V–A–C Sreda online magazine continues its three-month programme dedicated to air in art and culture.
In this issue, we publish a series of notes by writer and journalist Anton Sekisov. The author observes the rhythms of everyday life and records subtle changes in the weather—his daily entries capture the foggy streets of Tula, Moscow blossoming after winter, unpredictable skies over St. Petersburg, and the forest-encircled calm of Peredelkino.
A Diary of Observing the Air is far from being a weather log in the traditional sense—air becomes a recurring motif in a narrative of daily routines, walks, chance encounters, and reflections on literature and the practice of writing.
Tula
+5°
cloudy
feels like +2°C
pressure: 745 mm
humidity: 77%
wind: 2 m/s
lunar phase: full moon
This morning a message came from the Ministry of Emergency Situations: “Fog with a visibility of 200–700 meters in the Tula region.” A foreboding that the fog was about to thicken did not leave me all day, and the air acquired a milky hue, while remaining transparent: a fragile, borderline state of air, between clarity and fog, which, nevertheless, lasted all day.
I travelled to Tula to participate in the Lantern charity festival and also managed to look in at the All Saints Cemetery. A legend about the All Saints cemetery holds that an eccentric merchant by the name of Batashev buried his leg here. They say he erected the white stone chapel for his leg, amputated as a result of diabetes.
I went to the All Saints Cemetery with the literary ladies T. and S. T. is a Tula resident and sometimes leads tours of the cemetery. We didn’t make it to Batashev and his leg, we wandered chaotically through the crosses and fallen trees. The transparently pale S. in a silvery dress, moving through the boggy soil between the graves, suddenly began a monologue about the nature of time, which is non-linear, or, rather, does not exist at all. A strange and melancholy reasoning, arising, it would seem, from this foreboding of fog.
Moscow
+12°
clear
feels like +10°C
754 mm
37%
2 m/s
Returned to Moscow. The first day of full-fledged spring after unnatural frosts caused by the Zion cyclone. From the sofa I looked through the window at the Stalinist high-rise of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which blocks the sun. For the last week or two, I have been unsettled by a background anxiety, and I begin to wonder whether this sombre, looming colossus that does not let direct sunlight through might not be to blame.
After breakfast, I took new books out of their plastic coverings to smell them. This is a meditative activity, but there is also an element of obscenity to it, which prompted me first to close the door, and only then to start sniffing. New books always smell the same: typographic ink, paper. But then the fresh, thin pamphlet of Labatut’s The Stone of Madness smells of something more, one senses a touch of something medical, reminiscent of grandmother’s pharmacy. The smell is hard to place. I take the pamphlet to K. for her to sniff it as well. K. does not smell anything medical: “A normal smell.” When I sniff it again I no longer notice anything. There are only sixty pocket-format pages in Labatut’s book, in which the author yet again successfully poeticises (and monetises) the chaos, the Lovecraftian abyss, towards which we all willingly crawl and in which we are actively interested.
+17°
overcast
feels like +16°C
753 mm
36%
1 m/s
Clear, almost summer weather, reaching 20 degrees. The buds on the trees have finally blossomed, and I, thanks to the PictureThis application, have determined that the bushes running the perimeter of the building are lilacs. With every year the role of PictureThis becomes greater and greater—I think that in ten years nothing will interest me besides plants. You can go to the observation deck, sit on a bench. Such leisure is favoured by excellent visibility. You can see Kievsky Station with its tower in the neoclassical style and Empire elements, the Europeiskiy shopping centre, the towers of Moscow City, and many buildings in the Stalinist style—you can see all of this very well. It’s pleasant to sit on the hill and skeptically view all this. Dandelions and small light blue flowers grow by the bench. With the help of PictureThis, I determine that this is Siberian squill, also known as Siberian scilla. This scilla grows everywhere at the All Saints Cemetery in Tula. I want to sniff the scilla, but for that I would have to tear it off, and I can’t bring myself to: it seems that in tearing off a scilla stem I would disturb something essential relating to the order of things. I told this story to my friend M., and he cited a quatrain that hung at the entrance of his school physics classroom:
“Discovering the connection of all things,
We can easily conclude,
When we touch a flower
We stir a faraway star.”
+21°
partly cloudy
feels like +20°C
758 mm
30%
1 m/s
“On April 16, an anomalous magnetic storm will cover the earth, and will torment us with its capricious changes, ” announces Life.ru.
There is a faint buzzing in my head—who can say, perhaps it really is the influence of these changes. I do exercises on the balcony in front of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Probably, one or two ministry workers distracted from their bureaucratic affairs observe absent-mindedly as a man with a cowslip in shorts and a wifebeater does squats and stretches. Later, having collected my Ozon order, I go to the Moscow River embankment and down the granite steps to the water. The Moscow River is a lackluster rusty colour and doesn’t smell of anything. Scooters fly by on the embankment and signal. “I’ll signal you.” In the sun it’s already very hot, and there isn’t even a light breeze. I go home passing the embassies of Britain and Canada. The British flag hangs like a pitiful rag. It’s actually still dirty, they ought to wash it.
I organised a Zoom with my friend S., who lives in a village and is very pleased with this state of affairs. But he will soon have to move to one of the European capitals, which he does not want to do. In S.’s opinion, there are too many people with reproductive organs in cities. And this gives rise to unnecessary worries, from time to time forces you to engage in complicated love affairs involving the participation of three or more people. This happens particularly often in cities such as Paris or Berlin. It is consequently necessary to live, if not in a village, then at least in the suburbs.
The Nueri (inhabitants of South Sudan) believed that in ancient times reproductive organs existed separately, until at some point they attached themselves to men and women, forcing them to constantly desire one another and to suffer.
+11°
cloudy
feels like +10°C
736 mm
57%
1 m/s
I would like to slow down and pupate, to calmly observe the changes of the air through the window, but instead I am travelling to St. Petersburg, though this is also excellent. Four hours’ journey in the Sapsan is the most priceless time. For these four hours, you are put into parentheses, you become unreachable. Not belonging to either Petersburg or Moscow, you are additionally deprived of stable internet connection. The Sapsan is also an otherworldly place because there aren’t any smells here, no temperature. It smells of nothing at all (besides food, but usually there is no one eating around), and I feel neither cold nor stuffiness, whether I am wearing a T-shirt or sheepskin coat. Out the window, sun, rain, and hail give way to one another and intermingle, something like snowfall even flickers. Soon Petersburg will take hold of me, begin to overwhelm and excite me as only it knows how, but for now, I feel myself absolutely free, not just from obligations and influence of any kind, but from life itself.
St. Petersburg
+15°
cloudy
feels like +14°
759 mmHg
76%
1 m/s
14%
I rented an unfortunate room at the hostel: dark, with very low ceilings. The doormat reeks under the door. In the role of maitre d’hotel is a not particularly tidy type with large pink nostrils, like a bull’s, who is incapable of talking about anything but fines. Smoking is punishable by a fine. Guests— a fine. Noise after eleven—a fine. Leafing through my passport, which is in a shabby state, he remarks: “You know they fine for this too.”
This said, the room has a good view from the window. It’s remarkable how to this day, after so many years of relations with St. Petersburg, an unremarkable blank wall of a dull yellow colour is capable, by its very appearance, of plunging me into a feverish state, a mixture of despair and euphoria. And this is in the morning, in sunny weather—in the light of the setting sun, it becomes absolutely unbearable.
Today is standard Petersburg weather—“variably cloudy, ” when even on a short walk you need to take sunglasses and a raincoat. During my lunch break I set off for the Botanical Garden. It’s much more pleasant to come here at the start of spring: almost nothing has blossomed yet, colours are muted, and along with the smells they give pride of place to forms. I notice the following things: the branches of the trembling pyramidal poplar, as if shaking in a fit, the branches of the red oak, at once rising up and hanging down, like the tousled hair of a mad professor, the branches of an American ash, frozen in menacing rings, like the tentacles of a kraken or dangerously swollen leg veins. At the exit, I encounter my old acquaintance the scilla (or squill) once again. In Moscow and Tula, scilla grows disorderedly underfoot, but here it is considered of particular value, set behind a fence among other rare flowers and accompanied by a tablet.
And all the same in Petersburg “one breathes more easily.” To be sure, I don’t know whether the matter here lies in my lightweight touristic status or whether it’s just that the damp Petersburg air is more suited to me, it’s hard to say. But I know well that this effect is temporary, that Petersburg is not a panacea but the main source of anxiety. Or at least I am trying to convince myself of this.
+19°
rain
feels like +18°
756 mm Hg
61%
3 m/s
86%
Here is an irony of fate: despite the prognoses, such a hellish stuffiness has set in in Petersburg that there is absolutely nothing to breathe. During the first half of the day, I worked by an open window and watched passersby. Great disorder was present in the Petersburgians’ clothing: a number of people were dressed in shorts and puffer jackets. Later, my friend M. arrived, bringing with him two cans of okroshka, which my late grandmother would have approved of. We set off for the Neva embankment to consume okroshka with a view of the Peter and Paul Fortress. We descended to the moorings of Kutuzovsky Embankment and, roasting in the sun, began eating. Six or seven years ago, at this very place, I had the first panic attack of my life. It was pleasant to counterbalance that memory with this homely, comfortable leisure with okroshka and M. playing the role of my grandmother. The Neva against the background of the Moscow River looks cleaner, almost transparent, although it smells of mold. And of the products of the vital activities of drunks and fishermen, though this does prevent enjoyment of the view on the Peter and Paul Fortress.
There is a local madman in St. Petersburg who claims that every day, the Peter and Paul Fortress moves a few meters to one side, then to another, then returns to its usual place. He even provides photographic evidence, but few people believe him.
+8°
rain
feels like +5°
757 mm Hg
92%
2 m/s
97%
Overcast weather with intermittent rain and fog. In such conditions, there is nothing better than to set off for the University Embankment and to look through the fog in the other direction, where St. Isaac’s cathedral is visible in the distance. From this angle and in such weather the spectral nature of the city of St. Petersburg becomes absurdly evident. Even to the most thick-skulled person, here it will be clear that all these alleged embankments of granite and mansions of brick are really half-transparent smoke rising over the swamp, fantasies on the border of wakefulness and sleep, or something in that spirit, in a word, optical illusions.
I was meant to meet L., but he had left St. Petersburg due to the “f****d energy” that had, in his opinion, thickened in the city over the past few days (possibly since my arrival). We exchanged a few voice notes in which we discussed how to deal with stress. L. recounted how not long ago a friend-shaman had come over, and they had practiced holotropic breathing: they sat down opposite one another and began to breathe rapidly, taking in full breasts of air, and this continued for a certain time. Suddenly, L. felt he was beginning to fly. That he was rising above the armchair. He became scared, and cried out “Hold me!” With this, the practice of holotropic breathing came to an end.
St. Petersburg—Moscow
+8°
rain
feels like +3°
757 mmHg
93%
3 m/s
100%
In the half hour it took me to walk to the station, the weather changed three times: rain, then sun, then rain again. It was like that all week, and the weather in the somewhat more stable Moscow also promises to be chaotic: anomalous downpours, wet snow, and nighttime frosts. That’s a weather diary for you: you expect it to be meditative, but you only manage to note down the changes.
In the four days I was away, everything in the building’s courtyard has bloomed. The birches have turned green, and it seems the lilacs are about to blossom. One also has the feeling that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs building has moved just a little closer towards our windows, and now blocks out an even greater portion of the sky. Perhaps it will move like this every day, just a little, like the Peter and Paul Fortress, or like the forest in Asya Demishkevich’s horror novel, One Boy, Two Boy.
+22°
cloudy
feels like +20°
749 mmHg
39%
3 m/s
20%
geomagnetic field: light disturbance
A magnetic storm is approaching, which will last until the evening of April 23 and subside at night.
I went to Partisanskaya Station for work, and decided to also take a walk in Ismailovsky Park on this summer-like, sunny, warm (almost hot) day. I went into the silent part of the park, where the forest begins. There, an elderly woman in a leopard print top and a small bird on her head approached me:
—Do you know where the car dealership is?
—The car dealership? I don’t know.
—Ah, the woman paused, then said: So you’re here by accident.
The woman’s voice was hypnotically dreamy, and she pronounced that “by accident” with particular significance. Where is here? On this earth, in this reality? Afterwards, the woman just left, although not along the asphalt path, but into the dense thickets. It reminded me of a strange scene in Twin Peaks, where an elderly lady with a child comes out of similar thickets into a gas station to present Laura Palmer with a landscape painting. Labatut is right: matter is thinning, reason retreats in all directions, and chaotic energy from the otherworldly (or underworldly) encroaches upon everyday life with ever more intensity.
+26°
cloudy
feels like +22°
747 mmHg
25%
5 m/s
25%
geomagnetic field: disturbance
Again a sunny day, more or less windless. The disturbed magnetic field makes itself fully felt. Tomorrow there will be a sharp change in the weather. I am reading Susan Sontag on Wilhelm Reich, who had a theory of orgone energy. Orgone is an invisible, boggy substance dissolved in the biosphere. It comes from the cosmos, and from time to time takes root in our bodies, like an alien invader, mutating and causing deadly disease. Cancer according to Reich (in Sontag’s interpretation) is a “cosmic illness, a symbol of alien forces that have found shelter in the human body.” A death that is carried in the air. This explains the terrible, alien look of tumours.
The word “orgone” has been familiar to me since childhood: my father was fascinated by this theory. He thought Reich had been the victim of a doctor’s plot, that they had not allowed him to beat cancer. And Reich had wanted to beat cancer with special apparatuses that neutralised orgone energy. My father believed—and infected me with this belief—that we are too susceptible to cosmic radiation, and that we need to protect ourselves from it. He often spoke of Chizhevsky, who connected events on earth to solar activity. Chizhevsky believed that periods of elevated solar activity (large numbers of sun spots) led to wars, revolutions, natural disasters, catastrophes, epidemics, and an increased intensity of bacterial growth on Earth.
Lately, not only I, but many of my interlocutors feel an inexplicable anxiety, something like atmospheric pressure, they are gripped by dark forebodings, feelings of hostile whirlwinds nearby. It’s as though something in the air itself was not right—vacillating, heavy. It’s possible this is somehow related to solar activity, or to orgone rays.
Actually, for a long time, a Chizhevsky chandelier—meant to purify the atmosphere—has been gathering dust in my father’s apartment. Perhaps it would be worth borrowing it for a while.
+18°
cloudy
feels like +16°
745 mmHg
36%
3 m/s
12%
geomagnetic field: light disturbance
As before, warm, sunny weather. Sun all day. I went to Peredelkino for work. For a long time, I have felt as though I were caught in the 1970s: I left the cooperative House of Theatre Workers and travelled on the electrichka to Peredelkino to discuss anniversary material for Yuri Trifonov in one of the thick literary magazines. I walked by the Dom Tvorchestva—though seemingly not at all far from Moscow, it smells like a perfect forest. More than once I heard the phrase attributed to Bykov: “The air of Peredelkino itself leads to conformism.”
At present, the residents of Peredelkino are experiencing an invasion of hornets. I heard complaints both from Dom Tvorchestva residents and from locals. A friend—a local—was bitten by a hornet on the heel while putting on a sock. Which means that the treacherous insect had hidden in the sock, where, like a maniac, it had awaited his victim. “Hornets are winged snakes, true monsters, ” declared my friend, showing me the swelling on his heel following the hornet attack.
—Actually, he remarked, I felt in the morning that precisely this heel had gone numb, and I couldn’t stand. Before the bite!
—Which means there is no time. Or it isn’t linear.
—The Matrix, yes. Similar.
+17°
rain
feels like +11°
742 mmHg
54%
6 m/s W-NW
4
80%
geomagnetic field: light disturbance
I arrived at my father’s apartment in Nakhabino. Here as always I began to dig through the drawers of the writing desk, which has a remarkable property: no matter how many times you dig through it, you will always find something new. For example, some time ago I found a photograph dated February 24, 1917, in which light-haired men unknown to me pose with sabres. Most likely, I will never learn how the photograph ended up here, and whether there is any connection between these men and me.
I found the Chizhevsky chandelier in the sideboard, among boxes of medicine. Enormous mountains of medicine, most of which are decades past their use-by date: for some reason, I can’t find the strength to throw these boxes away. Not from laziness, but from a fascination with the strict order established once and forever by my grandmother in this cupboard, before my birth.
I connected the chandelier to a power source. For some time it refused to work, then worked after all: a red light, at least, began to blink, and it gave out the characteristic hissing sound that has been familiar to me since early childhood—the sound old televisions turn on with. This indicates the saturation of air with charged ions has begun, which is meant to lead to the elimination of dust contaminants and microorganisms. At least, this is the information in the instructions. This work of air improvement has a calming effect. Sitting beside a Chizhevsky chandelier and breathing in purified air is a pleasant pastime.
+5°
rain
feels like 0°
763 mmHg
48%
5 m/s
98%
geomagnetic field: unstable
When will the geomagnetic field become undisturbed, stable? Outside there has been a real fall in temperature. Since this morning it’s been only +2.
Continuing on the theme of various kinds of radiation, last summer, I read Pyotr Uspensky’s book In Search of the Miraculous—about the esoteric and the spiritual teacher Gurdžiev. Gurdžiev believed that a normal, unenlightened person has no personality, that all his thoughts and feelings are entirely dependent on the position of the planets, the phases of the moon, and various kinds of cosmic disturbances. This is the same message as in the book by the scientist Robert Sapolsky that I am reading now: personality is an illusion and all our actions are predetermined, only not by signals from Saturn, but by neuronal connections, which are just as mysterious and essentially unknowable. But Sapolsky’s juggling of terms from neurobiology, quantum physics, and genetics has more power over us, forcing us to listen meekly, unreservedly, while we genially laugh at the old Gurdžiev.
+5°
rain
feels like -1°
752 mmHg
43%
7 m/s
99%
geomagnetic field: lightly disturbed
A cool, cloudy day, at lunch they are promising light snowfall. The lilac that grows all around our courtyard is in full bloom, I thought it would smell of lilac from the window but instead the smell of rotten eggs floats in.
The promised snowfall took place, but was brief.
I have learned the following: St. Petersburg (Florida, USA) is famous as a city where the weather is never overcast, where the sun shines absolutely all the time. The record is 768 uninterrupted sunny days. Rain in St. Petersburg is a phenomenon akin to the miraculous healings of Christian saints. Petersburgian grandmothers speak of it to their grandchildren in whispers, and the grandchildren twirl their fingers at their temples. Rain? Water that falls from the sky? Did you just come up with this, granny?
+11°
cloudy
feels like +5°
753 mmHg
21%
5 m/s
24%
As I walked to the hairdressers, I passed a blooming cherry blossom. In Petersburg, tourists swarm to blooming cherry blossom like flies in their hundreds, push and fight for a place for a selfie, but in Moscow, for some reason, this is not done. This said, the people pushing and fighting in Petersburg are probably the same Muscovites who indifferently pass by Moscow cherry blossom. In any case, this cherry blossom is no longer very fresh: it seems the bloom is fading.
I took Alexander Belyaev’s book The Air Seller from my father’s apartment. In childhood, I really loved Belyaev and re-read his works a number of times— Amphibian and Professor Dowell’s Head, as well as The Air Seller.
The entire book is covered by my monstrous scribbles. What mediocrity: you can’t even say what it is I have drawn on the margins: tigers, elks, a person, or, perhaps, a toad? An ugly accumulation of colours and lines—you don’t need to be a specialist in drawing, a fleeting glance at these arts is all you need to conclude that the future holds nothing good in store for the child who drew such things, even if he is only three or four (and I could not have been less than eight).
Regarding the theme of the book, it is quite modern. Here is its brief description: “This is the story of the confrontation of Klimenko, a fearless young meteorologist, and the half-mad, genius adventurer Bailey, who learns to liquify air from the atmosphere and puts the resulting spheres of air gas-hydrate on sale. Bailey’s criminal activity leads to a radical change in the climate. The Earth begins to lose its atmosphere. How can the ‘air seller’ be stopped before he destroys all life on the planet…?”
+10°
downpour
feels like +8°C
743 mm
58%
2 m/s
lunar phase: new moon
Emergency warning from the Ministry of Emergency Situations: “In Moscow from 10:00 to the end of the day, winds of up to 15m/s are expected. Do not park cars close to trees, avoid unstable structures, and be watchful on the street.”
I asked an acquaintance who works at the weather service what causes these sharp changes in April weather—snow, then heat, then snow again, and gusty winds. He answered: “I don’t know, to be honest.”
On the ring line in the metro, I met a person with whom I was acquainted, even friends with for a time, it would have been 10 or 12 years ago. Moscow is too vast, its transport routes too varied for a meeting with an acquaintance to be considered just a coincidence: one always feels something providential, fated.
But I did not say hello. Although I am not a scandal-loving person, for some reason, I often have to end relationships, even if there is no actual break. I don’t become angry, I avoid conflicts, only mentally I allot a person another minus whenever they commit an action that is wrong from my point of view—this is what Kharms did, he gave minuses to his friends and acquaintances in a notebook. When too many minuses accumulate, their mass becomes critical, and communicating becomes difficult, almost impossible, and estrangement begins, slowly and mutely. You want to imagine this estrangement as something very grand: two asteroids, or planetary debris in the open cosmos, carried away in different directions, or something like this, only making an adjustment for our insignificance.
+10°
rain
feels like +4°
747 mmHg
57%
6 m/s
79%
geomagnetic field: calm
Again, sharp changes in temperature throughout the day—sun, then rain, then sun and rain at once. The geomagnetic field is calm, but there is a heaviness in my head, something isn’t right.
I observe the endless changes in the weather mainly from windows (not counting my walks with Jango): I have to finish a multitude of minor work tasks before the long weekend. The visibility after the rain is just perfect: I can even make out the curtains in the windows of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Some days ago I let down the blinds on the window so as not to see this Stalinist colossus, but, all the same, I felt its gloomy threat.
In the previous apartment, we had a view onto the Morozov Children’s Hospital. Out of pure curiosity, I wanted to see what was going on there, but I restrained myself, knowing well how it would look from the outside: a grey-haired man looking through theatre binoculars to see what children in hospital pyjamas are doing.
+8°
rain
feels like + 4°
741 mmHg
90%
4 m/s
100%
geomagnetic field: unstable
Today there will be rainfall all day (so says the weather forecast; at night, it promises wet snow. “Total trash” is how K. characterised this news), so I am sitting on the balcony. A strong smell of lilac and the singing of birds—almost a dacha idyll, despite the proximity of the Sadovaya ring road. Yesterday the bells of the nearby church rang all day, the bell-ringer approaches his work with soul, he works with a kind of primordial fervour, perhaps he is a former punk who has taken the path of an ascetic. At some point, Django growled at the bells, but then, defeated by the ringing, he left the balcony, then K. left too, and it was only the bell-ringer and I under the orthodox Moscow sky.
Gradually, I am freeing the balcony of “anti-pigeon defences”—those plastic things on railings that resemble small anti-tank hedgehogs. The previous resident, some sportsman-weightlifter, fed a whole brood, and a long laborious deliverance of the balcony from the dominion of birds took place after his departure, as well as a cleaning of its surface from the products of their vital activities. For now, pigeons and crows are not bursting onto the territory freed of hedgehogs.
Before sleep, I always listen to lectures on philosophy or on the history of religion. This time, I put on “Religion in Ancient Egypt.” It talks about castration among the priests of Isis, then tells a story about the Christian theologian Origien, who castrated himself. “In Egypt, the air itself leads to castration” says the lecturer jokingly, before moving on to ancient Egyptian cosmology.
+9°
rain
feels like +4°
748 mmHg
55%
5 m/s
58%
geomagnetic field: unstable
Yesterday rain poured down incessantly, but although today the sky is still dark-grey, not a drop has fallen since the morning. I have already walked along the Moscow River embankment to the Novodevichy Cemetery. The water is a dirty metallic colour, and still smells of nothing.
At the Novodevichy Cemetery, like everywhere else in Moscow, there are constant changes. The central alley changes every year: new faces appear, along with new memorials for old, familiar faces. The cross on the memorial to Gogol is now covered in gold, a copy of Dead Souls lies beside the tombstone, swollen with rain, along with a hillock of Kroket sweets. They also brought Bulgakov his most important novel, which is also swollen with rain.
I walked through the rain to the Novodevichy pond. In the evenings, the water resembles a reservoir of ink. This effect is probably created by the monastery’s lighting. A lapdog was wandering around the wet grass without a leash. Usually, the expression on a lapdog’s face is petty and argumentative, but this one’s is somehow stately, almost majestic. This said, it was very dirty: clearly, it had been turning somersaults in puddles.
+12°
rain
feels like +7°
739 mm Hg
64%
6 m/s
94%
There is neither wind nor rain, a calm grey sky, it is neither cold nor warm, ideal weather to walk, but in the courtyard people aren’t visible, and I myself am not walking. I sat on the balcony in a folding picnic chair, drank green tea with mint. Without mint, Melissa, and thyme, life is already simply unimaginable.
I read an excellent tale by Vsevolod Petrov; “Turdeyskaya Manon Lesko.” Like all the most important things, it appeared by accident. The tale is written in remarkable language, very simple, of crystalline transparency, though not at all nakedly, not “degree zero, ” as usually happens with simple prose. Here is a citation that has a particular relation to the air:
“And here I’ve died, and the soul leaves my flesh. Where will it go? Here it leaves the body that brings it into the world like a child. Like a child, it is weak and defenceless and naked: the body does not cover it. And what if it spreads out and loses its shape, drawn like a magnet to the passive souls of the people sleeping around me? These souls are half-open and ready to receive it. The soul will dissolve and enter in parts into the soul of each sleeping person. In each of them there will be a small part of me, and I myself will disappear.
No, one must die alone with oneself and with a final effort of will preserve the form of the soul, before it itself settles into its new destiny.”
Closer to lunch there was rain, and a gusty wind, and from somewhere in the upper floors a pink sheet was torn away, it flew by like a cartoon super hero then got caught before reaching the earth in bushes of it isn’t clear what (in what I will need to determine later through the app).
And in the middle of the night I woke up from a nightmare in which characters from Tod Browning’s Freak pushed, laughed at, and poked me: women with beards and strong men in dresses, dwarves, a worm-eater with a terrible twisted mouth and other such people. Such unpleasant dreams, of course, feed anxiety.
+20°
rain
feels like +17°
737 mmHg
37%
1 m/s
97%
geomagnetic field: light disturbance
The long weekend is coming to a close, a time during which I only sat on the balcony, smelled lilac, drank mint tea, and was somewhat anxious.
Almost uninterrupted sunny weather with the song of birds and hum of some far away mechanisms. They are announcing that downpour and thunderstorms will cover Moscow around 15.00.
A downpour did indeed cover Moscow around 15,00, although it was not so much a downpour as rain of mid-level intensity. I went to my sister’s housewarming party, she has moved into a new residential complex at Shelepikha. The houses stand in a circle, their windows facing each other, at the centre is the tower of a children’s playground, a true panopticon (Bentham’s). An exciting feeling that you see everyone, and everyone sees you, but in fact no one sees anyone: the windows are lightly tinted.
I don’t know whether the geomagnetic field is to blame, or the rain, or some kind of pressing aura present in this place, but almost immediately I experienced a sharp drop in energy, wanted to sleep, and had already lain down, almost fallen asleep, although during the day this almost never happens to me. Out the window everything is being re-covered, and excavators are working. I asked my sister if the residential complex is built on the site of something like a cursed Indian cemetery, and if she herself feels no atmospheric pressure? We walked, and it turned out that my sister’s residential complex occupies the former site of the Moscow Fat Plant. Which means that on the contrary, this place should infect with energy: Soviet people worked energetically here, producing fat. But, for some reason, the opposite effect is experienced: heaviness, melancholy, fatigue.
+13°
cloudy
feels like +7°
740 mmHg
58%
5 m/s
26%
“Look out! Active pollen
Today and tomorrow Moscow and St. Petersburg will be experience active pollen due to the blossoming of birch trees🌳”
I did not encounter active pollen, but my elderly neighbour unpleasantly activated, and denounced me to the concierge. Allegedly, this mummy with painted lips once saw me not clean up after Djano, our “pet” (as she calls him), and instead bury the products of his vital activities under the snow. Another time, I let him off his leash, and the “pet” threateningly sniffed the elderly neighbour. This old witch unctuously cooed at Django and apparently denounced us immediately after this. Probably, the neighbour wanted to play a double game, appearing friendly to our faces while plotting our punishment. But the kind-souled concierge denounces my neighbour to me with a laugh. There you are. This strange occurrence was even somewhat cheering and amusing.
+11°
cloudy
feels like +5°
745 mmHg
36%
5 m/s
29%
Scientists warned of the imminent fall to Earth of the Soviet “Kosmos-482” station. It was launched in 1972 to study Venus.
All the entrance smells of the rice prepared by the male concierge (the kind concierge’s replacement). Before, I used to really like making rice, but now it has somehow retreated into the background, and rice rarely floats up of late. They say that rice is a misogynist. Women, for some reason, find it difficult to prepare—it either ends up undercooked, or turns to porridge, no matter what tricks are employed. For a man, it is enough simply to put the rice in boiling water, to leave (not noting the time), then to return at some point, drain the water, and discover the rice ideally cooked.
I am working doggedly. For work, I have to select the best poems of Igor Kholin and Dmitry Prigov. If these were every day’s tasks, you couldn’t wish for anything better.
+13°
дождь
ощущается как +10°
742 мм рт. ст.
37%
3 м/с З
77%
It is ideal weather for running: not cold and not hot, a pleasantly encouraging wind. Runners have crawled out from everywhere in tight-fitting sportswear. There are many places where you can run, but they all make for the embankment, because of the picturesque view. Although I’m not allowed to run right now, I take a run all the same. In the literal sense: “they all ran, and I ran.”I am reading Prishvin’s diary, and of course, it infects one with the desire to make away to the bosom of nature, even to move there conclusively. So that it will be as it is in his diary:
“Greeted and congratulated the lingonberry with its emergence from under the snow. The grasses are still so small that further from the stream they are not visible. Only very close to the water are they all turning green, as if preparing to gaze into the stream and admire the heavenly reflection in the blue water.”
This said, one gets the feeling that after two or three days the village euphoria will subside, and thoughts will gradually take on the same form as in other places in Privshin’s diary.
“Svirin said that he could not get a thought out of his head—ending his own life with a jump into the crematorium.
—That’s hardly possible? I asked
—It is, he said, when the gates of the crematorium open, in order to let in the coffin, there is a moment when you can jump.”
+10°
cloudy
feels like +5°
745 mmHg
51%
5 m/s
36%
For already a few days now I have had a pressing, clenching pain in my head. Or perhaps discomfort rather than pain, I ascribe this effect to geomagnetic disturbances, about which there is no information at the moment. In childhood, I often suffered from headaches. Once, I was taken to what appeared to be an ordinary clinic, to the office of a woman who was dressed like a doctor, but asked peculiar questions. She asked, for example, whether I feel a particular connection to the moon, and I answered that I did (I did!). This woman was a homeopath, and she prescribed me globules that almost immediately helped—in any case, I forgot about the pain for a while.
+10°
cloudy
feels like +5°
745 mmHg
36%
5 m/s
33%
geomagnetic field: unstable
There shouldn’t be any cloud cover, given they treated the clouds with reagents so that on this day we would have a crystal clear sky above us. But all the same, clusters of clouds are visible. Today, my hand reached for a rag of its own volition, and I dusted the ancient piano that stands in the space between the door and the window. This is a trophy brought back from Berlin by a participant in the Great Patriotic War and the first owner of the apartment where we now live. The piano has a nobly tired look, and there are brass candleholders set along its sides. In the first month of my life in this apartment, the keyboard cover served me as a writing desk, and was very convenient. Today, an almost irresistible desire to use the candleholders has arisen, that is, to put candles in them and light them.
Closer to evening I left for Nakhabino, where I took a leisurely walk around the forest. Though it still seems too cold for shashlik, stalwart shashlik-makers have put on their winter coats and hats and flooded the forest, and now there is nowhere to hide from the smell of burnt meat, “tsum-tsum-tsum” music, and the life-affirming invectives of cheerful, energetic people, accustomed to taking everything from life.
My grandfather, with whom we often walked along these paths, actively hated shashlik-makers. There was even a period when he enthusiastically drafted schemes and formulas, attempting to invent a mechanism that would poison their leisure. The system would have released bubbles of foul-smelling liquid, and these bubbles would burst from the heat of the bonfire, attacking the shashlik-makers from the air. Probably, this mechanism would have been hidden in the branches of the trees. My grandfather was never able to bring this apparatus to life. Perhaps my life’s purpose lies in realising my grandfather’s dream?
+11°
rain
feels like +5°
744 mmHg
48%
6 m/s
79%
Geomagnetic field: lightly disturbed
Morning walk in the forest. How pleasant! Not a shashlik-maker in sight, light sun, and a pleasantly blowing wind. A woodpecker worked enthusiastically in a tall pine tree. A real rise in spirits, a feeling of the so-called fullness of existence, in which there is no place for vague anxieties.
In the clearing, I met the first butterfly of the year—they are meant to awaken around this time, and have acted according to schedule, despite the anomalous cold. The butterfly, and this was a cabbage butterfly, looks sleepy, and, it seems, sleeps in summer. It did not notice my approach, or was not perturbed by it.
I remembered an episode from early childhood. I was five or six years old. We were sitting with my father by my great-grandfather’s grave. It was some rural cemetery, and the boundaries of the graves were unclear or non-existent. I am not looking at the grave, I am looking at a white butterfly caught in a spider’s web. The insect is desperately trying to break away: it is visibly in a panic, it tosses about like a person looked in a burning izba. The spider does not emerge from its hiding place: apparently, it is waiting for the butterfly to calm down. The image of the battle between good and evil is as clear as in a fairytale (the princess trapped in the kingdom of Koshey) and to look on at this triumph of evil is impossible. Of course, I tear apart the spider’s web, and the butterfly turns a few grateful circles around my head.
In childhood, I dreamed of becoming an entomologist. Probably, I would have become one, had I not been very scared by the “Young Entomologist” group teacher: a thin and ungainly man, reminiscent of a beetle in a human body, like a character from the film Men in Black.
I also remember the joy with which I read Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, and with what horror I flung it away when I reached the part where Nabokov lustfully describes the killing of a rare butterfly, when the crackle of a pin correctly penetrating a haired back. Since then, my attitude to Nabokov has been cold and wary, and to this day I have not been able to overcome this estrangement, despite my admiration for many of his texts.
In the evening, I sat before the turned-on Chizhevsky chandelier, saturating myself with curative, ionised air. I think I’m only a step away from a foil hat.
+9°
rain
feels like +3°
743 mmHg
56%
6 m/s
98%
geomagnetic field: unstable
Light rain complemented by rain—appropriate weather in which to attend a Torpedo—Shinnik football match. The Torpedo Football Club is waging an insistent and melancholy battle for entry into the Premier League. They were somehow able to wring out a series of 1:0 wins thanks to absurd goals. Empathising with the Torpedo players isn’t easy, but you have to emphasise.
Some time ago the president of Torpedo, Ilya Gerkus, called the club’s fans, that is, me in particular, “heroic people, ” comparable to characters from antique dramas, and he had this stalwart, hopeless support in mind. And rightly so, given I could have supported a normal Moscow team, like Spartak or CSKA or Lokomotiv, but something, fate or a family curse, has allied me since childhood with the tragically unsuccessful Torpedo.
Once, a Petersburg poet, D., a Zenith supporter, said to me: “I thought you were a Torpedo supporter. You look like a Torpedo supporter.” Interesting, what did D. mean by this?
Torpedo gained another hard-fought victory under light rain. Thanks to an absurd goal, pushed in after a mistake by the Shinnik goalkeeper. And this already difficult spectacle was made even more difficult by a brief hail.
This is the second day in a row of a half-moon. I can go out in the evening with a clear conscience, sit on a bench and look at the moon. I am working, fulfilling the task set by the editorial office, and my task is to study the air, and everything related to it. Which means gormlessly looking up at the sky and breathing in the smell of lilac bushes is work.
+9°
rain
feels like +6°
745 mmHg
62%
3 m/s
100%
An “orange” level of meteorological danger due to frosts in the Moscow region. At night and in the morning, temperatures down to -1 are expected in certain regions.
Fantastically beautiful photographs from the Leningrad region, where for the second day now some grandiose Northern lights are covering the horizon in bright plays of colour. I have only seen the Northern lights once, not so long ago, during a trip to Murmansk. In reality, they were faded grey, but in photographs they came out very well, acid-green. The ladies from the Murmansk Region Scientific Library jokingly explained that the Northern lights are a grandiose fraud. There is something like a spontaneous conspiracy of tourists who come to Murmansk, see this pale it isn’t clear what, and are disappointed, but for some reason uphold the myth that the Northern lights are a spectacle of unbelievable beauty, one that takes hold of your soul. In reality, beautiful Northern lights exist only on last-generation iPhones. This thought helps me make peace with the fact that I am not currently in the Leningrad region.
+10°
rain
feels like +5°
744 mm Hg
78%
4 m/s
90%
I tried a number of times to leave the house, and each time it began to rain. In the end I gave up and decided not to set foot outside.
After a few deliberations, I decided to watch the new season of The Rehearsal by Nathan Fiedler, my favourite, a master of cringe-comedy. The second season explores the question of how to learn to say no to people without causing them negative emotions. Some people are able to do this. Nathan Fiedler (or his lyrical hero) is not. Why? His actions are all the same, he gives the same answers and uses the same expressions as people who do not cause negative emotions. The answer of one of the characters is: it’s all in the aura. Your inner energy—there’s what cannot be changed.
I understand this problem well, and recognise myself to be the bearer of a strange, uncomfortable energy. All my life I have been plagued by the feeling that I am located inside a transparent dome that transmits my answers to the outer world in distorted form, turning my words into something akin to a mosquito buzz. This has been the case since I was at school: all I need to do is joke in an objectively highly successful way for an oppressive silence to set in. Irritation and sullenness on the faces of my classmates. And then the school clown, who sits at the neighbouring desk, simply repeats the same joke, and the whole class dies of laughter—literally writhing and convulsing, they all have tears in their eyes, even the teacher has dropped her chalk laughing. Something in my voice itself, in its intonation, depresses people. It reminds them, perhaps, of visits to the dentist, or of sexually transmitted infections.
This is where my interest in writing comes from, it is an attempt to break out of the transparent dome. I rely on writing, and it helps every time. Like now—I began this diary in a state of acute anxiety, now I feel almost calm. Perhaps the reason for this is not just writing, but walks in the forest, and the Chizhevsky chandelier, and a more thoughtful observation of the weather, or some temporary easing of the atmosphere. In any case, the future holds more tempests and storms, and almost uninterrupted geomagnetic disturbances, which means we won’t be bored. But I will temporarily stop watching the weather (specially) and writing this diary.
P.S.
Despite the windy and rainy weather, in the evening, someone organised a 1990s discotheque on the children’s playground. Many long-unheard hits were played. Then suddenly they played the Bon Jovi song “It’s My Life.” I hadn’t heard it for probably 20 or 25 years. There was a period at the end of the 1990s when it was impossible to escape this song. It was dissolved in the atmosphere itself, it sounded from telephone lines, from irons, from public toilets: only by dying could you hide from this Bon Jovi song. At the time, I was already entering my teenage years, and I didn’t think of rebelling against the mainstream, I was entirely satisfied with the existence of one good song for all. I even bought myself a Bon Jovi cassette with the song “It’s My Life, ” and listened to it on the radio and on cassette, hoping to catch the differences between the two versions.