Georgi Gospodinov - The Physics of Sorrow

At that time, all the newspapers were writing about auras and aliens. And it worked, the woman, instead of slapping me across the face, beamed. She said I was a true poet, and that she had immediately recognized this. Only a natural born poet could catch auras. (As if auras were carp.) She announced that she lived nearby and invited me to her place for a glass of wine. I agreed mostly out of a sense of guilt. It turned out that she lived alone. She took out the bottle, sat down quite close to me on the couch, despite the abundance of open seats, and pressed her body up against me. I beg your pardon, I’m a poet, I shot out, quickly standing up. As if wanting to remind her that I work mainly with auras and that bodies do not enter into my sphere of competence.

Sssssmaaack! Her slap quickly sent that project, too, into the heap of Gaustine’s great and misunderstood ideas.

He took the lead in the “Condom Catwalk” project himself.

All he needed to do was go to the people with the cash and explain what a goldmine he was offering. He came back crestfallen. We sat down, poured ourselves green cows (crème de menthe with milk) and he described in detail how as soon as he set foot in that obscenely rich agency, he knew that they wouldn’t appreciate the idea.

A fashion revue for rubbers. A revolution, Gaustine was getting enthused.

A revue-lution, I chimed in.

That’s good, remember it, he noted in passing before going on. No one has ever done that kind of fashion show, know what I mean? They’ve put everything imaginable on the catwalk, but never this accessory, Gaustine was getting worked up. Total minimalism. Condom producers will pour crazy cash into it. But they were like — how would the whole catwalk with condom-wearing models work? First, the state would slap them with a huge fine for pornography, second, no TV station would broadcast that kind of fashion show. Or if they did, they would have to put little black squares right over the most central part of the event.

And lastly, heh heh heh, they were just rolling with laughter, who’s gonna guarantee non-stop erections backstage, huh? Who? Do you have any idea what a huge job that’d be? Like changing tires in a Formula 1 pit stop. Ha ha ha. We’re talking serious pumping!

Gaustine waited for the jokes to die down and told them coldly: Come on, take your wangs out of your mouths nice and slowly. In fact, the show won’t involve live models.

What do you mean, the agency guys gaped at him.

To avoid all those problems, Gaustine said, we’ll use African ritual figures. They all have large phalluses.

Large what? the dudes asked, confused.

Large, erect phalluses, Gaustine repeated calmly.

Cocks, the boss explained.

That way we’ll add some art to the whole business, since only then is an erect phallus not pornography, Gaustine concluded his presentation.

They made him wait outside while they made their decision. They called him back in an hour later and turned him down. Because of the art thing. Who’s gonna want to look at some African statues with boners? They had nothing against art (or porn either, probably), but in this case neither was worth their while.

So this idea, too, was sent to the repository of failures. Fine, put it down in the notebook, Gaustine said. Clearly we’re ahead of our time. Some day they’ll be fighting each other tooth-and-nail for that idea. And so he piled up his treasures in the future. I was merely the treasurer. In the end, writing, too, is the preservation of failures. Now that would really make him mad. Something that hasn’t happened yet is not a failure, I can hear him saying.

I believe that somewhere else, in some other time and place, he is an ingenious and successful inventor or a great swindler.

Here, in the brown notebook of failures, also rest Gaustine’s other unrealized projects:

Vault for personal stories. We would hear out, preserve, and keep stories in full confidence for a certain period of time. If the client so desired, after his death, his story could be willed to his heirs.

Projections on the sky . (One of his most monumental projects.) An ultra-powerful apparatus would project upon the whole “screen” of the sky. In the beginning, he didn’t have a clear idea of what exactly would be projected, yet the idea of that celestial open-air cinema filled him with excitement. Such a huge space can’t just sit there empty and unused. Just imagine the whole hemisphere craning their necks and looking up at the same moment.

A month later the project had taken on much more concrete parameters. Let’s project clouds on the clouds themselves, best of all when there’s low, dense cloud cover.

And what will you project onto them?

Clouds, for example, for a start.

Clouds?

Clouds on clouds. Let’s see how nature reacts to the duplication, to the tautology. And it’ll be best if we project rain. Just imagine — cinematic rain from real clouds. At first, the audience will scatter, frightened. Like in The Arrival of a Train in La Ciotat Station in 1896. At the beginning and end of cinema stands a natural scare. There’s more. Garden of Novels . Classic novels will be planted in rich soil, watered and fertilized with manure to see which of them will bear fruit. A project for reestablishing balance — what is made of wood should once again return to the earth.

The project “A la Minute Architecture” is also here. Small wire sculptures recreating several seconds or a minute from the flight of the ordinary housefly; the wire should accurately reproduce all the twists and turns of the flight.

And the photo exhibition “Skies over various cities, photographed at three in the afternoon.” And Lord knows what else.

Gaustine. His only successful project was his own disappearance. One evening he came to say goodbye, I asked where he was going, sure that he had come up with some new scheme. To 1937, he said simply. I took it as a joke. Drop me a line, I said. At that time the ’90s were in full swing, the most interesting of times, but he disappeared. I had no idea (and still don’t) what he had come up with. But when I got the first letter followed by two or three postcards, written in the old handwriting from the 1930s — yes, I think every decade has its own hand — I realized that this time, unlike all the others, he had managed to pull it off.

(I’ve told more about this in some “And Other Stories.”)

I saw him one winter afternoon years later at a café in the London airport, holding a magazine in his hand and looking worried, as far as I could tell from a distance. My plane was about to take off, I just ran over to say “hi,” I almost threw myself down on his table. He looked at me coldly, I noticed his white turtleneck sweater, of the type that had long since gone out of style, Are the gentleman and I acquainted? I stood there stunned for a few seconds, heard my name on the last call for my flight and dashed back to the gate. I had noticed that the magazine he was reading was Time from 1968, opened up to an article on the war in Vietnam. It was January 2007.

A late text message at 3 A.M. years later.

I found out that cat urine glows in the dark. I thought that might interest you.

There was no name, but it could only be from one person. At least now he was in some closer year (unless he was already a cat).

Recently the London Times mentioned a new invention designed for rich yet harried businessmen with a taste for pinching pennies (or leading double lives) — a tourist agency for virtual tourism. The agency also supplies souvenirs from the untaken trip. You receive all the material evidence of a journey, including stamps in your passport, photos, ticket stubs from the Louvre, for example, or shells from the Cote d’Azure. (Maybe even sandwiches from the Sandwich Islands.) They tell you how your very own vacation went, outfit you with a whole set of memories. It’s enough to make you yourself believe that you’ve taken the trip. For a moment it crossed my mind that Gaustine was giving me a sign.