Ricardas Gavelis - Vilnius Poker

But over time my delight with the theory of pure reason faded. It explained a portion of Their pathologic, but did absolutely nothing to reveal the purpose. Who needs all that? Plato proclaims the kingdom of kanukai until he’s hoarse, drives the dreamers and poets out of his state, deceives the throngs without ever feeling a pang of conscience — but why? In whose name, to whose advantage? To the advantage of those who are called “philosophers,” that is, the caste who assert that it’s proper to live in just exactly this way? But what are the criteria for the caste? What binds and unites them? Maybe those “philosophers” are the smartest, or the most handsome, or the tallest, or must be brunettes, or have a mole on the right shoulder blade? There are no criteria; They aren’t united by either government or reason. All I needed was to read Kafka carefully to understand there’s no reason in Their system. Both Kafka’s The Trial and The Castle are a priori senseless and pointless — actually, Their purpose hides beyond the boundaries of ordinary logic. I understood that the germ of Their system, the source of Their gray magic, must be looked for at an extreme depth — beyond logic and reason, beyond the understanding of ethics and beauty, perhaps in the depths of time and mythology. Only there can you find the crossroads where Their development turned in an entirely different direction than human development.

The biological aspect is extremely important here. Their biological origin obscures even racial differences: just look at how similar Brezhnev and Mao Tse-tung became in their kanukish faces. The depths of time must hide a hideous biological branching of species: They and humans. What’s to blame for that? Radiation? Emanations from outer space? The finger of God?

The Arabian Gnostics mention a vague power, Satar , which turned people against the word of God; even though they heard it, they immediately forgot it. Ancient Japanese sources mention a handless god of the plague, a strange plague that killed only certain select people — most often poets and wise men. That’s just where Their roots are hiding. Humanity wasn’t entirely blind; they recorded Their traces on many occasions, and They are not so entirely omnipotent — they didn’t manage to erase all of the traces. But where did They emerge from, when did they weave their cobwebs over Europe and Asia? There are simpler questions too, questions that are closer to me. For example, this one: from where and when did some kind of Lithuanians show up on the shores of the Baltic Sea, speaking a language extremely close to Sanskrit, but without any nomadic traits? Did they hatch out of a cosmic egg rotting in the Lithuanian swamps, or did they at one time, for just an instant, know how to overcome enormous distances, and then forget that knowledge? Did the Lithuanians escape Them this way, or conversely — were they a secret unit, a landing-party thrown into Their expanding sphere? A question from more recent times, connected with the first: by what means did Lithuania in the 13th century become the only state in Europe that wasn’t christened, that didn’t give in to the kanukish dictates of the popes of the Middle Ages? And why did an unappeasable desire arise in that state to penetrate into Russia and attempt to conquer it? Was this Their satanic influence, or did the Lithuanians simply have a sacred mission to get to Their center?

Kafka, understandably, couldn’t write about what Joseph K. was accused of. In his will he ordered that all of his writings should be destroyed, fearing Their revenge even after death. (Could he have foreseen Nietzsche’s tragedy?)

None of us know what we’re accused of. Their purpose can’t be described logically; only metaphors and presentiments, absurd associations, or poetic juxtapositions can be of assistance here. The majority of all definitions and terms are dictated by Them . ( They really love creating terms and slogans.) Only poetic intuition can lead to The Way; it’s the only thing that penetrates through their pathological armor like smell through solid rock. The thought that asserts that a river and a snake have a common soul because both of them wind , that all of the world’s sounds hide in silence, accomplishes more than the most rational theories in the world.

Oh no, it’s no accident that the champions of kanukism — starting with Plato, ending with Stalin — so hate and fear fantasies and poetics, that they tried so hard to make everything pragmatic, to explain it, to substantiate it.

Poetry kills Them , gives Them convulsions, wrings Their guts — like boric acid does to cockroaches!

But there is no poetry around; everything is familiar and deathly boring. The post covered with peeling announcements (next to it should perch two stupefied, lame pigeons), then the wide steps to the library (and there — a degenerate dog, sniffing at the ground that’s been torn up by the construction workers, drawing strange hieroglyphics with its tail). All of this has already been or will be. And I must pay absolutely no attention to it all. I must not feel the world outside, not even my own body. Only by these means is it possible to guard against Their attack: to be a complete void, to be imbued with readiness to fend off an attack at any moment. Nothing concerns me and nothing can concern me. I am a tensed string; I am a compressed spring. I am nothing, so I am invincible.

But Martynas keeps waving his arms, flinging cigarette ashes to the sides. What does he want from me? I don’t want to see this faded movie with third-rate actors. I have more important goals; I cannot waste time uselessly. I have to protect myself from Them; I need to hoard my black knowledge. I am no longer of this world; I am long since dead.

These thoughts are always inspired by Them . Thank God, once more a bright light flashes in my head, once more I feel I love this painfully blathering little man, I even love the women in our section, I love Stefa, constantly getting underfoot. I love this entire accursed city, because without it, without these women, without Martynas and Stefa, I wouldn’t be, either. If I were to forget the others, I would be destroyed in the blink of an eye. After all, I have set out on The Way; I torture myself and go out of my mind not for my own amusement, but in their name, in the name of all the kanuked and those who still resist, however pathetic that may sound. They’re all that supports me. They and everyday life, in which you sometimes, at least briefly, succeed in forgetting the horrors and the secrets, in turning into an ordinary little person looking for a breather and amusement.

“Listen, Vytautas,” says Martynas, “Let’s go somewhere and get a drink, huh? Some place where no one will find us.”

You must not just decline, not regret in advance the time you’ll lose. You must obediently agree — when you’re balancing on a razor edge above the abyss, every meager little pleasure could be your last. You must go everywhere, wherever you’re asked: amuse yourself a bit, swim in a lake, or go mushroom hunting. You barely manage to nod, and Martynas has already reviewed the map of obscure bars in his head and unerringly picks Erfurtas: during the day it’s absolutely empty in Lazdynai. If someone like us were to show up there, they would be looking for solitude too. All that’s left is to find transportation.

With Martynas I feel more or less safe (like I do with Stefa): he’s been carefully checked out. At one time I was convinced that Martynas was a dangerous spy of Theirs. I discovered that he had filled half of our computer’s disk with some sort of text of his, which I couldn’t read. The writing was encrypted, and if that wasn’t enough, you couldn’t get near it without going through a special procedure. It was like those books in special collections — it existed, but you couldn’t get at it. If you tried to break into it directly, the writing would have been entirely erased — we’d rather die than give our information up.