THE LEFT EAR OF THE VOLCANO

The shortstory was published in the 40th issue of the new music magazine "Glissando".

They were a contradiction of time, order and harmony. From the Perfect Reality Factory they fell on the vast space of frozen Siberian soil. The factory was located on the slopes of the old Bezymianny volcano, which, after almost one thousand years of silence suddenly exploded, causing numerous malfunctions in machines. No one could count them, because they existed outside of time. H39.8 was similar to an ordinary human being, but he surpassed them by having bones made of a harbour crane. He had also been equipped with a gyroscope in his left eye socket. He stood alone, suffocated by the endless space; copper grass was overpowered by ice, the sky was the colour of steel. He fell flat. He put his ear to the frozen ground and heard the repetitive, rumbling sound of crashing metal interrupted by noises. He stood up and, like a lone soldier, he set forth. Noise was information; he had to find its source. Thanks to his armoured legs he could travel hundreds of kilometres a day. He tried to regain symbiotic closeness with something he had lost.

We have to talk about language now. Language does not exist for H39.8. Of course he understands what the glottal tone is. He has the vocal chords necessary to create acoustic signals, but he cannot recognise speech. He thinks speech is a relic of his imperfect ancestors; he and his relatives think language does not communicate emotions properly, which leads to numerous misunderstandings, conflicts and even wars. Human speech only handles the exchange of information, of abstract terms. Speech can be assigned to the mind. Here we have to debunk the ancient Greek partition of the body, the soul, the mind and feelings. If language cannot carry the full message, which he, H39.8, wants to express, if language limits a part of his inseparable completeness, he must discard it as something imperfect. In the factory where he was made, the Perfect Reality Factory, language was rejected. It was decided that a new method of communication and expression had to be invented. Yet nothing has ever been made in the factory. It was built hundreds of years ago, but not a single lever has ever been pulled, nor any button ever pushed. The superscientists from the Perfect Reality Factory have still not reached perfection. Contradictions are obstacles in reaching the coherent, harmonic project of everything. Any time the project seemed to be perfect, a small intricacy came up, destroyed everything and forced them to start over. For generations, thousands of scientists who dedicated their lives to work on the slopes of Bezymianny died with a sense of failure. Scientists were born, they gained their PhD's, finally they were offered a job in the factory, which was the capstone of their careers, and after all those years they were happy – they hoped to work out the great unifying theory. Often they died of despair when their exertions turned out to be futile. Now they rest around the volcano. The cemetery circles the factory buildings. It was considered to be the highest honour – to be buried around this unfinished work. There are already more graves than originally expected, and recently a huge section of taiga had to be cut down to make space for the growing cemetery, but the work still goes on.

S79 existed in 1922, 1985 and 1986. It appeared on earth the same way that H39.8 did: as an effect of the Bezymianny volcanic eruption which destroyed the Perfect Reality Factory. They were lucky – thanks to this disaster they were brought to life. Let's not delude ourselves, the cemetery for the scientists would have taken up the whole of Siberia before production could have begun. Like H39.8, S79 resembled a human, but she was capable of time travel. In her memory sets she had stacks of associations and recollections from the whole of the 20th century. Their initial set-up wasn't agreed on, and S79's collection wasn’t complete, beacuse the machine was destroyed in the eruption. The error determined her future. Reviewing the associations she was equipped with, she decided to start collecting the cognitive material necessary for understanding from the closest associations. (It has to be mentioned that associations, which S79 was equipped with when she appeared, were only introductory material – collecting the rest was up to her.)

The sound of sirens lead her to the futurist Symphony of Factory Sirens for choir, for cannons, for every siren in the city. So this is 1922. Baku.

"Hence a shockwave is a carrier of acoustic energy, and a formant is a focus of energy in the spectrum of signal." This is an attempt to explain the process of speech. An attempt, using language, to explain the process of speech. As we agreed, language was rejected by the scientists, and therefore it is incomprehensible for H39.8. So we – with the use of language, of course – can try to understand what language is for him. We will do it with the use of language because we can't think without it. 

We will consider how someone who does not know language can think. How then can he think about language?

So he understands it as "a shockwave is a carrier of acoustic energy, and a formant is a focus of energy in the spectrum of signal", but just inerprets it completely differently. He uses different means of knowledge. The mind exists because of language, but language is imperfect. If language is imperfect, then the mind is imperfect too. In the superfactory there were trials to create a prototype of the perfect mind. It is agreed that every form of art is based on the imperfections of language. Yes, language turned out not to be capacious enough to understand reality. To say "not precise enough" would be absurd, because the more precise it gets, the less understandable it gets, and it cannot contain so much raw emotion. 

S79 listens carefully and tries to comprehend the sense hidden in sound. Her left ear is more sensitive to music. As in humans, the right one is for speech recognition, but S79 does not use this function. The first high-pitched sounds of the sirens reached her, wreaking havoc in her small body. The sound was so intense that it infringed her sense of security, but at the same time it felt nicely nostalgic. The great iron organism was slowly getting up to go somewhere. The deafening cannon fire disturbed it. The chaos of sounds made by human bodies and the beating of small tools held by small hands contrasted with the roaring steel. Fear of the great noise mixed with the optimistic expectation of change announced by the signals. The sounds were created in some enormous piles of iron. The moment when the bells began to ring introduced chaos, then the voice that came from the humans was hammered into cast-iron sarcophagi. The signals of the sirens repeated more frequently and rapidly until they started to resemble the cry of a giant. Then laughter. Then crying. Then just the echoes. In this way, S79 learned about genocide, war and revolution, about industrialisation, sadness, fatigue, dying, the rotting of human thought, about poverty and the hopes of the Futurists

He was made of what he heard when he was hibernating in the factory for hundreds of years. He has eyes of steel, always proportionally expressive, and smooth, copper fingers. After a week, P1.1 woke up in the Verkhoyansk Range, on the bank of the Yana River. This natural landscape seemed utterly strange to him. He was used to closed rooms and geometric shapes, and felt bad among these irregularities. He lay down on the black ground and stared at the calm river. No known sounds reached him. He recognised no shapes, no smells. Everything was strange. P1.1 was the smallest of the three – his appearance immediately activated maternal instincts, he looked like he needed to be taken care of. But he had to fend for himself. No one around was similar to him. For a while he wondered if the trees were not somehow related to him, but quickly understood that he was on the brink of panic. He had to lie on his back for a while – this position calmed him as he'd spent hundreds of year doing it. He lay like that for a few hours, and decided to set off. He awoke when he heard a long, weak signal. He decided to follow it, as it seemed familiar.

Raw emotions. “Raw emotions" always seem to be true, as what I feel and what I hear – I can understand everything incorrectly, but the act of understanding does not engage me. It is not entirely true. Actually, we engage in a different kind of understanding, a non-linguistic one, totally abstract to us. We can assume we are interested in the ways of understanding, not the means of it (so: minds, so: language, on which the mind is based). Please forgive me, but this is necessary: we can assume that understanding is building assumptions and sense and looking for acknowledgement, and that sense is built on subconscious associations. If I want to understand how the water boils, first I have to bring certain associations, then build the initial proposal of sense, and then look for its confirmation or denial. Those associations depend on cultural capital and the laws of thinking. The laws consist of language – but not that alone, as there are also associations like unnamed images and sounds, like flatness, harshness, and memories of touching or of suffering. There are sets of memories, sets of sets and subsets. The sets are not fixed: they grow and diminish, they breed and they die. One association can belong to multiple sets, but can never belong to none.

Let us assume that all the associations are unnamed because there is no language. Pure sound is superior. 

H39.8 stood in a great hall filled with light and noise. Peace overwhelmed him. A building in which he felt safe. Finally he had found a proper shelter. Inside, he decided to find a suitable place to lie down. There were a lot of people in the hall, but no one seemed to notice him. He chose a secluded corner with appropriate acoustics and began listening to the clatter. The sound penetrated and crushed his body. The noise told the story of a great country, tired of work and misery. H39.8 heard the scraping of an iron part of his leg before he even noticed that he was lying in a puddle. A worker from the military equipment factory had thrown him out. When he awoke and wiped his face, he understood that he was alone and everything around him was strange. He was devastated, he felt his body stiffen. He fell back on the ground, covered in sweat. He lay down, hidden in the tall grass, looking at the factory chimneys, and thought he was going to die. Finally, he fell asleep.

We have to remember that Kierkegaard considered music the highest form of art, as it could depict a series of moments – not just one, like painting or sculpture. The experience is too wide to be caught with words. We know that voiced sounds are made by the modulation of fundamental frequencies, and voiceless sounds are made with noise generators, so we can easily read the intellectual communication which the sender transmits to us in a language we know, and yet that language does not seem capacious enough to store solitude or despair within it. Without non-linguistic forms of expression, the world would be speechless. Or even incomprehensible. How much can you understand if you sit quietly in the cafe and listen to a conversation in an unknown language? It is enough if we just carefully listen to the voices. Then the sound of trees falling to the ground, of lightning, of sea breezes, of a skyscraper being demolished – the meanings are obvious. So we should stop talking and just listen. We should turn the faulty mind off and accept only primal stimuli.

The route from Baku to Moscow passed smoothly. S79 effortlessly travelled 2282 kilometres and 77 years. She had appeared in the city to listen to the story of a dehumanised society. The ticket only cost a few roubles, but as she didn't have any money she made use of the guard's lack of attention and slipped in. They were called Linija Mass. As she walked in, she felt at home – the sounds around were familiar. It was pleasant. The music began to speak. About a country of sadness and rot in which a man named "Dawning of the new era" or "The torch of world revolution" tried to implement his order, and from which it still hasn't recovered. It still hasn't recovered from his predecessor. And the predecessor of his predecessor. No nuclear bomb exploded there, but everyone has chronic radiation syndrome. It is impossible to do anything about it all, because his successors are already there. She thought about how terrible the human wishes for the impossible are.

"I grew up on the dead – my eyes, my legs, my stomach are junk, disassembled wrecks. I live on the junkyard of industrialisation, but them? Maybe they too were born on a junkyard, maybe they arose from filth. Maybe their limbs and their minds grew when they were fighting to survive the process of decomposition. And their minds? From the perspective of the whole planet – they’re just useful." P.1.1 was very vulnerable to reality. He couldn't bear the information about his situation and the situation of the world. If he was human, he would be one of those who decide to leave humanity and spend the rest of their lives as trappers in Siberia. Or those who die from alcohol poisoning. He changed the cassettes, one after the other. He read from them as if they were books. Stalnoy Pakt – No Sopkakh Manchzhurii. War. Another war. The crushing of skulls. Again. The death of children and horses. Empty chairs at the table. Empty tables. Empty rooms. Rooms without walls. Society is chipped. It's as chipped as an old comb. Missing teeth lie deep in mass graves. Maybe that was the plan – maybe they have to kill each other from time to time, because there's not enough space? No – rather they are too greedy.

What does a perfect tree look like? Stop. So you tried to create a perfect form of expression and communication. If the lion was able to speak, we wouldn't understand him. We can assume you've created it for nothing – after all, no one understands. They walk the earth, the same earth you walk, and you can't even communicate with them. You've created a separate reality, but for what? You cannot enter it. It is not even known whether it is perfected yet. And, if it is, it would be impossible to judge – we cannot reach them. The tree is always perfect, and the tree is always imperfect.

For a long time, H39.8 wandered about the taiga wilderness. Since he had heard factory sounds he couldn't stop thinking about them. His cautious sense of hearing led him down narrow roads. He searched for scraping, scraps, noise, echo and disturbing monotony. He almost walked on all fours, like a dog. With every step he put his ear to the ground – the left one, of course. The year is 2014. Until now CTM has only taken place only in Berlin. The Siberian scenery corresponds well with the line-up. H39.8 broke into the festival area. KP Transmission offers a smoother, less harsh reality. The noises are subtler – they seem to come from the deepest layers. All the sadness remains, but the movements are gentle and calm. Because it always are some movements, successions, consequences. The fictional universe changed its consistency – it's much better mixed and therefore smoother. Everything happens slowly, the sound surrounds the people and things like fog. This scares H39.8, because he is used to bold lines, sharp edges and clear-cut borders. He's afraid of this freedom of sounds because he is scared of himself. The presence of the sound doesn't disappear. Maybe he could read something from it all, but there is no one around, there is only void. Russia has changed: it is more European, after Perestroika the younger generation began to dream about the West. When the first McDonald's opened the queue was 1 kilometre long. So he has to die. His time has ended; the ideas of perfect communication, the perfect state and industrialisation have failed. In this moment he realises that he has not found his relatives, his home. He has not understood. He dies.

EPILOGUE

H39.8, S79 and P1.1 were speechless. They never learned to speak their own tongue before they became extinct. They never met, they just ceased to exist. So that was the world of ideas: the idea of perfect understanding, the idea of industrialisation, the idea of some system in some country which disappeared when confronted with reality. Plato created a perfect "Republic" which we now know is totalitarian. Will we be perfect before we become extinct 5 billion years from now? We just follow the orders of evolution. If we imagine the tropics, if we imagine the people who live there – a man who lives in the bush singing about his anguish in his primitive language – we have to realise that music is always about the same thing, and always grows from one need: everyone faces the same insufficiencies of language. Speech is the intellectual language, an attempt to imagine language based on the mind and emotions emerged from the evolutionary desire to upgrade. An ideal spoken language would make music obsolete. Its source is equally imperfection and the need for perfection. The simultaneousness of these aspirations show the weakness of the mind and the tragedy of the impossibility of reaching harmony. Human beings created the idea of a mistake, and in nature we usually face the results. Humming can be information, noise can be music. Only imperfection is true.