be dreaming of women as you would about men. You can deny vice, and it – due to its nature, and everything natural is very resilient – will evolve into other forms and will start to manifest itself in your activities. You can surrender to vice but then the sensations will disappear. You can always coordinate sensations and vice but then you will be dependent of love which gave birth to this contradiction. Can we comprehend vice? My appetence later was forgotten but the thought of it came back to me after what had happened.
From aside, Alan might have triggered completely different feelings that I had. I sometimes understood that I had never seen such a combination of obtusity and originality. He actually could infuriate with his stupidity but his unique outlook made him attractive. I think he himself realized his worthlessness and with all his effort was trying to become better, seeing the only one way to this – to be original. When he was not allowed to be himself, he immediately started a conflict: usually a calm person, he burst out becoming a brainless bull or a hysterical little girl. While growing up, Alan was dreaming of different ways of his development. Having learned about the past era, he wanted to escape “the island” and study the whole planet finding other places of life. Later, like the majority of other residents, he dreamed of building a perfect society on “the island”. Having read utopian literature, he thought that the problem of a perfect society had always been in the scale of this project realization – everything seemed too abstract. In our case the problem of the scale was solved naturally.
In the moments of loneliness Alan strived for going to the desert and wandering there until his remnants of memory disappear together with the sensation of time. He used to recall that in his childhood science attracted him because imagination didn’t aspire to comprehend the truth – it aspired to invent it. Later, Alan took up more practical ways of comprehension, this is how he could directly influence the truth and get a feedback. But the limits of such comprehension made him bored quite fast, because his imagination couldn’t find any life in it. He admired electricity, which fascinated his imagination, but household devices which depended on it, made him frustrated. All these ways joined in Alan by the time of his growing-up, and he always had to jump from one concept to another, producing an impression of a reserved but curious young man with a bit of a wild look. The idea to organize the trip abroad came to him in the moment of the deepest self-identification crisis: after a number of obsessive aspirations to do whatever but not to halt at one thing. He studied the motions of ants in an anthill, took up ornithology, arduously tried to understand the relativity theory and ecstatically went through cookbooks.
But let us come back to just another attempt of islanders to go beyond the border. It must be noted that on the day when Alan told me about his idea to go beyond, a retired patient died of a stroke. I had been taking care of this patient for a month and studied him well, even though he couldn’t say a comprehensible word. His image pierced through the mask of his disease: he made an impression of a stingy and capricious person because of his sunk look independent of his memory. Alan would see the results of neglected flaccidity in the man – he was always irritated by people without natural generosity, what made him behave really courteously with hypocritical people who, in the first place, try to represent benevolence and sympathy. That day he died of doctors’ malpractice, who prescribed him incompatible medicines. But their attempts to interact with him initially looked like communication of prison wardens with a retarded criminal. When I was first taken to him, he was tied to bed, as he was said to “show aggression”, but in the first two hours in his room I was able to acquire rapport – I had no sympathy to his mutilated body and no pity to his condition but the desire to communicate with a person who appeared to be in one room with me. This was the reason why the care for him was given to me, and I started to feel direct responsibility for his life, which refined my perception. That is why his death impressed me – I was furious.
If we look more attentively, our mentality works like a camera obscura: our consciousness presents some dark soggy room with a tiny hole, and an ethereal divine hand sends us shapes of the external world with a ray of light, but we receive an inverse and vague image and we have to cleanse the field of our turmoil of those vague images; though more often we concentrate on these scattered pictures, keeping only impressions and, finally, we live not in our mentality, which like an eye has to look to see, but in the kaleidoscope of our impressions, which turns our turmoil into a dense forest with various plants and insects with no colour, smell, taste or matter but with an enviable submission to our narcissism.
It is just the analogy I recollected but not from the death, that I had seen a lot of times, but from a legendary abyss between people – detachment. Pronouncing this word with just a touch with it I find myself in that room smelling of medicines, besotted with its sharpness and with a feeling of detachment as if you are in the devil’s office. Limitless vials and syringes as vessels of an ancient alchemist surrounded the dying, in order to press the soul to the body and not let it go, but they did serve to the decomposition of this body just as the room itself – decomposing of the various smells. Earlier I liked this combination of smells for their specific atmosphere of worship of a human’s desire to live, as frankincense opens the temple doors to worship the desire to believe. But it is a peculiar law of feelings that affects our perception.
We do not live by judgments, we live in a special world of feelings, an endless stream engulfing our energy, which can be renewed only by our suffering, and we can guess that by the movement of our thoughts, whose acuteness, in a greater degree, is shown in the moments of deep loneliness or loss, when we are ready to perform really heroic actions in good faith, with no conceptions and arrangements – on the contrary, all the chaos of these ideas confines our mentality in the moments of pleasure, which delivers envy, and we begin to consider all the received pleasures as a part of justification for our previous sufferings, but the true nature of the feeling is that it cannot be an entity, and so we have to form different feelings towards familiar places and people, familiar events and thoughts – they are in fact difficult to distinguish in our mentality, and we sometimes perceive more details of environment that thoughts in a person; additionally, we constantly have to feel our own existence, which is hardest to do, because we don’t want to reject places, people, thoughts and events as their loss leads to the loss of ourselves, our warm corner of life, in which I futilely tried to put the death of this man – with all my persistence I wanted to make it my own comprehension of life, but this spiritual passion emerged not due to his death but as a result of its incomprehensibility for myself and the impossibility to react to it in any way because I (if we remember my own feelings) have always seen sufferings and I understood that death was a real gift for that man, although, the thought of it was so exotic for my mentality that I was trying to outvoice myself so as to conclude that continuation of life would be the best outcome for him because the man’s identity and his sufferings joined in an integral whole and the real face showed only when the sufferings disappeared and I started to find living feelings towards him as I stopped seeing his sufferings. And now I see living feelings towards Alan too.
It was midday when this patient died.
To distract myself I accepted Alan’s earlier invitation to visit a famous venue orotundly called “Port Charlotte”, that offered the best smoking narcotic mixes, which disgusted me. Because of his eccentricity, Alan visited this place quite often. He always persuaded me that this experience is a wonderful method of work with one’s mentality. Without excessive attraction, these mixes could open new ways for contemplation, Alan said to me, and that day I yielded to his suasions but because of the horrific fear of this harmless action I decided to note down all my experiences in order to gain myself back deciphering the notes if something goes wrong. This experience was overshadowed by the necessity to communicate with Alan’s friends, whom I had never liked, but I needed to distract. Being in the basement of an old residential house on Owen Street, which crept out like a dead man’s bony arm from a grave in this quickly developing district of our island, I was irritated by each perceived object – this building