§0 This post is an artistic exhumation of pieces I created a while back so thou must abandon all hopes for quality today. It serves my inherent throbbing urge of creating “something”, anything even, whatever that is, absolutely in any medium, totally no difference, as means of expression of I don’t know even what, because why should I? What do we express when create something artistic? Ourselves? Our egos? Emotions? Ideas? Indescribable, unattainable, fragile pieces of Truth or whatnot? Images that we saw or felt and desired to share with the world? I prefer to think this is “pure metaphysics” which renders all attempts of comprehension absurd.
So, yes, there was a time I was 16 and there was a time I was 21, for better or worse. In those old times I was experimenting with various artistic fields, including prose, verse, scripts, music, visuals, etm. I want to show them to thee as my attempt make a promise for myself, a resolution to do more of that, either this year or at least until the rest of this calendar decade.
After a rather turbulent personal decade (2015-2025 in my case), in both lovely and stressful ways, on the creative front I’ve settled on literature, so thou might’ve noticed before if it’s not the first post of mine thou read. If it’s the first post, I urge thou to close this and read either this, that, or maybe this, or even that, or, even better so, this (it’s much-much better, mucho mejor etm., so better that thou wilt not regret)—all of which are given in random order and any semblance of importance forced upon me by our linear perception of written language, for I cannot (despite I’d very much like so) to shove them up thy thinking centre all at the same time.
§0.1 I’ve been experimenting with thou | thee | thy | thine today because I so miss the intimacy of “ты” and reverence of “вы” (when it’s not plural, of course) and I thought that English can ingest a lot and digest enough, mayhap not as much as Russian can, but still a decent amount, sometimes, in fact, it’s fascinating how much this language doesn’t care about being harassed, which, of course, isn’t even applicable for my usage of thou | thee | thy | thine. I’m gonna use it and thou shalt love it.
§0.2 I also hate forward slashes ////// look at this // / / and this / / / / ////// this is fucking ugly, unbelievably / fucking / ugly—
§1 A bit below is a poem I wrote when I was half my present age. It was called “wind” but now I call it “Resolutions”. It was written in Russian, because all I knew of English was spells in World of Warcraft, things like seal of vengeance, avenging wrath, divine shield, judgement, holy wrath, retribution aura, consecration, flash of light, hammer of justice, and such, which weren’t enough to compose a poem, or maybe I wasn’t creative enough. So today I present thee an English translation of that poem because I reckon it’s not so bad, in fact, one of my English-speaking friends liked it even when it was auto translated into free-verse, which is rather encouraging and, with much hope, not a total embarrassment. Please don’t unleash thy holy wrath and hammers of justice.
It’s a bit oblivious to me what makes good poetry, especially in English, but my resolution is to fix that in the upcoming months. If thou hast great poetry recommendations I must read, please share them with me. The only requirement is it must be rhymed and metered because that is what I like about Russian poetry (most of it) and I want to implant similar patterns but in English into my brain and then practice so I could write it, too.
So, here’s my old poem, translated:
Mayhap it's hard
to be a pawn,
blind to the chessboard's checkered game,
To tread with care...
and dwell upon
a thousand twigs of grief and shame.
To be a bird...
yet know the hour
thou'lt plunge into the chasm's night,
To gasp and sprint—
no trace of power—
while fate's cold verdict burns too bright.
To sink below,
yet clutch the thread
of light that swears it never dies,
Recalling one
bright blaze, long fled—
the joy of summer's cloudless skies.
To be the prey,
in frenzied flight,
with words like storms to scour the pain,
Then pause, half-smiled,
and fix thine eyes
on seas that choke the breathless plain.
To trust in truth—
gold, pure, unmarred—
eternal as the stars' decree,
Steel. Stark. Unbent—
till heart is torn
in savage glee.
To drown in tedious
abundance of lost,
unnecessary words,
At last to grasp
the fragile substance:
freedom is wrestled from the gods. §2 I used to play guitar a lot and even attempted to write music. I knew zero of music theory but could program drums and other instruments in Guitar Pro, a piece of software that allows you to program guitars, drums, and other instruments, professionally. It was a lot of fun and I want to do that again at one point, mayhap learning some proper music theory first. That is the second resolution for some mid-term future.
The track below is a short composition recorded with digital instruments (maybe except electric guitar, I don’t remember) and has a poor quality, yet I still like it and believe it’s not too embarrassing to share it with thee. It has a longer, more metal-like, version, as well as its neighbouring tracks in the “album” I worked on but I won’t share those. Be content with little.
It was called “Stolen Journey” but now it’s also called “Resolutions”. Everything, in fact, called resolutions these days. Stay resolute, droog.
§3 One more resolution is to make more people read my book “Deleted Scenes from the Bestselling Utopian Novel”. It’s in fact in thy power and agency to help that resolution come true. Thou canst purchase the book, thou canst leave a review, thou canst share it with thy family, friends, followers. Please, please, do that. Thou canst read more about the book, including copious reviews on it, here:
§4 One day, whether a house painter or a graffiti artist approached a white-as-white wall that begged to be written upon, and with all due resolve in his head said:
—I resolutely wish my Self to pour onto the canvas like Angel Falls rather than a stream of piss. Between Self and canvas there exists a layer of obstaclous substrate called society, parental programming, audience demand. I resolutely want to imagine there is no obstaclous substrate, no society, no parental programming—forgive me, my dear parents, I love you but this is the way—and no audience, but rather void, a gaping void of canvas. I resolutely want to imagine that behind this canvas stands thou, the observer. I resolutely want to imagine that upon seeing this canvas inscribed with my brushstrokes, thou, the observer, wilt rid thyself of thy own obstaclous substrates—chort knows what they are like on that side—and thou wilt see, thou wilt see everything as I have written it, and see it so seenly that the canvas disappears, and behind it, finally, we will see each other, all our flawed, raw, daring, human nature. In a pure metaphysical sense only, of course.
The wall looked at whether-the-house-painter or whether-the-graffiti-artist and merely shrugged its shoulders:
—Well then splash thine inks and paints, what art thou standing there for, counting flies.
—Paint, not splash, an artist paints.
—Well then paint!
—Well I bloody will!
And he looked at the white-as-white canvas and went ahead and painted, with maxxed resolution.
§5 Another significant resolution, and the one I’m most committed to, is to finish Tulubaikaporia. It is my next book and would contain all the stories about Tulubaika to form an intricate spiral narrative, absolutely experimental and mind-blowing. The current draft is 65k words but I’m planning to extend some stories, like I’ve done to “Helix”, which from a short story turned into a bit of a novelette. I decided to extend some of the existing stories instead of writing a few more because the ideas and symbol and themes and characters and all that are connected (or can be connected easily) anyway and most of the Tulubaika mythos is interintegratable and intertextual which makes it possible to turn it into a coherent whole, a symphony with many instruments even.
All stories are now unpublished from my website because I’ve started editing it all into a one big thing and many things would change.
I ordered a professional book cover from a professional designer so the book will look very professional and I will feel professional myself, so professional that thou, upon seeing the book would think, “Hmmm, indeed quite professional, I must read this!” This is the plan anyway. And I wrote this work-in-progress blurb for a back cover to entertain thee:
TULUBAIKA IS WHATEVER THEE WANTEST IT TO BE, MATE
In a land beyond, beyond, in a village that may or may not exist, where time flows in spirals and Truth dances naked through golden birch groves, lives the last Tulubayev — or mayhap the first. Everyone has either left or not yet arrived. All of them — prodigal sons and daughters, drunken philosophers, truth-seeking wanderers, cats with questionable metaphysical abilities — are haunted by the image of Tulubaika and the meaning it holds. Is it a village, a vague memory, a phantom, a chimera, a part of a vodka or mushroom induced delirium, just a word even, or none of those? Is it nothing or is it everything? Is it a deadlock or a way through? Is it an amorous hallucination or [redacted]? Nobody knows, but somewhere between the lines of these pages is the answer. Or mayhap a better question.
Part magical realist fever dream, part folk tale, part philosophical farce, part elegiac reflection, Tulubaikaporia weaves a darkly comic and at times tragic story of belonging, memory, time, and the comfy absurdity of longing for impossible things.
I describe Tulubaikaporia as a novel rather than a story collection. It’s more than just a collection or an anthology. Having a novel comprised of interconnected short stories and novellas isn’t new at all for Russian literature (and not new for me) so I’m confident I’m not a delulu. Many stories, some of the most voluminous ones, follow the same character, an unnamed protagonist | narrator as he encounters other characters: his childhood friends, his grandfather, random bus passengers, etm. on his journey to Tulubaika. Plus there are “variations” on Tulubaika, chapters each looking at it from a different angle. After a long struggle I finally figured out the structure, so I do have high hopes to conjure a proper magical piece of artistry.