Victor Pelevin - The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

Your world will soon be like ours (at least, for those who are kept on to service the extraction and export of oil), but as yet it still has twilight zones where a salutary ambivalence is the rule. And that is precisely where a soul like yours can be, if not happy, then at least in balance. If these zones of ambivalence are created for you by others, then enjoy them while they still exist. The world will not always be like that. This is me preaching to you in response to your lectures.

Now about English men. Don’t judge them from your brief encounters in the National. They’re quite different here. Do you remember the writer Yuan Mei, whom our sister U married in 1739? I don’t expect you’ve forgotten him - a scholar from the Hanlin Academy who studied the Manchurian language and collected stories about evil spirits . . . By the way, he knew who our sister really was. That was precisely why he married her.

His book (it was called What Confucius Did Not Speak Of ) is half made up of stories, but it also contains some intriguing ethnographic sketches. In those times England was known as the ‘Land of the Redhairs’. This is what Yuan Mei wrote about the English - I cite the passage in full:

‘407. INHABITANTS OF THE LAND OF THE REDHAIRS SPIT AT YOUNG SINGERS

The inhabitants of the Land of Redhairs often engage in dissolute behaviour with young singers. When they arrange their carousals, they invite young singers, undress them then sit round them and spit at their secret place. They do not require any greater intimacy. When they have finished spitting, they let them go, with a generous reward. This is called “money from the common pot”.’

This story, which might appear to be historically inaccurate, in fact reflects very accurately how an English aristocrat deals with a woman’s soul when it opens itself to him (fortunately, the system of privileged education here transforms most of them into homosexuals). Before, when I observed the English, I used to wonder what was hidden beneath that impenetrable armour-plating of hypocrisy forged over the centuries. And then I realized - it was precisely that simple act. There is nothing else there, and that minimalism is what guarantees the stability of the order of things here.

Believe me, if you come to London, you will feel like a spittoon wandering alone among snipers who hawk and spit into your very soul, men for whom equality for women means only one thing - the chance to save a bit on ‘the money from the common pot’.

As for the super-werewolf... You know, it seems to me you have become too bogged down in introspection. Think - if everything that is most important were inside ourselves, then why would we need the external world? Or do you believe that it no longer holds any possible surprises for you and it is enough simply to sit by the wall on a dusty meditation rug, pushing away the thoughts that crowd round you, like a swimmer pushing away dead jellyfish? What if one of them turns out to be a golden fish that grants wishes? I think it is still too soon to give up on this world - by doing that you might find you have given up on yourself. You know what my hubby said to me yesterday? ‘The super-werewolf will come, and you will see him as clearly as you see me now.’ Even if in my heart of hearts I agreed with you, how would I dare to argue with the head of the house of Cricket? :-=))). But let us discuss this when we meet, my dear. In a week Brian and I shall be in Moscow - don’t turn your mobile off!

Heads and tails,

E

When I finished reading the letter, I shook my head. Someone was in for it soon. The doodle :-=))), which looked like the war criminal Hitler grinning, was an ominous sign that E Hu-Li used - it meant that she had bleak and cruel intentions in mind. But what else was to be expected from the most pitiless fox in our entire family? She’s the same in everything, I thought. Ask her for help, and she advises you to think about something else. The clouds, she says, are just an illusion . . .

Although, perhaps she’s right? After all, things aren’t nearly as bad as I thought only yesterday. I was bursting with the desire to tell someone about the affair I had been forced to start. But who? Of course, I could spill the whole thing out to a taxi driver, and then make him forget what he’d heard. Only it was dangerous to play pranks like that on the road. No, I have to wait for E Hu-Li, I thought. She’ll certainly be interested in listening to me. And apart from that, she had been making fun of my virginity for so many centuries that it would be a pleasure to throw the news in her face. For all her sophistication, she had never had any lovers like that, except perhaps for one yakshi-devil in the sixteenth century. But compared to Alexander, even he seemed pitiful . . .

At this point I came back to my senses - my sister’s letter had reminded me about the most important thing of all.

I had known for a long time that the moment when you are overflowing with the joys or sorrows of life is the best time to practise meditation. I turned off the computer and laid out a foam plastic rug on the floor. It’s absolutely fantastic, a real gift for a meditator, it’s a shame there weren’t any in ancient times. Then I put a cushion filled with buckwheat husks on it and sat on the cushion in the lotus position, with my tail lowered on to the floor.

The spiritual practice of foxes includes ‘contemplation of the mind’ and ‘contemplation of the heart’. Today I decided to begin my session with contemplation of the heart. The heart plays no part in this practice, apart from a metaphorical one. It’s an accident of translation: the Chinese hieroglyph ‘xin’, which stands for ‘heart’ here, has many different meanings and ‘contemplation of the innermost essence’ would probably have been a more accurate translation. And from a practical point of view, it would have been more correct to call the technique ‘tugging the tail’.

Every child knows that if you tug a dog or a cat by the tail, they feel pain. But if you pull a fox by the tail, then what happens is beyond the understanding of even the most intelligent tailless monkey. At that moment the fox feels the full weight of all her bad deeds. This is because she uses her tail to commit them. And since every fox, apart from the total failures, has a whole heap of bad deeds to her name, the result is an appalling attack of conscience, accompanied by terrifying visions and insights so overwhelming that the fox loses the very desire to carry on living. The rest of the time our conscience doesn’t bother us at all.

A lot here depends on the strength of the tug and how unexpected it is. For instance, when we happen to snag our tails on a bush during a chicken hunt (I’ll tell you about that later), we also experience light pangs of conscience. Only while we are running, the corresponding muscles are tensed, and so the effect is not so pronounced. But the essence of the practice of ‘tugging the tail’ lies in giving your own tail a powerful tug at a moment when the area of the tail muscles is as relaxed as possible.

Not everything here is as simple as it seems. In actual fact ‘contemplation of the heart’ cannot be separated from ‘contemplation of the mind’, because the correct performance of the techniques requires consciousness to be layered off into three independent streams:

1. the first stream of consciousness is the mind which remembers all its dark deeds from time immemorial.

2. the second stream of consciousness is the mind which spontaneously and unexpectedly makes the fox tug her own tail.

3. the third stream of consciousness is the mind as the abstract observer of the first two streams and itself.