Listening to the story about our island I was thinking that Alan was going home really soon. Having no family of my own I had always been envious of Alan with his strong and traditional family structure, where he was growing under the keen supervision of his mother, who – with a truly feminine perseverance – fetishized the fundamentals of a happy social unit and saw the family as a project with its aims, tasks and budget. It might be why he had never heard his parents’ quarrels. His father came from a village on the edge of the island which was created by the people who saw the island as a possibility to return to natural roots. Graduating from our university he set up his small business of roasting and selling coffee beans. He was one of the few who went to the dangerous journey to collect these beans at the border – this is where they grew, though in a previous epoch they never did there. The father’s business had been living like this up to the moment when coffee quality started to be measured by the adequacy to capitalist spirit, i.e., advertisement. And as his customers had the same confusing values as the society itself, the slogan “we make quality” was a sign of a better product for them that their own eyes. Finally, his father started civil service as a border surveillance specialist – such a job, according to the mother, could save him from stress. Although after this his health started to deteriorate. The mother all her life worked as a teacher for the mentally challenged. Her pupils were mostly children from the slums. Alan liked to accompany his mother to their homes to learn about their social condition, which was significantly different from his own incredibly cosy home, and so Alan considered himself a fortunate boy from the very childhood.
The doctor still continued his long story about the island’s history and my look went to a scratchboard drawing, squeezed between books in the bookcase, depicting a one-armed astronaut. This drawing was presented to me by Alan. It refers to a remarkable dream which Alan used to see in his childhood, and which always fostered some inexpressible feeling in me, strange as it was not my dream but the dream somehow very close to my soul. It was this dream that first made me think that inexpressible soul forms have rather stable and material nature, which can be transmitted outside. In his dream but in different plots Alan saw a one-armed astronaut. He first saw the dream when he learned about the difference between “the past” and the present world. Lying in bed and thinking about the varied ways of wanderers to tread their paths in the desert, he imagined that they stumbled on the abandoned space station – as he knew from his mother, that year more spacecrafts were launched than in all the time of space exploration. Almost all countries joined the research of the unknown phenomenon, so it was not difficult to stumble on a ready-to-launch rocket. Having learned all the skills of rocket-launching, five of the wanderers left the Earth and soon were rotating on the orbit. They thought they would see other parts of the Earth but at one moment an air crash happened – the rocket was obviously not so ready. At that moment one astronaut went into open space and the shock wave tore his arm away and he himself flew towards the Earth. Alan often drew this astronaut, finding new meanings to the torn arm, spacesuit and floating in the open space. The arm sometimes personified a cruel battle, intergalactic wars and an exploded star. Then the arm became the part of an unsuccessful experiment, a woman was inside the spacesuit and the space acquired subsidiary meaning just like a gangway between the plots. By the time of growing-up, the arm became a symbol of lost hopes, the spacesuit had “Space agency MD” lettering, and the space became what exists beyond the thin wall of the spacecraft. But the imagination didn’t stop there: the final version was a mystic story of a self-cut arm, as a sacrifice to all humane, the spacesuit became a supernatural being, and the space showed itself as a living creature, engulfing those who couldn’t leave their material nature.
Alan’s image, which I painted to you with vivid brushstrokes, cut into my memory after all what happened, but Alan’s real impression was not always so homogeneous, which apparently happens to all the people on whom we focus our spiritual attention – from conglomerations of matter they turn into spheres which store illustrations to our impressions of a person. These impressions intertwine by the laws of our – not their – mind, and so our soul delivers a person’s equivalent who is an intermediary to communicate with real Alan. And this intermediary keeps our real sensations – he himself is a sensation, with which we perceive a familiar face and behaviour. The details fade away, we forget the elements of a face, clothes and behaviour but the sensation is more stable – it always stores its history, that is why, when we meet an old friend in the street who we don’t recognize, just before it, our soul in the form of impressions will transfer to us our attitude to this person and will focus our memory on the real context – not where we met this person but where we formed our sensation towards him. And we will suddenly remember why this person is unpleasant to us. On the contrary, person’s material life divides him into different personas which live in different places and times – they are the compilation of facts, characters of a book where the author decided to put into an insane man’s mind some imaginary people to whom he supposedly communicates. These people appear to be one sensation of denial of one’s own sensations, which makes rational people become insane creating a multifaced monster inside. If we compare all Alans with each context trying to abstract from our feelings, we will see totally different creatures – not people – who are born and die in a fast forward motion, they decay before our eyes, because every new impression takes away character features of this creature. With only an artificial effort (i.e., effort of deep consciousness) we mix different people in one persona. To recognize one Alan among many, not appealing to our perceptions, we will have to conduct an investigation to match different features of a face shown in any one moment, and we won’t be able to say that we discovered that very Alan but not his twin-brother or clone, or our illusion. Moreover, we won’t be able to say in the future that we see Alan. The sensation of a person is much more important than a person themselves, and Alan’s evolution happens in all people who know him, and each person infinitely draws his portrait from the number of pieces scattered in the space. Proverbial art of “realism” makes us study people as if we look at their “objective” portrait, but a much finer art brings up sensations and makes us think which museum we are really in. We would become confused in the arduous work of perceiving different people if we didn’t have a stable sensation – that very gravity which recognizes character conglomerations of matter and attracts them. Evolution does not make it possible to create two identical people, and so it gave us sensations which don’t perceive, or we wouldn’t have any spare room in our soul, but they create each person – life lives while it delivers sensations in any other living being. A person dies when we stop seeing them, when one actually dies, we fix the sensation of their complete life perception. If we learn a new fact of a person’s life, which will make us recreate a new persona, then this person revives to die again but being different – isn’t it why people try to achieve the depth in their works, the depth which can be renewed endlessly?
When I try to take my look away from the monument I created myself, I recall one unflattering detail of my sensation to Alan. I recall my childhood turquoise blanket which was a witness to the sufferings tearing my childhood soul apart because a spirit from another world settled there – love which, with its sharp blade, separated platonic passion from carnal, and sensation from vice. Alan’s sensation gave birth to intimacy that was immediately joined by vice, which made me dream of Alan and I was scared of my thoughts. My appetence to Alan didn’t stop my appetence to girls, in fact, it didn’t distinguish between these appetences. Separating different beings, “the sensation” presents each of them with freshness of perception and happiness – my separation to men and women happened just because of the knowledge of vice which is stored in a man and lack of the knowledge of a vice which lives in a woman; it makes me behave correspondingly and forms a different attitude to those. Dreaming of sensual pleasures, first, my soul was in the field of sensation,