II
See how ignorant you are of your own self; there is no land so distant or so unknown to you, nor one about which you will so easily believe falsehoods.
Guigo, Meditations, ca. 1115 AD
Somewhere around Proletarskaya I exited the train. I could not breathe; the sprawling concrete blocks hemmed me in, a maze of yellow curtains and porcelain bowls of purple vinaigrette. My shelter for the night was an old car whose side window I gutted with a brick.
There is no resourcefulness like the resourcefulness of the first hermit crabs of the Apocalypse.
A rat was my brick's next victim. I crushed its brain with an easy movement (Caesar waves his hand and the Helvetii are slaughtered). Leviticus, as I never tire of repeating, is no authority for me--though it lack cloven hooves, rat is as tasty and nutritious as anything the Azerbaijani on the corner will sell you. And, unlike the plebes who live behind these soot-stained parapets, I know that it is a sin to cook a piece of meat well-done.
I have removed myself from the world of the bestial philistines whose world is passivity and gradualism, from the money changers who build their own temples. Marx says, "An Aristotle who would take his Politics from our conditions, would write on the first page: 'Man is a social but completely apolitical animal.'" I am no longer an animal. I am no longer an animal.
It occasionally seems as if the dirt and the crawling in the dark and the undersides of benches and the slick black truncheons and the raw food hunted down and taken by force are whispering to me, trying to tell me something I can no longer hear. But I have no more use for words, words of warning or exhortation, of praise or reassurance or anathema. What did Gracchus or Hitler or Robespierre make with their tongues besides bricks for the Tower of Babel?