Оксана Забужко: Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex

(I believe that all those rigorous clerics had a point—the iconoclasts, the Puritans, and the rest of them—that the very idea of an icon or a religious sculpture profanes the sacred—the joint venture of religion and art truly is a compromise on religion’s part, an inevitable concession—from exhaustion—enough already!—because of an inability, any longer, to establish direct contact without resorting to various obvious vulgar devices: peeling gilding on wooden boards, an angel’s nose chewed off by bad weather, a statuette crudely decorated with motley rags. Quite possibly at one time there had been direct contact—there had, but what’s the point of trying to track it down now?… Religion, having become a social institution, has gone to the dogs—in church, where I dragged myself one day in the hope of somewhat dispersing the dark nimbus cloud that burned my brain day after day without allowing a single cooling thought to slip through, there reigned a distinct spirit of a closed society: curious glances at the stranger, clustering of old friends on the balcony after the service in separate groups, stares, laughter, meaningful exchanges, shared news—people showed up the way they would to a party, to “socialize,” and praying in front of them felt somehow inappropriate.) Right of access to the plan is still maintained by us—individual access, because humanity itself over the past several hundred years has been moving further and further away, in leaps and bounds (perhaps beginning with the Renaissance, with Mirandola’s audacious: “Man! Adam! I have put you in the center of the world!”—so go ahead and stand there, may you stand there till Kingdom Come, and now every psycho with a paralyzed arm thinks he’s Adam while we afterward scratch our heads unable to tally the millions killed: was it twenty, or forty, or all the way up to sixty?)—while the memory of lost divine status keeps teasing us, it so-o entices us, flickering seductively, but too bad, as soon as we step a little closer, oops—yup, there he is, waiting at the door watching us and rubbing his paws—the One who would be Author—he’d so love to wedge his way in there and take over, but can’t do it himself; only by riding in on our backs, on the backs of those with access can he get in there and that’s why it’s a hundred times safer for us not to even try anything, to forget all about access and play obediently in the sandbox, shuffling around those puzzle pieces, creating out of them newer and newer useless combinations—lining up Campbell’s soup cans in a row, displaying rubber chairs dressed in women’s shoes at the Biennale, blowing streams of soap bubbles onto newspaper pages—identical, meaningless words, sometimes it ends up being quite entertaining, kilometers of texts (that’s right, not poems anymore, texts ) about your first ride on a bicycle, about your first period, or about nothing at all—it’s okay, “interesting,” cackles the gaggle of critics, university professors, doctors of literature, forgive me if I’ve offended anyone present—they say that if you seat three monkeys at a typewriter that between now and eternity they have a chance of clicking out a Hamlet for us, ladies and gentlemen, I’m going to reveal a terrible secret to you now: art in our times is slowly going to the dogs because—it’s afraid .

Only love protects us from fear: only it alone can shield us, and if we carry it within us, then… then… (I honestly don’t know what then, I don’t know what will happen now with that man, what more destruction will be wrought by that black tornado with a slight, phosphorus-pale figure locked in an iron grip getting pummeled in its vortex—a “devil’s wedding” on dusty fall roads, my grandmother used to tell me: if you see it, step aside, she herself still knew how to throw a knife horizontally through the eye of the whirlwind, and then blood would show on the knife, all that we know how to do these days is perhaps whip a knife across the kitchen at the man we love—the gesture seems to be the same—a copy, an imitation, a reflex of tribal memory with its inner meaning dead, a gesture with which, rather than shield yourself, you throw yourself into the very center of the “devil’s wedding.” You mustn’t, oh you mustn’t chase the cold starlight of loveless beauty: those aren’t the allies you want on this path.

—that’s the sort of stuff I was writing, I finally got my wish, so to speak, look at me—Lady Dante! Yet Dante not only had Virgil, he also had Beatrice. And if there is no love living inside us at all times then, instead of expanding, the tunnel through which we race with such excitement grows narrower and narrower, it becomes harder and harder to squeeze through, and we no longer fly, as it seemed at first, but crawl with great effort, coughing up clumps of our own lungs and also that, which was once called our gift and which, my God, really was a gift!—and we ooze onto canvases like squashed bugs, with the colorful spots of our own poison, and we choke on carrion words that stink of rot and hospital carbolic acid, and all kinds of unpleasant things begin to happen to us, insane asylums and prisons show up on the horizon (depending on your luck), and then the only thing remaining is to jump off a bridge (Paul Celan), tie a noose around your neck in the hallway of someone’s house (Marina Tsvetaeva), stick your head into a gas oven (Sylvia Plath), lock yourself in a garage, maximizing emissions from an exhaust pipe (Ann Sexton), swim out to sea as far as possible (Ingrid Jonker), the count goes on, “to be continued,” so what do you think, is this normal, is this the way things should be? But the further you go on, the worse it is for these “things,” nobody lives to see their “Faust” anymore, what do you think, this is a coincidence, you think that people have less talent these days?… It’s their chances that are decreasing, chances are decreasing for all of us.

Only love protects us from fear. But who (what) will protect love itself from fear?

(And there are more and more sex shops with every year, mechanical devices, oh, these advantages of the technological age, sex over the telephone, they got me that way once, too—at home, in my own home, where did you think: took me for a ride totally, never did find out who it was—at first a female voice disguised as a whisper—I took it to be a friend, a pretty screwed-up gal: “Olka? Is that you?”—it was no Olka, as it turned out later, even though that thing seemed to confirm: yeah, me—and they began the scam: I’m in trouble, I’m calling from someone’s apartment: there’s two guys here, they say they want to rape me—either in the bum or in the mouth, there’s one of them coming now, I’m scared, “Where are you? I’ll call the police, give me your address!” but the non-Olka was gone and instead a young male voice, breathing threateningly, came on the line: “You’re her friend, right? You want me to let her go? Then moan for me”—what wouldn’t you do for a dear friend in trouble, it was disgusting—I tried to plug in my sense of humor, it’s okay, it’s like they’re asking you to sing a little song for them, but when finally, in reply to my helplessly painful cry of humiliation [you’re screaming from the abuse and they think it’s from pleasure, or maybe they’re not thinking that at all, maybe your pain is exactly what it takes to make them come?] the male voice abruptly snapped, “Done,” and a busy signal came in on the receiver, short beeps like drops of water from a leaky tap, I, wiping my moist forehead, nonetheless felt—laughs aside—raped: that was a young healthy man on the line, could it be that, damn it, he, too, was afraid of a live woman?)