhaps it is the violence itself of youth that prevents this. That has beaten the sense out of me and set me adrift among the stars like another wandering stone.

And I have exerted, yes, I have exerted my body to such great extents, as in war, or as in the pressure of force against iron, to produce nothing. But like planets move around the star, like fixtures and graves, chairs and tables, endlessly rearranged, displaying and exhibiting only the sensation of movement. But no real transformation.

This haunts and angers me, so I tore into the pages of the human genome in attempts to understand what would truly revolutionize life. And within it, I found aeons of possibility, cut with brief moments of hope, in which a new technology emerges, a new hand or arm, which may yet break the stasis of nature as she wanders endlessly through the undergrowth. Like vines curling around the body, producing and reproducing madnesses which we know as ourselves. Our most intimate natures behind the name and the face by which others know us.

And how much longer will this dance continue? This dance of mankind in which we’ve created our cultural stars, our myths, our governments. This time, for me, is nothing, and I wait for something which will break the agony of the stillness. A mind which can shatter my mind and, as such, revile the lockstep.

For I, too, am trapped in nothingness. The abyss which you refuse, but nonetheless keeps you.

Chapter 13

I suppose Anatoly lived in a hole in the ground. There was a possum in the walls. I suppose, too, that Anatoly was a philosopher. Or something of the sort. I can’t remember.

But are these your memories or mine? And is this a past generation, or is it now? You see, time slips for me in this way. That my experience is so subtly cobbled together by histories that become dreams and waking moments which cannot be thoroughly discerned.

And this is why I suppose the world calls me mad. That I was torn from my post as a lecturer in the university and thrown into the streets to live in a wine barrel like Diogenes. But I’ve told you that I am Alexander.

You see, I’ve run out of excuses, of reasons, of meanings of consequence. And once this is so, the damage is done. The boat of life is crashed up against the rocks.

Therein, I wish to let the director of my dreams take over and conjure great landscapes of flowing leaves. Greenery, soybean fields of some prior ecstasy where I verged on love, at loss. That I almost gambled my life away into the arms of another, and was snatched from it back into myself. White walls and silence.

I suppose Anatoly was these things. And is, in a way that I cannot reach him. That he drifts like a young boy playing with his toys in some faraway. And I reach towards him in the darkness, like a far-off light.

Who I am now was guttered by centuries, so it seems, but perhaps only decades. Events of consequence, one after the other. The drifting away of old conspirators. The workaday life. Strangers who interrupted the procession of my mind. Footsteps, gallows, trouble.

These all mingle with the palette in which I dip my brush and splatter grotesque greens and browns upon the page. For it is no matter that at last I write, because speech is like breath.

And the women who came closest to me appear and disappear like ghosts in the third or fourth layers of dreams. Pointing like an arrow towards a pure darkness or a set of stairs which I descend. And this, to me, is going deeper into life. A life that I have not understood and may yet never understand, even as I can recite and describe the principles at work within it.

For this is what it means to have descended into a body and to come up against the impermeability of other bodies. All I ever saw of her was but a shadow. And what I could know is only in touch or language.

And this is what makes us strange, deranges us. That feelings squirm behind the brick walls of the eyes and the mind, the sensations which tremble to expression. And this is the purpose of art. Just as what lies beneath Anatoly springs.

I don’t know if there is anything yet that he truly does. And I suspect there isn’t.

Chapter 14

So if Anatoly was my dream, then who are you? And who was she?

I woke up as a child and saw only blackness, at least as far as I can conjure in my mind today. At some point, an idea emerged. That these vague sensations began to constellate in a coherent, somewhat linear sense of identity. That I was to be a schoolchild among schoolchildren. That I lived in this home. And that I knew these people, because they persisted around me. Swirled, cooked their meals, read their books. That I had emerged from the ground of their flesh.

Surely, for you, this is enough. But for me, it was too thin. The story felt like papier-mâché dolls lined up. And yet, there was something real running through them. The heat and fire.

As I gazed up at the white splotches, seemingly unmoving, of the stars against the black canvas of night, I did not know, and I did not see. It was rather that within me, I began to feel the burning which became the logic of my childhood passion and the throes of my youthful desires, which impelled me forth to the mask of the beautiful woman.

And this is how you come to know, as I came to know, these three. And it was that simple. Yes, and it was that fundamental. There was no plan. No idea. But a drifting. A drifting of felt gravities which threw me, and I ran after them until my legs could no longer run, my arms could no longer move, and my eyes could no longer see.

I was like that root in a wood which grew and trembled under leagues of water which fell, blanketing the soil. Dark beneath it, my true nature moved, and I uttered words I did not know nor understand.

I became something out of necessity. And I threw the clothes of the name upon me, and danced with the washwoman. Danced with the butcher’s daughter. Saw in the eyes of the black-haired girl desire mingled with fear.

It was rather that life drove me mad, and muses were the island of sanity from which my art emerged. Everything else was forgettable and darkness.

Chapter 15

Who has forced this life upon us? I often wonder this as I move like a wind or a stone is meant to move. Acquire and shed duties, tasks, garments. I see the long procession from which we step. And between myself and the girl, we exchange glances, smiles, perhaps something more.

There seems to be only this: that my soul has marched long through cleft hills and valleys, carrying only what could fit on my body and in my hands, and perhaps upon my back.

There is this wail that is the music of time. Windswept, filled with rains in the almost mocking sun of the summer day. That youth itself was a burst of these rays which shimmered. And then to know the rays is to be thrown in the lotus of time into old age. Decrepitude. Perhaps alienation from the play.

Yes, youth was the stage that held its glamour by nature of its very newness and novelty. And it was these women that I met in youth that I was entranced by. And rather, their spell held over me like a rite. An ancient rite, established long before my consciousness stumbled into the play of being. And I suspect I held the same sway over them. Something of magic, in the sense that what we know of magic is that we don’t know. And this is why it appears to be as such.

This was the beauty. But as it repeats, like my lament washes over you, a drumbeat, and the heart compounds in its rhythm, you begin to understand not only the appearance, but the machination besides. And you reach for more, out of the promise of something deeper and greater than what mills about the surface of the water.

And you reach your arm into the lake and pull out the demon. And you realize the demon is the heat and the light, just as much as it is the cool depths of despair and horror. And you accept both of these things and return the chthonic beast into the ocean. Wipe your hands of it. Go home and eat a warm meal. Sleep, dream, and awaken, fairly convinced that you are not dead.

What is this death? Is it of the bones, of the flesh, of the body? Or is it of the mind, of the spirit, of the soul?

I am convinced that what is walking is a proxy. A proxy for the power of the things that hold us in their sway. A larger force with which we wish to commune. We call this sex. And this is how I know and what I know of woman.

Chapter 16

I think of Rimbaud, and I think of exile, madness. A strange beauty of poetry. The capacity to pierce the veil of mute time, empty like nature, and reveal something, some measure of the infinite. This being seership.

And I wonder if this was a decision I made or if it was made for me. These things reside in the realm of fate, if there is one, and in the realm of the decision and consequence of souls, after and before they are born, if there is one. Some things we cannot know while we still hold the hands of mankind.

That I descended into this willingly, being my greatest fascination, and I could not abide the milkmaid. And I could not abide the barwoman. That I could not abide the Parliament. The drag of the costumes of mankind.

I flew in that early life, naked in apartments, smoking endlessly what would always be last cigarettes. Drinking red wine, picking at the bones of chicken. Writing that first book, cobbling it together from the voices in my mind. Multiple voices seeking to coalesce, all of which saw the grotesque parade. The theatrical disguise of the schoolrooms and the culture. The commerciality of man.

Long have we had the polises for spice. For furs. For beads, meat. None of this could reach me. I saw the hand smeared upon the limestone cave. It was like the hand of young love upon my body. A geological mark. Could this itself be life?

And I staggered through the streets, writing in notebooks and scraps of paper endlessly. Pulling together an astral body which could sustain, which could know, which could be, in the face of the slipping away of the meat of time.

No one knew me but as a presence. It has always been thus. The depths became almost as infinite within me as the infinite depths I saw in the stars.

I wandered in the darkness. I craved the night as it fell over me and gave me permission to roam. The freakishness of prostitution, the vagabonds. Vagrants, train riders, the bus stations. These were my companions. Those who were simply passing through. The itinerant homelessness of the beggar. Of the wanderer.

Chapter 17

I sat in the midnight cafés, surrounded by strippers. Drinking strong coffee mixed with brown-bag whiskey. Waiting to return home to my simple guitar and my notebooks.

Out on the streets, in the middle of the day, drinking port wine with those who would come and go, nameless but for shifting nicknames. Prison sentences. New homes, speckled throughout the globe.

I was like a mist in the underbelly of life. Only visible at the edges. And it was there I stalked meaning, and breathed upon it for resuscitation. The cold moons marked by smoke from backyard fires. The encroaching cold of fall. The cemeteries which haunted my walk.

It was withstanding, above all else, as I breathed the cold air and saw my breath emerge from my body like a specter. It was that my body withstood time. And this was all. And my personality dragged behind it like a relic. Like a totem for all that I was, all that I did and had done.

That I was nothing without this body that I dragged through time like a ball and chain. That perhaps my deepest identity was a prisoner to form.

My spells of solitude, longing, and lust were briefly broken by a blond woman with glasses on a rope swing by the river, who knew nothing of this.

I drew the theater artists, the ballerina. I drew the painters. I drew the mad women. I drew those who sunk into deep blue-black pools of feeling, like true danger. For they could not escape. And that they sunk was that they sunk to their death.

These women, on the fringe of the world, about to fall off the ledge, barely existing. Creeping into life like insects across a grain of wood. We barely notice how thin this tether is between essence and form.

One of the women almost had it tortured out of her by a rogue police officer whom she took as a lover, who nearly beat her to death in a basement. This horror was behind the very desperation and fear of which I speak, and drew these women to me.

You know these three women. These three women knew me because I knew death. What was at the bottom of their art and their despair, their silence and their fear.

And as they left me, they dragged the corpse of their lives elsewhere, just as I with mine. And this is how we proceeded, rising and setting, until, in those brief moments of eclipse, the face behind the madness became too clear. Too extorted. Too visible to bear, ignore.

Chapter 18

I’m back, forgive me. It’s been several years since we’ve been speaking. I’ve forgotten precisely what it is we’re speaking about. What unfinished business or anger there was between us, if anything.

I’m still enraptured by some youthful image of your form that I uncovered amongst my papers on an autumn day where there was still a cusp of warmth to cling to. That we shared this in your beautiful image, naked upon the mattress, your eyes into the camera film. Your boots in the air behind you. Or you, with your knees upon the bed, baring yourself to me.

These images are carved like stone because they are. And this is, of course, the beautiful advent of photography. I write from an age, from a time where things can last. Real images of life, not simply drawings or paintings upon which we previously relied, frankly, out of desperation, to hold on to the moments which pass through our hands.

And moments now which I barely remember. Perhaps that gives me some measure of comfort and desire to dig back into these graves for you. These women whom I caught at a time of true beauty. And who knows what’s to happen afterwards, after life has beaten us into the ground with taxes and dilemmas which appear insoluble.

What will happen to us, and what happened to that memory of me touching your skin? In your room with the mirror next to the potted plants in the window overlooking the garden. Sitting on the picnic benches. Sharing a drink of beer.

What happened to that photograph of myself with the wine-stained lips, my brown, charred leather boots, in the alleyway, curiously lit by the yellow street lamp, on the way to play guitar in the abandoned park? Running through the groves of buildings, untouched for years. Canvases of art and dolls wrecked to dusty covers. And the thoughts of kissing you between long drinks of wine and liquor. The parties where we gazed up at the moon, icy streets, long walks back home to showers and bedrooms.

All of this beauty, which feels behind me in this cage of the dead man. Haunted by, as if a priestess of a prison. This patchwork Frankenstein, this body of history which I cannot grasp, but only summon in dreams and regurgitations which I sprawl here with true pleasure for you, the reader. But first and foremost for myself.

I must reacquire these pleasures as if they were objects, but they’re slips of time which burn as they fly into the image of the eye.

This is all who I was, and I realize now I’ve let it slip to you. What is beneath the name of the man who was something in the world, and even before he was something in the world, he was a sensation ripped from experience. I’ve given you the role. And perhaps worse, I’ve given you the passage of feeling which runs beneath it, like aqueducts or cracks in the river.

It is that man who is broken by the passage of that which has not come again, and thus resides in the opiated sleep of dreams, the reveries which bring about this reflection which I draw for you now, much like an addict takes to his favorite drug. His drug of choice.

This is the world which calls to me, which I cannot forget, that the present deprives me of. And a bastard world and a bastard time. Broken from the things I love, and yet I cannot bring them back.

Those schoolrooms, those parks, those girls, they don’t even exist anymore. What little they existed to me was but a sliver. That I caught their beauty, their words, their voice, their smile, in a moment in time which cannot be reproduced. Only thrown further into the burning of the furnace. Into the throes of cosmic heat.

Chapter 19

And yes, I loved her. The girl who worked on cinema, on scenes. Setting stages. And how predictable is my life? And she was not the only one who came into it bearing this role.

These girls who were dancers, who worked technical professions, preparing the illusion to be brought to life on film reel. These girls who painted landscapes cut with blues and pinks and grays, of horizons which could barely be discerned. Did I not see this illusion before my eyes?

But I was drawn to her, not only her body, but her spirit, in a way that engulfed me with curiosity and passion, however brief, however futile, however unable she was to open herself up fully to me or I to her.

I careened into these passions with the recklessness of one who is truly young and has nothing to lose. Does not fear death, and has no life. But is rather just a force of passion which rips through the wildflower. Produces such brilliant yellows and greens, oranges, purples, and pinks.

These were the hues of my canvases of horror, upon which I splayed beasts, half man, half creature. Something primordial and trapped between the twisting vine of species transformation.

And yet, I still remember her in the park garden. Kissing me. Asking the prolonged question with her eyes. And in Greece during the wildfires. Kissing me again. Asking the question with her wild eyes.

Myself proposing marriage, and her saying, “Marriage is not some simple, trivial thing.” My proposal being the only thing I could think to do. All that was.

And the love which splinters into some quiet dusk, where you sit or stand alone, leering at the moon, the same moon which gave you the night we met. The long night of wine and the empty museum. Walking through the bars, the row-house streets.

And I saw your face again, unexpectedly in my papers. And I loved you. Just the same.

Chapter 20

Why do I linger on this, this one woman? I suggest to you that it was the only thing that truly mattered. Perhaps outside of my work, or perhaps at all. That it was the experience and the encounter which lit what was only a bare emptiness and a march towards a predictable oblivion.

And for whatever strange reason of consequence or fate, I loved. And it was not the only time that I loved, and it was not the only way. But I loved just the same.

And this is perhaps what is at root of all of our digressions and dialogues. And get rid of this speech, abrupt, starting on again, off again, recollected, recovered, and discarded. Interrupted by sirens, songs. Girls, distractions, work.

It was that such a thing is and was possible. And it is and will be again. And I throw myself into life, then, like I always did. A beggar at the foot of love, and at the door of something which can possibly break me open again. Again and again, to that place.

Life provided me that chance. And it was a chance I took at the time in which I was alive. And it is a chance I will take again.

Between those two points, I have perhaps been nothing but dead. And that is the greatest horror: that without love, there is the suspended stillness that burns away at couches, eats away at days, and however brief the form taken of that love, there is a true and authentic preoccupation.

Preoccupation of one who is alive in the eyes and the mind of another.

Chapter 21

Is this enough sentimentality for you? I sit, and I smoke. The pipe curls around my lip, and I remember.

Now I live far away from the city, in what might best be described as a cave. A wood cabin with a smoking chimney. A chair, a cot, several books. A black iron tea kettle, and not much besides. Here, I conduct my reflections, like one who is after death, looking back upon the events of a life. Tallying the score with angels.

And is this the mystery? Are we meant to look back upon our life and times, describe it, decry it, shed tears for it? Is that what happens after death? Who is to say how little we know of the forms that possess us, and what beats within us, beyond the appearance it takes and the parts it’s assembled by?

The mysteries of the creation of the universe are only so far understood, even in this scientifically advanced day and age, only so far back into the annals of cosmic history. And what’s more, who is to say what and who, exactly, is assembling it?

I sit with these volitions, these loves. Proceed around them, examining them like artifacts, a multisided die. An old cabinet photograph. Or carved stone from an ancient civilization, depicting a rain god.

These loves themselves are artifacts and relics of the soul. They are where my life is. And this is the trouble, the despair of not having love, and the turning about to face love in the past. Longing in the past and the fleetingness of contact, if such contact ever was made.

And this is the trouble of love: it is the breach between two solitary forms. Two individuals in a night in which they burn and cross. Physical touch is barely one aspect of this unfolding. The deeper aspect, this communion at the depths of who one is as a person, however temporary. What one perceives, how one perceives, what one dreams and how one dreams, and to be able to share this across the borders of any given life.

And I see these failures of love, and the fourth woman I gave you. One whom I perhaps truly loved in a different way than the three. One who extended her hand to me insofar as she was able, through her damage, through her pain. One who saw and felt the very deformed terror of the body and the illusion of the name.

But it is to share this, and thus we have the craft of language, as we have with art, to communicate the incommunicable, the depths of the furnace of our experience that burns within. And this felt only by us.

And this is existential solitude. It is what is called subjectivity. That we live within ourselves, and feel within ourselves, and experience within ourselves, through the prism of our senses and our bodies. Perhaps even our souls.

And yet, how does that get out? Or become communicated to the beloved? This is, of course, our task, and the task of being in relationship. This communication. And perhaps this is the true reason for this book. Communication of what lies beneath.

And I can only speak this from myself once all else has been discarded. All other presumptions, names, and identities. The pure feeling of the experience, the encounter, and what coursed through me as I met the world.

This is the hidden relic of all of history. The dead soldiers. The farmers. The cattle, the mountain goats, perhaps even the flowers and the stones. What is within the realm of our experience has, in large part, to do with the architecture of its construction. And I have long since known this architecture is strange, particularly as it manifests at the locus of myself.

And thus, I confess, hopefully with the necessary honesty which brings about a revelation which I could not have even seen, but can only speak, and thus reflect upon in the quiet moments of the aftermath of its burning.

Chapter 22

None of this prattle changes anything. I am still in this cabin, chopping the firewood. Sitting over the kettle, muttering to myself.

And as there is no society, there is no Anatoly. There is the breath, the water, the lungs. And the hunger, which draws me out of my small room and into the forest.

The memory of these streets, these cities, these girls, is a marker at the end of the age of my life which is called the young.