The Fireshirt

"Igor Stravinsky's Hawaiian Shirts Declared Illegal in Australia."

-- An actual headline from one of my dreams this week.

The Many Lives and Countless Deaths of Daniil Ivanovich

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Writers are often told to "write what they know," but what does it mean, to know? We know our own imaginations, our own obsessions, and whatever heritage we choose.

For example, Jason E. Rolfe knows the heroes of the Russian avant-garde, although he has never met them; he knows the moods and complexities of their iconic city, Saint Petersburg, although he has never been there; he knows and loves the heritage of Absurdist literature that informs his work.

All that he knows comes together in his latest collection from Black Scat Books, THE MANY LIVES AND COUNTLESS DEATHS OF DANIIL IVANOVICH. Whether you find this book maddening or hilarious will depend on your sensibilities, but it made me guffaw like a sick-hearted hyena.

If we recognize absurdity and pointlessness in life, we can greet it with anger, sadness, compassion, or laughter. Rolfe has chosen to laugh:

"'Perfect nonsense goes on in the world,' the nose of the statue of Nicholas I formerly disguised as the nose of the statue of Nikolai Gogol whispered, as if reading Daniil’s thoughts. 'Sometimes there is no plausibility at all....'

"The five characters stood around for several minutes, silently studying their surroundings. It seemed as though each one expected something further, but when nothing else happened they shrugged and walked off, each in their own direction until only Daniil remained -- Daniil and the statue of Gogol. After several additional moments in which nothing significant occurred, Gogol’s statue stood, stretched, and walked away."

What makes life absurd? Politics.

"'Gogol was a pre-revolutionary writer,' the First Policeman said. 'He wrote political satire that was counter to the pre-revolutionary Czarist government and therefore revolutionary in its nature.'

"'Is it not still revolutionary in its nature regardless the fact that the government upon which it shines its satirical light is a post-Czarist, post-revolutionary, post-Soviet one?' Daniil asked.

"'Of course not,' the First Policeman replied, 'If Gogol truly were a post-Czarist, post-revolutionary, post-Soviet writer that would make him a neo-Czarist writer imbibed with neo-post-revolutionary ideas and would therefore be allowed under the current administration.'

"'But what if Gogol’s neo-Czarist, neo-post-revolutionary ideas were misinterpreted by a pre-post-Czarist sympathizer?' Daniil asked.

"'Don’t be absurd,' the First Policeman snapped. 'There is no such thing as pre-post-Czarism, it’s a myth, a hoax, a bad rumour started by post-revolutionary, pre-Stalinist neo-Bolsheviks looking to stir up trouble.'"

Also, business.

"Daniil’s primary role with The Company involved the writing, filing, and shredding of reports. He was greeted each and every morning by the same list of forty-two required reports. He spent the first three hours of his day writing them, the next three filing them. Between the fourth and fifth hours he took a brief lunch and, as discussed in another story, stared out the office window while his mind wandered along Nevsky Prospekt. When his mind returned from its brief jaunts, Daniil attended the Old Man’s meeting. The reports were never discussed. The Old Man preached the need for a passionate, enthusiastic workforce willing to surrender its life to The Company and its glorious ideals. He said these things in such a way that each and every employee understood them as unquestionable commands rather than encouraging prosaicisms. After the meeting, Daniil finished filing the forty-two reports, and then spent the final three hours of his day shredding them (for reasons known only to the Old Man)."

Also, bureaucracy.

"Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachev first learned of his death while at work. He had spent the first three hours of his day writing forty-three reports -- the same forty-three reports he wrote every day -- and the next three hours filing them.Between the fourth and fifth hours he paused for a brief lunch. It was during this pause that Daniil read the memo announcing his death. There were no details, merely a sentence stating that Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachev had died, and that no replacement would be necessary as the reports he wrote, filed and shredded on a daily basis were superfluous.

"Needless to say, he was stunned by the news. He felt more alive than dead. Surely there had been some mistake! While he sat contemplating his unexpected demise, his friend and fellow writer Alexander Ivanovich entered the small corner office. He carried with him a box of personal belongings, which he promptly began setting up on Daniil’s desk. In order to make room for the various photographs and knickknacks, Alexander had to push Daniil’s photographs and knickknacks aside. Once the box was empty, he filled it with Daniil’s belongings and carried it from the room. Daniil watched him leave in stunned silence.

"Several minutes later Yury Nikolaevich walked into the office carrying a box of his own photographs and knickknacks. When he saw Alexander’s photographs and knickknacks on the desk, he sighed and said, 'He beat me to it.'"

Also, death.

"Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachev stepped into the street and was instantly struck and killed by a trolleybus. He immediately regretted not looking to his left before crossing the street. Fortunately for Daniil, the trolleybus hit him so hard it actually knocked him back in time fifteen seconds. His foresight thus enhanced by time-displaced hindsight, Daniil looked left before stepping back into the street, saw the oncoming trolleybus and waited for it to pass before crossing. Unfortunately for Daniil, he neglected to look to the right and was promptly struck by a swiftly moving cube van before reaching the safety of the far curb. It can only be described as remarkable that the cube van hit him hard enough to send him back in time twenty seconds. Armed with the knowledge that he ought to look both left and right before crossing the street, Daniil managed to reach the far side of Nevsky Prospekt with his life intact. He is, however, a man both blessed and cursed with good and bad luck in equal measure, for as he stood on the sidewalk feeling quite pleased with himself, a piano fell from above and struck him on the head. Needless to say, he died almost instantly. To his continued surprise, the piano hit him so hard it knocked him back in time almost thirty seconds...."

Whether you find this funny or frustrating, I would recommend a few sips of this book from day to day. Taken all at once, it can induce mental chaos, but taken one story at a time, it can promise wide smiles. Jason E. Rolfe might be the most specialized of specialist writers, but he deserves a wide, non-specialized readership.

The Most Patient and Forgiving People on Earth

The people of the United States are the most patient and forgiving on Earth. For this, I offer proof: Americans have not yet burnt down the Pentagon, the White House, and Wall Street.

The Swill Of Corporate Swine

When I was in my final years of high school, I came to realize that I hated corporate culture.

There were current songs on the radio that I liked, a few current movies, and even a few TV shows, but more and more, I began to smell garbage -- a reeking stew of cynicism, laziness, and contempt for the audience. More and more of it seemed the flakings of a small heart, of a smaller head, and all designed to scoff at human feeling, to diminish human thought.

Because I hated what I saw and hated myself for wasting time with it, I became drawn without intention to works of the past. I listened to symphonies on CBC radio, watched old films on late-night television, read books and plays, poems and essays by writers no longer central in the public eye. All of this was purely by accident: I would encounter something that grabbed my attention, and this, in turn, would lead me down obscure pathways to other music, other stories, forgotten by many people but alive in ways that current offerings were not. What motivated me was neither a backwards-pacing need for some non-existent "golden age," nor a fake nostalgia for something I had never known, but a thirst and hunger for meaning. I wanted to be taught, challenged, and above all, kept honest.

The lesson, here, is that no one forced me to choke down the gruel of corporate commerce. No one forced me to wallow in the puddles of the Zeitgeist. I was free to look for meaning on my own terms, and if this meaning lay in works of the past, then I was free to love them no matter how many centuries had kept us apart.

I claimed this heritage. Anyone can.

When You're Strange

Social isolation has a tendency to distort subjective impressions of exterior phenomena, and this is not limited to perceptions of facial physiognomy; indeed, related phenomena can also be perceptually distorted, and this would include the qualia of non-same-sexedness and transport medium fitness.

For any given individual with tendencies beyond the socially-accepted range of performance and/or state of being, facial perception begins to seem a function of precipitation. Indeed, it can be stated that codes of personal identification become progressively non-optimal, when you're strange.

I Dream Of CD

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My dreaming mind has a sense of humour -- or, I should say, it thinks it has a sense of humour. Just before I woke up this morning, it tossed a stupid joke at me:

In the midst of our pandemic, I had a task to perform. From a pile of CDs in jewel cases, all of them symphonies by Anton Bruckner, my job was to put the CDs in order of composition, from Symphony No. 00 in F minor, to No. 1, to No. 0 in D minor, and then all the way to No. 9.

That seemed easy enough at first, but every attempt was complicated by a bunch of semi-identical CDs with a cartoonish black wolf on the white cover of the jewel case. Whenever the regular CDs appeared to be in order, these "cartoon wolf" CDs would show up out of nowhere to mess up my efforts.

I was getting frustrated: what the hell was going on? Finally, a voice in my dream told me that these disruptive CDs were the Bruckner variants....

Then I woke up, and thought, "Come on! That was awful."

Lonely Mitochondria

Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I worry about the endosymbiotic hypothesis of mitochondria. It keeps me awake.

Without mitochondria, the chemical reactions within cells that make multi-cellular life possible would not exist. The endosymbiotic hypothesis puts forward the idea that mitochondria were once individual cells living separately, that were somehow ingested or parasitized by other cells, yet survived, reproduced in their new environment, and provided a great source of energy for their hosts.

If this hypothesis turns out to be true, then here on Earth we have mitochondria by accident -- an incredibly lucky accident. How often could this accident (or any similar endosymbiosis) be repeated on other planets? How many planets are full of thriving bacteria, but with no multi-cellular forms?

Given the sheer size of the universe and the likely number of planets, this lucky accident might have occured many times, but on worlds far apart from each other, so far apart that interstellar contact would be impossible within the lifetime of any civilization, or of any species.

Either way, the implication here is that we live in a universe of planets bulging with life, but not with multi-cellular, intelligent life. And this idea nags at me: we might be alone, or so isolated by chance and by distance, that we will never learn if anyone else is out there. We will never know.