The most shocking book of the millennium
Prince Papa Jan
LUNAR ORGASM
Book One
MAD PASSION
Erothic thriller – multi-novel
Erotic thriller – multinovel
The most shocking book of the millennium
Prince Papa Jan
LUNAR ORGASM
or
the story of a suicidal love
book one
MAD PASSION
Unique world bestseller
Erotic thriller multinovel – Prince Papa Jan
The Night Of Eroticism And Madness series No 1
c. Prince Papa Jan – author 2001
c. Art Papa Jan 20013 – Publishing House
c. Prince Papa Jan – cover design
Kostadin Kutryanov – designer
Borislav Ardev – photographer
Andrei Todorov – translator into English
All rights of publication, translation and distribtuion in Bulgaria and
abroad of this book are the property of the author and the publishing house
Art Papa Jan – 20013
THE MYSTERY OF PRINCE PAPA JAN
PRINCE PAPA JAN – A LEXICON
Who is he
The world-renowned artist, author, director, healer Prince Papa Jan Ivan
Nikolov Georgiev, Academician, Professor Bulgaria.
Zodiacal sign: Virgo
Shoe size: 45
Beret: 67
Height: 172 centimetres
Parents
Educated folk of brilliant originality, pronounced spirituality and believers
in God.
Education:
Prestigious diverse higher education with many specialties and
qualifications.
Professions:
Social worker, afforestation worker, economist, curator of the Antique
Gallery Papa Jan 20013, nature healer, philosopher, author, artist, poet, film
director. President of the firm Art Papa Jan 20013. Chief executive of the
publishing company Art Papa Jan 20013.
Sports:
Master of sports in hiking, goes in for wrestling, body-building, swimming,
track-and-field, Eastern martial arts, yoga (he often relaxes standing on his
head).
Teachers:
The Universe with the diverse energies penetrating it.
Pupils:
Thousands of people who have imbibed the ideas of Energy Lyzism and
Janoism.
Posts and titles in society:
Communist Youth Secretary, Film Director, Pharaoh, Prince, Papa,
Academician, Professor, President, Major-General, Preacher, Don,
Preceptor, Benefactor, Messiah.
Vice:
Radical workaholism, winner of the order “New Elite of Russia”.
Hobbies:
Collecting pictures and antiques, skirt-chasing, admirer of female beauty,
interests in music, painting, poetry, philosophy. Singing, guitar playing,
painting, composing, reciting, connoisseur of culinary art, lover of speed.
Inordinate admirer of the theatre, opera, classical music and avant-garde art.
Prefers alternative medicine and a lifestyle conforming to Nature. Adores
Nature, fishing and the animals.
Motto:
“Amor vincit omnia.”
Stand-by dedication:
“To Beauty – with love.”
Sexuality:
Global predator.
Established expert in sex.
Sense of humour:
Operated for tonsilitis. HAS PAINTED HIS OWN ‘SELFPORTRAIT’(PAPA JAN IN A HAND-STAND WITH OPEN ANUS
UPWARDS LIKE A MONEY-BOX TO RELAX FROM THE
THOUSAND ‘CURSES’ ADDRESSED TO HIM BY ENVIERSAND
‘WELL-WISHERS’ WHO CAN KISS HIS BEHIND).
Religion:
Eastern Orthodox Christian drawn to Tibetan Buddhism.
Character:
Cosmopolitan.
Disposition:
Of iron.
State of health:
Perennial.
Diagnosis:
For others – a genius, for himself – a madman.
Records and sensations:
In the town of Varna Prince Papa Jan sold 200 pictures in bulk to the
financial pyramid MP-Group and was declared Pharaoh. After the collapse
of the pyramid these valuable canvases for more than a few years now are in
the custody of the police. The world sensation will be published in the
Guinness Book of Records as the largest number of pictures sold in one go
and longest arrested by the police. He has staged the most unique exhibitions
in the world amidst Nature in all seasons and in all the elements. He has
done the “picture of the Millennium jointly with hundreds of thousands of
people from all nations. Has a project for the longest picture in the world.
Prince Papa Jan – artist, curator, film director:
His creative inspiration dawned on him at Christ’s age. Passing through
Universalism and following the circular technique of drawing and painting,
his magic hand produced thousands of pictures to establish at long last the
new style in painting “Energy Lyzism”. Living according to the circular time
of eternity, Academician Professor Prince Papa Jan travels to dozens of
corners of the world to demonstrate his great art. He has exhibited pictures at
one-man shows in the town of Plovdiv, in Greece, in the towns of
Assenovgrad, Varna, Vidin, and Sofia, in the USA (the Du Pont foundation),
the Seychelles, France, Germany. He has taken part in scores of combined
international exhibitions all over the world with hundreds of pictures. He
staged an auto-da-fe of some of his pictures in the St Kirik monastery and a
similar one outside the Bulgarian Parliament as a sign of protest against the
heartlessness of the MPs. He also staged the first in the world underwater
preview in the town of Assenovgrad under the motto: “Megatour Energy in
Action”. Then followed a mega-exhibition at the House of Architects under
the motto: “I, Papa Jan...” – a universal premiere; exhibitions in psychiatric
asylums, prisons, orphanages, sports halls, administrative halls, cafes,
restaurants, monasteries, castles and fortresses. Exhibitions amidst Nature in
every season and in every element, amidst waterfalls, high up in the
mountains at an altitude of over two thousand metres, in oceans, seas,
volcanoes, caves, in the underground and other exotic places. Pictures by the
Master are on permanent show in the “PAPA JAN Gallery”. His private
collection includes more than 2000 pictures, icons and works of art by the
great masters.
The Master Papa Jan has painted the portraits of world famous personalities:
Christ, the Virgin Mary, Buddha, Granny Vanga, Van Gogh, Irina Delina,
Materius Rozenkroitzer, Marylyn Monroe, Salvador Dali, Czar Simeon II,
Lenin, Alla Pugachova, Shalyapin, Djuna, Nietzsche, Vladimir Dimitrov –
the Master, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson,
Theodore Roosevelt, Bill Clinton, Todor Zhivkov, Vladimir Vissotsky, Lilly
Ivanova, Bach, Pushkin, Baudelaire, Phillip Kirkorov, Alexander Tomov,
Valeri Taganski, Gergana, Lidia, Kali, Delyan, Koko, and others.
Thirteen self-portraits Prince Papa Jan.
Forthcoming art events:
A Black Sea tour (exhibition on wheels) – Sochi, Yalta, Varna, Burgas,
Sinaya, Russia.
An art tour (“American Dream”): New York, Chicago, Washington, Atlanta,
Germany: Stuttgart (the Mercedes offices).
Invitations for exhibitions have been received also from Austria, Brazil,
Canada, the United Arab Emirates, France, Russia, Sweden, Egypt, Israel,
China, Japan, and the town of Dulovo in Bulgaria.
By the end of the 21st century pictures by Papa Jan will have visited all
corners of the planet.On January 1, 2001 pictures by him were placed in four
opposite end points of the globe which will charge humanity with energy.
The year 2013 will see the decoding of the messages built into the pictures
by this Artist, which will carry extremely important and fateful information
about the world and the future of humankind. In that memorable year Prince
Papa Jan will complete his 20013th picture and his 20013th message. Soon
after he will embark on a cosmic journey with a cycle of “Universal
Exhibitions”.
At present pictures by Prince Papa Jan can be found in museums of art,
picture galleries and private collections in Japan, the USA, Britain, Russia,
France, Ukraine, Greece, Sweden, Egypt, the Seychelles, Israel and
Bulgaria. In more than 100 countries can be found pictures by, and
information about, the life of the great artist.
Prince Papa Jan – poet, philosopher, author, experimenter. Scientific and
theoretical achievements:
In the course of his brief life so far he has written over twenty thousand
pages of philosophy, poetry, prose, Haiku-Janoisms and scientific theories.
Under the literary pseudonym PRINCE PAPA JAN, HE WROTE THE
MOST SHOCKING BOOK OF THE MILLENNIUM, THE WORLD
BESTSELLER
THE
TRILOGY
EROTIC
THRILLER
THE
MULTINOVEL ‘LUNAR ORGASM’ which is published in Bulgarian,
Russian, English and other languages. He has written the poetic collection
‘PEARL MADNESS’, the book ‘HAIKU-JANOISMS and many others. In
co-authorship with Stefan Krustev he has published 10 books among which
is the trilogy “The Papa Jan Gallery”. Forthcoming is the issue of the first
audio novel in Bulgaria “The Papa Jan Gallery”, a book translated into five
languages.
The Messages of Papa Jan to the World:
1.If you have one picture, paint some more... The hand should get used to
caressing and building.
2. If you have one friend, let all others be his friends... Till infinity,
personally.
3. If you have one child, accept all others for his or her brothers and sisters.
4. If you have one love, let it be for all.
5. If you have a piece of bread, distribute it among your enemies.
6. If you have much money, hand it out to the poor... Towards your own self.
7. If you seek glory, let it find you.
8. If you have an aim, lay out a road to it, too. Not all roads lead to the target
and not all roads are yours...
9. If you believe in God, believe in yourself, too... He is in you... Herein lies
His greatness and omnipotence...
10. If you harbour hatred, turn it into love... and hand it out to everyone.
Destiny is a series of causes...
11. If you are a loner, let all loners be your brothers...
12. If you know the truth, do not cover up the falsehood. The truth is a
touchstone both for itself and for the falsehood...
13. If you build a gallery, let it be universal... IF YOU BUILD A
GALLERY, LET IT BE UNIVERSAL. (pp. 384,385 of Book One of “The
Papa Jan Gallery” – “A Shop for Airy Towers”)
Academician Professor Prince Papa Jan makes fresh discoveries in world
knowledge. He introduces a new spiritual teaching, “Janoism” the essence of
which is revealed through the messages in his books and pictures. He
initiates a new trend in literature “HAIKU – JANOISMS’; a new trend in
poetic prose ‘MULTINOVEL’; a new trend in cinema ‘ARTMULTIGEN
IMPRESSION’ films.
HAIKU – JANOISMS:
Chances
Reason is radiance.
Happiness is wings.
Life is a pit.
Memory
If you don’t like
What you are,
remember who you are!
Prince Papa Jan
I was born to be.
To be, I must.
Therefore I was born.
Prince Papa Jan has established a new trend in painting – Energy Lyzism. As
a style of all styles energy lyzism recreates light which carries the energy of
the Universe. The dissolution of the light spectrum dissolves energy in the
form of colours. Every colour bears the purity of the essential brick of the
Universe (Universal Gallery). The dissolution of the light spectrum is the
natural analysis of the energy of the world. Analyzing itself, it creates
colours as a presentation. Colours are the existence of the natural selfanalysis of the Universe. If Energy Lyzism bears the name of a certain style
or technique of painting, it is the Human Subjective Repetition by the Artist
of the Global Objective Self-Analysis of the Universe, through which it
depicts its Own Self in colour.
Energy Lyzism is a style for the universal Energy Dissolvability of colours
and forms among themselves, discovered by Prince Papa Jan, and realized
through his pictures which, accepting the Energy from his extra-sensory
activity, continue to transmit it as Art-Therapy Communication with a
positive healing and aesthetic effect.
He has created a new ego-centric philosophy of concepts. He introduces a
new omni-lexis of eloquence. He has discovered a new poetic alchemy and a
poetic omnisemantic credo. He is working upon the development of
monopersonal expressiveness and rhetorical pathos. He creates new
techniques of meditation and contemplation: “I breathe in the Universe and
breathe out Painting”, “I breathe in Being and breathe out Knowledge”, “I
breathe in Beauty and breathe out Poetry’, “I breathe in Philosophy and
breathe out Messages”, “I breathe in Feminine Beauty and breathe out Eros”,
“I breathe in the Atom and breathe out Power”, “I breathe in Spite and
breathe out Goodness”, “I breathe in Art and breathe out Eternity”.
Prince Papa Jan creates a New Quantum Microscopic Bioconsciousness in
art – “Cerebral OmniJanoism” – a technique of painting inside the brain of
billions of pictures and their telepathetical transmission in space. He
develops projects for cloning super-human beings, droids, by means of a
super-sensory bio-product; a project for prolonging life through techniques
of meditation and contemplation; a project for transforming memory and
consciousness, “Eternal Life”.
“Universalism” is a new reading and proof of the logic of the universe and
Prince Papa Jan’s experimental attitude to the world around us. The circular
technique of painting – a successful attempt made by Papa Jan at mixing
circular time, Bio-energy, the eternity of the universe and the energy of
colours.
The primal circular technique of painting was introduced by the “Picture of
the Millennium” which began the endless cycle of
‘ETERNAL
CREATIVITY’ whereby in each successive art work are contained elements
from the preceding picture like a spiral progressing repetition of circular
time.
Already scores of thousands of people sign themselves on selected paintings
by the Master. Prince Papa Jan’s idea is for the entire human race to become
co-author of the canvases which will fly in the Universe. Humanity’s
spiritual unification through great art is Prince Papa Jan’s basic motivation
for life in the 21st century.
“The ideas of my pictures and the idea of a Universal Gallery, as well as my
basic motto ‘To beauty, with love’ are more important than anything I have
created so far in order to attain Eternity...”
“And I have always believed that it is not important how many and what
kind of pictures I have painted...More important are the ideas for their
creation dictated by the Eternal Creator. Because even if the world were to
vanish, there will remain the idea of its creation and it will again be created.
In this way I feel a pupil simultaneously of Plato, Nicolo Cozanski, Leibnitz,
Hegel, Husserl, Whitehead, Materius Rozenkroitzer, Nikolai Berdyaev,
Nietzsche, Leonardo da Vinci, Van Gogh, Picasso, Renoir, Salvador Dali,
Aivazovski, Bach, Vivaldi, Beethoven, Wagner, Mozart, Shostakovich and
attain their motto: “Liberate yourself of the sense of possession and
ownership of the ideal products and the creations of the Spirit and elevate
yourself to the insight empowering you over the Spiritual Universes...’
Everything written, painted and composed by me has been written, painted
and composed by them and everything written, painted and composed by
them has been written, painted and composed by me. And the entire wisdom
of them all has painted the world – a world of beautiful ideas, colours, music
and dreams!
Therefore, the pictures which are painted according to circular time and the
method of Energy Lyzism represent Absolute Time without beginning and
without end. And the Universal Gallery is the linear time crossing over into
circular time. And to find yourself in the Universal Gallery is to find
yourself in the Eternal Present and Absolute Time!”
Prince Papa Jan is actor, screen-writer and director of feature films and
documentaries. Revolutionary is the discovery of a new technique of
movement and enlivening of his pictures. He has created over 140 hours of
film for his pictures, featuring in many films which are to be broadcast over
a number of world TV channels. A new trend in cinema: “ARTMULTIGEN
IMPRESSION.
Prince Papa Jan – public contributions: patronage,
sponsorship, charity:
Patron of the world famous Russian artist Viktor Bugai, of the Bulgarian
artists Lyudmil Ivanov, Nikolai Geshev, and others. He has provided
opportunities for creative work to a number of talented artists, writers,
musicians, philosophers, athletes. A tradition has been established to award
pictures by Prince Papa Jan to the winners of the international wrestling
contests “Dan Kolov” and “Nikola Petkov”. Pictures of his are owned by the
seven times world champion Valentin Yordanov, the footballers of
Bulgaria’s national squad, the bronze medallists of 1994 world
Championship. A special award has been given to Hristo Stoichkov,
footballer No 1 of Europe. Awards have been given to the No 1 footballers
of Bulgaria for 1994 and 1995.
Prince Papa Jan has bestowed pictures and books of his to orphanages, old
people’s homes, libraries, schools, ministries and departments, churches,
monasteries, hospitals and foundations.
He has cured hundreds of suffering patients with the bio-energy of his hands
and with the use of Chinese-Tibetan medicine.
After the fall of the totalitarian regime he established the First Private
Gallery and antiquarian display at the International Academy of
Architecture, the St Kirik monastery where doors are open for worshippers
and hundreds of people light candles at the icons of Papa Jan’s private
collection.
He is founder and president of the “Videlina” (Vision) foundation.
He is director general of the publishing house “Art Papa Jan – 20013”. He
has established the first in Bulgaria “Art Multi-Media Complex”.
Principal master of the “Independent Artist” guild.
Co-chairman of the “New Galaxy” transcontinental club.
Vice-president of the international foundation ‘PROMETHEUS’, a centre
affiliated to UNESCO.
He and like-minded people voluntarily afforest thousands of hectares in the
Pirdop region of the Balkan mountain.
Some of the thousands titles of articles published in newspapers and
magazines all over the world on the life and work of the great Master Prince
Papa Jan:
The newspaper “Segodnya”, 1995: “Papa Jan – the Bulgarian Picasso”
The newspaper “Russia Today”, 3 May, 2001: “Papa Jan burns in everything
to the last”.
The newspaper “New Bulgaria” 26 May, 1995: “Papa Jan:”if you build a
gallery, let it be universal””.
The newspaper “Arch Art” 1 July, 1996: “The artist Papa Jan – “The allpowerful Diamond””.
The newspaper “24 Hours” 1 July, 1996: “PAPA JAN IS TO CHARGE
THE WORLD WITH ENERGY”.
The newspaper “Region”, 23 August, 1995 : “PAPA JAN – ‘COSMIC
MAN’ – opens the first underwater exhibition in the world.”
The newspaper “24 Hours”, 29 June, 1996: “The famous hide in outlying
villages and caves. The self-taught icon painter Papa Jan is painting like mad
in caves.”
Magazine “Grace Style”, March 1999: ‘THE MYSTERY OF PAPA JAN’.
Magazine “Lifestyle”, March 1999: ‘PAPA JAN: MATERIALIZATION
OF THE IMAGINATION’
The newspaper “Anons”, 16 January, 1996: “THE WORLD FAMOUS
MYSTERY MAN, THE COSMOPOLITAN PAPA JAN exhibits in Vidin.”
The newspaper “Trud”, 20 July, 1996: “Valeria Veleva in conversation with
Papa Jan in the show INTELLECTUALS IN SLIPPERS: “I AM A SKIRTCHASER AND FATHER OF THE COLOURS’10 hrs a. m. 19 July, 1996:
Papa Jan burns his pictures outside Parliament, protesting the heartlessness
of the MPs.”
The newspaper “24 Hours”, 24 June, 1996: “Van Gogh himself steps down
from a picture for the Bulgarian artist Papa Jan. The Assenovgrad icon
painter encodes his works for the year 2013. Sylvester Stalone offers him 10
million dollars.”
The newspaper “Shock”, 3 December, 1999: “The Bulgarian Picasso – Papa
Jan – has screwed 10 thousand women, models for his pictures.”
The newspaper “Continent”, 8 July, 1996: “THE ARTIST PAPA JAN IS
TO PAY BACK BULGARIA’S FOREIGN DEBT. Papa Jan is arranging his
latest exhibition before conquering outer space.”
The newspaper “Nightly Trud”, 9 July, 1996: “Papa Jan among his pictures.
An exhibition with pythons around the neck.”
The newspaper “TBB Press”, 11 December, 1995: “IF YOU HAVE ONE
FRIEND, LET ALL OTHERS BE HIS FRIENDS” “PAPA JAN, THE
UNFATHOMABLE”
The newspaper “Trud”, July 1993: “Papa Jan, the millionaire from
Assenovgrad, possesses a collection of works of art for billions of dollars.”
The newspaper “Antennae”, August 1996: ‘PAPA JAN MAKES
PAINTINGS OUT OF THE SCREAMS OF LIFE.’
The newspaper “Yellow Trud”, 16 March, 1995: ‘THE MILLIONAIRE
FROM ASSENOVGRAD, PAPA JAN, PREPARES FOR THE NOBEL
PRIZE.’
WHAT OTHERS SAY ABOUT PRINCE PAPA JAN:
Czar Simeon II, Prime Minister of the Republic of Bulgaria:
Prince Papa Jan, I am happy to sign the “Picture of the Millenium”. It is for
the first time I learn of such an original idea. Thank you for the
extraordinary gift of a picture for my fifty-ninth birthday.
Old Granny Vanga, a world renowned healer and clairvoyant:
You will prosper and others will follow you.
Gorbachov, former President of the USSR:
The most meaningful 15 minutes in my life were my meeting with Papa Jan.
Old Petko from the town of Belene:
Thank you, son, for your God-given strength of hand which gave back my
health to me.
Kiril Rashkov (Gypsy King of Bulgaria):
Good for you, Papa Jan.
Ole Nidel, a Tibetan lama:
Papa Jan, be the “All-Powerful Diamond”. You get the highest degree of
distinction but it is for the services and skills which you possess.
Hristo Stoichkov, world-famous footballer, No 1 in Europe:
The painting “The Victor of the World” will be the gem of my collection of
pictures.
Richard Dow, international curator:
Papa Jan, you are the man through whom the world will discover Bulgaria.
David Schultz, world wrestling champion:
Your pictures threw me into a touch-down.
Mario Zhechev, artist:
I re-read the book “The Papa Jan Gallery” and carry it like a Bible.
Kostadin Kutryanov (Koko the divine), a computer specialist:
I thank you, Papa Jan, for helping me realize the dream of my life.
Valentin Yordanov, seven-times world wrestling champion:
Papa Jan, before a contest I always work myself up before a picture of yours
which I possess.
Elin Yotov, a police commissioner:
You, great Papa Jan!
A man of the Universe!
Both hell and paradise can be on earth. We carry them in ourselves!
And know that there is in life more imagination than you can guess. You,
my friend, are spiritually rich. And know that money does not make us rich
but busier.
Sergei Potapov, a big businessman (Russia):
Your pictures are the most valuable capital investment of our firm.
Bobby Mikhailov, world-famous footballer:
You are made of iron, Papa Jan!
Rossitsa Kutryanova, librarian:
Oh, my! He is actually living and breathing and not a legend!
John Glen, astronaut, US Senator:
I am shaken! These pictures will stir America!
Snezhana Zhivkova, associate professor:
Your pictures affect me more strongly than those of Picasso.
Yugo Tagasi, author (Japan):
Papa Jan, your pictures are like the dawn in our land.
Priest Joseph:
These are not human but satanic creations!
Helmut Muller, German art critic:
Papa Jan, even Van Gogh would have envied the colours and hues in your
pictures and the depth of your philosophical and aesthetic vision.
Zhelyu Zhelev, former President of the Republic of Bulgaria:
Man – Earth – Cosmos! Well done!
Academician Marin Goleminov, world renowned composer:
Paintings done as though with the means of music, with much imagination,
much meaning but everything is sustained with emotion.
Krassimir Balukov, world-famous footballer:
These pictures deserve to be seen by the world.
Alexandrina Pendachanska, world-famous opera singer:
There is so much music in your colours!
Lyudmilla Poptosheva, artist:
The enormous energy radiated by the pictures of Papa Jan, “The AllPowerful Diamond” is communicated to the viewer.
Robert Adams, collector:
These pictures are the most valuable acquisition in my collection.
Viktor Bugai, world-famous Russian painter:
From a pupil of mine you turned into my teacher. I am grateful for your
existence.
Todor Mikhailov, singer, literary scholar:
Every time I come in contact with a picture by Papa Jan I get an erection.
This phenomenon demonstrates unambiguously the presence in his paintings
of pansexual energy orgon discovered by the great thinker Wilhelm Reich.
Irina Delina, world-famous poetess and philosopher.
What strikes me most powerfully in Papa Jan’s paintings is that they are not
burdened by what’s temporal and secular. They belong to all ages at the
same time. They come before and after painting; before because they
possess the spontaneity and immediacy of pure vision of the primeval unity
and after, because they depict thought itself... Such an aesthetic assessment
ushers in the demise of art criticism...
Materius Rozenkreuzer, world-famous writer and philosopher:
Maestro Papa Jan is a nobleman in life and an adventurer in knowledge.
Where gods freeze in silly self-adulation, Papa Jan, unsubdued by his own
joy, indifferent to his latest success, bored by ovations he predicts, embarks
on his next adventure, now an intellectual one, or not, but that does not
matter because in the warped kingdom of life every exploit is the right one.
He is always a monk and a warrior at the same time. All these reincarnations which his soul undergoes – poet, artist, collector and patron of
the arts, creator of a new style in painting, “Energy Lyzism” of a new
spiritual teaching, “Janoism”, nature healer, are only the human and pale
expressions of a more noble and inexhaustible passion: Beauty! But,
unsatisfied with stormy life and by the aesthete’s cheap narcissism, he
attempts to encounter this beauty in a more bitter and dolorous image: Truth.
This offensive and haughty feminine form of Beauty becomes his last and
final beloved. He is that volcano of energy who does not care in what form
he will be cast. Constantly excited by artistic stimulus, no matter whether
vis-a-vis Earth, Woman or Idea, he recognizes only one unshared passion:
his own contempt. We can always see him, walking about, a self-critical
smile on his face. That is why he is ever after his own vision as a stranger
and yet thousand-times painted image. Lonely, with the millions of images
in the soul and thinking of communing only with his haughty Ego. Energy
bestows honours in loneliness which his nobility condescendingly rejects in
society. Proud with the cosmos of visions and ideas belonging to him and
modest with his human pictures which he paints in hours of boredom (three
hundred canvases a year), he, smiling sadly and ironically, alone ponders
himself: am I more talented than prolific? Whether he would embrace an
ideal, a logic, a compassion or a new style in art is for him invariably an
expression of bestowing ecstasy. Besides being an author and artist, Papa
Jan is also a nature healer, treating his patients with bio-energy. His
paintings produce energy curative effects with extra-sensory activity. The
energy of his extra-sensory abilities has become energy of colours; from
individual ability it has become an ability of his productions which,
independently of the artist, themselves carry out Art Therapy
Communication. Troubled by the unending energy stream in art and in life
and seeking to liberate himself of his bursting power, Papa Jan has been
compelled to develop a new style in painting – “Energy Lyzism”. It is a style
of the universal Energy Pan-solubility of colours and forms among
themselves. The missionary Papa Jan helps thousands of people to live on
physically and spiritually.
Violeta Gindeva, distinguished actress:
I am amazed by the pictures and their great variety. I wish you success in
future.
Incredible fantasy and productivity. Striving after eternity!
A genius!
Don’t allow anyone to corrupt you! You are supreme!
Svetla Dimitrova, chief designer of the firm “Aries-Unikat”:
Only true people can be geniuses!
Be what you are!
Live your life as God ordains!
You are a communicator and remember that!
Brain energy, expressive and operative, in the name of the good!
God bless you!
Geniuses are those who are mad! – (unfortunately).
Djuna, world-famous healer, academician, professor, artist, poet:
Moscow, 1 July, 1998:
Prince Papa Jan, you are a great man on this planet; your work has
tremendous importance and deserves great attention. It is food for thought.
Your painting brings eternal life. Let it be as your God ordains! YOU ARE
HISTORY AND A LIVING LEGEND! LIVE FOREVER! Sincerely your
friend: Djuna.
Professor Dr Hristo Draganov:
It is difficult to imagine the vast expanse of colour of the world-famous
Bulgarian artist and friend of mine Papa Jan. May he continue to fly in space
with his cosmic pictures! I hope to live to see his exhibition in outer space!
Todor Zhivkov, the last Secretary General of the Bulgarian Communist
Party:
I am amazed at the works of the great Bulgarian painter Papa Jan. I am
grateful for the picture “The World Upside Down”, a present for my
birthday. You are the pride of our nation.
I appreciate this.
Count Stefan Trashliev:
As soon as the picture by Prince Papa Jan entered my home all other
paintings lost their value.
Petya Naumova, extrasensory healer:
Amazing works of art! Pictures charged with healing radiance, so powerful
that it is imperceptible. I perceived it. Sir, may God bless you and give still
more strength to your hands.
Valentina Tomova, extrasensory healer:
I am grateful for the splendid pictures which radiate cosmic energy. May the
great artist attain cosmic greatness and may these pictures remain eternal just
as the Cosmos is infinite!
I revere Papa Jan’s great talent!
Valeri Taganski, actor, director, author:
Papa Jan,
His body – a picture,
His word – a soul,
Be great, as God has ordained.
Nadya Petkova:
Papa Jan is a great genius. We are glad he is Bulgarian. This is an optimistic
phenomenon.
Lilli Ivanova, the most popular pop singer in Bulgaria:
To Papa Jan with all my respect and reverence for his talent of genius.
I wish you all the best.
Ivan Tatarchev, former Chief Prosecutor of the Republic of Bulgaria:
I express respect for the man Papa Jan and immensely admire his palette. He
is a Bulgarian national asset. From the bottom of my heart I wish him health,
cheerfulness and fresh creative achievements. May he always be true to
himself.
Gal Grubby, artist and pupil of Prince Papa Jan:
There have been legends and customs still exist. You can hate but please,
love Papa Jan. The genius Papa Jan is lofty, elevated, immense and divinely
talented. The road is endless but do not stop for those who do not know.
Opening the flower from inside, everyone comes in but from an open flower
they come out. Be there, Papa Jan!
Maria, Katya, Boryana, fans of the Master Papa Jan:
We are amazed! A veritable wonder! Pictures of genius for Eternity!
Boris Stefanov:
Papa Jan’s pictures impart strength and power to everyone who views them
or comes into contact with them. They are not only healing but are also new
classics in painting. Papa Jan shows something that has never been shown
before!
Velin Georgiev:
Papa Jan, a poet in painting and an artist of glory!
Konstantin Krimets, chief conductor of the Moscow symphony orchestra:
THE GREAT GENIUS of the 21st century, Papa Jan – E (translation from
Tibetan):
Preserve your divine spiritual potency!!!
Let there be generations which can reach and get into touch with your great
masterpieces!
I thank fate for the joyful meeting with you!
Thank God! Moscow, direct communication with the Cosmos, 17 June,
1998, in this life.
Klim Lavrentiev, deputy director general of the Committee on
Cinematography of Russia:
Papa Jan, I am very sorry I saw only a small part of your pictures but many
of them will remain forever in my memory. They prompt deep reflections
and in general are a new style in art.
Lydia Fedosseeva – Shukshina, a world-famous distinguished actress of
Russia: Viktor Glushtenko, director:
Papa Jan! This evening in Moscow, this park, this spiritual communion is an
amazingly pure and unusual moment for our meeting with you.
Your pictures, your world will really remain for a long time with us.
We are grateful and will remember, remember, remember...
We will always be glad to meet you.
We hope that for you, too, this evening in the “dark park” will remain
forever in your memory!
With sincere respect!
Georgi Tsankov, author, critic:
With joy and excitement I look at the pictures and read the books by Papa
Jan.
He is a hope and a new phenomenon in Bulgarian art.
Masha Shukshina, actress:
Beautiful, brilliant, expressive! With confidence I expect a fast flight and
world-wide successes!
Grigori Rostovski, Consul General at the Russian embassy to the Republic
of Bulgaria:
Unforgettable minutes, ineradicable impression of the great art. The best
cordial congratulations and soulful gratitude for the pleasure received from
the Bulgarian artist of genius Papa Jan.
George Ganchev, an MP, presidential candidate in Bulgaria:
To Papa Jan, with love. I am grateful for the fine pictures, the best in my
collection.
Vladimir Sizov, a Moscow artist – surrealist:
When chance acquaintances become friendship this is already beautiful!
When the meeting of two artists becomes a union of deep understanding –
that is splendid!
And that union is of true masters of the brush.
Papa Jan is simply beautiful both in painting and in life – this shows genius
and is worthy of Eternity!
Zaza Melhistinski, a showman:
Papa Jan – Oh, you great Prince!
When I met you I was greatly charmed because such people as you are born
once in a thousand years.
You are the genius of the 21st century!
When I saw your pictures I was simply amazed and by the portrait of Philip
Kirkorov , exhilarated.
May God grant us what we have deserved in this life!
Adelina Pashova, prosecutor, the town of Sofia:
THE VERDICT ON PAPA JAN
I had difficulty perceiving that which can be collected in a living thing. Such
a wealth of abilities, ideas, realizations, pictures, books, poetry, music,
philosophy, performance and film directing, perfect driving, incredible
culinary abilities and other skills.
Papa Jan – phenomenal or a genius, is a gift of God, for the joy of us,
Bulgarians.
My verdict as a jurist – prosecutor:
IT IS
Be till the end of your life a creatively inexhaustible “CREATOR” of your
incomparable pictures, verses, thoughts, books and films. Create art, sing
and live according to God’s will on the Earth for our joy.
I SENTENCE YOU
Till death to be inexhaustible source of creative energy, which God has
profusely bestowed on you, to create incomparable and so far uncreated
masterpieces.
Alexi Naidenov, theology professor:
Prince Papa Jan
You are a channel for divine energy.
You are the ideal type of the man – creator.
We are all the product of a lesser or
greater love, frequently, of a rape.
You are a child of Universal love.
You are a plenipotentiary of God!
Through you God converses with people!
You bear no blame for that,
Which God whispers to you!
You are his last plenipotentiary!
I am happy that you exist!
Everyone who is climbing towards the peak
must descend!
Papa Jan has no peak.
Mikhail Yossifovich Vashkevich, President of Byelorussia abroad:
The artist and the Messiah Prince Papa Jan
the foremost phenomenon in the painting of the 21st century,
I am deeply convinced, is the work of the artist Prince Papa Jan. Centuries
will pass but his pictures will be an eternal, true spur towards the Sublime
Human Spirit.
When the hand of the artist is guided and led by the Creator of all humanity
Himself, by God Himself, then these pictures become immortal
and priceless.
May God bless the genius Papa Jan who has enriched humanity with the
lofty flight of his thought and fantasy.
The arts patron Prince Papa Jan
who in his life has helped thousands to survive
physically and spiritually.
With love to all:
Bulgaria: mobile: - 359/0899323932;
Russia, Moscow, telephone: 007095 (7265838);
Internet: http://papajan.biscom.net
e-mail: papajan @ abv. bg
PREFACE
MULTI – NOVEL OF EROTIC SPIRITS
This is the true term by which to call this work:
Again I attain her intuitively.
I attain her spiritually.
I tear her up.
She tears me up.
The saint is also a whore.
The sinner and the goddess.
It might sound trivial, but the fountain is the thirst!
I cannot revisit my memories without tearing them up, without mixing them
with the unexperienced which is yet experienced in my dreams. To tear the
pages and throw them up so that chaos can be my co-author
of this unique book without which our love was inconceivable.
I am going to lead the way through labyrinths in order to take you to
the deepest, warmest and tenderest cave. The cave of my heart and of her
heart, the absent reason and the frank absence of scruples approximating a
consummate morality and the consummate morality for me is the aesthetic,
i.e. its antagonistic opposite.
I am known as Prince Papa Jan, world-renowned painter, writer and
poet, philosopher, healer, Academician Professor: ever infamous, ever frank,
frequently seeming crazy, to other people – a man of genius. This makes
me real.
She is a poetess, professor – philosopher, artist, musician, the butterfly
of multi-dimensional harmony, virtuoso of verbal dexterity which makes her
multiple. Multi-faceted, incognoscible, divine.
I had the felicity of officiating at her thrills.
She had the felicity of being a spirit in the temple of my body.
Afterwards we reached out at more than one, nay, at a million
forbidden fruits. We fed on them but more hungry, we started being torn by
the thrills which at first were constructive.
We met in order to have an enchanting dream, we met in order to
live out an erotic thriller, a drama of broken hearts, trembling bodies and
brains, a collision of fantasy and harmony, in order to produce an actual
projection of a hallucination, to summarize the blissful impulses for love, to
fight with our love in the name of love and naturally, in order to chisel the
Virgin’s image of the third millenium, the universal and sinful image of the
modern and eternal woman,through my paintings and verbal diarrhoea. Then
we were to part in ink in order to turn into spirits which would possess your
bodies.
We had the right not to err.
To drink from the adder of our unscrupulous voluptuousness.
To live in our world of the imagination, indifferent to everything.
To be spiritual beggars in the bodies of aristocrats.
Our love to be the black mass which would poison the life of many.
It is impossible to deify without killing.
It is impossible to make love to someone without stretching his body
around your heart.
It is impossible to erotically touch a spirit without turning it into
ashes.
In this book we are a living unfulfilment. That, which we wanted but
dared not is in the text….
That is why turned from living ones into textual ones in order to live
our lives as a linguistical
lovers – romantically felicitous martyrs.
Parallelly, we are precisely those who we wereand those who we will
remain forever in the text. A fruit of our actualized and not actualized
reality, an expression of our lived and fictitious exquisite fantasy. Because
our love is magically realistically fantastic.
In the book, intellectualism turns into textoalism.When you leaf
through the pages of this book you will follow me into a mind-boggling
erotic play.
When you leaf through the book you will be aroused, totally
spiritualized because I know there is nobody who would not be altered after
such experiences.
The flesh is unworthy of them.
There is something transcendental, something linking them, more
mature than they which can only be called love.
Poetry is inevitable.
I was reincarnated in the word in order to leave the frame of my
experiences, in order to come into contact with their metaphysical projection
and to re-live it as spirituality.
Eroticism is present on every hand. When I touched my beloved Irine,
Shiva was touching Privati, Vishnu – Lakshmi, Krishna – Radha, Eros –
Psyche, Narcissus – Echo, Theseus – Antiope, Odysseus – Penelope,
Dionysus – Ariadne, Perseus – Andromeda, Mejnun – Leili, Romeo – Juliet,
Adam – Eve. On the threshold of the abyss I reached the summits. The storm
was breaking the tree branches and they bit it and kissed it. The rain was
possessing the earth. The fire, the cooled spirit. Everything merged into
everything else. It was not a love affair but a madness.
Today I went back to those passionate memories in order to make the
paper groan and my heart to dissolve and get wet in order to receive your
spirit in its kiss.
I went back to these passionate memories in order to confess my sin.
I revisited these passionate memories in order to convince you that we
love , therefore exist.
I revisited these passionate memories in order to kiss the past and be
parted from it.
I have been frank, indecent at points even, I have been sinfully daring
but throughout, in all these pages - pure before you, pure before her and
before myself.
Frankly erotic, exulting, ecstatic as in the pictures I poured my soul,
line after line in order to perform as MULTINOVEL the romance of my life.
Philosophically minded, with childish naivety, then I sinned and now I
analyse my sins and confessing them before you I divest them of their
diabolical image.
An existentialist, I paint an existence and interpret it through the very
existence itself.
Being an energy lyzist, line after line I dissolve and pour myself onto
the pages.
`
This is a multinovel of the modern and of the eternal. This is an erotic
thriller and a philosophical treatment of the image of love and a voluptuous
poem.
A book of the heart.
A book of the heart, of every fibre but also of thought.
An unusual history which tells of ordinary things.
An autobiographic novel but biography, in general, of love.
A scandalous self-compromising book but self-therapy as well.
Events from my past but also a bit of fantasy because love itself is
fantasy.
A series of diabolical stories.
Erotic poetry.
A sentimental Saga.
An essey on freedom.
Haiku Janoisms.
A formula of the absurd.
Omnisemantic biography.
Poetic prose.
Naturalist painting.
Introduction to the voluptuous madness of Energy Lyzism and
Universalism: my style of painting , writing and life.
Smashing of any and every literary norm in the name of truth, in the
name of love , in the name of Princess Erotica.
Naturally, the book could be called also a Bible of vice were not for
the fact that the personages could not but take complicated decisions of
moral nature according to the true Code of Liberty. And the true Code of
Liberty is unwritten, it is unbearable people who are given to passionate
reasoning of an amatory nature, it is inconceivable vis-à-vis the decisions we
take in the real world.
The book is an outpouring of ache, thrill, suffering, joy, sweetness and
chagrin.
Were I to be blamed for being overly graphic, lewd, insolent, crude
and primitive it would mean that merely my messages haven’t been
understood. Let my accusers re-read those parts of the Bible like “Song of
Songs”, then “Panchantra” and “Cama Sutra” – those archetypal books. I
urge them after that to re-visit my outpourings inscribed in blood, sweat and
tears, volumes of sperm and vitality. Having done that, can they then call
them pornography and sleaze? This is a novel about the absurd. The plot is
punctuated, contradicting, self-precluding, self-actualizing and without my
hel in places self-provoking, self-satisfying, filled with vicissitudes and
surprising about-turns. This is a plot – a mimesis of life itself.
In it are described post-modern features, existentialist, epoch-defining
events; they prompt me to boldly call this reading matter MULTINOVEL. It
is a new attribute in history, a pattern of countless literary forms and genres
within a single book – a unique literary creation.
I pondered long before embarking on this endeavour. Time and again
I gave it up but in the end I could not resist the temptation to experience the
most dazzling lunar orgasm once more. This is it.
Yours truly,
Prince Papa Jan
LUNAR ORGASM
Book one
MAD PASSION
1.
Sinner knows anguish. Sinner also knows delight. And emptiness.
Perhaps they also know love – through its spasms. Through the hurt and
delight which it gives them to take away their freedom and maybe to give
them that feeling of a bird in flight.
2.
Crucified on the Thirty-three Crossroads. Accidentally, in a way, if
there be accidental chances at all, I fancied her genuinely. I have always
desired her even if I did not yet know her; even if was not fully aware of my
precise wishes. I thought simply I wished to paint, thought I had never in
earnest regarded until then my dabbling in oils. I thought it was simply
because I was stretched on the cross of the Age of Christ, the time when
existence becomes a philosophy which in turn ceases to be a tempting daydream and becomes the bread, the fists, the lust for life. My empty canvas
was like an erotic challenge and I fingered the brush as I would finger a
woman. It was then that I felt excitement – powerful, lustful, deadly. And all
things changed all of a sudden. It was the start. It was the starting instant.
Without realizing it, I pledged myself to the woman of my tragedy and my
most potent desires, to the woman, angel and devil in one, the woman whom
I was to love. She was still an erotic challenge, lost in the distant mist of the
future, like a white canvas almost untouched.
“Papa Jan,” I heard myself whisper, “stop it! Stop it where you are!”
Icy creeps, then excitement… Again creeps of horror, again
excitement. The hand with the brush trembled on the canvas. I wanted to
touch it and was aware of its pointlessness, of its enormous cost but sinner
knows pain and is prepared to pay dearly for delight. I was tempted by the
blank canvas. It resembled a naked girl suddenly appearing in a dark forest
who like me was apprehensive yet desiring; who like me wished to tempt
and be tempted; who thinks she genuinely wants to keep virgin but this very
thought merely whets her appetite for sin. She opens her lips as if to say “I
can’t do it” but from her lips no sound flows; instead, they slowly come
close to mine. For their part, for no reason at all, they, too, fear the hot
contact and likewise try to eject the simple sentence: “I can’t do it “ but no
sound is emitted. Swollen with tender furies and sweetness, drunken, the
clips draw close. The abyss is inevitable. Before it, volition loses the power
to chose. Hundreds of baby-pythons creep on the skin. They are reincarnated into neuronal knods, trembling on the threshold of touch. Reason
is drunken. Lips touch and that is the end. Another life begins. In fact, real
life starts where values collapse and are replaced by new ones. I saw that the
light administering of the brush is feminine. Or rather a feminine nipple, a
tiny part of it. I was turned on. Aroused and horrified at what was taking
place. I was experiencing something almost crazy. For a sole moment I lost
any self awareness. It was as though I was possessed. Or insane. The tripod,
the blank canvas and the oils used to belong to a friend I had buried several
months before. He was Nikolai Geshev, a well-known Bulgarian painter. I
had been a patron of his and had great admiration for him. The unspent stuff,
sad and melancholy, reminded me of him. I often shed tears. They were the
only refuge where, alone, I could conduct an imaginary dialogue with my
deceased friend and moved me even to speedily do what I could to rid
myself of the sorrow inspired by this temple of incompleteness. I often had
a cup of tea with them as I used to do with him once but had never made
actual use of them.
A day back it would have seemed sacrilegious. Something had
happened with me. I do not know what. I simply felt her presence. She drove
me insane. She whispered to me to pick up the brush and apply it to the
canvas so she could reveal her nakedness through it… I was trembling.
Cold sweat drenched my whole body!
My hand was shaking at the canvas. Millimetres away from it. I dared
not touch it. Nor dared I move away. The ants of sexual arousal tore my
flesh apart morbidly and deliciously, as whenever I touched a new love,
only more so this time. I had a vision of the naked stranger in the forest
whose lips kept coming closer, wishing but failing to utter “I can’t do it!”
Shivering speechlessly, I muttered:
“Touch me, dearest! This a delightful dream!”
“Just a dream!” she said, melancholy and intoxicated with an erotic
surge.
The pupils of my eyes were fixed on the picture in which, mysterious
and barely stripped, the bust was visible. I stood before her excited as never
before, horrified at something incomprehensible and something desired. I
touched he again with the brush and resumed painting – making love to her
in fact – though I did not know her yet.
“Who are you ?” I managed to whisper before the prolonged trance
started while I kept on painting but in fact was travelling towards her
unawares. I slowly moved my face toward the oil painting. Something
opened. The womb. I was being born. I was a baby. A baby who was
hungrily sinking his lips into his mother’s breast and then everything
developed at breakneck speed. Life speeds on like a racing car. I again
pressed my lips into the breast but I had now grown up and the breast was
not my mother’s but my beloved’s. The one whom I met after succumbing to
the temptation to paint. I was kissing her breasts while she, groaning like
mad, went on answering my question who she was:
“The one you made a woman! The one you made… The one…”
The lunatic moon tore at the breasts I was kissing… It rent me apart…
We were standing in the atelier but several years had now passed since that
memorable evening when I decided to take up painting… I unstuck my lips
from her bosom. I took up the brush, the same one, but was now painting not
upon the canvas but upon the breast I painted the Moon. The lunar orgasm of
the full moon. After it came the new moon and the dark. I now knew well
who she was and sensed we were soon to part though I could not, did not
want to and feared to admit it.
She was called Irinia and had long been the renowned painter Papa
Jan.
It was then that I saw her!
The same one!
The one radiating feminine power!
Destructive and creative!
The woman who give both birth and death!
The same one with the radiant fingers!
The one I felt certain I would see when I stood before my first canvas!
The one who came to me in a dream after my first encounter with
Materius Rosenkreuzer!
The one wh so much disturbed me and inspired me over the past few
days!
The one who walked the tightrope over the precipice!
She was hazelnut in colour! Transparent tender skin, a long neck, a
hetaera carved by Phidias. Juicy lips, full and thirsty for endless kisses.
Cheekbones, protruding like a priestess’s who might have been living for
ages in the Himalayas with a Haitian tan. Aura, swollen like the Tower of
Babylon. The splendid breasts seemed to have a life of their own,
conducting, as they moved, the harmonious melody of infinite Nature. She
moved with the grace of a ballerina. Her exquisite erogenous hemispheres
were never chastened by corset or brassiere and her nipples blossomed
under her lace blouse like juicy figs. Perfect bearing of a fashion model who
has just climbed down from the catwalk of the world. Willowy lime-tree! A
crystal glass, so delicate that it could turn into powder at every touch!
Spectacles, out of which peered the freshed, the liveliest and the
deepest feminine eye!
A fleshly metaphor!A metaphor of the whole inspiration of man’s
history!
Our fingers touched!
I felt the ebb and flow of energy…
3.
I endured everything I suffered with Irine while I was painting the
picture: “Two rituals Over The Precipice”, also bearing the name “Our
Unanimity”, the thirteenth of the cycle “Unanimity” which I began in my
earliest creative period. I painted with facility, with a sense of intoxication,
comfort and radiance, the images of my friends, fusing intothose of their
beloved girls. I felt the surface and outer image of their love while I was
recreating it as love on the canvas. A part of me was with the lovers who
imprinted their images upon my canvases and this partexperienced the
liveliest, reckless, purest, holiest and brilliant of that love. I called them “the
lovers” in my paintings, depicting them as unity of thought: their faces
overlapped to become one and the same creature. So I painted Lucy and
Chris, Ivan and Geri, Dilyan and Kali, Stephen and Dea and many others…
The portraits were seven when I felt that I would soon have to paint my own
face which merged, yet distanced itself from that of Irine. I realized with
horror that unity of thought did not mean unity of existence. Even a creature
such as lovers are can live in a schizophrenic contradiction with its own self,
inhabiting two different worlds, though they became twelve while Maestro
Prince Papa Jan had long parted from his Irine. The fatal number of the cycle
again went to him. It was I who again drew the fatal lot!
“IF YOU ARE A FATAL PERSONALITY, EACH AND EVERY
INSTANT OF YOUR LIFE EACH AND EVERY STEP YOU MAKE AND
EACH AND EVERY DAY OF THE WEEK AND EACH AND EVERY
NUMBER IS FATAL! IF YOU ARE FATAL, STOP MEDITATING
UPON WHAT’S FATAL! ACCEPT IT, IF YOU CAN. LAUGH AT
RATHER!IF YOU HAVE THE STRENGTH TO FIGHT IT, DO SO AND
IF YOU POSSESS REASON TRIUMPH OVER IT!”
On my palette I was mixing hues of earth and ebony, of platinum and
of dusk, of old gold and humus, of sea and air , of vintage wine and of blood,
of dove and moon. I searched for the appropriate solution in order to convey
her tan. I was looking for the perfect swarthiness, brimming with life. The
colour of a bull-fighter’s jealousy and Gypsy rhythm, of visions of Gaugin
and of a day on exotic shores, of life in a body blessed by the sun. The
colour of a frivolous harmony wrapping a restive and profoundly
exploratory spirit.
Such was Irina’s image. Enveloped and blessed with beauty, tender
tanned skin, a spirit, unquiet and roaming from a world into another world
from one category of the impossible to the next.Essence, vibrating on the
metaphysical threshold.
She was like a scarlet dawn on a July morning, tender and exciting
under the caressing skin of a woman, born to be caressed. Her turbulent
spirit and her fragile beauty were in interaction and symbiosis. Such as her
are born once in a thousand millennia in order to divide empires and die,
bitten by a snake, beside their beloved.
They attract and tempt with fruit of knowledge their dear friend. They win
masculine fights and lose feminine struggles.They inspire and are adored.
And her features were adorable. She had adorable features. They were
chiselled by millennia of genetic play, perhaps even by God and with the
help of the Devil even in a Phidian manner. Dignified yet of this earth.
Intellectual, yet suffused with eroticism. A high forhead with a pronounced
hemisphere in the centre. A perfect nose like that of a Roman goddess made
of marble. Slightly modernized, less heroic and much more feminine. So
dignified yet far more tender. Such as her it would have been impossible for
the ancient sculptors to produce out of stone. Eyes, even if Asiatically
elongated, constantly wondering, touched one and did not radiate the
severity, typical of the painted eyes of the far East. With a natural brown
colour, exciting with warmth and when I last saw he after her return from
America - instead of glasses she wore contact lenses coloured bluish-green.
“Do I look to you like a toad?” she then laughed.
“You are like a kitten which purring and nestling its body can also
sink its teeth into you,” I said and when her eyes expressed more childish
wonder, widening more than ususal, I could not help bursting into laughter
and embracing her.
She was never boring.
I painted her eye and the brown overlapped with green. Her true
nature overlapped with the cosmetics of the instant. She was the woman –
half-maid
still wishing she had been born a boy, maybe because of her professorial title
in philosophy and despite her landmark works in books like The Body of
Christ. She succumbed to the global insinuation and attempted to re-cast her
divine beauty in tune with the times. Green eyes became her but the green
upon her retina was glass. Her America in the foothills of Vitosha where we
used to make love was glass. The almost imperceptible accent of her
intonation was glass. Refinement upon naturalness. In conflict. I felt I, too,
was covered in glass. I felt I saw her through it and she sees me like that. We
see our palms touch, our lips kiss, but both palms and lips touch glass. I
mixed the brown and the green and in her eyes an unfamiliar pageant of
colours started playing in them. So beautiful, dually expressive, playful,
simultaneously human and divine, sensuous, yet reasonable, intellectually
frivolous, frolicsome – as it suited her to be. I fully understood her only
now, in front of the portrait when she was actually far from me:
“Irine,” I exclaimed and it seemed as if her voice within my own self
responded:
“Didn’t you realize, Janino, that my life belongs to myself as well,
and is also on loan, that my nature is personal, yet part of the existence of
the world; that my beauty comes naturally but conforms to the aesthetic
frame forged throughout the centuries; that I love you but part of me is too
big, too much of the universe, too chaotic to be contained once and for all
within the heart of a single person. Haven’t you realized, Janino, that my
eyes have ever been of glass and protein, created by man as well as God,
brown and green. The brown and the green in them have ever been mixed in
an ineffable variegation with which you are in love. You have loved me and
will love me still just because I am dappled. Because you can always have
me and not have me. Even if you were to conquer the world you will lose the
soul that loves you. Were you to have this soul, you wouldn’t have the
world. I myself am not completely in possession of myself but am forever
gathering up myself, looking for something, classifying, re-arranging,
discovering myself every new day, dissolving, scattering and endlessly
chasing after my own self. You wanted to possess me completely and that’s
why you lost me.”
I painted her lips, full and wide. Her cheekbones austere yet tender in
warmth, trembling from eternal emotion: before our latest embrace, before
the metaphysical threshold, before the world adventure, before the next trip.
A heathen goddess, not of marble but made of flesh and blood…
How I wish to be Phidias now and deifying her, to sculpt her out of marble
and cease loving her! How I wanted at that hour to build her shadow into a
piece of marble or myself to become marble, or at least my heart to become
marble! I could not! Painting her, I re-lived all my suffering for her, all the
happiness with her, all our Lunar orgasms, up and downs and thousands of
verse we dedicated to each other. I painted her body, ethereal presence of a
doe, gentle like a warm endearment. It was perfect – svelte, with uplifted
ample full bosom with yearning nipples like flames of fire.The warm mound
above her thighs. The trembling fibres which, moving, seemed to say, “O,
Jan…”
I ruffled her chestnut hair in the wind because Irine was the offspring of
Wisdom and the Wind; of and ancient philosopher and a damned bacchante,
of a holy yet vibrant maid and the temptation, sent by the Devil. I also
painted the dejected crease under her lower lip. I felt sad but felt that even
in her happiest moods she had been slightly melancholy. She could not
possess everything and still less could she abandon the desire to have
everything.
“IF YOU CANNOT POSSESS EVERYTHING YOU CAN AT
LEAST ABANDON THE DESIRE TO DO SO! DO IT, UNLESS YOU
WANT TO BE SAD EVEN AMIDST THE MOST BLISSFUL MOOD!"”
With chestnut hair of dark gold… Around each thread of hair there shone an
aura of the colour of dark ochre, it was modulated and made her hair look
lighter than it really was.
Her face modulated into mine. It is difficult to pain the portrait of such a
spiritual person as Irina. No matter how successful it is, something is forever
incomplete, unsaid and leading towards the next and the one after the next…
The 2013th, if like and then more and more… To infinity. That portrait I
could never complete… A fictitious finale to a work of art which could
never be complete. When I posed the question in the preceding chapter as I
was sending a message: “If there is no end why the beginning?” It
immediately occurred to me to ask “What is the beginning? What is the
end?” Sometimes it is hard to say. Sometimes it is impossible to say. Who
starts a love affair?The spark in whose heart precedes the one in the other
Which body ignites lust in the other? Is there a first at all? Is that at all
possible if it is a question about unanimity, unison, harmony?In its most
perfect ways love is a circle between two persons. That circle often changes
shape. It can turn into a triangle or polygon even. The geometrical figure can
occasionally break up. It can be utterly erased by the rubber of the absolute
of world existence but has always been a circle. I circle where beginning is
inconceivable. A circle like a circular technique of painting where forms are
consequences of explosions of energy
like the Big Bang and only after they take place can there be any beginning
which had been lacking prior to that. Love between two people cannot
originate in only one of the two. The objects depicted circularly cannot be
each one’s beginning. verything is a beginning therefore everything is
endless.
So, without ending, Irina’s likeness fused with mine. The elongated
eyes were recreated in mine. Cinsiderably wider. They resembled the eyes of
a an owl, fixed on things invisible to the multitude but for the fact that their
colour was blue, which meant they very much loved light to be part of the
life of an owl. My eyes almost completely expressed my identity. Like the
owl I am a philosopher yet I would taher not give myself to endless
contemplation so I would not become captive to the perennial darkness of
the deepest categories only to be able to discern what others do not while
missing the hole in the road at my feet. I love wisdom but more than it I love
love istelf. Beauty is the gravitational attaraction for the lonely hearts. My
eyes combine the bird of love and the heart of loneliness. Myself, I am both.
I paint my eyes with milores (Paris blue)…
After that I choose dense paints. The most natural which are closest to
nature, to the earth. My flesh is infinitely of this earth, bursting with health –
the flesh not of an animal but of a plant. Melancholy is the twentieth
century: without elevating the spirit it has turned with conveniences and
easily accessible poisons the greater part of its offspring more akin to plants
which the gentlest breeze would break and even uproot. I am lucky not to be
one of them. I bite like a bulldog.When I decide to do it I tear wires with my
teeth. My star number before the audience is the crunching of beer-bottle
tops.I have not a muscle on me that isn’t well developed. I impress most
with the muscles of my face. They cannot be developed in fitness-centres.
There isn’t a muscle-building system for them and no diet has been evolved
to improve them. Especially sculpted and impressively swollen are the
muscles on my temples. On the faces of many you can’t even notice
them.The temple muscle is the one most used in the human body: both in
speaking and in chewing. That is why it is difficult to strain it, and therefore
difficult to develop. Mine is quite developed - as if I were of a quite
different breed. And that is a fact: I am a predator. Predators are the first
hunters and I am one. My blood group proves it. A hunter of emotion, love,
beauty, world glances, lanscapes, naked bodies, happiness.
My lips are full, expressive of joy, juiciness and sex, comparatively
narrow but my smile is broad and with all my thirty-two teeth so I am born,
a birthmark of unusualness, serried like a row of pearls.
My skull is massive like a statue of Zeus.
My forhead is shaped like Irina’s. It is high, and bulging in the
middle. I am partially bald. This strongly attracts the opposite sex. From
afar, women, nymphs hungry for something else sense that everything is
owing to the excess of testosteron in my organism. My virility seems
inherited. My grandfather created my father at an advanced age. The press
more than once has written stories about Papa Jan having ten thousand
women in his life. I am on my way of achieving the – by now – well-known
record of Inspector Megre’s creator, George Simenon, who had twenty
thousand in the course of his seventy-year-long life. My virility is hypercontemplative of the tender sex. Of my sexuality people say: a global
predator. Of me the great conductor of the twentieth and the twenty-first
century Konstantin Krimetz created the philosophical-sexual term the Great
Fuke. The remaining hair has retained its slightly rusty hue. I don’t have a
single white hair yet have experienced quite a few pleasures – as well as
displeasures – from people who grow grey. My experience is truly enviable.
My beard frames and symbolizes my face. It is rustier than the hair. It is
thick and is like that of a bogatyr. It is Assyrian-Babylonian, frequently met
with among the Thracians. After all, I am Orpheus’s ancestor! To paint my
skin I dissolve natural sienna into all colours of the rainbow. More important
are the adventures which I have helped preserve the natural colour of my
skin. The dissolvant in this case is life. I use natural sienna, my portrait has
to be close to my true image. I paint my nose, well-shaped, of normal mass
for such a face. In profile one can see the almost imperceptible curve on its
tip. Looked at frontally it is triangular. My ears are small – the final part of
my face. They are covered with soft fuzz. Sometimes I want to grow out of
their hairs outre moustachio similar to Salvadore Dali’sI started shaving
those hairs in order to obtain such extraordinary moustachios – an
expression of the exotic nature of Prince Papa Jan.
Well, friends, whims are what they are! I cannot see all of them
achieved. In the picture my ears are without the Dali moustachios.
I shape my cheekbones. Lower down my face is broader. I said I
resemble a mongrel of a vicious breed and I really do but right now I am
inclined to make my likeness resemble Polyphemus. That sinister and oneeyed giant from Greek mythology.
( Freudian aside: The one-eyed giant used to symbolize unsatisfied
male organ).
Besides a beast-like giant he was a suffering creature, in love with the
sea-nymph Galatea…
“Well, my dear Galatea! Why did you re-kindle after so long a time
the spirit of suffering the body of the giant?”
“Couldn’t the spirit of suffering be the spirit of the divine, the spirit of
the legend into which we are to turn?”
I am melancholy, though big. Body has a rock’s hardness capable of
fighting all hardships in life but it is also fresh bread which I hand out to
feed the hungry.It is forever fighting and winning against life’s odd. Its
muscles are torn apart, filled like wine-skins with vintage brew – the raw
flesh of life – it feeds upon it but is also like wax melting with the contact
with a soft line of poetry. The muscle fibres carry a rather heavy scent of
modernity but my eyes weep when I realize that my tears can slate the thirst
of the needy. Even the Jericho trumpet of the rock-sounding modernity
cannot shake it but love always can. It is corpulent, fascinating and always
‘there’ because it is called upon to intil life in the home and in the memory
of each new friend, acquaintance or girlfriend who can hear the melody of
my words and dance to it. It’s the body of man of few words and sure of
victory with the soul of a human being who has suffered countless defeats.
In this bear of a body there is coolness of a snake, love of freedom of
an eagle and affection of a mother.
The body would have exploded with its energy were it not made
divine by art which humbles it.
It would have lost its head completely before the divine were it not for
the love which makes it sympathize with fellow human beings.
It would have become effaced among them, could it not give proud
appellations to its image and paint it.
It would have met Narcissus’s end were it not for Irine.
One loves oneself, enamoured of the echo, which one has turned into
god.
The beloved.
The exiled one.
The enchantress.
The one before whom we officiate.
The one we desecrate.
The one we follow.
The one who inspires me to paint.
Francis Bacon thought three discoveries helped Europe conquer the
world, viz., printing, gunpowder and the compass.
The discoveries are a fact.
Another fact is the world conqueror’s lust. For such a one like her, the
one I have painted and loved. The one for whose sake paper was discovered
since it is discovered solely for poetry devoted to her – not for blueprints of
artillery. For her sake was the compass invented viz., not to point to the
directions of the world but to direct me to her alone. Gunpowder was
discovered for her sake as well because it was a chance discovery in the
search for the link with the Temptress: She. And this link was found
unawares. With gunpowder and lunar orgasm it conquers the globe. Without
compass subdues the four corners of the earth as it does all sheets of paper
since even the Relativity Theory, read by me is a love poem…
I was the man set aside for her.
I was a free bird, too.
I was also the melancholy one-eyed giant Polyphemus.
Viktor Bugai also painted me one-eyed in the triptych he dedicated to
me. On it he depicted me as Cyclops whose single eye is the symbol of the
only way: forward!
(A Freudian remark: since we’ve made clear the symbolism of the
one-eyed giant, we must add that Papa Jan’s, especially, is so significant in
his life and work and so clearly manifested in his aura that it was not for
nothing that he had been painted with one eye by the Russian artist in the
painting “The Generous Possessor of Russia”. A one-eyed giant conquers all
of Russia. Homer wouldn’t have allowed himself a topic like that.)
(A remark on the Freudian remark: Freud got it wrong. The penis
symbol is not the one-eyed giant but the penis is a symbol of him.)
The discerning third eye seeing the unseen! (Life-giving!)
(A Nikhilist’s Note: The giant and the anatomical organ resembling
him have nothing in common!)
(A note from 13,000 women: they have, they have!)
(A note of the dadaist: Freud and the giant do have something in
common but the resemblance is not in the picture.)
The mysterious sense perception which sees things unperceived by the
eyes. The ability to have a hunch about the future, to perceive invisible
things in my interlocutors and to peer into the past of Nature and and the
universe. With my psycho-kinetic energy I have cured thousands of sick
people suffering from all sorts of diseases. My aura is an ambition to
encompass all the universe. A thrill, perceived hundreds of kilometres a
portion of which I leave with every person, instil into each object, relieve
bodies, cure souls. I instil my energy in my paintings and through my
messages I will reach billions of people on earth. It is half-serious, halfhumorous, yet real like my story. Colourful like a painting. Brilliant like a
slight insanity, similar to the one I often exhibit.
I continue to dissolve the paints on my face. I dissolve it seems all
landscapes reflected in them till finally my face again acquires its natural
colour betraying life and outpouring of energy.
The face on the portrait is overstrained, like an affected galaxy in my
throat. When my facial muscles are tense I relax by farting. That is why I
fart several times before each business appointment or rendezvous. Unlike
Salvador Dali who crowed like a cock while farting, I bray like a donkey.I
can fart loud at any time of the day or night even when in bed with a woman.
I stand amazed.
I did not look for naturalism but I achieved it. My skin does in fact
shine. The sun’s rays play upon my flexed muscles.
I realize that reflecting the world upon myself I have imprinted myself
upon the world.
IF YOU WANT TO IMPRINT YOURSELF UPON THE WORLD,
BEFORE THAT IMPRINT THE WORLD UPON YOURSELF!
Loneliness is cured with searching. Even if you do not know you are
lonely you instinctively search and without knowing you cure yourself. Now
that all is ended I realize that better than ever
No, it has not come to an end. When does it all end? I am still alive
and I ache keenly. What I want is that everything should come to an end.
I am walking in a certain direction. The surf laughs. I am pulling a
black cow on a chain. I bought it a few hours ago. Before that I wanted to
kill myself. So that the pain should cease… The cow entangled its horns in
the branches. Now… I entered the empty belly. I tore the belly apart and
took out the guts. I took off my clothes. I felt pleasantly warm. The world
ceased to exist. I was not yet born. I was in my mother’s womb. I still did
not have a name. I still did not have a gender and could not fall in love but
lived in love and warmth. The umbilical chord was soon to be severed and I
was to start living in loneliness which I would treat by searching. I was to
sink my lips into my mother’s bosom and a moment after, still hungrier, in
the bosom of my beloved – the vile, the savage and sublime, the shivering
and the cool, the deceptive and the genuine, the cursed and the blessed, mine
and the one belonging to others, the only and the one of many, the bittersweet love. The one I looked for the one I found.
The one I lost and couldn’t have lost.
The one I saw in the picture and who was not there.
The erotic and the selfish.
The furious.
The illusory.
My fantasy had produced that creature.
Was it all true.
Did I not invent her, wanting to bring back the memories of the
conception, as I curled myself in the belly of the black cow.
I dozed off… The lights of old memories flickered. They belonged to
an earlier life which I could perhaps forget as soon as I saw the light of day.
I hear the whining of hungry dogs, smelling fresh blood.
Will they tear me apart along with the remains of the cow?
No. I’m not afraid.
In some way they seem to me like the passions of which I was not
afraid either, though I realized they could tear me apart.
I feel the closeness of the furious dogs and tremble in dulcet
expectation.
Just as at the time in the lift…
4.
More than four years have passed since the evening when I applied
brush to canvas. From that evening on I started feeling acute hunger for
painting. I sculpted breasts, thighs, cunts. Waves, resembling feminine
forms. Rocks resembling male firmness, sunk into the vulnerable flesh. After
each picture I felt relief as after a coitus. It lasted seconds and then again
followed hunger and the next picture. I saw the ghost which made me live
in that way and inspired me in every cloud behind every corner in each and
every natural form, in every woman.
I painted the miracle and it always slipped and no matter how perfect
the picture was life was still imperfect. Its absence and at the same time its
constant presence threw me into despair. I often told myself: “That is
fantasy, Papa Jan! An aspiration for perfection and it is merely a road! You
won’t discover it!”
And again hungry and passionate I stood before the next canvas. I
touched it with the brush and the breast came to life for me to ask: “Who are
you?”After that the search started anew accompanied by despair till in the
end the w o n d e r revealed itself before my eyes!
It happened in a lift. Now I clearly recall that before I got into it deep
down I knew it will happen and that would alter my destiny. I felt furious,
dumb excitement which I didn’t know how to interpret.
The lift in the Palace of Culture was packed . Many were those who
wished to hear the lectures of Materius Rozenkreuzer. The Knight of the
Sorrowful Countenance of metaphysical longings. The critic of the Mefisto
reason. The banner of the rebellion of scepticism. I, too, wanted to hear them
and maybe to make his acquaintance without supposing that this accidental
step will turn into such a U-turn of my emotional life.
I mentioned the fact that the room taking us upwards was jam-packed,
nor could I avoid chance contact with the woman. I felt the thrill. A moment
later – an erection which I tried to control by force of will. My
embarrassment fluctuated from pleasant warmth, to icy quivers and then
again warmth. Something snapped. Our hands touched. I saw the radiance of
her fingers which fastened upon my hand. A spark went off. The others did
not see it. But she was smiling at me. I felt shackled like a hero from a
nightmare.I wanted to do something, to think something but couldn’t. My
thoughts scattered and the packed lift was to move for ages.My hand
trembled and I touched her thighs under the flimsy dress. She felt the touch
and smiled enigmatically – a smile of falling clothes. Mocking, serious,
innocent and perverted. A smile of a woman knowing what she wanted but
did not expecting to know it. A radiance of a saint and a courtesan. Broken
chains. Such as can fire you up and madden you. Such over whom wars are
fought. A smile from the colours of my paintings. Odd and somehow
incomplete. Inexplicable. Brief as if she never had been. And illusion, a
magic…
But it was not so! Our eyes had met and drank on each other. The
expression of hers was quite different from that of her lips. She seemed
flustered like she was afraid of something. Maybe from the contact or maybe
– wounded – she wanted no more pain. … We communicated with our eyes
and the dialogue maddened me. “But what? That was a chance touch!” I
excused my action before myself but my heart was throbbing wildly. It was
no chance contact. It was real sex. The naked girl in the forest of my
fantasies and the breasts from my first picture. The unbridled fervour with
which I was painting and with which masturbated and sometimes spilled my
sperm onto the canavses. A seemingly involuntary touch but actually a
perception of lava, incomparably more powerful than those in the bed of any
other woman and my paintings.
“I’ll have this woman!”
She was like a swallow. Hazelnut… Ethereal… Slimlegged. Her lips –
full, kissing even when not actually kissing and at the same time a prominent
childish caprice, inspiring nothing else but innocence…
I wished not to hurt them but ro sear them with kisses. I longed to
submerge them in my passionate saliva and sperm. I wanted to smear them
with paint with which they would paint all my works. I wanted them to bite
me and me to bite them, to watch them biting off a piece of sandwich or a
banana, or a snake’s head. Spontaneously and madly to kiss the body of the
fictitious prince in the forest and to groan and groan…
I was not my own self anymore…
I was going to have this woman.
At long last the vehicle stopped on the floor where lectures were to
start any minute now. As soon as got there, she hurried up to Materius
Rozenkreuzer, the prime mover of the event. She kissed him a discrete and
wifely kiss on the cheek.
My stomach suddenly hurt as though I was bathed in cold water,
sobering me. I felt robbed by the very ban I had just imposed upon myself.
I listened distractedly to the lecture. The three hours seemed an
eternity and I still felt I was in the lift, my wild urges teaching me more than
the shared intellectual achievements of the genius, passionately and stylishly
uttered.
“What more can I get from you, you philosopher of genius, surely nothing
more than her!What more can you tell me than the savage lust I felt in my
loins!”
I was up in the air!
At the close of the lectures I did not realize how my legs took me to
the doctor of philosophy, wearied by his rhetoric and the woman who was
his wife and not the woman who had crazed me inside the lift.
“Papa Jan!” I introduced myself.
“An eccentric painter!
I laughed. She again smiled at me. Thus we seemed to have a secret
all our own. As if inside the lift our fingers had not touched but we had made
love and the wetness of my sperm above her thighs had not yet dried up.
“My name’s Irina. I’m very pleased to meet you,”warbled the
swallow.
The dumb dialogue was proceeding furiously.
“I’ll have you!All taboos end here! Good, evil end just as everything
at all ends except the ecstasy!”
Rozenkreutzer was smiling his medievally scholastic smile as if he
understood everything and was ridiculing it all.
“What the hell…”
“What the hell!” I did not realize how I uttered that phrase.
“In our time words themselves are the hell and…” Materius
Rozenkreutzer started on his lectures once again.
“You seem very nutty to me!” I thought irritated.
“What did you say?” smiled Irina.
“Did you say what the hell?”
“I wanted to say I am very keen to show you my paintings and their
photo-copies, of course… Yes, and let’s have a drink on that which is
happening in this hall because as from today Bulgaria would be a different
country. Even if a single intellectual is to be re-educated he would carry
along with him thousands of people and for their part they’ll… However in
the world did that thought occur to me!”
Her eyes sparkled with curiosity. It turned out she herself was also
trying her hand at painting. Half an hour later we all relaxed somewhat.
Photocopies of the pictures went from hand to hand and apart from
exclamations “Oh!” and Ah!” they were the subject of numerous halfbaked intellectual interpretations about style which betrayed a great deal of
grinded cliches and very few free bytes of feeling. I don’t know where all
that egghead crowd came from at the last moment. I was used to that, at any
rate. On such occasions when time for drinking comes there’s no way but
know-alls turned up en masse anyway. It’s most pleasant to indulge in clever
talk at table. It’s different before a blank canvas of an audience of
intellectuals whom you have to convince of your own truth. In fact the only
words I heard were those of Irina and Materius. Though he admitted he
knew next to nothing about painting, he gave me quite a few valuable ideas
about the philosophy behind my paintings and even told me things I had not
thought of before but had put in my picture by intuition.
It was Irina, however, who administered the crucial blow. The word
she pronounced shed light on all of my works. Up to that moment my style
did not have a name and thereby it was enfranchised and uncanonically
lively. This, however, created difficulties when exhibitions of my works
were staged and I myself did not always realize clearly what exactly I was
meant to say with my next picture. It seemed I had forever been captive of
the modern devil, the intellect.
“Energy lyzism!” she said.
“What!” I exclaimed in surprise.
“Lyzis – dissolution! Universal dissolution of everything into
everything else via your own energy.”
I had an uneasy feeling she had been reading my thoughts. I needed a
name for my art. She seemd aware of that even before I had told her about it.
I felt happy. An eternal instant passed and I was in love with her. Just like
that, in a thrice. In the same way as several hours before I had desired her
erotically.
“You will be mine!…” I muttered softly, so as not to be overheard and
felt desperate. I was falling in love and was aware I had to because in her I
had recognized the ghost compelling me to paint. That evening an about-turn
in my life was taking place. Without which, even if unhappy, I would live a
normal life. Without dreams, prejudices, lifts… Towards the bottom of the
universe, beyond each and every taboo, beyond good and evil...
The three dogs were tearing the cow to pieces and were soon to get at
my body, huddled like an innocent embryo. I wanted to satisfy their lust as
when I desired to satisfy my predatory erotic passion and sweet yearnings.
My second funeral. The first was with her.
“I want my freedom!” hissed the swallow which had become a snake.
“I love you but more than you it is my freedom I love.”
I was getting savage. At that moment she did not even suspect she was
near her death. With a single movement of my hand I could have broken her
slim neck.She had maddened me. She had awakened the lone wolf in me. I
tried to control myself. Everything was becoming rediculous and shabby.
We had already been lovers for a long time and had fogotten those weary
times when we could be together only for an hour or two while making the
rounds of the marketplace in our neighbourhood. It was a long time since we
made love by exchanging glances only, dreaming of a night like that after
my exhibition in Varna.
We made love fot the first time. It was wild and passionate. I don’t
remember if there was a full moon but we were in the state of the wild
moon. It was seemingly a hallucination. She didn’t seem to wish it to have
happened. At least she seemed to be playacting skillfully. There followed the
eternal ages in which we only met when shopping. We touched deliberately
by chance and like children felt obliged to have a false alibi for every
contact and each stolen minute together. Our desire knew no bounds, no
limits to craziness which the soul can sustain, no boundaries to dreaming, to
masturbation, to poetic metaphors, to any paranoid forms of expectation… It
went beyond all things admissible…
It was inadmissible that we should ever part. It was inadmissible we
should be together. It was inadmissible that we should hide. It was
inadmissible we should come out into the open. So, when nothing was
admissible for us, there came the moment when we realized we could not get
anything out of this phase in our adventure. We abandoned our expectations
and in an embrace found solace. “You made me feel a woman!” she
groaned lustily. “You made me… You…”
“Who are you?” I kept on asking and saw her in my unfinished
paintings.
“The love triangle has never brought anything good to anybody!”
close friends warned me who did not close their eyes to what was happening
between us…
5.
Wisdom and delight. What the hell! I knew it, but what of that? What
does delight mean? It would have been cruel otherwise. Perhaps it was cruel
just as it was. I learned to anticipate her thoughts, was fearful and that
perplexed me. At first she was like a swallow and the resemblance was
beautiful. Then I realized swallows are migratory birds. I was not entitled to
more than I was getting. I had no wish to deprive her of her freedom which
would have killed her. We were gradually bound closer together. The
freedom I enjoyed not less than she did seemed worthless to me. The goals I
had set myself before meeting her were now lacking any happy meaning.
Without her all my experiences were of no value without her. She had
caused something to happen to me which I had never believed possible. She
had appropriated me. And step by step she revealed her cruelty. t times I felt
like her tame boar, satisfying her animal urges.At other times I felt a fool for
feeling like her boar because she revealed her love and was playing no
games. I have enough experience with women in my life to know when a
woman is playacting, whether she be a comedy actress, a prostitute or a born
swindler.At times I was happy, at times fearful lest I lose everything I had.
It was odd. I didn’t even know what it was.I wished to understand but
perhaps that could have put an end to everything. A beloved or simply a
mistress?! Was it love or merely a panting passion?! If I could answer these
questions I would perhaps spoil their mysterious fascination… The mystery
of my dreams and their whirlwind…
She again uncovered her demoniac ego. We hed fled everyone and
were in an abandoned shepherd’s hut high up in Rila Mountain. While we
were making love we perceived the birth of divinity, the mystery of
innocence and full emancipation. Then we practised meditation. We made
love again but not with our bodies: rather with the vitality rid of reason and
with our stellar proto-images. Shining ghosts, writhing like snakes, chased
one another and tied themselves into knots. Involuntarily, our lips whispered
the mantra:
“I love you,
I love you,
I love you…”
Our hands were outstretched and our fingers touched…
“Let us preserve it!” she unexpectedly said and her voice was so
different it acted upon me like a cold shower and suddenly the hideout of
innocence turned into a lone abandoned shepherd’s hut which stank of
sweating bodies and mildew. The eternal and divine woman suddenly turned
into an ordinary dishevelled beauty and her vagina resembled a dirty Gypsy.
This re-incarnation excited me. She tore down the clothes of my dreams and
from an idea she again became a woman.
Her eyes, however, were staring straight at me. I felt like a schoolboy
unprepared for his exam. “Let us preserve the distance!” she said again. “But
does it exist at all?” I asked irritably and was about to let my hands drop
down but I didn’t do it. “I feel like you are a part of myself. We are one.
Believe me, there is such a thing as love!”
“It exists as long as there is distance!” the swallow was not flying off:
she was becoming a snake. “Don’t withdraw your hands. Don’t you either
pull them away or push them closer. Preserve the distance lest we cool off.
Don’t draw near lest we are torn apart…”
“These are poetic interpretations,” I irritably reacted, displeased to
have been aroused from my sleep. “What’s come over you?”
“It’s the truth. Don’t touch me lest you tear me apart. Don’t do it lest I
spoil you. Don’t distance yourself in order to possess me longer…”
I believed her. There was insanity in her stare which bothered me. I
forgot my dream and my senses were aroused.
“What’s come over you Irina?” I anxiously asked. “Someday it will
all end, no doubt. Let’s preserve part of ourselves to ourselves. We can’t be
selfless in our love because we are too narcissistic to love anyone other than
ourselves. Via the other we merely touch ourselves. That’s assisted
masturbation.” I shrivelled as I got slapped in the face.
I kept stretching out my hands though I knew not why. She spoiled
everything. She behaved like a schoolgirl filling her emtoional emptiness
with hypotheses about love. She needn’t have done it right now. We had
fought and suffered for that moment. For it to be powerful, delicious and
fiery. For such along time we had been keeping at a distance considerably
bigger than the space between my fingers. In an instant she negated it all.
What more did she want? I loved her and for an instant I reproached her and
forgave her thousands of times. I was puzzled. I failed to understand and
sought to blame myself. Desperately I grasped her hand. She pulled back
furiously but failed to wrench herself free. It was worse to have been slapped
in the face by her than by any other woman. I flew into a rage… I was not
sure was in control of my movements while she – angrier than me – was
pulling herself away and was furiously shouting. At one moment she
managed to extricate herself. I got hold of her once again. I pulled her down.
I sank my lips into her breasts. She struggled madly. She writhed like a
snake. This produced an even more powerful arousal in me and I
passionately started kissing her breasts. She tried to wrench herself away but
was not strong enough to manage it. I possessed her brutally. It was like a
rape and she gave out a pained scream.
I desired her, I loved her and had to be strong in order to subdue her.
Her groans resembled those of a whore. I ejaculated quickly. I felt satisfied
and robbed at the same time. She was silent and though looking at my face
she was not seeing me. She was somewhere else and thinking about
something else. Something which she regared with hatred.
“What do you want of me?” I shouted at her. I failed to understand.
What did you expect you’ll get?!”
“I told you not to get close to my fingers. Now you have torn me apart
You shouldn’t have touched me!”
“But I have touched you before. Even then in the lift I touched you
and the distance you speak of has vanished. Don’t you remember, my
swallow?”
She fell silent. She seemed to have grown mute and it was I who was
the foolishly trying to make her speak with my words. I couldn’t stand her
mute accusation. I would rather she screamed, accusing me, weeping and not
forgive than be silently blaming me. She more like a mute sphynx than a
defenceless woman. My barely controlled irritation amused her. The role she
had chosen to play and in which she had come to believe in order to hurt me,
misled by her own fanatsies, was humiliating to me. Or I was unable to
grasp her motivation. She had come to believe that this way it would have
been more delightful than it could have been. Before that she had frequently
tried to make things more complicated which in the simplicity of human
nature had probably made her ashamed of her present conduct.
“I love my freedom!”
My God! Strength… Weakness… in what sort of world was I living?
I would rather she had slapped my face. We were not on a stage where
conflicts found their solutions simply and rapidly – it was not theatre but life
itself: the truth I could not believe. Nor did I wish to do so. A brief phrase.
Like the hissing of a flying bullet, like the flapping wings of a bird of prey,
thunderous. The silence. Darkness. Uneasy and sinister. An endless duty of a
karma. Summing up on the verge of hysteria. Pain and a new moon. A
chance encounter, involuntary contact, vicissitudes and things tumbling
down instead of us enjoying a splendid evening. All soaking wet from the
unexpected shower, we had to reconcile ourselves to the fact that even
Nature itself was indignant at this lovemaking. She hardly realized I was
weeping under the pouring rain and in desperation wished to put an end to
my life.
A new encounter into the world beyond. Fresh failures probably.
Someone was hiding somewhere and then coming into sight while I entered
the first toilet room that came my way and masturbated, imaging I was with
her. I was unaware she had been doing the same under the shower .
I am alone in a lonesome country house.
I am painting all day and all night. While doing so I am aroused by the
image delineated by my consciousness, I am touching her, though not on the
breast… I get short of canvases.
Coldness, loneliness, anxiety… I want her… I set my canvases ablaze
to warm myself. In fact I am setting fire to my loneliness. Thus I burn up
part of my own self and then…
You gradually pipe down, slowly wither away and your soul is in
turmoil.Loneliness gets increasingly arctic. It touches outer space. I am
turning into a falling star. Want to be completely extinguished but tremble
with pain. Everything is confused. The memory loses the paranoiac
sensation of tragedy.
I want it all to be fine, I want to smile, I dream of undesired
moments. Five girls are in my lonely country house. I shove my hand up the
skirt of one of them.She smiles sweetly at me. The other one bares her
breasts and I suck at her nipples. Again everything is confused. I can recall
that the other three join the game. The picture – an imprint of their bodies –
remains as a memento of that absurd night. It reminds me that in the end I
poured several buckets of paint onto the floor and had asked them to dance
until the floor itself became a big palette. Then we made love on a canvas. I
called it “Iriniya”. Why? It was such an erotic challenge that I could not
resist it and ejaculated but unfortunately – incompletely. Shouldn’t I see a
psychoanalyst? Yes! Should I say to him that I had fallen in love with a
woman. The paintings began exciting me. I love beauty and want to make
love to her till the moon burns up in its orgasm.
Instead, I deliberately find the next female sitter. This time I curb my
desires and simply paint a nude. Or rather her spine. For the first time her
spine is so interesting. It turns into a snake in oils. Upon it blossom two
grapevine buds. The halo of astral radiance starts shining. Demons tear it
apart. The snake bites at the brain. Full of venom, drugged crazy, in a state
of delirium, I begin producing monsters. Anemic and small, they feed on the
Divine Soil and defecate metal. New monsters are born, which feed on the
metal and for their part give birth to still others, and others and so on… They
smoke petrol and lead opposite Olympians donning gas masks. The hurl
lightnings and rockets at one another. They stick their forheads to the spine
and drop onto my brush, giving off sparks, while it breathes more and more
hatred and aggression. Maybe against the snake which attracts it so
powerfully, maybe against myself, not least for my weakness. I lose
consciousness. Looks as if I ought really to consult a specialist, is what I
think to myself when I come to but I make no move again.
By and by I get rid of the nightmare. I am again a little bit in love.
Perhaps genuinely in love.A girl has appeared, our sentiments are radiantly
happy and do not produce monsters. She and I hide from no one. Her name
if Fanny and though still barely eighteen, she is a mature woman. Outwardly
she looks like Irina but it is not this likeness that attracts me. Girls her age
fall in love but not demonstratively.She did not regard our ralationship as a
serious one. In the final analysis we are nothing compared to four billion and
what are three billion compared to thousands of billions of stars? The
universe does not go round us and our sex organs, still less round our
inflated affairs of the heart. Emancipated, she abandoned herself to all sorts
sex games and accepted everything in life with astonishing simplicity. In her
book there was no apple tree in the garden of Eden so that no sin existed at
all. Our relationship was my cure.She, too, however, was smeared onto the
canvas. Simple. And quite businesslike. I did not expect anything else.
I was to see Irina and talk with her about annotating “energy lyzism”.
I was brash enough to appear to the public as a discoverer of a new style of
painting. I owed it to Irina. After all, she was godmother to the style in
question. When we met I did not forget Fanny.The river had not yet joined
the ocean and there was no way it could. Irina simply provoked me with an
“involuntary” baring of a thigh. She bared her thigh meaningfully and
reminded me that we were “good friends” and “maybe more”. Then she
suggested we go visit “the marketplace” again.
There followed those “innocent touches”. Hints. Then she was curious
to know what I was painting at the moment. Out of mere politeness. I
answered: a picture of erotic visions and experiences, a universal
fertilization. Then came the challenge, as if a joke, but in her smile there
was no joke; I, too, understand jokes, sometimes.
“Could I sit to you ?”
“When?”
“The opening of your exhibition in Varna is coming soon, isn’t it?”
That day there was no way we could write an annotation on energy lyzism.
Irina succeeded in opening the wound. In the sliest manner possible to a
woman. And a snake. The expectation of sin and the forbidden things. The
time for contemplation when I could only lose the battle with myself. The
time when I came to understand that no matter what I did I was to regret it.
An endless month to my great holiday. My first one-man show on such a
large scale: over two hundred of my works on all three floors of the Vestal
Gallery. I ought to have strangled here there and then.
Fanny was like no other woman. No one could neglect her for another
woman’s sake but only for the sake of a witch or a demon. But can you
strangle a witch? The stake would not have been invented for them if one
could strangle one. And can a demon be taken by the hand? And in the case
of Irina I would rather have my hands cut off than strangle her even if I
could. The hands I painted with.
“Your exhibition in Varna is coming soon!” – her voice echoed in my ears
while I was painting and the picture was getting more and more arrogant,
loving, grand and terrible… The dancing women appeared… “Your
exhibition in Varna is
coming soon!” – her voice echoed in my ear while I was making love to
Fanny amid hundreds of candles in a cave on the outskirts of Assenovgrad.
“Your exhibition in Varna is coming soon… Soon… This will be a
splendid painting if… it is… I don’t know for sure, my friend!”
I get crazy and push Fanny away from me. I insist we do a threesome
with a friend of hers. Fanny is emancipated but it is a question of her closest
friend who did not seem to be so liberated where sex was concerned. I
realize I want to nag at her because I feel guilty about falling in love with
another. I have no wish to neglect her as she doesn’t deserve that. I want her
to deserve it and to be the guilty party. I expect her to decline which will
permit me to get cross with her and to convince myself I have become cross
with her. She smiles shame-facedly instead:
“I’m not sure we’ll manage it, but if it does, it will be delightful!”
I slap her, calling her “a pervert pig”.
Days during the run-up to the exhibition are long. I don’t think of
Fanny. I wanted to accuse her of something. Unexpectedly to me, she herself
revealed something that I wouldn’t think my beloved was up to.She was
very perverted indeed. I keep thinking of Irina and the day arrives.Then the
night. Everything is upset.The distance dissipates and I sober up at last. I
realize that throughout, in my frenzied desire to possess her, I have behaved
like crazy.
The splendid moment passes. There again follow our rendezvous for
an hour or two, while shopping together, and a still crazier desire – and here
we are, having overcome it all, far from everyone, in solitary hatred.
“Do you remember us two in the pouring rain? With my key to the
atelier – with one friend, the key to the flat – with another, that to the car –
with yet another…”
I smile at the memory which I by now regard with a sense of humour.
They all seemed to have conspired not to give me back the keys on time.
Nor did I have any money with me. The little I had, I bought flowers with…
“The thirteen roses!” smiles Irina. It seems I had put an end to the
silence we had subjected ourselves to. “The thirteen graveside roses on the
proud, lonesome feeling we could have cherished towards each other. Which
could have elevated us above all those sexual excitements… And above all
that brutish fury… Tell me, how many times have you thought of murdering
me?”
I did not respond. I realized she had been aware of it all the time.
What is more – she had sought to provoke it. “A tombstone!” – my hand was
trembling as it held the lighter. She had overdone the poetic hyperboles! She
had overdone and hyperbolized the tragedy!
I was barely aware of the lighter in my hand which was tremdbling
over the bunch of dry hay. Everything would be in flames. Or rather, it
would explode.
“Here now, you have put a tombstone!” said I. “Over all that
happened between us!”
It was not me. It was my demon, whipping her demon. I had a partial
insight into it all and my will held me back from pressing the button.
“It wouldn’t be for the first time I would setting fire to my paintings!”
Irina jumped, panther-like, over me.She pressed my head between her
naked thighs.I endeavoured unsuccessfully to throw her off. I wanted to bite
her but I kissed her. I fell upon my back. She stood before my eyes as a
perverted idol, in her hand holding the lighter which unbeknownst to me she
had wrenched from my hand.She pressed the button and dropped the lighter
into the hay. It immediately burst into flames. I came on top of her, my penis
penetrated her again but now she was aroused and had regained the same fire
with which she had been making love till that night. We rolled off about a
yard or two away from the flames but they were soon to reach us. Both of us
were aware of them and wished to take away the final thing of beauty that
destructive love could give us. “Now we’re going to possess each other till
death do us part!” she moaned not like a prostitute but like a woman in love.
The flames were gaining ground. They whispered to us, screamed at us,
whined and crackled in unison with our broken groans:
“I love you.”
“I love you.”
“I love you.”
At last we collapsed in the centre of a fiery circle. We had not way
out.
“I buried you… You buried me…” I uttered, my voice trailing off
amid the louder noise of the fire, sounding like a verdict.
“No!” Irina’s voice came through it. “We are burnt up!”
I wished to live, wished to burn. I wished to burn in her arms. I
wanted to live – for her sake. Two paintings had caught fire, two delightful
paintings with a soul in them. Not that they were all that successful, not that
they depicted the flames of passion but rather because they embodied them. I
both hated and loved her but it was too late for anything but forgiveness…
At that moment it started raining. It was a downpour.The rotten roof literally
collapsed, crashing into splinters. Water, fire, sparks and smoke became
snakes like those which covered an erotic canvas I had long since been
painting which some time before Irina herself had called “Total Fertilization
On the Eve of the oming of a Messiah”. I imagined us built into the picture
and what were going through was its message and not the conflict of our
natures and lusts… For long did we shout and scream under the saving
showers. Then we made love amidst the mud and soot. We had been buried
and had survived. The flames spared us but I was not to be spared by the
fangs of the hungry dogs as I hadn’t been spared my hungry desire.
6.
I cease thinking of the dogs but rather of that day. The first we were
alone together. It was to be our first rendezvous and would have been that
but for a string of adversities. Perhaps even then the sky, via the rain, had
been trying to quell the flame. I was not aware of that, however, nor could I
have been.Yet later on I came to see it clearly. After the adventure in the
shepherd’s hut I fell deeper in love with Irina and she did not turn up till our
very parting. There were occasions when it was on the verge of appearing
but she calmed down the demons in good time.She seemed to fear lest
everything burst into flames once again. On occasion I dreamt of her like the
heroine from Stephen King’s “Living Torch” who, when angry, used to turn
into ashes everything around. From a certain point of view she was indeed a
living torch. And everything between us started swimmingly.
It was several weeks since we met. Though at the time I thought I
imagined it, later I realized we had indeed conversed telepathetically, even if
we were not aware, or at least didn’t believe we were. At nights, I heard her
whisper:
“Where are you? I want to be with you. I’m lying on my back, I have
pulled up my knees and my thighs are wide open, my nightie folded upon
my breast. I’m caressing myself and imagining it is you. You may be indeed
with me if I think it. Isn’t thought everything? It’s more thought than naked
bodies… Truly, I want you with me. I want it, yet we can’t meet… I
waaaant…”
“I waaaant…”, my voice merges with hers. I visualize the burning hut.
Then we roll in snow. The snow turns into a lawn of snowflowers. Hundreds
of big eyes are looking at from the nearby wood. Unnaturally large eyes.
Beastly, betraying intellect, hundreds of times larger than human eyes.
“I am clutching my nipples with my fingers. The most erogenous
points on my body. You’ve felt it, haven’t you? I want you to kiss me, suck
me and bite me. I want my sweat to trickle with your saliva. Do it like
that…. Go on! Gooooooo…”
“I waaaant…” I awake. My sperm has splashed on the bedside wall
nearly up to the ceiling and my organ seems made of iron, draining me of all
my energy. The electric bulbs on the chandelier remind me of her nipples.
The snakes on the still unfinished canvas, sprayed with my sperm, resemble
her thighs, soft in arousal.The blank canvases are like her nakedness. The
cracks in the wall evoke our tremours. The finished pictures speak of the
fullness of the emotions I experienced a moment before I came to from my
reverie…
I am again in a reverie. She’s whispering something to me. In my ear.
It’s dark and I don’t see her but it’s her breath all right. It’s her whisper:
“Your exhibition in Varna is soon to be but shall we make it till then? Do we
have to endure?! Shan’t we explode?! Shan’t we hurt our dreams?! Won’t
our hurt dreams desecrate our happiness?! Won’t our desecrated happiness
kill off nature?! Aren’t we cheating ourselves we possess will power while
in fact we are resigned to not having had a chance?!”
She keeps on whispering to me and the snakes penetrate my
skin!From my veins they drink the elixir of the pain producing inspiration
and being a component of frustrated blood. I think we are in that forest I saw
for the first time when my brush came into contact with my first canvas.
Irina is both the girl in the forest and isn’t she. She is and idea and a woman
at the same time. Pure, like a teenager’s fantasy and whorish like reality
itself… Alice in Wonderland and porno star, abandoning herself to any male
touch…
“…shall we survive, shall we survive, shall we survive till then…
Now it is so dark that we can meet even if we can’t see our faces… It is so
exciting…”
“Touch them… Touch my breasts… So… Sooo… Now undress…
Sooo…”
I am startled and it is already daylight. In the daytime I do not hear her
voice or at any rate it is different from nighttime but I recall the brief
moments spent
together and am certain she, too, desires me just as I do her. I am already
sure we will not survive till the exhibition. I fix my gaze on a sweet ass,
frankly outlined under a tight-fitting flimsy summer dress. I step on the gas,
stretch a hand out of my car window and withdraw it just as am about to
touch it. I laugh at my frolic. Then I notice another one – in a short leather
skirt which is sure to have been boiling in its own sauce in the heat. I repeat
the trick. I start on an aimless tour of the town, trying to find relaxation in
this way but it soon palls. Shall I again abduct a prostitute from her pimps
again? These not quite safe adventures really turn me on… I decide on doing
just that but soon think better of it.
The next woman I see in the back is shapely, black-haired and
swaying to and fro like a drifting frigate.To me she resembles Irina. All my
frivolity vanishes. All my mad desire to see her comes back. I pull up in
front of the post office. For a long time I rummage in my pockets for her
telephone number. I have a horror at the thought that I might have lost it.I
ejaculate when I find it.Two schoolgirls in the next telephone booth notice
that and giggle. I feel like pulling it out and shoving it into their grinning
mouths. I am tense but when I hear in my voice a warmth unlike the summer
heat it suffuses my internal organs and I relax as if I had been on
tranquillizers.
“Irina! This is me, Papa Jan!”
“O! I wanted to hear you so much! We seem to have done nothing on
annotating energy lyzism.”
It all fitted into place of itself.
“That’s precisely why I am calling! Sofia is a madhouse right now!
And that heat! I believe we couldn’t do any stroke of work even if I come
again. Here, in Assenovgrad is quieter…”
She falls silent. For an instant, which to me seems ages. My shorts are
again too tight for my comfort. The schoolgirls have moved off, joined by a
third and they are watching me, unaware I, too, can see them. Their smiles
are no longer simply merry – there is something like glass in them. It’s the
tension of excitement and confusion. The tongue of one of them seems to
have glued her partly open lips and helps them to behave bawdily. I look
away from them.
“Irina, I know it will be difficult for you to come to Assenovgrad.
After all, you have family obligations. Do realize that without you it would
be much more difficult for me to do the job and I don’t want to be
unprepared for my first one man show…”
“I would love to, very much…”, she fell silent.
“I know you do! Do it, for God’s sake, or these days will be hotter for
both of us!”
“I will be difficult for me!” she said after the pause.
“I am aware of that but you’ll do it!” I said in spite of myself. I gave
utterance to the happiest thought in my life. I was like drunk. I wanted to
drink. I wanted to bathe myself and everyone else in champagne. “I am
waiting for you!”
“See you soon!” she replied and now I no longer was sure whether my
heart could bear so much happiness and and my soul take it all in. What she
said was “See you soon”.
I bumped into the girls outside the entrance to the post office whom I
didn’t even notice at all. I had not yet completely recovered. I was hardly
ever to recover…
“Hi!” I was greeted by the petite girl with hair cut short like a darkcomplexioned boy who seemed the brashest of the lot; the other two blondes
was grinning embarrassed and somewhat silly. “Why are you pushing us like
a beer cart?”
“A cart with champagne! hich will be poured down upon you, my
little angels!” I was drunk with happiness though I hadn’t had even a drop.
“What?” the petite failed to catch on. Neither did I it seemed for that
matter.
“Have you ever felt so happy that you would want to bathe everyone
in champagne? Simply to share your happiness with the whole world. With
all things animate and inanimate so that even glass smells sweetly of love
and concrete, of vintage wine.”
“Well, I am not an alcoholic!” she snubbed me unceremoniously but I
didn’t give a damn, nor did I at all notice her snub.
“Nor am I! I am Prince Papa Jan! That means…”
“The artist?! the eyes of the curly-haired friend of the brash petite lit
up with curiosity. Her eyes were like a June evening. About seventeen or
eighteen, on the verge of her fall.The same, who had stuck her tongue to her
lips.
“The happy one!” I replied. “Not all artists are happy…”
“Although all lucky beggars are artists!” the dark –skinned petite
again tried to throw the conversation into confusion.
“And all syllogisms – out of place!” the little angel angrily
reprimanded her friend.
“Yes, that very same Papa Jan!” I stretched out my hand. “If only I
could now be the same man I was an hour ago… If only paint can be
dissolved in champagne…” What did that mean? I laughed.After me, so did
the girls one after the other. Saying no more, I embraced the two blondes
with one arm and the petite with another and shoved them in the direction of
my car. I had infected them with my high spirits and in any case they had
probably been wondering where the party was to be that evening till I turned
up. I made a stop only once – to buy champagne – and then raced the car
toward my atelier. Still on the stairs, I opened a bottle and started spraying
them with champagne. They screamed, trying to avoid the spurt
or standing under it with open mouths. The splashes rebounded around their
lips like little stars. Their bodies were outlined under their wet dresses. We
went with the champagne bath even as we entered the atelier, never minding
the fact that we were drenching the canvases.Then we drank and laughed. I
was not at that moment “that very same Papa Jan” indeed, but a happy
teenager like them. Without a name. Without memory. Without a past.
Without a future. We were living in a happy and innocent present. Innocent
was also the girls’ undressing. As they were drying, their dresses stuck
unpleasantly onto their bodies…
“We’re naked anyway!” noted the petite and pulled the shoulder strap
of the “sweet tongued” girl’s dress.
I can’t. We’ll be seen from the flats across the street!” her friend
objected.
There was no one to see except the doves. My atelier was on the tenth
floor and there was not a building as tall opposite it. Yet I drew the blinds.
The petite pulled off the other shoulder strap of her friend’s dress. Her hand
paused at the breast rather longer for the gesture to have been accidental.
Both girls looked at each other in embarrassment. Both understood yet did
not admit the meaning of the touch. Nor did I.I was their age and quite
happy. The third undressed herself. She had splendid form for her age. She
was the quietest but in fact the least innocent of the three. For an instant I
desired her then fogot my desire. We went on drinking and I became aware I
had splendid models and was the painter Papa Jan when all was said done.
Within minutes three naked bacchantes appeared on the painting featuring
the snakes. The depravity of their dance ran counter to the frivolous summer
evening. The girls giggled and danced in imitation of the bacchantes in the
picture.I also giggled like an eighteen-year-old. Till the telephone rang.
“Papa Jan,” I heard Irina’s voice, “Materius agreed. We’re coming to
Assenovgrad.”
At first I failed to understand. Then I suddenly sobered up and aged
by twenty years. I forgot the party. I forgot about my happiness before it
ever began.
“I’m glad,” I responded sombrely. I poured the glass on the cigarettes
burning in the ashtray.
“The party is over,” the petite said coldly.
“No,” I said. “Not yours… Mine! Don’t pay attention to me. Go on.
Guests are always welcome.”
But it didn’t happen.The girls did not continue much longer. Their
clothes were not yet completely dry when they put them on. The petite
waited till her friends were out.
“Do you want me to stay?”
“Please!” I replied. I did not wish to remain alone and she was aware
of that. I knew she was a virgin and when she went out a few hours before
she had not imagine it to turn out as it did and was prepared to sacrifice her
fantasy of her first night with a man for my sake – not to leave me alone.
Deeply moved, I felt happy again. I lost myself in her warm embrace under
her warm heart and the ghosts did not come. That was love, maybe, but my
fate was to know a different kind of love. A different one and probably more
complete.
I had quite forgotten about the dark-skinned saviour of lonely hearts
when, a bouquet of thirteen roses in hand, I was counting the seconds to the
arrival of the train from Plovdiv. The day began sombrely and, I would say,
boringly. The first to visit me in the studio was my driver and guard who
took care of my back in a crisis. His car was damaged, he said, and he
needed the keys from mine. I gave them to him on condition that he return
them by five o’clock in the afternoon when I was expecting Irina. After him
arrived my friend with whom I was working on the project of the anti-novel
THE PAPA JAN GALLERY. He asked me to lend him my studio at about
two in the afternoon. For some days now I knew he, too, was expecting the
woman of his dreams. I handed him the key and asked him to give it back by
six because I, too, was going to need the atelier. Neither had turned up by
seven. Irina was late. As she put it over the phone rather to inspire me with
hope again than to disturb me, she would try to come alone to prevent any
distraction. I would have looked very foolishly with that big bouquet of
roses on the platform if Materius Rozenkreutzer was to smile slyly and
wisely at the station next to her. I was tense and at the same time happy.
Things would settle down. My guard is a punctual boy and if he was late
there must have been a reason. In any case, he would find me even at the
Second Coming. As to the accommodation – well I had a flat as well. All
would have been futile were Irina not able to slip the family tie but I hoped
she would. I am not Happy Jan for nothing. Didn’t I redeem that happy
moment with so much mental torment and sheer craziness. At long last the
train was pulling upand my wild, wonderful love appeared alone. Oh ye,
gods! Oh what a bliss! Vicissitudes and threats! Lack of logic and luck! A
gamble of existence and love! Irony and Irina! Were somebody who knows
me to hear that Papa Jan had slept in the arms of a swarthy teenage beauty
without doing anything else, would cease to believe anything they heard
from that person. Even if that person was Papa Jan himself. However if Irina
is mixed up in all of it anything is to be expected.Even the fact that were
alone at the station.
She took the bouquet and kissed me. Neither of us believed our
senses. We regarded the event as an old, romantic, black-and-white film. We
identified with the personages but hardly believed it was us. A moment later
we realized that was not a Hollywood blockbuster but actual reality. It was
us, two. Everything was real. Half an hour later I angrily repeated to myself:
“This can’t be true! This can’t be true!” My driver-guard was still nowhere
to be seen. Through the door of the atelier I could hear the whole gamut of
the orgasm. So much so as to make me fear the door would somehow come
apart. This only lifted my spirits. I still believed we could find a resting
place in the flat or at my lodgings. Smiling, I asked Irina whether we should
knock and disturb them. We decided against it. Red from confusion and
excitement, she reminded me of the teenage girls of the previous night. For
brief moments we lent our ears to the commotion inside. We burst out
laughing. Then, hand in hand and jumping like children, descended the
steps. My flat was locked by my artistic manager. He is wont to vanish at the
worst moments. As if he had a premonition. I would have smashed the door
but some time before we had installed a steel grate there to prevent a breakin. I had to be a small tank…It turned out that my lodgings were locked, too.
Something must have happened to make the landlord lock the common
entrance. I had not turned up there for a week and they could not have
expected me to appear at the very moment of their absence. I felt like
weeping but our predicament had its comic aspect. Had I not been waiting
for this rendezvous for so long a time, if we had more than a few hours at
our disposal, I would surely have noticed only the comic side but as it was, it
was tragic. On top of it all, I had spent all my pocket money the night before
on champagne and the pitiable sum that had been left I had spent on the
roses. Thus, spending the night at an hotel was also out of the question.
The only thing left open to us was to find a lonely spot by the river.
We walked kilometres. The bathers and swimmers paid no attention to the
fact that the sun had disappeared behind rainy clouds. Fishermen pottered
along the bank who gave no thought to the possibility of hooking somebody
to their bathing suits or somewhere deeped down. Further up outside the
town every romantic spot had been occupied by loving couples. The kids!
They were barely fifteen. Their courage did not go further than the boy
shoving his hand under the girl’s skirt. A second boy came out of the bush.
He put his arm round the girl’s waist and pulled her down on the grass. At
long last the first one summoned up enough strength to roll up her dress and
pull down his trousers. The girl did not seem to mind. On the next day she
would be sorry and on the day after she would repeat it. A little upward we
saw a second pair. The beauties! They resembled thoroughbred horses. They
did it on the bank and then jumped into the river. Athletes! They made love
sportingly, passionately, perhaps for the thousandth time. I got angry. Surely
they had where to go but sought diversion. We looked at the for rather a
long time. Still further up we saw a third pair. It is beyond me to describe
my feelings at that moment. They were mirror images of ourselves.The man
was plump, bald with a reddish beard and a tattoo on the hairy back. The
woman was slim, with chestnut hair, long thighs and slightly younger than
he. They were us! We observed how “we” were doing it but that was not us;
rather, they had given themselves to their wild passions at that spot though
they surely did have where else to do it – quite unlike us.
I looked at Irina. She was thoughtful and blushing, as on the staircase
of my studio. She tried to say something but only managed to stammer that
she could not stand that any longer. She was covering up her excitement
with an indignation she did not feel. Still, we went on along the river bank.
On top of it all it began raining. Then it turned into a downpour. We could
hardly stand on our legs under the heavy shower. The stream, flowing down
the road, reached our calves and it was sheer luck that I managed to
hitchhike a car which stopped for us. The thoroughbreds were inside. Wet
and pleased as Punch. I, however, was weeping under the raindrops trickling
down my face. In an hour, Irina was to board the train and again leave me
lonely and crazy with unsatisfied desire.
“It started badly! It’s a conspiracy! The keys, the car, the friends!
Even our doubles and the sky itself! Today everybody were indulging
themselves while we met only briefly. I shan’t be able to stand that! I’ll
pierce my heart this very night! I feared being left alone but today no one
but Irina could give me solace. Last night was the final time I still could
manage!” An hour afterwards we parted. My tears had dried up.The thought
of suicide was somewhat distant. The time till the one-man show was short.
If it could not happen then… then it was not to be – ever… The rain did not
extinguish the flame!
Varna. The Vestal Gallery opens! Commotion!
A former Miss Bulgaria becomes a curator. What a sensation and
excitement!
Around the building which was soon to become packed with lovers of
the fine arts, plain curious people, party-goers, journalists, philosophers,
significant, less significant and plain insignificant folks, were milling people
likewise radiant and morose. The whole gamut of emotion. The event did
not need noisy advertisement.Materius Rozenkreutzer was going to do a
philosophical interpretation of “Energy Lyzism” – the new style in painting
and the intiator of that style is none other than the “Bulgarian Picasso” i.e.
Papa Jan himself as he was dubbed by the Russian press. That’s what you
might call a “sensation”.
It was nearing six and the exhibition was to open. The vestal virgin is
embarrassed. She is even ready to weep. Her first attempt at doing
something other than what she had been doing up to that moment is a flop.
Or was about to become so. It is now seven and the opening had been
scheduled for six. People were getting nervous and some, who had dropped
in at the nearest bistros to avoid the heat wave have gotten warmed up by the
cooling beer. Others, whose schedules are busy, are looking at their watches
and are making supreme efforts to accept things with philosophic patience.
Papa Jan is nowhere to be seen! That now is reason enough for excitement
and fuss. “If they start to leave I’ll do a strip show! And Papa Jan, I’ll…”,
the vestal is thinking, furious, then she laughs. She can imagine the startled
faces at the sight of the sudden stripping of the gallery curator. In particular,
the look of a short bespectacled intellectual whom she accidentally notices in
the crowd maybe because he is standing next to the bodyguard of two
metres height and a hundred and twenty kilos weight with bulging trousers
whose masculine gifts are surely greater than the bespectacled shorty. As she
thinks that, the former Miss Bulgaria bursts out laughing. The laughter gets
hysterical and she hurriedly hides in the toilet room. “I hope nothing has
happened to Papa Jan! He’ll show up eventually and my experience tells me
that delay makes things more desirable! What a trivial thought! I’ll grow
mad! I hope to God nothing’s happened to him. The Vestal Gallery can’t be
a flop at its very first opening!”
No! Nothing untoward has happened to Papa Jan! At least, not for the
time being!
Papa Jan is with another vestal virgin! I genuine one! A fantasy turned
reality… I met Irina a few hours before the opening and Materius was
indulging to such an extent in philosophizing with several female students
that he did not in the least notice our disappearance. We soon arrived at the
Golden Sands Hotel where I had booked accommodation for guests to the
opening…
“We have a few hours at our disposal!” she said simply as if we had
long since been lovers.
“An eternity!” I replied. “Yet a too brief one!”
I was about to tear her evening dress into pieces when she contrived to
slip out of it with the skill of a snake, shedding its skin.
“I don’t know how I did it!” her eyes betrayed embarrassment. She
seemed to have sobered up all of a sudden. She covered her breasts with her
hands. Imprints of plasma showed above them.Arcs of electronic lips
vibrated round her flesh and tore it in pieces. Evil contradictions sank cat’s
nails into my eyes. I did not wish to see that and more than anything I did
wish to. “The Naked Irina”, the idol, having the same kind of skin as any
other woman. The poetess of sublime sentiment with real female nipples and
a tiny beast between her legs.
Heavy gusts of air were beating against the window panes. Was that
the surf? No!
It was our lungs but maybe the surf was them.
I felt like putting my arms round her.Like a raped girl whom I had
discovered weeping beside her torn clothes… I wanted it to rain.
In my ears resonated that phone call which spoiled the champagne
party.
The memory came back to me of those lonesome nights when we
touched in our imagination. The loneliness and the unfinished painting. The
splashes on the wall and my madness. Our rendezvous at the neighbourhood
marketplace. No! I could bear everything. I could do it again. I would have
been the same man and now I was on the threshold of change. I was to
suddenly grow up after remaining innocent for thirty-six years. I bent my
head. I did not notice when she let her hands drop down uncovering her
breasts. She came up closer to me. Timidly, as if parting somebody else’s
hands, and the next instant she was embracing me with hers. Passionately.
As if she wanted to break my neck. She clasped my waist with her legs. She
pressed her lips against mine. After a prolonged drought - a torrential
rainfall turning into a hailstorm beating against two voluptuous bodies. We
collapsed on the floor. She was under me. Her eyes betrayed demonic
frenzy. Instead of frightening me, she looked like a an image from a fairytale, impossible for a real woman of flesh and blood. I passed a hand across
her breasts and felt the presence of qualit lacking in all my pictures. In the
flesh of any other woman. The real, untrammelled from all reins of society,
love and lustful desire. She was breathing heavily and the expression of her
eyes was all the time changing. The frenzy charted fresh boundaries of
normalcy and swiftly we forgot… That which was separating us, which
increased our mutual desire and whipped us with self-accusations. Nothing
could have been more natural than lying down and caressing each other. Her
hands, like naughty spiders were unbuttoning my shirt while caressing the
uncovered chest. She seemed at that moment to have more than two hands.
They could have been a hundred and one, each communicating a different
range of the sweet touch of love. They reached my trousers. I fervently
kissed the breasts I had been caressing. She groaned. The liberated steed was
sticking out of my trousers, having broken the chains of humanity. I
penetrated her. Everything changed. All desires were fulfilled. A timeless
bliss filled my soul while my body was savaging hers.
“Totally,” she groaned. “Totally”.
I screamed and fell backwards. She was bathed in sperm. She rubbed
it on my chest and smiled like she had never smiled before. Calmly and
blissfully. Somewhat distracted and sweet. It seemed improbable to me that
she could smile so and in an instant I found the truth. For a long time Irina
had not been sexually satisfied. She had long restrained herself in the face
many temptations. “She has tightened her soul with an iron bodice. With a
female body, she has not been a woman while the woman in her tormented
her. More and more rarely she and Marius have had sex. Only now I
understand her puzzling behaviour. Nervousness stemming from sexual
unsatisfaction. Suppression of desire, which isn’t very difficult for a
philosopher and yet devilishly hard on a woman like Irina!”
I felt relief. What I realized in that instant exonerated me completely
and I came to terms with my conscience. I would damn conscience!
I would have violated it! I would have lived with my qualms and
would have died with them because it was a question of the woman I
loved.However I would not have been blissful but now I was. I had fought a
torment and won.My crime is that I had put an end to a crime.I had smashed
the glass cover of her smile.I had broken the iron bodice her innocence.
Unwittingly, I had saved not only myself but also a woman’s body from the
fires of Hell.
“We have found solace, and what now? Perhaps there should never
again be a repetition of all this. To possess a woman once is enough!”
I wanted to say I was in love with her. Instead I nodded. Sideways,
somehow.As if to say both “yes” and “no”.
We couldn’t have everything in this world.And yet we want it all.We
cannot be inspired and pleased at the same time. To have a paradise and still
be dreaming of it. We cannot be that which we dream of.
“Why then the sadness in your words?”
“It is like a farewell.”
I tenderly brought my lips closer to hers. As for a parting. It didn’t
come off.
Aroused once again we pressed them tightly.She pushed me onto my back,
pressed my breast with one leg and started caressing hers. She had given
herself to the former fantasies about our intimacy.I caressed her calf. And
then her thighs.She was trembling.Like a leaf about to fall off and in the
final moment before being swept by the autumn wind wanted to suck as
much as possible from the tree’s juices. She herself was swept by passionate
sorrow. Desiring passionate sorrow. My hands caressed her thighs more
intensely. I felt her muscles soften and she standing on the verge of the abyss
with final drops of energy. How she wanted to preserve something which
she had not. As if dancing, and with a delicious groan, she smoothly eased
her self onto a part of my flesh, hard as the truth, which was pulsating
violently, outside its veins. Then both of us started pulsating outside our
veins. Our heartbeat was whipping our wriggling bodies. It banged the wall
with fists. It went out of the open window and dispersed into the Being.
Produced from the explosives of our bodies, which were like beaten drums,
it tried to destroy every existing thing. We were short of breath .
We went out on to the terrace. She grasped the parapet and could have
broken it when we joined bodies again in madness in a crime, in love… We
no longer thought of hiding, of somebody observing us, of doing the wrong
thing, of the thing we were doing being impossible. As if we were not in a
hotel but beyond the wondrous secrets of the grey horizon on which we had
fixed our unseeing eyes. Then I thought I was looking at the full moon.Two
full moons… They were her breasts but at last the full moon appeared. For
an instant everything was enveloped in total darkness.I had inhaled the
global thing and had shut my eyes. I opened them as I exhaled. Sweating,
exhausted, I lay on the terrace. Irina was not there.Still reverberating in my
ears was her scream:
“Total, total…”
I rose slowly. My God! The show!
I staggered into the room. Irina was arranging her hair.She was
humming a tune. hen she saw me she fell silent and her glance became
guilty.Like that of child who has broken the sugar bowl.
“The show!” said she shoowing me her wrist watch. “We are late…”
“We are not late for anything except having each other…” I thought
sombrely. It is because for THAT we were late, we now miss so many other
things. But what does it matter, my swallow? What are they in comparison
to what we’ve just had and may still not have.” All of sudden she had
become self-important, businesslike, alien. She was looking at her watch and
thinking of the social event.In her behaviour the significant seemed
insignifcant and vice versa. “Let us put on our evening dress and cast away
the memory together with the dirty underwear.”
She gave me a brief kiss but the second in which she touched my lips
was enough to reveal the genuine sentiment in all its profundity and to
dispel my gloomy thoughts.
On the way to the gallery we were singing and barely avoided
crashing twice.The major event in the international progress of my art one of
my biggest one-man shows passed in a daze. A pink daze and dreams of the
recent experience. My spirits were very high but no one suspected the
reason for it was not the opening of the exhibition, with champagne,
compliments and offers.
“I very nearly stripped off my clothes to hold the crowd!” the curatrix
pretended to scold me through a smile.
“Well, had I known I would have arrived even later! This way I have
deprived the crowd of…”
“O, shut up Papa Jan!” she burst out laughing. “You’ll drive me
crazy!”
“What does “lyzism” mean exactly? asks a sweet pock marked female
student with huge spectacles and huge breasts. “Leasing… lease…”
“Universal solubility of everthing into everything else!” Irina –
blushing – starts explaining.
“Stop that, Papa Jan!” she whispers into my ear meanwhile. I snatched
a bottle of champagne and started licking its mouth under the bespectacled
stare of the student.Irina had turned her back on me and does not see me but
the student is not listening to her at all. She is watching my monkey tricks
and barely keeps from laughing. Irina is probably wondering why the girl is
laughing at her and is on the verge of snatching her spectacles, scratching
her eyes, tearing her dress, drawing blood from her huge brasts with her
nails, murdering her and finally trampling upon the spectacles with her high
heels but with the stoicism of a preacher facing pimps and prostitutes went
on elucidating the subject of “energy lyzism” while I was licking the bottle’s
mouth. At last Irina turned round. Problably she would have hit me but
nothing came handy.I started spraying champagne around me. Finally Irina
took me by the hand and pulled me aside.
“You must freshen yourself!” she said, pushing me towards the toilet.
She bent my face down to the tap and splashed cold water on it. I shoved my
hand under her skirt. She did not manage to push me off. I rolled it up round
her waist, tore her panties and sat her down upon the sink. rina could not
resist She had spent the last drop of her determination to chasten me.
Worked up and scared she prayed that everything should end quickly and
never cease.
She wrneched herself out of my hands and pulled down her dress.
The party was over. I was very low spirits. I felt qualms vis-à-vis
Materius for Irina’s sake. I reproach myself and felt the ground slipping
under my feet.
“I wish I never got into that lift!”
The rest could not but pass in the only manner possible. The party
went on in the hotel. The euphoria had passed which surrounded a unique
international exhibition worthy of the Guinnes Book of Record. All two
hundred paintings were sold for a total of two hundred thousand dollars.
That’s why a stout bodyguard was stationed beside each picture that had
been bought in advance. My friends were drinking, merry-making singing
and philosophizing but I felt increaingly depressed.
Till the moment I heard Irina whisper in my ear suggesting we go to the
beach. In confusion I regarded Rozenkreutzer. He was not drinking but
looked more inebriated than the guy he was discussing something with.
He had not noticed the appearance of his wife. I don’t remember how
the sky looked. I don’t recall whether there was a full moon but the orgasm
on the beach was a lunar one. We rolled on the sand under the impact of the
waves. Our embraces kept being interrupted. We again and again pressed
into each other’s arms and when parted by the waves we sought contact. The
waves seemed to scream with us:
“Total… Total…”
Daybreak arrived. The opening of the exhibition at which I sold two
hundred pictures at one go, a record for the Guinnes Book, belonged now to
the past. The party was over. Irina was no longer an unapproachable dream
but was a woman whom I would possibly possess never again yet I desired
her more than ever before though I was reluctant to acknowledge it to
myself.
The lunar orgasm melted the Moon. There was a new moon rising.
Will the next full moon come soon? Who knows? With some other woman,
perhaps.I’ll paint the bodies on the beach. In that painting, the endless one.
Eternal art, a riot of colours, elements and energy would carry over from one
painting to another and so to infinity. The one I would never finish as
nothing between the two of us was finished nor would it ever be.
Total? I closed my eyes.We were approaching the waves.After so
many changes of mood I was not quite myself and failed to feel anything of
that which I would define as a certain kind of sentiment which has a name. I
dissolve into the landscape. All the cells in my body contain all the
information about all atoms of the night , the trees, the sands, the sea.They
sense the hollow rumble of the waterfall of passions with which the small
particles collide in order to lend a certain shape to matter. I perceived the
landscape dissolving inside me, filling me with energy from all the passions
that were burning that night; the energy flowed out of my hand into Irina’s
and the same energy flowed from her hand into mine. I undressed her with
all the hands which pulsated that night. I touched her lips with all breathing
lips. I touched her with all bodies. We were not just the two of us. We were
billions, making love tenderly for the last time that night maybe. Those who
desperately sought salvation in the brief moment. Who the next day will be
far from one another, maybe will not exist. Embraces severed by the
waves…Laughter, lost in the lapping of the waves… Search for an
embrace… A total embrace… A final embrace before the end of the world.
An embrace. A fresh blow of the waves, another severing. Depraved
severing. Depraved yearnings. Rubbing breasts and thighs against
underwater pieces of rock, jutting shore, roots. Another cherished embrace,
another severing. A thrill. The world vanishes. We are on the beach, our
bodies covered with seaweed. Like stretched kisses. Cold kisses of rain
freshen our still hot bodies… A new moon… Memory calls back like an
echo:
“Total!”
“We part and I am again amidst the stones, juttings and roots. Sex
kitten and sexy kittens… with sunglasses, blond and dark haired… Instead
of in your arms… How I hate being alone!” We are not properly built and
that is why perversions exist!
No! There is pornography because the eye behind the lens sees
perversions. When each and every particle seeks mutuality from another
and another and another in order for us to appear as we truly are we cannot
be much different from the stuff out of which we are built.
We people see and reflect on things. That is why we lack the
innocence of the animals which do not much care in which body they find
solace.
We utter perversions. We enjoy shabby pornography. Thus we
produce perversion and pornography. We seek refuge from being created
different by looking the person emblematic of the entire world.And this
Okey because given the words we utter and the glances we exchange we
would quite upset nature. When however the sole person able to give us the
embrace of the entire world is in fact in somebody else’s arms, or rather
legally belongs to that somebody else, eyes cease to see perversion and we
don’t care what words we utter. After that day and that night… Everything
began from the very beginning for the two of us.
Both of us found ourselves alone only when doing the shopping and
were afraid of talking about what happened to avoid hurtiful memories. We
also tried to forget but in vain. I struck up two or three other relationships
but thought myself a pervert, thinking of somebody else. Thus I stepped over
the threshold and ceased to have qualms about how I was doing and with
whom.I still loved Irina while making love to others in every conceivable
and inconceivable manner. That too, soon palled, however.I was burning hot
as soon as I found myself alone with her. I cannot realize how I refrained
from raping her on the very marketplace amids the throng of passers by upon
the tomato crates. A blinking red light signalling danger made me go back to
Assenovgrad and only in a life-or-death situation to return to Sofia very
briefly not setting foot in my atelier even which is ten storeys above Irina’s
flat… I was tormented by predatory instincts. Lonelyness was the death of
me. Desire was ripping me apart, yet I was already used to it all. Soon I
would resign completely, I believed.
Maybe I could have achieved resignation had I sought refuge
elsewhere. Not in a flat in a an apartment block furnished with a telephone
but in some outlying small village up in the mountains, whose inhabitants
had not even heard of this age-old accomplishment of perverted human
thought, designed to upset peace of mind.
No! I ought to have been inside a cave. Or – still better - far away in a
desert. On a desert island!
No! Not on a desert island. Since childhood I have always known that there
are always island women with slim bodies, golden sun tan, gorgeous breasts
and long chestnut hair – Irinas!
In a desert it would have been best but I thought I knew what I was doing
just when I did not know what I am doing. The image of my dreams was
growing pale. I was painting still better, still more assiduously, with keener
inspiration than before. There was also the occasional muse, though I did not
need muses all that much. I needed only myself. That which I had been
lacking now for years on end in its fullness and which I had to lose
completely as it happened with my fatal falling in love before I realized
how precious it had been.
I painted from sunrise till sunset. When colours wearied me I merely gave
myself to reflection and dreams of something distant, something that could
not materialize. Something only children believed in. When I sensed I was
approaching an emotional abyss I raced my car. When I felt hurt
emotionally, I resorted to prostitutes but most often I masturbated. All that
was a kind of trough but I felt it was only passing and soon I would be the
man I was before meeting Irina. A bit older, natuarally,wiser and
considerably wealthier… A phone call shattered all that I had been building
up for months on end.
“Is that you, Zdravko?” heard I her voice. I choked when I did. It did not
even occur to me it was a m a l e name she was calling.
“No. It’s me, Papa Jan!”
If I had only kept silent, then maybe… Actually, that would have
changed nothing. Her voice was the sound of the trumpet which had torn
down the Jericho walls of tranquility which I had been erecting for so long.
In that brief instant I was naked under her and she gave me scores of
lashings with a whip.
“O-o-o!” she was surprised but I could not say whether pleasantly or
unpleasantly.
“How are you?”
Damned indifference.
“How do you suppose I am! It seems my voice still smells of the sand from
that night. I have been simply trying to be my own self. You got as far deep
in me as I had never allowed anyone to be, and now you’re calling me by a
different name. Just think how you asked ‘How are you?’ “
“I simply dialled the wrong number…” she laughed shame-facedly.
“It was good of you to say so.”
“Are you painting?”
“Totally!” I said and felt sick.
“What’s the matter with you?”
“Tired and inspired. Bye, for now. You must check out Zdravko’s
phone number…”
I hung up before she had said “See you soon!”
I grabbed the brush. Then I flung it away. I laughed. Imagine my
voice smelling of sand! I giggled like crazy. This way I found refuge from
memories of the beach. I’ll visit the Golden Sands beach no more. I’ll
cherish the golden grains of sand in the treasure-house of memory, not to be
reached by anyone… My laughter turned into a sob of despair. A single one.
A brief sob, and then dumbness clutched at my chest… Cold dumbness…
The snake bodies in my painting - cold and solid –seemed to be inside my
lungs…I laid my brush on the painting which used not to tolerate my touch.
Unfinished. Still challenging. Grown cold at a very early stage… Filled with
passions, I was empty. Cold, although I was boiling in a cauldron. Desirous
and desiring nothing. Half-closing my eyes, I visualized that night. The first
and the last. The only one which was worth my first brush stroke. I had
better shut myself in the shell of my inspiration and egocentricity, slowly
forget who I was, lose the skills I had acquired with labyrinthine effort,
master new ones, part with the profitable business of an arts patron of
international stature and live with a faith in the problematic success of my
art work… Simply, I very acutely longed for that night and to be worthy of it
I had to devote myself to beauty with love… With all my heart and soul,
with each and every fibre of my being, with every single beat of my heart,
with all my heard and unheard of dreams, without even knowing what
beauty is, without being certain of the existence of love, apart from devine
and maternal one.
There was a hole in my everyday existence somewhere and it broke
down to uncover naked desire, unprotected from pragmatic materialism. It
was a desire for every single golden grain of the sand on the beach, a desire
of making love with the whole of my nature, to paint the unfulfilled
lamentations of the joy of the worthwhile thrill. I opened my eyes. The
snakes in the painting were quivering. They came to life before freezing. I
closed my eyes and with my lips touched the clitoris of the living goddess,
the one I could not lose, the goddess of the dream of that night. Her legs
opened and her lust was an escalation of the fire in me , a sweet lava, a
divine mass – that’s what I sucked with my lips. Totally! I whispered and
then, as if dictated to, I uttered a line of poetry, my first verse dedicated to
my Grand Passion.
7.
The sand was not the same. It would never be the same.There are
moments which simply cannot be repeated, which, no matter how much we
love to re-live, are different from what we like to experience again. In that
night the sand was wet like wild arousal and the beach seemed different,
though it was the same beach.
“We are far away!” Irina whispered. “Far away from anything
stopping us, which cannot stop us, which it is we who stop it together with
time itself!”
Her fingers were caressing my chest. Our lips pressed together in a
passionate kiss.
How could I ever think I could deny myself that kiss? My hand was
under her dress and under it, it was like the wet sand under our bare feet.
We are the closest to ourselves! Close to all that we desire, that is
desire, we ourselves are that desire…The desire of all time that we wish to
devote to each other… I was sinking into her. In her arms and lips. I was
losing my existence in hers. Losing my soul in hers. My flesh, hard as iron,
was trying to preserve under itself my essential being, so fragile and
vulnerable. My thoughts sought to preserve me from love. Part of me neave
ceased screaming that could not happen, had not happened… But the truth
was we were again on the same beach. Just the two of us. It was autumn but
the weather was that of summer.
Then I could not stand it any longer. As soon as I composed a
successful poem I felt I wanted to see her more than ever. Crucifying colours
in words, and words in verse, it, my love, was resurrected and went up to
higher dimensions of voluptuousness.
“Who are you?!
A ghostly beam of white light
coming from time immemorial…”
It was perhaps unwise but everything developed apace. Was it the
verse, was it my flesh who could not bear to be parted from hers? I changed
all my decisions and yielded to my emotions.
I forgot I was laughing hysterically and my laughter had turned into a
moan and then into silence. I forgot about the painting which my brush was
reluctant to execute. I went out of my studio and my lips were repeating the
sontaneously produced verse. I walked without direction. I felt I was going
to her and did not believe I was doing it. I got into my car. My lips went on
versifying:
“Nature joined mother earth,
to give birth to insane beauty…”
I wanted to see her again. Naked, embarrassed, frank.I wanted to be
unaware of why I was embarrassed when what Ihad to feel was solely wild
joy. I wished her to touch my mouth with her fingers as if admonishing
silence; I wanted to rub my lips up her arm and then to press them eternally
along her delicate neck, till finally time itself ended in the infinity of mouths
pressed against each other while my hands caressed her breast…
“Invented of created by God,
delight of everything on earth and in heaven…”
I was with her. Slight fear through wild joy peered from her glance.
She still did not believe I was with her. Like me, she did not believe that
could happen, yet happy with this incredible fact… We were alone in her
flat. Materius might return at any moment but it was too late for us to be
sensible, now.
Driven away or personified,
thoughtful, you peer into the night…”
She is in a long red robe with a deep slash. Neighing, growling, I pull
it up and wind it round her waist. Flapping like a fish out of water, groaning
wildly, she tries to disentangle herself from the shoulder straps but is too
excited to make a single precise move apart from the intercourse which
follows. I tear the shoulder straps. She scratches her breasts. Sucks mine. My
hand plunges into her vagina. We sharply tear ourselves apart. Look into
each other’s eyes. With embarrassment, tenderness and wildness. I cannot
say to her: “I missed you! I tried to forget you but I desire you
immensely…” I can say nothing other than recite:
“I looked for you along the Milky Way,
a star shone in all my life
so that two auras of a single dream can touch…”
She touches my lips with a finger. Wants me to be silent. I zig-zag
with my lips up her arm like the snakes in the painting. Materius can come
back any moment now and I want to kiss her shoulder for centuries on end.
I’m sucking her breast and – already forgetting where we are – we take our
time…
“You came to me with braided hair
of forest violets,
with eyes, shining like balls of fire…”
We made love. Upon the piano. Her voice reverberated against the
strings. A soft melody for piano and an orchestra of furies making love. A
tender, passionate, perverted, melody… The walls vibrated against the
sound. They echoed it many times and it was reverberated from our bodies.
Each note was an eye – the eye of a fish…
“I want to be a fish! To swim naked in the water! Let’s make love in
the water!
“Like a witch you prepared the poisonous brew
and I drank the dregs of the love potion…”
Her dress hung around her waist; her fingers are painfully stuck into
my shoulders; her lips convulse with ecstasy; her eyes betray insanity.
“I missed you!” she groans.
Lightnings touched the flesh and rain wetted it.
Thorns and bushes tore the memories of passion…”
“I can’t go on without you!” her voice rings out against the strings and
her elbows beat upon the keys…
“But we continued on our way
along the road the hardened destiny…”
I collapse under the piano.The lid bangs down heavily.A heavy
ringing.The moon shrinks. Irina screams:
“Totally!”
I still do not believe we are together and only hours before I was far
from her, trying to forget she existed. My existence I also wished to forget…
“Spellbound, our bodies joined and parted.
Hardened flesh spilled the seeds of voluptuousness…”
We drew breath for an instant and again joined bodies.As in the poem
which was ringing out in my memory. The words I did not utter, I turned
into action. I could not write down the verse before trying to live out its
poetry. I could not stay desperate and sick in my studio. I had to see her. Or
my heart would have grown dumb like an unspoken verse. Only when our
bodies convulsed for the second time that night in voluptuous spasms did I
realize what I was doing , what I wanted to do as soon as heard her voice on
the phone.
“I want to make love in the lift, the one in which we met!”
“And on the moon?”
“And on Venus!”
“Sweet figs!” I kissed her breasts. “And in a crate full of sweet figs!”
“What about on horseback?”
“Shall we?
“And in coffin?”
In a capsule where all air has been pumped out… The room seemed
tiny to me.What were we doing here? In her home, by the family hearth? We
had to be somewhere else…
“Now we’ll put on our clothes and drive off in the car. Without
choosing the direction. It will find us…”
“I want it to be perverted and nice! Wild! Like on horseback…”she
almost neighed which made me smile… It would have been still more
perverted and nice than she could ever have expected.
”Sensibility unlocked the drive towards perfection.
Darkness became mad light and our faces shone upon it.”
We were lying on our backs on the floor.We held hands and were
silent. Understanding nothing. Misled by our own selves. Desiring more,
having everything. We tried to pierce the celing with our glances.Tried to
explode in schizophrenic forgetfulness and not to be condemned to make
love punctuated by separation and touch each other in the teeth of being
forbidden to do so. Tried not to be Irina and Papa Jan but those of our
doubles whom we saw on the river bank making liberated love.
“I want us to be there!” I whispered to her.
“At the seaside… - you have guessed it…”
“Flying amid the elements of our emotions.
Moments and days were devoured by memory…”
Smiling, holding hands, we went out of her flat. A neighbour stared at
us with the eyes of a fish. Glassy. Not understanding. Amazed to madness.In
the car we were already kissing. Everywhere. Excited, I switched on the
engine. I did not pay attention to the direction of the road. I was kissing my
beloved and only from time to time looked ahead and into the mirror.The car
was racing ahead. Irina’s eyes, sunk in the visible, seemed to be dreaming. I
asked myself if I was not also dreaming and how was it possible for us to
escape just like that. I dropped my hand onto her lap. Warm, pulsating with
passion. Real. No, I was not dreaming. Alas, I was not.
My God it wasn’t a dream!
“The paint dried up on the canvas
shaping the touched up shape of bewilderment…”
“We are fleeing!” she whispered and embraced me. Then she placed
her leg on my lap. She sat in a riding posture upon me and pressed her lips
on mine. Her hand was inserted under my shirt. We lost the road. Barred by
a beautiful vision it no longer existed.A small part of my consciousness
feared an accident. Afterwards I ceased to care about accidents I thought we
had already had one as we had permitted to ourselves to divert our eyes from
the road and drive on blind, drunk with delight, solely by the will of
providence towards a fall or the shore of delight. I did not see the road I did
not want to see it. I wished to lose myself in her embraces. To dissolve her
in mine. To crash right in the moment of supreme delight so that we’ll be
forever in hot passion…
“This is madness! This is freedom!” she screamed. “A total
fertilization before fate overtakes us…”
“Before the appearance of a Messiah!”
“Kiss my breasts! Take your hands off the wheel… I want us to pass
through flames… I want it…
Somehow from the sidelines I saw the zig-zagging car. That was
really madness. Cold thrill of horror froze my body as I realized what we
had been doing but at that moment no force could have torn me away from
her caresses and make me see better the road I had long lost behind her
figure. She jumped up and down on my lap and screamed…
“Love me… love me… love me…”
The car continued its dangerous dance along the motorway.
“The words reflected the lust of the Universe.
The illusion of existence intertwined with eternity…”
I heard a car horn.The huge truck which drove past only milimetres
away from my car spared us as we were forgiven by fate. Irina was
convulsing orgiastically. The wheel slipped from my hands. It was
insanity.It was beautiful. My entire body experienced a thrill. She, too. I was
sucking her breast. With one hand I caressed her thigh while the other hand
was slipping from the wheel. My foot was off the gas but Irina stepped on it
full force.
It was beautiful…
I felt us merged with eternity. We had no chance of survival. We
could have our final thrill before death experiencing it with the fullness of a
whole life. In ecstasy. In total ecstasy…
“The neurons on the body were taut with expressiveness.
Thrills crawled on the sensitive erogenous areas…”
We were now on the sand, excitingly wet.Providence had forgiven
us.I abandoned the experience on the road and having arrived at the shore of
our dreams, happier than ever, we again abandoned ourselves to caresses…
“Eros was in waiting
of the total fertilization before the appearance of a Messiah.”
She became god-mother to the picture with the many snakes.
“How did it come off?” she asked caressing my head.
“I missed you and you turned into a verse,” I replied. “And I wanted
you to hear it…”
“Is that so?”
“No. I did not wish to destroy my feeling for you, satisfying myself
with a verse, when I could have the entire you…”
Meditating, we turned passion into a luxury.
The perfect promotion of exotic delight…”
“Divine clitoris!” I playfully said, passing my finger along the tender
flesh.
“Am I to hear it?The poem, that is.” she asked me playfully.
“It’s too early yet. Very early… Divine lips…”
“We have escaped,” said she, embarrassed. “And are still naked…
And the sun will rise soon…”
“I already know how the painting with the snakes is to be called, even
before finishing it: ‘Total Fertilization Before the Messiah’s Coming’!”
“You seem to have said it to me already!”
No! We both have said it to ourselves. Sound after sound. Expressing
it to the smallest nuance… We might have crashed but survived…
“In order to continue making love…”
“Yes…” I whispered, while the verse still poured out:
“Sunk in the whirlpool of vanishing reality,
we sometimes emerged from dreamlike nirvana…”
“How long will we continue fleeing, Irina?”
She did not reply. She said we had fled. In fact, that was the first night
when we were not fleeing. Till that night we had been doing it all the time.
We fled from each other, from our feelings, from that beach!
“Materius needs me!” she told me simply and laconically. “But let’s
not think of that. That night was ours and it mustn’t end sadly. Don’t think
we are separated. Don’t believe that the night is ended after all. It was so
beautiful. As though impossible.”
“It was impossible. I have grown perverted. My love I cannot have –
merely pitiable sweet projections of it in the bodies of other women. Having
the same divine clitorises and lips. But merely women, not you. You desired
Pluto, didn’t you?”
“And the highest peak on Mount Vitosha. No, on the Himalayas! And
in a crate full of fish!”
“But why should others enjoy my love?”
“But I’m not jealous. Discover me in them.”
“Do you think that’s possible?”
“No,” she replied.
“We wandered and stumbled in the reality of life.
Petrified statues rose from our footprints…”
“Will you tell me the verse sometime…”
“You may have heard it already, not with your ears though…”
“With my fibres”
“And with the aura…”
“Fog erased the shadows
of the transparent spirits that were being born…”
I feel cold…
“We cannot be forever on the run, Irina…”
“But aren’t we – all the time? Believe me, I don’t want to hurt
Materius. Please, love me like tonight. With him is another woman. She
resembles the one who is now with you and sometimes they share the same
body but they are different women. Have yours. The wild one. The
forbidden one. The eternal escapist. The one doomed to be yours with only a
part of herself though with her whole heart. See? You’ve made me spout
trivialities. I don’t like to blame Eros’s jokes on my heart…”
“O, yes!” said I somewhat ironically. “Your poetry is different. Too
intellectually elevated to acknowledge that a muscle ball can sometimes be
more eloquent than all written books which it is it in fact that has written
them all. We feel better when we ascribe everything to fictitious gods like
Eros, for instance, instead of admitting that precisely that ball of muscles is
Eros himself… We feel better beguiling ourselves with poetry instead of
being poetry!”
“Don’t get bitter!”
“I can’t help it!” every word I uttered pained me. “It will be daylight
after a while and we’ll be on our way back. You’ll get back to the family
hearth. You’ll again be the model wife and will insert me in your next poetry
collection as a verse. It will surely be a very intellectual exercise because
only thus will you be able to still your heart. Only that way. With much
reasoning… And I… I won’t tell you my verse. I’ll whisper it when I’m
alone… Because it resembles a confession… A disorderly confession…
Many concepts without sound linkage… Like our life, exactly. Like our
love. Powerful emotions. Explosions. No consistency. In one instant we bury
ourselves, in the next we help each other gain resurrection, only to kill each
other once again…”
“Please, don’t talk like that,” she was on the verge of tears.
I was spoiling it all. The splendid night. The delightful experience.
The joy of us being alive and had lived our life in accordance with our
wishes. I had nothing to grumble about. Sometimes one instant was enough
for you to take everything from life and now it lasted an entire night.
“The picture gallery was becoming a lovers’ temple.
Like candles our bodies melted in time…”
“I want you to fill the ocean with your sperm!”
“But that’s impossible!”
“Mine at least you can!”
Just one phrase from her was enough to arouse me again and I tried to
fill up not hers but the entire ocean.
Then I became sad again. And she was full. Glad. Happy. Desiring.
Immensely pleased.
“Why all that melancholy, Papa Jan! You live the way you want to.
You can’t realize it, but it is so. Or we would have met earlier. You have the
woman. Why do you need the female divinity of unhappy love? Don’t be
sad…”
“Well, you have interpreted it all. Again you have interpreted it and
placed it the way it should… And in the place it should… Philosophy puts
everything in its due place, even when it admits to knowing nothing.Even
when love itself is in question which it alleges not to understand.”
“Love, or sexual thrill?” for the first time her voice sounded cold.
“If for you it is nothing but a sex thrill, you may be right to ask that
question.
“With energy from above it dominated over obstacles.
It directed the telepethetic beam
of bioenrgetic interaction…”
“Why don’t you bite off my nipples? Do it, since you want to cause
pain out of love!”
She was right. I wounded her for no particular reason. One cannot
cure a wound with another wound.
I had no business saying anything other than that I wished to say. I
wished to say I was happy. Very much so. And if I said that I could be
speaking the truth. One is only true to one’s happiness. Even the miserable
ones. Those devoted to the opposite sign to that of their wishes.
Unconsciously, the soul produces whatever it wants to. Even when it fails,it
has passed through the garden of the Eden of the thrill of bliss, impossible to
be consciously realized. I was probably happy for possessing Irina only at
intermittent moments. For being in love and despite the lovers’ craze for
possession I do not possess her I was probably happy because my beloved
was a voluptuous thrill and the poetry of the soul weary of the whips of the
flesh. I was happy probably because I had to violate the rules of the game.
Or because I could not do so. Or because I was living in a dream. Or… Or…
Because my lot was not to have a predestined woman but many.
Frivolity and prettiness. Innocent perversions, not love but loves. Multiple
images instead of an image. Penises scattered in all directions instead of
family fidelity. A craze instead of composure in art. Aesthetics instead of
ethics. And over and above all that satanic disorder – the beautiful woman as
a priestess in the darkness of perdition and beauty… And my out-of-place
musings at the moments when I had the opportunity to enjoy the thrill… To
drink the sea out of the cup between her thighs. The fountain of
voluptuousness with the taste of salt. To add more sperm to the incredible
cocktail. More sperm than bile from unshed tears…
O, love why are you so melancholy even on your native shore?
Why are the stallions of eroticism bruised by your whips?
Why is your coach, broken, abandoned by the side of the motorway of
life along which now dash growling, stinking dragons, spewing burnt out
gases?
This is happiness for some people, no matter how absurd that sounds!
You, girl, are happy in your melancholy! In your inability to enjoy
your own sweetness!
“As the god-mother of ‘Energy Lyzism’
you felt full in your universal solubility…”
I came to. We were not on our beach. A lot of time had passed. Had I
been dreaming? At that moment I did not know. I had awakened from one
dream and as if in an instant had sunk into the next. I had smeared paint all
over myself. As in the old days when I was alone in my studio in
Assenovgrad. I do not recall our way back that morning. I remember we
again made love in motion. It was truly delicious…
“It cannot go on like this!” I remember saying to her.
“It’s magnificent!” she replies delighted. “Do you really wish
everything in your life to be systematic?”
“We cannot any longer deceive the old man. He also loves you.You
must make him feel a man! Then you can even forget me. You only have to
make him feel a man!”
“It’s you who made me feel a woman!”
Pleasant flame. Infinite cold in the Land Beyond Any Criteria.
“Thought sends passions into exile, my friend! Materius cannot attain
his body without having passed through all the circles of the inferno of that
exile. A rather long way before he touches me as you do… He needs a wife,
a friend, an intellectual partner but I would forever be the mistress of some
other. In fact I now know: of you alone.”
“Enough of this poetry. Be more humane!”
“Poetry makes me human. Otherwise I am a wild cat…”
I recall us parting that way. I went away aimlessly. Days after that I went
back to her…
“You must be crazy!” her scream was full of delight.
We are both crazy… This time we “escaped” closer to home… In the
foothills of Mount Vitosha. Under the gaze of many hikers. While she was
groaning over me, with the corner of an eye I saw our doubles.They were
watching us.They may have been the same ones we saw that night by the
river. Enigmatic. Nameless man and woman with faces like ours. With
bodies like ours who were enjoying their visual thrill.Weren’t they a product
of the imagination…
“Juices, colours, hues, bodies, nature and love
dissolved under the gaze of God the Creator…”
“Papa Jan, you are a tremulous mind, about to fall ill due to your
dangerous proximity to Beauty!” gayly speaks Materius, as he looks at
photos of my pictures. I feel like telling him he does not even suspect how
close I am to Beauty and how real is the danger of the illness he is speaking
of. I am pained because I love him, yet deceive him. I am pained because he
and I are not one man and his wife is not two women. I am pained because
philosophy ends where life begins, because he, the genius cannot discover
the formula to rid us all three from the haunted love triangle… I break out
laughing like mad. Materius looks at me bewildered. I am more bewildered
than he and it is infernally funny to me.
A love triangle. An enchanted circle. A most wonderful verbal
geometry according to which the triangle at one moment becomes a vicious
circle…
I laugh like crzy…
“You are rather infantile!” Irina tells me when she found out I was
laughing at my discovery of the circular triangle. Naturally, my dear. Only a
child can forgive that satanic sense of humour with which we love and love
our fellow man… I will again lift your thighs and everything will fall into
place or at any rate will fall into place before being derailed again… My
laughter dies down. I have again gone back to her from somewhere. We are
again alone. We are making love like the time before, near the piano…
And so, step by step
we’ve reached the basilica of the doomed.
The magician-priest was drinking the blood of the sacrifice…”
We parted. For the umpteenth time I told myself that we had
experienced everything will see each other no more. I went back to my
atelier in Assenovgrad with my unfinished painting and already had the
strength and inspiration to add to it all that was lacking. For three endless
nights and days I worked on it. In the end I poured kerosene upon it and set
it ablaze. Burning a part of me I hoped to purify myself. Next day within a
few hours I had repainted it only to realize it was still incomplete.
Something was lacking. Then I convulsed in a nightmare. On my skull was a
gaping wound. Like a blow with an axe. I was smiling with that sly
expression of infinite a somewhat melancholy insight, so typical of
Materius. I was sitting on the edge of a hospital couch and was smiling; my
body was weak, in danger of losing its enormous head at any moment. I was
the degenerate and was also Materius. The two men loved by Irina had
merged into one. And that man was sick and degenerate instead of being
perfect… I felt saved when I awoke from the nightmare.
I touched the unfinished painting and what followed was no dream.
Nor was it a hallucination of “a tremulous brain gotten sick from its
dangerous proximity with beauty”. It was a miracle, an actual miracle. One
of the snake-like women stepped out of the painting and kissed my lips
tenderly. The lips of the second one, wet and passionate, sank into my lap. I
found myself in the picture where evrything was sincere and beautiful,
where I boldly made love to the bacchantes unafraid they might tear me
apart, where I did not have to hurry anywhere, nor think of what I would
lose when the night ends, where the night could not end, where the night was
Irina herself, who had chosen to make me happy with different faces of her
many-faced splendour…
“Standing before the altar of votive service
we repeat conjuring mantras:
burnt love,
burnt love,
burnt love!”
I am not in the picture; I am in my Sofia studio. Irina and I are putting
the finishing touches on the painting. We glue the snake skins we had
collected the day before while on Mount Vitosha…
“Would you believe me if tell you that for nearly half-a-year I have
been living in a dream?” I ask her.
“Since the night we ran away?”
I nod affirmatively.
“Since the night I collapsed with delight.When I did not want you to
die in that verse of mine. It is constantly sounding in my head. Even now. It
eats at my memory like a computer virus. Sometimes it even makes me
happy.”
“Molten by the priest’s magic, we left trance-existence…”
“One night I had a revolting nightmare: I and Materius were one man.
Degenerate…
“We are all degenerate. It makes us beautiful. Otherwise we would
have been perfect.”
“Yet, if we open our eyes in an instant and see how degenerate we are
we’ll disgust us.”
“We won’t open them!” she replied while gluing the tail of a snake
onto the vagina of the woman depicting her in “Total Fertilization Before the
Coming of a Messiah”.
She gave a moan. She passed a finger along the snake skin and
jokingly slapped the bottom of her double in the painting.
“It’s a treat,” she laughed. “Sometimes I am really her…”
“I opened my eyes. The splendid flesh had gone.
It even vanished from memory,
like scalding lava it slid between my fingers…”
“And when you are not her?”
“Well,then?” she came up to me and sat on my knees. “I am a poetess,
bored with much life.”
“Only the picture on the wall remained with the dear image.
Do you exist, or did I invent you?!”
“You are a philosopher,” I told her. “Can you explain to me the
strange things that have been happening to me since that night? I am no
more mentally ill than is safe for me and those around me. Yet I forget many
things. Other things happen to me which a rational mind can’t believe in.”
“Auto-editing of memory. You would rather have beautiful memories
than real ones. You prefer to remember things not as they happened but as
you saw them. You have ended a phase of your life to which you return with
your ‘edited memories’. You find that more interesting. Will you tell me the
poem with which that night started?”
“Do you exist, or did I invent you?!”
She looked at me questioningly.
“That was the poem,” I told her, smiling. We both laughed.
“This time your really surpassed yourself. Usually, you are not all that
sparing of words and so convincing!”
We laughed more freely. I kicked at the painting. I took Irina under
the arms and placed her on the canvas as though on an oblatory skene. What
followed was not sex but a peculiar religious erotic ritual, a sacrament
neither of us saw differently from all other occasions we made love. It was
the end of a phase in my life. The end of a poem. The end of an infinite
string of thrills. After it we would be different…
“Do you exist, or did I invent you?!
In dreams, the memory of your presence
brings sorrow back.
Lived joy, misery, sick time
planted flower, withered by the frost of life.
Faded thrill, the fire won’t die,
nor would the tremour of my soul…
Who are you?!
A transparent ray of white light…”
The poem ended. So did sorrow. I was ripe enough to love her and not
to suffer and to derive still greater joy from old sorrows.
The hourglass, having counted our dulcet thrills, had covered the
shore with a golden blanket for lovers…
Our shore; which after that night would not make me suffer,
pondering things which must only be experienced. The ritual ended and
making love began.
8.
It was on the outskirts of Balchik… The first world exhibition of
balloons. Pictures by me, tied to balloons filled with hydrogen, were about to
fly to the four corners of the world so that I could share my art and
inspirationwith the birds and then with the lucky ones who would discover
the fallen paintings each of which for a long time now was priced at
millions. Ever since Irina and I started to meet whenever we wanted to not
caring much whether we were being seen or heard such ideas frequently
occurred to our minds. Exactly, o c c u r r e d . I don’t even recall now if the
exhibition venture with the balloons was or was not her idea but it does not
matter. We were of one mind during those months. She and I, though so very
unlike, often merged not only corporeally but also intellectually. When the
balloons were let fly in search of lucky discoverers we two sailed in a
fisherman’s boat after them.We saw them off till they disappeared in the sky
like the breasts of an unhappy love. I touched mine. I locked her fast in an
embrace and hers was desperate.
“My breasts won’t melt this way!”
“I don’t want to be a bird but a fish which drifts away and returns…”
“And which most fully experiences the ecstasy of love because it
takes the spawn with her entire body.”
The entire catch was under our feet. Tons of still living fish. Irina jumped
into it, sinking up to her knees. She took off her bikini and I jumped upon
her almost tearing my bathing trunks.
“Now we’ll experience this orgasm with them!”
“Now we’ll experience this orgasm with them!”
We fell into the heap. Thousands of fish eyes were looking at us with
their extraterrestrial looks. All were taking part in our love play. They slid
along our bodies, into our embrace, slapped us in the face with their smooth
bodies, suffocating, kissed us passionately, desperately with open mouths.
We experienced what they did during orgasm.Sex with thousands of fish on
a stolen fisherman’s boat. Universal total fertilization before the deaths of
thousands – our orgasm was the fullest.
“I want to be a fish… to be a fish… to be a fish…”
“You are!”
“Oh!”
Under me her body moved exactly like a fish. A fish had penetrated
her open asshole… I penetrated quickly from in front and shoved another
fish into her mouth. She herself caught two in her hands and then scores of
the creatures, as if realizing what they were invited to, began jumping upon
us again.It was fantastic. In a human way, we remained perverted and the
things we were doing was perverted but at the same time we were fish like
all those unfortunate creatures which would soon be food on the table of
some housewife or other.
“You wanted to be a fish, didn’t you?”
She said nothing. It seemed she was imagining it, because she kept
opening and shutting her mouth like the miserable creatures around her and I
availed myself of the moment to enjoy a quick French kiss. And ejaculated
right on time. Amid tons of scales and spawn, because just after that we
were found out by the coastline guards who had been on the lookout for the
disappeared fisherman’s boat. When they let us go, we did not wash. We
still stank of fish, yards away, and our bodies were covered with scales. Our
hotel was almost empty. We made a round of the rooms and spawned our
roe. We made love till our legs could no longer support us, till our eyes
popped out, our bodies get stiff, our brains stop thinking – in each and every
room.I don’t know how many times we did it.In any case, it was withing
human capability. I don’t know how many hours it lasted. In any case, it was
for longer than we could absent ourselves. We did it in all possible ways; I
even felt like penetrating into her veins and I think I did it. Without hurting
them. Simply, while caressing them with my penis I felt I was discharging
my fluid, yet I saw no traces of it on her. Some would say, of course, after so
many times there would be nothing to discharge!
But no!I got re-charged with sexual energy from somewhere else.!
From the universe, from the world, from Nature. It was always like that
when I was with Irina. I am extremely delighted, satisfied and satiated. I do
not think of another woman but with her I want it all to go on forever. When
things between us were not yet settled, understandably, we thought it was
our last time. It was not so since a long time now. Now we even tried to
channel our thoughts of it being like that. Out of superfluous perverted
romanticism we were not only profoundly but absolutely sure we would
meet again and again till parted by death alone. After that – one never
knows.
We could have been reincarnated as fish in love or flies in love which
could do it flying. One night, assisted by long meditation we has transferred
part of our consciousness onto such small creatures and it was fine.We flew
about the room, preparing the fifty-thousandth generation to torment
humanity, till finally we crashed upon the window again awaking in our own
bodies upon which two flies had fallen. I still keep them in a box. It had all
been so brief and so splendid – us, experiencing the Lunar Orgasm in them.
In its fullness and its total eclipse.
We have also made love upon horses. And like fish. We have
experimented with all things that are not r e a l l y perverted, like tearing up
of veins and shoving a penis in them or discharging sperm.What happened,
however, was different: I was rubbing her arm with my penis when I felt I
climaxed most powerfully, most fully and most unburdeningly exactly upon
the vein. There was no sperm.It seems it had passed into her in some transbilogical, contactless manner, because at that moment I felt my own
biological energy field inside the body of my beloved.In an instant she was
altered, becoming stronger, more liberated but much more
aggressive.Aggression is desirable in sex when it is shared. This time,
however, it was a question of aggression, trensforming itself into tenderness.
It was savage, masculine aggression. If I had long hair, she would have
grasped it, pulling my head backwards and shoving her non-existent penis
into my lips, parted in the uttering of a groan of pain.Instead, I began
tenderly kissing her clitoris and thighs, zig-zagging with my lips down them.
I sensed the hurricane passing and Irina becoming the same Irina, though she
was now carrying my fruit inside her.
Then it all subsided. Even the nearby waves seemed to have become
quieter. I wonder if, after a total orgasm like that it only seems so to us, or
really the whole environment perceives it and quietens down with us.We
were lying close to each other.Our bodies were still warm and red, smelling
of fish and freedom. The sun was setting and our full moon was again above
us.
“I’ll soon be the same!”
“Which of them all?” I smiled at her.
“The witch who performs her rituals under a full moon. Naked, she
takes men’s hearts and women’s bodies. Mixes male and female sweat with
cow’s milk. Adds two drops of her own blood. Plus two drops of the blood
of a boar and a rabid dog. Then she milks the moon, reflected in a copper
full of the magic potion and then she rubs her breasts with it in order to take
the strength of the full moon, to take the strength of the tide – the tides of the
earth, of all hearts, lungs, testicles and vaginas…”
“You have never performed such rituals!”
“Oh, I don’t smear such disgusting potions upon my breasts!” she
sweetly smiled.
“I manage to observe the moon in your eyes and it will sink into my
psyche. After that I make love to you with its strength and all tides and give
myself to love!”
“And you turn into a fish…” she smiled.
“I’m a fish when I swim naked in the sea. Alone at night I expect you
to come into the body of the sea god, sometimes into that of a sea monster.
Today we only participated in the total fertilization of the fish.”
My head spinned. I believed that and feared lest it be true. It
continued floating inside my skull.I recalled our feelings hours before while
we writhed along the dying fish in ecstasy and agony, covered in sea drops,
spawn and scales With every fibre of mine I experienced the ecstasy.Every
inch of our flesh was a sex organ. Even the aura was an erogenous area,
aroused and swollen like a nipple, spreading miles around us and sensing the
arousal of lips when kissing, touching the departing balloons hung with
paintings. We made love in water and air, touched the nearby shore and
made love on it, loved in the fish bodies under the cover of every grain of
spawn. Though we were simply lying upon the fish and Irina’s legs tightly
clasped my waist while her hands held two of the bigger fish, we were not
making love merely with our bodies. We were something more than bodies,
or if we were, those bodies, opening onto Nature’s whole orgasm, managed,
in a way unknown to man to make “unperverted” love to all of
Nature.Outside the cells into which fish spawn.
I was gripped in horror by the thought that this could really be a great
Discovery. I am not even aware, how that thought occurred to me amid all
those experiences, first as a hypothesis and then as picture called
“Immaculate Conception” which I swiftly confided to my beloved.
“Penny for your thoughts,” she said.
“Do you know why I’m Papa Jan!” I laughed. “Because I have eaten
quite a lot to grow so big…”
She also smiled, briefly. She was probably wondering what the matter
was with me. That matter which was still of interest to her was swelling once
more but my thoughts were preoccuppied with something else and I was
sweating with inspiration.Before my eyes I visualized the picture which a
moment before had merely been an idea, a philosophical challenge with
great theosophical value. The value of all heresies in order to strengthen
religious dogma or to make a dent in it with a view to upcoming heresies and
the next, greater, strengthening of dogma.
“Immaculate Conception!” the naked Virgin whose cells are open to
the entire universe. Having conceived from the fish spawn, discharged into
the air.
Irina looked at me amazed. Then she merrily laughed and kissed me.
“Now they’ll actually proclaim you Pope…”
She laughed but I was serious because I visualized the picture. God,
please forgive me, if you are the one people appeal to. Sometimes I still
believe in you and often when embarking on my way I call upon the Holy
Virgin to keep watch over me. Forgive me, you – sole God of Love – if I
who see it differently from most worshippers, am erring.
“The Virgin in a rather voluptuous posture,” whispered I to Irina.
“Above Her - the angel and fish. Flying fish. A great many fish. Curved
spaces. Geometrical fantasies while She experiences an orgasm.The
greatest,the most sensual, the purest. And the most total. The orgasm of the
entire mankind! The orgasm, till today unfelt, till we ourselves experienced
it. Out there, in the fisherman’s boat. It is still vibrating in our bodies…”
Irina kissed me.
“Then let’s waste no time. Let’s take the rest of it before it is gone. I
want us to swim once again.”
We didn’t bother to dress. We jumped down from the terrace. Night
had fallen. A passionate night of summer. With the caress of sea wind and
still panting with the hot day that had passed.A night like a woman after full
lovemaking.A night of drinking youths and short skirts. A night of youth
and much more love.Above all, a night with a full moon. Our night, when
we, still under the spell of what we had been through, like alcoholics
wanting more and more and more superfluous dizziness, naked, ran to the
shore.
We waded into the waves. Subsided until a short time before,they
were again agitated or perhaps we, excited, felt them to be so. The moon
shone upon our shoulders when we in a long, long kiss, up to our knees in
water, felt the new surge of the infinite cosmic forces of giving oneself to
love…
Irina did indeed seem to have milked it and taken away her strength.
With her love, she was imparting to me all the earth’s tides and the tides of
all lips, genitals, hearts…
“Let’s swim!”
“Let’s become fish!”
“Let’s!”
“Let’s swim naked…”
“Under the pictures lost into providence…”
We fell silent. We pressed our lips together just like the moon sucks in the
witch’s copper. Her legs were twined round my waist. Our groans merged
with the splash of the waves. My lips were kissing her breasts and when they
were parted from them splashes replaced them. One wave, mightier than the
others, knocked us over. Our faces were under the water surface. They
appeared somehow extraterrestrial. Human, yet of the ocean. Belonging to
people living in the ocean. In a boundless country love is also booundless.
We did not wish to stick our heads out, we kissed underwater. She fell on
her stomach over me and I penetrated her. The ocean was carrying us away
but we were not humans but were fish. We were not afraid of the ocean
stream, as we were not afraid that the stream of life will carry off our love. It
was so incredible, it so powerfully experienced the Full Orgasm that even if
that happened, the felt joy would not be taken away from us. It was to
flourish in the spawn carried off by the typhoon and tossed up and down by
the wind, would enter, soft, caressing and tender, through the window of a
lonely girl, gazing at the full moon. On her budding breasts and stomach it
would splash in the form of male semen and female juices; it would turn into
creeping ants under the skin which would descend down the skin towards
the tender velvet and would possess it with her own hand, while her eyes,
fixed at the moon, see upon its face our own tattooed
ones. Harmonious spirituality and fatal flesh, tender inspiration and wild
passion would fuse together.Two faces, male and female upon the face of
the moon. Faces human and of fish, chained in the madness of passion,
liberated by universal harmonious love which breaks any and every chain…
The stream continued carrying us into the open sea when, just before I
exploded, Irina unstuck herself from me and after a masterly swimming
exercise turned round and took it into her mouth. I saw her spine, writhing,
flexible, like that of a snake, shining in the moonlit water and then
everything disappeared from my vision. I experienced it.
I was flowing out, all of me, devoured by the Abyss of All Abysses –
predatory, greedy, madly loving, infinitely selfless and infinitely voracious,
as deep as the Universe itself. I felt smashing the palate like a fallen meteor
and reaching the brain. I splash amidst the brain convolutions, flow along
them and we tremble from our mutual touch. I came to before I had
swallowed water. Everything returned to its regular place. The waves,
radiant under the moon, the fish jumping on the surface Irina’s smiling face
and the now distant shore. Everything was in its normal position before my
eyes but they did not yet see things clearly because I was still dizzy with
what I had experienced and failed to realize what had happened. More than
once before I had finished inside her mouth but this time there was
something different… The writhing fish spine!
The sensation prior to it!
The day, full of emotions and experience!
The writhing spine!… I’ll paint it some day… I’ll paint it… I was still
dizzy… I recalled the sensation which seemed to repeat itself… I spilled my
semen in her lips as soon as touching them. I smashed the palate and
penetrated the brain, flowing amidst the brain convolutions. I was absorbed
by the cells which produced flowers. Wild forest flowers. Thoughts…
verses… Crazes…Inside the head of a godlessly beautiful witch who wanted
to milk the moon… The curved spine!
No, it was not the spine of a fish but that of a panther, a black panther.
A strange species, living in the water. It had the form of a woman who,
when sexually satisfied under a full moon, turned into a panther in an
instant. This is a trick of the imagination She simply seemed like a panther
to me. Her spiritual loftiness and good manners are traits in Irina’s character
which in no way at all prevent her being wild sometimes exactly like a
predatory panther. And it is like a panther I will paint her some day.In that
respect, in fact, Irina is not all that much unlike many other tender kittens on
two legs who can murmur sweetly when caressed on the back but capable of
tearing you to pieces the very next moment. I was familiar with that aspect
of Irina’s because in that, as I said, she was not unique.Other aspects of her
had slipped me. Such as were not frequently met with. Such as have no
analogies in real life. At least not in that kind of life which is knowable and
can be written about in a book by a writer, or captured on canvas by an
artist. Such aspects were only to be perceived. By few lucky ones under the
eternal full moon. The writhing spine… The lips where her vagina has been
a moment before. The breakthrough!
The brain!
I pour out my fluid over it!I let it drink and enjoy touching it. I am
ecstatic… Was there really sex on the brain? Only hours before it had
seemed odd when I imagined I had penetrated her veins and now something
far more incredible was happening to me.
“What happened?” I shouted at her while she, resembling a nymph
laughed at me swimming around.
“Nothing, my love! Simply, the full moon! A priestess of arcane skills
can dissolve everything in everything else on such a night. She can open
non-existent doors…”
“Ah, you!” I laughed and rushed after her. We swam fast further into
the sea.In a normal condition we would have thought that unreasonable, the
shore being rather distant, we, being rather exhausted, but after the
experience in the fisherman’s boat, in the hotel and that which happened a
moment before we threw reasonableness to the winds and now we were not
human beings but fish who did not fear not being able to make it back to the
shore, because their home is the sea and not the land.
“I’ll love you in the air… I’ll love you in the fire… And on land
again… And in the water again… And in all the elements… And I’ll mix
them… And you’ll mix them, too… And they’ll dissolve… They’ll be
smashed like atoms and we’ll absorb their mushroom in bodies… Because
you are aware how doors are opened and absorption takes place…” I
shouted at every few metres as I, panting, swam after her and she – after the
horizon.
I caught up with her. Our bodies intertwined. We touched each other.
Tenderly, with the fingers of hands and feet. We overturned and our tongues
frolicked on erogenous areas. We rose above the waves and kissed. We
dipped downwards and swam towards the bottom of the abyss, till our lungs
were blazing with shortness of air and for a kiss above the surface of the
water.And again swimming further on, dipping, touching with fingers of
hands and feet, frolicking of tongues on the erogenous zones, rising above
the waves and kisses, diving deep down and swimming further out into the
sea, till we saw several dolphins. Swimming, they danced round one another
and pecked at their genitals. Then they made love. Merrily, like humans, but
more freely.A whole group of playful dolphins, playing the game of love.We
watched them long, delighted. At last only a pair remained. We swam
towards them and like them did what we had been doing before meeting
them. Though the dolphins were busy frolicking, watched us and only for
brief moments looked in another direction. Apparently, they, too, enjoyed
our love game as we did theirs… I cannot say how long we stayed far out
into the sea and how it occurred to us at all that we had better go back, lest
our strength failed us on our way to the saving shore…
Gradually, yet swiftly, the mood changed. With every passing second
we became aware what we had done.We had overdone it, the same way as
when we made love on the road with my hands on the steering wheel.
“After total passion! After the latest temptation! What remains?
Death! What the hell, this is not our first game like that.Our love is suicidal.
We gave each other supreme delight which could not be topped by the
perception of death. The lunar orgasm! The new moon! We are killing
ourselves!”
What nonsense! We are frivolous to death. Literally to death. Oh,
Lord!
A metre after metre I was making progress. Initially, she was far
ahead of me but she began dropping behind. She lacked my stamina and my
routine of fighting off death.
Yes, besides being an artist, I am also an adventurer and very much a
hothead at that. I have travelled a lot and have been anywhere. I have gotten
lost in Siberian deserts of snow. I have trodden upon a mine and have had to
stand motionless for an eternity while rats gnawed at my legs. More than
once I have been far out into the sea, drained of all strength under much less
romantic circumstances....* I have survived in all those cases thanks to
Divine Providence and a wild lust for life in the name of all I have had and
still have. Richer souls than mine have failed in such circumstances. At the
moment I feared very much for Irina. Very much indeed! She did not
possess my will to live. Nor would the milked moon help her reach the
shore. My darling! My darling! Our love would have killed her. But no! I
simply h a d to manage it somehow.I would support her as much as I could.
I am not stronger than her for nothing. I am a man after all! I had a surge of
energy. I mobilized my strength to the limit, even doubled them – we were
two, weren’t we? I would rather save this cosmic woman than myself.
It is strange that when one is ready to sacrifice oneself for one’s
beloved one does not regard that one as his own possession. Only then!
Maybe one loves more, maybe less… I was getting very close to her… My
leg went numb. For one terrible moment I thought I was drowning. Without
glory! Without having succeeded at nothing for my love other than causing
her death.
To cause her death out of love, out of passion. In order for us to meet
as snails or more miserable humans in the next re-incarnation when we had a
Lunar Orgasm. I did something Idon’t know what. I was petrified yet my
body moved on the surface above the waves even faster and stronger than
before. I had sobered up completely and realized only now how crazy we
had been.
“Irina, we must learn to stop before we reach this point! Beyond it, all
meaningful sense is gone…”
I caught up with her and grew now deadly fearful. She was swimming
but screaming with passion.
“We’ve got there! We’ve got there where is no more! We’ve got to
the limit. We are dying, my love! Dying out of love!”
I had to slap her and shake her but that day I had penetrated her blood
and her brain sharing with her the universal lunar orgasm. Something had
happened which robbed me not only of bodily strength but of my very own
soul; in parallel with that I realized that the shore was still very far away and
the stream rather fast for us to manage, exhausted as we were.I felt the
sweetness of surrendering to death. I also felt the horror of losing so much
but her kisses was what remained. Full of sadness, I could yield now to the
only delight – very brief at that – at the very moment I was losing
everything. We were kissing and no longer making headway towards the
beach but only kept afloat on the waves. I sensed that soon we’d no more be
able of doing even that.
The waves absorbed us and at that very moment my feet sensed firm
support. The contact was a pleasant one. It was with the beloved creature. In
an instant I realized I was on the back of a dolphin. Then I saw that Irina,
too, was waving her arms like a sea bacchante, riding upon another dolphin
and giving out wild screams. They were the same dolphins, the ones we
observed making love and which observed us doing the same. They had
saved creatures similar to themselves.
“Darling!” she shouted.
I felt an emotion stronger than death. Survival At long last, on the
beach.At long last subsided in silence. Sunk in our own selves, beyond the
memory of the past day and a large portion of the night. Yards from each
other, creassed only by the wind.
“Do you suppose we leav an imprint upon the wind?A picture of a
second’s duration. Not simply air but a picture” Irina, absorbed in thought,
asked of herself rather than of me.
“I recall the underwater exhibition,” I say more to myself than to her.
“In the swimming pool at Assenovgrad… It marked the start of my
exhibitions ‘Water – Air – Fire – Earth’ … We have all existed first in
water though we were made of clay; water is our earliest memory. Tonight I
have convinced myself of that…”
“Yesterday you staged and exhibition in the air. Why?We still live on
the Earth, don’t we?”
I broke out laughing spontaneously till I almost choked. Till there
were tears in my eyes and my diaphragm ached. I paused for a while and
again broke out laughing.
“What is it!” Irina asked and just as I was about to subdue my
laughter, infected by it, she began laughing this time, re-igniting my crazy
laughter.
“Wh-a-a-a-t?”
I managed to say it.
“Well, some have done it in the air, too, and therefore must have
dwelled in it.Do you remember when we were flies? Well, Salvador Dali
was rather keen on flies. He smeared honey and excrement upon his body
and felt absolute sexual delight from them creeping upon him…”
Irina gave a false laugh as if to say “How very funny!”
I went on in a serious tone:
“We have come out of the ocean but are not yet living on the earth,
although we tread upon it, feel and think about it. With our tread, with our
emotions and thoughts we live where they lead us. In heaven or in hell. We
aspire to heaven. We even believe in eternal bliss but one moment of heaven
is bought with a hundred years of burning in the hell of passions and the
vicious circle of rationalization, remorse, dissatisfaction. This is the
symbolism of my series of exhibitions.”
“And the earth?”
“We start living on it when we are underground. When we give life to
innocents who exist without thinking.!”
That night we could make love on the earth, too. Had we died
together.
“I wish it and yet don’t wish it to be so.”
“So do I, my beloved!”
“Irina, we must go back,” I told her tenderly. We kissed goodbye. I
could hardly imagine how she was to return naked to her husband but she is
a woman. She would surely find a way.
As soon as I smelled my pillow I fell asleep.
“You recall everything as in a dream because it is period of your life
which belongs to the past and it has remained with you as you prefer it and
not as it has actually been!” Irina spoke to me while I myself was walking
along the bank of the Chaya, looking for her, though I knew she was in Sofia
with her husband.
A car pulled up alongside. A pretty brunette with long curly hair,
springtime green eyes, an athletic body with lots of sun tan smiled
charmingly. Wasn’t I at Balchik and wasn’t I doing an exhibition in the air?
I shuddered with horror. It had all been a fantasy!
“Come on in, swell guy, don’t you recognize me?”
I recognized her inside the car. She was the sex athlete.She and her
Stallion had given shelter from the rain to Irina and me. She took me to the
place where I had seen her fucking with her Superman. She pushed me over
onto the stones and started riding my like a race horse. In the air I saw the
balloons flying my paintings. Around them flew a shoal of dolphins. The sex
athlete’s partner emerged from the bushes. “How very pretty!” said he
joining the act, and strated screwing her in the
behind… Then she turned into Irina while he… He was a stranger to me. A
horrible creature with bluish face and huge black lips, hairy arms, ending in
nails. Instead of groaning from the arousal, he laughed sardonically. Irina’s
face was wrinkling till in the end over me was an old hag and finally a
skeleton. My penis broke against her pelvic joint, my sperm filled her bones
and they burst into pieces. I penetrated the creature but it was a woman by
now.At first demoniac like the one who was behind Irina but gradually
becoming a woman till at last turning into Irina herself…
“You have penetrated into my bones as well,” she screamed. “In a full
moon I can open all doors.”
“But that isn’t you!”
The dolphins were now flying lower. Just over our heads.
“But who were these after all?”
“Us!”
“But that isn’t you!”
“It wasn’t I before you met me. You were not with me before I met
you! I wasn’t really with you before you penetrated my blood and my brain!
You were not truly with me but with old projections of women,
superimposed upon myself, till your love penetrated my bones, too! Some
day we’ll make love together on the earth as well…”
I recovered my senses. It was only then that the nightmare began. We
were swimming far away from the shore. The unexpected salvation. The
dolphins.The shore. Our quiet return. There can be no survival for suicidal
love. Just as with drink and drugs. You simply have to give them up. Only
that way can you survive. You cannot have it without killing your beloved
with it…
I sank. I wished to swallow water and everything to end at last. The
hallucinations of an impossible salvation.The passions I felt for her. The
damned lust for life which still kept me on the surface. The damned lust for
Irina which was killing me. The damned lust for a woman who kept me
alive. Damned lusts. Why couldn’t I drink up the sea I was drowning in if I
was so thirsty? Yes! Because it tastes salty, same as love and sex. Doesn’t
slake the thirst but aggravates it. Well, soon we were going to make love on
earth. Or in heaven, if it exists. Or rather in the fire if a hotter fire at all
exists than the one who seared us in the past day and night.
Instead of swallowing water I floated to the surface and screamed:
“Hold on, hold on!”
Death’s cold embrace enveloped me like a wave. I swallowed water. I
felt a pleasant touch and a firm support… The dolphins!? Who believes in
them nowadays!? I think only children!
We were by the river. Heavy rain was pouring down. This is how
death looks.
I opened my eyes. I was surrounded by life-guards on the beach.
“Is she alive?! I shouted.
“These nighttime swims aren’t all that safe,” one of them said and
smiled. “She recovered consciousness before you. She said the dolphins had
pulled you up. They can’t have come to the beach with you. What saved
you, do you think?
“I believe I love her more than I love myself!”
“How is she?”
“We picked her up! We didn’t find your clothes. We’ll have to
provide you with bathing trunks. What saved you, do you think?”
“One never knows, I’m sure. What about you, a life-guard?”
“There is no one nuttier than an artist or a poet but you, Papa Jan, are
to give me an autograph.”
“It’s yours, Mich Buckanan!” I laughed. A fine morning.Sunny, yet
cool. The morning after the first death, after the first complete Lunar
Orgasm. Morning and life again! But for how long? As long as it’s
possible.At that moment I realized I have the will to fight the waves for
hours, to wander about ice deserts for days and to stand upon a mine and be
bitten by rats for an eternity but did not have the strength to fight love, more
dangerous than the waves, more cruel than the ice desert, more slowly and
excruciatingly deadly than the rats biting an man standing still.And yet
pleasanter than life itself.
9. Rupite. Inspiration and mystery. Cosmic touch. A night before we
departed Irina felt something kissing her on the cheeks, lips, breasts, which
was not flesh. Prior to that we had been together and she was so emotionally
spent that I did not believe it was acase of unsatisfied libido.For a long time
I had known I satisfied her completely.What is more, I was the only one who
could open the door to her sexual inhibitions and make her behave that way,
as for instance in Balchik and often after that. Almost always when we are
alone and want it, we make love. The rest of the time she turned into the
charming, worldly woman, a poetess of spirituality and wife to the
celebrated Materius Rozenkreutzer. She could smile so that the man on
whom that smile is bestowed might think he has a thermonuclear generator
inside his pants. She could whisper sweetly in someone’s ear during a party
about spiritual striptease, about the torn clothes of the raped earth and the
voluptuous whisper of words which fulfils all youthful forbidden desires,
about the skepticism within her splendid breasts, till in the end the listener
finds himself in a delirium as if bitten by two thousand Spanish flies. She
could bestow such a look in the eye as to be able to kindle fantasies about
Trojan wars, swords, blood and numerous manly deeds of valour in the
name of that look. But she could not be a woman apart from that beautiful
shell. I often asked myself how I had won that honour.
My momentary fits of jealousy were out of place. I could not seriously
think that the evening after we fulfilled a long-cherished dream of ours, viz.,
to make love in the lift in which we first met, she would be touched in her
fantasy by a stranger or even me, since the episode in the lift, brief as it was,
exhausted her emotionally. Yet I could not refrain from asking her on our
way to Petrich:
“I should have tipped that friend of ours more generously, do you
think?” I meant the technician at the Cultural Centre who saw to it that the
lift should be immobilized for an hour. Irina was cross.
“Did you realize what you wished to ask?”
“You have dreamed of being touched at various intimate spots. Well, I
don’t mean the cheeks. But what is an hour inside a lift to the woman who
was prepared to be drowned for passion’s sake?”
“Sometimes much more! The lift was filled with passengers. I did not
know you and was on my way to my husband’s lecture. I chanced to touch a
stranger. Something happened. A demon awoke inside me of whose
existence I had not suspected.At that moment all others vanished and I
yielded, though with some trepidation at first, to the stranger’s caresses…”
It was exactly like that last night. She was timid as before the
exhibition in Varna. I was to touch a virgin yearning. I myself felt like that.
Everything was OK till we entered the lift. As soon as the doors behind us
closed and we realized we were alone, we forgot we were lovers. Excited,
we were afraid of violating the distance between fear and pleasure. Excited,
we overcame the fear but it went on in the moment when despite it we
yielded to pleasure. At that moment of absolute lust we seemed to be killing
our innocense and with it, our souls. We violated more grossly the life of the
one we loved than we did when we nearly drowned. While taking off her
dress I did not bite at her breasts but barely touched them with my lips but
the sound which came from her made me realize the touch was much more
painfully sweet than when I bit them. I was not licking the magic clitoris but
barely touched the velvet crown around it but her knees trembled as if her
secret attractions were touched by lips for the first time. After that we
continued more tenderly than ever though in the end we got hot and broke
the mirror…
“In an instant, everyone disappeared. I was alone with the stranger
and in yet another instant I lived with him through such experiences I have
had all the time prior to that with him. It was splendid..”
“And yet, those caresses. There are passions we don’t suppose exist,
not that I can be jealous of them…” (Yet, I was, damn it!).
“Please, Jan!” she put her hand on my thigh. “Believe me. I regret
being a woman! If I have any forbidden and secret sexual urges, they are
linked to my quite conscious desire to be a boy. On that night someone was
touching the woman but it was different… Different even from the
spawn…”
We both laughed.
“Yes!” she went on with a smile. “It wasn’t some impudent angel
taking advantage of my unconscious condition. Simply, something touched
me. It may not even have been a person but a mysterious force. You know I
have given names to all metaphysical forces, but that one… That one was
different, you see…Now I believe we’ll get to the clairvoyant…”
“And why did you at all doubt that?” here I was about to get cross.
She, like others, had acknowledged that I am a man to whom nothing is
impossible that can be done by man. I am a rare breed for which no “can’t be
done” exists. I am an artist and a poet but do not look like an intellectual
precisely because there’s nothing I can write or paint that I can’t also do in
life.Maybe that’s the answer to the question about my seemingly absurd
success with Irina. I get cross like a child whenever anyone doubts
something I have said I can do.
“Jan, you are being childish again! You know I am now confident of
your abilities.However, I have been waiting for so long for the meeting with
Granny Vanga that when that became possible I got surprised.”
Yes, she knew I could and would arrange that meeting for her. And
indeed that seemed the real reason for my success with her. Besides wishing
to be a fish and a boy, Irina wished also to be a knight. Like in the Middle
Ages. Rushing on horseback and sword in hand in the night. A knight errant
in constant search for adventure. She knew it was impossible for her to be a
knight but like a girl of fifteen she believed she would find her knight. The
one for whom nothing was impossible. I have always sensed that and
forever, without consciously realizing it, I have endeavoured for her sake
more than for everyone else to storm the impossible and fighting it, to
narrow its compass metre by metre.
“And what do you think that force was?” I abandoned the topic of
what’s possible or impossible which irritated me.
“Maybe it is aware of the fact that I was born in order to be touched.
With love. By the unfamiliar. By the superhuman. Maybe that is the
prophecy I expect!”
“Let’s hope it’s as tender as all that!” I had no reason to be ironical.
We drove on in silence and in memories of the lift. Irina kept caressing my
thigh. In a way that was pleasurable but not provocative.
We both were worked up over our meeting Vanga, the clairvoyant. I
was also somewhat afraid, though I could not share my fearfulness. What
had caused me to worry for a long time now was the most pleasant
experience in my life in which there had been thousands – what am I saying,
hundreds of thousands – of unpleasant things. For the matter of that, the
pleasant ones numbered billions. In spite of that, nothing could compare
even remotely with what we experienced at Balchik. But it worried me, as
well.What we felt that day in the car, racing in the opposite lane against
lorries, could have been a chance, isolated, simply wild urge. What we did
with ourselves at Balchik could not have been any of that. The first time we
had not had time to think but the second… And there w a s a second time!
When something is repeated it becomes systematic. An all too familiar truth.
I feared standing before Granny Vanga lest she should say I had to choose
between the love thrill and the safety of us both. At the same time I was
hoping she would say something else about us. Something that would make
me glad. Oh how glad I would be a single good word about our relationship!
The joy would have carried me over the lunar orgasm… It would have
caressed me like a mysterious ghostly hand in the night… Had it not been
touching Irina?… At last I stood before Granny Vanga.
“You have come from another age, Papa Jan!” she told me… Then I
saw her eye. The seeing one. It hung a few inches above her head and
something bright was showing through it. Something that made me close my
eyes for an instant. When I opened them I saw her as a quite normal old
woman, except for the powerful radiance emanating from her.
“You were born to be great and for people to follow you…”
“Please, say something about Irina! Or, no, don’t say anything!
Please, better not! I won’t believe you should you say something untoward,
although I know that myself and although you are the greatest clairvoyant!”
“You are going to paint me some day but I shall be no longer here!
You painting will cost as much as all other pictures you have sold up to now
and will be bought by a person who like you has come from another age in
order to be great and be followed by people just like you. After that painting
there will be others which will cost even more and more but that one will
perhaps be dearest to you… You however will be for ever moving along…
Because you are the Prince…”
I failed to understand her last words… I could not say, as I was going
out, whether I was glad or not at her not saying anything about Irina. Maybe
it had to be so. Yes, clairvoyants should not say things we make our destiny
through our individual will but only things already predestined by God
Himself and which we cannot change yet we wish to know of, or things we
can change solely through God’s intervention, heeding the words of His
prophets…
All of a sudden everything became sunnier, pleasanter, more lively.
My last thoughts were much more encouraging than should Vanga have said
some day Irina would enter the temple with me, in a bridal dress. It
transpired that God does not object to our relationship. Over it the Devil did
not hold greater sway than we ourselves did. So, everything was a matter of
personal choice and love. So, everything was up to us to decide: with reason,
if possible, if not, with our passions…
“Penny for your thoughts,” I asked Irina when we were outside.
“Nothing about us, and I’m glad!”
It is marvellous when the one you love thinks like yourself. That way
you seem to be reading each other’s thoughts. Erotics of the mind! Fantastic!
“She foretells me great success. Abroad.”
I was glad. I was happy about the prophecies about ourselves we both
had heard. Hand in hand, we reached the mysterious lake. All of it
enveloped in mist and fragrant vapours. That same lake by which a
mysterious whirlwind had lifted Granny Vanga when a girl and when she
alighted back on the ground she could not see any longer but she could
prophesy.
I put my hands on Irina’s shoulders. We kissed. In the mist our faces
were no longer visible. Our bodies also vanished in the fog.We touched each
other without seeing ourselves.We felt the trembling flesh like never before.
Livelier, more sensual, more innocent, more self-desiring.The flesh of
watery orgasm. Drenched in mineral vapours, resembling human bodies
touching each other. Groaning with human voices. Purified, in the mineral
spring, of the desire for self-destruction. Feeling angelic love for each other.
Constructive love. Not a jot less passionate, yet different. Still wet and
happy, we got into the car… I already saw with my mind’s eye the painting
of Vanga’s image. A spiral with her face. In the uppermost corner, I and
Irina, embraced like Adam and Eve, spirits in Granny Vanga’s skull, open
for revelation, surrounded with symbols and memories of mine and hers…
“You will paint it but I will not be here…”
Her words were sad, yet I was happy. Happy about the fact that over
everything Irina and I were feeling and doing for each other did not hang the
dark cloud of suicide. I was also happy about what we had experienced by
the lake. It was indeed pleasanter than ever before. And briefer, too!
All too brief, in fact!
10.
August 11, 1999. Sofia. I write these lines with great pain. It is one
year ago today that Irina and I parted!
I write these lines with great joy. A year has passed since I made the
vow. Till today I waited for her. As from today, according to my vow, I have
to be free of my feelings for her! Is that possible?
There is going to be a solar eclipse today. The body of the moon will
cover the image of the sun. That will not be the moon full of passion, under
which one day-dreams, one frolics, under which millions of naked bodies
revel in passion for the universe. It will be shadow which for a minute or
two will cover the source of its own beams.A sudden usurpation. Quite
normal but giving rise even in this day and age to fear in people lest it
should be eternal. A short-lived usurpation. Darkness and stars.Then
sunshine once again. Having pledged my vow I resembled a solar
eclipse.Not that I did not touch other women during our year-long
separation. Not that I wasn’t occasionally infatuated, even. They, however,
were overshadowed by Irina like a lunar shadow. According to all laws of
nature it was now time for that shadow to pass away and again wait for the
night in which it will shine. Will it do so, however? Hardly, so far as I am
concerned. I write this with pain because I still love the night but I also write
with joy because even more than the night I love the auras of the sunbeams
reflected on flowers, the cars in the opposite lane whose headlights are not
blinding me,the girls in pink, light-green, red, white, magenta, violet…
bikinis and sun tan, the auras around the antennae, the light radiating
through the doves’ wings, alighting on my terrace, the hues and canvases of
daylight, the hurried and the bored figures under my window, the daily
bustle scattered in numerous directions, happily as well as unhappily.
A life in which I am not alone with my suicidal love but am sharing
maybe the love of the world, as I’m making love to another girl.
It is perhaps symbolic that Rumi is a sunny girl. With copper-coloured
hair, changing hue under the changes in light. With her smile and with the
tiny playful suns in her eyes. Sparks of laughter, jealousy, anger, love. The
tender character. The words which are caressing like the rays of the sun. Her
summer touch. The small clouds before her which sometimes darken her
mood but not for long. The laughter, like that of thousands small and big
children on a fine summer day.She herself was a sun. Today I realize that in
a solar orgasm which you can feel in a pair of eyes, all the lunar ones can be
encompassed which you can experience with all the fibres of your body, if
you live to see that day… Now I realize I have long been in love with Rumi
but she had been still in the shadow of the moon and of my vow to wait for
Irina. We people are not for long. Nor are our passions. Sometimes it seems
to us we are eternal and can be forever.Sometimes it seems to us that a
single instant can hold eternity.Sometimes that single instant does indeed
hold an eternity.That eternity of our however passes.It has other dimensions
which we conveniently have called “paradise” and “hell”.
The laws of physics are immutable and one of them is that solar
eclipses don’t take long.Today Rumi and I are going to observe it.When
darkness falls we will make love. I know her ways. Tender, sensual.Kisses
like the kissing of icons. Yielding a body like yielding a soul. And at the
climax of lust – a whirl of calm silence around the bodies, raging in their
thrills.When at last daylight arrives. Oh, how I love that word “daylight”.
For the first time, without any clouds, without any usurping moons in
my heart, with all my soul, with all the fibres of my body, with all the
inspiration of my lips, free from all vows and compunction, free from the
chains of all old memories,from all marks of pervertness inherited from
before and with Irina, without any balloons and dolphins, without any
prophecies and fuming lakes, without hallucinations and lust for life, without
me hiding from anyone, as if before the whole world but in fact before her, I
will say with delight as I had not managed with Irina, what I never told her
throughout all those twelve months:
“I love you, I love you, sun of mine!”
And we will again caress and make love, this time in her milieu: “the
daylight”. And maybe at last my soul will come to resemble her hair.
Sparkling with joy, illumined by purity. After the catharsis, having
understood that it is loneliness, not love, which drives one into suicidal
love… It is twelve noon. It will start soon. The sunny girl is waiting for
me.We have our sunglasses ready. Our eyes are hungry for the rare natural
phenomenon.Our bodies, too, are hungry for each other. I still have time but
I am in a hurry.Then I pick up a sheet of paper and a ball-point pen and write
a verse to her. I write because I cannot order the seconds to pass more
quickly. I feel like a prisoner who has counted the years, months and days
and is now gripped by the worst form of impatience: to count now the
minutes to the opening of the heavy gates. When the poem is completed I
have very little time. Now it has overtaken me. I’ll have to drive as I know
best but it is not safe, all the more so as the driver himself is in such an
emotional state as mine. The dear, radiant Rumi of mine. She is a puppeteer
who left a small infant inside her for the sake of her profession or chose her
profession precisely to preserve the child.
Darling Rumi who loved children so much but was herself without
one and wanted it from me. From the man she loves and who sometimes
made her needlessly jealous… Soon the moon would settle in the sun’s lap.
In its attempt to usurp the sun it would draw the curtains on the room of the
heavens, and remain with the sun alone in it. She, small and fragile, yet
harbouring in her fragile body so much fury and passion and the sun –
selfless and lavish. It tore its own body even, in order to reveal greater
nakedness. They would look into each other’s eye, for a moment left alone
by the five billion eternal guests of theirs. The moon would bend on its knee
before the sun and bow to it, while it would drop under the disgraced lunar
body and make it tremble with passion with its kisses.
Rumi and I watch them through our sunglasses. I wonder why we
revere it so much only during its eclipse when in fact we owe our lives to it.
Because, maybe, we feel the primeval fear of maybe seeing it for the last
time. Or, rather, what we wish to see is not a brief usurpation but a love play
of celestial bodies from which we derive energy for that of our own. When
Rumi opened the door to me she was sunnier than ever. I perceived slight
trembling. That which cannot be perceived by anyone but the loved and the
loving one. We joined hands.
“You are terrific! You are unpredictable, my strong, blue-eyed boy.”
We kissed tenderly yet the kiss was hot probably like that of the moon
and the sun. I was on the verge of saying to her “The period of the vow, of
the damnation is past!” but I did not wish to darken her high spirits before
the eclipse as she was still probably jealous of Irina, given her sensibility.
“We can only be together now! A happy ending to a terrible fairy tale.
You cannot imagine how close I was to self destruction before I met you,
you simply cannot imagine how close…”
A thin half-moon cut across the sun’s crown…
We tumbled down into bed without taking off our sunglasses. There
was no need for us to see our bodies. They were away. The heavenly bodies
were now clutched in love and in battle now. I kissed the yellow-haired
moon while she, hidden behind her protective glasses, had undressed
unobserved. My hand caressed a sun beam. It groped from the breasts
downward.I covered her body with kisses. I did not wish to leave a spot on
her body untouched by my lips, just as the sun did not leave a spot
untouched by its beams on the body of its beloved partner; yet, at this
moment it was only kissing the foot just as I lingered with my lips on the
foot of my girl. Tiny kisses. Long kisses. With tongue, and without, on the
foot of my puppeteer. She was breathing heavily. I was aware that behind
the dark glasses she had her eyes half-closed in passion.
“It has never been like this… Never like this before, we are opening
our senses for complete yielding as if it is the last, as if dying of love,
overfilled..."”
“Every time is the first time!” I responded. “It’s always
the first, while today is a very special one. Much different from any other.”
“Go on, I like it, I like it, I like it….”
My arousal was like that of a solar protuberance before eruption. I
wanted to keep my lips glued to her foot. At the same time I feared lest I
should explode, more than anything I wanted to jump upon her and, blinded
by the dark glasses, to make love to her along with all womanhood and all
celestial spheres, yet I kept my lips there… Infernal flames spread from my
loins to my feet and chest, reaching the brain. Only my lips felt relief like
coolness, air and lightness. I made as though to ride her but the desire that
evrything should last longer curbed my action but not the fiery passion.
Temperature was rising. I was melting. I was turning into plasma.
Which was about to flow over everything and I went on kissing the lunar
foot of the sunny woman. Just then came relief. The fire erupted out of my
lips. My body went limp like after a most complete intercourse. It was
enveloped by pleasant breeze and enchantment like on an anesthetic. The
moon had covered a third of the sun. I kept kissing her thighs long, long,long
and having mastered the skill of delight stemming from the patience of
celestial bodies, I no longer burnt in flames but blossomed in the aroma of
love’s beauty, awaiting reciprocity for more than half a century and the
rendezous lasted a mere few hours.
Patient delight wrapped in impatient bodies. Heavenly infinity in
human love. It was getting dark and I fear was taking hold of me. I cannot
account for the cause of that fear in the instant of supreme delight.
“What’s the matter with you?” Rumi perceived and took off my
glasses, she had taken off hers as well and I noticed the alarm in her pupils. I
cannot say how she had become aware of my fear. Probably at that moment
she had acquired the same hypersensitivity as mine. It was dusk. There was
something scaring in the dusk. The nightmare had gone.Maybe the most
passionate, most beautiful, yet also infernal nightmare had ended. The vow
had expired and in front of me was she, the sunny one. But the lunar eclipse
was at its apogee. The same lunar eclipse which was love between the moon
and the sun and between me and Rumi. The same lunar eclipse which was
also a symbol of my vow to wait for the return of the Priestess of the Lunar
Orgasm… I kissed Rumi. Then I pounced upon her. We tumbled down on
the floor next to the bed. She gave out a laugh, passionate and wild.
“Love me, Papa Jan! Love me! That’s right, give me more, and more
and more! I feel you terriffically! That’s right…”
And I made love to her. Passionately, furiously but not savagely. The
way a man loves a woman, whom you are afraid to break with your onset of
emotion. Artistically, the way one loves an actress. Beautifully, the way you
paint on canvas. Long, until oblivion and I forgot. The dusk deepened. I
knew that by now the lunar shadow stood before the sun. Countless
sunglasses must have been peeing into that sight, not suspecting it was me
and Rumi. Behind countless sunglasses people concealed from themselves
the fact it was them. The dusk deepened more and more. I felt lightness
coming over me. For the first time in many years – lightness and freedom.
Freed from the murderous love in the embrace of the angelic one.
“Everything bad is over, darling!” I whispered to Rumi. “Everything
belongs to the past now!”
“I do want to believe that, my beloved! There stood something
between us. As between our eyes and the light…”
“That is passed! The nightmare is passed! It was beautiful, damn it!
She is gone to sleep now, the infernal voluptuary! And she is in the heart!
Not mine alone! In the heart of the world in general, which is a statue of all
beating hearts stuck together. Mine is now unstuck!”
“Mine has long been unstuck!”
“I know, dear! Now I can lie next to you!”
“And we’ll have a child!”
“Who will be a great friend of yours and will enjoy your games with
the puppets!”
“O, yes! I’ll be its best friend! A better one than any in the
neighbourhood and will play with it in the best way.”
“Apart from me!”
“O, no! I will play better!”
We laughed and embraced. Then we put on our sunglasses again and
peered at the sun, now almost entirely vanished, leaving behind only a
sharp-edged, terrifying crescent, resembling the scythe of death. We
embraced and made love on the very window sill. It was twilight anyway
and everyone at that moment were surely looking at the sky. I was making
love, pouring out in space and was free. My energy was pouring out, my
reason was pouring out, as was my damnation; overfilled with tenderness I
was intoxicated with love’s tenderness. Liberated, at last!
Wounded!
Before that, seduced!
A lift!
Rain!
Exhibition and foolery! Wild love!
Opposite lane and lips, burning me to death!
Karmic duty or simply a curse!
Balloons, dolphins and survival with an uneasy aftermath!
Prophecies about great successes but not happiness!
What are great successes without happiness?
Having nobody to share it with!
A little child who will grow to be a man or a woman shared in mutual
love is something greater than all worldly achievements, than all lunar
orgasms and solar eclipses!
All is passed!
The most bewitching woman! The devil of a woman was far from me
and at last had freed my heart after having doomed it to captivity for one
hundred years. Yes, that single year was, in the true metaphysical meaning
of the word, in fact a hundred, filled with horror and expectation.
Expectation of my executioner, my beloved. My gravedigger who desecrated
my grave and under the grapes kissed the rotting lips to rob me of my last
wish to feed the worms, after having deprived me of the opportunity to feed
my passions. The passions of the purest love I cherished for her at the
beginning… All is passed>
An actress!
A sunny creature!
A child!
A woman!
I was being kissed in the twilight of the passing magic. Within
minutes we were to take off our sunglasses and then I would see her face
fresher and more beauitful than ever. We were kissing tenderly. Our bodies
slid as if covered in oil. They yielded one to the other and overflowed with
love inside each other, dissolving the cells into new cells after which we
were not to be the same and each one of us was to carry a portion of the
other and even alone we would make love to each other. It was cellular
sex.The cells dissolved, merged, split and generated new ones. We were our
own parents and our own children. We had passed the climax but kept on
kissing.Then she bit me and took off my glasses. I was frigid in the
unbearably hot day.In the twilight before me stood Irina.Demoniacal. Still
beautiful but with enormous canine teeth and fiery-red eyes.Her high
forhead had shrunk and wrinkled deeply. Her mouth was convulsed in a
sardonic grimace.
“Well, my dear! she said to me. “You think all is passed! You think
you can hide from me in the eclipse of the sun and the dark glasses…O, how
tenderly you used to kiss me. How sillily and naively…”
She made a sinister pause.
“I never believed there can be silly and naïve kisses!”
“Every woman chooses her kisses,” I replied with a trembling voice.
“I like sunglasses. That way you can hide from the glance of the one you are
making love to, passing for another in their fantasy…”
“Who are you?”
“How so? Didn’t you recognize me? I am your love!A pretty one am
I. I was not like that at the exhibition in Varna! Nor by Balchik. We perhaps
was like that near Balchik. But not in Sinemorets. Do you remember the
painting with the jokers? You sure do. And in the lake near Rupite? In the
snows on Mount Vitosha when we wanted to leave our imprints in the snow
like those of American president in the rock. Oddly enough, you wished to
make love to me in the four constructive elements but the one thing you
didn’t dare do is make love to me on the earth. Perhaps you are more fearful
than in love with me…”
“You didn’t want to, you fled.”
“O, my dear Jan! Nothing was impossible for you! You could easily
have caught up with me.”
She laughed like never before. Not like a woman but like a demon.
“I wasn’t like that at the Wonderful Bridges, either. Nor was I like
that on the bough of that tree and when it broke and I began to wail for my
torn dress, you replied it was nothing because your testicles very near were
smashed against the tree. Nor was I like that in the fitness hall where we
pretended to be muscly sex maniacs with wooden heads. When we let snails
creep on our bodies, smeared with paint and then lay on the canvases. I must
admit the thing with the snails gave much pleasure, though it was somewhat
perverted. And on horseback? And under the waterfall? When we shot those
erotic photos?”
I stopped my ears. The pictures danced one after the other, one after
the other…I wanted to make love to her. Just as she was at that moment. A
devilish creature. I wanted to enjoy the final thrills we could share and
descend into hell.She scratched my chest with her long animal nails. I did
not feel pain, it was a pleasant thrill, but the streaks of blood terrified me.
The she knelt before me. From her mouth protrude a long iguana-like tongue
which slid on my wounds. I nearly fainted with delight.
“Stop it” I managed to utter with clenched teeth. “Stop it…”
I could not say that again when the tongue twined around my penis
and started massaging it. I fainted. I floated in outer space which smelled of
anise-flavoured brandy, a comet looked to me like an axis line and I darted
alonside it.
I pushed Irina away. It was dark.
“I love Rumi! The nightmare is ended and I love Rumi!”
“What’s the matter?” heard I Rumi’s worried voice. I was not seeing
her. Then she took away the protective sunglasses from my eyes and I saw
her radiant face.
“What happened?”
“We made love and then you dozed off for a while it seems!” Rumi’s
face was still somewhat worried. The solar eclipse had ended and the sun
was shining, happy and beautiful like a pure, innocent love. Soon trouble
vanished from the face of my beloved and the sun again shone on it.
11.
While most of us were somehow dissatisfied with cheated hearts on
the evning after the solar eclipse I felt heavenly.
As ever, when one expects much they receive little but I had beaten
off the demon. I never knew I had been in love with a demon. Then, was I
not demoniac myself. I was taking a turn in the car in the direction of the
neighbourhood where I lived when a familiar but different touch upon my
thigh startled me so much I nearly crashed. It was beside me! The demon!
Irina! Her canine teeth were not in evidence and she was smiling most
charmingly. She placed her foot in my lap. Sweat broke out on my forehead
but I kept cool. lmost calmly, I asked:
“What do you want of me?”
“The truth Jan! The truth that you can’t do without me! You ought to
be dead. Not physically, of course yet not alive either!”
“I’ll survive somehow! The vow has expired!”
“Not the memory, though!At the time, in your hallucinations, you saw
salvation once, before the dolphins came. Do you know how it happened?
They had sent you a message they’ll arrive.They had told you to hold fast
and soon they would help you. Not everybody would have perceived it but
let me tell you now that I saw salvation before we were saved. We two are
unusual. We are superhuman and so is our love. We are the last surviving
ancient divinities… What can an earthly woman give you?”
I felt hot and cold by turns before I resolutely opened the door at her
side and pushed her out.
“Go to sleep, you infernal voluptuary!”
I was still termbling when I pulled up outside the block of flats where
I lived… I couldn’t summon up the courage to enter my home. I was afraid
of seeing her face on the canvases I had painted her. I went back into my car
and made for the nearest fitness centre.
“You are seeing ghosts. Your relationship with her has drained all the
strength out of you. She is damned like many of her sex but she isn’t a
demon.
The demon is in your head, Papa Jan! bit of exercise will do you
good. It cures everything. Lust, stress and paranoia…”
At the machine I stood but couldn’t move. Memory was stirred when I
dozed off next to Rumi and Irina appeared to me as demon for the first time.
It reminded me of something that had happened in another fitness centre, a
personal one. It belonged to friend of mine who had invited us to visit. Irina
was dying of happiness as she imagined how were to spend the time and
indeed she had a reason to do so.
Fitness centres, the well-equipped especially, are temples of bodily pleasure.
And if the exercises for fitness are mixed with erotic ones, the pleasure is
beyond description.
Both of us first stepped into the sauna. There we found a girl but not
heeding her we started caressing each other on our erogenous zones. Under a
temperature of over a hundred, everything is different. Perhaps it is
dangerous for people with weak hearts and for those with completely healthy
hearts but the pleasure is worth the risk. It’s like being high on narcotics.
The body is doing the thinking and drunken, the thought roams somewhere
far away. Your body parts perform their usual functions beter than ever but
with a subdued sensibility as though you are slightly drunk. You feel nearly
ecstatic.
I took Irina by the leg and turned her upside down. I penetrated her
anus and she screamed…
“It aches… But it does me good… It’s repulsive but is delightful…”
I had barely made two thrusts only when she began to sound as if she
had had a long sex session with me.
The girl was apparently unimpressed by the sight. The visible melted
in the sweat which blinded me. Everything became different. I was
swimming in an unknown direction and my body was bursting and emptying
all over.
I was again in the municipal swimming pool in Assenovgrad where I
had staged my first underwater exhibition.I swam and peered at my pictures.
Swimming and peering at my pictures were all who managed to turned up
for the show.Under water the pictures looked different. The diffracted
sunlight made them look mysterious like exotic creatures on the ocean
bottom. As if the were themselves made of water. They were reefs, they
were lost pirated treasures and lived a life of their own. The light playing
upon them turned them into petite nymphs who were making love to their
viewers.It was all magical. Like sweat in your eyes druing lovemaking in a
sauna.
I overturned Irina and rode upon her like a horse. I was overexcited to
the limit and my heart was threatening to come out of my nostrils and it did
indeed come out. I saw it moulded out of steam like an alien creature
looking at us. Then Irina'’ heart also sprung out, this time out of her lips. The
two hearts collided in midair. They turned into transparent ghostly
semblances of ourselves who were performing the sex act just like us. We
two left without hearts, feeling no strain, turned into horses in human bodies.
Horses? Nay, satyrs, raging satyrs! Lovemaking resembling a fight. A
downpour of rain. Interlocking lightnings, locked into the total group sex of
the tornado, earth, wind and fire and living creatures.
The temperature in the sauna was rising not from the machine outside
but from our bodies… We rushed out of the sauna and into the snow.We
wallowed in it; it melted under us with a hissing sound and we went on
making love in the pools and the steam.
`
We went back into the sauna and came out onto the snow once
again.
“Now, something special!” I said to her. We went back to the fitness
hall. I reclined back and made her sit down on me. Further on she knew
what to do.
She half-closed her eyes and rode me. In her imagination she was
probably being the knight-errant of her dreams, galloping in the night
towards a fresh exploit, the desire for battle giving him pleasure as orgasm
did to a woman…Then she started lifting the bar and I sat down at the end
of the apparatus and began kissing her knees. She gave a nervous laugh but
went on lifting the bar. When I reached her crotch, even before I had reached
the life-giving wellspring, she began doing the exercise with peculiar hissing
sounds much more intensively till at last she gave in: she placed the bar on
the stand, grabbed tightly at my ears and pulling my face towards her
breasts,she gave me to understand what she wanted. I showered kisses on
her breasts. She locked my waist with her legs and lay down for another
series of exercises with the bar. I again penetrated her from behind. There
was no need for me to move.While performing the exercise, she lightly slid
her body along the board, wet with sweat. When she put back the bar in its
place I lifted her in my arms and took her to the swimming pool. Without
letting her go, I jumped into it. I had the feeling I was going to see my
pictures arranged there. I had an experience similar to the one back then.
“The first underwater exhibition in the world… Irina and I are doing it
that way for the first time… With her it’s always the first time… I simply
can’t say where does all our for love and art come from… These things seem
to fused together.”
The water was warm but part of me was still out on the snow.The
snow, melting under our bodies.
“It’s only in the snow we have not staged an exhibition!” I thought
and remembered the pictures on which we faced the four corners of the
world and which we buried at four secret sites famous throughout the world
with their mysteriously radiated bio-energy so that they are likely to be
found after hundreds of years. Maybe after more years but they would
certainly be found so that I can be heard the confession can be heard of the
messages encoded in them. Before I decided to stage that exhibition of sorts
for the future Irina and I pondered for hours whether we would some day
make love on the earth. I told her then that even if we don’t, our day-dream
of doing will remain. She asked me in what way and I couldn’t say but I
devised a plan later on. I had indeed staged exhibitions in water, air, fire, and
by then on earth which for me meant underground. Of course, I took care
that the pictures would be well protected from rodents and from rot.
I wonder why I kept thinking that just when Irina and I were
ecstatically chasing each other about the swimming pool. Perhaps because
happiness in excess leads to sadness.We can’t stay forever in this swimming
pool and this fitness centre but on earth which means underground and we
would perhaps not be making love. When she kissed me the odd and sinister
idea occurred to me of dipping her head underwater.I did not respond to her
kisses. I was shocked at my ideas.Exhibition in water, air, fire and
underground. Love in water, air, fire and… again in water. Love transcends
death.
“My dear boy!” resounded her memorable words from our adventure
near Balchik. “I have perceived a sensation stronger than self-destruction.
Survival!”
I took her by the hair. Dipped her head underwater. I bent my face
down to the water surface where our lips met and then let her go. She
performed the same dexterous motion as she had done at the time. She
writhed like a fish and her head was between my legs. It was and at the same
time was not like it was back then. This time we were near the bottom. The
abyss threatened us. It threatened us yet she was not aware how much. The
abyss was in me…
“Let’s go out!” I said to her.
“Why? It’s so pleasant here!”
“We haven’t finished our exercises.”
“Exercises in Kama-fitness, do you mean?”
I laughed. Sincerely. The evil demons had left me. This cheerful sexy
joke dispelled them.
“This belly must come down a bit,” she said cheerfully, pointing at the
“Roman chair”.
It had to come down not “a bit” but “a bit more”. It never occurred to
me that she had again decided to add to the exercise. I started doing pushups while she slid under the Roman chair with her body in the direction
opposite to mine. Her lips established playful contact with the backside of
my thighs, the testicles and base of my prick. While I was pushing
backwards my back fell in her open thighs and she gave out frantic sounds
of delight. It was as if my bald head was the biggest male organ to touch her
vagina, yet it couldn’t enter it because of its size but the pleasure of being
touched by such an enormity was rapturous. I did many more push-ups than
I am normally capable of and in the end my back was as wet as if having
been in the rain but that was neither sweat nor the water from the swimming
pool that hadn’t yet dried up.
We went on to the rowing simulator. While she rowed she was sliding
towards me and for an instant we were joined and in the next movement
separated: again and again and again… The breast-opening exercise is
performed with the body slightly inclined. I stood before her and our game
now was that of a body-building instructor and a female lover of strong
bodies. For that purpose Irina used a short skirt she had found in the locker
room. Then she bent down and uncovered her “kitten”.
“You don’t do it like that,” I instructed her. “The load should be here”
and I placed my hand on her breasts. “You should bend more at this point,”
and my hand caressed her waist. “You bottom should be further off… That’s
right.”
I went on with my instructions till the moment we had no need to play
any more. Irina’s groans “O, Jan… O, Jan… O, Jan…” resounded in the
hall. When we had exercised our muscles enough I popped out to the car and
brought back the five boxes of champagne bottles which I had got ready for
the occasion. We bathed in them and laughed. We washed the apparatuses as
if performing a special religious ritual. We poured several bottles into the
swimming pool as well and it occurred to me some day to stage an
exhibition in a pool of champagne. “The Cheerful Suicides Exhibition”,
“The Beauty of Depraved Existence”, “Visions in Free Fall”
The last mouthfuls of champagne I poured into her vagina and we
drank them up together. In the car she kept caressing my head and repeated
that she loved doing that because my head resembled a “huge phallus”…
Within hours she would speak quite differently. Going on about existence,
consciousness, the Divine Body, the categories of the spirit, existence in
itself and out, the monads and the transcendental projections. At the
moment, she whispered how much she liked caressing my head which
looked like a phallus to her… Yes! She did not suspect what had occurred
to me even if momentarily back in the swimming pool. Was it me, at that
time? Was it me? Was it me afterwards? With her it was always different
but who of us two was different every time. Wasn’t she? And then was I the
only one she made love to or was she doing it every time with a different
person with my body.
Each time I touched her angelic face was the first. Each day after
parting from her seemed the first on which I suffered torments for this
earthly yet also heavenly creature. And so, till today, the day of the latest
solar eclipse on which she appeared in a demoniacal image… My vow
ended but not the memory of her. Everything continued to connect me with
her. Even the bloody fitness centre where I tried to hide…
“What is it, Papa Jan?” the beautiful lady instructor interrupted me.
“For half an hour now you have been lying on the apparatus without
touching anything?”
“Help me to fix the weights.”
We fixed six twenty kilogram pieces on each end of the bar.
“You must be kidding! The whole weight amounts to two hundred
and forty kilograms…”
“Let’s make it three hundred, what?”
“Boys, come here! There is a guy who must have decided to kill
himself or is getting ready for encountering Hulg Hoggan! At least two of
you will have to stand behind the apparatus… Are you sure you want to do
it. You are strong but not that much.”
“Please, let no one stand behind the apparatus!”
“You’ll be crushed to death!”
“Let us place ten kilograms more on each end” said I in a voice
brooking no objection.
“As you like but I’ll stand by the telephone to call First Aid,” said the
lady instructor.
“I bet he’ll push them,” said one body-builder.
“O, yes!” intejected the lady instructor and murmured: “And they say
solar eclipses are harmless!”
I lifted the bar from the support. Heavy as my life, it pressed against
my body but I didn’t allow it to crash my chest! My muscles were strong
enough to preotect me but not sufficiently so as to push away the support
near the the saving support of the normal people. Those who don’t think it
necessary to lift it from it. The ceiling of the hall was dissolved into a
multitude of colours. The colours took the shapes of paintings and the bar
was pressing against me as it oppressed me throughout my life…
“Papa Jan, you are impersonating a Russian man but you are not! You
don’t know what Russian roulette. It is not simply a gamble but a whole
philosophy –“ saw I among the pictures Vitya’s face, a former bodyguard of
mine whom I loved dearly and who betrayed me.*
Vitya’s face was fused on the façade of the Bulgarian Parliament
outside of which I set fire some pictures of mine in protest against the
indifference of the MPs to the fate of their children. I had staged a charity
exhibition for the orphans of lady MPs who had died in accidents. I staged
one of my exhibitions in fire. I destroyed them for the sake of a man who did
not wish to understand them but in fact I only transformed them with fire. I
turned the images on them into fiery ones and Irina is to blame for that as
she transformed the pictures I had painted on canvas into fiery longings.
Longing at first for the woman I could not possess and then for the one I
could not keep in check…
My jaw bones were being crushed under the pressure. I would not
allow the weights to crush me.I would not permit anyone to help me…
Three vicious dogs were gnawing at the corpse of the cow in whose
womb I wished to return as an embryo… Was I still there? Were those
indeed memories of things I had experienced before hiding inside the cow
and wait for the dogs… The dogs became those of the picture on which I had
painted the Titanic. Man-eating dogs among the waves tearing to pieces
shipwreck survivors and next to the sinking liner there rises Mount
Rushmore – the granite Pantheon of the American Presidents Abraham
Lincoln, George Washington Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, to
which I would add Bill Clinton…
And a naked Lenin, deep in thought, sitting on a rock, and pondering
the revolution. Above all those rulers of the world stands the goddess of
victory, Nike, and thousands male and female bodies fertilizing in countless
shapes and sizes, conceived, living and burnt out from humanity’s unreason.
*The Russian roulette adventure is described in detail in the book The Papa
Jan Gallery vol. one: “A Shop for Airy Towers”. The event of the burning of
the pictures outside Parliament - in the book The Papa Jan Gallery, vol. 3
“Daylight”.
** American presidents. America! Where my love fled to leave me with the
demon. Goodson Boreglum has chiseled upon Mount Rushmore the images
of the great presidents. As to us, let us imprint ours on the snow of Mount
Vitosha. Imprints. Desiring to be of granite but turning out to be of snow and
melting with the change of seasons… Grand passion! A megalomaniac
passion of the Titanic which sank… Vicious dogs! All prophecies had been
fulfilled! All of them!
In the foreground the writhing body of the dancing Ismael Ivo,
performing the Phoenix dance. Bodies symbolizing life, symbolizing
death!In the bottom left-hand corner I painted the portrait of my teacher
Salvador Dali, standing before an easel, observing the subject of this picture,
delighted and insane.
The painting became smeared. The bar was lifted half way. I saw
myself and Irina wallowing in the snow, naked, happy, in love. We lay down
in two large snow-drifts. We wanted to leave our imprints just like those of
the great American presidents. Just then I visualized the look of the painting
depicting the sinking ship. It was a symbol of the sinking 20th century but I
could not imagine that in fact that picture was a prophecy of our sinking
love… The bar with the weights was almost lifted up when I saw the hollow
eyes in which flame raged. The canine teeth… Irina’s wrinkled brow. She
pressed the bar towards my chest…
Well, dear, it seems time you racalled that hall.The other one! When
you pressed the bar just when we felt so good… It’s not always that I am so
perverted but can, on occasion. Just as I can be everybody and
everything…”
My hands succumbed to her pressure.
“No, you won’t crush me!” I angrily pursed my lips fighting her, and
raised the bar several centimetres further up.The evil dogs had by now
picked the cow clean and were biting me. But wasn’t that in the past? And
how did I manage to survive that time?
Irina pressed the bar with all her strength – the bar of my life –
towards my chest.
“It will crush you,” she giggled.
Before my eyes again appeared the picture I had painted of the
Titanic… The most apocalyptic painting in my life rose, floated and danced
as it were alive…
And we had been so very happy in the snow!
“Let’s take off our jackets, Jan!”
“You are mad, as usual!” A strong wind was blowing and it wasn’t the
beginning when we decided to stage an exhibition on “The Snow Princess
and the Seven hundred and Seventy-Seven Dwarfs and all Penguins and
Walruses Who had taken their Sunglasses with and Have Gone Holidaying”.
It could start snowing any minute now and we could ramain forever lost on
some of the peaks of Mount Vitosha and fall asleep peacefully locked in an
embrace. I almost never gave a thought to that till she told me she wanted us
to take our clothes off. I never thought of that because I was doing
something I had not done till then: an exhibition in the snow. How would
my pictures look against the background of an ice age or among the
Eskimos. Well, there it’s a question of ice, not snow, and moreover the smog
above Sofia cannot be seen, but a little imagination goes a long way.
Exhibitions in all the elements but not in all physical conditions.Yes, that’s
what had escaped me and I was thankful to Irina for her idea that we should
go to some of the Vitosha peaks and stage an exhibition attended by the gods
of Olympus. With the help of imagination Vitosha, too, can become an
Olympus. As the gods were in session or were occupied by other important
business, they did not come to the charity exhibition just like the others who
had been invited like the Snow Maiden and the seven hundred and seventyseven dwarfs, so we decided that we ourselves should be Olympian gods
who, divine as they were, were not averse to human entertainment.
We threw snowballs at each other. We buried our hands in the snow
and kept them there till they became insensitive with cold and then we
shoved then into our bosoms to warm them up.
Like a divine amorous couple at the exhibition we viewed, as though
for the first time,the paintings and indulged in lengthy verbal analyses of the
terrestrial human being with divine descent called Papa Jan. I was happy
about my exhibition. It was a genuine artistic endeavour attended by a lot of
people. Then I wondered whether the Olympians had attended, after all.
After all, it was a question of gods who sometimes appeared in the guise of
humans. But when Irina suggested we take off our jackets, I felt the cold.
The real cold, with an admixture of terror. “You are as mad as ever! The
weather is turning foul!We ought to put the paintings away.”
She put her face closer to mine. She smiled and kissed me. “What did
you say?” she asked innocently. I had lost will power. That was the most
sinister sign when one is amidst snow. I felt my legs wobble, my hands – as
if those of someone else and my tongue was tied. “Come on, Jan! We are
Olympian gods and they do not wear jackets.”
I failed to say anything and she unzipped my jacket. Pulling it off, she
threw it over one of the pictures. Then she unzipped my trousers and went
on her knees in front of me. I had a broad panoramic view of Sofia. A
myriad lights flickered and we were above them.High above everyone else.
My chest was overfilled with the pure air I had inhaled deeply and which,
who knows why, I did not want to exhale.When I after all did so, I felt
warm. Very warm. With the air in my lungs I lost all precaution in order to
become happy. I started undressing rapidly and some of my clothes were
torn at places. I grabbed Irina by the elbows and, lifting her from the ground,
I put my face closer to hers.
“Tell me you will be forever mine! Tell me!”
There was fear and delight and a challenge in her look.
“Tell me you will eternally be mine!| Do tell me! It is simple! Only
say: ‘I’ll forever be yours, Papa Jan’… Or ‘Janino’… Or say simply you’ll
be mine. In front of these paintings which we have arranged here. And
which for us have the sanctity of icons…”
“Oh, please, you are causing me pain! You know that part of me is
yours. You have the lover’s fulfilled dream, so far as that dream concerns
the possession of the loved one and so far as it is possible for one to possess
another!”
“None of your philosophical mumbo-jumbo!… Say it simply…”
I could not refrain myself. We fell down in the snow. She was
laughing. My hands went into her bosom which was ablaze at that moment.
Because of the cold outside her and the passions which raged inside her.
Gently and carefully, taking care not to tear some piece of her clothing, I
opened her and started kissing her breasts while she writhed gently and
passionately, gasping for breath. In the same slow manner I proceeded to
unbutton and take off her shirt under her jacket. My lips slid from one breast
to the other; downwards, towards her belly and back again upwards towards
her breasts. She unbuttoned her trousers and took off her shoes. Her bare feet
sank up to her ankles in the snow. She stepped back, trying standing to pull
off her trousers and started kissing her footprints in the snow. They melted
from my kisses and Irina groaned as if it were her feet that were melting and
not her footprints. When I looked up she was naked. Her pelvic hair was
covered with snowflakes as if with little starlets. I touched them with my lips
and they melted, leaving a pleasant taste. This time she took my by the
armpits and stood me up. I was long kissing her passionate breasts before
we stuck our lips together. Then we made love in the snow. Large
snowflakes had started to fall.then we chased each other and the snowfall
was constantly growing heavier and heavier. I now forget which one of us
thought of us lying down in the snow naked and leaving the imprints of our
bodies. It was not the alleyway of imprints in Hollywood nor the rocky
pantheon of the great American presidents but for us our imprints had the
same value.
We had already dressed up when the snowfall ceased and Sofia,
enveloped in sad smog resembled the sinking Titanic to me.
I kept thinking: “It sinks in smog, it has collided with the iceberg of
its utmost opportunity, it is inhbited by people drowning like rats and people
hungry like dogs and like dogs ready to eat up one another if that were
possible. “But the whole world is like that, damn it, the whole world! While
we were ecstatically fleeing up the snowbound mountain of insanity and
perhaps of grandeur, not having the courage of Zarathustra to descend. And
even if we did, what would we preach? Even if could preach, would anyone
hear?”
Such were my thoughts and it seemed to me I was seeing all of that in
the picture which I was later to paint. My thoughts were tinged with anxiety.
Not only the city but we ourselves, too, were sinking. And it was precisely
because of that, that we longed for self-destruction. We were romantics and
wanted to die with pure lungs, capable of cherishing love, and not clogged
with the jelly of values smeared by a mixture of blood, sperm, sweat and
tears…
Irina was pressing the weight-bar and winning. The heavy load was
almost fifteen centimetres away from my chest this time. A couple of bodybuilders stood by, ready to lift the weight should I let it fall upon me. I
screamed at them:
“Leave me alone! She is mine!” and the next thing I saw was the
weight-bar fixed quietly on the lever.The coach and the body-builders kept
staring at me in fear and amazement. Finally the fellow who had betted on
me clapped his hands which changed the general mood. Irina was looking
superciliously at me.
“You think you defeated me?”
“You should have done me a blow job if you thought to kill me in that
manner.”
As I was the only one seeing Irina, the coach thought I meant her and
instantaneously came up with the answer:
“If I had done you a blow job I would have killed you anyway!”
The boys laughed like imbeciles.
“You just wait! I have dealt with prouder insolent hens than you in my
time! One of them had just vanished into thin air!”
12
I knew it! I knew she would be waiting for me at my home. In spite of
that I could not but go home. Even if I had not done it and had forgotten the
way to my refuge, I could not have fled from my fate. It would have kept on
chasing after me. Demoniacal and and unrelenting. Beautiful and calling up
cherished memories. Insane and outfitted in an armour of philosophical
concepts, stronger and securer than those of a medieval knight as she saw
herself in her day-dreams. The other’s soul could not penetrate them. She
opened them up merely to get in touch with the shade left by the image of
her lover. That was the projection, formatted by her occasionally strange but
otherwise quite natural desires. The telephone was ringing. I supposed it was
Rumi but could not lift the receiver.Irina had put her hand on it and was
growling at me. A beast’s snarl was coming out of her breasts. A second row
of teeth had cut in her mouth. Triangular and sharp. Gilded hairs had started
covering her face. She was taller and leaner than before. It may sound absurd
but to me she looked even more sexy in the guise of a beast. She frightened
me though.
“My god, Irina, what has happened to you?”
The telephone kept ringing.
“Do you imagine you lover her after you have had me?”
“I don’t imagine; I simply love her.”
“You are a large-hearted man, Papa Jan. Hence, your problems. You
very well knew who I was when you allowed yourself to fall in love with
me. Irina?! Oh, no! You were aware I was the fatal woman in your life. The
stuff of which erotic dreams are made. The profligacy of the soul. The
inspiration. The meaning of your
mÐù½0
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½0(ü½08ü½0Pü½0hüaterial existence. Your narcotic. The book between the
lines of which you can order your scattered existence. Your “wonder
bridges” to the world you aspire to reach are the pictures and your aesthetic.
The negation of your vulgar masturbation with other women.Your avoidance
of group sex wh number because she does not have her abstract nature, yet
she has an abstract quality of her own, more abstract than anything else; who
is countless logics, each of which is more logical than logic itself. That
which you keep trying to find as long as you live but which does not meet
your expectations. Love is an annihilation, dear! And you felt it when you
met me. One final desire remains after sexual orgasm and that is the wish to
commit suicide. In the case of ideal love the man and the woman are the two
opposing poles of matter.Ideal love, full orgasm amounts to annihilation.
Utter self-destruction…”
“You are fantasizing!” I calmly said. “Moreover, now I quite
understand that our love has not been perfect. Perhaps such love does not
exist. At the time you declined to have a child by me…”
Irina giggled with such contempt that I felt an urge to slap her face.
“It was yourself who said so then… Survival is a greater delight than
dying…”
“Poor you…” I again felt an urge to slap her. “You are mixing up
your memories with hallucinations…”
“It was yourself who said,” I interrupted her, “that when a period of
our life ends our memories of it are such as we would wish them to be and
do not tally with objective truth…”
“The meaning of historical knowledge… But why speak of it? It is so,
with us, romanticists. We remember the knights and the moon when we are
drowning making love but do not think of the lack of air in our lungs…”
“The bit about drowning I understand but what about the knights?”
I remembered again. I unlocked one more door in my memory.
We bought horses. Irina frequently confided in me that her wish was
to have been born a medieval knight. That was a crazy wish of hers she had
to cope with, so I was keen to prove to her day-dreams were not superfluous.
As I had made quite a lot of money selling two paintings in which I had
depicted The Last Supper in two different ways, I decided to buy two horses
for a single Last Night. The stallion and the mare I had bought were young
and rather ungovernable.
Armour, though, would be difficult to find. I have applied artist
friends but we did not have much time, or…
“We have armour,” Irina said, pointing at her temple. “They are here
and you are the angel of knights…”
“O, come! That’s a bit too much.”
Italy, 1498. The eighteen-year-old knight Irinio, a clandestine
adherent to the Rozenkreutzers, an adept at alchemy, had discovered at last,
after prolonged experiments, a formula for the dissolution of everything into
everything else. His discovery could overturn the world but the daring youth
felt fearful for the first time in his life. He feared not the Inquisition but
rather those who were his brethren till then. There are occasions when a
youth suddenly becomes a man. It takes a second, a chance event, when all
at once his eyes see a different world, his brain starts measuring time
differently and even his heart beats with a new rhythm. Suddenly mature, the
young man realizes clearly that his erstwhile friends are actually enemies.
He realizes he has been drawing his sword at an imaginary foe who could
have been his ally and his daring deed had only brought God’s anger upon
him, determining his own death by the sword. In Irinio’s case that moment
came as soon as he realized the historic significance what was in the testtube in his hand. He had to flee from those with whom till the day before he
had been bound by oath which meant more than life and death to him, till he
became aware of the totality of his discovery…
He sped away without a clear direction. Had he made a rational choice
his whereabouts would have been discovered. Young and predictable, he
decided to act unpredictably. He acted wisely by not taking a rational step.
He thought so as he was speeding on but a chance glance backwards set at
nought all his illusions. He recognized the stout figure of Papa Jan. The
mystifier whohad apparently come from nowhere to their brotherhood and of
whom nobody knew anything apart from him being well versed in arcane
skills, unattainable even by the cleverst practitioners. His origin was
shrouded in secrecy. His real name nobody knew. He was supposed to be a
Russian duke. Two things were clear, though. First, that he would have been
the greatest painter of the day if he had not the habit of setting his picture
ablaze.Second, he was very, very dangerous… He was approaching. A duel
between the two meant sure death for the youth. Communicating his
discovery would spell global dictatorship, much more strict than that
enjoyed by the Inquisition. In despair, the youth spurred on his horse
frantically. Yet, the mysterious Papa Jan seemed to be riding not a horse but
a dragon…
“Stop, Irinio!” he heard his voice. “Please, trust me. I want to help
you. You are in mortal danger…”
“Go to hell, you infernal creature! Think furiously, think, Irinio!”
The young man ceased spurring his horse and gave a light pull to the
reins. His hand slipped under the saddle and caught hold of the potion which
he had obtained from the magical formula. He did not know how it will act
but had no choice. He had to take a risk if he wanted to save himself. He had
to spray his pursuer with the potion. He had no idea what effect it would
have upon him. The only thing he knew was that Papa Jan would cease
existinging as he was. When the mysterious chaser got nearer Irinio
managed to accomplish only half of what he wanted to. With a deft
movement he sprayed his foe’s face with the potion. However, he was
frightened as he had never been which prevented him from thinking of
everything. This time he missed performing a simple act. The wind! A part
of the potion splashed on him, too.
“I’m dead!” he thought instantly but then he realized that he had
scored a victory at a much greater cost which involved a greater humiliation
than death. He was galloping through a tunnel. His armour fell apart. His
breast was getting bigger. His hair was growing. His skin was getting more
tender and he felt an unfamiliar, very pleasurable thrill. He despised it yet he
could not resist it. Irinio was being transformed into a woman. His memories
was dissolving into hers. She was born approximately five centuries later
than him and like him she looked for a formula of universal dissolution but
could not discover it. Moreover, she, too, was pursued by the invincible
mystifier, or rather by her own feelings towards him.
“I’ll destroy you, chaser!” she screamed.
I caught up with her. With her behind lifted high, she shouted at the
stallion to go faster but apparently the horse did not intend to race ahead and
I soon came abreast with her. I jumped from my horse onto hers. She
slumped into my lap, jockey fashion. I felt like a wild stallion. Somehow I
managed to grab the reins which had slipped from her hands. The horse rose
up upon his hind legs and I simply couldn’t tell how we managed to stay on
it. When it slowed down to a trot, she turned to me.
We made love on horseback. Our sweat mingled with its own. Its
mane was intertwined with her hair. Our groans of pleasure were in counterpoint to its braying. When the stallion climber over his partner I understood
why, despite being spurred furiously, he, the horse, did not run faster.It was
crazy! It was fantastically beautiful! The stallion and the mare were making
love under us. We – upon them. The night’s black clouds were above us.
The wind was mixing the fragrances in the same beautiful combination as
the sounds of delight… On the morrow we let the horses go…
“Where will they go?” Irina asked.
Most probably to their former owner. The old man is lucky – he sold
two horses and most probably will soon have three. He might even guess
there will be a third as soon as he sets eyes on them. One day I’ll return for
the young one. I’m sure it will me a male one.”
I opened my eyes. The picture with the signatures. The signatures of
celebrated contemporaries of mine. Diagonally, one behind the other, five
identical girls with roses for vaginas. A symbol of history upon which I
decided to leave the imprint of modernity through the signatures of
remarkable personalities. Irina was standing before the painting and not by
chance, either. We decided so on the morning when we let the horses go. We
talked about how sad history was. We compared it to released horses, bought
for just one night and having done their job were now superfluous. We could
not hold back the seconds, yet each one is an epoch in itself. How are we to
merge the delight of the present with the memory of the past?We had
already lost the formula of the universal dissolution of everything into
everything else! We had lost it five centuries before which were equal to a
night of eroticism and fantasy.
Then it occurred to us that upon the picture of history the modern age
should leave its imprint with the most passionate organ of its body – the
hand! The organ which after all creates history, unlike the brain which
assumes that merit while in fact it only plans history… A night of
lovemaking on horseback! A jump of five centuries!
A picture of five girls with roses for vaginas and hundreds of
signatures upon them. Eugenie Bell – the best-selling author of erotic
thrillers. She had signed it with generous immodesty upon a whole breast
and even beyond it, upon the breasts of the second girl. Above it, with even
less modesty, feminine fashion, stood, on the girl’s face the signature
“Ursula” – perhaps the most famous transvestite in Bulgaria. Yes, of course,
but after the Italian-born Bulgarian Irinio, who, for the sole purpose of
changing his sex jumped five solid centuries in time and then ceased
mourning for his absent attribute of masculinity and for being in love with a
man. Just under it, upon the calf of the third girl Tsetsa had written:
“There are no chance fortuitites…”
Some boorish fellow had added under her maxim:
“Does punk exist?”
Above Tsetsa’s signature, on the girl’s thigh, almost next to the rose
Irina herself had placed her signature and had painted lips. The demonic
woman was smiling. She was leaning on the painting…
“The imprint of modernity upon history!” she laughed. “Seconds of
sex! Through the torn clothes of time which parts them!”
Experiences clothed in precipices, barring them from fleshly
contact.How can we make love to a memory in the present? With the
universal passion of longing hearts, laying hands upon the cancer of the sick
memory in order to cure it… I had difficulty finding the signature of Yoto
Patsov, my friend and editor of international standing… I set eyes upon the
signature of Svetla Dimitrova, a world-famous designer and also a good
friend of mine – perhaps a lover from and earlier life. Then, Tanya’s
signature. My most loyal friend!The staunchest girl with whom I shared
quite a few “masculine” adventures – a really steadfast girl and not merely a
girl’s dream of being a boy… My mum’s signature… The signatures of
pupils of mine… Even that of Vessi, the pauper of our block of flats…
Dissolution of personalities into a single one. The laying on of hundreds of
hands into a single one. They all needed me in order to get in touch and unite
their forces. They all loved me sincerely and loved one another through this
one picture of mine. Could I, for the sake of an imaginary demon, take away
from them all that I had given them?!
Did I have the right to betray them?!
Having guessed perhaps my reasoning, Irina was hardly concealing
her sarcasm.
“You fear, as you contemplate your own world; why? Y needn’t be
afraid! It is yours…”
“Because you are leaning on it and look demonic. Please, don’t lean
on the picture!”
“But the great mystifier who instilled fear in the hearts of the
Rozencreutzers and who had attained the highest levels of knowledge is
himself frightened… Back then, as I was passing through the tunnel, I said
I’ll destroy you and I see I am about to do just that…”
She touched the signed painting with her animal nails. I expected she
would tear it at any moment but she was not doing that.She was evidently
enjoying my state of fright.
“You have once torn up my world already,” I told her calmly. “You
can’t harm me further by tearing a canvas.”
“But I’ll enjoy it!”
“Hardly, because you’ll go away with the picture. Didn’t you realize
you aren’t a lonesome peak. You’re one signature among many on my
picture. The most beautiful. The most passionate! Laid there by the most
perfect hand, yet it is just one among a hundred. In fact, thousands which are
not to be seen on this picture. It was you who inspired it, who excited me to
do it. It became such as it is thanks to you but it has invariably been a mere
picture with precisely those colours because it was who painted it. It has
always been with that largest signature in the bottom left-hand corner – my
own. It is my own ego. The picture would have looked different but for your
signature on the painted girl’s thigh. Mine, however, will stay there…”
She was changing sharply her attitude.Despite her look of a wild
beast, she again resembled a girl in love. In love with unsuspected things
found in her beloved. She was staring at me and seemed to be absorbing
every single word I uttered by just looking hard at me.
“I’ll tear up the painting!”
“It is yourself you’ll be tearing up! This picture isn’t me; it’s my
mirror!”
“I’ll tear it up!”
Tears shot up into her wild beast’s eyes. How touching! How
commonplace!
“On the day of the latest solar eclipse you wrote a poem about it…”
The telephone was again ringing.
“How dared you! I’m still your inspiration.”
“Nightmares can inspire as well, can’t they?”
She gave a beastly scream. She lunged at the picture and it was as if
she had sunk her nails into my face. Then she lunged at me. She threw me
down upon my back and rode upon me. She tore up my clothes and my flesh
under them. She bit at my neck but not very fiercely or with her teeth she
could have broken it. Imperceptibly she softened. Gradually she was
becoming a woman once again. The beastly sounds of her throat resembled
more and more the voice of a delighted woman. Her skin was getting softer
and more sensual, such as it had always been, her forehead was getting
smoother, her fangs were vanishing and her lips became tender. We made
love under the picture – long and tenderly this time, forgetting that thereby
we were provoking Death. Forgetting that we were enraged and vengeful at
each other. Forgetting our old memories we were creating new. On the night
of the last solar eclipse of the outgoing millennium.
We no longer were Irina and Papa Jan but two young people who had
met an hour before. The girl had wanted to have a look at the young man’s
painting on being told he was a painter. A studio is always an open soul. Its
interior most closely approximates the soul’s plan. The studio is a naked
soul. A beloved awaiting her beloved – the artist. To touch her, to make love
to her, both of them to create something new. There is no need for a young
artist to reveal further his soul to the girl. She instantly saw it bared in all its
splendour. She realized she loved that soul. She realized she was in love
with its possessor. There was no need then for prolonged amatory overtures.
The girl threw herself into his embrace and for a long time they made love
under the picture which she no longer remembered she had signed…
Memories came back as the telephone rang again.
“Please, don’t answer the phone!” Irina begged, the same Irina I had
once loved and not the demon. “Don’t lift the receiver!”
“I will always desire you, Irina… I wish to pray but to what god?” I
said abstractedly while the telephone went on ringing, bringing me back to
reality. I did not lift the receiver but neither did I touch Irina again. What is
more, I expelled her from my thoughts and finished the poem dedicated to
her.
Thus I ended another period of my life. On the night following the last
solar eclipse of the outgoing millennium.
13.
I awoke under the painting. I looked for a sign on it and on myself in
order to reassure myself that I had not had a nightmare: “a prolonged,
tremulous night of one mind which had gotten sick from a dangerous
proximity to Beauty!” I found none, yet I was somewhat different now and
the picture with the interwoven energies in it of the present, laid on over the
past, was also different and the day was hot, unremarkable, quotidian, as if
telling me the night of sinister, delectable miracles never existed. Yet it had
been such. I had no signs on my skin but my skin had been scratched. In a fit
of hysterical, murderous passion. “Ideal love is annihilation… The man and
the woman are opposite signs which touch and destroy themselves…”
“They become zeroes. Genuine love is a zero. Therefore such a
love cannot exist,” I concluded. “But there can be tenderness, passion,
mutual respect and understanding which are also attributes of love.”
The telephone rang. Rumi was calling me. We agreed to meet and all
of a sudden the horror at the demonic image which had stalked me vanished.
“And what can Absolute Love feel?” I went on ruminating. “Its
attributes are felt. They are the erogenous zones. They are our bodies and
our hearts which aspire to it and their aspiration is the passion which
Absolute Love can give us without killing itself or us, like a pitiful
possession in the hands of lovers who can feel it as long as they are
powerless but only seek and desire it. They can be satisfied insofar as they
possess its gifts. “I will be a good friend of our kid!” heard I Rumi’s
whisper. “Don’t make me laugh!” echoed Irina’s sardonic voice.
“Tomorrow the old man who sold me the horses will be lucky. He sold two
horse and three would now return to him.”
I felt a furious desire to see the young colt. Irina did not bequeath me
a kid but a colt. I had sufficient time till my rendezvous with Rumi. I had to
see the colt. I desired it so powerfully and so spontaneously as I had desired
seeing Gergana and Lydia – my daughters from my first wife. The colt must
be a grown-up stallion by now. I may now be a grandparent. I laughed at my
thoughts but was not at all in a mood for fun. I was too agitated to be joyful.
I stepped on the gas. The village where my offspring lived was more
than a hundred kilometres away from Sofia and I had to cross the Balkan
mountain range but the dynamo of my car had been giving trouble of late.
These apprehensions were in my subconscious and were dissipated by the
excitement of my forthcoming expectation to see the child conceived on that
night of heady gallop and passions.I was driving at a great speed and Irina’s
sudden appearance nearly caused a crash.
“It is now a habit with you, isn’t it!” I said, angry but not as horrified
as at our previous encounter. “Don’t you see that it was our last night?”
She laughed.
“What, in fact, are you?”
She again answered with a laugh. Then she said:
“Why do you object to my seeing the colt, too?”
“I thought you did not seek in our liaison more than fleeting
experiences.”
“You don’t understand anything.”
“At the time you refused to have a child by me.”
“Our love is our child. Annihilation…”
“Enough of your fantasies. I told you last night. You know that
survival is a greater delight than death.
“That was precisely why I fled, Jan! In order for us to allow ourselves
that delight! The pain of survival. The refined sadism of two lovers who
think up reasons for not being together…”
“You are being ridiculous!”
“Yes, Jan! Don’t think I no longer love you! From the very start,
however, our attraction for each other acted like a drug. In the beginning a
soft one, say, cannabis. Later on it wasn’t enough for us and we resorted to
other means. More effective. More dangerous. Such that cause addiction…
Do you remember how we set fire to ourselves in the shepherd’s hut? We set
ourselves ablaze like you put your exhibitions on fire. Our fiery love was
inevitable…”
She fell silent.
“I don’t see what you’re getting at.”
“At the time I told you I wanted to retain my freedom and you were
infuriated. What I wanted was to cure our mutual passion from addiction. In
other words – our love. I didn’t succeed. We came together again like old
pals from an underpass who had been discharged cured from the clinic but
who, after a couple of months’ labour had decided to revert to their old
habit!”
“Well, if you see things that way…” I murmured.
“But it’s like that, Papa Jan! Or else you would not be seeing me in
that way… We went on… None of our adventures in the air, in water, in the
fire – every time we wanted to feel on our bodies death’s cold hand and
avoid it. We hoped we’d get wiser that way. It is like making love to a
destructive demon, not to an ordinary man or woman…”
I burst out laughing. My laughter was loud, irrepressible, haughty and
irritating…
“You ought to have given me my freedom instead of making love to
me in the fire. In that case we wouldn’t have gone on… till death and then
further on: in a tormented existence. A separation after which neither of us
knew whether we’d meet again or not. We are afraid that might happen
again yet at the same time we eagerly hope it would. Do you know that
several times I bought a plane ticket to Bulgaria. And each time I lost it
somewhere…”
This time I was the loser. She had distracted me and I had lost the
way. We were driving along a dirt road without any roadsigns, through a
village which seemed eerily empty. “Empty like my own heart! Eery like the
demon of my love!”
We meandered a long time through the dilapidated streets, as if in
labyrinth.
“I’ll not be able to see Rumi today, either!” I thought sadly. “Nor will
I manage to see the young colt! Truly, she has decided to deprive me of
everything. And has left the signed picture for the end, as a dessert…”
Before I managed to say “Go to hell, you, infernal voluptuary!” and to
push her out of the car she melted in a light-blue haze which, with a hissing
sound, filtered through the open window. After she was gone her beastly
laugh continued to resound… The further I drove, the more confused I was.
In the end I pulled up before a swamp. I went out and lay on my back. I
wanted to relax. I wished to cease thinking of her and to collect my thoughts
in order to survive… “If she is right about our love having been a narcotic,
now I am abstinent and have to exercise my will power to get rid of it. She’s
right, though. I had simply been carried away but the term of my vow has
expired and should time fail to cure me, will power can heal any wound… I
have simply to pull myself together and find my way out of this godforsaken spot… The only thing to do now is concentrate… Just that!”
The frogs were croaking. Mosquitoes kept biting me. It smelled like
that day. I heard Irina’s laughter; not the one in the car a while before but the
other, as we made love near the bog.
“Go away!” I shouted but she stayed. She kept on peering in from
every corner and every particle of dust of my being. She had misled me or it
was I who wished to be misled as she wished to lose her plane tickets. She
had brought me to the swamp so that I could remember… In fact, it had been
lobg since she had dragged me to the pond. Bit by bit. Philosophizing all the
way to this spot about love, loneliness, annihilation, refined sadism, the
scourge of concepts upon a naked body of a god… It was then that we lost
our way. I could not remember where we were heading to. The only thing I
recalled still was our joyful and boundless love despite the lightnings and
storm-clouds of destruction at the time of our lunar orgasms. There was a
full moon again and she was again “the witch, milking the moon” in order to
take over from it its power for the purpose of loving or destroying. Now she
was laughing and wanted to make love. Not that – laughing – she was
powerless to destroy but at the moment she really wanted to make love.
Unwittingly, we had lost our way. We once again made our way along
bumpy roads across ghostly villages and again left the last one behind by
chance in order to find ourselves on the edges of a swamp. I was
worried.I’m not a devil-may-care chap who could get lost just like that and
not only not get anxious but positively to swoon with delight as was the case
with Irina. I went out of the car lay on my back to relax and think of the right
way out.
Just then Irina, naked, appeared in my vision like a ghost of the
swamp. Hands outstretched, she danced around me and was singing
something in an unfamiliar language. Then her words became clear:
“I call on all will-o’-the-wisps, insects, swamp ghosts and forest
ghosts, from the white and the black realms, from the realm under the earth
and sky, from the realms of day and of night, the forest and the vines, the
rose and the dragon, of the fox and the lion, to join in our amorous rite. Here
in the swamp where we were born and where we live…”
It seems to me I saw an ignis fatuus above her head. Or, rather, it was
the full moon I saw through the tree branches, torn like the heart of a girl
after the first night of love… “The heart, did I say? Rather like her pants in
the branches of the tree under the balcony…”
Moonlight poured like honey on the breasts of the forest spirit and
they resembled little moons. The light filtered down her belly and gilded the
hair under it… I felt hot. I was dreaming and wished the dream to continue. I
did not want to wake up and didn’t move. I was lying on the ground on the
edge of the bog and at the same time I was flying and circling over it. Above
the chorus of frogs while I felt the mosquitoes’ biting as a pleasant, sexy
thrill. The swamp spirit went on dancing around me…
“Ye powers, that be inside and outside me. Ye powers of the moon
and night, of human reason and understanding, of the elements and of fire,
of water, air and earth; ye powers of swamp mud of which we are made; ye
powers of the visible and the invisible, fill me…”
“Fill me!” she said it, shouting this time. She tore her breasts with her
nails and with eyes towards the sky she kneeled down. Her body was
convulsing and she was murmuring softly and inarticulately. I was startled.
Of course I was not dreaming. I jumped at Irina, caught her but at once let
her go. She was shaking like an epileptic and her mouth was foaming… I
only managed to shout:
“Irina!”
Then she jumped at me. Glued her lips to mine and from them flowed
all the energy she had gathered in her body during the strange and beautiful
ritual. I did not know whether these were the forces she invoked or her own
inner strength which had gathered up in her during the ritual but it was pure
magic. Magical power. The power of love. Nature’s pure energy. I perceived
it in a single passionate kiss. The foam on her mouth dribbled down my
chin. She tasted like a magic potion produced only by a female organism
when the woman gets control of her exultation. n a very rare moment, maybe
once in a hundred thousand which made that elixir practically never tasted
by masculine lips. As she unstuck her lips from mine, everything around was
speaking a language I did not understand. The mosquitoes buzzed, vowing:
“I’ll suck up your blood! I’ll suck up your blood! Buz-z-z-z-z!”
The swamp sighed in a woman’s voice:
“It’s good, oh how good!”
The branches sang:
“They love each other… Two human bodies. Two hearts in love…”
“Let’s enjoy this film by night!” heard I the voices of night birds.
Then I ceased to comprehend. I felt dizzy.
My soul seemed to have departed my body and it, soul-free, could
experience each thrill purely. Was that a narcotic?
Yes, indeed, it was a peculiar kind of narcotic without drug use…
When the imaginary speech of all around me was stilled I was possessed
with a frantic power.I grabbed Irina and leaned her against a tree. She
embraced the tree with one hand as if were another man while I, wildly
excited, strove, with energetic thrusts to penetrate to the tree and split it right
through its core. Owls flew around and slapped their wings against our faces
and backs. Startled birds mingled their squeals with ours. I felt overfilled
with all the strength she had invoked and pushed her against another tree.
“Ouch!” she screamed and tried to get away.I grasped her hand. In her
attempt to wrench herself away she bowed down and it was then that I saw
the hollow in the tree. I shoved her head inside it and went on with my
savage thrusts. Then the tree itself murmured:
“I’m choking! It feels good! Choke me darling… Oh, so, so, so
good… Don’t stop! Don’t come!I want my head forever in that hollow…”
Her voice was coming out of another hollow in the tree. At first this
startled me and then it became funny and my erection subsided. Irina took
her scarred face out of the hollow and slapped me in the face. I could not
stand this. I fell to the ground from laughter. A tree having an orgasm! A
merger between a human and a plant… Irina jerked her head and made for
the swamp. No matter how funny I found all that, I took control of myself
and went after her.I did not want her to be cross with me. I took her hand as
before but this time she did not pull away. There were tears in her eyes but
they were the tears of laughter. Quietly, catching it from me,she had seen the
comedy of the situation – against the background of all the romance of the
situation, it had become far more comic than under other circumstances…
As she controlled her laughter I told her what I had heard the mosquitoes
say… There came another explosion of laughter. Till we were totally
incapacitated with it.
Such laughter with the beloved is a true orgasm of the diaphragm. I
thought of it there and then but did not communicate it to her lest we fell
into another bout of laughter. I tried to forget the powerful voice of the tree
hollow experiencing an orgasm: “I’m choking! I feel good! Go on, go on…”
I shook it out of my head only after our legs sank to the ankles in the
mire while we, facing each other, were staring into our destiny. We felt we
were sinking deeper in the swamp and embraced still stronger… We wanted
to be together. We were horrified at the thought that the swamp might be
very deep and solid ground, far from our feet. This thought horrified and
excited us at the same time. When the surface reached our waists we knew
there was no turning back and we have to leave everything to chance – we
were in nature’s hands. With each movement towards the shore we might
sink deeper…
“Are you afraid?” she asked when the mud had already reached up to
our waists.
“If I had been afraid I would have avoided our relationship.”
“Because it has been a swamp!”
“Because it IS a swamp!”
“Because we are no more than stalks of cane!”
“Cane which thinks!”
Her breasts were warm. Now that our passions had subsided, now we
were on the edge of the precipice of existence, they did not arouse me
sexually – I rather felt them to be a maternal support. Like weeping I could
not console because the child, no matter how strongly it wanted to go back,
had grown up already and had sunk in the swamp of its own life… The
surface of the swamp was breast-high.
“Are you afraid?” she asked me again.
“No. Because our love was also the balloons above Balchik! And
pictures in the snow!”
“And a speaking tree hollow!” she added, softly smiling.
“And a speaking tree hollow!” I repeated.
“And a colt to be born.”
“And a child you don’t wish to be born,” I added sadly.
Our feet were now on firm ground. Again saved and aroused, we
started making love in the mire. It was not easy. Our bodies touched with
difficulty but when the did it was pleasurable beyond description. Our
bodies slid against each other and the touch of the mire, a new and
unfamiliar sensation till now, was a novel experience…Even the toad which
jumped on my bald head just as our orgasm finished caused laughter and
added a pleasurable experience…
And I recalled the originator of haiku, the Japanese man Basho
(Kinsanu Chuemon) who was born in the town of Edo (the old Tokyo) in
1644 and his famous haiku:
A frog jumps
a splash in the water.
An old swamp.
And I also racalled the well-known American haiku author Jimmy
Katzian and his haiku:
A moon in the afternoon
The blue in the sky
Is hers.
I started joyfully reciting haiku-Janoisms from my latest book:
HAIKU – JANOISMS
764 WITH IRINA – 1 AFTER “CORPUS DEI”
Sometimes you will see
my hard one, stuck in the opening
of the Cosmic Vagina!
765 WITH IRINA – 2 AFTER “CORPUS DEI”
Sometimes you will hear the wind of my breath
and my tired steps, looking for you
in the echo of erupted volcanoes.
766 WITH IRINA - 3 AFTER “CORPUS DEI”
You will give your body
to the life of parting
as well as to the life of the word.
767 WITH IRINA - 4 AFTER “CORPUS DEI”
A voluptuous instant! In the mirror of eternity
you see your image
painted by me on the sun.
768 WITH IRINA – 5 AFTER “CORPUS DEI”
We sweep the last drops on the verge of sunset
in order to swim to the clarity of the night
charred by the last coals of life!
769 WITH IRINA – 6 AFTER “CORPUS DEI”
Whose hopelessness fertilized the sounds
and scattered them in your mouth
conducted by my brush?
770 WITH IRINA – 7 AFTER “CORPUS DEI”
On the spear of darkness
I impale sunken pleasure
upon the phalus of knowledge!
771 WITH IRINA – 8 AFTER “CORPUS DEI”
The night is the storm, created by you,
in order to drown and save at once
the remnants of my sperm.
772 WITH IRINA – 9 AFTER “CORPUS DEI”
You tear up the cobweb of stars
in order to save the drowning man at dawn
who has crawled up to your beautiful ankle.
773 WITH IRINA – 10 AFTER “CORPUS DEI”
You are the mother of verbal death
and the wife of homeless disbelief
as well as the step mother of my Love.
WITH IRINA – 11 AFTER “CORPUS DEI”
The grimaces of flesh recall to me
the posture you had adopted
when you kissed my swollen head!
WITH IRINA – 12 AFTER “CORPUS DEI”
You are a hooked bait – meat of innocence –
impaled upon an abyss of memories
and I remained a gladiator stuck between your thighs.
WITH IRINA – 13 AFTER “CORPUS DEI”
I plough with a glance your verbosity
or look for myself drowning in your waters,
my desire to see you again in the abyss of the Cosmos!
“CORPUS DEI” (OF IRINA WITH PAPA JAN)
In “CORPUS DEI”* is the word of CHRIST,
I re-discovered the blood on the cross and on my hands
which wrote “That” for you, my BELOVED!!!…
“CORPUS DEI” – the first collection of poems by the world-famous poetess
and philosopher IRINA…
“Let’s hope a stork doesn’t alight upon your head next time!” she told me
laughing when we came ashore.
“We haven’t made love up in the air. What do you say about a
balloon?”
“Why not a zeppelin?” I said with light irony.
“Formidable!” she clapped her hands. The frog which had jumped
upon my head was giggling.
“What about an aerostat?”
“Terrific, but do you know how it’s handled?”
“No, neither a balloon.”
“They say it’s easy.”
Maybe, but I did not know how easy it would be for us to get back… I
found the road as I had done the other time. Calm and having switched off
emotional thought, I relied solely on my hands on the steering wheel which
proved trustworthy. At last I was on the highway. It was dawn at the time
while now it was sunset, so it was rather late for me to meet Rumi.
14.
The signed pictures. The present spread over the past. Counting the
substitute for the formula of circular time, lost by Irinio, the paintings were
to be thirteen. Upon thirteen paintings I collected the signatures of
footballers and politicians, eccentrics and shady dealers, poets and painters,
scholars and ordinary workers.That was a part of one of my projects for a
Guiness record – the making of eternal works. Even after my death, my
pupils will continue collecting signatures.The other concerned the quantity
of pictures. Twenty-thousand and thirteen for twenty-four hours, thereby
bettering by several thousands Picasso’s record who painted 16 400 pictures
throughout his life. Twenty-thousand and thirteen! No, that was not insanity
nor a Quixotic miracle. On a spread canvas, 2 313 metres long I pour my
favourite colours, charged with energy and dissolved one into another. Then,
naturally with the help of my pupils, we cut up the canvas into small-sized
20013 paintings which I sign. Hundreds of thousands of people will
participate in the project, most of them children. Therefore the motto is
“Children for children”. Actually, there will be three records fitting to be
published in Guinness. The longest picture in the world, 2313 metres, the
greatest number of pictures, 20013, painted within a short period of time and
the largest number of people participating in the painting of the picture. I
took the decision to do all that in Moscow’s Red Square. The reason for it is
the fact that it was in Russia that I painted my best portraits of famous
personalities: Shalyapin, Vissotsky, Pushkin, Alla Pugachova, Phillip
Kirkorov, Valeri Tagansky and precisely in Moscow because I appreciate
Russian culture. One picture I will burn, another I will dip in water, a third I
will hitch onto a balloon, a fourth I will bury in the ground and a fifth will be
launched into outer space. I will place the pictures in their natural
environments amidst the elements: fire, water, air and outer space. I will
put in each of them a black and a white bean in the form of an embryo,
symbolizing yan and inn – the sign which for its part symbolizes the world
harmony between day and night, good and evil, etc. Two-hundred and
thirteen pictures I will present to Russia’s president for him to give them to
213 presidents across the world. Hung in their offices, they will remind them
for ever of the fact that these pictures were made during a general meditation
of thousands of people under the motto: “No to war. Let us live in the name
of goodness.”In that “Picture of the Millennium” all of us will depict the
Evolution of Mankind. Its energy will be collossal.Everyone participating in
the project will benefit aesthetically and health-wise.After that I was to
devote myself to organizing the first Space Exhibition.The pictures will be
thirteen, silent yet speaking volumes.They will look for alien reason and
mutual love in the abyss. They will be a discovery for history and the printed
present, joining the energy of today’s people. Yes, they were mine and yet in
sense they were not. That was a multiple creativity, destined for another
world…
I began work on the yan and inn pictures with a police chase. I was in
a hurry for an exhibition and exceeded the speed limit. I did not obey police
warnings to stop and there followed a heady car chase till in the end they
blocked my way and I came to my senses faced by a dozen Kalashnikov
muzzles. I was frightened but only a little.I am always excited before an
exhibition.The euphoria of creation makes any other sentiment pale, even
the fear of death. I quickly managed to gain psychological advantage over
the men in police uniform who had thought a moment before they were
chasing a dangerous escapee. Yet, they recognized me and officer Renni, a
charming open-hearted woman even in police uniform, sighed and smiled:
“Papa Jan, is that you again…”
I received inspiration instantly. From the euphoria of stage fright,
from the breakneck speed and the muzzles of the submachine guns, from the
smiling reproach of the beaming lady in uniform. I do not know how the
beans came to be in my car. To be honest my vehicles are always like a
shark’s belly and you can find inside all sorts of things you don’t expect and
not be able to find what you are looking for. At that moment the beans were
there. My lottery ticket with a big prize. Rags and paints are always to hand.
With my fingers I put some colours to the rags. I hastily signed them and
wrapped the beans in them. I explained the meaning of that work of mine.
With inspiration I chattered away about my admiration for the service of
lady-police-officers and my intention to stage an awarding of such pictures
to them… It could safely be added to my other traffic offences and attempts
at bribing officers. But they were done all in good faith. Were I not Papa Jan
and had I been a stranger to them, were I not perfectly sincere, eschewing
any ulterior motives, they would have done it. Besides, the state I was in
indicated to them I had valid reasons for my haste and even the law
recognizes compromise when beauty is in question. Beauty, of course, is a
violation of the laws, the old laws and a creator of new ones which one day
it will again violate in order to create still fresher laws, and so on… But
don’t let me digress. I will only add that I gave awards to the female police
officers as I had promised to do on the eve of the exhibition and then I
thought of giving awards to others… I was not awarding their loyalty or
some merit worthy of being awarded but simply because they had souls and
every soul merits at least a hundred more prizes besides those which it
already has…
Now, that was a message to the thirteen thousand I will collect by the
end of my life while at the beginning they were no more than thirteen:
“EACH SOUL DESERVES AT LEAST A HUNDRED MORE
PRIZES THAN THOSE IT ALREADY POSSESSES!”
I told you about all this because it is part of my unrealized longings.
But why?
I was inhibited by something inside.I was going to do great deeds in
my life but was not to be happy. Satisfied, yes! But not happy! What do
fame, success, riches, greatness, even immortality, amount to if you have no
one to share them with? Yes, of course, I was to share a part of me with the
thousands, but if there is not a single person to share your whole heart and
soul with, you could not do it with the millions even! The following is
another message:
“IF THERE IS NOT A SINGLE PERSON TO SHARE YOUR
WHOLE HEART AND SOUL WITH, YOU CANNOT DO IT WITH THE
MILLIONS EVEN!”
You cannot love your fellow creature if your beloved is far away!
My sober reason had long denied the possibility of us meeting
together again, of her not losing her return ticket. My body, however,
negated my reason. My dreams ruled it out. My days tended to be like my
dreams. My heart negated experience. Faith killed thought. The nightly
thrills of loneliness proved to me that I had been in love. And love conquers
everything, does it not? Like a guileless child I ask you: is it really so? In
one thing I am convinced – there is such a thing as love without which
everything becomes meaningless and if there isn’t love, meaning itself is an
empty notion.
The date was approaching of my widely publicized show which would
bring success to my endeavour to become a GUINNESS record holder. It
was to run parallel to a major rock concert in Main Square. The square was
to be like a Tower of Babel. I was to give away paintings and everyone who
received one was to sign the other yet unsigned six out of thirteen. Alas, the
nearer the day approached, the emptier and less buoyant I felt. I, who could
charge people with energy, I, who dissipated my own energy upon my
canvases and in my daily life. I, who have combined with my own eyes
landscapes and faces for thousands of years to come… That same I, who –
before I knew Irina with her thirteen billion faces – used to make love with
thirteen women simultaneously – a fact which caused a furore when I
communicated it with the hostess of the popular TV show “A Nightly
Magazine”. “Thirteen women! I also have thirteen basic messages to the
world…”
No, I did not say exactly that. I merely thought of it. That TV show
was focussed principally on the private lives of its celebrated guests.
“Apart from money, I cannot think of another motive in the case of
these thirteen girls,” the hostess challenged me at the time. “O, no!This is a
merger of bodies and energies…” I replied that night and continued:
“Besides, I reach thirteen orgasms in twenty-four hours…”
The show caused a furore and my memory of it, laughter tinged
sometimes with sadness… The merger of bodies and energies is much more
complete with one partner who carries the energies of thirteen multiplied by
thirteen at the thirteenth degree sexual partners and that can only be the
beloved because there is a saying to the effect that “the most erogenous
organ is the brain! As well as the tenderest, the most vulnerable, the one
which aches the most, the one that is the most drugged, the one which is
most difficult to erase and which creates the greatest problems…
Instead of being in the square, giving out pictures and receiving
signatures, I found myself in a lonesome pub. Far from Sofia; far from
myself… Along with the last wretched drunkards, the pub owner had buried
his head in the bar and I poured drinks to myself from time to time: “Life as
in a movie”. In the end I got fed up getting up from the table, pouring a drink
to myself, sitting down again, draining the glass and getting up again… I
took the bottle and stared at it. I tried to see the image of Irina in its depths –
according to the advert, in it one can see many more absurd things than a
lost love. It was, however, not a case merely of an advert, nor a tearful love
melodrama but of a bottle of vodka and harsh reality like that of lone man in
a Siberian forest… There was steam on the bottle. But no; it was only my
tears…
“Papa Jan, you are not a drinker!” I said to myself outloud. You must
leave that bottle alone…”
“IF YOU BUILD A GALLERY, LET IT BE UNIVERSAL!” I
murmured my most important message, the thirteenth out of thirteen
thousands, and went on with drunken inertia:
“IF YOU HAVE A LOVE LET IT BE GLOBAL!”
I laughed bitterly and began now to recall those episodes from my
interview for “Nightly Magazine” which I avoided remembering because it
did not cause laughter but sadness in me… And I continued with a
drunkard’s inertia to pour out messages…
“IF YOU LOSE ONE LOVE, DON’T LOSE THE WORLD WITH
IT”
In my bag I found a marker and started writing upon the table cloth
worn out from frequent washing and probably much soiled from vomiting:
“IF YOU LOSE THE WORLD WITH ONE LOVE, DON’T LOSE
YOUR SOUL…”
The bottle was getting wetter and wetter. “My last love was the worldfamous poetess Irina!” said I to the hostess of the Nightly Magazine show on
TV.
“When we parted I bought a cow, gutted her intestines, huddled in it
and put my toe into my mouth. It was my desire to revert to my embryonal
state…”
Then I was born. I saw a female breast and was hungry. I put it into
my mouth and sucked it. When I had finished sucking that was no longer my
mum’s breast but that of my beloved woman and I was not hungry for milk
but for love. For a lunar orgasm…
“IF YOU LOSE YOUR SOUL, RESURRECT IT! FALL IN LOVE
AGAIN!”
I hurled the bottle into a corner. The drink trickled on the wall into the
shape of an abstract painting. I shoved the table cloth into my bag. I left a
couple of banknotes on the bar in front of the sleeping bar tender and went
out in search of her again. I got into a prostitute’s car and took her to my
studio. The sun was rising and I was sobering up. I had a splitting headache.
A bit of jogging, I thought, would not come amiss and a glass of beer
perhaps. At long last I opted for a jog. It had rained and there were many
snails along the track at the stadium. I collected as many as I could and
returned to my studio. The girl was still sleeping. “What if I marry her? We
are both so lewd!”
Then I laughed and wept, not knowing which came first. I let the
snails crawl on the palette; then I put a few of them on the girl’s body. She
stretched her limbs with pleasure. She was awake but shut her eyes and lips.
She was enjoying it. I covered her body with snails and then mine. I lay
down beside her, holding her hand. I closed my eyes. All the surroundings
began dancing. The hand I was clutching was changing till it became Irina’s
hand…
At that time I had not been drinking but I go jogging often and it had
rained then, too. The snails caused an arousal in me. I collected them just as
I did now. I returned to my studio where it was not a prostitute who was
sleeping but my very own beloved woman. Then, as now, I let the snails
crawl along the palette and then onto the greatest gift of God – the naked
female body…
“It’s so pleasurable, it’s well-nigh impossible!” groaned the woman
and I didn’t see whether it was the prostitute or Irina. I didn’t understand
whether the anger and separation, the sorrow and agony, the unaccomplished
projects were not a hallucination from the delight I also felt from the snails
creeping along my body…
“Melt inside me! You melt me!” No, a prostitute could not be saying
this. “Ye-e-e-e-s!”
I was delighted still more. The pores of my skin burst and the bones
were melting. I was becoming a body without bones, a body that could not
merely twist but pour down over the one of the beloved. And I was poured
down over it. I did not open my eyes. The snails’ shells were cracking and
tearing our skins but even the pain was pleasurable.Like semen, the snails’
jelly, alive and moving on our bodies, poured into our wounds.The touch of
paints, slightly different from the touch of jelly, added to the pleasure… We
were groaning and creeping over each other like veritable snails.At last, as
we lay down upon the blank canvases in order to imprint the picture of our
passion, I saw it was not Irina but the prostitute stranger who was not
altogether like a prostitute herself.
“You are recently in this profession, aren’t you?” I asked.
“What makes you think that?” asked the girl for her part. It was only
now I noticed her swarthy complexion.
“I don’t know. simply notice it – nothing can escape an artist’s
practised eye.”
“You gave me real pleasure,” said the girl, delved into her bag and
shoved a hundred marks towards me. “We, prostitutes, never experience true
orgasms.”
“Take your money back! The pimp will murder you!” I said with a
voice, brooking no objection.
“Besides, I am not a prostitute,” there were tears in her eyes. “Several
times you called me by another woman’s name. She must have been happy!”
“IF SOMEONE HAS IGNORED HIS GREAT HAPPINESS AND
YOU EXPERIENCE IT INSTEAD OF THEM, YOU ARE HAPPIER
THAN THEY, EVEN IF THEY BE BORN UNDER THE LUCKIEST
STAR!”
The had gone. She had gone days, or weeks, or months before…I
often went out and collected snails. I lay down with eyes closed and took
pleasure in their crawling along my naked body. I always felt I held a tender
hand, desiring love… When I opened my eyes, I was surprised: next to me
lay the demonic Irina.
“As before!”
“Aren’t you going to let me be, after all?” I said to her. “Let me be so
that I can go on!”
“O, no! It’s not so easy as that! I wish to die, making love to you, I
wish to destroy myself in your love!”
“Maybe… Some day…” I recalled the capsules. “When we can
encapsulate in a single brain cell all our memory somewhere else and
discard our bodies, now unncessary and worn out.”
“But not before you see with this body’s eyes the young colt!”
“Not before I accomplish my project of the two-hundred thousand
pictures within 24 hours and not before I send into space the signed
thirteen… Simply tell me you will be losing your ticket every time and
won’t come here in your true guise. Simply say it!”
“I can’t, my dear Jan!I believe some day I’m going to buy a ticket I
won’t lose and will come back to you!”
“Why do you torment me? I pass out every time waiting for you.
Some thing inside me postpones things so we could enjoy them together.
Tell me you will never come back! Give me freedom!”
“At that time I begged you to give it me and even earlier than that,
five centuries ago, not to catch up with me.”
“That is a fantasy!”
“That’s a joke of the formula of the dissolution of everything into
everything else. Of circular time, as you call it. In fact time is a spiral. Like a
spring. Each next circle is the next century. We have clutched the spring and
have brought two of the circles into contact with each other.”
“That’s science fiction. Abandon poeticizing and start writing. You
could become the next Asimov.”
“And how do you account for the fact that I’m with you. Paradoxes in
space are created with non-linear time. How is it I’m with you and in the US
at the same time?”
“You are inside my mind!”
“Then why do you beg me to set you free?”
“I beg my own self. There may exist a telepathetic link between us
and from a distance I may be begging you not to buy anymore air tickets…,
or…”
“Or?!”
“To buy one and never lose it!”
“My dear Jan, console yourself as you like. However, I am real and
feel delight, touching you. I am extinguished when the snails crawl upon my
flesh. I am jealous of your new lover and maybe I’ll kill her…”
“Don’t do it!”
“You have now become convinced I am real but I’ll think again about
not doing it. I want you to grant me a single night more.I want us to repeat
the flight with the monoplane…”
“We nearly crashed then!”
“Well, think! Whether to risk the lives of two brutal souls, ready to
destroy the world even for the sake of a little more erotic pleasure and
grandeur, or that of an innocent creature who is still playing with dolls?”
I was silent. Shivers of cold terror crept along my spine. And they
gave me pleasure. I experienced it with every new sensation. I was captive
of the shivers of my body. Addicted to eroticism to the utmost…
“It won’t be as before,” said I with a certain nostalgia.
“You are mistaken, if you think I will be like I am now. I will be the
old beautiful and sexy Irina.”
“You are beautiful and sexy just as you are now.”
“I know. I meant I will not be in the guise of a beast but in my former
guise, the one which made my relatives say I am the younger sister of my
daughter…”
My heart sank. My body was bursting with sweet shivers. It was all in
mud, snail’s juice and tiny fish, gliding here and there. Somewhere in my
sunken heart, cuddled like a weeping infant, like a kitten in a corner, was the
cheated Rumi…Was I really fearful about her or simply I, like the demonic
woman, wished to re-live our love-making in the air?
15.
The monoplane lifted off the ground. I was aware that Irina was afraid
of dizzying heights and that the higher the adrenaline, the more intense the
delights of sex.She was before me. I delved a hand into her bosom and,
letting go of one of the controlling ropes, I let the monoplane drift at
random. Before us was the terror of crashing down.We had escaped it once
before but given our craziness, the falling craft was almost impossible to
control. Previously, we had closely escaped crashing into the rocks at Mount
Vitosha. Just a few metres from them I had managed to wrest control from
the hands of accident into my own. Now this was repeated.We were only a
few metres away from the rocks, cleft like a medieval fantasy. This time I
mastered even more surely the flying craft and let it rise in the air. Irina
lifted her skirt – she wore no underwear. With a backward movement she
unbuttoned my trousers and my erect beast shoved out of them, exposed to
the winds from all the four corners of the world. We started our love-making
high above the ground. The risk of falling down was great. And they
experience the cruellest fall who are themselves the greatest. This happens
also to the loftiest ideals. But we were not ideals – rather, two bodies,
trembling from the cold winds.Trembling from fear and from passion. From
a delight in the freedom of the open sky… The monplane was drifting out of
control while we, still less under any control, loved and loved, and loved…
In the same way as before. A furlough from the barracks of the
present in the arms of a lover from the past. Even more passionately,
murderously and beautifully... Our groans mingled with the shrieks of
several eagles, flying by. The lords of the air themselves imagined perhaps
that we were one of them and like the horses, the fish and the snails joined in
our love-making in their own manner. Circling in the air and enjoying the
delights of their flight which partook of the nature of eroticism. They made
us into eagles in love. A pair of lovers who have the opportunity to make
love for five-hundred years in an inaccessible nest. I experienced her wet
vagina as hole in the sky through which I had penetrated into Eden in order
to enjoy forever purest love which after killing itself had attained eternal
life…The demons, however, were alive even there, in the heavens. I felt that
beastly passion whose thrills are more innocent, insane, selfless and wilder
than anything else…I let go of the reins. I grabbed her breasts and started
squeezing them. The flying craft went totally out of control, drifted without
direction and dipped downwards. It defied all my attempts at controlling it
and we were already on the way downwards. The winds were unfavourable.
“Now, we are to make love on the ground,” I said and grabbed Irina’s
breasts.
I started kissing them with abandon.We were falling like angels who
had opted for earthly passion instead of the lofty and boring delights. Our
fall would put an end to our splendid and refined torment. As we fell further
down I lost consciousness and the last thing I remember was:
“I love you!”
And my final thought was: “Forgive me, Rumi!”
When we recovered we found ourselves hanging in the branches of a
tree. We struggled out of the straps around our bodies and our bodies were
again joined as on the day when I had asked her to make love on a tree
branch so I could recall a twelve-year-old experience when two women
older than me robbed me of my virginity in similar circumstances…
“It seems we are destined to relive everything we experienced before
and after our separation so we could be rid of each other at last,” I told her,
spreading out her legs over a bough. I knocked with my body against hers
wildly, like a pre-maturely developed twelve-year-old rabbit of a boy. She
groaned, tore leaves, crushed them in her fists and screamed:
“Just so, my little one, Jan! Your big sister will show it you all… Just
so… Just so…”
I collapsed rapidly. Then went at it again and again… At last I
reached my thirteenth message inscribed in semen fluid on the female belly,
breasts and hair… The bough broke and just like the previous time Irina
murmurred sorrowfully about her torn dress and I, almost angry, yet smiling,
responded:
“Your dress!? My balls nearly were ripped off on that bough…”
We walked along a path through the forest hand-in-hand. We were
soon to join the road which would take us to the destination of our desire and
with the coming of night Irina acquired a demonic guise and I was now more
fearful than delighted.The fear was naked, savage, darkness of the soul, a
terror and the gnashing of the teeth…
“You want us to part already!”
“Irina, it was you who first desired that! When I was in Russia,
making that telephone call to you, you told me ‘Farewell’ and I realized it
was a genuine ‘Farewell’ and our love was ended.”
“But it did not!”
It did. I would live with your fantasies about a beautiful death in love,
about absolute love which annihilates one. And I had truly lived with them.
You recall how we dreamt of being launched into space, having air to last us
a mere twenty-four hours while we made love till the oxygen is spent and
the space capsule, gravitating down to earth, shines on some night in the
eyes of some dreaming girl or boy, so they could wish something and enjoy
such a thing of beauty like a transient love. Besides death, we also wished
for eternity.We wanted to discover a way for a brain cell to retain all
memory and besides till death, we could love throughout eternity. I was even
ready to die loving you without the benefit of eternity but I was probably
held back by my own reservations and the awareness that my earthly
mission isn’t finished yet. In our fantasies we even saw a new religion.
Millions of capsules of loving couples in the heavens. It may sound terrible
yet at the same time it is so very tender. Yes. That, I could accept, although
we both preferred life itself rather dying in love – the stronger sentiment
was that of survival and the demise of a love affair. The demise of a love
affair, or its regeneration after exhaustion and subsequent boredom, after it
has dissipated itself in its craving for the employment of all the resources of
the Universe. I would, after all, accept self-dissipation and annihilation.
Rather that, than the slow destruction to which you subject me. I still love
you but I must love with hatred mixed with love. I am no longer dual in my
sentiment as I used to be and I believe radiation of sunlight is what it is even
if did not know the darkness, thanks to which we believe we appreciate
sunlight the more…
“I will not give you up, Jan!” hissed she like a snake and melted into
nothingness.
16. We, both, were on screen.On a green mountain meadow, the
clouds, thin and white, resembled a cobweb. Nearby, the forest, young and
tender resembled a girl’s pubic hair. Irina was lying down, while I, half
lying, kept my hand upon her breast… This was shown on the monitor of a
powerful computer which Ivan, a computer specialist of genius and a friend
of mine, had constructed. He installed a program which helped the thrills
along the skin, traversed by the mouse of the computer, turn into graphics.
The graphics themselves were by me and another computer genius, Koko the
God, had given them life. He had made them move.
Before the computer Irina and I were lying down in the same postures
as we had done on the meadow. When I let pass the mouse across her breasts
she laughted sweetly.
“It’s a pleasure when a mouse crawls upon your breasts, especially an
elctronic one. The other ones horrify me.”
I let the mouse crawl across her belly and both of us appeared on the
monitor in a paradisiacal corner of nature in virtual reality…
“I wonder if they feel anything,” she timidly asked. She was not the
demonic Irina this time. She appeared ever more frequently of late in her
most tender feminine guise…
“To be sure. I’m afraid even feelings are arranged according to a
formula, inaccessible to us, humans.”
“What if we are ourselves a computer graphic?” I perceived the cold
horror in her voice. “What if we are in the monitor of a computer, operated
by frozen, capricious and sadistic child?”
“No, darling!” said I and moved the mouse along her right thigh… On
the screen we were by a shallow but rapid mountain river. I was kissing her
thighs. I was sliding my lips along them just as – outside the comupter – I
was sliding the mouse. When I reached her left breast a volcano appeared on
the monitor. A volcano throwing up fire, brimstone and blood. A volcano in
the shape of a vagina. A volcano, risen high above the plain, pouring out
upon it passioantely and cruelly all that I had kept hidden in myself up to
that moment. The blood and the lava demolished fortress walls, castles,
village huts, skyscrapers, playgrounds. Baroque and futuristic buildings
vanished in the fire while the volcano kept on its downpour. It resembled an
asthmatic woman taking deep breath. Irina whispered:
“I want it all sometime to love me, love me, love me to distraction…
To-o-o-o-t-a-l-l-y!”
I moved the mouse along her other breast. Slowly. With a light
pressing and clicking the left-hand key. In such a way as to prolong her
pleasure.Ants were creeping all over her body.White ants, leaving behind
red traces. When I reached the other breast I saw a geyser throwing up water
towards the sky and the water turned into vapour, then into clouds and in the
end into tears on my face which had just then come out of the door of the
labyrinthine Universal Gallery. I slowly moved the mouse across her belly.
A jumping wild pony appeared on screen. It galloped, its mane waved in the
wind in fire whose flames mixed with those of the lava of the volcano which
was now covering the body of a gorgeous, healthy woman, a stranger to me.
I had painted her once as an Earth symbol and Irina was aware of that. She
had closed her eyes and saw herself as a woman-earth, possessed by violent
sexual desire.
“Don’t open your eyes! said I to her. I rapidly circled her entire body
with the mouse. On screen there appeared “The Picture With the Jokers”, a
memento from Sinemorets and of the best moments we had spent together.
In it I had depicted Irina as an inhabitant of an island in the manner of
Gauguin. A red and black joker, torn into bits and carried by the waves
hinted at the opportunities we could have had. Yet, everything in the
painting was sunny. Even the threatening jokers, the promising jokers.There
is no bigger threat than the promise and there is a surer promise than the
threat. Irina was moving now. She stood up. She wnet in the direction of the
waves which covered her breasts, took the jokers in her hand and threw them
in the sea. It turned into an Irina lying down with the moon sliding over her
skin like a cursor.Then the moon took the shape of my tongue, of my prick,
of my heels, then again it turned into a cursor and into a moon. Irina was
turning into waves which scattered over the beach – no longer that of
Sinemorets but of the Golden Sands on the night we made love for the first
time. She was lying down with outstretched hands. She was clutching sand
in her hands and it was pouring out. I was between her legs and resembled a
horse. A thinner one with bulging muscles and tendons, black, with her hair
waving over my head, resembling a horse’s mane… The mouse was again
on her belly. On it a spider crawled on the screen, making golden cobwebs
which were twining round her body and I no longer knew what was going
on.
Such graphics I had never done. Was it the computer program that
was so perfect as to produce analog combinations of Irina’s emotions,
including elements of other graphics, or was she so much aroused as to
discover fresh dimensions of virtual sex…She opened her eyes. She placed
the mouse upon my chest and a single picture froze on the screen: the
painting of Sinemorets.
“The Picture With the Jokers”… Immobile, still. Done in oils, even on
the computer screen, yet alive, though still…
The picture which added to the Gallery of My Memories – a happy,
sunny, yet tragic. A memory which is enough to lend meaning to my life and
make me wish for death. In the picture my beloved looked like an island
woman from a Gauguin painting, but impressionism did not suffice for me to
render what I felt. I painted her left breast in a lunar hue and on the righthand one I put a pair of the bits into which the jokers had been torn. One
represented myself, the other, Rozenkreutzer. Squatting by the sea, half
naked and gorgeous, she held us like torn jokers. The parts of our bodies
were in the bay behind her.On the rim of the bay itself two goddesses were
walking towards her or towards one of the torn jokers… Athena and
Aphrodite. Irina moved the mouse but the screen was still full of my
picture… The most gorgeous and the most tragic one. Some time before I
had found Thracian ornaments in a cave. At the time I had been led to the
cave by a blind feeling – I never even suspected the cave existed. When I
found the copper objects, crafted with an incredible sensibility for beauty
and almost modern aesthetic point of view, I felt a strange proximity to those
times. Today I account for my discovery of the objects in the only way
possible, viz., they are odd remains of a previous existence of mine. I stuck
them onto the picture. Like a necklace hung on Irina, the girl of the oceans,
like a key, connecting the two jokers and a shield on the belly of the armless
Goddess of love who had approached closer to the bay. A string of blossoms
between Irina’s bare knees symbolized the fruits of beauty… Under the
sun’s rays the waves before the goddesses were becoming golden hair…
Irina rapidly moved the mouse and savagely pressed the two keys till in the
end the eyes of the Goddess with the shield shone with the redness of blood,
signalling danger…
“What’s the matter?” Irina was disturbed. “Why isn’t the picture
moving?”
“Don’t you feel anything? Or are you a statue?”
“I would rather be a statue!”
“Didn’t you want to kill my sentiments before killing me physically?”
“I never wanted that! You didn’t choose to let me have my freedom
for which I begged you so much. The freedom which would have given us a
love more sunny than this picture even.”
“Hardly likely! Now I feel it but in that picture I managed to instill all
my thrills. I succeeded, though in a somewhat abstract manner. Don’t you
see this isn’t Sinemorets only but Varna and Balchik as well? Can’t you see
that the wto goddesses aren’t only your two loves but also us two. Set in
stone and eternal! Can’t you see also the balloons, though they aren’t on the
screen, and also the dolphins underwater? And the sunken Titanic? Sunk in
the waves and in oblivion…”
“And what about Selistar?”
“I remember,” Irina said with nostalgia. “I wrote a poem in two parts
about the most tranquil beach…”
“The most fantastic!”
“And protected by astral energy.”
Two rocks in the shape of the sex act between a man and a woman,
created by sculptor nature, aroused us.One seemed to penetrate into the
other. Maybe they were indeed humans who had transcended the lunar
orgasm and had succumbed to the final temptation – death, and had been
petrified for eternity…At night, clothed in moonlight, they resembled
deities. In the morning they resembled real joined bodies. At the time it was
our fancy to make love on them. They were warm strangers who gave off
part of their warmth to those who sought it and shared their adventure solely
with the waves who bathed them…Under a new moon when the stars shone
most brightly we sat on them and dreamt.
“What will happen if we grow old?! If our cells cease to think of love
but about the diseases of old age?” Irina asked me.
“Then we’ll launch ourselves in a capsule into outer space. We’ll have
oxygen for only one day and one night which will be enough to remind us
we had been young and we’ll do it just as at the time when we had been
anxiously thinking of precisely that moment.”
“And our bodies, petrified as these rocks are will arouse the
asteroids…”
“Or we could land on the moon which won’t be as beautiful but will
need us to make it look pretty.”
“O, Jan, take me in your arms!”
We were on the warm rocky strangers. I embraced her. She spread out
her legs beneath me.We made love to the strangers for a long time. Then we
chased each other around them and jumped into the waves. We were trapped
in seaweed. Sea snakes touched us. We were short of air as in a capsule.We
surfaced again and the stars gave enjoyment to our eyes. Naked and
beautiful as we were…
“But why should we leave this splendid world?” she asked me. “By
that time we may discover a way for our memory to regenerate our souls in
forms different from our bodies and that memory will feel not only her
thrills but also ours as we remember them…”
“But by then we who exist now will be like them,” she pointed at the
two rocks making love.
“But they still feel! If you lend them your ear, you can even hear their
groans…”
We got closer to them. She rested an ear upon the rock.
“They are actually groaning. Really. They are even whispering it’s a
pleasure to them to be touched by living flesh on a protein basis… Let me
climb on your shoulders.”
I let her do it. She started caressing the male rock. Tenderly, as she
caressed me. Slowly, she let her hand slip downward. Finally, she sat on my
shoulders. This allowed her to lock her legs around my back while my lips
were at the spring of the acutest earthly pleasure. She was already caressing
the female rock and the echo of our voices, beating against their flesh
became their own voice. A wave crashed against the rocks showering us
with white foam. We fell at their feet and again merged with the foam
soaking in the sand and the rocks making love started groaning with us. At
noon we awoke in their shadow. We started walking naked along the beach.
Then I thought of making erotic snapshots and she accepted. I asked her to
hide with “our friends” while I go fetch the camera. When I returned she was
caressing them tenderly as on the night before. She was highly excited and
her excitement was communicated to me. It was first shot: a protein
substance engaging in a love game with limestone… I photographed her on
the sand. Underwater. With the help of a tripod we took snapshot of
ourselves in not particularly discreet postures including the 69 or French
love. We took shots very close to the frontier with Turkey and the guard at
the tower did not shoot us dead most probably because he held a weapon
other than a Kalashnikov.We took shots of ourselves embracing the trees.
Locked in each other’s arms amid the trees. With our heads in tree
hollows.With laurels on our foreheads. Semi-nude and semi-dressed.Again
upon our friends and under them. Dry as well as wet.In the act. Artistically
erotic. Pornographically. In any manner that occurred to us or any other
couple. Till the night when the stars again descended…
On that beach I wrote my poem “Champagne for Two” and started
recitng to her passages of it:
Foamy love
like a Selistar beach,
foamy love
like a September morning,
foamy love
like snow and July beer.
Bitter love
like an unappropriate sentiment
which turns into snow
and melts away on a warm morning,
which crushes on the Selistar beach…
And the glasses burst into bits,
bits of glass pierce our hearts
and tender absolutes weep
and the flesh itself melts
in time and Eternity…
Did we drink to the bottom?
A golden harvest is our love.
We drowned in voluptuous foam.
We met in a divine bedroom!
Doomed to wandering,
our hearts travelled to strange worlds!
And to what was left of the Champagne
tender furies brought us back.
We left some Champagne in our glasses,
traversed a global and spiritual road,
absorbed in a grey morning,
a love on trial!
And again exonerated,
celebrating victory – Woman
two were locked in passion
but joy lasted merely till the next day
And dawn blazed in the glasses
sparkled like evil eyes,
whispered sinister oaths
and cruel power parted us.
But foamy evening draws near
with the brooch of the golden moon,
turns you into a nymph
and we again intertwine our bodies.
And the glasses are full of champagne
freed again by a court of law.
There’s no room for our love in the world
but love is greater than the world.
Sparks of a meteorite shower
burn at high speed,
mocking its Moiras
and creating various heavens.
And condemned, then exonerated again,
again holy in its sin
stormy and unbridled in its wanderings,
a phoenix, rising from its own ashes…
Hearts doomed to wandering,
parting from philosophical names,
sparks in champagne glasses,
love is miraculously foamy…
Irina kept on moving the mouse on my neck and ears and the “Picture
With the Jokers” kept on covering the computer screen with oil and charging
mankind’s virtual memory with erotic memories…
“Am I to be still unmoved?”
Later on, at our parting she rummaged all things to find the film with
the negatives and destroy it. I was pained. Not because by destroying the
photos she was to destroy something that had happened between us but
because she repudiated it… No matter how alien to her aesthetic principles,
no matter how afraid she had been of others’ eyes seeing the photos, no
matter how strong her wish to forget me at the moment when the film burnt
in the ashtray, she ought not to have behaved like that. It was only at that
moment that we were true to ourselves...
At the hotel we had different rooms but a common terrace. Her room
was in blue, mine, in pink. We alternated between blue and pink nights. On
the nights we stayed in our rooms, that is. Then we watched the bolides. We
wished ourselves to make love as often as many bolides we saw. It was a
veritable shower of stars and to make our desire happen we went back to the
pink or blue room in order to make blue or pink love. I am not aware of the
difference but there it was.
Pink love was more daring and lavish; the blue love – more pungent,
more lustful and erotically unbridled. Pink love was more tender, blue love,
more voluptuous. Pink love was more mature and had the taste of vintage
wine. Blue love was more like a teenage party till dawn when our bodies
were shivering with cold but happy. Pink love was more like a sunset; blue
love was carefree and without any principle. Pink love was a rose, blue love
– a cornflower, smiling yet on the verge of tears. Pink symbolized years,
blue, the instants. Pink love was a calendar, blue, a clock. Pink love was a
full moon, blue, the first phase. Both pink and blue meant passion. When the
sea-gulls woke us up in our separate rooms each morning the first thought
that occurred to us was to come out onto the terrace and be again together
whispering our secrets till the moment when we would produce yet another,
a new, secret. When the wind lulled us to sleep we thought of the sea-gulls
which would wake us up on the morrow.
According to Irina, a poetess and university lecturer, we must have
annihilated even then. Her words were not in error. The errors were those of
their users, the poets and university lecturers. I love philosophy but even
more I love to love. More than the words I love the dulcet and sometimes
hurtful thrill. In the moments when we made love amidst the water snakes
and seaweeds I wanted to be a water snake or a seaweed. The do not fear
their fantasies about annihilation. They merely make love, not paying
attention how and whom they are touching… For a second, I recalled the
exhibition of three-hundred of my pictures and the Architects’ Club. The
exhibition named “I, Papa Jan”. At the opening I turned up with two
pythons. One was a white-and-yellow albino. They were hanging around my
neck while I was reciting the poem “A World in a Hurry”. Thousands turned
up to see the living Papa Jan, smothered by pythons. The newspapers at the
time wrote: “The world-famous artist Papa Jan is to pay back Bulgaria’s
foreign debt”. I did indeed know how to do that. My idea to make a Gallery
out of Bulgaria’s parliament fell through because it threatened the livelihood
of many mediocre MPs. All the artists who took part in the project remained
misunderstood, poor and hungry… With the touch of their bodies the snakes
made visible the memory of these earthly events projected in oblivion… The
recollection again faded in the depth of the seas.
I was enjoying it all. The snakes knew how to touch spots on the body
unlike any other creatures… That is why their touch is invariably pleasant.
Suffice it for one to have developed a refined skin sense of what is
pleasurable…
Irina kept on playing with the mouse on me.When she placed it on my
head they eyes of the goddess with the shield shone brightly once again…
“What does this mean?”
“Close your eyes!” She did so. “You are in the picture.”
“But that’s not Sinemorets. Only a part of it where I’m alone…”
“Without the torn up jokers?”
“Without them!”
“And what is in the water?”
“I see her. She’s coming out of the water. That same one, with the
shield… She is coming up to me…” At first Irina’s voice was full of horror.
It became a whisper betraying excitement…
“She’s very beautiful. She’s walking along the shore… She so
sensuous…
I placed the mouse on her lips and Irina’s tongue played around with
it.
On the screen I saw her kissing the Goddess’s breasts. The shield
dropped down from her belly revealing an enormous virtual spider. Irina got
caught up in the cobweb. She struggled to tear it but got tangled in it more
and more till in the end she disappeared under the sticky web. On the screen
I saw her huddled like and embryo in the centre. Huddled like an embryo
was I as well. We were in a posture reminiscent of 69 and of Yin and Yang.
We were innocents deeply entangled in the web of our guilt like children
entangled in the web of world developments and in their own passion. We
were in a state of heavenly oblivion, given to the heavenly orgasm of the
unborn. Then we saw the spider’s mouth. Something opened and we saw the
sky. We started crying and looked for a milk breast to satisfy our hunger and
after finding it, satiated, we parted… Irina and the Goddess kissed. Both
were convulsing under the Sinemorets sun. That was the other Goddess now.
She was not hiding the intellectual web under her shield…
The computer was blocked. It produced uncharacteristic sounds and
visibilty on the screen was poor. For an instant the picture came sharply into
focus. The memory was working. That was not in the program but the
computer seemed to suck up Irina’s memory and then reproduce it…
My darling Irina. She was standing before a blank canvas, brush in
hand. Slowly, she undressed till her body was as bare as the canvas. Her
movements betrayed hesitation: was she to paint on her body or on the
canvas? With the brush dry, she executed a few brush strokes along her
breasts. She opened her lips. Her tongue passionately licked them and they
became very bright. The pupils of her eyes had widened with excitement and
the hand holding the brush trembled. She slid it in a zig-zag from the nipples
down along her belly. Along her thighs. Still zig-zagging, she again reached
her breasts, exhaling in excitement.With a trembling hand she touched the
palette with the brush and then daubed the canvas with it. Then her
movements became surer. Her breathing – more frequent. Involuntarily, she
started shaking her waist as if dancing exotically and continued painting.
The painting became radiant. A radiance of excitement, bright as Irina’s
lips, wet with arousal.Gradually a woman’s body took shape on the canvas.
Her body, shaken with the same arousal she experienced at that moment.It
was a self-portrait of what she was feeling at that moment. Irina was
embodied in the picture. As if she had built into it her shadow and her
arousal; she was exhausted as after a stormy orgasm. Her hand, however, did
not let go of the brush. Something was lacking in the picture. Her open lips
took the shape of a smile. As if a humorous rose had blossomed.
She started painting little penises on her portrait. Penises which
touched every corner of her body. They traced the line of the brush with
which she had touched her body a short while before.Penises different in
nature. With a different potential of masculinity. Penises, expressing
different sensations. Penises of different colour. Irina laughed and went on
adding more and more intimate male attributes upon her naked selfportrait… She was painting her emancipation. She was breaking the shackles
of the intellectual order with which she had corsetted her emotions. She was
undoing the corsette of her refined professorial politeness. She loved herself
in the picture and was giving herself to her desire. She was satisfying herself
as she painted. She rebelled as she imparted on her picture erotic excess
bordering on indecency. More and more penises… She grabbed another dry
brush and again caressed her body with it. Her bristling skin evoked
associations with the male organs upon her nude self-portrait. And so the
naked Irina created the portrait “The Nude Irina”.
On the morrow, the frowning Rozenkreutzer with typical half-irony,
half-alarm, scepticism and reproach in his voice murmured:
“That Papa Jan has taken complete hold over you. Penises!
Intellectual exhibitionism and masturbation!This picture stands between
your body and what you truly feel!”
This was a fault of the faultless Rozenkreutzer.The picture represented
her actual sensation…
I pulled down the switch to turn it off and was horrified to see that the
machine had never been turned on…
17.
The next day I learnt of the numerous problems which had arisen
across the electronic network. Several older Internet enthusiasts had for the
last time turned on their favourite machines before heart failure had mowed
them down. As for the teenagers, they crazily boasted to their school-mates
what “screwing” they had been doing with their computers. Numerous
overfilled disks. Many blocked computers. Many over-used
installations.Perhaps it had nothing to do with us…
18.
The “Titanic” depicted on my painting was sinking but something was
lacking, viz., a rock upon which somebody was sitting in an erotic posture.
A long time after Sinemorets I witnessed the philosophical spider entangling
our innocence in its cobweb, till it tore it apart to feed on us.I wanted to
revenge myself depicting some philosopher or other. I first thought of
Rozenkreutzer as the most talented. It would not be gentlemanly, though.
After all he was my rival in love and I need not hit below the belt.I then
thought of my pal Stephen, but he is no system-builder; he was intuitive,
rather, nor did he possess that title and fame, due to him in order to be guilty
to me and to the world of his thoughts. I decided the immortal were guilty
rather than the living ones. Kant, though dry, was to my liking. There could
be no question of Nietzsche. He was a martyr, a half-saint. He would
certainly have been canonized had he not called himself an anti-Christ and
had he taken to defending Christianity, instead of battling it… Nietzsche! I
painted Lenin in the nude. Yes! None other than Lenin! I painted him sitting
on a rock. His whole body exuded hyper-sexual, unsatisfied passionate
desire. Of the kind that instigates revolutions. Nietzsche and the naked Lenin
were unfortunately both stricken down with sexually transmitted diseases
and could not see my creation. The author of the “Merry Science” could not
make merry nor could the leader of revolutions be enraged as a
revolution…As a revolution featuring nude women and a tricolour held up
on high… All that accompanied by scores of youths toting their guns… Well
I think that kind of picture was made by another painter!
I painted Lenin sexily naked upon a rock!
Philosophical dictatorship over emotions is a dictatorship over the
whole world. This is yet another message:
“PHILOSOPHICAL DICTATORSHIP OVER EMOTIONS IS A
GLOBAL DICTATORSHIP!”
That was the message carried by my controversial painting. I felt the
spider under the shield of Pallas Athene would leave Irina and me alone
now.And should it bother us again I will at any rate be satisfied I had given
it as good as I had got from it… I had painted a terrorist of philosophy
naked…
19.
We stood at the crossroads of separation. I had things to do in the
Commonwealth of Independent States and Irina had to wait for me… As
soon as the world-famous actress Lydia Shukshina called me on the phone
and asked me to meet her, I was aware of a string of ebbs and flows in
Irina’s breast. I knew what that meant. She would take advantage of my
absence to flee away. While I was with her she could not summon up the
strength to do it. We were to be rude to each other again, wounding each
other vulgarly and then turning vulgarity into tenderness. We were to burn
inside shepherds’ huts. We were to hide from each other and in telephone
calls to seek out fictitious “Volodyas” and “Samantas”. We would score
verbal points against each other and then be bored with the game of words.
We would look for the next, more powerful dose of love and adventure. I
would be unfaithful to her on occasion which she would punish by making
me fulfil desires repugnant to me. Then again our hearts would be in Balchik
or in Sinemorets… I would see the world as a sinking “Titanic” and naked
bodies in the ferocious dogs, intertwined in a final love thrill but in fact
clinging onto life itself…I would by and by realize “Titanic” isn’t the world
but our love. I would renounce it. Timidly and by and by hysterically, she
would ask for her freedom which later she would rather not want with all of
her heart, soul and flesh. Often she would be with me in her capacity as a
prophessor of philosophy when all I want is a lover. Often I would be the
rider chasing her when she wants a lover…
I had not yet seen the pony and most of all I feared she would leave
me before we had been to see it… I knew she would leave me yet I
continued to believe otherwise… Her tears when seeing me off betrayed her
yet again but I did not shed a single tear, thus not betraying myself. I merely
told her we were parting for a little while but I knew it to be otherwise…
Our farewell was genuine.
During our phone call she repeated her genuine “Farewell!” which
eliminated any doubt about her leaving me. However, I refused to trust my
intuition just as I often refused to trust my reason – that day was a
memorable one for me, so I did not yield to sorrow. I had been given the title
tavricheski prince of Russia for my services to culture and world art. Days
before that I had also become a professor at two Russian universities for my
discoveries in painting. “What does fame, money and recognition mean
when you have no one to share them with…” thought I as I put down the
receiver after her farewell… But all is not lost, despite my doubts, she
would wait for me. She would be happy for my successes and for the fact
that the prophecies of old Vanga were already materializing… These
thoughts lifted my spirits.
Juna was waiting for me at the reception in the official hall. My
recognition began when I first met her. At the time we held hands. My bioenergy was transferred to her body and returned to mine different. Her bioenergy passed through my body and returned different to hers. I never
supposed such a powerful exchange of energy could ever happen. Never
suspected such a passionate contact between energies. For a fraction of a
second I perceived something new in my brain. A new creature, new road,
new thought, new insight, pregnancy of the brain. Juna fertilized my brain…
She was the woman who saw to it that I receive the title Tavricheski Prince
of Russia and the order “New Elite of Russia”…
After some time I became an academician at the “Juna” International
Academy of Non-Traditional Medicine. At the reception I tried to behave
normally but in my thoughts I was now in Balchik, now in Sofia, now in
Sinemorets… At all the places I had visited with Irina… Her “Farewell!”
never ceased reverberating in my head.
Mechanically, I handed round the diary in which I collected opinions
of people from all walks of life, intellect, erudition, outlook, family status,
nationality, race, occupation and state of mind. Opinions about me and my
art, about what they received from me would like to do so in future. The
diary would have been inadequate without an entry from Juna. Before
making the phone call to Irina I was happy that that evening I would get the
entry and was excited in my anticipation about its content. I handed the diary
with indifference which I hope I did not betray outwardly and even managed
to conceal my emotions from the hyper-sensitive Juna. I hoped… Seated on
my shoulders, Irina was tenderly caressing the male rock…
Her buttocks raised high, Irina was riding the horse… On the back of
a dolphin, Irina shouted that survival is more splendid than death. Irina and I
were rolling about on the carpet of caught water snakes… I was making love
to Irina in the stolen fisherman’s boat and she was holding two fish in her
hands… The pictures and the exhibitions were smeared in the four elements.
The exhibitions were turning into love in the four elements. The iron spring
of time shrank and we found ourselves in another epoch. In different epochs
we found the same form of love but with a different taste. Irina and I were
betraying a man whom we both admired, respected and loved. We felt like
criminals and discovered that nothing was sweeter than the crime of two
people in love and that nothing was more bitter than its fruit. Irina and I
wished to lie down in the final bed of love. The earth itself. We wanted to be
launched in a capsule and there suffocate. While at the same time we loved
life so much that we could make love to the whole of nature.Without
perversity which has been invented by reason.
With the thrills of natural purity… Of trees and of the carpet of
snakes… Of fish and the warm rocks… Under the gaze of hundreds of forest
spirits to charge with energy the moon and its brilliance to fill the eyes of a
lonely youth with passionate yearning and frank love. I did not look at what
Juna had written in my diary. I went back to my room and again tried to
contact the woman who had caused me even before I met her to put brush to
canvas and who was keeping her distance from me so I could unburden my
passions on the canvases, who opened a door to herself to me in order to
inspire me, who wished to leave me because she had perhaps seen how
dangerous our affair had become and how deadly satiety could be… The line
was engaged. I slammed down the receiver. I looked at myself in the
mirror.I opened a bottle of champagne and knocked lightly on the glass with
it:
“Good evening, Your Highness Prince Papa Jan, Prince of Russia and
of exile!”
I opened the diary at the page on which Juna had written:
“Prince Papa Jan, you are a great man on this planet; your work is of
great importance as it deserves great attention and gives a lot of food for
thought and contemplation; your art has eternal life in it and let it be as your
god decrees! You are a living legend! LIVE FOREVER!
Your sincere friend: Juna, Moscow, July 1, 1998”
At the moment I had to be most happy I felt keenly unhappy. There
was nobody to share my joy and nothing could make you happy at such a
moment. This is yet another message:
“WHEN THERE IS NOBODY TO SHARE YOUR JOY, YOU ARE
MOST UNHAPPY EVEN IF YOU ARE HAPPIEST.”
20.
When I apply the brush to the canvas…
I touch a virgin breast and fly; I become the alpha and omega of all
things. I whisper to grass and trees. I descend into the precipice of memory
and frolic with nothingness. I expand the universe and create a planet for my
dreams. A planet of beauty. A planet where there is no sickness or war. A
planet wher I am alone, yet in the company of millions of souls.In a desert,
yet in a garden. I shake the foundations of matter and absorb many souls in
mine.I perform a magic ritual thereby re-living mankind’s dreams. I carry
the vision of a dew drop and of silence, of thunder and of snow,of the newly
born and of the expiring, of the snail and the eagle,of the strawberry and the
rose, of sea foam and of the invisible lunar oases, of forgotten dawns and of
the clouds, of the infinity sheltering in a single heart, of the sunbeam peering
into a cave, of the hungry spirit and the fruits of the soul in the garden of
wisdom.I am everything and every one. I experience all lived moments with
all hearts who have ever lived or are unborn. I dissolve the lava of anger in
tenderness and plant the roses of love in the craters of spiritual death. I speed
along the highway towards the absolute and dance with perfection. I lose life
and win life. I exist to live and live to exist. I day-dream. I build the castle of
existence. I crown life and it is my sole master. The one before whom I can
kneel. The one to whom I am loyal and whom I obey. The one on whose
behalf I can wage war against everything except Freedom…
When I apply the brush to the canvas…
I recall the first sunbeam in my eyes
I adorn time with new space.
I make new clothes for God.
I create a new Credo of a New Faith.
The pupils of my eyes kiss billions of other pupils. My hand caresses
billions of hands. The cells of my body become infinite in number. The
number of my emotions becomes equal to the number of atoms in the whole
universe. I travel in the secrets of all dimensions. I write a billion of volumes
simultaneously and sing with the voices of all humanity. I change thirteenthousand skins in an instant. One touch of the canvas with my brush helps
me live through thirteen million years. My breaths make up the bricks of the
fortress of eternity. I inhale the scents of all existing things.
When I apply the brush to the canvas…
This is I, though my “I” is not a single “I” but many.
I am a falling angel but also a soul ascending into heaven.
I am a tree with countless fruits.
I am food for the hearts who love to love.
I am wine for the souls that live happily.
I am a road where there is no road for thought.
I create my own self.
I am a game with new rules.
I am the bright side of all human relationships. I am a lover of
eternity…
I am the apocrypha of interpretations of genius.
I am the form of formlessness, colours.
I bear my own name but can be called by the names of everybody and
everything.
I have my own face but under it are hidden all the faces of the visible.
My memory if the world memory.
My sins are the sins of all mankind and the canvas is the redemption –
redemption without pain or bloodshed.
Redemption through a fresh birth.
When I am with a brush in hand I set myself ablaze. I am born of my
ashes scattered by the wind.I become bigger. A snake with its tail in its
mouth. A line without beginning or an end. The outline of the mirror in
which shines the image of love. When I am with a brush in hand I am
ancient history. A parable with many meanings. An eternal wanderer in a
strange land. Unheard speech, absorbed in the yearning skins of all living
creatures. Love, conquering all and giving itself to all.Which IS everything.
Looking for a caress where there is no ash. Feminine truth,
love,ecstasy, clothes knitted by the gods – that is me!
That is ME!
My heart is the unpolished and innocent gem of youth.
The experience of my mature years has not made it more sinful but
has only adorned itself with its pure brilliance.
I experience catharsis and am a catharsis myself.
I dilute paints and am paints myself.
I weave dimensions and myself become a new dimension
I dream and am a dream myself. I turn dreams into reality and am real
myself.
With my breath I wave the flags of time.
Ghostly, I inhabit the towers of the crumbling castle of unadulterated
truth.
I search for light and light torches which at once are extinguished, till
I myself become a torch and produce light even for a brief instant.
A brush in hand, I am a child who knows he wants to Be and to
Possess. I ask myself no questions but spur my horse towards the next battle.
I look for the end of infinity, for the brink beyond which lies eternity. And I
know and I want to Be and Be, and Be…
I am ecstasy and lunar tranquility.
An emotion approved and rejected by reason.
Many destinies merged into one: mine.
A knot of choices and a spider who knits out of lights the blood
circulation of Living Beauty.
A worm in the fruit of knowledge, fattened by fresh questions about
old sins.
A seducer with an iron patience who destroys the pillars supporting
peace of mind yet I am also that peace itself, endangered by its own
temptations.
A hedge-row between Happiness and Bestiality.
Human, yet not entirely so.
A long story begun before words existed which never comes to an end
even when concepts are no more.
When I’m with a brush in hand…
Then I am a transmission belt of the engine of life.
A yearning for what has never been yearned for.
A vision of the the invisible.
A thought about things never thought of.
The truth about things which do need justice but love.
The logic of the absurd.
An adventure within an adventure.
And again chemical reactions, living cells and a hand. Eyes full of
wonder before a canvas.
A sower in the garden of Eden.
A searcher for God but above all for Man.
A betrayer of a tragic destiny.
A long farewell to old loves.
A passionate Aurora Borealis on a wet and oppressive night.
An icon-painter on the vault of heaven.
Wild, undimmed freedom.
Primary solution.
Black remorse.
A rebellion of innocence and a fresh guilt.
What will I be if I let the brush go?
When the fingers of darkness rub the temples of the tired sun?
When my breast at my last breath like trumpets announce to the dark
that a heart has gone silent?
When the inevitable comes, of which we know but in which we do not
fully believe?
When the walls of my memory collapse and it merges with the
voiceless?
When the nightmares get tired and oblivion takes place?
When, in a cold hand, the brush gets cold as well?
When the world shuts its gates on me?
No! I will not shut my eyes. I will sneak a glance or two whenever I
hold a brush. I’ll sneak a glance at the world from my pictures and will
laugh at the stares of all who had lots of money but were not inclined to buy.
I’ll be all I have always been. I’ll still be thrilled with my former
thrills.Because I have allowed myself to be so many inadmissible things.
Because I have dared exist even outside existence. Like the imprint I have
left upon time. Like a colour and a thought in which I harnessed the stallions
of my breaths of passion.Like a message I have uttered and like all messages
I had not time to utter but instilled in colour.Like memories built into the
canvases.Like the emotion which I gave to them. Like what I have been -–
the person who knows not time which measures his right to live because I
have been outside time.
I am familiar with global sorrow but am not sad. I cannot reconcile
myself to the thought that at some point in time all will end after having
been able to press the infinite into an instant. The instant when I hold a
brush. The instant when I have been genuinely happy!
“IF IN A SINGLE INSTANT YOU HAVE BEEN GENUINELY
HAPPY, END DOES NOT EXIST FOR YOU!”
21.
My apprehensions were proven justified. When I returned to Bulgaria
Irina was already in America and I did not know her address. For the first
time in my life I cursed my faultless intuition. For the first time I wished it
was not me. I scorned my success and my titles. I scorned my glory. I
scorned lust and even more I scorned philosophers, philosophy,
philosophizing... artists, beauty, love. I scorned my very scorn. I was a
precipice which led to another one. Was all that in Sinemorets genuine?
I recalled Irina’s words: “A phase of your life has come to an end, Jan,
that’s why you recall things as you wish them to have been and not as they
truly were.” I came from the abyss. The abyss of her body. The abyss
between her legs. The abyss in her head. The abyss under her pores. The
abyss of the infinite combination of atoms into genes which had created the
woman-abyss…
Unawares, I found myself on the brink of the abyss. I stood on the
parapet of the fifteenth floor. I stood erect, without moving. The height
attracted me. I felt my body incline, saw the most beautiful picture and
experienced the most terrible orgasm. Perhaps it was divine intervention or I
was simply in luck. A sudden wave, powerful like a hurricane, pushed my
body back towards the room.I fell from the parapet and nearly broke the
glass.I clenched my teeth and again made for the parapet. It was then that the
doves attacked me. I love feeding the doves and even if I had a mere slice of
bread I chose to break it into crumbs and hear their song.They learnt to
alight upon my arms and shoulders. Sometimes they behaved like veritable
cheeky beggars but more often than not they were simply buskers whose
tunes I enjoyed and who expected a reward in exchange. At that moment
they were predatory, quarrelsome and full of spite. They beat me with their
wings and pierced my skin with their beaks and nails. I attempted to defend
myself but I never suspected how skilled in martial arts these peaceful birds
were so much so, that in spite of my heavy and strong body I could not make
headway towards the parapet… Scratched all over, I tried feeding them for
the last time… I shared with them my loaf of bread. In their company I ate
the most tasty bits in my life and when – pleased – they started singing tears
filled my eyes and through them I whimpered:
“I love life! I love life! I love life!”
22.
Before sunrise I started on my way to the village of the old man from
whom I had once bought the horses. I wanted to see the pony. It was my
foremost wish. I overcame it because I did not know what might happen to
me from then on. Instead of horses this time I bought a cow which I killed,
gutted and huddled inside it like an embryo. I kept on thinking. I thought and
thought and thought and finally I stopped thinking because I was already an
embryo…
23.
Rumi was lying before the computer with closed eyes and her entire
expression betrayed intense pleasure. Irina was caressing her body with the
mouse, whispering to her in my voice:
“It’s good, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Rumi groaned. “It’s delicious, my dear boy!”
The monitor showed an infinitely spreading fine meadow, the wind
was frolicking on it and the grass resembled waves… When my face met
with that of the demonic one she raised a threateneing hand with enormous
nails above the heart of the girl I was with at the moment… She went on
playing with the mouse. She passed it over Rumi’s breasts and peaks
appeared on the monitor. The height was enormous. Dizzying. Causing icy
trembling in the groins. Terrible icy shivers for the one who does not like
heights and passionate for the one who is accustomed to them… The mouse
travelled down onto the belly and sunny meadows appeared. Still further
down – a thin copse in which Rumi and I, still children, met in secret in
order to embrace each other and frighten each other with demons. Still
further down a pull came into view. We bathed under the water-fall. We
laughed. Ferocious teeth showed on Irina’s face and her nails grew bigger.
Automatically, I grasped her hand. I struggled in silence. She was pressing
her hand in the direction of Rumi’s heart and I was trying to deflect it. She
was demonically strong but I used to be angelically in love. I pushed back
the hand and Irina melted.
I went on playing with the mouse on Rumi’s body. Suns were
spreading light and illuminating her hair. A moon covered the sun but the
sun won. We made love in her room but it was illumined by our countless
moods and was different each time. We travelled round the world in her
bedroom and then, when the mouse was upon her lips, we gently kissed.
Rumi opened her eyes and turned off the computer.
“And now, let’s do it in real life.”
We embraced, completely forgetting the lurking demon who was
jealously sharpening her nails and teeth. The monitor showed scores of
blinking eyes, peering at our naked bodies. We made love on the parquet
floor, before the “Picture with the Jokers” and when I looked away I saw
the still demonic woman.She lived in her blue world. She was watching us
but was not jealous because she felt quite satiated with her own self and the
sun, not showing in the picture, shone upon her. I involuntarily recalled the
two rings of Thracian chieftains as well as the other ornaments, two-and-ahalf thousand years old.I found them with the rest and glued them onto the
picture. Then I removed them. One became Irina’s possession, the other,
mine. Things between us went badly from the moment they were stolen in
Balchik. She perhaps still has hers but the rings have to be two. And the
bodies have to be two.
“There have to be two bodies!” I said to Rumi.
“Sometimes I’m alone but do make love to me now! Make love to me
Papa Jan, make love to me and let’s merge into one.”
Her body opened with delight.Her lips like tender plasma poured
down my skin. They sank under it in order to become an oasis in the desert
of my soul… I lifted her. I made her sit on the tripod. I leaned it against the
wall to steady it and went on at greater pace. The tripod was about to break
at any moment. The sounds coming out of Rumi’s mouth bumped against
the paintings and altered the hues. The colours brightened and came to life.
Now I was sharing their beauty with someone else and they became still
more beautiful because another pair of eyes were experiencing happiness
under them. Rumi gave a piercing scream and her body on the tripod went
limp. I took up the brush and began painting on her stomach. I was painting
the “Picture with the Jokers”. Reduced in size, with pale hues, with
goddesses collapsing in the waves, with a woman of the Pacific islands, her
face hidden in fog and complete with untorn jokers.The five blossoms on the
original picture were now thirteen… When I painted the face of the moon
upon her left breast she was already laughing. Merrily, like a child. On her
right-hand breast I painted a window out of which peered eyes full of tears
and yearning.
“Sometimes I am what you see on my right breast…”
“And am I the left?”
“Sometimes.”
I cleared my working table of the brushes and palettes. I lifted Rumi
from the tripod and placed her upon the table. The picture from Sinemorets
was becoming a palette on which I mixed the paints. I wanted to paint
Rumi’s virtual emotions although I was still hearing Irina’s demonic
laughter.
24.
Danny, Mimi and Peppy. Three candles sadly melting. Three liberated
women who in that distant past when I was encountering Irina only on the
municipal marketplace, provided cover from the man who desperately
desired the woman barred from him… We made a video-impression where
the naked bodies in the pictures were transformed into pictures on naked
flesh upon which, in black, burned the signature “Papa Jan”… The images in
the pictures were making love. The pictures dissolved in the reality in which
Papa Jan was kissing the breasts of all three. Before the finale of the
impression there was a comic banter. After the scene in which my head was
like a female breast amongst the three pairs of breasts had vanished, the
medal of a “Hero of Socialist Labour” appeared on a smiling female breast
with bared teeth.
The finale was touching. I was standing before the candle and prayed
for forgiveness… The three sadly melting candles Danny, Mimi and Peppy
were burning out far from me.That was at the time when I could be
frivolous. When I could be satisfied by orgies and not know what
pervertedness was because after all perversion is an invention of our
imperfect reason to rein in the freedom that Nature gives to us… Where did
those carefree times go?!
At the end of the old memory on video I prayed before the candle. I
prayed to be liberated from the demon… As in the old memory on video I
felt remorse and emptiness.
25.
December 8th, 19… We were in a cave near the Miraculous Bridges,
as if in the jaws of an enormous beast which might at any moment sink its
stone teeth into us. As if we were cave dwellers. As if we belonged to each
other’s heart. Perhaps that was how they seemed from the inside. Dark,
frightening, beautiful – hearts in which there were only the two of us. Hearts
in which our voices reverberated… Irina started singing, louder and louder.
Her song reverberated in the cave. The acoustics were perfect and I felt as
though I was with a choir of three-hundred Irinas… I started singing too.The
male choir merged with the female one and the teeth-like stalactites turned
into a piano. The idea of a piano excited us.
The excitement of the bodies was transformed into an excitement of
the voices. They struck against the stalactite piano keys strongly,
passionately and wildly. We turned into a grand piano. A grand piano on
which was making music the tenderest, the most inspired, the most liberated
and the most soulful composer. We were his fugues and his requiem. We
were turning into sounds and sounds have no clothes, so thoughtlessly,
without even being aware how and when, we undressed.We became a
polyphony. We merged and we dreamt.The cave turned into a music
platform. It turned into an audience, gripped by ecsatsy over which we
poured ourselves. Which we possessed.From the heart to the tips of the
fingers. From the deep throat of the cave our song poured over the forest
and when it turned into the sound of mutual orgasm several stalactites fell
down. On both sides of us. Centimetres from our bodies. We kept on making
love, screaming and singing. We felt as though a Damoclean sword was
hanging over us.
“Love or death!”
“A song!”
“A romance and a requiem!”
“A cave!”
“An oven!”
“A sword!”
“Love or death!”
“Transcendent hearts!”
“A sword!”
We shouted out the words in between our songs and after each scream
a sharp stalactite broke off and fell near our passionately intertwined bodies.
Our voices made love. We penetrated like male flesh deep into the cave and
it reflected them in an orgasmic tone… Stalactites kept breaking off while
we made love ever more furiously, happily, ecsatically in the grand piano of
a cave upon whose keys the most talented composer with a name no one
knew was creating his “Ode to Love”. The sounds were turning into
pictures. The falling stalactites were falling angels and became closing
years, lost memories,near deaths in the rush of mad love. The sounds were
turning into pictures… The pictures of virtual reality in which Irina and I
found ourselves next to the piano in her room. The composer was a young
woman.
A young woman with blond, almost silvery hair, snow-white face and eyes
of a spring leaf. Her tender fingers struck at the keys. Our cells were turning
into keys on which played creatures like that at the piano but transparent and
almost invisible. They were composing the most moving, most passionate,
tenderest, most earthly and most human fugue…Our voices reverberated in
the cave and I wanted to paint “The Voices of Love in the Cave”.
I soon painted that picture, too, and its message was:
“THE SOUL IS A CAVE – SILENT WHEN EMPTY AND
BEAUTIFULLY SINGING WHEN IT HARBOURS OTHER SOULS.”
Later on I staged an exhibition in another cave near Karlukovo. A
quintet of naked female violinists was performing music amidst my pictures
and the two memories merged into a single symphony, a single picture. It
represents a violin. A violin moaning and in its peculiar way cleaving
hundreds of space dimensions… That violin was a cave!
We were that cave!
It was decorated with my pictures and a quintet of nude female
violinists played in unison with the enormous grand piano of the cave…
We stood in the cave and our bodies enjoyed the fine music. It gave
out the same sounds as Nicolo Busoti’s “red violin”. I told the story of that
sinister bloody drama. In 1681 the Italian violin-maker Nicolo Busoti
dedicated one of his violins to his yet unborn son. At the birth of the child
both it and his wife died. Nicolo mixed blood from his wife with the varnish
with which he subsequently varnished a violin.
The famous “Red Violin” traveled across the world, many
monasteries and fell in the hands of celebrated virtuosi, but everywhere it
went, it brought misfortune and death. All who played on it died in
mysterious circumstances. In the 20th century the violin was priced at 2.4
million US dollars. We at once decided to perform a magic ritual at the
memory of that sinister drama, leaving imprints with our blood. I tore up
Irina’s white skirt which served as a canvas. We cut the palms of our hands
and started painting the most beautiful violin in world painting. I took the
canvas to my atelier and completed that crazy masterpiece. I called the
picture “The Blood of the Violin” and hid it so that after many years experts
will try to guess at the mixture of paints.
26.
An orgy with thirty girls. The last supper of Papa Jan, the Demon. We
ate voraciously using only our hands.We tore up the half-raw meat of the
sacrificial lamb. We drank wine straight from our bodies. We raged and
everybody sought the aggressive, savage embrace of just about everyone
else. We threw pictures out of the window and a friend was photographing it
all… That film was not to end with Papa Jan praying before the candle! I
was not to renounce the demonic side of my nature. I wished to become a
demon like the one pursuing me so that we could malke love again and be
forever together, even though in hell. I wished to provoke her. I wanted to
challenge God!
The orgy ended.
When the euphoria of the making of the scandalous film passed, I
came to my senses sadder than ever… I started on my way to see the pony
but instead I changed my direction towards the Rila Monastery where I lit
thirteen candles as I usually do. No demon at all was to become of me. I
don’t know if I repented sincerely enough… Perhaps I, like Dante’s most
pitiable characters, was to stay forever in Purgatory. Unredeemed for
Paradise and too much despised to be admitted to Hell… If, that is, heaven
and hell exist apart from what I lived through…
27.
On the morrow after the university holiday the grand piano melody
still reverberated in our ears. It merged with the murmur of the engine of my
car.
At noon it echoed from the snow-covered boughs of the trees of the
forest near the Bachkovo Monastery. It was still in our ears even at the
monastery – like a heretical tune amidst the singing of the church choir.
It was with us outside, in the December wind; in our monastery lodgings
where we made love, although we had prayed to God to pardon our sin, just
a while before…
“Now we’ll either be punished, or our love will no longer be sinful…
Or God does not exist…”
“You are strange, Papa Jan,” Irina said as she lay prostrate after lovemaking. “On the one hand you regard Christianity as a tradition, yet on the
other – as a myth…”
“The professor has resumed lecturing,” I laughed. “I can’t deny what I
haven’t seen, nor can I refrain myself from doubting my beliefs, cannot help
believing what I don’t wish to believe and doubt causes me mythical horror
and fantasies. Or simply, my nature is made like that. I see things differently
as my mood changes. And besides, I’m still hearing the symphony of the
grand piano…”
“The cave!”
“The grand piano of the greatest composer!”
“Its tone becomes awesome, I hear him borrowing from Beethoven’s
Fifth Symphony…”
“Whereas I hear borrowing from Bach’s Toccata and Fugue,” I said
and half-closed my eyes. And saw a waterfall. Around it – snow. Above
them – falling stars. They merge with the waterfall and crash as they touch
the Earth giving out a rumbling sound, splashes and beauty… Then we
remembered the talented Bulgarian composer Trifon Silyanovsky. A great
Bulgarian who was revered by none other than Shostakovich but whom the
“just” communist authorities threw into prison along with many other
distinguished Bulgarians. We recalled his last concert which he gave after
obtaining due recognition at which I presented to him a fitting painting. At
the time Irina told me of her great admiration of him. We deeply regretted
he was no longer with us in order to write the music of the waterfall.
“I want us to stage and exhibition. To arrange the twenty or so
paintings which are in our car.”
“But who will see them? It’s the dead of night now!”
“The waterfall dearest girl! The waterfall!”
After gaining some distance away from the monastery we undressed.
We wanted to listen to the melody through our skin. We wanted to touch the
snow naked and to transform our shivers into notes and amorous passion.
Lots of snow fell from the trees upon us.
“It is covering us!” said Irina but before we had completed arranging
the exhibition we felt sleepy. Nevertheless we decided to make love just as
tired as we were.Then we decided to repeat the love act, again and again…
At last we reached my number – thirteen. Metres away from us the snow had
melted, we were enveloped in vapour and felt hot as if it were the hottest day
in August… The sun was rising and we had to complete arranging the
paintings for the exhibition.We looked for convenient trees to hang them
onto.Billy appeared as if from nowhere.It was a white dog with blue eyes. I
immediately saw it was Billy because such a dog could be called by none
other name.It started peeing beside the trees and thus it indicated which were
the most suitable.It had an amazing taste.Were it a man I would have at once
appointed it to be my curator. After all why not?It found a way to indicate
the suitable spot for the most suitable gallery and the trees it had peed at
would not look at all uglier than the mediocre creations of my
“colleagues”…
The sun had completely risen when Irina and I came down from the
waterfall. Its rumble produced yet another motif for us to include into the
symphony from the cave and when Billy, standing on the shore, joined in the
tune the symphony transcended all cosmic dimensions which even the
genius of Bach had left untouched. The waterfall lashed at our naked bodies
which were locked in a passionate embrace. The waterfall ceased to be a
waterfall and turned into a rain of stars under which we were making
love.The first man and the first woman in the universe. There were none
other than us and beyond the embrace and the icy water there was desert and
loneliness… We were interrupted by a waiter who dropped down his tray.
Both he and the couple who had ordered some meal, were watching us. The
couple, with delight, while the waiter who had apparently collided with the
table gazed at us with eyes wide open. When we turned round we were
rewarded with a loud applause. I burst into a laugh and Irina pouted her lips.
Her mood changed radically when we were again in the monastery, warm
and refreshed.
“A waterfall and glances! And the symphony of the whole of Nature.
Of the falling stars and stalactites, of dogs in the cold and and applause. ‘A
Symphony of Fantasy’. Please, paint it, dear Papa Jan!”
“As soon as we complete it.”
In my mind the idea was adumbrated of the exhibition with the
orchestra of naked female violinists…The symphony was almost completed
and Irina was to see it painted. A painting of sounds. A picture of bodies
dissolved in sounds. A heavenly violin. An angel touching with his bow the
strings of the six human senses. Spaces broken down into dimensions. They
had merged to produce the finest polyphony…
“A WOMAN IS LIKE A VIOLIN. THE MALE SENTIMENTS ARE
THE BOW. IF A MAN IS NOT A VIRTUOSO MASTER OF HIS BOW,
HE CANNOT EXPECT THE DELIGHT IN ITS MELODY OF LOVE!”
28.
I was making love with Irina, the demon. Amid thirteen candles
arranged to form an inverted pentagram in my studio. The floor was soaked
with inflammable paints and we expected the burning out candles to set fire
to them at any moment…I had already made my choice. I could not burn out
slowly. I could not be a flickering light around which bats flap their wings of
unhappy love and could blow it out completely at any moment… What was
left to me was to perform the final, most sinful ritual and die and in hell to
find solace from the inferno on earth. If Hell did at all exist! If we had not
merely invented Paradise in order to feel heavenly pleasure in the brief
moments in which we are happy and which are followed by an endless
sinking into the morass where frogs do not croak, nor mosquitoes buzz,
where there are not marsh spirits nor a marsh priestess. The swamp of death
in life. The dull pain in the soul, more excruciating than the most refined
torture of the sadistic Inquisitor… The candles were burning quite low now.
The paints gave out a stink. They began to give out smoke. We coughed and
were choking and enjoyed our pleasure. Then we were enveloped in
darkness.We were carried on demonic wings… It felt like the adventure on
the monoplane because we were making love even as we hovered above a
precipice. There were however no rocks because under us and around us
spread only this all-encompassing abyss…I was choking and short of breath;
I wanted to beg for my life. I knew that a single word would bring recovery.
I could not utter it. There was no air in my lungs. My body was
mechanically touching and coming apart from that of Irina. Her body was
pierced by a passionate thrill but her lips did not give out that sound, so
familiar to me, which had turned into my favourite melody… Where were
we heading for?
Why were we doing it at all?
Our thrills were somehow bored and stiff! Cool and frustrated!
Sombre, dark and vapid… A single cry: “I love you!” would have saved us.
A single picture in the abyss would have brought us back to life but there
were no pictures in the abyss because there were no walls at the bottom of
which Billy could pee… A quake!
I forced myself to cry out. I heard the groaning! The abyss was
uncovering its bottom. Hundreds of infernal creatures writhed around one
another, bit one another, flapped their naked bodies with their tails, strained
their necks on chains. They poured tons of semen onto one another. They
enjoyed it and groaned in pain. They made love, if love it was, upon live
coals… The demon flew down. At long last he let us into the midst of the
demonic orgy… One infernal female voluptuary with three vaginas
embraced me with tentacle arms. She encircled tightly my neck with her
whip of a tongue. Two others started pulling me towards a love-nest
throwing up lava. A love-nest resembling a vagina.They made me lie into it,
pressing down my head on all sides with their drooping breasts. The vagina
sucked me inside itself. It drew me in in order to make minced meat out of
me… Like millions of vaginas before it had tried to suck me in in order to
turn me into minced meat… I lost sight of Irina. I was horrified at the
thought of what might be happening to her at that moment and summoned
up all my will power to call her but my feeling of sinking into an enormous
vagina which was going to make minced meat out of me began to give me
pleasure. I felt a frenzied excitement at the prospect of being turned into
minced meat in the organ of pleasure… I lost my senses. I was intoxicated
by the unknown, superbly delicious feeling but somehow I succeeded to find
in me that most pure voice, the one with which I sang in the cave, the one
which merged with the rumble of the waterfall and with the tender sound of
the violins of the nude girls and to cry out:
“I love you, Irina!”
The enormous vagina spat me out. I fell in the midst of a circle of
repugnant infernal beauties who bared their teeth at me. I succeeded to cry
out again:
“I love you, Irina!”
I felt the choking odour of burnt paints. The window was open. The
fire was extinguished. Irina was still in a swoon.I was not to know who did it
and that’s why I stopped trying to understand. I was still horrified and
disgusted to the bottom of my heart.
“But these were hallucinations caused by acetone vapours!” I was
prompt to reassure myself but my heart was still horrified. With its beats it
was saying:
“That is truly Hell itself, that…”
The candles had gone out. I stared at them. They reminded me other
candles at another occasion…
At that point I again started reciting a portion of the poem “Pearl
Frenzy”
You were a temptation, a betrayal,
you are the seasons, a red tulip,
a black accusation and tender flattery,
and live coal dying down in my hands.
And a wound, excitement and air and asthma,
and countless words in a biblical order arranged,
and a blossoming bud, a sword, a threat,
and a ticket to paradise bought on the black market.
Thorns coming from a cosmic distance,
mysterious steps towards my heart,
a poetic breath, a prosaic day,
air, pulsating under my wings.
The black boredom of my joys,
the eternal day-dream
the faded song of the bubbling brook,
a kiss in the darkness from hot lips.
The faded joy of mindless eternity,
pulsating happiness of winged dreams,
a caressing thrill of the exotic body,
a yearning for serene thoughts.
Madness, ecstasy and reason, earth,
wilderness and a blossoming garden,
you, Irina, wanted to have the world
which you lost without me.
29.
The candles at Belchin Banya. This is the name of a splendid resort. A
good friend of mine owned a hotel with an indoor pool with mineral water.
The marvellous symphony still sounded in our ears.We still felt on our
skin the icy tremors of the Bachkovo waterfall. Now we dived into the warm
mineral pool the tremors blossomed into diverse colours. The most beautiful
ones. We began singing our melody. In loud voices, without lyrics, we sang
the tune we had heard by the unknown composer in the cave, enriched by the
rumble of the waterfall and the barking of the dogs, and completed by the
naked female violin-players in order to make the work the single most
beautiful one. A work which only our ears could hear and only our hearts
delight in. Probably we were the composers. Our love. Our absurd wishes to
possess the whole of Nature and merge with the whole of Nature… We
made love underwater. Just as in Balchik, at Sinemorets and in the pool of
the fitness hall.After that we came out and lit a hundred and thirteen floating
candles which we had prepared for the occasion.We arranged them in the
form of a heart. Around it we let float paintings and roses.
We made our way inside the heart. For a long time we stood
embracing, facing each other, till in the end our faces got estranged and I
was not her one-time lover nor was she my beloved. At the moment we were
characters in a novel about love. She was a woman passionately in love with
a Franciscan monk who was myself. To reach him she, dressed as a boy,
had managed to join the Franciscan order. We spent a long time in spiritual
closeness and conversations about earthly and heavenly love, till one day she
confided in me she was a woman. We were in her cell when she opened her
cassock for me to see the most beautiful creation of the Most High. Two
hemispheres full of passion, trembling as though they lived a life of their
own apart from the body. I was stricken dumb.In front of me was the devil
incarnated in female flesh.
“I have always loved you though I realized our love is impossible
because you are a monk. I thought I would be content with just being close
to you, yet my desire for you grew stronger and stronger…” Her eyes were
full of tears and resembled a pool in which floated candles arranged in the
shape of a heart in which were just the two of us.
Voluptuous torpor overcame me. Then my mouth got dry. The very
floor under my feet shook. The church bell rang for vespers but its sound
merged with my heartbeat. The heartbeat I had experienced before. I wanted
to shout: “Go away, Satan!” but I could not. I felt I was not a true Franciscan
monk.
“Put on your cassock. Leave the monastery and pray for absolution!”
my dry lips uttered but then something choked me.
I felt a weakness for the boy whom I thought she was. I suffered at
having been betrayed.I lost a friend only to find myself confronted by a
tender seducer. My suffering sank in the walls of the cell. What I knew the
next moment was that my hands were upon her breasts. We pressed lips in a
prolonged desperate kiss. The transient pleasure of earthly love was leading
us along a road of roses into Hell. She succeeded in seducing me. I yielded
to her embraces and we had to flee in order to avoid severe punishment.
Thus she returned to her father’s house – one of the wealthiest aristocrats of
his time – and now we were in the pool. Seducers and seduced who had not
yet yielded to the sexual thrill. We kissed passionately and long. Just as if
characters from a novel. We started swimming to the borderline of flames.
Finally, when she timidly opened her legs in order to lock them around my
waist and I penetrated her, she shook as with the pain of a virgin being
deflowered.
When that moment passed we were again our real selves. We made
love as we usually did. Wildly and passionately, sucking in all our
surroundings.We made love amid the flames and the water. We were making
love at the centre of a heart of fire. In the end, however, our love became
rather stormy, causing waves which tore the heart.
A rose hit a candle and caught fire but was rapidly extinguished in the
water. Sadly smoking ash was all that remained of its face… I put the
charred wet rose into my bag which I had left beside the swimming pool. I
need not have done it. Irina and I were happy and there was not a trace of
sorrow in our love games, enhanced by countless fantasies…
30.
I was speaking to Svetla Dimitrova. She is a world-famous designer
and a good friend of mine. We were planning a joint project. A crown with
three triangles in front each one of which is a picture by me. At the
forthcoming show several girls were to demonstrate such crowns. Each of
my pictures symbolized the three-fold nature of Man. The left-hand one
symbolized the soul – stylized coloured lightnings in a coloured sky and ink
blots. The right-hand one also symbolized the soul and consisted of a
stylized penis upon a female breast in the shape of the Moon. Between them
was shown the crucifiction in the shape of a tree. Abstract, too. Only its
leaves were visible in countless colours, merging into one another. They
were sparkling, radiating life and joy.
When I told Svetla that such crowns will be very fashionable in 2013
she replied that perhaps they will continue to be in fashion even till the year
20013 despite the fact that in this crazy world nothing is certain, above all,
fashion.
“Are you still thinking of her?”
“Do you mean about Irina? Perhaps I ought to visit a psychoanalyst.
She pursues me. She changes several demonic faces. She tempts me to
Hell… Once we fancied that I was a Franciscan monk whom she seduced
with delights of the flesh to leave the Order…”
“It may have been true!” replied Svetla who dabbled in arcane
sciences and was convinced of the reality of rebirth.
“It may have been. And it may have been a proto-image of that which
is happening now. I fear her. I can’t, however, allow the masculine in me to
surrender to a woman even if she is a demon. And besides, I’m still in love
with her…”
But why did I resume talking about all this as if it was all true? I’m
having hallucinations. Every object, every sound, every experience reminds
me of her. Our relationship was so full and complete that we shared it with
the whole of existence. It’s our separation, the fact of her absence in the face
of continued existence, that is demonic. She changed my soul, if I have
any,and everything which undoubtedly I have to be that which I am. Before
we met I was a transcontinental sexual predator.I have had several thousand
women and about thirty-thousand orgasms over a period of thirty years.
Enough sperm to fertilize the universe with little papa jans but all that is
hypothetical. Thirty thousand orgasms. I intend to paint about the same
number of pictures. I do not know if there is a link between these things.
Everything changed as soon as I touched Irina. She was enough for
me.I do not know whether she tempted me to leave the monastery of my Ego
where I performed my rituals according to my own vision of the Divine, or
that which she aroused in me is the same which poets call “love”. After all
that our separation has caused I cannot but see her as a demon…
Svetla was making circles around my face with her open palms…
“That which you call a demon is there. It’s not exactly a demon but
vile energy which can materialize and…” she paused. “What were you going
to say?”
“She wants to destroy you. Slowly. First destroying the day-dreams
and the memories. All that you love apart from her. And she is really leading
you towards Hell”, I perceived fear in her voice.
“You are dreaming it all up!”
“Let’s hope I am,” Svetla laughed bitterly. We looked into each
other’s eyes sadly and recalled… That which could be a play of the
imagination of two creative spirits but could equally well be true.After all
time does not follow a straight line. Rather, it is a spiral as I had been told
more than once by Irina both when she was an angel and when, a demon. It
is a spring which brings into contact the points of two of its circles. Svetla
herself was a believer in rebirth with knowledge and capabilities in the
sphere of the arcane…
It was at the time of the heyday of the Third Reich. Refugees of
diverse nationalities, chased away from many countries, swarmed in France,
undisturbed by the authorities and having a small problem: how to find
shelter and stave off starvation. I was a young unknown painter. To survive I
painted portraits to order. Quite by chance, I made the acquaintance of the
Russian duchess in exile Svetlana Dimitrievna. One night the two of us were
leaning down from one of the bridges over the Seine and peered at the
reflection of the moon in the water. I wished to paint it reflected in the river.
Thus, the Seine was not a river nor the moon was a moon but rather an
impressionist painting. Painted by a luckless chap like myself, who has
nothing to eat but whose canvases would one day hang in the rooms of
people of means and full bellies and will be valued at a sum sufficient to
feed all starving creatures who now saw a fried chicken more inaccessible
and more beautiful than the moon.
“Are you suicidal?” the lady asked me with a Slav accent.
“Always. Just now, however, I’m merely admiring the view.”
“Me, too! Duchess Svetlana Dmitrievna is my name.”
“I am simply Jan!” I said after kissing her hand.
“I saw the Seine and the moon as a painting by an impressionist.”
“And I see only uniforms! I’m tired to dreaming of uniforms, of
hearing uniform phrases, and looking at uniform faces. Something terrible is
bound to happen soon. I wish to design different clothes. Not uniform ones.
Unfortunately I’m not a fashion designer. Fashion designers are at the front
now.”
“It has grown cold! Let’s go into some place or other. This evening I
need a bottle of fine cognac”
“Me, too!” the exiled duchess smiled at me.
After the drinks she visited me at my atelier and an atelier is always
an open soul so I didn’t need baring my soul to her any further. She had
come to love it. I made love to the duchess till morning. When I awoke she
was gone. I felt empty and lacking inspiration.
She came back to my atelier at about three in the afternoon. She told
me she had organized an exhibition. I was both happy and embarrassed. The
exiled Russian aristocrats are not wealthy people as a rule.
“We’ll manage, Jan!”
It was insane. Nobody bought pictures at the time, even in the city of
the Louvre where everyone could enjoy the works of immortal geniuses…
The exhibition was a flop and we, laughing and happy to be in love again
found oblivion in each other’s arms to the exclusion of the threat of war, the
misery and the exile. We met every night and each night was more tender
than the one before. The duchess organized a second exhibition despite my
objections but it, too, was a flop.
“Why do you do it?” I asked her attempting to reproach her but unable
to do it.
“The Russian writer Dostoyevsky has said that love will save the
world. But what is love without beauty? How can we know beauty if not
through art? In these times exhibitions are more necessary than ever. Soon
there may not be any halls where we could exhibit your pictures…”
We made love passionately. Russian sentiment and French skill
against the background of the fear of war, poverty, the insecurity of a studio
between a hereditary aristocrat and an aristocrat of beauty. The surge of
emotion in an attic studio, as if on the roof of the cosmos itself. Before the
third exhibition I noticed that the hereditary golden ring, the precious family
relic which she valued perhaps more than life, was not on her finger. I was
afraid to ask where it had gone. The third exhibition was also a flop. We
stood for a long time on the same bridge over the Seine and talked about the
impressionists and about the uniforms which she wished to replace by
another style of clothes… Then we made love more passionately than ever
before. On the next morning she made the windows air-tight and turned on
the gas. She thought I was asleep and I tried to make her believe so. Then we
fell into everlasting sleep in each other’s arms…
Now I was facing Svetla Dimitrova. I perceived in her eyes her
concern about me.These were the same eyes I had seen near the Seine. They
were looking at the confused young man on the bridge.At that moment I
recalled our love from our previous existence. Killing ourselves, we had
killed it, too, but now friendship was to save us and exonerate us for
everything we had lost but could have experienced together...
“If Irina has turned into an evil infernal creature, you must locate the
wound she has inflicted on you. That is the only way you can cure it and
expel the infernal creature from your soul… Return to where you believe she
has inflicted the wound. Discover that spot and destroy her demon!”
31.
She was again Professor Irina, travelling with me to the University of
Blagoevgrad where she was to deliver lectures. Previously, I always thought
that philosophy professors are invariably ascetics or at any rate become such
at the moment when they are to address their pupils. All along the way,
however, Irina kept caressing my head and producing sounds of delight:
“Your head is like an enormous penis! What delight it is to be
caressing this divine phallus…”
Being thus caressed, my head was getting empty of thoughts. They
flew out of the window of the car. Colours that I was to paint blossomed
beyond it on the spring vegetation along the roadside. Girl-trees, flowers like
eyes, tattooed roses and other flowers. Many Irinas in diverse postures. With
legs open towards the sky, locked around a tree with one bough growing out
of her crotch and a few warbling birds upon the bough…
“Stop it, Irina!” I muttered, confused, and barely avoided a crash. My
trousers had become too tight and I unbuttoned them to free the creature
inside, hard as a weapon of the Inquisition. When it appeared outside Irina
started massaging it. Finally sperm splashed the front window but there were
no cleaners on the inside.
“Rub it off now!” I told her annoyed and happy and she started
“rubbing” it with her tongue, smearing it even more. Finally, I handed her
handkerchief and she cleaned the glass.
We then arrived at Blagoevgrad. I always listened to her lectures and
was pleased by the eloquence with which she delivered her intellectual
insights.Often I got carried away by it. Her voice hypnotized me and then I
digested her ideas much better than if had listened attentively. This lecture,
however, I omitted to attend lest I should burst out laughing. The adventure
along the road was indeed a comic one and the more time passed since then
the oftener I thought of the hand which had caressed me and of the picture
of Nature which reminded me of the erotic postures of the lady-professor
who was lecturing on “earthly and heavenly love”; I also recalled the
unbuttoned trousers, the semen on the glass and the tongue which smeared it
the more. So I had to leave the auditorium to avoid being laughed at by her
students.
I got into my car and drove back to the erotically spread tree with the
birds warbling on its boughs. I started painting it and everything was
accomplished faster than she expected. I called my picture “The Spring
Voluptuary” and when I got back to the university there was still half an
hour to go before her lecture finished. An interminable half hour during
which I gripped the steering wheel fast, lest my hands clasp some other
object.
“And thus I’ll paint myself:Gripping tightly the steering wheel,
surrounded by erotic visions of pre-history, antiquity, Gothic and Romantic
times, and from the 1960s, ‘70s, ‘80s ‘90s, futuristic and avant-guardist.
With two hands on the wheel and one inside my trousers… No! One, paleblue hand, buried in the soil in front of my tomb…
At last Irina re-appeared. Smiling and wiping her nose with the
handkerchief with which she had wiped the front window. We kissed long
but this time I did not unbutton my trousers although they were even tighter
now.
“And now, Jan…” she said in her tenderest voice.
“Now, something special!”
I took her up to that tree. The one I had just painted. I took out the
spare tyre and tied it to one of the opened legs of the tree. Irina huddled
inside the tyre. I lay down under it and rolled it…
“I am dizzy. It’s fantastic.”
I rolled the tyre in an opposite direction and kept on doing so till the
rope twisted in such a way that Irina was now hanging centimetres away
from my phallus. I let go of the tyre. The rope started unwinding at an
incredible speed. Irina was gradually being pricked by my organ but
swivelled rapidly and if I had not controlled myself, my orgasm would have
been complete before the head of the phallus had entered her entirely. Under
the force of inertia the rope began twisting in the opposite direction and
causing ecstasy again. Irina was distanced from me. Reverse inertia caused
fresh pricking and so on till the forces of friction stopped the rotation of the
tyre and the boughs of the tree were wet with semen. I raised my head,
looking round, and saw in the nearby bushes masturbating voyeurs. I
laughed and Irina, upon noticing the same, reddened. Then she laughed, too
and again huddled inside the tyre. I twisted the ropes to breaking point and
lying under the tyre held my sex organ in my hand in order to direct it to the
necessary spot. She swivelled round it so that she almost twisted the penis
despite it being all wet. Then we yielded to the inertia of the ropes till we
almost lost consciousness.
Staggering, we got into the car somehow but I did not know whether
we’ll manage to arrive back at Sofia… We did, and from that time on this
was our favourite ritual every time we returned from Blagoevgrad. I heard it
rumoured that Irina was delivering very inspired lectures and had become
the favourite of all philosophy students. I heard it said that she fell into
intellectual orgasm while pouring out her erudition and her soul… As for
me, I knew she looked forward to the ritual with the tyre and if the tyre has
indeed contributed to the intellectual capital of humanity, I could only be
very pleased…
“I understand now what delight the Earth feels as it rotates around its
axis!” she managed to utter amidst her screams of ecstasy as the tyre whirled
in the opposite direction. Involuntarily, I looked round and saw that the
voyeurs were now more numerous and it seemed their number would
increase every time we were their…
Long after my separation from Irina I went on my way to see the pony
but made a detour in the direction of Blagoevgrad instead and saw six or
seven tyres hanging there from tree branches… “I wonder if they’re still
there,” I thought as I left Svetla’s house on the evening she told me that in
order to cope with the demon I had to discover the most painful wound the
demon had caused me.
“It doesn’t matter!” I told myself as I started the car engine. One
gentle touch on my head made me tremble with horror and become stiff with
fear…
“What an enormous, divine phallus!” Irina told me, her face deadly
white. Upon her naked breasts, like a bra, hung the two torn jokers… “I have
to deliver a lecture, Jan. Will you take me?”
“You are no longer the faculty’s favourite but surely they haven’t
forgotten you yet. Nor have the voyeurs, nor the sex athletes who borrowed
our posture. What shall we call it? Perhaps ‘Twenty-four hours’?”
“The wheel of history!” laughed the demon.
“And why not ‘The Merry Go-round’?”
I was afraid and did not know whether to drive to “our tree”.
However I had to find the wound, even if Svetla had not told me to do so.
Thus I would find a cure. A gallows hung on the tree…
32.
An owl was perching on the bough on which warbling birds once used
to gladden the heart. In the owl’s shining eyes I recognized the looks of all
voyeurs but there was no delight in them – only a painful insight in which
the sole spark of life was a flickering sad nostalgia. The gallows swayed
like Foulkaut’s Pendulum, proving the orgasm of the Earth as it rotated
around its axis… The gallows seemed to me to resemble a woman’s open
arms… Irina was caressing my head and telling me how much it resembled a
phallus… It felt a desire to penetrate her. Irina kneeled under the gallows. I
put a foot upon her neck. Then took in my hands the slender torso of my
beloved. I opened her vagina. She tightly gripped my neck. Irina shook
under my weight. At any moment her muscles might succumb and my last
delight would come to an end…
I flew along an axis. In an unknown direction. I saw myself on a tree
with two grown-up girls. Then – among thirteen women with whose bodies
mine was intertwined… We were swilling champagne. The eyes of my
daughters flickered from some corner or other. I was galloping on a wild
mare after a girl riding a stallion.I was kissing the breasts in a painting which
the next moment became real flesh. I shouted my messages:
“IF THERE IS NO STRENGTH IN YOUR TENDERNESS, YOU
WILL KILL A LOVER!”
I flew along an axis. I was dressing nude statues with my clothes. I
was opening a gallery of antiques at St Kirik monastery. I was carousing
with debauched bacchantes.I was tenderly kissing my mother’s forehead. I
was collecting signatures for a cosmic exhibition. I was packing black and
white beans into a painting of mine. I struggled with life in a Siberian desert.
Bottles were hurled at my head in drunken scandals. Standing naked before a
canvas, I was painting with an excitement more pungent than the sexual
thrill. Besmeared with paints, I lay down upon canvases with snails crawling
on my body. I lay down beside bogs in order to recapture in my memory the
right way amid my wandering. I engaged in philosophical disputes with
friends. Peered at newspapers. Made faces to chance passers-by. Stretched
out my hand from the car window to slap the bottom of some pretty girl or
other. Enraged, I set fire to my pictures and found myself in the midst of a
fiery circle in an abandoned sheepfold and then the circle of fire turned into
a heart of fire inside which Irina and I were making love. The sheepfold
turned into a swimming pool on whose surface a few of my painting floated.
The swimming pool grew infinitely large and under the enormous moon of
Sinemorets I was kissing the most exciting point on Irina’s body – her
breasts. They were the universe split asunder.Each hemisphere contained all
that I felt and touched but which I could not gain. The universe then shrank
to the infinite loneliness of my studio and merry suns peered from behind the
frames of my old pictures. My heart could not stand it. It wanted to possess
everything. My heart could stand it and continued to want more and more
and was ready to destroy itself for the sake of possessing all things in a
single picture or a single love. At least for a moment… I caroused with
Russian loners and slowly was killing myself before opening my eyes one
morning and sensing how beautiful life is, after which came the day when I
desired to cultivate the offshoots of wild beauty, to implant them in the soil
so they would blossom in human form… Aurora – the dawn who reminded
to me I had to live – was in fact Irina’s little daughter whom I loved as a
child of mine… Her voice had a singing quality. “O, Jan, Jan!” That was the
ringing, joyful childish voice of my beloved.Everything was now exploding
from my heart which was soon to shrivel to oblivion… Irina’s body
trembled under me. She was making a desperate effort to sustain me.
“I want to experience with you all the horror and pain of your
destruction…” she hissed through clenched teeth. “I love you, my dear!”
33.
A hundred and thirteen torches blazed in the prairie and a female rider
galloped in slalom among them in the night. At each round she grabbed a
torch and threw it in the nearby swamp…
“Your male self-love!” she threw the first torch and galloped on.
“My feminine weakness!” said she, throwing the second torch. There
were tears in her eyes. Beautiful and upright, with spiritual charisma, the
strange woman betrayed with every movement her desire to forget
something. Some experience, once pleasurable but now unbearably painful.
“Our seductive contact!” she threw the next torch; the horse was
already very tired but she cruelly spurred it on.
“My fantasies about you!” she threw the fourth torch and the horse
sped on with supreme effort.
“Our experiences in the air!” she threw the fifth torch. The horse was
now limping.
“Our experiences in the water. The numerous ones!” she threw the
fifth torch and it seemed to her she saw him near the swamp. He lay
helpless, opening his flesh with a palette and mumbling something.
“Our passionate love in the fiery circle, when we could still be free!”
she shouted as she threw the sixth torch.
He was indeed by the swamp. A lying demonic creature of mud who
helplessly whispered still: “I love you!”
The beautiful woman turned the horse round and galloped among the
remaining torches.
“Our desire to make love on earth, too!” the seventh torch was also
extinguished. The horse was now limping and she had ceased spurring it on.
She slowly let fall the eighth torch.
“Our boredom, my dear Jan!”
She slowly dropped the ninth torch, too.
“Our desire to be together for the last time. To be ourselves. And to
die!”
She let the horse rest, went on foot and took the next torch to drop it
into the swamp.
“Our desiire to be immortal as we are created out of mud and die in
mud!”
She was also tired when she dropped the eleventh torch.
“The child to which I didn’t give birth to, your child which I wanted
to give you!”
She was shuffling her feet with weariness as she dropped the twelfth
torch.
“My desire to still have you and your wish to have me!”
When she dropped the thirteenth torch she collapsed with exhaustion
and uttered:
“Your desire to still have me and mine to have you!”
Then in the swamp blazed thirteen thousand candles.The muddy
demon embraced her and she yielded to his caresses.Then everything
vanished. When she came to on the morrow, the jaded horse was snorting
over her.
“All is over, Jan!” Irina said.
34.
When I’m holding the brush…
I dress up emptiness with divine cloothes.
I bathe in the pride of the dew.
I am a harbour to each inspiration.
I am insight itself contained in one body.
My heart is a sun’s ray.
My features are a mask concealing everything and evrybody.
I am my own road. I travel within myself.
I am a winding river. A ford across it. A bridge on which pain and joy
meet. Sometimes I am a precipice and crumbling rocks.A falling
mountaineer. A dying person’s cry. The resurrection of all creatures. A
victory of love. The mane of a fiery steed and a neighing chest. A silent
statue. My own self-portrait and not my own self.
Wind-swept ocean in my soul. A quake of the thirteenth degree on the
Richter scale of my everyday being. Storm and destruction, yet a creator and
a creation. Blind towards the visible and a look into the invisible. The
flapping of an angel’s wings. Enigmatic mood.Tropical heat and a downpour
of emotions. A loner among billions of loners. My own teacher and my own
pupil. Seeker for fresh colours in the spectrum. Nails, scratching the dullness
of existence. A gigantic mace in the hand of humanity’s daydreams,crashing down onto the world spleen. I am spleen itself. I destroy
myself and recreate myself out of my ruins. The same, yet different. Singular
and plural. A face combining the features of each human being. Flesh,
subject to the passions of each living creature. Bits of thought, hand,brush
and canvas. All that is myself. I paint myself. I am the brush which paints.
When I hold the brush…
I shatter the chains of shackled spirits.
Rebelling passions fulfill my designs.
Touching the canvas, I play on David’s lyre the psalm of life. The
psalm of Man. The psalm of love. The sole, endless psalm. Breath. That
which stops in somebody’s lungs only to continue raging in the lungs of
somebody else. The breath of love and passion. Of destruction, too. The
exquisite melody dedicated to Revelation.
When I hold the brush…
I write an interminable sentence that cannot be uttered but can only be
felt.
I am a teacher to mankind and a pupil of the elements of my soul.
An arcane tattooed sign upon the maternal breast of the Earth.
A caress of the thigh of the Beloved, Nature.
A traveller in mysterious countries.
Uncharted territory, dream and fountain.
Thirst and wilderness.
Bitter wine.
A priest devoted lovingly to Beauty. A sin offering to its respectable
idol. An exotic plant. Raging ashes. A stop-over between existence here and
the existence beyond.
An actor in the Theatre of Eternity.
A librarian in the Library of the worlds.
An alchemist of emotions. A philosopher of Silence. An athlete of the
spirit. The red rose in the hand of the Feminine Goddess.
Air on Alpine peaks.
The sighs of all loving hearts
Sardonic laughter of all souls fighting for survival, vulnerable and
equipped with cynicism.
Lover of forest demi-goddesses.
A magician – black, white and multi-coloured.
Juicy fruit in the garden of intellect. Tempting forms. Design of the
all-encompassing.
A spot of colour on death’s black cap.
Laughter and joy, tears and sorrow. Lies seen through and worn-out
truths. Blockade before mental terror. A happy tragedy. Autumn and spring
leaves. Autumn and spring caresses. A winter’s tale and a summer’s
freedom. A long winter night and a long summer noon.
When I hold the brush…
I dissolve the world in other worlds. I collect the worlds in a world
picture. A universal gallery. Millions of heartbeats I merge into a single one.
I feel things which are impalpable.
I think things which ought not to be thought of.
In cosmic silence I hear a lyrical song and dance in step with a distant
star, long extinct.
I fight demons and angels.
I treat myself to demons and angels.
We drink at the fountain of infinite insight and feed on dead matter.
We often argue and our polemics go on thousands of years.
We compete in contests entitling the winner to realize his or her
project.
Within a fraction of a second I wake up a normal man again.
Normal. Within an instant I forget my Merry Doll again and and am
once again travelling along the fantastic countless dimensions of the
Country.
When I hold a brush….
I am the hot clothes of the cosmos and my flesh tossed ecstatically
between heaven and hell,touches the supreme revelations of the possible.
My essence is the freshness of the new-born splendour.
My hand is upon the breast of unknown Beloved.
My heart explodes in order to re-create the world.
Tears, sweat, blood, sperm, dew, and ocean after an explosive reaction
become colours and the image which I seek to discover myself.
Life’s caresses and fists become a melody of light.
I kiss the hand of Eve who offers the fruit of sin to my lips.
I tempt the snake of my subconscious thought.
I race towards victory.
I turn darkness into a harp and awake the dawn with its tune.
I make love to the fiery-haired moon.
I split into millions of selves.
I whisper with the wind and the grass.
I drench the earth with my happy tears and it brings forth Love.
I melt icebergs in my palms.
Light frolics in my veins.
I descend along the infinite spiral of consciousness towards the most
secretive corners of the Universe.
My hands are the oars of thought.
I return before the beginning of the infinite to lay it again.
I frolic in fantasies. I turn my craze into reality. The real becomes
fantastic. The evil dies in the embrace of beauty.
With the days I adorn the nights.
Stars are the pearls in the hair of the woman whom I love and bless.
I halt time. I speed it up. I carry myself into the past and into the
future. I shake up history. I give birth in pain and delight.
I boil in pain and delight.
I live beyond pain and delight.
I paint pain and delight.
I bring back the childhood longings of aging mankinds.
Boldly experience the most daring emotions.
I intimately caress non-existent things. I stir them up in my orgasm
and they become fact.
I burn myself to ashes and am born out of my ashes.
When I hold a brush…
I utter the final message of my heart.
Brush in hand, I look for you in order to say it to you. My friend, you,
who have also devoted yourself to Beauty with love. You, who are also
travelling to the depths of soulfulness. You, who spur your thought on, in
order to know the secrets of the universe. You, who are also dreaming about
the day of Seeing It All…
I know I have discovered you but I am still discovering you.
“IF YOU SEARCH FOR BEAUTY, IT WILL FIND YOU!”
35.
I was hanging but her body could not endure. It seemed to me that I
saw her far away from me dropping thirteen torches in a swamp on the edge
of the prairie and then thirteen thousand candles start blazing in the mud… It
was dawn but she still endured under the weight of my body, under the
weight of her love. That was not the demonic but the real Irina. The one who
loved me and though she wanted to, she would not dare flee from me, lest
she kills me. I even wished to hang on the gallows, so she would cease
tormenting herself. During those long hours I had re-lived my life, moment
after moment, re-lived our beautiful love a thousand times. I could die now,
though I still wanted to live. Irina collapsed with exhaustion. The bough
broke.
36.
On my thirty-seventh birthday I staged an exhibition at the St Kirik
monastery. Here I once had a gallery of antiques but at that time I was not
possessed with the demonic spirit of the artist. Things changed and I was
now paying more attention to my art than collecting great creations of the
human genius, left in history as a legacy to the present.
I started, drenching my guests with champagne.Then I set several
pictures ablaze, to the horror of their admirers. Then I explained to them that
from a single detail, through cloning, I could restore an entire painting. It
was one of my exhibitions in the fire and Irina’s eyes, reflecting the
flame,had turned into a miniature fiery exhibition. In which my pictures
were burning and in which I was burning also. I saw myself lying upon the
glowing embers. Live coals spring upon my body and she, lying upon me,
fans the embers still more and then they remain.The canvases are burnt out
but are not melancholy. One can draw with a piece of coal, and very well at
that, and if the coal contains oil paint, maybe the picture will turn into that
magic formula which Irinio lost five centuries ago…
Our eyes met.Now hers were flickering with merry little flames. Not
of the embers but of the falling stars. The falling stars of the wonderful
symphony. Not noticed by the guests, we went into my room one after the
other. I lay down on the floor and felt the embers under me. The ones I had
already seen in her eyes. I burnt but did not feel pain. I was re-charging
myself with energy from the fire. Every cell of my body was turning into a
Phoenix which burnt and was re-born from the ashes every second. My
astral body was becoming plasma which poured down on the whole world.
Divine satisfaction was transformed into sexual passion. My lips of plasma
kissed Irina’s lunar ones and she caught fire. Like a little beast she nestled in
my embrace and showered me with kisses.She was kissing my ears,
shoulders, chest, belly, thighs… the thighs, the belly, the chest the shoulders
and finally – and long – my lips of plasma. Our bodies were burning down
like the pictures. We rolled from one side of the room to the other and with
tongues, with lips, with sex organs, tried to extinguish the raging fire. Not
because we feared being burnt but because we did not want to turn all
existence into ashes…
“Make me a woman!”
“Make me fall in love with a woman!”
“Make me a moon!”
“Make me plasma!”
“You have poured out onto me!”
“For beauty’s sake!”
“So that I can be a beauty, too… Make love to me!”
Just as we lay together holding hands, our bodies suddenly merged
together but they were no longer a fire but a downpouring waterfall.
Waterfall of our own sweat… We could no longer inhale air, as if we were
inside a space capsule…At that moment the wind burst the window open
and we turned into two creatures of air who went on making love. Till we
were short of breath again… In the end, exhausted, we seemed to touch
down on the earth. We re-joined the party and continued swilling
champagne with the rest… That was the happiest 8th of September in my
life. The thirty-seventh. I intended it to be that even before the end of the
party, but it was still full of surprises… Quiet and alone at a table, Irina and I
still talked that our doubles of fire, air and water must have continued
making love. We also talked about the supernatural force radiated by the
locality around the monastery and about the fact that it is beautiful to set fire
to a work of art after completion but it is mad all the same. We also
discussed whether we preferred living in accordance with the laws of
symmetry or of assymmetry, i.e. sensibly or beautifully. We did not speak
about ourselves only. About how we were to continue. Where were we
heading together? Will our paths diverge? And what did we expect of each
other? And what river is carrying us along together unless it be our own
volition of lack of will… We cut our conversation short in order to leave the
monastery.
We made love amidst coniferous trees and were discomfitted by the
green needles. Some forest animal or other jumped onto my back and then
ran away but we went on rolling upon the carpet of coniferous needles and
being happy making love in that desperate manner which is practised only
by lovers without a future. Covered from head to foot with coniferous
needles, we went back to the monastery and again sat down at our lonely
table. We continued our conversation about exhibitions and about our
doubles of fire, air and water. We caressed each other with words and
avoided speaking about things that worried us, made us think and were
important for our future. This went on for some time, till she abruptly
digressed:
“I have my own Aurora. She will make a magnificent woman. I also
wish to have a child by you, though I have refused it to you. I want children
of all races: black, mulattoes, Indians, Eskimos… Most of all, however, I
want your child but I can’t allow myself to have it before I have attained the
goals I have set myself, careerwise…”
I became upset all of a sudden but when I pondered it all, I was madly
happy. So happy that I wanted to dance upon the still glowing embers of my
burnt down paintings. “She wanted a child by me! She wanted what I
wanted more than anything else!She had simply set certain objectives to
herself which without doubt she was to achieve. Hadn’t the clairvoyant
herself prophesied it to her? Then our child would be born and then… I
would not at all be jealous of the fathers of her coloured children because
they would be mine as well… Soon she would meet with success. She would
also be seuccessful in giving birth to a child of ours!”
“You have received your biggest present for your birthday, Papa Jan!
The biggest one!”
I saw a fiery pony in the flames.A fiery pony on a black night. The
pony frolicked long till in the end it lay down in an emryonic posture. The
night opened and it was a crying child hungry and looking for a female
breast. I saw it become an adolescent, hungry for a female breast but
confused and unable to interpret his desire: was it love or was it
untrammelled sexual feeling… The pony was turning into a heart. The fire
was dying down, extinguished by my tears of joy at the fact that the pony
was turning into the child I had so eagerly expected…
At sunrise the faces of the party-goers were melancholy.From too
much drink,from the past moments of merriment, from another night lost in
dance, alcohol and orgy… The past moments were empty for those who had
not completely shared the joy of the person in whose honour the party had
been held. My face, however, was radiant. The face of my beloved looked as
though she suffered from the chicken pox. How funny!
“Forest chicken pox!”
“What’s so funny?” she murmured crossly. “I found conifer needles
even even in my bikini. Materius is worried lest I have the chicken pox but I
reassured him that have had it as a little child.I told him it must be some kind
of allergy but he isn’t a silly man.”
“My dear, even the greatest genius can be a silly husband. And this is
another message:
“EVEN THE GREATEST GENIUS CAN BE A SILLY
HUSBAND!”
Besides, if he is jealous he won’t allow you to have a coloured
progeny.”
“And what about you?”
“I myself am jealous but I will be happy if you have children from all
races!”
I started loudly reciting portions of my poem “Self-portrait In Verse –
10 + 33”
My lot on earth has taught me
that good and evil are illusions
having known both God and Satan,
on my visionary way
Won and lost nearly everything,
I achieved and discovered a great deal,
willingly, I broke hearts
and caused much pain, but won in the end
I broke cars, hearts and vaginas without count.
I tasted potions, poison, too
and loving Irina, whom I deified
I doomed myself to fresh pain.
I built a Babylon-like gallery,
caught stars in my palm,
bored stiff with myself
but never bored with Beauty.
I was prince, devil and man,
artist, wanderer and outcast,
a fool, a dreamer and a poet,
a believing and non-believing preacher.
I was a grey cloud and sun’s ray
and wild adventurer,
I was ubiquitous whisper
and dew on a beautiful morning.
Having realized my lot here and now,
I will find fulfilment in life
the end is the same for a beggar and for a king
death is the great equalizer.
The universe is only a part of me
and I am a part of the strength which
recreates a sincere dawn
in every season.
I have tasted vintage wine
and salty girl’s tears
heaven’s hues
and the odour of loving souls.
One hour from my absurd road,
a verse for a whole century
a portion from a crumbling castle
and a lover of a devil worshipper.
And an autumn leaf in the hearth
and an erotic bud in spring
and profile against the background of nothing…
I am the inheritor of all ages.
And a raindrop against a window pane
and an icicle
in a storm, a peace maker,
and a fragile, yet flexible stalk.
A ad poster and an icon
a mountaineer climbing new peaks
sometimes an outlaw
is that heart of mine.
A lover, insatiably quick,
I sucked the lips of my love;
I recited Kama Sutra
like a stallion neighing of passion.
A bottle of vintage wine
and steady temper, yet odd,
a message built into a picture,
I am a votary of Beauty…
I am the human gallery
and every beat of my heart
is a painting in an orgy of colour
am the human exhibition
and every expression of my face
is other worldly.
I am the human brush
I paint the time with flesh
and every image is new worlds.
I am human plasticity
lovers create out of my flesh
the idols they dream of.
A child of a grey epoch,
a child of the shining moon
in which you discern an image
yet not knowing it is your own.
You take it for a golden bird
a lonely virgin
a rose in the palm
of a lone and great man.
You take it for a recording of a tender tango
tasting of an orgy, of love
of a fairy and voluptuary
and an ornament of a divine bed.
You take it for an adventure without end
for a tender blossom in a melancholy May
for a Baudelaire verse in the ashes
and, phoenix-like, reborn in sorrow…
Till death I am a believer of all that,
I turned my heart into wings
and a part of the moon’s face –
my poetry – into everyday existence…
O, how many nightmares I resurrected
and found beauty in them.
O, phoenix with a black felt hat
in the light of the moonlit sky.
Still conversing, we got to the forest again and lay upon the carpet of
conifer needles.Our skin wanted to taste pain with the delight and the pain
would enhance delight.We made love amid the conifers, till in the end we
came to resemble them and were again at one with Nature. Down below us
was the redeemer of human vice. The monastery in which God redeems
people making them as innocent as nature itself but the people had
desecrated the monastery We were two conifers with human passions and
being still human, though in the guise of trees, unclean with sin, we
descended down the road to join all other melancholy hearts… Maybe I was
the less melancholy of the two of us since I visualized the pony which would
become a child of mine…
37.
While there are eves, there will be fulfilled dreams as well as
unfulfilled ones because otherwise we will lose our day-dreams, the
sweetness of hope, faith and expectation. We’ll be living in an endless
“now” where nothing happens because everything has happened already. It
is known to us, we are reconciled with the downfall and to the polish.The
unknown future will not tempt us in any way. We will fear no
disappointment because we are disappointed as it is and have long
swallowed our disappointment.
While there are future eves we will recall those that have already
passed. Our hearts will be pained because not everything we expected from
life has come true.We will be triumphant because life has given us more
than we have dreamt of.
While there are eves prodigal sons will return to their roots. The
wanderer will pull up his car to the side of the road, will look at his watch
and when the clock hands approach the colours reminding him of his youth
the face of his watch will be clouded in the tears of a galactic touch of the
heart.
A flower and a tree can blossom and yield fruit even in outer space so
long as there is a root. So long as there are former Christmas Eves which his
heart and soul can recall.
Even an ascetic who has renounced his body and his soul cannot attain
harmony with his spirit if he does not, at least for an instant, let his soul
recollect and it does not bring tears to his eyes, evoking a memory.
Even orphans who have no recollections of their parents do not
believe they had a mother and father at all and even if some of them are
deeply convinced they originate from a miracle like the Big Bang and suffer
from not having roots and are all the more unlike the rest of us for that
reason, ought to have their Christmas Eves.
Families fall apart.
Clans disperse.
Wars and roads obliterate them.
Somewhere deep in the black earth their roots remain. Because
nothing that is sown cannot but leave a part of itself as a memory of the One
Who is Present at each Christmas Eve. Her Majesty the Earth Mother.
Pondering on these things, I gathered together twelve orphans to
celebrate Christmas Eve with me. We were to be a family. I did not feel
lonely. I wanted to pay my respects to those whom death had removed from
the festive table: my father Nikola and my mother’s father, old man Angel.
There were thirteen of us at that memorable Christmas Eve when from
the pastry with fortune slips I drew out “Great Deeds”.
“Papi,” the fourteen-year-old Nikola of whom I knew that he had
gifts for literature (he wrote splendid essays) asked me, “why are we twelve?
is it because there were twelve Apostles?”
“We are thirteen, Nikola. Count me, as well, and I am not Jesus. As to
the Apostles, each person is an apostle of existence, of the world and of
himself. This sometimes means of the devil. Frequently, it means of God.
And every time – of his or her Freedom. In fact the number of us gathered
round this table is not accidental. Recently, I have recalled frequently one
particular Christmas Eve. A family affair, just as it should be. Such as I can
describe only in a pastoral spirit.Such as moves me deeply and makes me
sentimental. Nor is your name accidental. It is the name of my father for
whom now is that glass of wine over there.”
“Do tell me, please.”
“On that occasion from the pastry with fortune slips I drew out ‘Great
Deeds’. It was written in my handwriting and under it with black letters was
my signature: P.J. Nobody ever understood the reason for my brief seclusion
and withdrawal into myself nor my subsequent extremely merry mood. It
was not me who had put that fortune slip with ‘Great Deeds’ into the pastry,
not me, believe me.”
“And how come you drew out such a fortune slip” asked Lydia, a
twelve-year-old girl, who beautifully sang folk songs of the Rhodope region.
She bore my mother’s name and just like her she could sing beautifully
these unforgettable melodies, which seem to come from the bottom of the
heart of all martyrs, mixed with the strength of the Argonaut, the hero and
the Maestro Orpheus.
“A miracle. The German writer Erich Maria Remarque has written in
one of his books that life is always a miracle of no miracles but I can swear
they do exist. There have always been and will be miracles if we know how
to notice them. If we do not deny them but believe in them…”
At the time none of my family knew that one day I would be a world
celebrity and will be Prince Papa Jan who has touched everything a mortal
can. I knew it even before I took my piece from the pastry with fortune slips.
“Tell us more of your family!” insisted Ilko.
He bore the name of my nephew plus his explosive, likable derringdo. Unlike my nephew he often asked too many questions. Surely, he would
make a celebrated journalist. My intuition told me that one day I would be
invited to the ceremony of his being awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
“Let me start with my father, Nikola. Look at me: he was much
stronger and bigger than I am. He was extremely skilled with his hands and
his heart was a box containing golden talents. Nothing that he touched
failed to become alive. He was tall and bald.The same as you see me and can
paint me – almost the same you can imagine him and recreate his image on a
painting. He bubbled over with strength and health. When he was merry, as
he was on that particular Christmas Eve, he used to sing songs from the
Rhodope region and his voice merited a broadcast into space. It was not a
voice but soulful confession out of vocal cords. Rufinka has fallen ill…” I
started singing in his manner and then I went on with my story… “and my
mother chimed in. Some day I’ll introduce you to Mummy Lydia. Were it
not for her there would not now be Papa Jan and not only because she
survived the birth of a giant weighing 5 and a half kilograms but also
because only one mother – mine – can bring up a man without a father.
“Without ‘Mummy’ there cannot be ‘Papi’. Selfless devotion instills selfless
devotion just as the song of the Rhodope region inhabits the 20th and
subsequent centuries…”
“To your health!” urged the eighteen-year-old Irina, who had chestnut
hair and hazel coloured eyes and who produced splendid drawings. “And
who am I? Am I your beloved?”
“No. You are my grandmother. From a very early age I heard her tell
horrific tales about weasels, hobgoblins, ghosts and black cats. As a little
boy I was afraid to go out and answer a call of nature. Can you imagine,
Irina? That a man who did not tremble when his body-guards, canailles all of
them, played a game of Russian roulette with him, still fears hobgoblins and
vampires. This is typical, you know, of people with a lively imagination. It
was Granny Irina who cultivated it in me. Since a tender age she raised me
up to fear the devil, as far as a living, sincere and God-fearing man can.She
brought me up to fear, that is, to have the fantasy to impagine the horrific
things, that is, to have the ability also to imagine beautiful things because
every fantasy is beautiful, yet horrific.”
“And who am I?” asked a ten-year-old fair-haired girl who as soon as
she saw paints started painting on walls.
“If you can imagine my life-energy and my mother’s goodness, you
get the exact image of my sister, Anny. She’s the mother of little Nikola and
Ilko who were also present on that Christmas Eve.My wonderful, noisy
nephews who are like sons to me who would be more than sons to me, if I
had any, but instead of male offspring, God has granted me two wonderful
daughters. Gergana was six at the time, and I did not expect she would give
to our extended family the hereditary Prince Papa Jan junior. Well, parents
are liable to get surprises.Evidently Gergana wore an invisible golden star on
her forehead. Lydia was still a baby and she merely laughed on that evening.
My father and mother sang: ‘Rufinka has fallen ill…’ I’ll never forget the
house where she had gathered us.It is like a warm caress to me. Like a
revelation. Like a mother’s womb.It was at the foot of one of the hills in
Assenovgrad. Above it rose the monument to the Unknown Soldier and the
youth club which was to replace the Hunters’ Lodge was not yet built – it
was later to become the Assenovgrad Paleontoloy Museum, a pride to our
town. For us to erect our house, my father and I had to dig in the rocks.Every
centimetre was for us a victory in man’s unequal struggle with nature.Nature
is powerful but it stands no chance with a man, determined to raise his home
in its bosom. We dug and we won. We gained each centimetre with much
sweat.Each rock brick placed upon the preceding one was a sigh of relief.
We later redeemed each drop of sweat and each breath we took with a great
deal – millions – of tears when our house was demolished at the whim of
those who raised in its place so ugly works of socialist architecture.
Our house, as I said, stood at the foot of the hill on which rose the
monument to the Unknown Soldier. Each demolished house is a memorial to
unknown soldiers who do not destroy but build. Its two stories bathed in
radiance of love. It had a front yard and a backyard with a lot of vines and
fig trees – symbols all the wild, erotic love of the universe, of everything
that is to be born and will go on and on giving birth in turn and be victorious
and before it dies – it will give one more birth. It will produce fig trees,
vines, children and erect new houses where interminable Christmas Eves are
to be celebrated. There was a flower garden. Sometimes I would stand for
hours in it, contemplating it. You know, long before I started painting I
combined in my imagination the colours I observed in that flower garden
which later produced many of my pictures, I had seen there with my mind’s
eye perhaps all my pictures: past, present and future – those I will paint
some day.That small garden was all my teachers in one, my spiritual guru,
my academic teacher. I learnt much more from it than from Van Gogh and
from Renoir because there isn’t a better pupil than the one brought up with
love.
In spring we would take out to it the cages with my singing birds –
gold finches, canaries, parrots. On the roof dwelled the doves.Some of them
had so much gotten used to us that we used to leave the cages open and
allow the birds to fly anywhere and in the end they again came back home.
My mum, singing ‘Rufinka has fallen ill…’ instilled in each and every
flower all the love of her big, tender heart with which she had warmed up so
many friends and strangers…
I recall how Grandfather Angel who died at almost a hundred, raised a
toast in Russian. A long, full of metaphors toast which can only be raised by
a hereditary Russian aristocrat.
Grandfather Angel, who lived in the town of Svishtov on the river
Danube was famed for being a skilled maker of fishing nets and an excellent
fisherman who used to often take me fishing with him in the Danube. He
was possessed of enormous physical strength and good health and often told
me he was a descendant of an ancient Russian princely clan.He also told me
that the Russians come from the Bulgarians as the brother of Khan Kubrat –
the father of the founder of the Bulgarian nation – Asparukh – was once the
ruler of the lands and people who later on made up the Russian state and
Russian people. Later, this fact of history was proven by scholars. In
communist times he had given up even dreaming that one day his clan can
get back its titles. That evening as I heard his toast in Russian and perceived
nostalgia in his voice, I swore I would get back the titles of my clan. But I
did not mention my resolve to anyone as nobody would believe me. My
grandfather lived to an advanced old age as if to see the time when that
which he could not even think of came true.
He said his teast, clinked glasses and embraced my Grandmother
Dimitra, his wife who had always had a respect for him as though he was a
Prince!
On that night we all were in the hands of God together. We knew that
later we were to part. Some would embark on their individual roads in life,
some would depart this life altogether. The Rhodope song went right to the
heart of everyone present, its tune was imbibed in all of our bodies, opened
up our souls and united them in a single soul at the family table.The little
ones were frolicking and cavorting. The youngest one, Lydia was laughing.
Conversation was cheerful, cordial. It was a conversation before separation.
A conversation I was aware I would miss down the millions of kilometres of
loneliness I had to travel in search of myself.
“It’s so hot in here!” Maria whispered in my ear and Lydia said
“mummy, daddy”.
“We ought to treasure each and every moment of warmth!” I
answered her.
“You can’t keep anything to yourself!” said my father who had
accidentally overheard our exchange of words. “To your health, children!”
“Be happy my children!” mum said through tears and kissed my
daughters and then my sister’s sons.
“I drink to a hundred more!” my brother-in-law raised his glass.
“Won’t you get fed up with them?” Grandfather Angel slyly smiled.
“As for me, I won’t be fed up, provided we stay together!” I
cheerfully answered but what I did not say was that “… but we won’t be!
God has established the family’s warm nest but has also granted us so many
different roads in life! Whatever may happen, however, even if I froze to
death in Siberia, on the North or the Southern Pole, or on the moon, the
memory of that night will always warm me up.”
In my consciousness the theme of a picture took shape. Years
afterwards I called that picture “The Last Supper”. A last supper takes place
in every family which has preserved its tradition, which, though torn apart, is
not dispersed into lonely, searching eyes around the world. Rhodope bridges,
Danubean nets, a Rhodope song, Russian nobility, Bulgarian youth and
childhood dreams were fused together. They were dissolving in the light of a
Christmas Eve. Thirteen souls turned into a single spiritual essence. A
spiritual essence, which was to scatter its strength in thirteen directions but
now, in those festive hours, it was in its climax.
We were together. Each one of us, on at least a single day in his or her
life, was to remain a pair of lonely, searching eyes somewhere in the world,
but that supper was to give him strenth to continue in order to return some
day to it.
At the time nobody even suspected that one day I was to become
Academician Prince Papa Jan. I sensed it because I drew out the fortune slip
of mine.
In more than one picture I have painted that idyll. Some day, when I
get to be at the age at which my father departed this life I’ll paint it again. If
I become as old as Grandfather Angel I paint it once more.I’ll recreate more
than once. Till death makes it impossible for me to continue.
On the morrow while the carol-singers passed, I had not slept a wink
all night, given to dreaming, pondering the great deeds awaiting me and I
lapsed into a brief doze. In such a moment Dave Rees approached me.He
was the fourteenth guest at that splendid Christmas Eve. He drank a bit from
the glass set aside to honour the late Grandfather Ivan.The glorious builder,
Grandfather Ivan, who had covered with the bridges, the roads and his spirit
the whole range of country from Assenovgrad to Sliven. Master Grandfather
Ivan had been an architect; he had studied at the university of immutability,
having himself cultivated his gifts and immortalized his hands in the things
he constructed.
My distant great-grandson Dave Rees of whom I did not even yet
know, sipped from the glass of the ancient builder and told me:
“SHOULD YOU WISH FOR IMMORTALITY, LIVE LIKE
YOUR ROOTS ADMONISH YOU TO!”
38.
We met once in order to be together all of us. We exchanged our
energies and experienced a night at Videlina. After that we would see one
another hundreds of times but would never be all together at the same time
and same place; nor would all of us so strongly feel each other’s presence,
nor would the presence of each one of us fill everyone else. I will tell you
about that gathering. I will tell you the little I remember from it because I
was drunk. Spiritually drunk!
Bolides flashed above us. They died down. They turned into the
desires of spectators.
“The universe is simply uncounted atoms!” said Boiko Ganev. “Every
word about spirit is a conventional order to which we subdue our own
disarray!”
“I gave birth to the universe,” Irina answered him in a theatrically
naïve voice.
“I am egocentric!” Simaka shouted. “That’s why I would say that your
spirit is a feather, fallen in the inkpot, a feather sinking in the dark which
awaits its turn to open its gates which are opened by Handel himself ,
reading the Bible after its own fashion, thus penetrating the hearts where like
a meteor rain it pours down messages in confusion…” he mumbled.
“Pours down messages – Haiku-Janoisms, Corpus Dei,” I continued.I
tried to recite some lines from my latest book of haiku-janoisms which I was
holding.
“And the body of the god is Judas’s betrayal,” Irina added after me.
“And Judas is purple dress!” added Mappi.
“What does it mean?” asked Boiko Ganev. “I’m not a poet like you.”
“Material welfare,” explained Manol.
“Does anything else but matter exist?”Boiko asked rhetorically. “Say
it.”
Boiko had once been a cop. When I say a “cop” I should add that on
the word “cop” one can produce an unseemly large scholarly tract which
would still leave unanswered what is the meaning of “cop’. Generally, a
“cop” is a conventional word like “love”, “spirit”, “soul”, “universe” – all
things of unclear meaning yet clear as far as individual beahviour went.
Things we do, yet cannot explain. Things, too splendid as fact to ask about
them and too revolting to be accepted as a part of life. Boika had belonged to
the once powerful State Security. His glance was still “on the muzzle of a
gun”. When you speak to him he does not blink. I have staged contests with
him who will give in first. I have won because I am Prince Papa Jan. I never
blink but he withstands for more than an hour. You know the colour of my
eyes. His are the same colour but cooler, slier. Despite that, he was not a cop
but a philosopher. Of the absurdist school at that. He had built his whole
existence into a system he detested. He was the Ideal, according to the Great
Leaders: ‘With cool brain, warm heart and clean hands…’. After that he
became a modest fellow, a middling businessman, indifferent to fame, to the
quick strokes, to big money. A fellow with a quiet conscience, clearly aware
that whatever he does will be in this life, will not be enough but life is what
it is – you have to live it no matter how grinding, absurd or happy it is.
“Is there anything else but matter. I know of no other state of affairs,”
asked Boiko Ganev for the second time. “The questions we pose to ourselves
are nothing but chemical reactions…”
“Cats bark at the Assen Castle, maaan,” Simaka replied. He is the
brother of Brother Stephen.
“What did that mean?” Boiko asked.
“The chap is talking dogmatically,” Irina explained to him. “Here I
must be the interpreter to you all. Each one has come here with a vision of
their own but without a face of their own which he would open to the rest.”
“Of flesh and blood; Handel himself,” Simaka replied.
Irina fell silent. I smiled and explained:
“A play upon words. The boy is really a composer but it is a question
of…”
“A sun!” Irina laughed. “Splendid.”
“We have been talking after all about whether we should regenerate
on the morning,” reminded us Old Joro.
“We are Okey as we are together at present,” Jivko Kolev interposed.
“We might be regenerated different on the morrow. We might remain the
same. I don’t worry either way. I believe we are happy as we are at this very
moment.”
“In a former existence I used to be ozenkreutzer knight and was called
Irinio,” Irina said.
“And I was a he-goat!” Mappi said.
“And I was Jesus!” Manol joined in with his typical modesty.
“And I was atoms!” Boiko Ganev said.
“My brother Baudelaire!” Simaka shouted.
“And what about yourself?” Irina asked.
“I was fluff,” he replied.
“And maybe nothing?” I asked rhetorically.
“Maybe,” he replied rhetorically.
“All the same, mere atoms which rearrange in order to lock into a
living biological chain…” Boiko continued.
“After the he-goat died I was Jacob Boeme!” Mappi raised his snowwhite beard.
“And what makes you believe in regeneration?” Boiko asked
rhetorically.
“You ask what?” for his part rhetorically questioned Old Joro. “A
night like this which happens once in a blue moon.Papa Jan has gathered us
together to chat to relax to await the sunrise. It’s as though we are
passengers on a ship. Everyone is headed for his own destination and and we
have a brief span of time during which we can get to know each other and
part forever. The ship is Papa Jan.”
“But we won’t part for ever. We live in the same town. A small one.
Where even if you don’t want it you are bound to meet your acquaintances,”
interjected Dr Kalinov, my dentist and and pupil of Old Joro’s in Asian
martial arts.
“We won’t be arranged in the same way!” laughed Simaka.
There was no way for me but to kiss him on the temple as I would
have a son of mine. He was a boy of genius. When he somposed his
melodies sounded both like those of Bach and of Schoenberg. Although he
was Stephen’s brother, he did not inherit anything of the romanticism in the
poetry of the elder sibling, but on his own found a manner of writing verses.
It was like Dada but they were distinctly his own. More articulate, schizoid,
anti-talented, brutal, self-mixed, savage, sick, and significant words from
Dada and nihilism.
Sunrise came and we were still awake. The dawn, soaked in the wet
leaves gilded them and slowly chiselled the actual faces of my friends which
till now had been sunk into nightly and metaphysical darkness. Within hours
each one was to embark on his individual road and attend to his obligations,
becoming the personality of his particular class, determined for him by
society and his Tao. Only hours before everyone had been the magician in
the dark wood, the sage from a strange country, the knight-errant of his
visions and reflections who had come to the traditional tournament to meet
and duel with the likes of himself. Most of them were never to inscribe their
names neither in golden, nor in silver, nor even in chalk on the global
contest but their intelligent, bold, aggressive and yet deeply meek spirit were
to subscribe to all those who had left their mark on world history. Because
each celbrity is the progeny of thousands of nameless and unknown
magicians with faces hidden in the darkness of the night. Because each
complete thought is woven by thousands of sleepless nights spent in
deliberation by thousands of intelligent people, capable of thought but whose
lives have ordained them not to reach to the conclusion of a syllogism but
simply to stay alive. Such were my interlocutors on that night. Interlocutors?
What am I saying. I was celebrating. I was intoxicated spiritually. I drew
inspiration from the love of wisdom. I was lucky to have had them. I was
lucky to be there with them. It seems they were lucky too, to have me, to
have me gathering them together there, near the ossuary of the Bachkovo
Monastery, the same ossuary from which as a young boy I dug out a skull
and chased my female schoolmates in a terrifying guise.
We were: I, Irina, Jivko Kolev, a natural born philosopher and poet,
living in a village near Assenovgrad with whom I enjoyed numerous merry
experiences. Bore Kaloferov, my first teacher in alternative medicine, a man
seeking to have his place in society equal to his state of mind, to his
requirements and fitness. A man, steeling his body with his soul, educating
his soul by steeling his body, having taken from the wisdom of every nation
and producing his own original outlook. Like him was Old Joro, the founder
of the Bulgarian Martial Arts society. These arts are a system of
metaphysical views, exercise in hyper-sensitivity, and fighting skill
resembling cung-fu yet by the opinion of all experts superior to the
celebrated cung-fu and the Eastern style of life. In that group as a matter of
course were also Manol and Mappi. If someone thinks there are no ascetics
nowadays but merely average citizens in the guise of a millionairs,
politicians, beggars, criminals or philosopher-poets, he is mistaken. He
should visit Assenovgrad and inquire about Manol and Mappi. One out of
ten would know them. If he should inquire about those two further, however,
the townsman is apt to laugh or fall silent. Many people know them by face.
But few know their souls. I did. They knew me, as well. When I say that
many people know their faces but few, their souls I might as well include
myself in their number. If you are a stranger to the town and chance to ask
any Siberian, one Moscovite in ten and one Sofiote in a hundred about Papa
Jan they will tell you they know him. If you ask for further information
about me most of them will wisely keep silent and some will lie. Actually, I
am grateful to those few who would lie because they build the legend about
Papa Jan.
But to return to Mappi and Manol. They are known for being peculiar
eccentrics but if somebody knows that they are more human than eccentric,
that they are living souls and not outcast geniuses, that they might be
prophets, but above all friends, that they are to a large extent crazy yet
profoundly erudite; if someone can know all that, that someone is bound to
be one of their few friends like me. Such were Manol and Mappi. Manol
said he was a human god, that by merely thinking about it he toppled Todor
Zhivkov from power, that he caused the Gulf wars, the bombing of Serbia
and even was the one who caused the Big Bang.Manol isn't a schizophrenic,
he works at the Assenovgrad museum of paleontology. The museum is a
pride to our nation. When his boss, Dimiter Kovachev, without any title to
his name though I’m certain he deserves all scientific degrees, discovered
the third in the world and best preserved skeleton of a denoterium ( meaning
terrible beast) , the forebear of the elephant, almost twice as big as modern
elephants, the Soviet news agency Tass paid the Bulgarian news agency
(BTA) five thousand dollars for the announcement only. Manol worked at
that museum. Besides being an amateur paleontologist, he is an amateur
metaphysician who has studied divinity, renounced all dogmas and on
occasion he boldly declares that he will unveil a new teaching called
“Manolism”. That’s his usual manner of speaking but one can learn a great
deal from him. For instance, his individualism. Along with that, complete
abnegation of self. A dialectical contradiction contained in a single human
body bordering on the absurd.
It is now in order to say a few words about Mappi. I recall a chapter in
Jack London’s memoirs called The Naturalist. I cannot avoid mentioning a
naturalist in my memoirs, too, but he is quite different from the hero of me
predecessor whom I profoundly respect. The naturalist in my story has a
thick white beard and a silver gray mane of hair, a sun burnt face and deep
voice. With him you can walk thirty to forty kilometres at a fast pace
without seeing him tired at all of speaking to you about dimensions of the
soul, the categories of the spirit, about black, white and gray and about
asceticism. On that last topic one cannot avoid touching upon sexual
misconduct, masturbation and and Lunar (i. e. feminine and Earthly (i.e.
masculine) principle. With all those friends of mine we afforested an area of
10,000 decars under my leadership in the Balkan Mountain near the town of
Pirdop in 1985. A million of trees were planted by our hands. The area was
called “the Papa Jan forest”.
“Everything is in Nature!” said Jivko Kolev. “And everything is
Nature!”
“Everything is in Nature!” I shouted. “And everything is Nature!”
“Isn’t that so, Papa Jan?” Jivko smiled.
“You bet it is!” I replied.
“We will build the Universal Gallery!” exclaimed Old Joro, “because
it too is part of Nature.”
“We will!” shouted Dr Kalinov in the dark.
“It is built,” Irina whispered in my ear.
“What isn’t built will never collapse,” chimed in Simaka. “We are
words so finely constructed?”
“Everything that is Nature has already been built,” said Jivko Kolev.
As I mention his name, my respect and gratitude compel me to
describe my adventures with him. Even if I unduly prolong my narrative I’ll
do it.
He made sculptures from vine branches. Erotic bodies, overfilled with
energy, ready for global dissolution and awaiting Daylight.
Once, I sold seven pictures to a Canadian collector of pathological
painting. He himself was “pathological” but only the poor in this world are
inasne – the rich are eccecntric. He bought pictures by serial killers,
schizophrenics and old masters whose karma was damned. He had read in
the papers that I said I had had thirteen thousand women in my life, that I ate
human flesh, that I dropped pictures of mine into volcano craters… And
since Nature had deprived him of the requisite degree of intelligence when
receiving information, he considered these to be crazy rumours. We met and
when I realized what sort of person he was I continued playing the role of a
psychotic. In the end he bought my Seven Deadly Sins sequence. By the
way, he owes me half the sum he promised at the time and Jivko Kolev and I
spent the money lavishly. For the seven pictures, each of which depicts one
of the seven deadly sins the Canadian collector whose name I won’t mention
for ethical reasons paid me 50 000 US dollars.
Then Jivko and I rented three Mercedes cars. In one was I, Jivko was
in the next and in the third… my beret. In the Shareton grand hotel I fancied
a girl. Because Jikov and I both fancied dancing but I did not have
anywhere to leave the money I went up to her, shoved the packet into her
bosom and told her that under her bra there is something very very dear. She
would do well not to take it off till I come back, nor allow anyone to touch
it. She looked questioningly at me and I had to explain to her that it was a
matter of fifty-thousand US dollars. While we danced she sat at her table
like a snow maiden with a stick in her spine and a orthopaedic corset.
One another occasion Jivko and I were celebrating his sixtieth
birthday at the Arapovski monastery, the place where chieftain Tanyo once
hid himself and at a later date the Politburo headed by Todor Jivkov used to
party. From seven in the evening till half past ten the next morning Jivko and
I recited our poems. Our guests got drunk, fell asleep, woke up and got
drunk again, all the while being amazed at our verses.
And when, disappointed at the attitude of Bulgarian society to art (it is
a question of 1994) , I sent boys, dressed in black with my visiting card to
take away my pictures from all galleries in Bulgaria, I hid the canvases in his
stables and the animals enjoyed no less than two hundred oil paintings by
Papa Jan which only a month afterward were sold to the “Vestalka”gallery
for 200,000 US dollars. Then the gallery was shut down by the authorities as
an underworld undertaking , locking up the canvases as well which “under
arrest” to this very day. For seven years solid my pictures are deprived of
freedom without being sentenced. No such precedent has occurred anywhere
else in the world. There are no pictures under arrest for longer than these
two hundred. Add to that the fact that they were hidden in barns and guarded
by goats… There are no pictures with a more adventurous history than mine,
the same which once Jivko Kolev popular philosopher and sage, hid.
“Everything that is nature is already built up!” repeated Jivko Kolev.
“Everything that has been built is borrowed from nature!” Mappi
elaborated on his thought.
“Has everything been built, Papa Jan?” Simaka asked and gave the
answer himself: “Of course all of us gathered here by you are the symbol of
all that has been built.”
“But has everything been built?” Irina asked and herself added to her
thought: “it has, but it awaits its ruin and ruin is part and parcel of
construction.”
“And yet, everything is matter!” insisted Boiko Ganev.
“But matter is spirit!” Mappi raised his white beard.
“Matter is spirit!” Old Joro repeated.
“And spirit inhabits matter!” Iliyan Kalinov added. “What do you say
to that, Papa Jan?”
“Don’t you feel it? Don’t you feel the aura and haunting in our
circle?”
“I do!” Irina was the first to answer.
“It is similar to that in your pictures,” Old Joro added.
“Because in them I also gather points and egos, I pass from the point
into the line, from the line into the plain, from the plain into volume and the
volume passes into multi-dimensional spaces in order for me to turn them
into a circle and fuse them together and in that circle to capture the willful
and freedom-loving spirit. I turn everything into everything else – Omnia in
omnibus – I instill all my energy into my pictures and they radiate it as arttherapy-communication with a positive effect. I called this style of painting
“ENERGY LYZISM”. This is the style of universal dissolubility of colour
and form. You asked my opinion on whether spirit inhabits matter. My God,
yes! I feel it filling me and then it pours out like sand between my fingers
and like colour all over my pictures. I feel it like white light but surely all
colours of the rainbow are contained in white light, according to Newton’s
law. Sometimes I only need the colour white in order to think and paint. I
feel it like a circle of kindred spirits which argue and do not agree and yet,
while they are together, they combine to constitute it.
I also replied to them:
“IF YOU HAVE FRIENDS, THEY’LL UTTER BEFORE YOU DO
EVERY THOUGHT OF YOURS!”
After conversing with my friends and Boiko Ganev I spent a sleepless
night and found the answer to the question: “IS THERE ANYTHING NOT
MATERIAL IN THIS WORLD?”
Wisdom helped me come to terms with reality. It reconciled my daydreams with it and preserved them.
“But you might kill your dreams that way.”
“I don’t think so.They are alive and I haven’t lost a single one. Now I
recall that I dreamt of hitch-hiking the first flying saucer passing the Earth
but that did not stop me dreaming of the loneliness of our civilisation. I
dreamt of re-discovering new continents and I wasn’t prevented in that by
the fact that I belong to an age when all continents are discovered. I dreamt
of being carried by the wind no matter where it would take me and I wasn’t
prevented in that by my social responsibilities. I dreamt of attaining to the
lonesome peak of human uniqueness and I wasn’t prevented in that by my
own limitations. I fought on the side of the Earth against my own daydreams… I could see them behind my car, racing towards something more
real.They looked to me like scattered, useless sheets of written poetry.
Falsification of the soul. Intellectual pervertedness. Verbal exhibitionism…
But not that were my day-dreams.”
“What then?”
“My thoughts aren’t a woman of easy virtue, either – “ I did not
respond directly. “Do we really have the right to dream only of that we can
achieve and do we necessarily have to be realists when we day-dream? Do
we necessarily have to do something to achieve our day-dreams, even if that
be madness?”
“And what are your dreams?”
“A day-dream is living in unreality. A day-dream is not a metaphor,
nor a parable but existing reality. A day-dream is neither easy nor hard to
access. A day-dream is simply what it is. Finally, day-dreaming is not at all a
measuring rod for the value or otherwise of an existence. Ther can be no
question of a crietrion. They are separate and free of everything else though
they can be linked to everything else. Sometimes they are bigger than the
cosmos itself, though almost always commensurate to our notions of it.”
“And are painted upon despair?”
“Often they are painted with despair. Now I dream of abolishing
despair and of your always being here, you erotic beauties, you, tender
verses, you earthly poetry.”
The painting “A Day-dream” was finished yet I would never cease
day-dreaming.
“ACHIEVE YOUR DREAMS BUT KEEP ON DREAMING!”
“There is one door you cannot open.”
There is one thing leading to thousands of things which lead to a
million of things which in turn lead to billions of things which lead to
countless others – that one thing you cannot touch.
One essence cannot wound you because it is really holy and spiritual.
One word, evoking pleasure, cannot fill your mouth with a sweet
taste, nor can your nostrils sense the pleasurable aroma, because it does not
have either a taste or an aroma, since it is immaterial.
One yearning you cannot pick and put in a vase at home because you
cannot exploit it, you cannot lead it…” said I to my listeners in the
Mysterius Magicus auditorium, a hall enveloped in semi-darkness where
were gathered representatives of the science of the spirit and of nature.
“You speak of God!” heard I a voice from one of the darkest corners.
“I speak of something rational,” said I. “Something we know exists
without being believers, yet are never sure it would happen.”
“There is no such thing!”heard I several voices at once and one of
them continued: “There is no thing which is immaterial and which we call
by name without believing in it!”
“But is love material!” I heard a voice countering them.
“According to this question there are two kinds of love,” was the
answer, “One of them has a material dimension. It does not need us to
believe in it because it is a fact. The other kind, which we call spiritual, does
not exist on any grounds, i. e. only with faith can we say it exists.”
“This is the way with all things,” another intervened. “There are no
immaterial things. You cannot know of something into the wound of which
you cannot put your finger without faith. I believe everything is spirit and
matter is simply its reflection, but I’m saying this because I believe, because
it is absurd and not because I know it.”
“And is thought material!” heard I an angry youthful voice. “A
chemical process in the brain. Does thought flow out of the brain like a
liquid from a kidney! This is vulgar!”
“Vulgar, yes!” the attacked one defended himself. “It is vulgar
because we believe that thought is more than a process in the brain and it is
vulgar to us who believe in it and is not vulgar to those who believe in the
opposite. We can believe without being convinced of the opposite.”
“What sort of a gathering is this today?” said a voice which was
vibrant and fresh, as well as sarcastic.
“Haven’t we had enough of argument about how many devils can
dance on the point of a needle when the World Fortress is collapsing! What
matters in the present hour of a turning point in Existence whether the
categories of the spirit are nine or more or the dimensions, more than four;
we must rather ask ourselves whether we will survive and whether we really
want to.Let us leave the questions whether the spiritual exists without our
faith and can the spirit be touched for later.”
This supporter of Camus with his questions made me intervene in the
dispute I initiated.
“In my opinion what I’m talking about is not abstract and not in the
least scholastic but bears directly upon our existence, our responsibilities,
freedoms and individual choice.There is one thing which we cannot touch
and of which we are certain even without faith.There is a thing which can
entirely be called Spirit because it has no mass nor volume. It has no first,
second and third dimension. It does not contain a single atom in its body and
in general has no other body than the icon-stand of the word by which we
call it.”
“There is no such thing!” heard I several voices in unison followed by
a heated debate resembling a bee-hive from which an articulate phrase
reached me from time to time.
“The souls of the dead…”
“…who has touched them…”
“… you cannot with your material hand touch something
immaterial…”
“… but about the souls of the dead you know nothing but you
believe…”
“… I know because it has been written…”
“…then you believe in it…”
“Faith itself! You cannot believe in faith itself because a thing cannot
be itself!”
“… a play upon words! You cannot believe that you don’t believe, haha-ha.”
“God has entered a material body and has proven His existence!”
“…through the material body in which we believe again…”
“… it’s futile to ask where the spirit is placed, how to name it and
what its likeness is.”
“How can you speak of material love!”
“I didn’t believe in love till I touched it the other day!”
“I believe in love!”
“Precisely. ‘Believe’.”
Those true aristocrats of the word quite shut themselves up in its
magic circle and after the hysteria of its impotence was reached there was a
real danger of disputes turning violent. Things got to such pass that I heard
someone say with a stammer that the only material things are Thought,
Faith, Love and the Absolute and all else is a spiritual reflection. An
ingenious girl asked whether illusion is material while an angry ingenious
young man asked her why yesterday she had an immaterial illusion after a
quite material bottle of vodka of whose material nature he knows from the
bump on his head, unless all that is material, like the vodka, is the prime
cause of all that is not material like illusions. For its part, this enraged a
dogmatic idealist who – I am sure – felt a quite material passion, linked to
faster heartbeat, sweating and perhaps erotic tingling , to inflict a second
bump on the young man’s head. Such behaviour was inadmissible at our
gathering. The giants of thought started behaving like children but after all it
was what I intended when all was said and done.
It behooves us to ask ourselves about many things we are convinced
of. It behooves us to ask ourselves why are we convinced of them. What
entitles us to hold such views. What is the reason for our calmness as to the
fundamentals of our knowledge of many, many things. Only then do we
stand a chance to learn for the first time something which would provide a
genuine basis for our knowledge and be calm on that sound basis which
cannot be shaken by what seems a childish but in fact diabolical question
such as “Can you name an immaterial thing in nature?” What is material and
what is not,what is knowledge built in our minds upon a dogmatic basis and
above all upon faith. That has agitated minds throughout history, or rather
agitated passions, and has led to arguments similar to this one which when
all is said and done always reaches the prime causes which cannot be proven
in any way other than imposition of will, or by an entirely physical
manifestation of force which fact, I’m sure you will agree, is if not absurd at
least rather ridiculous. Yet, I was to blame for the scuffle which broke out
and it behooved me to put an end to it somehow.
“I can name something non-material in nature!” I shouted loudly.
“This is absurd! Nature is entirely material and if something is nonmaterial it is outside nature!” my opponent nearly caused a second wave of
violent debate.
“I can name it in the language of nature!” said I. “As regards any
other concept in our language which is related to the lack of material nature
we cen be sceptical but not as regards this. It is the future that is nonmaterial. As I said it has no material measurements. It has no material
qualities. It is impossible for us to measure or capture it in any of our senses.
Thinking the unthinkable. The existing non-existence. The not felt feeling. It
is spirit.”
“But in nature there is no past or future – only an endless present!
Time is a conventional quantity for us humans.”
“Exactly,” agreed I. “For us, the ones with a soul. We prove the future
not with our bodies but with our souls. Everyone in his or her own way.
Take me for example: through the circular technique of painting I mix past,
present and future.Something no longer there which has merely left its mark
upon what is actually here – that something I mix with the thing which is
here and that which is not yet here but will happen. In my pictures they
again become the endless changing present and what remains to me is the
unsafe road, the responsibility towards that which has not come about and
can do so only through my intervention. What remains to me too is the
profound metaphysical fear of fate and my will power over the body with its
limitations which cannot touch the spirit but feels responsible before it.”
Silence reigned again.
“What the future will be for you, or you, or you, or for me, and on the
earth generally, is unclear but a future there will be. What today is nonmaterial will tomorrow be actualized as matter and we are responsible for
the shape it will take. We ought to feel it. We ought to have the souls to
accomplish it. We ought to make it part and parcel of ourselves and us – into
a part of the past. We have to be in the eternal circle of past present and
future in order to have souls, in order to come to know the unknowable and
rid ourselves of the chains which link us with the solely material TODAY.
The future is a little spark of divinity which we have and enjoy the freedom
to create.
This is what I felt once when my hand started of its own to paint the
past unactualized thing, the memory of the hazy visions about that which
will come about, that which I experience as circles which acquired the
coming form and substance. I painted memories and current experiences of
my soul and the future was in my pictures as that spirit and that
unimaginable thing of which I spoke to you, of which I am speaking and
which I feel in my pictures.
I feel in my pictures, therefore I have a soul.
“THE ONLY NON-MATERIAL THING WHICH WE CANNOT
DISTRUST IS THE FUTURE!"
39. Irina was standing before the granite statue. In the months during
which she rarely saw her lover she would come to that secret place and
started to strike the chisel with the hammer in anger. She wished to produce
an abstract image of an evil deity. Of the demon that was inside herself.
With each passing day the image became ever more real. She was not a
gifted sculptor and marvelled at the thing taking shape at her hands.
Imperceptibly, the work absorbed her and she devoted more and more hours
at her secret, on the outskirts of the forest. Absorbed and horrified at the
thing which was emerging, she went on chiselling the image of her lover, of
her demon in life till at last Papa Jan stood before her. His eyes were not big
like the stern freedom. His body was not warm though it was him. Complete
and almost genuine. Irina gazed long at her finished work.
She expected to feel sorrow and anger but desire possessed her
instead. She bared her breasts and with them touched the lips of the statue.
Passionately, she stretched out her body. She nearly tore her clothes and
long caressed herself with the granite statue chiselled by her own hands. She
was kissing it from head to toe and the neighing of the horse which she had
tied nearby reminded her of his voice in the climactic moment of sexual
satisfaction. She rode on the statue and caressed its head. She clenched its
neck with her thighs and her lips dumbly screamed:
“Totally! Totally! Totally!”
Her creation warmed like the Sinemorets rocks and above her shone
the Sinemorets moon, under which the two of them chased each other and he
was not the world-renowned painter Papa Jan, nor was she the philosophy
professor. The two of them were so enamoured with their unhappiness, so
happy, that the steps of their neurons are a maze which leads to paradise or
to hell but not to the earth… Irina pressed her wide open lips to the
shoulders of the statue. Her palm caressed its penis. Her breasts rubbed
against the statue’s granite chest till the shriek of her supreme delight
merged with the neighing of the horse tied nearby.
40.
The exhibition I staged was fantastic.
The highlight was to be Vissotsky’s portrait which was the only
covered picture there and with the Russian consul to Bulgaria we were to
unveil it together.
I was young when I made that genius’s acquaintance and our meetings
were only a few but the closeness which arose between us since that time
was to leave an imprint upon me till the end of my life. Delight, anguish,
inspiration. Our common friend Valeri Ivanov Tagansky had been living in
Bulgaria for the past ten years. One evening, sipping our drinks, we recalled
his acting in Hamlet where he was partner to Vissotsky. One memory led to
another, live an avalanche. We recalled the old stories on the stage and the
fights in the pubs.
My meeting with Tagansky inspired me and within a few days I
painted the perfect picture depicting Vissotsky and Tagansky in the play
Hamlet. Currently, Tagansky was president of the “Russian club in
Bulgaria” but with part of himself he was still on the stage with Vissotsky. I
was really lucky to have completed the painting days before the opening of
the exhibition. There were speeches – pleasant and boring. Speeches
delivered with pathos and through clenched teeth. With slowly moving lips
and enthusiastic phrases. When Irina took the floor, however, everything
changed. She was the sorceress of the word and of linguistic beauty. A true
alchemist of oratory. My one and only Irina.
“We are gathered here because we are in love not only with the
pictures but in Papa Jan himself. In each one of us there lives a little Papa
Jan whom we have locked up and are trying to set free but are oppressed by
the renown of the sole Papa Jan.Though oppressed, we are in love with him
just as we are in love with that little Papa Jan who lives locked up inside us
and whom we are unable to set free… His work is mega-hyper-erotic.
Infusing it with all his elan vital he is trying to encompass the entire logos…
It is of interest to note that the Christianity of his paintings is both traditional
and mythological…” I no longer was hearing her. I was transported as at her
lectures in Blagoevgrad. Subconsciously, I accepted her suggestions which
revealed to me the truth about myself… I was hearing the chirping of a
swallow. Of that swallow to which I had likened her when we met for the
first time and my worst fear was lest that swallow fly to the warm southern
countries because only that swallow could make me happy and gild with
human delight my artistic achievements…
“And now – a surprise from the sweets making firm The Two
Swaggerers,” announced my art manager Alexander Kutryanov. “A cake
with a bas-relief image of our beloved Papa Jan.”
The guests swiftly cut the cake. So swiftly that Irina and I could not
manage to have bite at the sugary taste of my face. The art manager seemed
to have perceived my disappointment and whispered in my ear:
“There is another cake. For you and Irina only. It is in your room.”
I found Irina in the crowd and told her about the surprise. In the room,
as if stretched upon a pathologist’s table lay a thing wrapped in a sheet
which resembled a human body. When we found it we saw it was an entire
Papa Jan. Made of cake chiselled from top to toe with an erected penis
which had started melting. I lifted Irina’s skirt and pulled down her bikini. I
threw her upon the cake. I don’t know how I managed to do it but hit exactly
on my penis which splashed under her. We smeared everything with the
leftover from my bas-relief.
We made love upon it till at long last we made into a paste. Then we
started to lick the sweet remains upon our bodies and smear them more
upon our bodies. We ourselves became like our own confectionery basreliefs which tried to eat themselves and like children we didn’t cease to lick
ourselves. The longest time Irina’s lips garnered the sweet remains of my
penis while I, from her ass-hole. At long last lest we should suffer a
hypoclycemic shock we entered the shower room and under the stream of
water in the new surroundings we ceased to be like sugar melting in the heat
but bodies which sometimes can taste bitter…
“In each one of us lives a small Papa Jan,” I repeated her words. “But
I ask myself if I, who have managed to make it big, do not continue to keep
locked up inside myself another small Papa Jan.”
“Even if he grows up he’ll also have inside himself another one.”
“And we have fulfilled our childhood dream to eat ourselves full of
sweets.”
“And our predatory dream – to eat ourselves up like buns!”
We smiled under the shower and our embarce was no longer sugary.
That was real flesh and not a fairy tale.
41.
We were returning from Varna… Irina as usual was caressing my
head…The pendulum of the swing swayed above me and I, absorbed in
dreams, was recalling. We had again been playing Wagner. We were
travelling from the direction of the northern slopes of the Balkans and
passed Byala. We passed by the creations of the Master Kolyo Fitcheto. The
bridge which was to combat eternity. The bridge which the master builder
seemed to have built in order to make a transition between himself and
eternity. For a moment I imagined an overflying plane and a bomb falling
upon that creation. I turned off the cassette player. Irina laughed.
“You fear destruction?”
“I fear lest an earthquake destroy one of the most splendid works of
Kolyo Fitcheto – the church with the spinning columns in the town of
Svishtov.”
I was silent for a bit, then went on.
“Above all I fear the ruin of the human soul and kitsch. I fear collapse.
I fear decomposition and the warping of human sentiments.The warping of
romanticism. Domestic and global decomposition. Here now, this is
romanticism before which you can only be silent unless you cannot build
your shadow into it. The rest is merely a flight from your depression,
through the destruction and depressing of others. Here is the greatness which
has won against the centuries. It has jumped over them. A self-taught master
with a real soul has managed it…”
“You said that before such romanticism one must only keep silent but
you don’t, Jan; romanticisim is talkative.”
“Sometimes. When it cannot build its shadow into its own yearnings,”
I smiled at her thoughtfully.
We stepped onto the bridge, holding hands. We enjoyed the creation
and were sorry that we cannot build our shadows into the bridge… The
swing in Tanya’s court was still the clock pendulum. Through it I saw the
storks and then the titan who was destroying the fortress into which his
beloved was built: Nature… And nature itself wished to build itself into its
dead creations. In an eternal marriage with its idol with whom they were to
die together. Nature was man and woman, walking along the bridge, which
had sustained the unbearable pressure of the years. A man and a woman
holding hands. They kiss. It’s us. Irina and I. Dreaming to be shadows built
into stone. Wishing to feel something more than ecstasy.
We slowly walked along the bridge and spoke about the stone and the
soul already built into the stone in order to touch the feet of its future
children and to inspire their souls to be built into the next creation, built
upon theirs. A creation that would rise up to the sky. A tower of Babylon
which would confuse even God and will make Him stir the languages so that
we would seek in their tangled order the model of genuine knowledge…
We walked gripped by desire. Holding hands which were a bridge to
eternity. A bridge having endured eternity.A bridge in which the masterful
hands had not only built into their shadows but the flesh, the blood and their
passions.The agitated tiny wasps which were biting us all the time but the
pain was so poor that it resembled rather a pleasant touch. We long and
silently contemplated in order to make the chatty romanticism indeed to be
silent in order to manage to build its shadow and the more we yielded to
contemplation and the human creation having enriched it with its beauty the
closer we were to it. The more cleaner was our beauty.
We felt uncomfortable in our clothes. We took them off and went on
moving naked around the bridge. We didn’t think of anything we didn’t feel
anything till the moment in which we felt how the greatness of nature
penetrates the heart of the master. It, too, governs him sexually and it, falling
into ecstasy begins to love for its part nature, turning the stones into life. Into
a bridge along which will pass living feet. Into a bridge such as is the
woman. The master felt a longing for the nature of the woman, he
contemplated her as flesh and every cell of his body instantly discovered a
way how to satisfy her longing, how to meet her longing. How to make love
in such a way that the snow would not melt and the shadow would not
vanish. Stone, while in fact flesh. Flesh possessed by the tools of inspiration
– precisely the living David sculpted by the hands of Michelangelo – a good
association of the living stones.
Imperceptibly we had reached a niche in the bridge. It resembled both
a vagina and a starry tunnel. We stepped into it and embraced.
“We too will built our shadows into it,” she almost shrieked. “Love
me to death! I want to die between these stones so that my soul will remain
forever in them. I want to die! In your embrace! Love me! Love me.”
It was not drowning. It was not a burning hut. It was not a risky flight
on a monoplane. It was something more. She really wished to die in the
flesh.To drown, to burn, to crash and suffocate in the flesh. I lost my breath.
I felt as though I suffered an asthmatic crisis. My heart beat faster in my
throat. My tongue had grown so thick that I couldn’t say anything. I felt as in
a cage. I seemed to be built into stone. She had built herself into me. She –
my beloved – and I was suffocating in her and she wished to be suffocated in
me. In order to remain eternal. Bridges and destruction… The wasps began
stinging me ferociously. My entire body was weak. I had no will power. No
memory. It seemed to me I was seeing a pendulum and a cradle. Or a
glittering garden with cherry trees. Had it happened, or were it ever to
happen? I embraced her. With a strength with which I was to crush her in
my embrace but she was living and for her part clenched my waist between
her thighs so tightly as I never supposed she could and she could have
cracked my waist, yet I was still living. We pressed our lips together – to
suffocation. On every side we were covered by the grey dead-living stone;
our souls were lost in a maze. The passionate ghostly flames intertwined and
loved while our bodies died into eternity… Sunflowers. Inquisitive
sunflowers among which we chased each other and photographed each
other, blossomed amidst the floating, chasing, ghostly flames…
We were falling with a diving-bell into the abyss.It was deeper than
the Marian Gorge and suffocated. In fact built into a bridge rising high
above the Marian Gorge. The flames still flickered, though we were dead.
The flames continued to burn with passion, though we were lifeless bodies
built into the old bridge… The titan was smashing it. He was shedding tears
and to a Wagnerian tune he was smashing it with a large hammer.
My car was tearing along the wrong lane. In front of us, a lorry.
Burning with passion we felt stronger delight with the risk we were
taking.The car collides with the lorry.
Flames. A bomb falling onto the bridge. Flames. From the lorrry exit
fiery bodies which continue to tear themselves with caresses and to whisper:
“I love you, I love you, I love you…”Flames, but the bridge is okey.In it the
flames contiue to chase one another.I was suffocating. She screamed: “Love
me to death, to death, to death…”
My thrusts we so intense that I could have smashed her bones and
penetrated into her throat.She clenched my throat with her thighs. I thought
she would break it but at the same time I drank the strongest elixir maybe it
was the wine discovered by Noa, or some magic potion, discovered by the
young crazy Rozenkreutzer Irinio in order to please me. To poison me with
pleasure because he has not found any other tormenting way of annihilating
me…A car colliding into a tanker-lorry on which is written “danger of fire”.
Flames. I pour champagne onto the models of the celebrated designer and
friend of mine Svetla Dimitrova at some avant-guard super-show, halfexhibition, half-revue. The champagne turns into napalm. I burn. I suffocate.
I become ash. The spirit departs the ashes and penetrates into the cold
stones.At long last the fire dies down.At long last the lungs don’t want air.
We travel in an endless darkness.I feel her. I feel my beloved Irina
whispering to me. I do not understand her lingo.We have built a part of the
tower of Babylon so that we could not reach heaven.God has made our
languages unintelligible to one another…We wish to invent a star so that it
isn’t so sombre.Then we explode into hundreds of stars. I feel I am
fertilizing the entire universe. Then I populate countless planets but
countless is too few to populate the emptiness caused by the loss of the
shadow of Irinia built into the bridge.Then I populate a planet which I call
beloved and discover the shadow of my lover in the chink of a bridge. The
two of us are devoid of strength and we realize that we have fortified the
bridge because we have indeed built our shadows into it.
42.
I am listening to Vivaldi’s “Seasons” and my road leads me towards
the bridge. Though I know it is still intact I want to see it with my own
eyes.The clock keeps ticking in my head and I realize that each second
brings me closer to the moment when I’ll again embrace my beloved. I had
to stop several times. Most of the details of the day when we were building
our shadows into the Kolyo Fitcheto bridge escaped me.While I was
travelling towards Byala they appeared one after the other. To the tiniest
detail and the feelings were the same as at that time. Maybe more powerful
because fantasy made memory devine. I did not wish have an accident and I
had to stop.Sometimes in roadside coffee bars. I was lost in the confusion of
my emotions and for an instant I thought that maybe the eyes indeed saw
everything which was not there before they saw it. What were to be if my
eyes saw the bridge destroyed by a “smart bomb”? I was aware that hadn’t
happened and the war in Serbia had already passed and there was no dnager
of a schizophrenic smart bomb missing its target and falling on the bridge
into which our shadows had been built; yet I had not seen that and for an
instant I was horrified that the bridge could have been destroyed.
“Jan,” I murmurred into my beer, “you are getting mad. The bridge
was there even without your scandalous eyes lifted the skirt of the girl from
the 8th grade when you were in the 4th. Her kitten was there too even before
your eyes saw it and you got a slap in the face.”
But why are rockets so much like penises? Because they are the
product of pathological erotic revelation of some sexually unsatisfied
element… My sombre thoughts were dispelled. I recalled the latest
controversy with the latest American feminist.She had collected about a
thousand matchboxes with pictures of nude girls and had constructed out of
them something she called “homosexual robot”. I responded with a picture
the photo of which I sent her by e-mail. An American smart bomb had fallen
in her backyard.
43.
The bridge was in its place. How could I even think of it being
destroyed. Even if the war had been waged in Bulgaria and even if the
missile had been directed with maximum precison at it, it would not have hit
it and even if it hit it it would not destroy it. Indeed, our shadows had been
built into it and I felt that as soon as I entered that niche where we had made
love at the time. I felt it like a powerful sexual arousal. She came to me
silent, ghostly and brilliant. She was clad in a nightie made of cobweb which
she gracefully took off. She came up to me and embraced my neck with her
palms.Then there was a prolonged kiss.It was the shadow, separated from
the woman who loved me savagely and passionately to death. The shadow
was tender, given to its dream, deprived of reason or any other sentiment
apart from infinite tenderness towards the other shadow which had chosen
her gaol, her castle, her prison. Irina’s shadow could not feel any other way
towards me. It could not be cross with me, disappointed, wanting to hurt me,
be sorry occasionally of being love albeit for a short time. She shadow was
eternal because it was built into the bridge between life and immortality.It
was so perfect that I feared it might be torn in my fingers but it didn’t.
We made love as before till light vanished from my eyes so that I too
turned into my shadow built into the stone. Wasn’t that in fact death?
No. Death looked differently. Death was rude and brutal, or at any
rate its onset was rude and brutal even if pop groups like The Eagles glorify
such an onset quite tenderly. The shadow built into the bridge was eternal
but the man to whom it belonged was not. It might never return. A short
barrier prevented it from doing so at the time after which it would never
return in order to set the clock forward. ..
We were in Sofia and the summer was hot and painful. It was filled
with burning negative emotions and the madness of the herd. The
neighbourhood was gripped by manic depression, the entire capital was
gripped by manic depression. The entire country was gripped by manic
depression and perhaps the whole world was writhing in its crisis of hyper
agitation and hyper-explosion. We, little creatures called humans, so great
in their talent and passion and so paltry in the paws of the ocotpus of five
billion cells we also hyper-agitated and nervous. Deprived of reason but also
deprived of that passion which educates reason towards the good. We were
gripped by certain others, trivial, paltry, malicious and cruelly stinging
passions which paralized both thought and real profound sentiment.
On one of those days came one of the most serious ruptures between
Irina and myself. In fact it had begun weeks before but they were the run-up
to the crisis which abruptly cut through both of us and nearly caused my
death. It would have been otherwise if it had happened between me and
another woman. The weeks during that run-up were filled with trivial
arguments which at first resembled tender teasing but gradually became
coarser till in the end they turned into scandals. Irina suddenly became a
woman who wished by hook or by crook to turn the man beside her into a
puppet. A puppet which still had certain feelings but not true love. Feelings,
which by and by were to vanish completely. I felt it and told myself I was
imagining it. I even accused myself and told myself I a rude fellow and had
had relations with too many bad women who had – when all is said and done
– deprived me of the real woman and real love. Alas, my presentiments
were correct and not the merely elementary psychoanalysis tending towards
self-flagellation and self accusation.I refused to believe what I noticed with
the eyes of everyday wisdom but I believed what I saw through the eyes of
love and here I was, gun in hand, in her flat. The entire wall is covered with
inscriptions of schizophrenic confessions of love written with her lipstick.
The bottle of Smirnoff rolled next to the bottle of Johnny Walker and the
boxes of tranquilizers. Still full are the bottles and the boxes and on the
wall, with the lipstick of my beloved, I had written: “I love you, I love you
Irina; we are sinking in the dawn. Irina, we are dying but you’ll survive
whereas I am finished. Irina. Alien! Mine! A peak knocked into that niche in
the bridge where are gathered the juices covering the bark of each tree and
every fruit after each night of love… I believed there were no distances but
they exist. I believed there were women, but there was a Woman who
turned into an ordinary one yet I cannot but love the woman because I
cannot help loving beauty…”
Thus ended the lipstick inscription. Then I hit it long with my fist till
my hands bled and the inscription got smeared. I went on beating the wall
with my hands as though I beat walls between us two.The wall of her
capricand my failure to fulfil it or help her overcome it.The walls forever
separating us and they were not only that schizophrenic summer. They
dated from the first time we met. The walls through whose chinks we peered
in order to see ourselves in intimate postures but which in no way managed
to smash. Before I opened the bottle of Smirnoff, before I put the first bullet
into the revolver. Before swallowing the first five milligrams of tranquilizer.
Oh how much I was to enjoy my pain! Oh, what masochistic delight I was to
experience.I was to shoot first at my knee so I would feel an excruciating
pain but would not die. But I was to place a pillow before the muzzle to
prevent the shot being heard or being saved by somebody whom I might kill
before killing myself. But before that I was sip some quality vodka and
single pill.Not as a tranquilizer but because that was the beginning. I kept on
beating the wall with my fists.
“Now I’m going to show you what a wall is! A tombstone is the
fastest wall between two souls. Now I’m going to destroy this one in order
to erect the undistructible one. And went on beating with my fists till the
poetic outpour were quite smeared under my blood and only the smeared
text remained: “I love you Irina, I love you…” The blood from my hands no
longer left traces, no longer dripped but was pouring out and I began writng
with it on the stucco peeling of from the strokes…
“I love you even when I kneel though I never genuflect and when I
have to make love with the devil in order to bribe it to give me something
with which I could attain you though it might cost my soul, Irina! I love you
even when there is nothing that my soul hasn’t known and felt and is filled
to rupture like the belly of a greedy pig on two legs and there ought not to
be a place for you yet even then I love you, Irina. Welcome to the Hotel
California, Irina! Embrace me now for the final time, embrace the love,
embrace death. You did not give up a single feminine caprice while I’m
dying of love for you, Irina…”
I must have broken my knuckles but felt no pain. It was silly but
readied my photo camera with which we once made erotic snapshots of
ourselves.I faced it with a revolver pointed at my temple. I seem to have
fallen into the habit of playing that game. But for the first time I pointed the
muzzle at my head. I loaded it. The mechanism gave out a sweet sound. The
trigger clicked discharging nothing at precisely the moment when the
camera clicked, too. I stared at the bloody inscription: “I love you to death,
to death I love you, Irina. And there’s more…”
My hand did not tremble nor did I feel any pain from my broken
knuckles.I recharged the revolver. I smiled. Everything seemed a arce to
me.The entire scene. The first bullet was of lead. The other four were silver,
the final one, golden. I had melted an odd candlestick and a golden ring
which once meant a lot to me, in order to make the bullets. Did it matter
with what bullets I was to kill myself? What did precious metals matter if
killed myself indeed? I opened the bottle of vodka. I drank profusely. I
might have downed a hundred grammes.The instead of one, I swallowed
three tranquilizers and felt relief. I again loaded the camera and recharged
the revolver. A click came both from the camera and from the pistol.I was
alive but indifferent. How else could I have felt when the Woman had
become the women…
Our scandals started with trifles. At first we chided each other over
our behaviour. She said I behaved scandalously and I accused her of being
childish. Of course I behaved scandalously. Recently, I had no other clients
except ones I trusted but they cheated me. So, imperceptibly, my material
standard proved lower than what I needed to meet my expenses. But just
then Irina had decided she greatly needed me but she was my last concern
amidst my financial crisis. She ought to have understood me if she was a
woman with capital W and in turn I had to understand her if my love was
with a capital L. “Why kill myself when I am dead anyway? Why this whole
farce? Anyway my life from then on was to be a slow suicide. Irina would
not be the same to me. Even if she were to return from the seaside…”
With my blood I added further schizophrenic stanzas:
“The sea separates me from you, from the waves and for you
separation are the rocks on which snakes hissed, tempting us and suggesting
to us, and defeating us, fertilized completely with the insanity of the original
sin of faith in the infinite love and the heel smashing the heads of the snakes.
Sinemorets is smashed upon your wall and each bloody stanza will remind
you of the shadows built into it and of the cradle which I stopped with my
body, and of the stork’s nest, and of the sunflowers, and the capsules and of
the rockets and of the golden bullet like a golden pump of the miserable
teenager girl who sought wramth in death’s cold embrace…”
I was not sure if I would be alive when the turn of the golden bullet
came. That seemed to breathe fresh life into me. It awoke something in me.
It resembled a sporting esntiment and it is after all a wish to live and when
there is wish to live the wish for death is real and is no longer any face
despite all farces accompanying it…
“You must spare some time for me. Only a few days! I want us to be
together again on those rocks, just the two of us… I feel so emotionally
exhausted and so insane in this pathological atmosphere, I wonder if can
stand it any longer.If you love me truly, you’ll manage it. Are you not up to
anything? Haven’t you been cross with me when I doubted you…”
She needn’t have said these last words. With one sentence she caused
me to doubt myself. It was an absolutely novel experience in my life. Maybe
that’s why I couldn’t manage though at the time I embraced her and said to
her:
“I’ll do what you want of me Irina,” said I but I had by now lost faith
in myself and couldn’t cope with the trials which arrived over the next few
days on which I will not dwell but will only say they were unbearable. I
would have overcome them but with a single sentence Irina sowed in me the
seed of self-doubt… I saw myself undressing her by the piano. I felt her lips
on mine and the sweet taste of chocolate melted in her vagina. At the
beginning she found it repulsively perverse but later my delight merging
with hers made the woman who painted her nude portrait with … the
phalluses… Yes! Now there were phalluses!
I sipped more vodka instead of melted chocolate and took two more
tranquilizer pills. I felt both delighted and pained while that was my most
successful and most avant-garde exhibition. Bits of stucco and smeared
verses in blood and lipstick, a camera and tranquilizers in such quantities as
would have killed several elephants. Alcohol… A great deal of alcohol.
“I can’t come… At least for now I can’t promise. Tomorrow things
might change,” I told her then and she waited for me till the next day and the
words, i. e. what I told her the evening before I had to repeat again to her…
“I love you Jan! I love you very much,” I perceived anguish in her
voice. Anguish that boded ill. Who was I to prevent her from going to the
seaside? Who was I to deprive her of her happiness? What mattered most to
me was that she should feel well. Was it right for me to stop her? Was it
right for me to let her go with others? I learnt she had found company. Was
it possible for her to replace me and if she could do so what was the
problem?
“Be damned, Irina! Damned love! Damned earth!Damned snake!
Damned woman! Wild woman. Wild snake. Wild love. Be wild Irina, be
divine. Divine love, divine earth divine snake divine woman. Be unfamiliar
Irina, unfamiliar love! Unfamiliar earth. Unfamiliar snake. Unfamiliar
woman! I am torn to pieces, the tranquilizers won’t suffice.The golden and
silver bullets will never turn into sand at Sinemorets, my splashed blood is
colder than my sperm. The poems on the wall are more pitiable than the
whisper: “I love you!The bits of stucco will fall upon your hair all of sound
in order to make them silvery and I know that after you inflicted pain on me,
I will do the same to you by taking myself away from you forever…”
I smeared the blood with my palm and the words disappeared. I put
the second silver bullet into the revolver. I wanted to paint myself in the
image of an evil spirit.Aren’t evil spirits killed with silver bullets? I burst out
laughing hysterically, then I cried and laughed again. The most avant-garde
work of art. I loaded the camera again… Clattering mechanisms of a camera
and a pistol.
I unbuttoned the topmost button of her jeans and she looked at me
somewhat embarrassed. At the time we were on the rope bridge under the
mill at Assenovgrad. Many people were passing and the bridge was not at all
the one built by master Kolyo Ficheto. Simply a rope bridge. Below a
voyeuristic fisherman was watching our reflection in the water and did not
care whether the fish was biting. Her look became even more embarrassed
when I undid the second and third button. At last she smiled and in her
smile after the embarrassment there floated such sweetness and perversity
which can arouse a man more strongly than any female breasts, vaginas,
pornographic films, perfumes and dirty conversation.I spread her body on
the bridge in order to be able to pull off her bikini. The bridge swung and
she flew away from it. She hung on the rope. I lifted her. She gripped it
soundly so she could not fly away from it with her back to me.We shook the
bridge so much that the metal ropes creaked like thirteen electric guitars
with distorted rasping voices as through a funnel. Love above the banks of
Chaya, wild, summertime, heavy metal. Gaping mill workers at the end of
their shift after having fulfilled their quotas, cannot pass across the
bridge.Thirteen sound guitars. Six rhythm and solo guitars, two voices in
ecstasy rising above the din of the electric guitars till the moment when I
gripped her breast, she let go of the ropes and we fell from the low-lying
bridge into the river which fortunately was deep at that point.
The bits of stucco and blood on the wall resembling a woman holding
fast to the ropes of a low rope bridge… Resembling arousal and
embarrassment in the eys… The bottle of tranquilizers was empty. The
bottle of vodka was empty, too…
A day ago I went to my studio and noticed her note:
“Jan (I’m pronouncing now your name helplessly and exhaustedly). If
you cannot summon the strength to apologize to me by tomorrow evening
and promise that you’ll come to the seaside with me as it suits you then
farewell forever” Farewell had been underlined nervously and resolutely.
“Forever, with no trace of hatred. Look for more than one girl friends
because you’ll be in need of a great deal of psychotherapy and many new
women who would have to fill the abyss I’m leaving behind. Or the last
traces of a dead body.
Irina”
I put the third silver bullet into the revolver. My hand was heavy.
She was heavy on my hands. Opened her lips and I kissed them. No,
no I had stuck my tongue into the muzzle of the revolver. I pulled the
trigger once again. I laughed. I was alive again but for how long?With this
combination of tranquilizers and alcohol there was no way of knowing. I no
longer wished to die. She had hurt me. I had hurt her too./Why did I have to
destroy her by destroying myself before that? The last traces of a body -–she
said it well And what about the shadows? They will remain there.
“The pony is one of the traces, too. Of two bodies, not one! And one
day you will see a falling balloon with a picture of mine hung upon it.
Prolonged psychotherapy – laughed I. Here I was wrong. I hate everything
that is repulsively long, though I love the long moments of beauty… There
are other cures. Well, a bit immature but effective. What is psychotherapy
but deadening of a genuine sentiment. The whole of me is a sentiment. A
vile, harmful sentiment. Ever since the moment we met in that lift, ever
since then. Unfortunately, I wish to live again. However, instead of
repenting and awaiting with fear my fate, I’ll try and speed things up. Just as
I have always speeded them up.Just as would have accelerated the earth’s
rotation, had you wished it but you simply wished me to come with you to
the seaside and I couldn’t because one sentence, a single innocent sentence
uttered by a professor of philosophy can kill first faith, than a man.”
I saw a mirror.A clock tower. They did not mean anything to me. I
filled my palms with some pills whose inscription I could no longer read. I
seem to have violated the ritual. A silver bullet again. I had to place it in the
revolver first and perhaps only then to load the camera and take a picture of
the wall first because the wall with the bits of stucco and the verses lost in
blood were my soul.I opened the window for some fresh air or for me to
jump out of it. I fell. Not from the window, though.I had fallen on my back
and took a fistful of pills which I still held. But with what alcohol I took
them.. Naked, she stood over me, caressing my chest.
“What’s going on?”
“Everything is fine, Jan. In paradise they neither marry, nor have
children. There are no longer any barriers between us two…”
“But why are you here, too?”
She smiled at me and her infernal teeth shone in front of me.
“And why are you with me? Wasn’t your place up above?”
I seem to have taken some pills. I did not know what was happening
to me.Was I awake, was I dreaming or dead? What was going on? I was
creeping on the floor and found the pistol. Then I dropped it. I lay exhausted
in my studio.I still could not understand whether everything had passed or
was only beginning. I was reading Irina’s letter. In the next moment my art
manager Alexander Kutryanov smashed the door and lugged me towards the
sink to vomit.Then I again beat the wall with my fists till finally I realized I
was awake and that it was cruel to be still alive.
While we were making love in the niche of the bridge of master
Kolyo Fitcheto with Irina’s shadow the only thing my beloved murmured
was:
“We cheated ourselves that we could fall down and destroy
bridges.We cannot do that yet and the final trace of a body leaves a scar till
the end… I’ll soon be back.”
At dawn I made for the infinite.I had to return to the room which
nearly became my grave.
44.
I stared at the photo from that night when I challenged fate, or ran
away from it, or there was no fate at all, or that was fate itself. Touching my
temple with the muzzle of the pistol, sitting on the bed, around which beside
the bottles of alcohol and the boxes with tranquilizers were strewn bundles
of banknotes and a candle. The thirty-centimetre long candle into which
were built several heads of Buddha and which had been brought from India
as gift to Materius and Irina. It was burning. It burnt upon the ashes of letters
written by Irina… On the next photo I was setting fire to a picture once
given me by Irina at the exhibition when we made love upon the cake. That
was a picture of an angel and on the photo from that night of fatal
lovemaking and madness I was setting fire to the painting. First to the
angel’s forehead and then to his wings…The strewn bundles of banknotes I
had won that same day. They need not burn because they would be needed
for my funeral… On the next photo the candle with the Buddhas had
covered with its molten purple the whole of the nuptial bed while I was
sitting on the still burning wax with a revolver pointed at my temple.
Irina gave me the expensive candle. Irina burnt it.On the photo the
molten candle was like my outpouring blood.The entire room was in blood
hue.The bottles seemed full of blood, contaminated, which poured into the
veins of the world. The strewn banknotes were dripping with blood. They
seemed to be the money Judas Iscariot had thrown with a loud scream:
“I don’t want bloody money!”
Had I won them a few days earlier free from material problems, I
would have spent them at the seaside with Irina. Now, they were meant for
my funeral… The next photo was bloody hues, too.The candles were
sprawled upon the charred letters.So I hadn’t burnt them completely. No, of
course not! I still kept some of them.Bloody ashes, bloody letters. Red
molten candle.The entire body of poetry I had dedicated to Irina, hundreds
of charred sheets strewn on the floor. Living carrion with my own features
on the next photo held a pistol aimed at the heart this time. I was completely
mad. I threw the photos into the car. Life went on. After Alexander and his
wife Rossi helped me leave the purgatory of death, for three days which
were thirteen millennia I tossed about in it where I met terrible strange
creatures with my features. I passed through thirteen mirrors and thirteen
new pictures of mine, a portion of them with the old subjects but charged
with the energy of the new life on which I embarked after that night of
death. The nightmares had passed. The cobweb was torn at just the moment
when the black widow, satisfied by me, tried to savage me.A lightning
which was in fact an angel’s sword cut the cobweb and I fully awoke.Empty
and happy.Wearied and inspired. Virgil and Dante were behind in purgatory
but I went out leaving there only bits of stucco, a lit red candle with the
image of Buddha, verses of mine dedicated to Irina and Irina’s letters to
me.And the costly picture where she depicted me like and angel but
naturally burnt.
I was a bit sorry for her but it was no day for regrets nor for dying. I
began painting. My art manager was shocked. Until moments before I
looked to him still as a traveller but within an instant I lifted myself and
took up the brush.I saw the thirteen pictures.Not yet in full detail but almost
complete.I had simply to paint them in order to break the final thread of the
cobweb which still linked me with hell as an umbillical chord. In the first,
called The Demon in Me I took my brain from my skull and pressed it hard
with my hands, turning it into an amorphous mass.The demon which had
pointed the revolver at my head. The demon which did not want me to think.
The demon which helped me feel. To hate and to love. To destroy myself.
To be an amorphous mass of grey cells. A living carrion with a pistol
touching my head.The demon which triumphed over me. The demon I
smashed in the boxing ring. The demon which with a hit bellow the belt
instead of causing me pain brought me satisfaction which inflicted the
trauma on my brain which hurt me so much that the hands broke the skull
and took out the brain in order to turn it into an amorphous mass and
scattered thoughts and maybe from this amorphous mass with the hands of a
sculptor would create plastic figures symbolizing sorrowful existence and
the collapse of the will to power. Perhaps the sculpture would represent a
nude woman in purple with wide open thighs on the throne of the world and
between them the head of a slave into whose back she was plunging a
dagger… An open skull and amorphous mass.
“IF YOUR DEMON TURNS YOU INTO AMORPHOUS MASS
FROM THIS MASS YOU SCULPT THE FINE STATUE OF YOURSELF
SUCH AS YOU WOULD BE IN FUTURE!"”
The second: Human candle. My head was melting like a candle. Like
a sculpture of a pagoda, like a waxen Buddha, like a setting sun, like a
sunset of the gods, like reality in dream, like a powerful emotion amid
indifference. Bright colours and the utmost inspiration upon entering the
thickets of the infinite country of sorrow. Like lust for life. Like lungs,
seeking a gulp of air in a fog of poisonous gas. Like pouring napalm. Like a
burning down civilization. Like a day-dream which grows old and turns into
a reality. Like a fantasy which is extinguished in order to turn into a lie. Like
every person. Not like every person but only like oneself. Like the whole
world. The human candle. Girly tears. Sweating on the first nuptial night. A
bright moon dying out in the Moon. Melting autumn leaves. Countless
frittered sentiments. A melting candle. Wax. Man.
“IF YOUR SENTIMENTS MELT, ILLUMINE THE WORLD WITH
YOUR SADLY VANISHING BODY!”
Third picture: Circles without count… Fiery circles… Two naked
bodies in the centre. Two bodies interwoven with the circles. A clock hand
moving in a circle. Circular time. Memories from the future.Unlived life. I
am not what I have been but what I’m going to be when I return to my
previous self. I am a perpetual aspiration. I am a sower. The planter awaiting
harvest which might or might not become bread. Can he perish under hail or
die in a fire caused by an evil hand… I am the one sowing the seed into the
woman and with her wait for fruit.
“Will we live to see the harvest?” The second book from the trilogy
“The Papa Jan Gallery” I was setting fire to my pictures in which a hurt girl
did the same and seeing herself as one of her own completed pictures
decided to explode together with a block of flats…. In fact to explode with
the entire world. A hurt genius ready to blow up the entire world, finding it
perfect; feeling creative still, he turns creativity into a destructive force.
Billions will not live to see the harvest. I ask myself again: “Where are you
heading to?” This is the first and last principle of Janoism which is neither
Hitlerism, nor Stalinism, nor any other “-ism”.
Janoism is my teaching and my energy which I impart to others so
that they might keep the world in motion and beauty, too, but beauty isn’t
Perfection so the creative urge can only aspire to it and not become
destructive. So that we can live to see the harvest. Janoism becomes haikuJanoisms – my basic messages to the world!!!
After the lunar orgasm and the delight of suicidal passion one should
taste the next, grander one – survival. The fallen revolver with the golden
bullet still inside it. Janoism is the golden bullet which can always be loaded
into the revolver but will never be discharged. The aspiration towards
perfection which genuflects a step before it…
The picture “Shall we live to see the harvest” depcited a disintegrating
dry tree one of whose branches is the smashing atom. The other ended with
an odd fruit – the fruit of knowledge – my brain!Upon it I left the oily
imprints from my palms. Everything depended on me. Whether I’ll live to
see the harvest.
“IF YOU ARE AWAITNG THE HARVEST, WAIT FOR IT
PATIENTLY, SO THAT YOU DO NOT TURN INTO A VILLANOUS
HAND WHICH WILL TURN THE YIELD INTO ASHES"”
Fourth picture: “On the threshold of reality”. I am lying flat on my
stomach on the sand with my back to the atomic explosion in the sea. Irina is
in the pulsating, trembling, writhing, orgasmically ejaculating mushroom
distorting the volume of space, absorbing the clouds, burning the sky and
mixing with all the elements.She is pure, saintly and naked. Around the
mushroom hover buddhas, angels and prophets who deliberate, grieve, fear,
wish to change something, wish to gather in that which they have already let
slip from their hands. The feminine flesh and passion…
“SHOULD YOU FEEL A STRONG PASSION, STEEL YOUR
HANDS! YOUR FINGERS SHOULD NOT LET IT SLIP!”
Fifth picture: “Meditation” I am with one eye only. My hands are tied
but I feel the throb of the universe. The thrill of the atomic explosion
between the thighs, the beauty of the earth hanging above it like a threat to
the entire world. On the boundless green meadows horses gallop and sunny
does race in the heavens each doe being a human soul. The demon who
picked out the brain and smashed so that the man in it to be moulded into a
naked, innocent and pure woman which can later be seen as an atomic
mushroom. The beautiful fields can again be seen and on them racing
creatures and skies inhabited by human souls. The candle burning low which
sends its messages into deep outer space in order to discover a fairy-tale
planet. It would brurst on the threshold of its actuality and deception like a
smashed atom… Circles and circles again.Pulsations throughout the
unverse.From the Big Bang to the Earth covered in lava.From the first living
organism to the virtual reason.From one explosion to another. All words, all
notes, all colours, all fingers playing with them, eyes, hearts. All cells.
Living and dead. Dead and resurrected.All sombre predictions and those full
of hope.Everything in my heart that I would devote to the Universe, tying
my hands and closing my real eyes in order to unlock my dreams and the
dreaming eye is that of the artist.
The eye of the one who had died to redeem the sin of his beloved but
who had resurrected to create her anew. The eye which gives birth when it
opens.The eye which truly sees. The blind eye which contemplates. An eye
disconnected with the deceits of the other senses.An eye clear of the mazes
of linguistic splittings of minds, of the demonic lack of restraint and
supernatural perceptions. The meditating eye which can truly encompass an
entire universe. Suffice it for you to know how to shut the other two and to
create daylight in them. Suffice it for you to be able after that to seek and
find out, then to use experience like a door-key and to unlock its
eyelid.Suffice it for you to know how to push it open with gentle love and
not to kick it open. Then will open the endless fiery circles of all the
elements – the endless circles of all ages, the infinite moments, each of
which, equal to eternity and each of which is like a circle from eternity
itself.Each of which a minutely brief human life span. Each one majestic like
a single human life.A fiery circle in a shepherd’s hut around two naked
bodies.Pagodas burning down in circles. Confused angels, demons and
buddhas… Dwelling inside them. In the midst of fiery circles. Released
passion and relief.A pendulum-cradle which takes you to the next instant
which is a previous one.Circular motion of the brush. Circular motion of the
universe. Pulsation. General orgasm! Relief and again a dream and work of
art and struggle and solicitation. A swinging rope bridge. A roulette set
turning. A barrel of a gun set turning.A golden bullet… Lightning, an
angel’s sword cutting the web of hell… Golden circles… Fiery circles…
Infinite… Total release! And again a circle and an infinity!
“IF YOU CAN SHUT YOUR EYES SO THAT YOU CAN CREATE
LIGHT IN THE DARKNESS, YOU WILL OPEN AN ARTIST’S EYE IN
YOU!”
Sixth picture: “The eternal phallus”? If I am the eternal male?If I am
masculine eternity? If I am eternal? If I am male?And I am male and am
eternal!And I visualized the golden bullet cracking my skull decorating the
wall with an earring of brain, blood and gold.And then the wall emerged to
attend the stars’ evening ball and display its fresh piece of jewellery.And all
the stars were fascinated by its beauty.And all the stars desired that piece of
jewellery and jostling they created me. They created a demi-god with a
phallus in a state of erection. A demi-god they desired. Loved and desired
making love to it.They wanted to be fertilized by it.And they ceased being
stars and became women while I naked and with a magnified masculinity on
the picture fertilized all of them. Totally… Totally… So that I can enter the
eternal circle. So that I can return to the eternal circle.So that I can be in the
midst of the fiery circle with a single woman and from a multiple demi-god
to become a man with one soul, mentality and love. So that the fiery circle
would encompass our bodies and make them superhuman once again.To
make them again an explosion, angels and shut eyes producing light in the
darkness. Under them should be the burning down candle and behind it – the
demon. And a circle again… An eternal circle and fertilization. Circular
time. Circular manner of painting. Elements and energy from one picture
passing into the others, eternally.
The first picture of this series is “The Picture of the Century”. That
picture has been signed by thousands of people, celebrities, athletes,
politicians and others. My wish is to produce a symbiosis of politics, sport
and art and the energy of all those people to be imprinted on the canvas.
With this series I began the cycle “Cosmic Exhibitions”.
Rain outside. Rain, taking possession of the Earth… Lightning
beating at the trees. An angel’s sword, tearing the cobweb of purgatory, the
cobweb of science… Death and resurrection. Resurrection through
fertilization. The thing which you will generate will carry your gene and the
heavy burden of intellectual heritage left by you. Perplexed by your
maniacal states in which you produced your creations, solaced by your
spirituality, depressed, inspired. A progeny of the aroused women and the
eternal phallus…
]
Picture No seven: “A Shop for airy towers”. Once upon a time it was
book. The book of my memories. I tried to arrange in it my life thrown
away in adventures and inspiration. Once I met by chance Brother Stephen
with whom we started work on the trilogy “The Papa Jan Gallery”, of which
“A Shop for Airy Towers” was the first volume. It investigates human
values and reminuscences. Roaming in the gallery of memories and in life.
Memories were superimposed upon the current scene. The book ceased to be
a book but a struggle against the current scene, which I couldn’t hold for a
single instant because that very instant it turned into a memory. “A Shop for
Airy Towers” ceased to be a book and turned into a human being. I ceased to
be a human being and became a text from “A Shop for Airy Towers”. I
could not reach the memories via the text, because I stood between it and
and them. Like a beating heart. A beating heart, which in the course of the
writing of the intial two hundred pages fell in love with Irina.
I could not reach my heart because in front of it stood the barrier of
the text of “Shop for Airy Towers”. I did not understand how it happened
but from a proto-type of the book I became a character in it who is enjoying
himself in it. I did not understand how it happened but I started a textual life
rather than an existential one in the enormous book and got lost in “The
Gallery of Memories”, till at last I managed to get out of it and breathe once
again fresh air and not a dust of reminiscences. Once this was a book. Now it
itself became part of “The Gallery of Memories”, in which I discerned my
image in the night when I expected the golden bullet to split my skull.
Once it was a book but it turned into a painting “A Shop for Airy
Towers”. In that first book of the Papa Jan trilogy I recreate the Manifesto:
“THE LOGIC CHAIN – THE IMPLICATIONS OF THE
DISCOVERED ENERGY LYZISM – A NEW STYLE IN PHILOSOPHY
AND LIFE”
Energy lyzism DISSOLVER – DECOMPOSER –
DIFFERENTIATOR – ANALYST – TRANSFORMER –
TRANSFIGURATOR of everything into everything else (omnia in
omnibus).
The aim of the logic chain of Energy Lyzism is to show how it is
simultaneously a universal dissolver (decomposer) and a universal
transformer of everything into everything else. If it is a universal
transformer,it is also a universal synthesis (equalizer of all things). It is not
only a unversal analysis but also a universal synthesis.Energy lyzism in
painting as a concrete technique of transforming a dot into a line, a line into
a surface, a surface into volume, a volume into multy-dimensional spaces
(the multi-dimensional spaces of non-Euclidian geometries). By definition,
the multi-dimensional space, focused into an infinitely small dot is an
artefact of Abstractionism. If we collect all generic concrete items into an
infinitely small dot, what we get is Abstractionism. If we dissolve an
abstract image – we get all generic concrete items. Therefore, Energy
Lyzism shows the origins of Abstractionism as a universal container of all
possible present and future styles and techniques of painting. That is why
only in the Universal Gallery you could see Energy Lyzism, and vice versa,
only Energy Lyzism can build a universal gallery because it would not be
the style of all styles if by its method of universal dissolvability it did not
thus destroy each thing inside itself, in its own structure, so that through that
destruction - deconstruction – of things it shows the links between all of
them.
That is to say, Energy Lyzism proves that each deconstruction is a
construction afresh. I was myself amazed when I realized that Energy
Lyzism points up the universal connection running through one life – of
paintings and books and the Universal Gallery Papa Jan, Janoism as a
general outlook. Trying to live, I turned my life into a book. Trying to read
it, I painted it. Trying to view it as a painting - I stepped so far back from it
that it emerged as a thought.
Janoism – Energy Lyzism, and when you step out of this world –
Called after Itself. Then I looked back and saw all things collected in a
Universal Gallery which locked the world inside itself, painted by me but
only outside me did it exist as a spirit and something unimaginable. That is
he who succeeds in painting it all and build the universal gallery stands
condemned to remain outside it, unpainted.
In the same way God who creates the world is Himself obliged to be
out of it. The eternal mantra of all religions tinged with philosophy.
God was Nature.
God was the Soul.
God was Language.
He is priceless.
God is unimaginable but He is doing the thinking.
He does not utter anything yet He speaks.
He is unemotional yet feels.
The spiritual existence – to be.
And the material one – to have.
If you want arguments, these are they: The One who planted the apple
tree, can He appear Himself as a tree in the Universe? Of course not! It is in
vain that Wittgenstein retalls and sums up all transcendental philosophies
thus: “The meaning of the world must be outside it”. Because the one who
planted the tree, should He Himself appear as a tree, will need again for His
part, a creator. And to cut short the endless logical chain of Creator and
Creation we must cut an cul-de-sac abyss between those two – “what creates
is forbidden to appear as a creation”.
Energy Lyzism as a style of all styles, recreates the light which carries
the energy of the Universe. The dissolution of the light spectrum dissolves
energy in colours. Each colour carries the purity of the soundation stone of
the Universe (the universal gallery). The dissolution of the light spectrum is
the natural analysis of world energy. World energy, analyzing itself ,
generates the colours to represent it. Colours are the incarnations of the
natural self-analysis of the universe. As far as Energy Lyzism bears the
name of any style or technique of painting, it is the human subjective
repetition of the artist of the world’s objective self-analysis of the universe,
through which it paints itself as colours. Energy Lyzism as the style of the
whole energy dissolubility of colours and forms , discovered by me and
embodied in my pictures which receive the energy of my sesnsory activity
and continue to impart it as art-therapy communication with a healing and
beautifying effect.
My face was depicted half-turned and under it above it and around it
were scattered old canvases. They were held on the tips of the fingers of the
cruel spider with a human face. The face of the Black Widow. With the face
of the present turning tye next moment into a reminiscence, having enjoyed
your emotions and having deadened you in the memory. Under me was the
devil with an erected phallus who tempted me to sin. He promised me
unearthly delights and made me create miracles out of my memories.The
scattered pictures, however, were the open doors, unlocked by the cruel
spider in order for me to have glimpse of the present before he shuts them
again but they slipped and he managed to do that. I did not paint on my
picture the fact that the formerly erectile penis of the devil was now limp.
Let it remain erectile on the canvas in order to remind to me and all the rest
that temptation surrounds us all the time and no temptation is greater than
getting lost in the "Gallery of Your Own Memories”.
“IF YOU FIND YOURSELF IN THE SPLENDID GALLERY OF
MEMORIES, DO NOT SUCCUMB TO THE PICTORIAL SUGGESTION
THAT THE PRESENT IS AN ALL TOO BRIEF A MOMENT FADING
INTO MEMORY BUT DO OPEN THE DOORS TO THE PRESENT
WHICH IS FREE OF ALL REMINISCENCES!”
Picture 8: “The Last Emperor”. When all empires collapse. When all
walls between the souls collapse. When there are no longer and soldiers or
philosophers. When after all there is no history, either, but only tales of past
times.Then the sole need will be for more and more beauty. An emperor
without a mantle, without a throne. Without troops and courtiers. Emperor of
the empire of freedom. It sounds absurd but that emperor is the artist.
Though it be a bit immodest, but in my image I summed up that of the
perennial Artist. I painted myself in the image of a Roman emperor as the
last emperor will not look.
“IF YOU CREATE ART YOU HOLD SWAY OVER THE MOST
POWERFUL AND INVINCIBLE EMPIRE. THAT ONE WHICH WON’T
COLLAPSE! THAT ONE WHICH DOES NOT HAVE ANY ENEMIES!
THE EMPIRE OF BEAUTY! I PAY MY RESPECTS TO YOU, YOUR
IMPERIAL MAJESTY! YOU ARE ME AND I AM YOU!”
Picture 9: “Playing Poker With Death”. I’m playing cards. Till death.
At stake is my life. I also stake my soul to illumine me. For beauty’s sake I
stake my health. For experience – inspiration. For wisdom – pain. For solace
– lack of sleep. I stake all these. At the same time on the canvas I’m playing
at cards. I am playing at cards with a few bums, seeming live characters out
of a book by Hristo Kalchev. Ancient history. I won hands down. That same
night I heard that a friend had killed himself while playing a lonely game of
Russian roulette. Maybe he was in love, maybe simply mindless, maybe
wearied with life, or maybe looking for a thrill because he could not find
anybody to fall in love with him. The same night in a telephone conversation
with Brother Stephen I learned that he had lost a friend who had joined a
religious sect. He had hanged himself. In a game of poker with the devil the
boy had sought God and had lost the game. I knew him too. He was a
splendid boy. Then with brother Stephen we decided to write a book
dedicated to all victims of pernicious religious cults and we drew inspiration
from sudden emotions as if on a roulette which helped us write the horror
thriller in less than a month. “Playing Poker With Death”.
Years after the writing of the book I thought I would never stake the
thing most dear to me although I enjoy taking risks. The book had simply
released me from the wish to play games of chance which was much
stronger than sporting passion and greed, alcohol dependence or addiction to
drugs. But you see that the book had cleansed me completely.
Some rich man staked a great deal on his colour. The roulette spinned
like a barrel which only lacked the golden bullet for death to be certain. The
roulette in the casino stopped.The rich man turned into a pauper in an
instant. He went out. He placed the revolver to his head and the bullet soiled
with blood and traces of brain pierced the heart of a chance by-passer. My
revolver doesn’t shoot. I see the faces of Alexander and Rossi. I recall how
he and I loved to play poker but staked dimes or beers. Instead of depicting
revolvers and eyes shining with madness I painted eyes shining with
intoxication belonging to a couple of card players playing for rather low
stakes which were the paltry delights of life itself and not the grand,
greedy, insatiable and predatory pleasure of the poker with death, the poker
with the devil in search of God, the Russian roulette in search of the thrill in
the weary overindulged soul.
The staking of one’s life against the brief oblivion of loneliness and
the absence of true love. Whoever is incapable of enjoying the small stakes,
loses the grand ones. Whoever cannot savour the act of feeding the dove
perched on his window will remain unsatisfied even if he had build the
Space Transgalactic Titanic. Poker with death is for those who have long
since ceased enjoying life. I did not paint them but the others – the lucky
card players.
“IF YOU CONSTANTLY SEEK GOD, REMEMBER THAT YOU
ARE PLAYING FOR HIGH STAKES WITH THE DEVIL!”
Picture ten: “Daylight”. I am with closed eyes. In a dream in
expectation of daylight. I see my own fantasies of the daylight but it.I dream
of it. I make it into art and wish when I open my eyes to recreate it. I am
afraid but my face is impassive. I do not have fears because my calm
appearance penetrates my consciousness. The darkness lifts. Through my
closed lids I see the daylight illumining the world. It seems strange but it
has uncovered its other features. It is tender and tenderness isn’t sweet, isn’t
bitter and wicked. It is pure tenderness without any other notions around it.
The shapes are odd but they are not due to gravitational warping and chains
but to fingers, caressing the eyes. The forms are light itself. Rainbows. Eyes
locked in kisses. In kisses without superfluous voluptuousness. In kisses
without a desire to bite. Kisses which never end and which cannot be stolen
by a lustful fornicator or from my office like a Jules Pasquin painting. The
light illumines boundless meadows. On them bulls and stallions gallop. The
clouds are sunny does racing along the sky.The sunny does are the purified
souls. The candle melted and left its radiance to travel in the darkness and it
after thirteen trillion years of travelling will reach the planet over which it
will reign like a queen of Daylight in order to open my eyes… (“Daylight” –
the third book of the trilogy “The Papa Jan Gallery”.)
“IF YOUR EYES ARE SHUT AND IN THE DARKNESS YOU
CREATE LIGHT, OPEN THEM IN ORDER TO BEQUEATH IT TO THE
EARTH!”
Picture eleven: “The Phoenix Bird. Past, Present and Future”.
I was a statue by an ancient sculptor. The ancient sculptor was I who
had myself chiselled my own past. I had donned knight’s armour and with
outstretched wings was about to fly out from my own past towards the
present. I was about to take off towards the dawn’s opening scarlet doors
and the dawn was my murky future… Winged, in knight’s armour, above
the live coals and masterpieces of ancient sculpture; behind me – a fire and
apparitions of angels and furies, endless doors leading into hundreds of
strange spaces. I rise from the fire. I rise after the flames and blood stained
walls, after the poison and the molten pagoda. I am resurrected, in fact I am
reborn out my ashes.From the ashes of the unfulfilled harvest, from the
bodies charred in the fiery circle, from the trees burnt down by the
lightnings…
“IF YOU ARE ASH, TURN YOUR HEART INTO A PHOENIX!”
Picture twelve: It would have been my unfulfilled bequest to the
world.It would have been a thing I would have tried to take with me into the
next world, although nobody has ever managed to take anything from this
world into the next. “The Palette in My Tomb”. A palette but actually a
painting which I would have bequeathed to my deadened flesh which would
have fed the worm because it, too, is part of the perennial circle and I saw it
with my single eye after I shut my eyes to my senses. In fact that worm
perhaps before Adam and Eve even had tasted the fruit and that is why it had
hastened to hide underground where it is easiest for the eyes of the senses to
close and and then opens the single eye with which one perceives the entire
universe. With “The Palette in My Tomb” I hoped to bribe the worm and
inhabit it in order to continue my existence as flesh and again to feel the
entire unierse and its eternal circle as spirit. I asked my friends, my children,
and my children'’ friends to bury the painting with me.
And the picture itself represented rainbows from thirteen planets, each
one of which was near thirteen suns. Into the rainbows I built my shadow.
“IF YOU ARE MORTAL, DIE LIKE A MORTAL, EVEN IF YOU
BELIEVE IN YOUR IMMORTALITY!”
Picture thirteen: Perfection itself. Vanga the soothsayer. Her third eye.
Her skull open like a spiral while Irina and I, like spirits, hold part the spiral
skull. Mythical Gothic creatures peer in.A girl peers from behind the trees.
Into that picture I infused all my energy and with it I was resurrected… Irina
and I were built like statues of stone into the soothsayer’s head. I also
painted a coloured girl under the soothsayer’s face. Creepy creatures peer
out of the ghostly wood, spreading behind the images… A girl is playing on
a piano… I see her fingers moving. Also moving is the hand of Franz, a
friend of mine who played the violin. A single portrait and a million
paintings. I used all known and unknown styles and schools of art to paint
that picture. I was sad. We soon found ourselves with the soothsayer who
predicted a glorious future to both of us, saying nothing about our
relationship but we were happy. I felt sad to be alone while painting it…
When I finished it – impressionistic and expressionistic, surrealist and
realistic, Gothic and futuristic, with fabulous and virtual effects, romantic
and naturalistic – I felt cleansed…That picture was in the style called
“Energy Lyzism” – the style of the universal dissolution of colour and form
among themselves. A discovery Irina and I had made…The style of all
styles. The discovery of my genius. Fresh and alive. Having survived.
Having forgiven. Smiling good-naturedly at what I had done and attempted
to do to myself a few days before…
“IF YOU SURVIVE, SURVIVE COMPLETELY! FORGET YOU
HAD TO SURVIVE AND REMEMBER THAT YOU MUST SURVIVE!”
45.
I again managed to contact Irina from Moscow. She sounded peculiar.
I was worried. Before I could ask her what the matter was the line went
dead.I tried dialling again. The number was engaged… I tried a third time
again to no avail.
I was standing on a mine. I could not move lest I be blown apart. My
entire life seemed frivolous. Death, too, seemed like that. Only SHE still
meant anything.Only she… I was moving into a tunnel…
“Feel me inside yourself!”
“I am not myself!”
“Feel me!”
“I feel you, we are far apart, and again I am not myself!”
“Do you feel me?”
“I’m dying in your embrace. My thighs are pulsating in the rhythm of
horror and the impossible!
Cold sweat poured down my brow.My legs had long had to go limp. I
ordered them not to and they didn’t but they should have. Rats were
crawling up and down them, gnawing at them yet I could not make a motion
for fear of blowing myself up… I am familiar with these mines. They were
made soon after the Second World War and were German. The only German
product that was below standard. They could explode at any moment and not
because of a move I made but of a mere involuntary tic, even a smile…The
rats gnawed me cruelly. I would not move, even if they reduced me to a
bunch of mere bones because till the last moment I will keep believing I will
meet her again and we will make love again upon the cake or in a pine
forest… I could see that the bone of my left leg was alreay bare. The pain
was horrible and by all laws of medicine I had not only long had to have
fallen but also to have lost consciousness. But had that not happened
before?* Hadn’t I survived then? The pain was excruciating. Odd, but it was
not sharp as it should have been as of rat biting… And when all was said and
done how at all did I find myself here if I was in my stately home in Russia?
I trembled. I exploded. But no, I did not explode by accident.As I trembled I
recalled her orgasms. Of all her orgasms which resembled explosion. At the
beginning, after our first contacts which were so impulsive and unexpected,
she exploded rapidly but a short time after that I needed hours before I could
arouse her, before I could make her summon that energy which after that
was a real mine explosion. The blowing up of a mine I had stepped upon…
But hadn’t that happened long before?
How did survive it all? Where was I, in fact?
The rat which was trying to break my bone had Irina’s face… I
awoke, hot with perspiration. I reached out for the telephone once again. I
did not know what time it was in Bulgaria but I wished to hear her. To tell
her what Juna had written down in my diary, how I had spent the evening
and to ask her how she was. All the usual things. I simply wished to hear her
voice… The line was again engaged. I tried contacting her via the central
station but the girl there answered me the link was damaged.
“Just like ours!” I said involuntarily and was scared at my own words.
I had by all means to hear her voice because I was aware that was to be the
last time I would. I was no longer afraid to think of that. I hated being afraid.
You can’t but simply resign to something which is bad and is happening to
you. Even I, who never resigned, had to, when faced with the inevitable…
Thirteen girls were dancing in a fiery circle, one of whom was Irina but not
the Irina of my acquaintance. This one was primitive with boorish language.
A black witch. From the ground there sprang snakes, snakes were dropping
from the trees and copulated with the dancing girls. In front, in the behind, in
their mouths… They twined round all their bodies and more and more
snakes cames till the ground was covered with a thick carpet of snakes
which convulsed in lust. That was the sex practised by a great mass,
debauched and brainless. From time to time from the heap of snakes there
stuck out hands, legs and heads of the girls taking part in the ritual and the
snakes went on raining down and sneak out till in the end they jutted out of
my painting because all this was happening in a picture of mine… They
filled my studio. Irina and I jumped into another painting to avoid taking
part in the mass orgasm of the reptiles.Then we thought better and jumped
back into the picture of mass orgasm in order not to miss it.
We got tangled in the snake heap. In the bands of the rest of the
females.All was in motion, all was vibrating flesh.All were experiencing
ferocious delight. Then there came suffocation within the capsule where the
air was at an end and after the final total orgasm I wanted to be born. To be
reborn as a single cell but the cell was a spring bud unexpectedly seared by
frost…
I dialled Irina’s number again and this time I heard her say:
“Hullo!”
But the line again went dead. What time was it actually in Bulgaria?
What time was it here, for that matter?
I stood upon the mine again. The wall was covered by mildew
resembling an abstract painting. I saw myself naked under Irina’s body. We
were at a totally unfamiliar place. It was an oasis in the desert and on her
forehead there was a wreath of flowers…
“Shall we place wreaths around the pictures instead of frames?” Irina
suggested and I realized it was time we left the desert because tonight I was
to present a picture of mine to the current beauty queen of Bulgaria. We
made rose wreaths which did a better job than the frames. On our way to the
Hrankov mansion where the award ceremony was to be, I again let go of
Irina’s hand and found myself again in the basement infested with rats and
was standing upon the mine…
“Penetrate me!” the echo of her voce whispered. “I want to feel you.”
I saw her put her arms around a granite statue of me. She was
experiencing the delight as when she was with me… I feared I might cry out
thus setting off the mine. I bent down my head and became aware of
standing upon Irina. It was she who was the mine that scared me… I had
long been walking inside the basement pervaded by the stench of mildew
representing modern reality and was trying to decorate them with my
paintings. I painted voices from the Rhodopes and northern breezes, secret
suppers, card-players, anger and beggars, Jesus Christ with satyrs, innocent
and debauched female bodies, cruel insults and girls carrying books, flowers
and torn wolves, erotic symbols and faces of friends living and dead, of
enemies… I painted seas and moon lit oceans, fortresses and breasts, proud
saints and sorry sinners, fire-dancers and house-wives, village girls and
perverted street walkers, moon dreams and rabid dogs, circles and violins,
landscapes of fire, of ice, ash and vapour. Lanscapes of spring, summer,
autumn and winter. Inhabitants of other planets, of the ocean depths and
celebrities. I attempted to paint every conceivable mood and shade of
emotion, each wave of the world ocean. I tried to paint it all to avoid the
sight of mildewed walls which were the result of human sloth in the
presence of Nature which we must look after and to which we must be
devoted. So, unawares, walking amid the rats, I found myself standing upon
Irina and to step aside would mean certain death…
I again woke up. My watch had stopped and I had no idea what time it
was but I knew that dawn approached… I dialled her number again. A signal
was coming from the other end. My heart beat faster. My head was
swarming with all memories on paintings framed in flowers… The lift and
Sinemorets, Billy, the white dog and the fish. The snakes and the scatterd
bottles of drunk up champaign... “Have no fear, Papa Jan! You have
achieved all you wished for! Now you are the Papa Jan you were born to be.
You cannot be unhappy…”
There came another signal on the phone line. “And all that about
suicidal love was sheer fantasy. A suicidal love would have have been an
obstacle to both of us to realize even an infinetisemal portion of our dreams
but here you are – yours are becoming a reality. Soon hers will be a reality,
too. In America they will appreciate her intellect and when you visit her you
will do everything possible never to part from her again…”
Yet another signal. “Isn’t there anyone at the other end? Isn’t there?”
I was breathless. My heart was going to burst. The play of memory
sent me back near that tree on the outskirts of Blagoevgrad and I had a hardon coming. I recalled yet another episode from my life. That time like now
when I also longed to hear her voice and was so delighted when I did I
bathed teenage girls – complete strangers – in champaign. I would not have
done that now. I had matured a great deal in the course of my relationship
with Irina. There are many women one cane share one’s delight with, a lot
more than thirteen. Happiness, however, can be shared with a single one…
There came anther signal on the line. Then came Materius’s sleepy voice
and despondent, I dropped down the receiver. I lay back on the bed and felt
sorry we were saved that other time by the dolphins…
“No, Papa Jan! That can’t happen to you at this moment of all
others.You have achieved everything! You are happy!”
I kept my eyes on the face of the clock. The clock-hand indicating the
seconds was moving slowly while the one, showing the hours sped on. I
dialled once more. The line was engaged. I slapped the receiver. I went out. I
roamed round beautiful squares and my thoughts were far away. I wished to
share with her the beauty of the squares. Or simply to hear her voice. To
hear it once more and see if the final “farewell” which I heard was truly
final.
Then I had a meeting with representatives of the Russian artistic elite.
They did not mind spending a few hours with the newly minted Prince of
Taurida “The Bulgarian Picasso and Dali” as they nicknamed me in the
major Russian newspaper Today. I drank a lot and never stopped thinking of
her. I left the revellers and again went to my room and dialled. This time I
was in luck.
“How are you?” I shouted.
“I’m Okey.”
What did that Okey mean? What did that indifference in her voice
mean?
“Irina, I love you!” I shouted at the top of my voice.
“I love you, too, Jan…” she said but somewhat tearfully. It could not
have been tears. She engaged in sex like a woman while being in fact a boy.
It could not be tears. It could not be a parting. No, it could not be a parting,
now that… The line again went dead. I seemed to hear a scream from see
zor and a satanic laughter…
“You are drunk, Papa Jan! Soon you’ll be with your gal but now have
a good drink like a real prince who doesn’t give a damn for the fall of
Petersburg…”
I was not merry-making. I only pretended to for the sake of my
companions. I could no more deceive myself – that was the last time I had
heard her… I had drunk too much. In my bag I always carried tranquilizers
in case stress got the better of my sentiment. I recalled my father whose hand
grew cold in mine. His soul was vanishing with the fading warmth. Till the
last moment he wanted to live, till the last moment he wanted to die. He had
been drinking a lot and on top of that had swallowed a handful of
tranquillizers. I could easily do the same but the morning star shone as it had
done in my youth… It was still beautiful to be alive, though immensely sad.
Then, in higher spirits, I thought that it was most trivial and boring to kill
yourself for a woman.
Papa Jan! You are not given to watching soap operas and in them
noone kill themselves for a woman. On the plane to Bulgaria, however, I no
longer thought so. I was flipping a coin betting on either side alternatively in
the hope she would be waiting for me. I nearly died waiting for the
resolution to my suspense. The flight seemed too long. As though I was not
travelling from Russia to Bulgaria but from the sun to Pluto. I shouldn’t
have done it but the plane seemed slow. I drank a bottle of wine and then
another. On the next day I was to find out I had forgotten a camera and
twenty-three thousand dollars I kept in a small bag at my feet. But that was
yet to come. A far more bitter disappointment awaited me now… I kept
asking myself what I would do if she was not to meet me. I found no answer.
Before landing I had again dozed off.
We were descending on the monoplane which was turning into a
winged angel from hell, carrying us to a group indulging in the most
revolting orgy. I was startled by the scream at landing. I sweated profusely
while riding in the taxi-cab to the block where was the studio nd her flat. I
kept ringing long and my clothes were wet as if after a heavy rain. I rang all
the neighbours who knew me well and had no reason to fear me.
“Where is she?” I asked breathless.
“A week ago she left for America and her husband went yesterday…”
“Her husband!?” I shouted. “But I…”
I choked and was silent. It seemed one card was a winner.
“Did she leave a message for me?”
They all shrugged their shoulders. “I love you, Irina!” I told her on the
phone at the time. “I love you, too, Papa Jan!” she replied and perceived in
her voice the abysmal despair at the absurdity of life. I went back to my
studio. I looked for some note from her. I looked into secret corners, though
such a note is left on the most obvious spot possible… I lay down beside the
telephone and bacame quite still. A single ringing could have made me
happy. The phone could have been ringing eleven thousand times but none
was what I expected.
The prophet Jonah spent three days inside the belly of the sea
monster. I cannot say how long a time I spent in the maw of despair waiting
for the divine voice over the phone to bring me sunshine once again. My
thoughts resembled a Dada poem. Incoherent. Chaotic. Incomaptible with
one another. I dozed off and in my dreams I saw her naked on horseback
with myself behind her. I dreamed of her as an enormous vagina which
sucks me inside and explodes like a mine. I dreamed of her rotating on the
tyre which was in fact earth rotating around that thing of mine. I dreamed of
my former love affairs. I wanted to go back to them but I could not touch
them because I feared lest they take away from me her sentiments. I woke up
from the latest telephone ring for a business appointment or an offer for a
purchase of a picture of mine but slammed down the receiver.
At last my temptations were gone. I could not turn my ossified past
into food for my love. Another period in my life had passed…
46.
I was under our tree at Blagoevgrad. Inside the tyre I had stuffed an
inflatable rubber doll which bore Irina’s face. My fantasy produced a pale
likeness of the feeling had once had. I was about to cut the doll into pieces
but when I espied the numerous peeping Toms thought better of it and
decided to leave it to them. It was a mere fantasy doll… When I started off a
motor bike passed me by. A huge bike of a make unfamiliar to me… It
obstructed my way. I swerved. With a few motions of an unthinkably swift
reflex I zigzagged, thereby escaping a fall into the ravine on my right.
Cursing the motorists I raised a hand. The same motorist pulled up who
previously nearly killed me. Now I felt like killing him myself but walked
along him peaceably and rode the bike behind him.
Then I fingered her breasts. It was she in her daemonic guise and was
speeding on. I now knew it was the end. I did not even know whether she
was the daemonic or real one who had decided it was time to make love on
the earth… She drove madly as no other contestant would risk driving along
such a road. Soon, however, we were in Sofia. She pulled up outside the
block where I lived and then she sped away. I only noticed that before she
turned round the corner she was engulfed by flames.
47.
You must spot the wound. By all means you must; and after that you
have to find a way of curing it… - it was Svetla speaking to me. “Everything
is somewhere in you. In your memories which constantly bring her back to
you.The wound is something akin to a marked door for dark creatures…”
“Nothing of the kind. Simply a suicidal love…”
“Well we all make love and most of us do so in line with the latest
fashion. Besides, I can tell you love is an annihilation. If only it is absolute.
Fortunately, we are imperfect and the Absolute dies of boredom for not
having our quirks because they are the beauty and lead us to the perfect, yet
so boring zero…”
“You cannot say that. You know nothing!”
“And how do you account for the motorist engulfed by flames?”
I said nothing.
“What am I to do, my friend?”
“Let your heart tell you that tonight! I will perform exorcism for it to
be sincere and if you really believe me I am a sorceress, it will give you the
correct answer…”
48.
I went back to the old man from whom I had once bought the horses
but not to see the pony – rather to buy another cow… I ripped her and
huddled inside like an embryo. Memories long tormented me. For hours,
days or weeks. I dozed off and dreamt of her. When I awoke, I felt hunger
but assauged it. As I did so, it was my thoughts that grew hungry and the
long torments began. Then appeared the hungry dogs which started gnawing
the cow. Some day they are to discover a picked skeleton of a cow
harbouring a picked human skeleton. That of an eccentric, a turbulent mind
who got sick from a dangerous proximity to beauty. A man who had decided
to go beyond anything human by inhumanly falling in love, by inhumanly
desiring all other things in the world as well.
Gradually, my thoughts vanished. I was not dreaming, yet I was
asleep. An embryo, expecting to be born without memories and yet to
acquire such things. It could be stillborn. It could perhaps meet her in life
beyond death. But these were not thoughts. They were perceptions and
apparitions like the canine teeth which were starting to bite me. When I
opened my eyes I had a vision of her as one of the three dogs. Blood dripped
from her beastly mouth but her eyes were full of tears:
“I beg of you,” she said to me in the tenderest, the most strongly
vibrant and most sincere voice, “please free me!”
“How?”
“Let both of us forgive each other.”
“I forgive you!” I said. “It was beautiful but I forgive you!”
“I forgive you, too!” she replied. “You brought me down from my
snow-bound peak and turned me into a woman, but I forgive you!”
She set off for the woods followed by the dogs. She disappeared into
the thick forest… I started off for the sea. I washed away the blood on
myself and felt reborn. Purified and new. I was beginning a new life.
49.
I caressed the pony which had been conceived that night. It took
pleasure in me feeling I was his father. Then I let it go. Maybe it returned to
its owner like its parents had done. Only the love could not return to any
owner because nobody owned it. What could not be recovered, either, was
what had been lost in the passage of time…