Russia and You

Sometimes life is like a Russian novel. More so, the more I read Russian novels. I love Russia, at least as it was before the Soviets. There's a sense of greatness about it. Of indelible sacrifice, as though every minute is subject to the painful weight of a world on its back. I don't think anyone is so aware of the possibilities of humanity than the Russian authors. America is content with the thaumaturgy and fantasia that come with wealth and power. Russia looks on the same and sees choices like charity or greed, duty or squander, an overwhelming responsibility to be great that crushes most humans and grinds them flat. There are highs and lows in Russia. Palaces and poverty. Drunkenness or starvation.

They say, I think, or I say anyway, that the class system exists to serve the middle class. The proletariat live difficult and unfulfilled lives, struggling with all there worth to climb out of their problems, reach elsewhere. The upper class are fulfilled to a point of excess, completely out of control in that they have nothing to live for and nowhere to go unless they go about assigning some arbitrary task to themselves, be it governance of others or personal pleasure.
And in the middle we work. We see that we are capable of worse and capable of better. The middle is the place to be if you're looking for meaning in life.

Russia has no notion of the middle class. I think that might be a part of it. Everything is desperate, everything greater and more polar by the elimination of that middle ground. I think when you're cold and starving the idea of owning something like a caftan or a horse becomes ridiculous, not even something to desire. And when you have an estate and a title and an inheritance, the idea of suffering becomes ridiculous. Princes can go about the work of the serfs effortlessly and enjoy doing so, because work and life and living are just an amusing sort of game.

So wherever you stand, it's ridiculous. Why not fall in love in a heartbeat? Why not fall out of it the very next moment? Why not engage in some trivial cruelty just to see what happens by it? Why not bet your last copek? What's one more days bread, if tomorrow you will have to go without? Let go of any prospect of salvation, save some time. If you are to be destitute, if you have to reach that point, why wait?

The material does not matter. That's what I see in all this. The rich get poorer, and the poor get poorer. People die, even. But not from hunger. From nihilism. From madness, or chance. And it is these things that are the true stage in the lives of myself and all the Natashas and Raskolnicovs and Bezuhovs. Life isn't a struggle for independence or security or peace, so why bother? It's a struggle to stay on the raft when the wind is blowing you turvy and you can't find anything to live for and everything seems stupid and cruel and falls to pieces. It's about holding on to your integrity when you're the only one who seems to have a use for it. It's about being a witness, an observer, without destroying the experiment by the act of observation.

And I'm starting to learn that it's not Russia. Russia's just a place that happened to notice these things, but they exist everywhere. Up in a tree by lonely parking lot, in crowded cafes, in small and fettered lodgings. There are endless moments when a couch or a bed takes on the qualities of that raft, at once becoming a trap and a safe haven, and I lie there contemplating everything beyond the couch, not daring to touch it because I'm not a fish and the ocean isn't made for me. So I'll sit there brooding, at once very large and very small, and wrestle with the notion of greatness, trying to reconnect with the part of me that writes... because writing is like turning that raft into a spaceship. Why swim? Why bother? You'll never reach land. You have to make your own world. That's what it's all about, really. The ability to acknowledge that though the world may be a tiamatian crazy mess, it need not be your mess. You can pick yourself up, set a world aside, do some good, love. Those who do so are the true heroes of Russian prose.

If I were a Conservative my blog would look like this:

Another day spent fighting. It never stops. Everyone knows it’s going down the tubes. The world, that is. Human civilization. The virtues they claim to aspire to – It’s crazy. It’s all damned crazy and it just keeps spinning out of control. We wear t-shirts to oppose rape when we should be hunting people down and castrating them. We complain about over-population when all anybody seems to want out of life is to churn out their own litter and live in the suburbs. Half the country is getting diseases spread by drugs, sex and open wounds, and the other half is getting cancer. We watch life through screens, letting people half-way around the world to the legwork for us when we could be imagining and thinking and exploring for ourselves, or we blast our music as loud as we can in endless loops so we don’t have to hear our brains working. No-one reads anymore, I swear it. I’ve been looking for them, but they aren’t out there. I just see these narcoes standing asleep in lines at shopping centres or post offices or those thrice-damned government places for the forms and the licenses, and they’re just sitting there, waiting for their turn, calculating how long it’s going to take while they complain about how long it’s already taken. It’s downright depressing. Sometimes,

sometimes I have this sort of dream only it isn’t really a dream because I’m awake and aware of it, but it’s just so real even though it isn’t that I have to call it a dream, and in this dream it’s already happened. The end of the world. It’s like all the computers are working and the power’s still on and the people in the city are all there, but they’re just machines going and doing the same stupid stuff every day because they’ve been programmed to, and they’ve been doing it so long they’ve forgotten that it can be any different. And all the live ones, all the ones who can see what’s happened, they’ve gone sort of crazy and feral, like they want nothing more than to pick up a hammer and start swinging it at people to see if it’s just gears and cogs that spill out. And I see them and the robots and all and I think to myself, “I’m the last one on Earth” and in a way it’s true,

not true in the dream but true in real life, because no-one god damn reads anymore. It’s just me and a few misfit types out there who kind of get what I’m driving at, but not all the way there. If they read it’s because they’re trying to get in the book. They want something that makes the world go away, something they can put their five star recommendation on like it’s a drug that takes you on a really good trip, but that’s all. No-one pulls anything out of books and it screws me up, because that’s what books are, really, if you treat them like you should. They’re supposed to make the world so much better, because if you’re reading and you find something you like, that really gets you rolling, that touches you deep in whatever part of you you thought was that sacred space nothing would ever touch or understand, then you want it to get out there. You want it to become a real part of your world, because like it or not this great dead planet is the one we keep getting dragged back to at the end of the story.

What the hell is it that stops you people? Why do you keep going on vacation when you could use the cash to make your home just a little bit more lovable? How come you can only see God around other people, but you can’t stand the thought that you need to find her inside of you when you two are alone?

Christ, it scares me. People acting on their feelings instead of acting to create feelings. Thinking that they’re just one person inside, instead of a million little voices who say ‘I want but I want but I want but I want’ and all wanting conflicting things. They say ‘we want’ and pick one, just because they think that’s sane. You know what you people are doing? You’re staring at screens again. Do some legwork, you bastards.

But I’m not, thank the Universe. You folks do whatever you like. I’m just going to sit here and live my life my way, and I encourage you to live yours your way. The fact that my way is better is completely besides the point.