Part One
My English is inadequate to the task – I’m not a native speaker. Besides, I’m not quite sure what makes me write about a mysterious woman coming from Scandinavia to the South Caucasus to be shot dead by one of her admirers in my hometown more than one hun- dred years ago. Moreover – I’m a bad man: I don’t know what love is and, yes, there must be something definitely wrong with my liver, because I drink too much… Actually, maybe I drink because I don’t know, or maybe I don’t know because I drink? Here, here!St. Paul, the thirteenth of the twelve, who spoke with the tongues of men and angels, knew what love is. A long time ago he wrote to the Corinthians: “…and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing.” And more importantly: “… Love suf- fereth long and is kind … Love doth not rejoice within iniquity, but rejoiceth within the truth.” …
Well, what shall I say of this knowledge?! Me personally rejoiceth within alcohol, which for sure might contain some truth in it, as the Latin saying has it, however mostly it contains some regular stuff dis- tilled from grapes, barley, grain, or berries, or whatever, which bathes and then shrouds my brain and then buries it… And yes, love is also there, but as far as I can savor it within the 40% per volume it amounts to less than one percent, especially if one drinks alone. Thus to high- jack that very St. Paul, the way I understand love is almost the same as a sounding brass or a clanging cymbal would understand the sounds they make or, to be more precise, my knowledge of love equals the knowledge of love ‘experienced’ by, say, Eric Dolphy’s flute, when theguy played that old jazz standard You Don’t Know What Love Is on the very same flute.
No doubt the flute as a musical instrument is something extraor- dinary: it was invented by a theriomorphic creature, a half-goat-half- god, to celebrate the moment when the physical matter went mad, all in a golden afternoon... As some Gaelic bards suggest, the best flute is made of bone taken from the thigh of a heron crazed by the moon. Maybe this is why nearly all flute players are slightly nuts, like the most obvious of them – Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson. And yet, the maddest of them was a Russian one – Vladimir Mayakovski: once he even ventured to play his spinal column like a flute… Just imagine him standing on one leg, the other one up, and with his eyes wide shut blowing into the vertebrae – flying so high, trying to remember…
May I suggest here a music-orthopedic definition of love? Love is when her/his breath is filling up your spinal column with sounds… and the gentle wind moving silently, invisibly… Love that never told can be… Here, here!O yes, Dagny Juel Przybyszewska must have been such a kind: she would play the spine-flute of the men around her, stirring jeal- ousy with excitement, mixing orgasm with dying, and transforming their sexual fears into the destructive aesthetics of the fin de siecle. The Nordic Sphinx, as they called her, she would strangle them with her illuminating riddles, like a fetus strangled inside the spectacular belly of Our Lady of the Life-in-Death-and-Death-in-Life-as-Art. The High Priestess of Berlin bohemia, the midwife of the Terrible Beauty that was being born; she was their Androgyny and the absolute source of ecstasy, madness and inspiration. And they all
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