The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - Сергей Николаевич Огольцов

brick stove left room only for a bed and a desk by the window, yet it was enough for me to shack up with a couple of books in German and The German-Russian Dictionary of Medical Terms because no other kind of a dictionary in the target language happened on the shelves in the bookstore on Lenin Street. The rent was only 15 rubles but, nevertheless, I finally stopped sending out the already irregular alimony transfers in 2 directions…

The extended interest in German was brought about by training up for the final showdown with that old good Freud. As an attested schizophrenic possessing a considerable store of experience in the field studies, I did not see any plausible reason for his fixation on the symbolism of genitals. Well, yes, a cigar may have penis' looks while an ashtray may be persistently associated with vagina and so on and so forth. But then, what of that? They got transfixed by those interpretations and stuck with no more progress than a stick in the mud.

So I finally consolidated my belief that Freud, in fact, is a storyteller, like, say, Hans Christian Andersen, they differ from each other only by the choice of words they used. Thus, Freud divides the Kingdom of consciousness into four parts (a good fellow Sigmund, that was a step forward from the Hegel's triads):

the Duchy Consciousness;

the March Subconscious;

the Baronetcy Ego; and

the County Super-Ego.

Ah! How nice and pretty! They're so delightfully poetic, them those fairy tales! Thank you, Uncle Ziggy!

Anyone has the right to a scientific theory of their own, however, theories are checked by their application in real life situations. Propped by the theory of personal concoction, Freud cured 12 percent of his patients. And although they might've recovered on their own accord or else got healed by the cruelest, yet most efficient therapist of all – Mr. Time, we'll still will give them to Freud awarding for his merits – he offered at least some foothold, a gaudy oasis, when the subject in question was as bare and empty as the arid desert, which endeavor put the inventor on the map.

Besides, he still inspires slews of artists to portray their individual vision of adventurous cocks and charming fannies in all sorts of disguise and juxtaposition…

Yet, leaving the grounds of the visual Art and turning to my personal case, what cured me?

Cured? Whoa! Slow down! Easy, boy, easy… To be cured, you should get ill first, but was I? Where are the indications?

All my life went without the slightest deviation following, straight as beeline, the blue print from The Bhagavad-Gita. Baby—kid—youth—man—old man, you know. The crazy summer '79…hmm…nah, I won't start a clash about terms… though it is their word against mine: beautiful or crazy – tastes differ… Now, even that period was in precise keeping to normality, one of the necessary stages in the spiritual development as expostulated by Hegel in his Phenomenology of Spirit, the stage of "youthful folly" awaiting any normal man in his development was, in my case, a bit acuter and delayed for 10 years, that's all. But even the postponement was not my fault, I was too busy for follies in the conventional period, marriage, army and stuff, you know.

But then, what's normal? wearing a modish necktie and well-pressed parade-crap when loading a pistol for the suicide?

All my abnormalities are well contained within my dreams. Yes, I hear voices in my dreams, I will not conceal. I’m sleeping, and they read to me—in an impersonal and distanced tone of voice—pieces of prose. I must admit, rather enviable passages of neatly composed and glibly flowing prose they are, somehow resembling a movie screenplay. From time to time the reading voice gets substituted by visual action illustrations, yet when there’s a change in the story-line, it pops up back and starts to mumble again.

I’d rather turn them those voices off, not because of being envious, it’s just that they interfere with my sleep, but I don't know where’s their switch control…

Yet, all that is minor inconveniences when compared to the sheer horror of “Sisyphus’ Reiterations”. By its monstrosity, such reiterations are on a par with the ever switched on bulb above your head to remind that you’re shut in a madhouse only they are directed the other way, not from outside. In the course of such SRs you find yourself in the reality which you’ve lived thru already and because they reiterate themselves, maybe, more than once. Your state though is always the same, ineluctable as weightlessness when orbiting the planet—you are suppressed by a dreary dismay and urges to cry only nothing comes out like from a tube twisted out dry of the last drops—circling in sticky necessity to live anew some stretch in your life which you naively considered left behind but no! All around you flows the same yet already estranged life because you are not that former “I” any more. Graying, brow-wrinkled ignoramus, you’re roaming familiar labyrinth of the hostel and auditoriums to get the lousy diploma you don’t even need but it will save you staying there for another circle in a row… or you’re sitting just like right now on the brown hard stool in the mire of dirty-green lino between the plywood walls beneath the fluorescent tubes, the iron of siderails in the bank bed prop your back and not a single familiar face, your buddies since long demobbed and these around are here to keep me for one more cycle or even dump to stockade.

– Look here, ‘suckers. Put off whatever you’re jerking in your brains right now. It’s Political Study Class here. Today’s topic is the Corporate Imperialism. Clear, ‘suckers?

– Aye-yup! Comrade! Leftenant! Col’nel!

– Good… off we go. You keep a-showing me your ram optics now and think, if only you can at all, OK , Col’nel, push forth your shit. You think—if only you have what to do the trick with—that everything goes on just as it goes without a plan, direction and stuff and here you’re