A withered bush juts out beyond the garden of stones. There I hid yet another thought of mine, one born in a difficult, nightmarish dream: Their dialectic isn’t the world’s dialectic. Their doings unravel the world’s harmony. The bush’s branches are dead; the rotten leaves hang on crooked stalks. They can only kanuk a human; neither rivers nor trees submit to Them. When sucking out people’s souls, They, willingly or not, contradict nature. The community of soulless humans destroys nature by its very breathing, even with its thoughts. Particularly thoughts. That’s how ecological disasters happen. That’s how the one that still awaits us all will happen. The ancient Chinese knew very well that a person’s spirit, his thoughts, and his morals affect nature directly. A human spirit changes air, fire, water, the origins of the cosmos, and cosmic harmony. When the spirit fails, so does the great harmony. Futurologists delving into ecological balance with computers are ridiculous. They count external symptoms, but they don’t know the deeper reason. They have no idea what I’ve encrypted into this poor, puny bush. They can’t see a bush like that right in front of their eyes. They don’t live in Vilnius. They are blind — I was like that too, not so very long ago. If we want to save ourselves, we don’t need to count the smoke coming out of factories, but rather the remains of the human spirit.
Why, what’s it all for? Why do They need it? Why did the kanukai metropole settle into Vilnius in particular? Why not in Bangkok, Port-au-Prince, or a nameless valley of snakes in Burma? Don’t tell me They are attracted by the Neris’s broad banks and the high-rise building boxes that are slowly wading into the stream? Vilnius really could drown; the houses could, in a sad row, crawl into the water. Unfortunately, the Neris is too shallow.
I can sit on the bank across from the double whirlpools by the Žirmūnai bridge for hours on end. It is one of the Neris’s most dreadful spots. Every bit of straw that floats by, swallowed by the throat of the vortex, turns into a ruined human spirit. See there now, a scrap of paper floats in, thrashes, and disappears into the black funnel. Perhaps that’s Freud, who got a craving to pull Their image out of oblivion, out of the subconscious, and was instantly dealt with. What’s left of him after diving through the whirlpool? Naked biology, the libido, and sexual impulses. And perhaps that little stalk over there is Tolstoy, searching for the human in humanity, but ending in complete drivel. Or Picasso (a Spaniard!), striving to breathe spirit into art, but turned into a joker by Them. Or perhaps the little stalk will never again rise from the whirlpool; it’ll be swallowed up and left on the bottom for the ages. Then it will be one of those who never gave in, let’s say, Lorca (a Spaniard again!), snuffed out like a smoldering candle the moment he tried to hint of Them less indirectly. (Do you remember “El publico”? Do you remember the fake Juliet and the scream, “That’s not the real Juliet, They’ve tied the real one up and pushed her under the chairs”?)
I’d really like to announce my knowledge to everyone, but it’s impossible. The Neris is the only place that can safeguard my thoughts. If I name all the nameless stalks, if I give them meaning, even They won’t be able to destroy those meanings. They can’t drink up a river. The one who comes after me will understand everything. The Neris will float my memory to him. I hid everything I know in the current of the Neris. I hid it well — even They won’t decipher those signs. Only the one who will come after me can read them. The Neris is my encyclopedia, the magnum opus of my life. Heraclitus couldn’t wade into the same stream twice. He didn’t have his Neris. He didn’t have a river whose current is eternal and cyclical, where not just water flows, but thoughts and words flow too, where my cry flows. The entire river current is full of my cry; it pours into the sea. Its particles splash with the spray of ocean crests into the shores of Australia, America, or Africa. And no one, no one hears it. No one. Except maybe Them.
Only They always hear everything, that metaphysical tribe that broke off from the human family in times past, the carrier of bulging little eyes, the parasite of the spirit, the apologist of deformed bodies, Vilnius’s secret ruler. I cannot bear it anymore. It would be better if They shoved me into the Neris, so I would float downstream like someone’s recollection myself. It would be better if They strangled me in my sleep. Why do They let me live? What task of Theirs do I fulfill without being aware of it myself?
I have only one answer: They forgot their own purpose long ago. They do everything as if they were automatons, as if they were creatures driven by a pathological instinct. They themselves no longer understand the reason why they have to bear crippled bodies and kanuk everyone in sight. They themselves want to know what it all means, or if they have a purpose. And they hope it will be I who will discover it, who will read it in an old folio, or dream it, or sweat it out during some night of kanukish nightmares. If there is such a purpose at all. What is the purpose of the movement of the stars? For what purpose do we dream of white horses or stares without eyes? What is the purpose of Vilnius’s existence, the purpose of this river, the purpose of us all?