I am drawing happy people of many colors. They are dancing next to a brown house with a small window. Above the house the sun and moon are side by side with light blue clouds and big stars. Smoke rises from the house's chimney to the sun. A cake for the little people is baking. There is grass around the house. I carefully draw each blade of grass. Among the blades of grass there are flowers of many colors, like the people, and big, like the stars. The people are dancing and laughing.

I am sitting in a chair with my legs tucked under me. On the wall there is an enormous magnetic chessboard with a game in progress. My brother Igor sits for days on end at the large table opposite the chessboard as he prepares to enter the university in impregnable Moscow. My nanny, Marianna, sits on a stool in the kitchen and knits little rugs out of old rags. I can hear her talking in Polish to the cat Kos, her only listener--she's sharing memories of her youth. She's wearing a black apron, tied in a knot in the back, which I always untie, after choosing just the right moment, and then duck the inevitable slaps.

I am drawing little people of many colors and I am smiling. My little people are the happiest people on earth. They are dancing and also smiling from ear to ear--the happiest smiles. The sun is yellow (the yellow color of a newly born chick), the moon is light blue, the dancing people are happy and from the chimney the aroma of Alichka's cake drifts toward the sun. The big stars are reflected in the flowers in the yard in front of the house.

I run to show my drawing to mama.

"Mama, look!"

After taking a look at the drawing, mama asks, "Why are they fighting?"

"Who?" I ask, not understanding.

"The people. Aren't they fighting? And why do they have such angry faces? And look, the house is leaning, it's going to collapse. And then you can't have the sun and moon in the sky at the same time."

"Those aren't angry faces, they aren't fighting, but exactly the opposite, and the house isn't falling down, but is flying, and the moon married the sun and now they can live together in the sky!" I'm practically crying.

"Oh, so that's the way it is... Well, then I understand," mama agrees to make me feel better, after seeing how distraught I am. But that doesn't work with me. How could it be that mama thinks that my happy, dancing little people are fighting? I look at my drawing and it seems wonderful to me, more wonderful than ever before: yellow sun, blue moon, stars, flowers and happy little people. But the shadow of doubt has crept into my heart. I forget about the drawing, but several days later I come across it when I'm leafing through my album. The little people of many colors with the monstrous gashes of their mouths that run from ear to ear, grimaces of either anger or disappointment, have frozen in awkward poses--they're either fighting or arguing. The brown house is at a slant--it's going to collapse on them at any moment. The column of black smoke from the chimney is propped against the sun. The thorny grass is like needles between which the varicolored smudges are supposed to be flowers. In the sky hangs an absolutely incongruous light blue plate, apparently the moon, and big, sharply pointed flourishes represent the stars.

I study the drawing with horror. Where has the world of wonderful, dancing little people with the happy smiles gone? These grotesque monsters don't have anything to do with it.

Nevertheless, this was my drawing. What has happened? I cry inconsolably, my tears run on the paper in varicolored smudges, and the world of happy little people that has nothing at all in common with my picture floats away on the river of losses to the shores of memory in order to be saved by memory in the primordial world.

Only children are given to cry over true tragedy and to know bliss.

In the darkness, in childhood, lying at night with eyes wide open and listening to the ticking of the clock on the wall. Second followed by second--and I knew for certain that those seconds would never return--they sank into oblivion.

Later this terror intensified and at age twelve I would stop the pendulum on the wall clock, I would remove it, I'd banish the clock from the room, but all the same at night rang out: tick-tock, tick-tock--that was my heart beating. And I had neither the strength nor the will to tear it from my breast.

From early childhood, from the age of six, the fear of Time passing.

Not just passing, but slipping away. Almost physically, visibly seeping through my fingers. This terrifying and inevitable feeling poisoned all my childhood and youth. And every day--a challenge to my invisible and indifferent rival. A successful day is like recaptured territory, a respite, a truce until the following day. And the despair and terror during the lost day. Life is an attempt to swim out of the sucking whirlpool, where Time bears our days. Because of this all my poems written as a child are variations on the theme of the passing day and interminable epitaphs on Time.

In my early infancy, before the age of six, this was not the case. The "Apple of Knowledge" had not yet been plucked (by whom and when?). The days were as long as eternity, and the clock was an empty knick-knack on the wall.

Interminable illnesses that were transformed into dreams, and dreams that flowed into days, and days into illnesses.

The world was wise and clear. It became overgrown, like seaweed, with fantasies and dream visions, but nevertheless it preserved some part of its original harmonious foundations.
And the boundary between existence and nonexistence was fragile. The latter was too recent and close, the former too amorphous.

My Teachers, (Oh, I had marvelous Teachers; in infancy while I hid in the wardrobe that smelled of mothballs, I would talk to them at length and there was nothing more fascinating than those conversations), my Teachers would tell me about how the world was organized. And these stories were as far away from that which I later learned by rote from textbooks and found in books, as that blessed time is far from me now.

Stars, leaves and music, the smells and sensations of past lives and all their accumulated experience found a place in their stories; they cast a spell over me and turned into dreams, and dreams into illnesses and again that fine thread separating me from my recent nonexistence quavered and broke. With age these conversations with my Teachers (with an ever-increasing and obvious switch in favor of existence) became more and more rare... It was a peculiar loss of ability to comprehend their voices. Or rather not even their voices, but feelings, since we communicated without the aid of words (words do not help, words separate, and any act of speech is nothing more than a translation from the original). But they are some place close by, my guarding angels. I know that. And Time, awful Time, nonexistent Time will not overpower us.

I am my memory, the sum total of all the moments I have lived. Moreover, my "I" divides and multiplies: I am an infant, and an elderly person, and an artist, and a thief, and a murderer. All of these possible past incarnations of mine swarm past in my subconscious like phantoms, and when I begin a monologue in my own name (as I see myself at this very moment), I inevitably put it into the mouth of a phantom from my own midst. And that which seemed to me to be sincere and the only true thing when I was writing is only one facet of a thousand and, like the crooked mirror, does not reflect the features, but distorts them. Although who knows, perhaps only crooked mirrors tell us the truth. I see crowds and crowds of people. Among them are artists, captains, artisans and kings, musicians and circus performers, milkmen and murderers. And all of them are me. And every time I begin to wind the thread that leads me out of the labyrinth toward the light, instead of exiting I fall into a new labyrinth. In each of the labyrinths a Minotaur lies in wait--sin that arrives from my former incarnation. And my goal is to kill the Minotaur.
Here are several characters from my spectral retinue:


Madman
Gambler
Robber
Adventurer
Wise Hermit
Skeptic
Child
Artist (Odysseus
His Muse
Apollo (Rational Force)
Dionysus (Elemental Force)
Gaiea (Primordial feminine, fertility, the mystery of birth passed on from mother to daughter)
Savage (Mowgli)
Nymphette
Homeless Wanderer (The Wandering Jew)
Martyr Hero (for whatever you like: faith, fatherland, ideas)
Clown
Whore and Nun
Don Quixote
Maniac Murderer
Joseph, sold into Egypt


–Well, who else is there, come out into the light!
The characters are wearing masks, one transmutes into another. A mirrored hall, where the mirrors reflect one another, fracturing the reflections. A carnival of phantoms; bifurcation, disorder, division of my self.
...In his own likeness and image...
A crowd of mirror werewolves.
Welcome to the theater of the absurd.
Abel = Cain.
And so, ladies and gentleman, let's begin.

The poison of memory is as sweet as the irrecoverableness of loss. Poison is the best medicine. Medicine for insanity. For unthinking. For the insanity of the unthinking that encircles us. Encirclement (in the military sense). Encirclement--the jaws of a trap.
Medicine is a cloying syrup. Not flight from, but finding yourself in the maze of memory. The work of an archeologist is to see palaces in the rubble and to reconstruct the past on the basis of paltry fragments. To make it the property of the present. To be such a person at the very least must be exacting and complicated. It couldn't be otherwise. That is, of course, one could let the past be forgotten and let the moss of non-existence grow. But that would spell poverty and barbarism.
The poet's path is to hear the strings of the primordial melody amidst the ruins. In the beginning was the word. Music is speech. Speech that hasn't yet named itself, unrealized and therefore not yet lost.
In the beginning was music. The world was created with it. On the sacrament of loss, a sacrament, for while we loose we do not deplete; by losing I make whole and acquire--the world was born on the sacrament of the primordial melody of losses. And there was loss before birth. For birth is a loss. And the infinite tenderness of this loss, this loss that gives, this giving loss, this abundant loss; it is tenderness, the tenderness of a return is precisely the harmony of power which holds the world together.
Our losses are the only thing we possess completely. Memory is the river of losses, lost moments, days, years, that have forever sunk into the all-embracing Past.

I

May God delay for us that day
When our children flagrantly surpass us,
Like empty books, they tidy us away
Into their dusty orphan's casket.

And in old age, caught in a vicious orbit
Of empty injuries and wistfulness
So proud, so bored we are that
We cut the string of our attachments.

So little binds us to this life:
Some scraps of greying photos
Perhaps a dog's reproachful eyes
Fixed on the yellow flagstones;

Wallpaper the colour of parting;
A voice trapped down the phone line,
Prophesising our meeting –
Out there on the nameless horizon.

II

Far harder than the very hardest labour
It is to find yourself without a task
To know there is no water left to savour
And that your life has burned to ash at last

That you are needed by precisely no-one,
That your loneliness – it is beyond repair,
And to the depths, the depths you're going,
With only ruins left behind you here.

That power lies now with another century
And you have lagged behind, absurd and sorry,
Time is a wall that widens endlessly
And death – she is your promised legacy.

III

Glancing at yourself, still half-asleep
All of a sudden you can see that lines
Have gathered round your mouth and cheek,
The ruins of your face around your eyes.

And you are just a shard of days gone by
You never will be whole as once you were
Exactly like your torn and tattered rhyme –
And you can only stand there numb, and stare.

And every day, again, again, again
You gather yourself up once more
How hard it is, oh God, to start each day
How terrible the structures at your core.

How hard it is to face entirely alone
The noisy army of your ugly chores
Oh, who will heed your prayers to postpone -
Surely there is another tune within the score?

And, oh, what quiet heroism's called upon
To get up in the morning. Start again.
And know that this is life, you're pressing on,
Although the purpose may be hard to ascertain.

I know the price of Silence,
When on the threshold of sound,
It congeals in the contour of emptiness,
Blends with the beating heart.

The air is charged with fear
And opens into voiceless space.
Hypnotized by incorporeality,
The wind unfurls its wings in dance.

Silence parches the mouth
As I catch it on my lips,
Mesmerized by the muteness of sound,
The dreary whiteness of the page.