Texts from the prose poetry book The Body of a Thing (Daikto kūnas)

 

Translated by Markas Aurelijus Piesinas

 

 

[Text published on the book cover]

I’m not sure whether I should be thankful to Tomas Petrulis for creating me, for while writing his book THE BODY OF A THING he would force me into awkward and even dangerous situations. His dubious aim to portray people as things and things as people at times made me feel like a participant in a game that wasn’t quite moral or sincere. I can certainly state that his latent necrophilia, peculiar understanding of Catholicism, and the occasional pursuit of unhygienic erotic adventures not only established, but also irreversibly traumatized me. Thus, if I could compare the author to a father, I’d like to note that he is a brutal and capricious father who, under the guise of humor and lyricism, hides an overbearing severity – a patriarch like no other, although one who gives birth. However, for the sake of honesty, I must say that now, having been written and existing in the textual plane, all of the author’s traits that I felt so strongly while he wrote me seem to have become distant, ephemeral, false. Sometimes I even wonder if TOMAS PETRULIS is still alive and whether he was ever alive at all. Perhaps I was merely haunted by his authorship? Or it could very well be that the author simply let himself die while writing me. If so, all the better for me.

The Lyrical Subject

 

Amusement

To pretend you don’t know, not knowing that you don’t know – such is the most important duty of working. Who made it so is a mystery though. Such amusement is the most important aspect of work – moving the body, saying the words. Words fly, turn into sentences, but how they become thought, the employee knows not. That’s how he speaks to another employee like him, who is likewise filled with words to the brim, until it’s finally clear it is he who answers his own words, while the customer, gracious to both, keeps telling them more of the same, before he splits into employees and customers too. A busy day quickly turns busier still. Everyone’s working and going in circles – the circle is one, while the workers are boundlessly more than just two.

 

?

“I don’t want to prove anything to you, and I don’t want to teach you anything. I would only like for you to sway, to be carried back and forth. I’d like for someone to caress you or strike you. These things bring me the most pleasure. Soon there will be nothing for me to say, and I won’t even be able to speak, and you won’t be able to tell me anything either, even though you’ll have the ability to do so, since I shall have no way to know what you’re saying. So, when I am no longer present with you in language, keep on speaking – pronouncing words, chanting, reciting, syllabifying. Let your words bounce off me. Maybe then I’ll be able to know that you possess words and perhaps even ‘values,’ but it will not be ‘values’ that shall destroy you, and ‘values’ won’t save you either, for you can only rely on your voices to do that. As long as you speak to each other, there will be no one from the outside to tell you that you’re right or wrong. There will be no one to comfort you, safeguard you, affirm you. There will be no one to support you. But you shall be supported as long as you speak to each other. And when your voices fall silent, all of your differences will vanish – and you shall be dead. Therefore, whatever you do, never stop pouring out words, writing words, and thinking words,” thus spoke unto them an electric train that had just arrived at the platform, before falling silent forever. In this way it tempted them to try the unknown fruit it had brought with it.

 

To Whomever

The wasteland – it’s a wasteful space with a table. A table for one. On the table there is an ashtray. Soon he will come – a wastrel of sorts. A wasteful presence already hangs cozily around the table waiting for him to arrive. The table is black with four corners. It’s great for absorbing the wasteful presence and all of its particles.

Here he is – a wastrel of sorts. He steps out and takes a seat at the table for one. Cozily nestled, the wasteful presence already slumbers. A persona of sorts emerges through the door. She’s holding a notepad. The wastrel tells her something, she writes it down. And the wastrel now holds a glass with a drink of sorts. He will now drink it at once, and as he does, starving families keep circling him on the sidewalk, as if they were waiting for him to commit the initial mistake, after which they all could partake in his wasteful cadaver – the parents and their vicious underage kids. Because the best families are mostly sustained by people’s remains. They set an example by teaching their vicious children the same.

So what’s left is for someone to pray, so that this wastrel doesn’t commit a mistake and rises from the black, four-cornered table alive, and goes his own way, above which bodies glow unfulfilled in the sky. They don’t even try.

 

EVP^[1]

Sounds descended upon me, descending briefly and lengthily, in wholes and in fragments, in diverse wavelengths and particles. They fell from the sky and they fell from the earth, and they fell from the varying sides of desire. They fell and they fell. Oh, my inner ear, why do you hum, why do you fire away? Why do you let me be tossed to the sides? Oh, my inner ear, I cannot soothe you. Chunks of sound confront you and me wherever we go. They torture you and me both – and how can I soothe you, when I love you more than myself, yet you are inside me? Oh, inner ear, through my passion for you I wander about, overcoming the fields of white noise, where we, I believe, shall meet one another someday, and you will be across from me, and you’ll stand before me, and you’ll stand unseen. And we shall be joined by a wireless link, and you’ll be the voice from somewhere beyond, the voice that shall penetrate me. Like that Latvian whose ear made love to him, becoming his girlfriend, caressing him with the voices of Mayakovsky, Joyce, and Ortega y Gasset. The Latvian from an age past, from the very innards of that age, spending the nights in his studio amid tape recorders and radio receivers. My inner ear, when you become the specter caressing me, when you’ll glide across high and low frequency ranges, alone, yet split into pieces, and when you become for me the dead that are mine, and when you’ll be more than my ear – remind me that I am Raudive, speak my name clearly.

 

Winter

Sluts fell from the sky. They circled the air, descending on houses, sidewalks, people, and cars. Cold sluts, the coldest, so cold they were almost impossible, covered the streets, forming a thick white mass. These were small sluts, so small they were almost impossible, but their mass was a force. Their mass obstructed the routes of the passersby, the passersby whose singular goal, the final goal of their lives, the goal of their shared life was to pass by, only to pass by. To pass by and not concern themselves with what has been passed. They were only concerned with the passing by itself, and thus they were passersby, mere passersby and nothing more. But being a passerby was difficult on that windy and cold afternoon because of the small, cold, sticky sluts, which fell from the gray clouds, from those slut-carrying ships. The sluts, too, were merely sluts and nothing more. Their singular goal, unbeknownst to themselves, was to fall and fall freely, to keep falling and sticking into a mass that obstructed the passing routes of the passersby, unaware that they must prohibit the passersby from being who they were. But were the passersby aware that their goal was to pass by, that this was their singular afternoon goal toward which the moral force of passing directed them? The moral force of passing, which compelled them to keep walking and not be tempted by the sluts, to carry on uninterrupted, to not fall into the mass – into the sluts, to avoid falling into their slutty embrace. The moral force of passing, unaware of its own morality, shaped the morals of the passersby and their hatred of sluts. Such hatred they felt, despite the beauty of sluts, the beauty they saw, and the secret desire to fall and keep falling together with them, secretly wishing in the consciousness shared by them all, to only be sluts. To be sluts, virginal and pure, sticky and cold, the sluts of a windy afternoon that were trampled and sullied, having their purity stomped by the feet of the passersby, secretly jealous of sluts, by the feet wearing their heavy winter boots.

 

The Coat of Arms of Lithuania^[2]

The naïve nature of astonishing, overly aestheticized stories, the fascinations and the “oohs” and the “wows” all move in different directions and have little to do with the misery of pretense, the inability to say anything real. If a wind were to blow on this page, it would inevitably blow away everything that’s written here, mercilessly wiping away every last trace. But there’s no wind blowing on this page; thus we may carry on writing, making it seem like we’re writing something of value, something directed against exaltation and the “oohs” and the “wows,” and against the indoctrinations of all veracities (yet perhaps this is actually a propagating text, which propagates a certain kind of “bird watching”). We may carry on writing, content with the fact that almost nobody is going to read this, with little hope regarding the “almost nobody.”

Look at them go – the friends of ideas: ecology, communism, feminism (“let’s edit the photo of the signatories”), Antifa, activism, but on the other hand: nationalism, fascism, “Pro Patria”^[3] (“the priest would never lie”), “The Holocaust didn’t happen” (but more subtle, because as students of history they know it actually did). And all the conspiracies, too: “false flags,” a flat Earth, the rapid corona test and the rest. A true amusement park with a carousel where heraldic horsemen and horsewomen keep pursuing each other in circles without one ever reaching another, much like the two little sisters who can’t get together over a hill.^[4]

A more demanding reader might ask: so what does the author of this text have to offer? Nothing, really, absolutely nothing, and perhaps this is precisely why he doesn’t exist. Yet even a non-existing author can easily appreciate and record the beauty of an activist rising like a Phoenix or Christ from the sack, how they approach the carousel and pick out a horsey, get on top and ride in circles while yelling their battle-cry through a bullhorn as it merges with the voices of all other pursuers and becomes part of the common clamor. A clamor which reminds the non-existing yet still writing author of visiting an overcrowded beach or, better yet, the festivities of the “Baltic Circus,” where an aging, neurotic neighbor lady from the childhood of the lyrical subject (may be confused with the non-existent author) addressed a staff member during break time, asking them to turn the music down.

Alright, that’s enough. The non-existent author has grown bored of appreciating beauty and rises from their chair, puts on their shoes, “powders their nose,” and ventures forth into the winter, into the blizzard, into the social network to propagate something.

 

Conclusion

What is the conclusion that follows him as he walks alone on a dark night through an alley along the riverbend? Or on the brightest day of the year, when he walks with the crowd through a glaringly bright street, looking around and squinting his eyes in the sunlight, feeling as if he were in the darkest of nights? He was too paranoid and disoriented to stop, turn around, and face the conclusion that stalked him. For quite some time, the fear of the conclusion had impaired all of his faculties. It would’ve been too hard to meet its eyes, and too hard to somehow mediate it. To turn it into the most beautiful, most inexorable, and thus most ruthless prayer. And what is the conclusion, if no one has ever spoken it, although many might have tried? Perhaps it is merely a hollow form and a deadly prison for those who have entered it and cannot find their way out? For all the incurable and initially naïve lyricists who remained unchanged for too long to be able to stay like that in the future, for them, the conclusion is like a lethal afternoon trap. That fateful afternoon, when it shall appear to them with all of its unmediated might, only to become an anonymous punishment for everything – the emptier, the more agonizing. From now on, it will stay with them forever until the moment when, perhaps not on the brightest day of the year, having drained them enough, it will abandon them and move to an indefinite but not necessarily very distant point in time, where it’ll become a fierce and inexorable mother of the personal misfortunes and societal tragedies that should befall them. Or it may very well be that nothing particularly horrible or unexpected will happen to them or the world, and they will continue living as they were, abandoned by the conclusion, unable to remember what could still be in store for them.

 

P. S. Open Letter

Tell me, how did you come to believe, why did you move to a cloister? For the silence is ringing and I’m curious, what were You able to hear through its unceasing ring. Generally, silence is not silent, and it is not silence at all, perhaps it’s what is left unsaid in speech. And this quality of being unsaid is the very first tribulation that begets all others. For the words of the Gospel hide more than they uncover, for the teachings of the Church misguide more than they save us from error. For the silence is ringing. It is also the gaps between words and sentences, it is the pauses in speech. It is that which separates one word from another, one thought from the other. It is also what separates one speaker from another. Tell me in a way that would evoke in my vision the live painting of Jesus becoming Christ. Perhaps if I see this becoming, I shall understand something that so far has evaded my eyes and my ears. For love is not enough to believe, for love is possible without faith, perhaps as the last thing which remains. But the silence is ringing, and Your story, and the live painting of Jesus becoming Christ, will likely only obscure the truth, it will only push veracity further away. And thus we ask together with Pontius, but maybe now without irony: “What is truth?” (Of course, we may always joke that truth is a woman.)

But why would anyone ask this at all? Are we fanatics in our pursuit of the truth? Why do we need truth, like some kind of thing? As if there weren’t enough things made already. So it’s better that you don’t tell me anything, let us do something instead, maybe only in words, or perhaps even in deeds.

For perhaps it truly is better to negate and to understand negation, to understand what is negated and how, to understand that nothing which is negated truly ever disappears, and that as long as we have the strength, we can always begin anew. Perhaps only it, the negation, can still liberate us from what we comprehend, the poverty of it, from what we comprehend, the rigidity of it. Perhaps negation is precisely that which shall eventually take us by the hand and, without any resistance but with proper negation on our part, lead us to where the heart of Jesus bleeds.

 

 

1. Electronic Voice Phenomenon – according to parascientists and enthusiasts of communicating with the dead – are the voices of dead individuals that can be heard in the white noise of radio static or in sound recordings (there are many ways to capture dead people’s voices using sound recording equipment). The text refers to Latvian writer, philosopher, and parapsychologist Konstantīns Raudive (1909–1974), who is one of the pioneers of EVP research and creator of many such recordings.

2. Lithuania’s coat of arms features an armored knight on horseback brandishing a sword and holding a shield with a double cross. In Lithuanian, and in this text, it is referred to as the Vytis, a word whose etymology is not universally accepted but which can be variously translated as “Chaser,” “Pursuer,” “Horseman,” etc. For the sake of clarity, the translation uses a variety of these forms instead of the original “Vytis.”

3. A right-wing political movement in Lithuania.

4. A popular Lithuanian riddle (the answer is “eyes”).