ANOTHER MATTER : THE FIRE EXCERPTS

by Alla Gorbunova

Translator’s note: The stories in Alla Gorbunova’s 2021 collection Another Matter resemble lightweight anecdotes but add up to a primer on everything that exists: a wisdom book. Throughout, illumination comes from experiences that are deeply quotidian or, even better, painfully embarrassing. The meaning of life can be derived from a run-in with a gang of teenagers in a stairwell. A tiny yapping dog is exactly as frightening as a charging yak. The desire to do a good deed is no guarantee of a good deed. And so on. In short, the narrator and mostly everyone she meets are misguided, well-intentioned souls who briefly recognize each other, if they’re lucky. In a story about accidentally accusing a classmate she likes of stealing her ruler, Gorbunova writes that: “Children can be terrible, it’s true, because in children you can see clearly the matter that everyone, without exception, is made of: the capacity for love, kindness, virtue, as well as the capacity for cruelty, cowardice, betrayal.” As in her poetry, she’s concerned with the primary and primal, the elements. In the stories included here, real and figurative flames serve as signs of illness and insight, and bonfires are used to destroy bad poetry, roast freshly caught frogs, and launch the ongoing conversation of everyone with everything: a dream of unity or a shadow play.

— Elina Alter

The Guy Who Ate a Cat

My friend Masha and I, two schoolgirls, 11th-graders, decided to hitchhike to Veliky Novgorod. For some reason the drivers all asked us, “Aren’t you scared?” To which I replied, “You rarely meet bad truckers, and we don’t get into regular cars.” I had hitchhiked before, but it was Masha’s first time. We stayed a few nights with my Aunt Lida, and spent the days hanging out with a group of rebels and outcasts we met on our very first day near the Novgorod Kremlin. There was a guy in their group, really a full-grown man, whom I reminded of his first love. We started messing around. He was extremely good-looking, gentle and strong, dark, with black hair down to his shoulders and amazing blue-green eyes. His nickname was Monster. He was from Severodvinsk, and the others told me that he had a wife back in his hometown, the only woman in the world he loved; she was a sex worker, and he slept with everyone, too. And they also said he’d been a volunteer soldier in Chechnya, and something terrible had happened to him there, but what it was exactly no one knew.

We spent one night at his “place” — a dormitory on the outskirts of Novgorod and there, on the floor, in front of Masha and everyone else, we fucked beneath a blanket. Before we started fucking, Monster took a signet ring from his finger and put it on mine, saying “You’re my woman for the night.” When we finished, he took the ring back. He had a lot of highbrow literature in his room, novels by good writers, and judging by our conversations, he had decent taste. “Have you read this guy? He’s not bad ” and he showed me a newly published translation of Bukowski.

One evening, when Masha and I showed up at our meeting spot, the others told us that Monster had eaten a cat. I’d heard him consider something of the sort before, whenever he’d seen a passing cat; he mentioned that he sometimes ate them. I had been appalled, but it was something that felt far from me. While now it turned out he ate a cat on the very day we were supposed to see each other. Caught it, killed it, roasted it. After that I couldn’t bear to look at him. I expressed all my rage and indignation, but in the end we made up — I remembered that he’d been to Chechnya and lived through something unfathomable to me. And I could also see that these people just didn’t have any money for food. Later, as we sat out on the riverbank at the edge of the city and built a bonfire, these guys caught frogs and cooked them on the flames. I started to rage again, but they said,

“The French eat frogs, what’s the big deal? Try a piece.” I felt very sorry for the frogs, but I still tried a leg, out of curiosity.

Then Masha and I left, and for a long time I felt I had committed a transgression that was particularly terrible for me sleeping with a guy who ate cats, and being present at the murder of frogs. After all, killing animals is one of the most powerful taboos I recognize; I usually even feel bad for mosquitos and try not to smash them, I move worms when I see them in the road, and now this.

As we were getting ready to hitchhike back, the gang walked us to the highway, and on the way Monster picked up a new girl. Later, people told me that this guy, Monster, borrowed money from everyone and disappeared, and no one knew where he had gone.

My First Love

My first love practiced magic. I was 13, and he was my “husband.” He told me that Jehovah was actually a usurper, and that in the beginning our world had been given as a gift to the one we now thought of as the Devil; this being called himself Asmodeus. My love was a god himself, of a much higher order that Jehovah or Asmodeus. Asmodeus was something like his kid brother. If everyone had to belong to either the Light or the Dark, he belonged to the Dark, but really he was Rainbow, because the Rainbow was the Law of all Worlds, and the highest god he knew was the Rainbow Dragon. He had a particular affinity for dragons and for fire. He wore a ruby earring in one ear and looked a lot like Kurt Cobain. He was quite short, much shorter than me, but I always found him incredibly attractive. He worked as a plumber in the village where we spent the summers. And he was also a hired killer and said he was made for murder. He taught that it was right to act in accordance with your nature and to listen to your heart. He could interpret my dreams, control the flame of candles (I can do this too), appear in my mirror. When he tried to join the army, they wouldn’t believe that he could do magic, and gave him a diagnosis of schizophrenia. He was 19 years old. He drank and smoked, at some point in the past he’d shot up; now he and all his friends just huffed benzine out in the swamp. I feel consumed by an unbearable, everlasting flame when I remember how much I loved him. He said that “There’s no such thing as love, only attachment,” but at the same time he was always telling me he loved me. When he was eight, he lost his virginity to some nurses at the hospital. He liked sex. He told everyone he was going to fuck them. And he did fuck everything that moved, he was particularly obsessed with virgins. He was bisexual, he made out with some other guy in front of me, behind my back he took the virginity of all my friends (I never slept with him). And in spite of all that he was incredibly jealous. Mostly we just played at assault in my barn one of my girlfriends and I called it “gangbanging.” He broke my heart and taught me a great deal.

Burning My Archive

By the time I turned 13, I was sitting on top of a trove of poems, novels, and private diaries. And then I finally understood that most of this stuff had to be destroyed right away, before anyone could find it and read it, and also that there was just too much of it, in any case. So I locked the door to my room, gathered all my papers on a table I had cleared and covered in oilcloth, and lit a fire right on the tabletop. The flames rose merry and bright. Then I left the room and ran into my horrified grandparents, who had been racing up and down the stairs, trying to find the fire.

Scabies

I’ve had scabies twice.

The first time I was 16, and I caught it from my boyfriend, who’d gotten it from a friend of his, a guy home from the army who’d spent the night sharing a mattress with him. Really everyone who hung out with them got it. I noticed that I started itching, but I didn’t know why. My boyfriend made a date with me, brought some benzyl benzoate cream, and told me, “I’m so sorry, I think I gave you scabies.” “That’s all right,” I said, “it’s good when people have something in common.” He really liked this sentiment of mine, he later remembered it as the best and brightest thing that ever happened between us. Then I had to use the cream for a long time. The scabies would fade, then flare up again, like a bonfire in the rain. Over the course of those six months, I kept going to school, spending time with my family, and wearing my mother’s clothes. No one else caught scabies.

The second time I had scabies I was around 30. My grandfather was very ill, undergoing chemotherapy at the hospital. A man was put in his ward who looked deeply unkempt, but my grandfather shook his hand anyway. And then he developed scabies, and my grandmother did, too; then I got it, and my mother, and my husband. We were preparing to celebrate my grandfather’s 80th birthday, and everyone understood that it would be his last. My grandfather waited impatiently for the day; he really wanted to live long enough to celebrate and gather all his loved ones around the table one last time. We went to the Together café, on the ground floor of my grandparents’ apartment building. My grandfather, barely breathing, sat at the head of the table. His sister Aunt Lida came, and cousin Tolya and his wife, a few old friends. I hardly need to mention that all of these people developed scabies and proceeded to pass it on. We had guests over, then they went to visit other friends, and these other friends soon began to complain of some strange allergy … So, all in all, the scabies spread like wildfire, taking over St. Petersburg, Moscow, Novgorod, and even other countries. We sprayed ourselves with Spregal Anti-Scabies Spray, sprayed all of the apartment surfaces with some other crap, washed our linens in hot water, used benzyl benzoate and other creams, but the scabies burned on and on. Finally, we went to see a dermatologist, and the dermatologist said that it wasn’t even scabies anymore, it was an allergic reaction to all the creams, which looked just like scabies, and also itched.

Everyone seemed to get better in the end, with the exception of my grandparents. They died without ever having totally beaten scabies. My grandfather could hardly walk before his death, and my grandmother had been bedridden for some time, so it was logistically difficult to apply the creams and wash them off, and though they did the best they could, a touch of scabies remained. Because of this, my mother and uncle avoided touching my grandparents, and wore gloves when they did. Whereas I became incensed with all creation, that it had allowed such injustice and humiliation to occur that my grandparents, in their last months of life, would suffer from not just anything, but scabies! I remember a mean, traitorous thought flashing through my mind as I embraced my grandfather for the last time; I was thinking that he had scabies, and I had finally just gotten rid of it, but I immediately banished the thought and hugged him back. I spent two days at my grandparents’ apartment taking care of them while my uncle was at the dacha, and when I was heading out one evening, after my uncle had returned, my grandfather said, “Thank you,” and opened his arms to hug me. I held him, touched my cheek to his prickly cheek for the final time, inhaled the smell of his skin, his flannel shirt. In the morning he passed. I’m happy that we had this good farewell, that he thanked me after all, that’s the best thing you can say when parting. I’m glad we hugged. Meanwhile, the scabies … It was gone for a few months, and then came back we probably caught it from my grandmother, and then she too passed on. I began to think that at the end of the day, the mites just grew tired of me, and I of them, we really had nothing in common anymore, and so they went away. It’s no big deal, honestly, scabies.

Crossing

There was a time when I thought deep and long about the way of antinomy, a path at the end of which you arrive at a point where you must do something impossible, something that contains a contradiction — like going right and left at the same time. Or saying yes and no at the same time. And when you did this thing, you would leave the Matrix, exit the zoo, break the chains of time and determinism and undergo some kind of indescribable transformation. And the way to this point led through complete psychosis, through some absolute double bind. A complex, schizophrenic path beyond all known borders. And so, I was coming home one night, pondering all of this, when I noticed that at the totally empty intersection of Leninsky and Zina Portnova Avenues the traffic light burned simultaneously red and green. There was no one else around this was obviously meant specifically for me. I simply had to cross the street beneath this light, which communicated both yes and no, stop and go. A simple crossing this was my impossible action at the conclusion of the path. It was clear that if I were to cross the street beneath this traffic light, there would be no going back. For a few seconds, I stood still. Then I stepped into the street. Everything was completely silent and it felt like time had stopped. I crossed.

The First Word

I know that it happened like this: once, a stone at the very bottom of a swamp in the cosmic night began to speak. It brought forth the first word, creaky and indistinct, mute and wild. A severed head responded. A bonfire was lit, and around it gathered the living and the dead, beasts and birds, grasses and people. This is how the conversation of everything with everyone began, a conversation-oath, directed toward the place where everything and everyone is alive.

On Curtis Cuffie (Blank Forms Editions, 2023) by Perwana Nazif

Light often presents truth in Western histories. Such “truth-seeking” spans histories of stained-glass chapels as solar projection rooms to ecstatic illuminations spawning scientific revolutions to the more recent holy exposure that produces the photograph followed by cinema-cathedrals. Tracing light back to some originary of the constructed truth-sight nexus, the illumination of these various “truths” could very well be a vatic proffering by fire.

In a 1998 text, artist Curtis Cuffie writes of a desire for his assemblages, made on and from the waste littering the streets of downtown New York, to be prophetlike. Cuffie’s refigured refuse is a sign of the divine, rather than the divine itself. His work, therefore, does not collapse truth and sight as does the history outlined above. In fact, his works are made up from the shattered remnants of such historical constructions, material and otherwise. They radiate in this fiery destruction of such reproduction of supposedly given truths, the crushed stained glass refracting holy truths elsewhere. The light bounces off the lustrous objects of Cuffie’s artworks, gleaming onto us and making shadows apparent of such violent undergirding of Western truths made universal. To know is not just to see.

Cuffie’s text, from a grant application that asks the artist to describe his work, is republished in Blank Forms Editions’ forthcoming book Curtis Cuffie. The first publication on Cuffie, the book includes republished and new essays by Alan W. Moore and Ciarán Finlayson alongside exquisite photographs of Cuffie’s works — many of which are presented here. The photographs by Katy Abel, Curtis Cuffie, Margaret Morton, Carol Thompson, and Tom Warren are largely what remains of Cuffie’s practice outside of stories and the few sculptures that survived the violent, relentless police raids of the houseless and, to a lesser extent, Cuffie’s disassembling of his works to sell smaller portions. The site which the works were made from and produced on was also Cuffie’s home. Cuffie’s primarily unhoused status, while doubtlessly largely informing his practice and exhibition of his work, sutures him to the problematic outsiderart genre, a genre classed and racialized as outside to formal art production. The essays offered in the book self-reflexively complicate such classifications within the art world’s limited inclusion of Cuffie’s work historically and contemporarily. facing page: Image detail from Curtis Cuffie published by Blank Forms Editions Photography by Katy Abel, color, ca. 1994–96 above and facing page: Image and detail from Curtis Cuffie published by Blank Forms Editions

In one of his works, on page 84 of this issue, a trumpet lies at the head of a bejeweled gold bracelet-like object held together by a paisley tie. This arrangement sits on a thin pole loosely wrapped with a silver streamer whose shimmer competes with the trumpet’s shine. An orange cloth patterned with white and green hibiscus envelops the beginning of the base, which may or may not have a white-painted traffic cone threaded through the pole. The assemblage is photographed by Katy Abel against parked cars in a lot, presumably somewhere around Cooper Square, the Bowery, or Astor Place where Cuffie was known to make his artwork. Cuffie’s amalgamation of clashing prints, dirtied by the dayto-day of New York streets, and competing luminescences collaborating with the sun and car mirrors that reflect it as they drive by are as close as we can get to revelations.

Photography by Katy Abel, color, ca. 1994–96

Images from Curtis Cuffie published by Blank Forms Editions left: Photography by Tom Warren, black and white, ca. 1993 right: Photography by Tom Warren, black and white, ca. 1992 facing page: Image detail from Curtis Cuffie published by Blank Forms Editions

Photography by Katy Abel, color, ca. 1994–96 above and facing page: Image details from Curtis Cuffie published by Blank Forms Editions

Photography by Katy Abel, color, ca. 1994–96 above and facing page: Image details from Curtis Cuffie published by Blank Forms Editions

Photography by Katy Abel, color, ca. 1994–96

Michel, 1981

Vintage gelatin silver print

© Christine Guibert / Courtesy Les Douches la Galerie, Paris

On Hervé Guibert

by Perwana Nazif

In Hervé Guibert’s photograph Autoportrait, devant la glace-Christ, we see the photographer, filmmaker, and writer’s mirrored image sitting on a bed. Laid against the mirror are four identical prints of Jesus Christ. Guibert’s own image emerges from between the last two images of Jesus. Guibert’s hand reflects the gesture of the punctured hand of Christ’s image. Without the hole, but holding, just the same. It’s unclear if Christ has risen from the dead yet. His eyes, like Guibert’s, seem closed. We wait for him to awake from mortality.

The black of Guibert’s suit merges with the blackness surrounding Christ, as if this recognition of transcendent knowledge is only seen against Guibert, the photographer and the photographic subject-object, as mirrored with Christ, the martyr. As if transcendence is only illuminated against this mirroring. As if Guibert’s reflection to us ordains martyrdom. The truly mirrored hand, the hand against and by which we receive knowledge, is the hand that snaps the photograph and materializes it. The hand in its latency or seemingly non-visible presence in the images presented throughout this issue of Tarkovsky or Foucault or Guibert’s great-aunts, much like the ghost images Guibert writes through, exists as both spectral and physical. Guibert sacrifices himself, his mortality immortalized and immortality mortalized, through becoming outside of the image of himself. He rises again and again even if we cannot see the bloodshed splashing across the developed image.

Guibert’s photography is like holding a flame to the photograph and not just as illumination qua knowledge production. To introduce fire, the subject of this issue, to the photograph both exposes the image, developing it, and manipulates, if not destroying, the image along with its self-contained truths. The process both creates and distorts the embalmed image French film theorist André Bazin so fervently writes of as collapsed with reality as is — Bazin sacrificing spiritual aesthetics for a given realism. Bazin’s image that grows too heavy to be carried away with time, thus embalming time itself, is instead cremated by the flame, the subsequent dust gathering and dispersing over time. Think of sweeping in vain clouds of historical dust. Think of the moving image of Jean-Hugues Anglade as Henri in The Wounded Man ( L'Homme blessé ), his shoes loudly pacing, the taps boring holes in the train station floors. Think of Courbet’s painting of said blessed man punctured (punctumed) by the erect sword and think again of the ultimate blessed man Christ’s mirrored hole in Autoportrait, devant la glace-Christ. The dust of decay settles, weighs down, and sinks with frantic passion to the point of crucifying, only to emerge again.

Hervé Guibert

Louise les cheveux, 1978–1979

Vintage gelatin silver print

© Christine Guibert / Courtesy Les Douches la Galerie, Paris

Hervé Guibert

Thierry dos penché, 1981

Vintage gelatin silver print

© Christine Guibert / Courtesy Les Douches la Galerie, Paris