Denis Nushtaev - True Sadness

But Alan was proud of his broad-mindedness and, probably, the leap of his narcotic imagination pushed him to develop the idea of going abroad, which he had mentioned before. He told me about his determination the next day in my room. He came early in the morning, which he hadn’t often done, and almost immediately went to the core of his topic, giving numerous reasons and tending to a cup almost every second – he seemed to be in a tense disposition and drank a lot of coffee. But for me, it was more interesting to gaze at morning rays of light on the table, which seemed especially golden and nonintrusive that day. But when I understood what Alan was talking about, his decision was unexpected to me and hinting me how badly we know our friends and relatives: or, rather we know their static state, but when comes the time of change, only true feelings and sensations remain stable, all the rest is swept from the field of our life.

– Physics, philosophy – they will never lead to significant advances because they don’t have anything new. We need a novel method of uncovering reality, which the island gives. We must be engaged in an idea of a real movement. These people sitting still and scared of everything that will not help them warm their flabby snouts must not be the landmarks in our search. They can’t even buy flowers to fuck well. Going beyond is a wonderful idea not to dry out in this bog. You know, I have been thinking a lot about mentality and concluded that you were right – everything that we see is an illusion. I am sure that we can invent an instrument to break this illusion and find the way to new realities…

After these words I felt such a stream of inner malice and violence that his words still sound in my head like a prophecy harbingering the upcoming disaster – I have never talked about the evanescence of reality and when I was talking about “illusion”, I only meant our personal inability to perceive accumulating layers of perception, which take so much of our energy, that we are often unable to understand everything according to its inner nature.

– I recall you were going to start a family? – I asked half-jokingly to stop this delirium, but indignation from my phrase spread over his face.

– Children are too easy, it’s the easiest way to achieve something, but then we will never move and will die of hunger on this island – sooner or later, it is going to happen as said in your lecture by… – here Alan mentioned the name which I completely forgot, but whose lectures he really liked – I was looking for these lectures later but couldn’t find, or I might not have wanted to find, – you must listen to them. He actually speaks about illusions which surround us.

– Yes, but I meant those illusions that are only in ourselves, and the problem itself never leaves our mentality. As if it exists only in us. Why do you think that we are surrounded by some worlds? – I had a feeling that I was talking to Alan for the first time, although, I had already had this impression before.

I gradually started to lose the thread of our conversation and started to concentrate on my own soul. Only some words and sensations were left in my memory after this dialogue. “Maybe, you don’t want to develop your idea yourself?”. “No, I meant a completely different thing”. “I think you go aside from the real way”. “What is the criterion of this way?”. “We can prove it. You can’t prove philosophy – it’s just a fib and yet another illusion”. “I don’t think so, do you want to go abroad the island?”. “Yes, this exit is the most important for our island, though being a dangerous enterprise”. “Whyever did you start to have such thoughts?”. “I was observing a bee flying in our flat, that was banging the glass to fly away but couldn’t notice an open window in two metres. It was so silly and limited. I didn’t help it because my help would have killed its will. I was just watching her hit and thought that we are banging in the same way. We are no less unhappy than this bee. Suddenly I was so furious with these snotty thoughts – I wanted to jump out of the window myself, but then returned to my human consciousness and understood that the window is our border”.

Earlier I liked various analogies, which seem to help to understand the topic, but later, when Alan did what he did, I found their dangerous meaning. Analogies are an attempt to manifest your thought for another person and they serve as an excellent way to explain, but any explanation is justification, even a scientific one is justification, which we recourse to admit our inability to understand a deeper truth than a shallow comparison of a person to a bee. But “I decided to go abroad and even if I go alone, so be it” and “I am used to being not understood by people, to inability of achieving synergy with them, although I expected another reaction from you, but you just stuck too deep in your thinking – lately I haven’t understood it at all”.

Following my spiritual weakness, I agreed to think about my participation in the mission, although I was sure of my resounding refusal, again, due to my cowardice – contemplation of a faint-hearted philosopher was much nicer to me than useless bravado of newly-minted knights, but inside I agreed to observe the project process and take part in its preparation. I also hoped that Alan would face the strict principles of his beloved, who would take decisive measures in order to nip this project in the bud. Ursula. Incredibly skinny, a bit taller than Alan and with an eagle face. She was a real stalker in life, a strategist in communication, a curious child in thinking, and in my imagination was always presented as an amazon grown up in the wild forests abroad the island. Her original light mannerism shifted my understanding of beauty, and I started learning to find charm in all faces – both men’s and women’s, gradually removing the layers of sociality and intellectuality from genuine features, which have the traces of the life which moves parallelly with our social fate. That face, in which Ursula created her own kingdom with steadfast principles, felt in all her caprices, which I observed beyond the gate of their relationship. She spent most of her life in that kingdom, thus making the public feel the absence, where we can easily guess the arrogance, egotism and even the lack of intellect or – what is even worse for a social human – originality.

Symbolics of a social human is the most developed branch of science, of which nobody even speaks, because one swims in it like a fish in water or as an experienced comedian in the world of human vices. This symbolics fills our minds, which yearn for a real human, but cannot accept him, so we invent notions which, as we think, accurately describe a human soul – selfishness, avarice, gluttony and so on. But let us imagine that a man considers himself kind and in the moment of distraction forgets to leave a tip in a wonderful restaurant, where he had a date with a woman, who, following even a more ancient science than the symbolics of a social human, starts to rebuke him with her look, and he, not suspecting the mysterious conclusions, which circle around his head like a halo, constantly reminds himself of his kindness.

And the broken process of mutual trust makes her think about her companion’s greed, and him, starting to feel light detachment, think about insufficient effort that he makes. He begins to show what best he considers in himself – kindness, and on the peak of mutual misunderstanding, she declares him cheap, and he – because of the eternal man’s weakness in front of a woman – starts to justify himself not understanding what the reason of this deduction is, implanting the opinion that he is cheap into himself, and that kindness is the reason of his meanness, and he himself is the meanness in its genuine sense, as if descended from Giotto’s frescos, and, to cut this image out of his heart, our hero turns to the divine power of god Susanoo’s legendary blade, but in fact he cuts the way back to himself and begins to live in an illusory world of a “social human”, where the abyss between opinions of different people is smaller than the abyss between a thought and one person’s thought of a thought. In this world of Giotto’s images, we rather tend to believe the others than ourselves, and so people’s exterior attitude to us is so contagious: someone’s distorted fantasy or their genius is closer to us than comprehension of our shortages or our genius. And, as Little Prince, we are thrown to the different planets of human vices – that is how the symbolics of a social human works.