Бесплатный фрагмент - Mothman

For a long time, a deep thought sailed from one century to another, much like smuggled cargo, carefully guarded from prying eyes in the holds of book ships. Having reached the next harbour, it began to wander from mind to mind, multiplying and making its way between thickets of words and wilds of pages, where only an attentive and experienced hunter could entrap it in his snares. One of these hunters happened to be a poet who lived in a house embellished by rock paintings of modern Neanderthals.

This poet has a distinctive style and form in writing, fusing serious ruminations about theology, philosophy, history, politics, art and folklore in simple images in order to make them palpable to all, also amalgamating them in an unusual, sometimes paradoxical way. Of course, many poets were not original in their desire to be original, but in this particular case, unusualness and innovation were not necessarily conscious tasks. Rather, they manifested casually and viscerally, in the process of discussing something close or of significance to the poet.

Voltaire defended the right for any literature to exist, except that which is boring. Flaubert conceded that he always wanted to write a work about nothing. Alain Robbe-Grillet believed that the true author has nothing to say, and it is not important what is said, but how it is said. Hemingway, on the other hand, opined that a good work demonstrates only a surface of an iceberg, while going on to add that the author is limited to what others have done before him. Meanwhile, Baudelaire contended that the goal of poetry lays in poetry itself (and it must be bereft of any other goals). However, that didn’t necessarily imply that the final result shouldn’t ennoble morals and elevate a person above the level of mundane interests. Instead, his implication was that poetry couldn’t be ingested with knowledge and morality under the threat of death or decline, and if the author did indeed set some clear goals and objectives to himself, he actually weakened his poetic power. Furthermore, although all his predecessors came from different cultural dimensions and the poet didn’t concur with them on everything, it could be assumed that they would support and understand his undertakings more easily than most of those around him.

In almost every work, the poet’s creative paradigm combined the original choice of the character (it could be even a stool if he wanted), the original situation (in which the stool, for example, would bloom and give birth to the offspring in the form of a whole set of furniture), the original narrative and the original ending. At the same time, the vanities of the world were shown as unsteady, fragile and illusory against the background of the eternal, and the author’s style was replete with satire, grotesque, allegories, metaphors, free associations and psychological “semi-automatism”, which united the conscious with the unconscious. If it was possible, the poet didn’t indicate the character’s name, time and place of action, although this rule wasn’t immutable. He didn’t like pining labels as all kinds of supporters of imaginary comfort appreciated, so he didn’t attribute his works to any school or movement. However, wanting to get rid of the most persistent interrogators, he called his writing style “inversionism”.

The name “inversionism” came from the Latin word inversio, meaning reversal and permutation, which could be applied both to style and content. What he meant was a game of meanings and perception perspectives, moving from one position to another, turning the usual logic upside down, rearranging and shifting images, and so on and so forth. The poet didn’t want to follow the frantic herd of imitation, the poet followed his own path, noting the cliches and avoiding, or ridiculing them satirically, but without venom.

Emphasizing the non-utilitarian purpose of art, he considered the emotional and sensory perception and non-discursive method of cognition as valuable as a speculative and logical approach. He didn’t oppose them to each other and at the same time believed that author should work in such a way so that he need not be ashamed for his creation before God and people.

Any work of art had to have the truth in itself, and here it was necessary to avoid the widespread substitution of concepts, since the truth, even clothed in the most phantasmagoric metaphors, remained the truth, while the lie, even described with all naturalness as if in forensics report, remained the lie.