So whatagain and namelysaved science from my ground-breaking, epoch-making discoveries which neither Einstein nor Tesla saw in their wildest dreams?. Ever?.
Despite my obvious propensity towards pure science, there popped up a pesky predicament attributed irrefutably to my personality traits. One of those prevented my plain sailing to the glamorous shores of purity.
To tear, straight and openly, the mask of false shyness yes, it was me or, rather, my unconquerable dislike of useless inactivity that separated us from each other, Science and me.
The most noteworthy fact about my vibrant briskness is that it tends to manifest itself selectively. On the one hand, Im quite capable of sitting on for hours, who fly by like seagulls past a buoy of no interest to the gluttons looking for some chow, when I am pouring over an electronic microscope or thru the Hubble telescope (none of which I have got, as of yet, as well as a bicycle which cryingly unjust deficiencies I refuse to discuss now).
And on the other hand, whenever called to participate in a sitting of any kind at all, be it an AA caucus, a General Assembly of UN (the most hateful are those time-wasting get-togethers of a trade union members) I feel sick in one way or another. Some averse endocrine shit shoots thru my system, the bladder sounds sirens of micturition alert and, so as to abate their combined peak of energy, I evaporate on the sound excuse of legitimate need of peeing immediately.
That same restlessness turned to be the stumbling block as big as the huge rock carved with the directions for further routs in front of the knight-ridden stallions face who does not know how to skirt around it, the stallion doesnt because the knight in his medieval pants and not my jeans gives no clue to his means of transportation and just sits irresolute and irresponsive to the uncertain snorts of his companion with the stares of them both fixed blankly to the rock.
Which fork to take? Really? The divination for the outcome down each of the three trails available are pretty ominous: loosing your dear life, loosing your faithful steed, getting married to who knows whom. Some bleak dilemma for any sentient explorer, take my word. Just like choosing your way in science which, lets be frank, is a minefield of all kinds of briefings, meetings, colloquiums, symposiums, congresses, conferences, convocations
Let us peruse a trivial, predictable case of my visiting Stockholm to collect the Nobel Prize for my quant-mechanical achievements andbolt from the blue!it turns out I have to sit thru the Ceremonial Blah-Blah first! So? And have you consulted my peppy whippiness beforehand? Just to plumb if your planing had feasible grounds?
Hence, the conclusion which any average horse would whisper into your ear: sorry, mankind, for leaving you without the second to none discoveries and inventions buteven for the sake of your unavoidable convergence with AII wont rape my nature. Not a chance!
Thats what I am and gonna stay on unlike the proverbial hunchback getting straightened by his grave. Mind you my personal hole is to be dug taking in account the peculiarities of the would-be filling (supposedly me but well, whatever Forget it.)
Sehrgueys, are notoriously tough customers, if you recall the Ciceros harangue or another, recenter development at the Radonezh Monastery where the Catilinas namesakes funerary skiff went counter the flow drift which phenomenon was not expected by the onlookers from the bank because 600 years ago the science was not keen yet on motor-boats.
(*A life-hack tip here for startup parents: be careful at choosing the name for your newborn so as not to kick yourselves later for the gaga flippancy Ah! The kids turned utterly unruly!)
And finally, summing up my scientific experiences, its only fair to admit: whatever is is right and although we, I and the science, keep moving on independently, the separation might very well be for the better.
How do I know? Easy as a pie. After taking a shot at a crossword or puzzle I have a nasty backache next day because whatever I do I do with enthusiastic vigor.
d. Find yourself and pass the rudder to the foundling
And if anyone had, nonetheless, the nerve to read up to this here line just to remark, both deductively and scornfully, to themselves, The guy is so predictable! Now, hell start kicking the educational systems ass,' then, dear Sherlock, take my advice: possessing suchlike knack at clairvoyance keep off betting.
No, Sir. I refrain from whipping it, the system that has formatted us and picked up mutilating our offsprings, not because of its immaculately chaste innocencemiles from that! the slut has been used by every other fool in all manners of postures and weird juxtapositionsbut out of a pity for the poor wretch. And, overwhelmed with empathy, all I can say is o! poor thing! and clamp my teeth firmly blocking the outpour of four-letter words, condolent as well. Absolved you are, poor child, go take some rest before the upcoming reformative changes in you by a bunch of sleek-talk buffoons.
As a natural gentleman I have no intention of entering the subject any deeper and instead will I get straight over to where all of my meander circumgyrations were, up till now, leading to so as to let you see what namely I am about, after all.
Now, dearest dear, get ready! Your entrance, yes, the dessert crowns a dinner, mind it, sweetie.
Hats off, gentlemen! No semi-monde tramps here Enters Lady Belles-Lettres!
I do foresee the ineluctable backlash, like, the smirk of my acquaintances at any level of familiarity, What? That jerk and belle-letters? Are you kidding?,' and haughty, One more hick in dang-smeared boots!,' from the heights of the Laureate-Nominees Olympus, and the matter-of-fact response from the too busy slip-slap-sloppy bestseller kneaders A bitchy upstart!,' and Holy Baaa! Belle-Bull! braying by the counter-culture shitheads from their glossy latrine they try to sell us on as the Underground.
What belletrist am I? Frankly I have no idea, some passages of mine are, like, to my liking, others not exactly, depends on the extent of the dose consumed, I reckon, and, maybe, on the time of day as well. Yes, Sir, I stay ignorant as to who I am as well as to which correction institution will be honored with seeing my end. Yet one thing I know for sure there are no born belletrists, writer is a self-made product.
That said, Im far from denying possible presence of one or two smithereens of truth in the commentaries of my still-to-emerge-at-some-later-point critics, be they aesthetes groomed in the scholarly shade of ostensible family trees or common drunkards kicked out from full of hell of a lot of noise speakeasies. A winged byword from the public domain attests that any asshole might happen right when they pop up at a proper place with good timing.
And yet, how pitiful are the clowns who try at staking off their short-lived being right and keep their current position forever by falsifying elections results! Nitwit schmo schmucks with their tries at putting shackles on time!
And you, Citizen, keep back your shocked-loyal-subjects burps, I meant Muammar Kaddafi here. As of yet. Though the finish by them all is pretty similara gutter holding the divine ruler of yesterday now ditched and turned rat-food. Game over, Your Majesty
Secondly, what else am I supposed to do if fishing does not turn me on? Neither get I aroused by Real Madrid nor by Manchester United? What is there to do? (Damn, I have definitely met the phrase someplace. Am I plagiarizing?)
The answer is as simple as follows: your only choice, sonny, is to become a belletrist. Amen.
And here immediately springs up the galling question: why?
You are asking why? Comrades! This here Citizen would like to know why!
(Couldnt stand the temptation, huh? Poached from Dovlatov, you bookworm thief!
No way to go without, Your Holiness! The great are out there for us, the worthless sinful rubble, to have whose shoulders to stand upon.)
Here we have a rare case whenwhy? looks like a reasonable question to ask.
Okay, no use of hiding my ardent envy, way back, of the demigods who could casually flash their IDs of membership in Writers Union. And yes, I cherished a vague dream to earn a living by my books printed sometime by someone somewhere. Later, I just spat at the hooey, openly and profusely (hard to describe how willingly it went out) and now I write for my personal entertainment and then publish the books online for free downloading. The Russian Litres library brands them with the obnoxious «18+» mark while the overseas Smashwords platform use a more civil definition books for adults. Whichever way no kid can decry my products as means their grannies used to molest them at bedtime with.
Thus writing became my instrument of pleasure to fill the educational gaps tracing back to my adolescence years.
Nowadays its just a mouse-click away, this or that kind of tutorial Masturbation for Dummies or, maybe, Headfirst Crash Course and so forth, I am too lazy to find out the exact tittle but tutorials are there 100 per cent. Not a chance the stuff pulled for so hotly by Hollywood and Italian cinema will remain uncovered.
I mean, the learning curve looks too steep and makes me hesitant to follow the ever modish way in dealing with unhealthy amounts of spare time. Seems like, my innate laziness prevents my grabbing anything weightier than a quill.
And it is when we, at long last, arrive to the final question concerning the subject in hand. (If you still follow.)
How to write?
The question is too abysmal to answer it before the upcoming blackout (because of the blockade which were living thru here the electricity is supplied in rational 3-hour fragments to make the endemic life-style as harmonized as possible). For which obvious reason Im gonna consider the question under the next heading in this here preface under the cloak of a dissertation.
e. The awl pricks out of the knapsack for all to see!
We are a mighty enviable crowd. Look around to get proud what an unparalleled stretch of time were living thru and recollect the verse from the high school curriculum: Happy are they whose lot it is to visit this world on its fateful days, and so on because no one remembers the following lines even less the name of the poet. Yet, some deep thought sits there, maybe.
The world were visiting now is on its cut and run, globally, innumerable streams of refugees plod on along the roads all over the earths face both accelerating and slowing down (by their counter-directed movements in treks dispersed too chaotically for a meaningful account) the spin discovered and declared by Galileo.
Messy madhouse everywhere. Yet, there still are places for sober people to reach out to each other. One of such spots provides proza.ru long live the site! Its where I can meet so dear to my heart compatrio er sorry, guys, I revved overmuch at this point because at proza.ru I, actually, have none of the kind.
The site whose visitors majority do share the mutual historical past. Our dads and grandpas stomped in the same columns to the front lines, and extermination camps, and demonstrations on Mayday and on the Great October Revolution Day. Our genes got accrued with a special chromosome, odd yet useful bugger, for composing false reports and giving bribes to the established cadres.
Deeper than the unenlightened rest of the world comprehend we the famous address of N. Khrushchev to the UN General Assemblyoff tore the the berserk hero the shoe from his left foot to hammer repeatedly at the varnished rostrum top in time to maddened chant, Ill show you the motherfucking Kuzkas mother!
Thats when even the most experienced synchronous interpreters scratched their well-trained heads: whos Kuzka?!
(*Note for the Generation Z: Khrushchev was the head of the Soviet Union. And what a clever head he had! Even at hangover spells. He could announce the precise date of Communism coming in its own right all over the USSR or give out a motivational divination, like, Well catch up America and overtake them!)
And after the indestructible USSR collapsed disintegrating into separate states sprung up from our mutual Motherland fragments, I was left without countrymen and my relief and consolation comes mostly from the same language users who roll out their literary works at proza.ru each one with their own spelling innovations.
To them, my lingua-roomies with acute graphomaniacal addiction, address I my question
How to write? Tell me!
Write not in the sense of poking the keyboard with a finger or two but as regards quality how? So as to reach an effect stronger than the moonshine shooting down to your very heels, the quality awakening self-admiration, Bastard SOB, youve done the real thing! Thats what I crave for.
Well, okay, you know as well as I do theres a slew of courses, master-classes, and webinars all anxious to sell you all kinds of know-how that just works. However, no use in hooking us, the lingua-roomies, with spangle glitter and chaff stuff that makes us retch.
I think, when I think (not constantly yet prolongedly), that a forum-like approach is what we need here combined also with willful sharing of personal experience. All of us have this or that trick begotten in hard labors, some scribblers charm to run the sought result down and fixate for readers gratification. This here prologue is the cornerstone which I put, in full command of my sane and sober (as of yet) frame of mind, into the foundation of the edifice of gratis dispensation assets amassed concerning how to write so as not to feel ashamed in the long run.
You can do writing in different ways sober, drunken, giving free reign to your loco-motion reflexes, and etc
(*The user of LMR, the third from the above mentioned methods, should equip themselves with a couple of ball pens and a pack of copy paper (A4, 500 sheets per pack) and start writing without watching what they, actually, write. Neither plot nor story line, nor characters names are needed. All the details are decided by the skeletal-muscle parts of the author whose mission during the creative act is to bring themselves to and hold on in the state of automatism which, by the way, is the name of this particular method.
In the morning, the loco-writer checks the thing produced while they kept the pen replacing the filled-out sheets, and choo-chooing on, swoony and enthusiastic.
Well, well, well, lets see what I created this night? Oh-oh! What the Well, I never I be damned if its not Yes! Its the fourth volume of War and Peace written just overnight! O, fuck! The fourth volume for the fourth time in one month!
No wonder, and no use hitting the roof when you let the outflow gush on its own accord, uncontrolled, like, AI throwing together programs for its private entertainment.
Up front, I have to disenchant you, the trick described here is not my choice, I prefer in absentia digging. The idea was picked up from a prominent Soviet author from the period of stagnation in the USSR.
So he instructed (I dont divulge his name for human reasons but those interested indeed might contact me by email), It was Chekhov to tutor me. I opened a book of his stories, and began copying, line after line.