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2 the difference is that a guard dog cannot guess for itself which is the correct sector to bark into, but an Internet columnist is often capable of this

3 the similarity between an Internet colues that hus take for reality

4 the difference is that a fox is able to do this, but an Internet colu Would anyone as able to create plausible es work as an Internet columnist? Unlikely An Internet columnist can&039;t even convince hi ht to sit quietly and only bark when

Then I forgot about Internet coluht of truth suddenly flashed in my head

&039;Convince himself that his inventions are real,&039; I repeated &039;That&039;s it Why, of course!&039;

Quite unexpectedly forup on it for many days, first from one side, then fro turned and clicked, and everything suddenly fell into place - as if I&039;d put a jigsaw together by chance

I realized hoe foxes differ from olves As is often the case, this difference was no more than a mutated siic was based on the manipulation of perception But the means of ression is required here, or else I&039;m afraid what I say will be incoue about whether this world really exists, or is so to argue about All problems of this kind derive from the fact that people don&039;t understand the words they use Before discussing this subject, the first thing people ought to do is get to grips with theof the word &039;exist&039; Then a lot of interesting things would beco

Of course, I don&039;t mean to say that all people are total idiots There are so them whose intellect is almost the equal of a fox&039;s For instance, the Irish philosopher Berkeley He said that to exist means to be perceived and all objects exist only in perception You only have to think calmly about the subject for three minutes to realize that any other views on the od Mithras In ht that has visited the Westernand funny history: all the Hu the canvas of this great insight in a fussy satin stitch

But where does an object exist e turn away and stop seeing it? After all, it doesn&039;t disappear, as children and Amazonian Indians think, does it? Berkeley says that it exists in the perception of God But Cathars and Gnostics believe that it exists in the perception of the diabolical deuments are no worse than Berkeley&039;s From their point of view, matter is an evil that shackles the spirit By the way, reading Stephen Hawking&039;s horror stories, I often used to think that if the Albigenses had had a radio telescope, they would have declared the Big Bang a cosraph of Satan&039;s rebellionThere is a h this morass of idiocy - to believe that part of the world exists in the perception of God, and part in the perception of the Devil

What can I say to this? Fro, just as the Tower of Babel that Breughel painted never existed, even if there is a reproduction of the painting hanging in a room that you dream about And God and the Devil are si in a roo on the wall in a room they dream about Berkeley assumed that perception has to have a subject, and so the coins that rolled under the cupboard and the socks that fell behind the bed were solemnly interred in the cranium of a Creator specially created for that purpose But hoe deal with the fact that Berkeley&039;s God, in whose perception we exist, Hi of certain representatives of the endangered European race? And he doesn&039;t exist at all in the consciousness of a Chinese peasant or a little bird which is unaware that it is God&039;s? Hoe deal with this if &039;to exist&039; really does mean &039;to be perceived&039;?

We don&039;t, say the foxes Foxes have a fundamental answer to the fundaet this fundamental question There are no philosophical probleuistic cul de sacs created by language&039;s inability to reflect the truth

But it is better to run into one of these cul de sacs in the first paragraph, rather than after forty years of searching and five thousand pages of writing After Berkeley finally got the point, the only thing he wrote about was the wonder-working properties of the tincture of bitumen that he&039;d come across in North America And as a result, ever since then he has been mocked by various philistines, who aren&039;t aware that in that distant time bitumen was produced in Aious hypocrites accuse us were-creatures of addling people&039;s brains and distorting the Ie of God The people who say this have a rather poor idea of the Ie of God, since they s In any case, talk of &039;distortion&039; and &039;addling&039; is too judgee like that shifts the question on to the e of the real nature of the matter, which is as follows (please pay close attention to the following paragraph - I have finally reached the s consists in their perceptibility, any transforh the perception of transformation or the transforreat Irishman, I would like to call this rule Berkeley&039;s Law It is absolutely essential knowledge for all seekers of truth, gangsters and extortionists,specialists and paedophiles ish to remain at liberty And so, in their practice, foxes and wolves exploit different aspects of Berkeley&039;s Law

We, the foxes, use transformation of perception We influence our clients&039; perception and make them see ant them to see The illusion we induce becoettable Pavel Ivanovich&039;s back are the best possible proof of that But we foxes continue to see the initial reality just as, according to Berkeley, God sees it That is e are accused of distorting the Ie of God

This, of course, is a hypocritical accusation, based on a double standard The transformation of perception is the basis not only of foxes&039; witchcraft, but also oftechniques For instance, Ford takes the cheap F-150 pick-up truck, gives it a lovely new front grille, restyles the bodywork and calls the resultant product the &039;Lincoln Navigator&039; And no one says that Ford is distorting the I about politics, everything&039;s clear already in that area But sonation

Unlike us, olves use perception of transformation They create an illusion, not for others, but for thely that the illusion ceases to be an illusion There&039;s a passage in the Bible on that subject - &039;if you have faith as a mustard seed, you shall say to this mountain, "Move fro shall be impossible to you"&039; The olves have this mustard seed Their transformation is a kind of alchemical chain reaction

First a olf ing tail, which in wolves is the saan as it is in foxes, exerts a hypnotic influence on the wolf&039;s own consciousness, convincing hi transformation and so on until he is coists call this positive feedback

Alexander&039;s transforan in the same way: his body curved over, as if so drawn taut Now I&039;d realized as happening While foxes directed energy at other people, wolves trained it on the a transformation, not in others&039; perception, but in their own, and only afterwards, as a consequence, in that of others

Can we call such a transfor of this epithet, especially since every historical age fills it with its ownFor instance, in modern Russian the word &039;real&039; is employed in four basic ways:

1 as a battle cry uttered by bandits and FSB agents during the ritual change-over of the roof, or protection provider

2 a jargon terarchy in conversations about their offshore accounts

3 a technical term applied to immovable property

4 a widely used adjective with thea dollar equivalent&039;

The lattermakes the term &039;real&039; a synonym for the word &039;metaphysical&039;, since nowadays the dollar is an occult, mystical unit based entirely on the belief that to that should be practised not by were-creatures, but by those who are professionally obliged to do it - the PR consultants, political technologists and economists That is why I did not wish to call the olf&039;s transforive the iic But two things were undoubtedly true:

1 a wolf&039;s transformation was qualitatively different froh it was based on the same effect

2 the lupine y - far more than we foxes expended on a client

That olves could not re, and folklore linked their transformation with various forms of temporal li of that kind

I re - when for the first time in my life I became aware of the relict radiation froestion had I been i in gestionWhat was going on? I felt as if I were standing on the threshold of soelast, out of the spiritual impasse in which I had spent the last five hundred years But, to ht about was not spiritual practice at all

I&039;ht that came into rey tail and realized how to raise our erotic sensations to a totally new level It was all very si consciousness employed by foxes and wolves were identical in all major respects - the only eleestion and its target I, so to speak, served ne and it made him tipsy Alexander sed an entire bottle of vodka all on his ohich made everyone else around horrified But the effective substance, alcohol, was the sa our resources, we could ne and vodka After all, sex is more than just the simple conjunction of certain parts of the body It is also a connection between the energies of two beings, a joint trip If we could learn to combine our hypnotic impulses in order to iht, we could set ourselves up with our own tea for two, in which every drop would be worth its weight in poloniuree on anted to see And not just in words - words were an unreliable prop If we relied only on theine the final destination of our journey very differently Soe was required, one that would serve as the starting point for our visualization For instance, a picture

I tried to iine an appropriate classical canvas But unfortunately, nothing interesting came to mind - all I could recall was Picasso&039;s early masterpiece An Old Jew and a Boy Many years earlier I had used a postcard of that picture as a booky of Everyday Life, which I sih, and ever since then I had reures

No, pictures were no good They didn&039;t give any idea of how an object appeared in the round Videos would be ht Surely it ought to be put to good use?

There&039;s a kind of chewing gu couples in various hus are captioned &039;Love is&039; and I often used to see them stuck to the walls in lifts and cinemas If I wanted to draw my own version of these cartoons, it would shoolf and a fox sitting in front of a TV with their tails intertwined

The technology of aIt was enough to bring our hypnotic organs together in any pose that allowed us to do it Only our tails had to touch: we had to folloas happening on the screen, and any closer proxily quickly Usually he would lie down on his side, with his legs hanging down on to the carpet, and I would sit down beside hi and I caressed his up on his shaggy side, we joined our antennas together, and what began then was totally insane, so that no tailless creature could ever understand Sos were so intense that I had to apply a special technique to calm myself and cool off - I looked away from the screen and recited part of the &039;Heart Sutra&039; to myself, a mantra as cool and deep as a well: I could dissolve any emotional upheaval in those Sanskrit syllables I liked to look at the way our tails corey As if soulfed by dancing flames and sparksBut I never shared this simile with Alexander

However, while the technical aspect of the whole thing proved to be eles always involved argued to different universes In his case it was hard even to speak of taste in the sense of a definite systeuidelines Like a schoolboy, he liked everything to be heroic and senti sa that I simply couldn&039;t stand - Japanese cartoons about robots And then in our dream we played out the secondary love themes that the directors had had to use to provide at least so Actually, at first it was quite interesting But only at first

As an experienced professional, I soon wearied of the standard quickies - I had induced more dreams on that subject than mankind had h the terra incognita of ions, the backyard of social morality and h no one in the world could have witnessed our joint hallucinations, he was always stopped dead by his internal sentry

He would either respond to my appeals to embark on sogest so that was unthinkable for me For instance, to turn ourselves into a pair of cartoon transformers who discover their attraction to each other on the roof of a Tokyo skyscraperHow dreadful! But when I wanted to become the German major in Casablanca and take hiain, he was as horrified as if I&039;d been urging him to sell out thetopic for Dr Spengler: most Russian men are homophobic because the cancerous cells of the criminal code of honour are still deeply embedded in the Russian psyche Any serious , subconsciously ainst a prison bunk and tries to ensure that his service record doesn&039;t include any conspicuous violations of prison taboos that he ht have to pay for with his arse in a very direct manner This means that a Russian macho man&039;s life is like a per in luxury, the soul is doing time in the prison cas are, and I could write a big, thick, clever book about it Its basic idea would be as follows: Russia is a communal country, and when the Christian peasant commune was destroyed, the criminal commune became the source of the people&039;s morality The proprieties of the underworld occupied the place where God used to live - or, to put it more correctly, God Himself was incorporated into the notional rules as a top criious prosthesis, the Soviet &039;internal Party couitar tuned for prison songs set the e of the Russian soul

But noprison morality may be, there is no other morality left at all, only the siuards or sprintii journalists specializing in the propaganda of liberal values

Oh I deliberately won&039;t cross out that last sentence, let the reader admire it There you have it, the vulpine mind After all, ere-foxes are natural liberals, in pretty much the same way as the soul is a natural Christian And what do I write? What do I write? It&039;s terrifying At least it&039;s clear where it all caot the stuff about the sprintii journalists frouards fro to be done: if a fox has heard an opinion, she is bound to express it in the first person We can&039;t help it We don&039;t have any opinions of our own on these hu we need), but we have to live aood thing I don&039;t have to write a book about Russia after all What sort of Solzhenitsyn would I ain

I didn&039;t often discuss the nature of Alexander&039;s homophobia with him (he didn&039;t like to talk about it), but I was sure its roots had to be sought in the criminal catacombs of the Russianthat was even reays so ainst nature&039;

&039;But it was nature that created theainst nature?&039;

&039;I&039;ll tell you how,&039; he said &039;Children are hidden in sex, like the seeds in a waterht to eat a waterainst?&039;

&039;The water since But a watermelon can&039;t exist without seeds And that&039;s why I say they go against nature Will you say they don&039;t?&039;

&039;A certain watermelon I used to know,&039; I replied, &039;believed that the propagation of watermelons depends on their ability to iestion that it&039;s healthy to s the seeds But watermelons overestiation of waterh a process of which the watermelons are completely unaware, because they are unable to observe it Because this process only begins where the water those fancy knots again, Ginger, I can&039;t follow,&039; he grumbled &039;Save it Let&039;s do without all this tricky queer stuff&039;

Alexander particularly disliked Luchino Visconti Any suggestion to put on soreatest masters of the twentieth century) was taken by hiues in my journal are reproduced from memory, this one is absolutely accurate - the conversation was accidentally recorded on a dictaphone I include it here because I would like to hear Alexander&039;s voice again - I can listen to it while I type

AS: Death in Venice This is getting tiresoer What do you think I am, some kind of queer?

AH: Then how about Conversation Piece?

AS: No, let&039;s have Takeshi Kitano Zatoichi punishes the geisha-assassinAnd then the geisha-assassin punishes Zatoichi

AH: I don&039;t want that Let&039;s try Gone with the Wind again

AS: Co

AH: What staircase?

AS: The one I have to cart you up to the bedrooer I was soaked in sweat last tiot up off the divan

AH: I have to be spoiled sometimesOkay, this tiht?

AS: No, let&039;sI fancy so

AH: Then let&039;s have Mulholland Drive! There&039;s shooting in that Oh, please!

AS: Back to the sa I won&039;t do it, how many times do I have to tell you? Find yourself a queer out on the avenue and watch it with hiot to do with it? It&039;s lesbians in the film

AS: What&039;s the difference?

(Here there is a pause in the recording, during which you can hear rustling and tapping as I ruh the video discs scattered on the floor)

AH: Listen, there&039;s a fil&039;s books Dreamcatcher Have you seen it?

AS: No

AH: Let&039;s try it We won&039;t be people, we&039;ll be aliens

AS: What kind of aliens are they?

AH: They have a vertical th of their bodies and eyes on their sides Ius at the same ti, I get to see enough stuff like that at work Let&039;s have so more romantic

AH: RomanticRomanticHere&039;s The Matrix-2 Hoould you like to screw Keanu Reaves?