Denis Nushtaev - True Sadness

But if we want to return to our inner empire, we will need Ursula’s power, who had a natural talent not to notice this strange symbolics, and so had to find her principles and create her notions. To tell Ursula about his idea, Alan called me on the pretext of going to the cinema together. After the film (I can’t remember which one), he shared his idea.

– You are an absolute fool! – she replied to his offer.

– I will take you.

– Thank you, you are quite thoughtful. Might we have a baby and take him with us? Or better, I will become pregnant and give birth right there – he will be the first child born abroad. I like your aspirations not to become a bore but don’t be an idiot – at least you need a decent plan.

– We’ll do it. See, it is our possibility to wade to the unknown. People have strived for that in all times. Right now in front of us is a phenomenon which has already changed lives of all people, and if we don’t learn to be friends with it, to understand it, we will all soon die of boredom. We will build an ideal society of idiots. How can one think of an ideal society when we are on verge of a super-breakthrough? Especially when the government gives money to anybody who wants to go there.

After the film we were sitting in a small café. Observing Alan, when he was presenting Ursula his points, I felt uneasy of my presence next to their electric looks. And I thought that the birth of “divine” and “cosmic” in a man’s mind has the same way as giving a woman her mental shape. In a man’s mind, a woman is always in the process of evolution and objectification – in the process very similar to art, so a man, to a greater degree, creates but not perceives a woman. At first, he senses only a light spirit of dissimilarity between these angels and his own vicious entity, which, contrary to fallacy, is shown since infancy. A woman’s spirit has no body, or rather, a woman’s body shell is only its temporary shelter as well as her clothes, environment in which she lives, and so, a man gives the same sensual look to many women, seeing nothing reprehensible in it and being afraid to enter the area of any of them, not to induce his own vice in his own fantasies. Studying his fixations, a man loses his will, so what we call “vice” starts to live its own life, assembling a wonder-woman as a Florentine mosaic – from different parts of woman’s ontology. But gradually, a particular woman begins to form its own material planet in a man’s mind, which leads to a light gradient between the perceptions of different women, starting to manifest its difference between various soul angels. And here emerge nagging disadvantages, which deprive particular women of their female spirit, and they immediately fall into the world where our material vice lives, so the objectification of female passes through the research of the women who a man doesn’t like – a man protects his angel’s image for a long time from these whores of the material world, that’s why he wastes his quite real time on unworthy women (with his actions or thoughts), but finds this image only in details unable to assemble the wholesome fantasy. Gradually, a man ceases to have energy for the continuous and creative task, which paves the way for the dependence on particular relics, who jealously protect a female spirit in the very woman’s body and behaviour – these relics exist due to the difference from a man’s anthropology, so, a man has literally “kind” feelings to the tags of femininity, but eventually, every woman is objectified because of the presence of the human in her – simple wishes, jealousy and other vicious thoughts, as our human is initially connected not to high ideals but to vices, so any human community unites on the basis of common vices but not aims. This process of objectification happens continuously and with each perceived woman, so “an angel” stops being an aim and becomes a method of a woman’s perception – a benchmark for those women whom he likes, and gradually such criteria as “she was charming” step to the background if they don’t satisfy a man’s fetish, because a vice is a vessel for fantasy, which ceases immediately as soon as a man starts to perceive a woman-person (a woman’s main enemy to a man’s mind). A man can quite satisfy himself with such a woman but only temporarily – as well as with flashes of comprehension, which give us motivation to change only for a short period. Desire is not an aim but a milestone that triggers our thoughts and they, languishing in our mind, invent complicated ways to satisfaction, and when we try to reject our vicious desires, we actually return to our initial desire, which demands not satisfaction but maintenance. Isn’t it the same with divine?

Afraid to lose the draft of thought and deciding to interrupt their argument a little, I asked for paper and a pen, and Ursula gave me her sketchbook which Alan had presented to her trying to make her show her creative spirit, and unexpectedly for me, Alan snatched it from her hands – I had never noticed such sharp movements in him, but I definitely understood that it was the time for me to leave. Only a few days later I learned from Alan that the beginning of this project became the end of their relationship but it didn’t influence his wild intention.

After what happened to Alan, Ursula told me for the first time that he had been beating her, and once again I became assured that violence is not flapping arms. To me, thoughts about mind and violence always went side by side, and I think that the thoughts of violence have more metaphysical nature than people tend to think. These ponderings were caused by my observations that fighting people in a bar do not spread so much violence as a person who quietly weaves inner jealousy towards everybody but shows nothing with the actions. On the contrary, such a person is often courteous as was Alan.

– I think violence can never be justified. Never – even protecting close people. If you want to protect them, you should run away from any signs of violence but not to show protection when you are cornered… You know, he sometimes beat me.

– Why haven’t you ever told me about it?

– Because he was a good man. One day we were in a restaurant and he told me: “If I ever cheat on you, she wouldn’t be this kind of a chick. Nothing can be more stupid than a farm chick. I’d better sleep with a Boucheme’s bust, it seems to have more life”. He meant the students celebrating their graduation and behaving provocatively.

Ursula was crying while she was speaking, and I thought how women’s tears are different from men’s – a woman always cries about an unrealized reality and a man cries about a shattered dream. Walking along the street with her, I looked at the habitual environment, but Ursula’s tears coloured my soul even more than the rain. But no matter how habitual the word “soul” is, which we use in totally different contexts, we are quite far from understanding some rich vastness of our own depths, having a mixed nature of two substances: cosmic and our own – this mixture hints at the content of our thoughts, aspirations, feelings, which, on the one hand, are ultimately close to us, on the other hand, do not belong to us at all. And probably this formula is the best definition of ourselves with our intrinsic content, which bears the spirit of the wholesome space but not its dissolving parts, to which we got used to due to our imperfection – and for a fleeting moment it became clear to me that all the living was born beyond the space and then was mixed and put here. Some short time later, this moment of comprehension left only a dry formula: “was born beyond the space…” – generally meaningless because I can peer into this combination of words infinitely but cannot develop that short moment of comprehension – it should be looked for again.