Discharge
is the most apt definition. Now I can see that it
was exactly like an electrical discharge. The pulse
of the last few days became ever drier, ever faster,
ever tenser — the poles got closer —
dry crackling — another millimeter: explosion
— then silence.
Everything inside me is now very quiet and empty
— like in a building, when everyone’s
gone out and you’re lying in bed alone, sick,
and clearly hear the precise metallic clanking of
your own thoughts.
Perhaps this “discharge” has finally
cured me of my torturous “soul” —
and I, once again, became as the rest of us. At
least, right now it causes me absolutely no pain
to see, in my mind’s eye, O-90 ascending the
steps of the Cube, O-90 in the Gas Bell. And if
there, in the Surgery, she gives them my name —
so be it: at the very last moment I’ll piously
and gratefully kiss the punishing hand of the Do-Gooder.
I have this inalienable right, bestowed on me by
my relationship with the United Nation: the right
to bear punishment — and I shall never give
it up. No digit should ever dare to give up this
right, our only — and therefore immensely
valuable — right.
My thoughts are clanking quietly, with metallic
precision; an intangible aero carries me up, into
the blue heights of my beloved abstractions. And
I see that here, in the clear, thin air, my ruminations
about “rights” pop with a light crackle,
like a pneumatic tire. It becomes clear to me that
they are nothing but an acid reflux of a ridiculous
ancient prejudice, the ancients’ idea of “rights.”
There are ideas made of clay — and others,
made to last forever, of gold or our precious glass.
In order to define and analyze the matter of an
idea, all one has to do is test it with a drop of
strong acid. The ancients knew of one such acid:
reduction ad finem. I think that’s what they
called it, but they were afraid of this acid, they
preferred to see some sky, even if it was made of
clay, even if it was a toy rather than the blue
nothingness. We, however — praise the Do-Gooder
— are adults, and we did away with childish
things.
So, let’s drop-test the idea of “rights.”
Even among the ancients, the more mature of the
adults knew: might makes right, right is a function
of might. Take a pair of scales and weigh a gram
against a ton; an I against a WE, the United Nation.
Clearly, to assume that “I” has some
sort of “rights” in relation to the
Nation is to assume that a gram could ever weigh
as much as a ton. Hence, the ton has rights, the
gram has responsibilities; and the natural path
from nothingness to magnificence is to forget that
you are but a gram and realize that you are a one-millionth
of a ton.
You, my voluptuous, ruddy Venusians; you, my covered
with soot, like blacksmiths, Uranians — I
can hear your objections in my blue silence. But
you must understand: greatness is simple; you must
understand: only the four rules of arithmetic are
immutable and eternal. Hence, only the morality
based on these four rules will be great, immutable,
and eternal. This is the ultimate wisdom, this is
the summit of the pyramid that people had spent
centuries trying to scale, red, sweaty, kicking
and screaming. And from this summit — even
if down below the miserable worms of something that
survived in us from our ancestors’ savagery
are still crawling — from this summit, everybody
is equal: the unlawful mother O-90, a murderer,
or that lunatic who dared to lob a heretic poem
at the United Nation — and so is their punishment
equal: premature death. This is the divine justice,
much ballyhooed by the stone-housed people, lit
by the naïve pink rays of the dawn of history:
their “God” punished disrespect for
His Holy Church just as severely as murder.
You, Uranians — glum and black like the ancient
Spaniards who so wisely employed bonfires for enlightening
purposes — you are silent; I feel you’re
with me on this. But I can hear the ruddy Venusians
prattle on about torture, executions, return to
barbarianism. I pity you, my dear Venusians, you
are incapable of philosophically mathematical thought.
Human history rises in circles, like an aero. The
circles may be different — some golden, some
bloody — but they can all be divided into
360 degrees. And so, if we move from the zero forward
— 10, 20, 200, 360 degrees — we come
to zero again. Yes, indeed, we return to zero. But
to my mathematically reasoning mind, it is clear
that this zero is completely different from the
last zero, it’s all new. We turned right from
the initial zero, we returned to it from the left,
and so instead of a +0 we have a –0. Get it?
I see this Zero as a taciturn, huge, narrow, knife-sharp
cliff. In the brutal, hairy darkness, holding our
breath, we sailed from the black, night side of
the Zero Cliff. For centuries, we, the Columbuses,
sailed and sailed, we went all around the earth
and finally — hurrah! Salute — and all
lookouts aloft: before us is the other, heretofore
unseen side of the Zero Cliff, lit by the aurora
borealis of the United Nation, the blue monolith
sparkling with rainbow colors and the sun —
hundreds of suns, billions of rainbows . . .
What if only the breadth of a knife edge separates
us from the other, the dark side of the Zero Cliff.
The knife is the most enduring, most immortal, most
brilliant human invention. The knife has served
as a guillotine, the knife is a universal means
of resolving all knots, and along the knife’s
edge lies the path of paradoxes — the only
path worthy of a fearless mind.
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