Speaking In Tongues
Guided by Voices
Translated by Max Nemtsov
DRIVEL 1
by Ivan Artsimovich
here at this spot... at this very spot... like any other spot... yes,
undoubtedly in any other place... listen to me, listen, I'm tellin' you...
I'm talkin' to you -- do you hear me... I'm speakin' and would you please
listen... I'm beggin' you, listen carefully... this is my voice -- do you
hear it... that's good -- now open up your eyes and you'll see me, as I'll
be talkin' to you -- that's it, stop, we're turnin' it on -- one, two,
three -- look, that's me... and I'm tellin' you here like in any other
place -- positively, here we are in place -- I'm beggin' you -- listen
to me carefully, with your mouth shut, not averting your eyes -- just listen,
I wanted to tell you for a long time... let's make it with no image at
all, no wasted faces, no movements -- don't, don't do it... listen -- she
went anew -- here, in this garden I love her, like a livin' one would love
a livin' one, I long for her -- no, I'm not sufferin' -- no, here I long
for her, oh, I'm sayin' -- sweet nova... rejoice as you see me and both
of us will be glad... let a brow touch a brow, let's walk like a couple,
slowly whirlin' and laughin'... laughin', laughin' uselessly... uselessly
laughin', we'll go away with you -- my sweet song... the old song of love
not yet forgotten -- hello, do you remember my face... will you know my
face when I wrap it for you, for you alone -- my irrestrainable... my inspiring
one...
DRIVEL 2
by Mikhalych
Toad Dreams? Another pinchbeck of the subconscious -- stiffened out
by endless hours of heart-searching and self-identification. A toll to
fashion -- flirting with the xenophobia. The dark side of the anthropocentrism
-- the soul dysmorphomania.
Not in the least.
Everything is simpler, more natural and easier (for those who want
it).
The winding labyrinths of the first signal-system spellbind. The stone
floor is covered with dry leaves, and they are scribbled upon. The walls
are covered with all but effaced frescoes. The labyrinth is inhabited:
among ghosts there a human wanders (or a beast). His face is hung with
a black scrap of cloth. Yet he is the vessel of the ancestors' memory,
a bottomless well, a rabbit hole into the unconscious.
If you address him by the name, he'll disappear.
The print of his foot (hoof) rubs off from the stone floor as soon
as you want to compare his form to anything (like a leaf of Cannabis sativa).
His touch is like a bolt of lightning.
The man doesn't wait for you, but neither he is a game. The wounds
inflicted by his sharpened horns are deadly, yet there is the water of
life in his saliva. His blood is the elixir of youth. That who eats his
liver will acquire eternal life.
To overcome the barriers of intellection is the task worthy of creatures
spellbound by the glimmer of marsh lights and rustle of decaying leaves.
To watch the grains of sand that slowly waltz in the streaming flesh of
a rivulet -- what can be better for the one who doesn't remember his name?
The clouds form shapes -- one can think of names for them, but why? The
smoke from the smouldering moss trails like silk, the spread of implicit
freneticism, step by step to the loss of consciousness. The shades of smell
are the language worth mastering, the nuances of transparency besot like
a kiss from a siren -- the image that wakes the eruption of cellular rapture
to life, the genetic memory of the past, the history fixed in the combined
chronicles of both worlds.
A toad watching television only perceives the flickering of shadows
and colors. The streams of information effluvia, senseless feelings and
groundless suffering pass through it, leaving its essence intact. The dreams
of a toad are filled with movement and rustling, soft quiver and warm opalescent
rays: the theater of shadows, the kaleidoscope of colors. Let's leave what
is the toad's to the toad, and take what is ours. But is there any sense
in denying us that what is ours by right.
A Cambodian hunter performs this curious procedure if game no longer
gets into his snares. He makes a trap in the sand, intentionally reels
at some distance from it and then tumbles upon the tool of his trade. The
trap snaps at his foot. «Wow, what is it?! -- he screams. -- Looks like
I'm caught!»
The same goes for me.
My lens is the toad's eye (does a toad have a video jack?). A TV screen
is the pool of barbarian rapture, the dense stream of joy born inside of
the flittering consciousness as the product of the life-form with no name
attached.
A video camera is the instrument of searching for Tao.
FURTHER DRIVELS AND PURE TEXTS
by Ivan Vasilenko
The inflamed process of contemplating the insensible. Along the creaking
floor-boards, black and cracked with time, there it walks, stumbling and
sinking its head into the cold and juicy sky, scrambles like a crumpled
shadow by the hushed children, by their parents, grandads and grandmoms,
by all those doggies and pettable kittens, the imperceptible spot, inaudible
and imponderable, never detected by anyone, the spot far behind any barrier
of human perception, the lush green spot -- not a toll to fashion, the
one by birth, it suddenly scatters with seagulls' cries -- the spot concentrates
around the flock, and all this happens in a split second, in the one hundredth
of the second, everything it takes to spread ear to ear the careless dreams,
slow radii and never-ending repetitions of our palpitating youth...
PLKN PRNL LMNL in the unclipped language is some sort of a pattern.
On its facets you can guess visages of the people deep in their specific
state. Reared by the epoch of post-industrial art yet not strange to fresh
decisions in cybernetics and applied magnetism, those people carry their
exquisite burden to the altar of the All-Consuming Nothingness.
Obviously, PLKN is more of a sect that unites a number of musicians,
artists, mock philosophers and the visual workhands (whoever they might
be). We are thinking about involving the masters of tactile sensations
in the future. (But we're not planning to smell as yet.)
The initial tasks of the project were the brazen-faced flirting with
mass media (with the secret goal of enjoying the taste of its bone marrow),
intruding into mass media with the purpose of establishing false principles
and self-destructing obligations there, making contacts with the Jedi knights,
black cross and crescent masons, pulsing infinity devotees, obsessionists
with God knows what, invisibles and spooks of all types, empty-headed concertmasters
who conduct the orchestra all of us will find ourselves in some time, debris
of secret societies and carriers of forgotten cults.
This is the expedition, the conquest of virtual spaces and territories.
In order to have some place to move to when we're bored to death.