The Bonfire

Stas Rybkin: We are downstairs. Just outside the open sitting room an extensive dance floor has been laid out. At its far end, against the backdrop of the sea, a large heap of bulky bales of some kind of hay has been stacked. By all appearances, this heap will soon turn into a big festive bonfire. Let us look around a little.

Music is playing. It is very rhythmic, very African, harsh and deafening music. It seems to me that such music could easily put a person into a trance all by itself. Then again, we shall not be able to test that today, since apart from the music there are plenty of things here capable of altering the state of our consciousness.

The heavy bar counter at the back of the sitting room is today serving its proper purpose. Behind it a buxom dark-skinned lady in a green patterned robe and a tall striped cylindrical headdress, resembling a turban stretched vertically, is pouring craft beer and wine. Both drinks are made locally. Both are free.

There are no strong drinks at the free bar downstairs. Strong drinks can be bought for hard cash at the second bar, on the upstairs balcony. That is where we talked with the Doctor.

From the dense, though carefully trimmed, thickets another dark-skinned lady has appeared. Completely naked, very slender and very young. In her hand is a powerful, roaring spirit torch. Dancing, she hurls the torch into the heap of plant bales, and almost instantly the heap is engulfed in hot straw flame.

And then we realise what the bonfire is made of! It is pressed cannabis leaves and stalks. Realising the scale of the attraction, Zhenechka and I hurry to retreat from the fire to a safe distance…

……………………

Here, on the rise behind the hedge, the music sounds less piercing and loud than right next to the fire. From here one can do a report, and from here the dancers are perfectly visible.

There are more and more of them. Right now, on the floor in front of the fire, we see about a dozen silhouettes, carried away by a very energetic African dance. Above the dance floor there is a lattice canopy. It serves as a support for some climbing plant. The dancers are shielded from the pre-sunset but still hot sun by a roof of living leaves and flowers.

No sooner had I turned my attention to this roof than a downpour came crashing from it onto the dancers!

Evidently the lattice ceiling consists of thin pipes through which water has been run, and now this water is cascading down onto the dance floor. Clothes are clinging to young bodies. In this wet space everyone has suddenly begun to behave many times more uninhibitedly. The dance poses have grown sexier. More brazen. The young men and girls now dance closer to one another. They embrace. They flirt.

All of this is absolutely insanely sensual and desperately picturesque. You can picture it if you combine into one spectacle the “cave dance” from “The Matrix Reloaded” and the wet madness on the central square of a big Thai resort, Hua Hin, say, during Songkran. I badly want to plunge into all of it. So does Zhenechka, as I can see. But neither of us is dressed for getting wet. Zhenya, do you want to get soaked in a crowd of stoned young people?

Zhenechka: You bet! You and I are chilling in the bushes like cave mould. I feel like an elderly voyeur.

Stas Rybkin: Well then, let us go and change and get properly soaked… (to the cameraman) I sympathise with you deeply, but I shall have to ask you, after all, to film Zhenya’s and my outrages.

Cameraman: No problem. To be honest, I would not have dared to dive into this wet den of iniquity anyway.

Stas Rybkin: And why is that?

Cameraman: A paunch and a deficit of inner freedom. I am not very good at living life to the full. I prefer to film how others live. That is the main source of my joy. Have a good dance!

…………………..

Stas Rybkin: The dancing goes on, but Zhenya and I have decided, after all, to leave this delightful wet dance floor. On the one hand, we are tired, and on the other, we do have to work now and then. We have changed again. Look what an amazing ball gown Zhenya is wearing. Silk. Skin-tight, with glow-in-the-dark inserts along the back, on the chest and on the hips. I think this is a very expensive dress.

Zhenechka: This is my best club dress! I put it on specially for the interview with the august couple.

Stas Rybkin: By “the august couple” Zhenya means Oleg and Delphine. They should be coming over here any moment, to the chill-out…

And here they are. The Island’s hosts have also managed to dance their fill and change. Delphine is now in a miniature lime-green dress that reveals practically all of her magnificent body. On the head of Olokun’s daughter is a tall, pale green headdress. Around her neck is a heavy silver, highly figurative necklace — a woman in the pose of the dancing Shiva within a circle that emits a multitude of rays curving like tentacles.

Good evening, Oleg! Hello, Delphine!

Oleg Batygin: Good evening! Are you enjoying the party?

Delphine: Hello! I am so glad to see you!

Stas Rybkin: The party is absolutely magical!

Zhenechka: Hello! The party is not just magical. It is unique. I am utterly delighted! Thank you so much!

I would be very grateful if the esteemed Lady of the Island agreed to answer a few of my specific, “women’s” questions.

Delphine: Of course! I shall gladly answer any questions. Although the title of Lady of the Island embarrasses me a little. May I ask you to call me simply Delphine?

Stas Rybkin: Let Zhenya conduct this interview, after all. Society life and parties are her speciality. As for me, I was a recluse from the Moscow suburbs, and so I have remained. Except that now I am not a stay-at-home recluse but a wandering one…

Zhenechka: Excellent! Then let us start with the question we are asking literally everyone today. Tell me, what is the Island for you?

Oleg Batygin: I think it would be right for Delphine to answer first. I have already said a great many things on the subject as it is.

Delphine: For me the Island is a miracle. Oleg has most likely already sketched out my biography for you in broad strokes. You must be aware how large a share of my life consists of coincidences as strange as they have been fortunate for me.

At a certain point it became important for me to “give the miracle free rein”. To stop being shy of it. To realise clearly and for ever that I belong to what lies beyond the usual order of things.

The book about Harry Potter helped me to understand and overcome my shyness about manifesting my own “miraculousness”. It is hard to imagine an image more repulsive than the image of the Dursleys. And the most important quality of the Dursleys was their way of being ashamed of the miraculous that had found its way into their nauseatingly dreary life.

It has always seemed to me that the habit of being ashamed of one’s own, and still more of other people’s, unusual qualities is the most repulsive trait of the social human being. When I was at university, I found that students and even lecturers were ashamed of their own knowledge. They tried to talk in company exclusively about simple things that anyone could understand. They considered displaying their intellect and erudition “stuffy” behaviour.

At a certain point I got into the habit of starting, with every new potential young man, a conversation about something complicated. About quantum non-locality, the neurophysiology of THC, or the painting of Wu Guanzhong. No wonder I could not find a partner for so long.

As soon as a young man showed me that he preferred to talk about suburban hiking, new trainers and the latest “Transformers”, I felt the strongest disgust and hurried to end the acquaintance. It seemed to me that the stately, athletic youth suddenly began to reek of sour office sweat and rotten teeth. This, of course, phantom smell I privately called “Eau de Dursley”.

The first young man who passed the test in question with honour was Oleg. And, to be honest, I was not surprised for a second that Oleg had come from that very space of the miraculous to which I had evidently belonged since birth.

Oleg brought me to the Island. And since then the Island has become for me a literal avatar of the miracle. Here lies a kind of centre of gravity of the miraculous. Sometimes it seems to me that everything mysterious under the moon revolves around the mountain peak above our village…

Zhenechka: Oleg Gennadievich, and how do you feel the Island?

Oleg Batygin: For me, too, the Island is an avatar. Only I would call that of which the Island is an avatar for me not a “miracle” but a “mystery”. By nature I am more of an engineer than a scientist or, still less, a philosopher. So I very much value understanding the details of how complex mechanisms work, and at the same time the value of any metaphysics strikes me as extremely doubtful.

I allow myself to use only those ontologies that have taken shape in my mind on their own. Independently of my will. I have already told you a great deal about the established and hypothetical particular mechanisms that led to the Island’s emergence. However, over the time I have lived here I have accumulated a fairly extensive and, above all, usable ontology, within which the Island exists as a kind of exceptional phenomenon. As a mystery that in principle cannot be solved.

Stas Rybkin: This interview is Zhenya’s. And I have grown used to her preferring to avoid complicated abstract reasoning. So I shall venture to butt in, after all, and ask Oleg Gennadievich to tell us briefly about the ontology he mentioned.

Oleg Batygin: Well, briefly, then. Have you heard of “quantum non-locality”, which Del has already mentioned?

Stas Rybkin: Somewhere, something…

Oleg Batygin: If, using a special crystal, for instance, you split a photon into two little photons of lower energy, these two little photons will turn out to be strangely synchronised, regardless of how far apart they are. But what will interest us now is not their synchrony, which turns physics and common sense upside down.

Any parameter of two such “entangled” photons will invariably fluctuate in a truly random way. This true randomness is proven by experiments with Bell inequalities. But again, those are details.

What matters is that true chance exists in our universe in principle. And that is a scientifically proven fact.

That is, there exists a kind of chance whose manifestation is not conditioned by a lack of data, by chaos, by unknown variables and rules and other mundane rubbish. True chance is in essence the only thing in the world that has no need of a cause as such.

From the fact that true chance exists, it follows that our universe is not fully deterministic. Most of its sequences of events, often very long ones, are deterministic beautifully and flawlessly along their entire length. But I think I shall not sin against the truth if I say that at the beginning of every such sequence lies precisely true randomness.

In my ontology the manifestation of true randomness is the elementary form of an event. That is, it is the simplest thing that can happen at all. In perfect emptiness, out of nothing, a random number arises. This arising is conditioned by absolutely nothing.

At first glance such events, though they happen constantly, have no significant influence on our world. Their “influential power” is too small for that. Determinacy, or conditionedness, is simply another name for “influential power”. The more conditioned an event is, the more strongly it influences other events. This idea is so obvious that it seems tautological.

It would seem that in our world, made up entirely of high-power deterministic chains of events, there is no room at all for true chance. But one day a friend of mine, who worked professionally on software models of chaotic environments, stumbled upon a very strange thing.

It turned out that a truly random parameter generated by a special chip (such chips have existed for a fairly long time now) works better in a model of a really existing chaotic environment than pseudo-randomness of any kind. That is, randomness inside very large chaotic environments, such as storm fronts or global-scale stock exchanges, tends towards true, quantum randomness. Towards the kind that is obtained by cutting photons in two.

As I recall, when I first heard about this I was in Moscow. My friend and I drank as many as three bottles of port. The next morning I felt simply awful. I was lying on my back on a lawn in the Botanical Garden, where I had come because I could not make myself go down into the metro.

Clouds were drifting above me. The winds forming them were a chaotic system of precisely that sort. That is, a finite but gigantic machine of interactions, each of which was deterministic. But the result of all these interactions tended towards true randomness. And that was ultimately expressed in the whimsical, unpredictable shapes of the clouds.

This thing was very simple. Intuitively clear.

One can imagine that any system possesses a certain measure of predictability, expressed by a finite number. A system consisting of a single component will possess maximum predictability. A system of two components will already be less predictable. Now imagine that there are quadrillions of these components.

The predictability of a system will fall as the number of its constituent components grows. And so, the more complex the system, the closer to true randomness the “result” of its work will be.

There are quite a few such highly chaotic environments. In particular, the world market is one, the Earth’s atmosphere is one, the Ocean is one. And so is the space in which the cyclones of global trends roam.

Our Island is a product of the existence of a highly chaotic system of this kind. And it is part of that system. Just as clouds are part of the system that shapes the processes going on in the atmosphere, and just as painting, Basquiat’s for example, is part of the world market of values.

And in this sense we are cloud-dwellers. Our Island is an utterly ephemeral object of this kind, formed by several chaotic and aggressive environments at once. That is, it is a product of the activity of that very true chance. Or of chance as close as possible to the true kind in its properties.

That is precisely why our Island is the most reliable place in the world. From time immemorial people have intuitively settled their gods on clouds. That is, in places that lay closer to true chance than their familiar terra firma.

Things change under the influence of environments. Environments change under the influence of tendencies. And only true chance remains unchanged. Today it is exactly the same as it was at the very beginning of the world. Our Island in its present, promised and mythologised form, as well as the whimsical tropical clouds floating above it, are to a high degree the offspring of true chance. That is precisely why they are something one can lean on without fear.

In this sense my words about a mystery that in principle cannot be revealed become clear and transparent. If our Island was formed by true chance, or by something close to it in its properties, then the question of the causes of its emergence, like the question of its prospects, is equally meaningless.

True chance is in no way connected with causality. And to say that a given object has true chance as its cause is tantamount to saying that the object has no cause.

Zhenechka: I do not know how scientific your reasoning is, but it is exceptionally elegant and romantic…

Stas Rybkin: That is just the point: the very concept of correctness or rightness has no meaning in this case…

Oleg Batygin: Quite so. The correctness of a judgement is usually determined by how correctly the reasoner has reconstructed the chain of events that led to the result. But what if there is no such chain? What if the result is the result of the action of true chance, or of something very close to it…

Zhenechka: Yes, you are right. In just the same way it is meaningless to discuss whether the shape of clouds is correct…

Oleg Batygin: Exactly!

Delphine: That is why I have loved painting clouds since childhood. Simply because no one ever complains that clouds have been painted wrongly. Clouds can be anything. In the same way our Island can be anything. And we, its inhabitants, can be anything. Whatever that means.

Zhenechka: Tell me, Delphine, you are a really big, large-scale, genuine artist, are you not?

Delphine: Well, that I am big and large-scale is, of course, beyond doubt. (Delphine smiled at Zhenya from the height of her alien stature.)

Zhenechka: What I meant is that I love your painting very much. I have been following you for a long time. And in my modest flat outside Moscow two of your works are hanging.

Delphine: That is utterly, insanely flattering. I do practically nothing to maintain my popularity. The fact that I remain a not-unknown painter, that someone somewhere still exhibits and buys me, is, from my point of view, simply a continuation of that same miracle we have already talked about.

Zhenechka: That is just what I wanted to ask you about. As far as I know, you appear at art events extremely rarely. At least, I know of only two art parties at which you were scientifically proven to be present in the flesh…

Delphine: That is quite true. I have been present in person at only two of my exhibitions. At my very first “serious” exhibition, at the Brooklyn Museum in 2011. And at the Museo Boncompagni Ludovisi in Rome in 2012.

Zhenechka: I tried to get into the opening of your second exhibition, but I could not get through.

Delphine: And that is a terrible shame. That time I was in Rome alone and, I confess, rather bored. I am sure that, had we met then, we would have found something to do together.

Zhenechka: That is for sure. I have actually got goosebumps from your words. I imagined some of what we might have done together in Rome…

Delphine: Perhaps we shall still do it. Rome, so far, is still standing, it seems… So what did you want to ask me in this connection?

Zhenechka: I wanted to find out whether you miss artistic publicity and whether your popularity suffers from your reclusiveness. But you have already answered those questions. I have understood that you feel no need for publicity and that your popularity only gains from your distance from the scene.

Delphine: I really do not like the scene. I like sitting in a close circle on the seashore with craft beer and a good pipe.

Zhenechka: You will be surprised, but so do I. I am one of those people who turned their main problem into their profession. Until I was sixteen I was a very thin, grumpy and nasty girl. A kind of Daria from the cartoon of the same name. Only I dressed differently.

My dad was an artist. He painted sickly, creepy girls in the style of Mark Ryden. And I tried with all my might to be like those girls. I tried to be just as nasty, independent, unsociable, malevolently cute and morbidly attractive.

One day I started literally cosplaying Mark Ryden’s girls, taking photos of myself and posting them on Instagram. A year later I had five hundred thousand followers. And then I began to monetise my fame and turned into a boring travel blogger, which I still am to this day.

Delphine: You are not a boring blogger at all. I have been watching your Instagram and reading your Facebook for a long time. And on Minds you and I are even close virtual friends…

Zhenechka: Wait… Can it be that you are Mariana Hole? I have no other close friends on Minds…

Delphine: Exactly! Mariana is me. However ashamed I may be of such a telling nickname.

Zhenechka: And it was you who gave me Oleg Batygin’s nickname in MTG Arena…

Delphine: Uh-huh. Only it was not Oleg’s account. It was my account. I am the one who is magically and mystically obsessed, after all. And, naturally, I play MTG Arena.

Oleg Batygin: Let us put it more simply. It was Delphine who invited you to the Island. She merely informed me that journalists would be coming.

Zhenechka: This is amazing! I thought I was Sherlock Holmes in a skirt. And it turns out that all this time I was being reeled in on a hook by a lovely dark-skinned Lady Moriarty!

Delphine: All the same, I am more like Sal Paradise than Dean Moriarty. In our partnership the role of Moriarty has always been played by Oleg. He is pragmatic, ruthless, brave, and drives vehicles along mountain switchbacks with stunning dash. Which is how he won my heart in his day. And it is he, of course, who has a special passion for waterfalls and big commercial enterprises. Whereas I am simple-hearted and romantically inclined. I sincerely love art and believe in people. And I hope, like Sal Paradise, to come out the winner in the end.

Zhenechka: Perhaps this will be immodest, but I would like to get a personal piece of advice from you yourself, from the legendary, magically lucky and successful Delphine. To a certain extent I can be proud of my luck. From the outside I look comparatively good. But inside a great deal is not in order. I am a person consumed by a faint but very persistent anxiety.

When I look at you, I am quite sure of your deep serenity. Of course, you are inclined to worry. You are a nervous and reflective nature. But it seems to me that your stresses are large and rare. And they are far apart in time and unlike one another. Your stresses are like mountain peaks on the horizon. Whereas my stresses are all identical, small and monstrously numerous. They are like prickly lawn grass. And I am forever standing barefoot on that grass.

I would rather have a stress picture like yours. And I will be very grateful if you can suggest a way for me to stop suffering from the nasty pricks of the prickly grass. Do you not stand on this lawn? Do you not notice the thousands of little pricks? Or do you have some secret way of avoiding them?

Delphine: I shall answer your question with the greatest pleasure. And I shall give you not even one piece of advice, but two. In your place I would put on some shoes and stop mowing the lawn. Wild grass is picturesque and soft. Whereas mown grass is hard and prickly. In this it resembles British sociality, which is precisely what gave birth to mown lawns. I would even say that a mown lawn is a fairly transparent metaphor for British sociality.

Zhenechka: A metaphor is exactly what it is. You are giving me metaphorical advice. It sounds beautiful, but I do not understand how I can use it…

Delphine: It is a sort of pattern… Would you like a concrete example of how to apply it?

Zhenechka: Yes! I would like a direct recommendation.

Delphine: I can see what exactly is bothering you right now, and I understand why.

Zhenechka: Interesting… I thought I was relatively calm just now. In general I feel surprisingly calm and comfortable on your Island.

Delphine: And yet you are shifting from foot to foot rather nervously. Making small sharp movements with your shoulders. Insects are biting you. There are quite a lot of mosquitoes here at dusk. And notice that here they are biting only you.

Zhenechka: Amazing! They really are biting me, and I had not noticed. But why are they biting me and not the others?

Delphine: It is because of your gorgeous club dress with the glowing inserts. It is precisely these showy decorations that attract the insects to you. Mosquitoes fly towards light. Especially blue light. The kind given off by the phosphorescent insets in your dress.

I think the right thing would be to put on something else. And that falls under the part of the pattern about “do not stand on the prickly grass”. The idea of “not mowing lawns” is far broader and more abstract. Most of your time you do what your heart is not in. I do not think you really like club life all that much. And you are not all that fond of the techno aesthetic. You treat it as work. You need to be fashionable. But in reality you want something quite different.

Zhenechka: And what do I want?

Delphine: You want to live here, with us, on the Island.

Zhenechka: Wow! And it is true! I really do want that. I have taken a close look at your everyday life, and it seems to me that my whole life actually resembles a stubborn and pointless standing on prickly grass with bare heels.

Delphine: Then drop that life of yours and stay with us.

Zhenechka: That is not so easy to do.

Delphine: It is very easy to do. The decision seems frighteningly large-scale to you. But I assure you it only seems so. What always helps me is to make a less significant choice first. When you need to move something heavy, you usually rock it first. It is the same here.

Zhenechka: What small choice could I make right now?

Delphine: Let us go and choose you a dress. Here on the Island we produce small batches of fashionable clothing. Mainly beachwear and clubwear. I am the designer of some of the pieces. Not all of them. But the very idea of the clothing brand, its stylistic concept, is entirely mine. And I terribly want to give you a present…

Zhenechka: Oh… I feel so awkward…

Delphine: You are stepping barefoot onto the prickly grass again.

Zhenechka: Oh… It is hard to adjust all at once.

Delphine: Nothing hard about it. Let us go and change you…

Zhenechka: Let us go.

Stas Rybkin: The women are leaving… Two exceptionally graceful silhouettes in the rays of the setting sun… It seems to me that that is enough long and complicated conversation for today. One should simply watch all this beauty in silence. An acid, electric-pink sunset. The sea, like a silver platter under club ultraviolet… Figures of dancers… Figures of dancing women… Graceful silhouettes of women dancing a sensual, hot dance against the sunset sea…