Mikhail Veller. The Guru

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      © Copyright Mikhail Veller
      © Copyright Translated by Eric Gillan (keeder()gmail.com)
      1-15-2002
      Origin: "Гуру"

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      "Your ignorance is boundless, and not even amusing..."
      This was the first sentence I heard from him - the slide-tackle to my fate that forever changed its course.
      But, to hell with the intimate details.
      Everything I am, I owe to him. Everything.
      It is too late now to know who he really was. He liked being mystical. Very much.
      I would come to his doghouse of an apartment with a bottle of port and a hunk of salami, or a loaf of bread, or a package of dumplings, or a carton of cigarettes. And, before my finger touched the doorbell, the confident, successful, well-dressed educated young man turned into something I really was - a young pup. He was a master who, from the mountain peaks of enlightenment, had scorned the trades. He was a sage. I - a frantic and arrogant brat.

      He hated order, clothes, reputation and public opinion. He hated money, but he hated conceited poverty even more. Good and evil didn't exist: he belonged to the caste of hunters of the truth. He shunned the farce of everyday news and sluiced for truth's precious grains; he panned for it like a prospector.
      Like a careless farmer, he scattered the golden sands of his truths by the handfuls, paying with it for everything.
      His currency had limited circulation and his life could be called a history of struggle if it weren't a history of beatings. He was hardened and scarred, like a saxaul tree in the desert.
      Flinging open the door, he squinted his farsighted eyes with valor and contempt for me and, through me, for the outside world. His scorn leveled the scales of his view of life: in the other cup rested his love rejected by the world. I understood it much later than expected.

      He took my gifts like one would take groceries from the neighbor's boy who was sent to the store while the housekeeper was sick. Every time I was afraid that he would give me a tip - I wouldn't know how to behave if he did.
      Deliberate with his old man's squeamishness, he silently pointed his finger at the coat rack and then, at the door to his room. That was my invitation.
      In his room, he pointed in the same way at the curio cabinet the age of Noah's ark and a chair. I took out the wine glasses and sat down.
      He tossed down the port, lit a cigarette and in the formless mass of an old man's face appeared discrete features - hard and unhappy. He was one of those who never quit and kept going until the end. But, since everything alive is forever changing, he, with his unstoppable momentum, went too far and ended up empty-handed. But in that emptiness, he possessed more than those who perceptively followed every fluctuation of the living world. He remained with nothing - but with the very essence of reality, gripped and preserved by his caustic consciousness; and in his consciousness, it stayed forever undistorted.

      "My boy," he always started this way. "My boy", he would say, and the air, vibrating with his voice, stretched like a membrane about to explode under the unavoidable and powerful pressure of his internally concentrated thoughts, rapidly expanding, turning into words, like gun powder turns into gas and, expelling the projectile out the barrel, with one tight shockwave explodes the air.
      "My boy", he crowed angrily, now animated, with his two eyes stabbing me like two fingers, "did you happen to read some of this American scribe named Edgar Allen Poe? Accidentally, perhaps?"
      I answered yes, not afraid of the ambush, but certain that I will end up in the puddle of mud anyway, from which I will be lifted by the scruff of my neck, only to be dipped into it again.
      "So, then, my boy," he continued, and from a barely perceptible gesture I knew to pour more into his glass. He drank, stood up and didn't look at me again as he spoke. I was the outside world. He consulted the world. No more, no less.
      "All grief comes from ignorance," he said. "And ignorance - from lack of respect for your mind. From happiness of being a sheep in a herd.
      Ignorance. Dishonesty. Stupidity. Subservience. Cowardice. The five things, each one able to destroy creativity. Honesty, intelligence, knowledge, independence and courage - these are the things you must develop to the greatest extent, if you want to write, my boy. Those honored by their contemporaries are not writers. Edgar Allen Poe is a writer, my boy," and he placed his hand on the spine of the book as if it were the shoulder of E.A. Poe. He was acting, but when I replayed these talks in my head later, I found nothing abnormal in his acting. Maybe, we act every time we stray from the spontaneity of expression.
      "About honesty," his voice lowered and turned hoarse, hissing like a worn out stylus of a turntable, dulled by the unbearable energy of the recording - the energy mixed with the aggregate of knowledge, suffering and anger. "You must be completely aware of your own motives. Your true feelings. Don't be afraid
      to see a monster in yourself. Be afraid of being a monster, and not knowing
      it. And don't think that others are better than you. They're just like you! Don't be deluded and don't be offended.
      Then, you will understand that every man possesses everything. All the
      feelings and motives, the sacred and the evil."
      His finger was a barrel in a firing squad aiming for the bridge of my nose. I pressed my back into the chair and sweated. "These are words from the primer. You are ignorant, but I don't fault you for that. You should have known this at seventeen, even if you couldn't understand it. But you are twenty four! What were you doing in that college of yours, you feeble-minded amateur?" Hot drops of perspiration left my armpits and rolled down my sides.
      "Without honesty there is no knowledge. To be dishonest is to close your eyes to half of this life.
      Our feelings, our system of knowledge and perception of reality are a magician's glass through which we can see an otherwise invisible picture of the world. But there is only one point from where that picture can be seen undistorted, in harmonic balance with all its parts. That point is truth. The point of enlightenment is absolute truth, without the need for judgments.
      Don't be afraid of the morals. Be afraid of distorting the picture. Because with the slightest departure from the truth you will see - and describe - not the three-dimensional picture of the world, but only a two-dimensional one, and even of that just a drop. And distorted. A reflection on this glass, this artificial screen of an ignorant and obliging human brain. With the changing times society changes its point of view and your depiction is no longer what seemed to be the truth. But the three-dimensionality and truth, even though they may not coincide with appropriateness of the times, never change. The oscillations of public opinion can't touch them; in fact, they correct those oscillations.
      That's why you should never associate with people who ask: "Why are you writing about this?" Hinting that you should write in some intellectually balanced proportion, pursuing some goals familiar to them. Those people are dull, dishonest and ignorant. What do you know about dipoles? What about prana? About Yoga? Don't waste your energy and your life-force by being around idle people and idiots."
      "Art, my boy," he was getting drunker and more resolved, "is learning about the world. That's all. Never mind that with more wisdom comes more sadness. What, you haven't read Ecclesiastes? What a gray raincoat... Gray rat on the steamship of the modern progress... Spiritual experience of mankind - that's what art is. Analysis and a textbook of the human race at the same time. That is the grindstone that shapes and sharpens man's feelings - all of them! Full range of them! With which mankind heals its soul. All the black dirt and sparkling fragrance - the realm of art and also the realm of humanity. Enlightenment is the realm of humanity. Happiness? Happiness and enlightenment are synonymous, listen to me, my boy. All this is banal, but remember it, ignorant youth. You are young; your soul, even if sensitive, is dim and undeveloped; you won't understand me. You will understand later."
      Drinking the wine, I was getting high. Intermittently, he was a sage and an empty talker. The logic of my perception was tearing to pieces, unable to keep up with the swift stream of strengthening essence of his thoughts.
      "The public always applauds fakes professionally made to its demand. Masterpieces? It can't tell them from meager replicas. Its vision is two-dimensional. But what's left are only the masterpieces. An artist adds to the intellectual and spiritual fund of mankind. Why? Why are people on this planet? Only the ignorant ask stupid questions like this...
      Have you heard of experiments with rats? The first to move into the new territory are the "scouts". A strict hierarchy is established after the settlement takes place and the "scouts" are killed. "Such is the world, my Hamlet"... And Icarus is still falling and still flying: the happiness isn't in the riches, not by the bread alone, we're not dead if we're alive."
      He finished the wine and, obeying again an invisible gesture, I went to the kitchen to brew chifir. He didn't drink coffee - he drank chifir. He said that he got used to drinking it a long time ago in a place far away and gave long lectures extolling advantages of chifir over coffee.
      Brewing of chifir signaled the end of the "general information" and the beginning of "literary mastery" part of the conversation. He announced that I was the lousiest and most incompetent of all the candidates for an apprentice in his entire life. And, even more insulting, I was likely the last one. He was inarguably right about that - I was the last...
      "My boy," he said with inexpressible scorn, his face reflecting a contemplation of whether to vomit or to lie down and wait it out. "My boy, you suppose you wrote a story better than this one," he shook the magazine like it was a severed head and the head disgracefully flew into the corner to join cigarette butts and dirty socks.
      "Masterpieces!" He yelled. "Poe is a writer! Akutagawa is a writer! Chekov is a writer! Put this garbage out of your head unless you like the idea of becoming garbage!"
      Then, he sang praise to the short story.
      "A piece must be readable in one sitting, he insisted. Exceptions are fiction of mystery, adventure and romance. Justification: a masterpiece novel, with information every bit as concentrated as in a short story. There's only been a few dozen like that.
      Concentration - thoughts, feelings, storyline. The more information a story contains per unit of volume, the greater it becomes. More possible interpretations! A real three-dimensional plot - that's the ideal! A story with a real plot is always a parable!
      Material? Fool! Shakespeare wrote about Venice, Verona, Denmark, about an island that didn't exist. And Poe? What about Akutagawa? The idea lies at the foundation and you make it come to life with adequate material. You must know, see, smell and taste it, but it doesn't mean it you'll find it under your feet. Find it where you can. All of the time and space, real and not, are at your service. This is the abc's ..."
      He was conducting to an invisible but finely responsive orchestra.
      "The process of creation of a story is composed of these layers: choosing the most fitting, most appropriate, strongest material; building of a story, composition; and expression by the means of a language. This three-step process is made fertile by the idea, the underlying thread that is the essence of the story. Disregarding any of these four steps will cease the creation of truly great writing."
      "Even though," he shook his worn-out sleeves, and the orchestra stumbled. "Even though discovery and perfecting of just one of the four attributes will lead us to consider luck, talent and so forth... only perfection of all four gives birth to a masterpiece!
      Every letter must be the only possible one in the text of the story. Editing is for slobs and hacks. Don't fuss and try to be clever: listen carefully to yourself, until the string resonates with the one true note of the tuning fork.
      Don't pile in the details. To you, they seem to define the scene, but in reality they distract from the precision of the picture. Every reader imagines something of his own in what he reads and it is your job to foster his associative vision with one or two details. Scarcity of words is a richness of perception, my dear."
      I was forbidden to take notes. He was opening himself to the world and he didn't want an alienation of his truths in someone else's handwriting.
      I cheated. On the porch of the neighboring building I filled pages of my notebook with crooked shorthand, and transferred it all into a thick journal I kept at home. Sometimes I felt like a dimwit who was memorizing the rules, hoping to find the secret of success.
      "The boy can write, " he said with sarcasm. "The boy has a brain, that's good. A creatively impotent man can't fertilize the material; at best, he is a scribe. A business trip. Drove in and described what he saw. Savages! Paustovsky was like that, too, by the way. Not for you to pass judgment! First, learn from him the skill of clean and beautiful description. Insufficient case, but not useless."
      Drawing on a cigarette, he took a sip of chifir and inhaled the smoke. And then exhaled:
      "First. Learn to write light, free and relaxed - just the way you talk. Don't strain and work it to death. Tell what's on your mind. Ordinary spoken tale - only on paper and without contractions.
      Second. Write about something you know, something you've seen and lived through. More definite, more detailed, more extensive.
      Third. Learn to write long. Think of a size of a story, and then write three times that much. Come up with non-existent, but possible details. The more, the better. Fantasize. Be naughty.
      Fourth. Pull out all the stops and lie. Fabricate from the beginning to the end; if a little truth comes through, put it in, as well. Believe that it is just as plausible as what you experienced. You know your fantasies just as good as your reality."
      With theatrical disgust he leafed through the pages of my opuses and they fluttered into the corner with the butts and socks, like feeble deformed pigeons unable to fly.
      "OK. We finished first grade: we learned how to draw a stick man. Let's keep going...
      Fifth. Cut out everything that can be cut! Turn a page into a paragraph, then a paragraph into a sentence! Don't mourn the fifteen pages turned into one. What's left is sinew and meat on the bones, no fat!
      Sixth. No repeated words. Look for synonyms; find something to replace a repeated word. Can you read in French? Oh, pardon, I forgot what gardens you are a fruit of. Read "Madame Bovarie" translated by Rommov! A hundred times! Start anywhere in the book! When you can imitate that, we will go on."
      In his voice, for the first time, I heard leniency of a high priest towards a wet puppy on the steps of the shrine.
      The pummeling began. I stopped sleeping. My heart, and the whole left side, ached. I was jumping up in the middle of the night, unable to breathe. The winter was coming to an end.
      "What," he ridiculed. "You don't like writing simply, huh?"
      I criminally read magazines and terrified myself. I wanted to publish and announce myself to the world. The current carried me and I didn't resist: the foggy bank promised unimaginable marvels, if I didn't drown along the way.
      In April, I brought him four pages that didn't disgust him.
      "So, the second grade is finished. None too soon. Not altogether giftless, hmm... Some talent is coming through..."
      I think I was near a nervous breakdown, because I almost cried from adoration and love I felt towards him. The old son of a bitch farted with gusto and picked his nose.
      Finishing the port, he told me that everything was now in my power: stay with it or quit. But, if I kept going, it will for sure be the end of me.
      Feeling ordination in his words, I answered that I was done for a long time ago; that I could die in the gutter with dignity, and forty-five years of life is really quite enough.
      I May, I brought two more similar stories.
      "Aren't you tired of writing the same way?"
      "Yes..."
      "The element of discovery is gone... All right..."

      "Seventh," he slammed his fist on the wall. "You must have the right relationship, proportion between what you read and what you experienced with your own hide, between what you made up and what you heard from people, between refined information from textbooks and the knowledge you got by tossing around the world. Get out of here and don't come back till autumn! Go! The farther the better. The tropics!"
      I left everything, quit my job and went to Yakutia.
      His memory was like epoxy: anything that touched it was crystallized in it forever.
      "Eighth," he said calmly in the fall. "Let's work with the syntax. The punctuation can do amazing things to the text. Experiment with it, keep bending the stick, look for it. Reverse the meaning by using only syntax. Read some Stern, my dear. Lermontov, the one you don't know."
      I put out more effort. He wrinkled his face.
      "Stop showing off. Simply look for what feels right."
      What followed next caught me by surprise.
      "Ninth," he was quiet but triumphant. "You already know that every detail has to work, that the "rifle hanging on the wall in act one will go off in act three". But, the technique of the aces is a gun that remains on the wall. That's more cunning. Carefully read Akutagawa, Ryunosuke-san, the greatest master of short prose of all times and cultures. Only Mr. Poe can hold his ground. Read "Rashomon" and "In a Grove". Pay attention to the sword that disappeared no one knows where and why; to the missing finger about which nobody asked. Akutagawa possessed - on the level of technical application - the greatest secret, my boy: the ability to give an immeasurable depth of hidden meaning with one detail, to instill the feeling of inexhaustibility of occurring events," he started coughing, bent over, and, wheezing and pressing his arms to his chest, collapsed.
      I yelled for nitroglycerin and, toppling a chair, raced to the hallway for the phone. After I called the ambulance, I saw him earthen-pale, but calm and angry.
      "You panic one more time and I will throw you out," he crowed. "I know when my time's up. Go already!"
      With the technique of "extraneous detail" I agonized like a monkey with a sextant. Hopeless...
      "Don't shame yourself," cawed my mentor. "This kind of work is for the masters. You're still young."
      Then, destroying my conception of how to write, he added more fuel to the fire.
      "Tenth. Add superfluous, unnecessary to the meaning, words. But in such a way that without these extra words the zest of the sentence disappears. Put on your desk the "Life of Monsieur de Moliere", by Bulgakov."
      And so his staff-like finger sent my life into its next mysterious curve; by the looks of it, way off the road. As the English say, "I lost my nerve". In March, a year and a half after I started this suicidal mission, I came over and told him that I wanted to be a magazine writer, or, even better, a columnist. I raised my hands.
      "Eleventh," said coldly my Lucifer. "When you decide that you can't write any better, write three more stories. After that, you can hang yourself or go teach high school."
      It all ended in May - a good month for either a beginning or an end for any undertaking.
      "Young man", he addressed me formally. "Have you any money?"
      I haven't had money in a long time. I have become a lumpenproletariat.
      "I don't care. Steal it," he advised. "Come back in an hour. Bring a bottle of good cognac, half a pound of coffee, a package of "Peace Pipe" tobacco and a pipe made by master Fedoroff, which should cost anywhere between 12 and 30 rubles at the "Artist's Bench". Don't forget the lemon and the "Karakum" candies."
      I sold eight books to the book pawn. To this day, I have yet to replace Gogol, Camus and "Sailor in the Saddle".
      I begged the lemon from a manager of the special orders desk at the "Elysee" market.
      "That's it, young man," he said. "There is nothing more I can teach you."
      He was unrecognizable. He was wearing a cream-colored wool suit, light-blue silk shirt and gold-with-black necktie. Maroon woven-leather shoes and red socks covered his feet. He was clean-shaven and smelled of expensive cologne. In front of me sat an aristocrat who did not need confirmation of his standing by everyday attributes.
      Noble cobalt flowers on the snow-white tablecloth were made up of the embroidered "Property of Berlin Municipal, 1900." Crystal glasses clinked together like at a wedding in a king's castle.
      "I saw Mihail Chekov as a boy," said the host. I froze because I didn't know who Mihail Chekov was. "All my life I dreamt of running a school of literature. Don't be an idealist; I don't really care about anything, anyway. Obviously, it is my own business."
      "Don't delude yourself," in the almost-transparent coffee cup he stirred the lemon with a silver spoon. "I gave you no more than a few techniques and showed you how to use them. I opened your eyes (it wasn't your fault they were shut) to a couple of things. I saved you some time, while I still had the strength. Only time will tell if it was worth my while..."
      Sentiments in his presence were inappropriate. The terrible sadness about this farewell came later.
      How much nobleness of true and unadvertised importance was in this man! I swear he could have been the crowning jewel of any international assembly! A luminary who came down from his Mount Olympus for a half-hour.
      He sipped cognac, rocked his woven-leather shoe, and smoked his captain's pipe. And magnanimously gave out farewell instructions.
      "Read less, re-read more," he said. "Four hundred books is quite enough for a professional. When the classics reveal to you the human weakness and sinfulness of the authors then you can really begin to learn from them.
      When reading, try to improve it in your mind. Read slowly, very slowly. Taste and savor every phrase with the author's eyes. Only then will you be able to understand what it contains.
      Hurry up while you're young. Fame of the old men is built on their accomplishments in younger years. The best years for a prose writer are between twenty-six and forty-six; exceptions are rare. When you're fifty, you can engage in literary nonsense, but before - it would be a pity..."
      Later, hanging around in his kitchen, I learned a lot about him - all contradictory and less than credible. These two years he kept me from sticking my nose in the wrong places, trained me like a coach trains an athlete who can't be allowed in the competition until he is in top shape.
      "Learn how to pull yourself away from your work," he taught. "Save the nerves for when you need them. Professionalism, besides other things, is an ability to consciously bring yourself to a state of highest excitement. There, connecting with your subconscious, you can iterate the different variants and alternatives with great speed."
      "By the way", he got excited, "how nave are discussions about creativity of machines, don't you think? A maxim: knowledge is inexhaustible and infinite, especially as related to the workings of a "man". We will never be able to understand - and, consequently, model - the mechanism of a creative act and account for all the factors: weather and humidity of the air, arthritis and heartburn, feeling of a cavity in a tooth, even the time of year, month or day. What we know is like a "black box": we put something in it, but what comes out is completely different. We try to imitate with the goal of like results. Masterpiece is a non-standard solution. Computer is a "super-solution" using the "super-standard": it is all logic. Art is not logic."
      "An artist is a turbine through which pours a huge amount of scattered energy of the universe," he kept teaching. "This energy emerges in all spheres of intellect and perception. And, really, all those spheres are one: to think, to feel, to create and to enjoy are all one and the same. That's why an impotent cannot be an artist."
      He towered as he rose to shake my hand. It was all over.
      But, really, it was all over in October, when I came back from working up North, having cleared my head and regained consciousness. I spent a week blowing money with old friends and called him on the eighth, leaving myself to forever regret waiting until the eighth.
      Ambulance took him on the sixth with a heart attack. After forty minutes of calls to information, I got a hold of the doctor at the hospital where he was taken. He had died the previous night.
      He had no relatives. At the morgue and his building's office, I found out how to take care of his burial and his apartment.
      I got a key from the neighbors and, uncomfortable and ashamed, looked for the necessary things with the help of a super. There were none. I bought all that was needed, and a wreath and a plain ribbon. It was unlikely he would have wanted anything elaborate.
      But, under the curio cabinet, I found a packet of my writings, neatly stacked and tied together with twine. They were all there, to the last one. That packet, and four more like it, I burned in the back yard by the dumpsters.
      In the drawer of his desk I found an envelope, addressed to me and with instructions to open on my thirtieth birthday.
      I ripped it open that evening and read:
      "So, you couldn't wait? All the worse for you.
      You are not Turgenev; you don't have land to support you. A professional must make a living. The only thing to do for people like you is to write for the public, but without writing for the public. With the same chisel! There is a tight connection between publishing and ability to write to the fullest extent of your talent. Writing for the future leads to degeneration. Kafka is the one exception that confirms the rule. Bulgakov, well, that's Bulgakov. In spite of being limited by mythical themes, they were great artists. Build your life in such a way that all the gates and ruts in the road happen when you are not there. As if you don't even know about them.
      Otherwise, you get fruitlessly bitter. Then, sorrow and dementia. "He is nothing! I can write better than that!" And who kept you from doing it? Sorrow and dementia!"

      A few silver spoons, porcelain cups and crystal glasses was all he had of any value. I thought for a while what to do with the few hundred rubles that I got from the consignment store. There wasn't enough for a tombstone and nothing else came to mind. Somehow, the money disappeared.
      The night after the funeral I was again leafing through my thick journals where I wrote down everything he said.
      "Don't forget about "ending with a tail"
      "Cut twenty years from the body of an uneventful story and put what's left together. It creates "dramatic longing".
      "Good story is like a coded text, it has the beauty of suggestion and innuendo, and is understood with slow reading."
      "Don't be afraid of contradictions in your description. They allow the reader to view the object from different angles, and make it richer."
      "Short story has not yet known a master of counterpoint."
      And a lot of other stuff. I couldn't sleep.
      The day of the funeral was just another day, ordinary and gray. He lay there in the coffin and it wasn't him. Yes, I knew how the bodies were prepared in the morgue...
      I didn't call anybody and sat next to the coffin by myself in the back of the morgue van.
      The North Cemetery, a huge industrialized necropolis of a city of many millions, with businesslike rhythm and lines at the entrance, didn't inspire contemplations of eternal life.
      The hired men took the coffin out of the van and placed it next to the open grave. For some reason, I recalled a tale of Czar Nicholas the First getting out of his sleigh to walk behind a coffin of a poor officer who had no family.

      It was strange how simple, conventional and commonplace this was. Like going to the dacha for a weekend. But, driving back from the cemetery, I thought that I would never write anything more.

Notes

      Saxaul is a woody shrub that is native to the semi-desert and desert zones Of Mongolia. Almost leafless, saxaul "trees" grow to between 2 and 4 meters high in moving sand, rocky valleys, and on hillsides.
      Chifir is powerful drink, black and thick, was invented by inmates of the Gulag. It is brewed with approximately half a pound of tealeaves to a pint of hot water. The resulting drink contains great quantity of caffeine and tannins and was used by the inmates to "get high".
      Konstantin Georgievich Paustovsky (1892-1968) was a Russian writer known for his colorful descriptions of nature scenes.
      Yakutia, also known as Sakha, is a region in North-Eastern Siberia.
      Lumpenproletariat - permanent underclass: in Marxist analysis, people regarded as living on the margins of society, particularly criminals, homeless people, and the long-term unemployed
      Dacha is a vacation home away from the city, a country cabin.