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A brush with Soviet counter culture.


I was in Leningrad once with a group of Soviet New Agers. One of our group from the UK was an artist. She painted everything from her bed. There were pictures of her feet, of the window, of a view of a tree seen through the window, of the door, with a coat hanging on a hook, a tall lamp switched on. The lampshade was beautiful.

The painter was fey. One of the Soviets was arranging a marriage with her in exchange for roubles galore and the use of a flat in Leningrad for a year. Negotiations lasted just one afternoon.

It was 1985 and this was the Leningrad underground and it was lumpen, but jumping. The man the painter was about to marry was a Latvian with a smooth face and a blond beard. He described how he had become so knowledgeable: he had studied with shamans in the Far East for a year, he had swum in Lake Baikal, he had climbed the Urals barefoot. He had taken psychotropic drugs.

There was so much more mobility in those days. When they were allowed to, young people got on planes for a few roubles and travelled across to the other side of the Soviet Union. I listened to what he had learned from these experiences:

'What are the ordinary people, the workers and the shop keepers, the desk clerks? They are just pigs. They are non-sentient and hardly deserve to live. There are many of us who would welcome nuclear war and the destruction it would bring, because it would clear the Earth of the human scum that pollutes it.

He was full of shit.

His ideas were an embittered response to what was being touted as communism.This was the philosophy of a member of Soviet counter-culture, and remember he was living in heroic city of Leningrad.  After the siege, the name Leningrad acquired more resonance in history than the name St Petersburg. Many of the survivors of the siege, and their families and descendents were hurt by the name change.

I was tired of him and, from my bean bag, asked: 'Where is my friend, the painter?'

I'll take you to her, he said. He and his girlfriend and friend got up and we went outside.

It was dark and snowing gently. No wind.

We got to a crossroads lit by a street lamp and they stopped and looked at me, as if by pre-arrangment, and said. 'You choose the way.'

A bollocky New Age test.

I must have read the cues from their body language, feelers out, and pointed right, and said: 'This way.' Then after a while I turned a sharp left, went round the back of a tower block and in five minutes I had lead them directly to the door of the building where the painter was.

One of them went upstairs to get her.

They were impressed. OK. Now he said. Tell us what to do.They wanted a party trick.

This would only waste 5 minutes. I thought for a minute. Then suggested:

'Ask yourself any question. Circle this fountain clockwise three times, circle it again anti-clockwise three times and you may get an answer to your question.

Well, I had to try something, killing time before the painter came.

They did it, felt silly and stopped. Now you they said. Taking my own medicine, I walked around, crunching gravel, ignoring them I asked myself.

What the hell am I doing on this planet?

The answer, when it came, was very faint, and rather bland. My unconscious bobbled up and said: 'To increase our knowledge of the cosmos.' It was a boring answer.

Do we know we live on an island in the northern seas. Do we know that we live on a planet? Can we feel the weight of the ocean? Turner lashed himself to the mast of a ship in a storm to know what a storm at sea was like. A street vendor understands traffic. A dishwasher knows dishes. A baker knows heat.

Do we even know what a potato tastes like? A simple thing.

Go to Germany, Poland, the Ukraine and Peru and shop carefully. You will eat potatoes, as I did, and exclaim:

'Ah, so this is the taste of a potato.' 

Do we know what a galaxy is?

I was at a bus stop waiting for the K1 bus, looked up towards the street lamp and watched the Snowflakes fall. Snowflake after snowflake, star after star: tens of thousands flowing, swirling. After an hour in the cold looking up (two buses had been cancelled) I had seen several million.

We can only know the Milky Way by analogy, by standing in a snowstorm.

Alternatively, don't get out of bed, just lie back, and watch a snowstorm through your window.

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