THE JOY IS NOT MENTIONED/ Cat’s pyjamas playing bingo with you

I awoke one morning to the sound of furniture being dragged around in the flat upstairs; I tried to fall asleep again while imagining that I, a sculptor, would climb upstairs to greet my neighbour and with my massive hands, squeeze the hand of that old ex-KGB agent until it cracks. However, I didn’t manage to fall asleep again, and so I got out of bed and went up to my neighbour’s where I found his door partly open. As I peered inside, I saw that the walls were plastered with paper clippings, like the sketches of some sort of plot. The flat was otherwise empty, clearly he had moved out – noisily.

Afraid of being discovered there, I quickly pulled the clippings off the wall at random and left as fast as possible. At the time, I thought the clippings were cut-outs he’d made, and ‘censored’, or collected from blogs of people from the local cultural scene, or maybe letters stolen from post boxes, nicked diaries, or the likes. Only later did it occur to me that they might be excerpts from transcripts of unofficial interrogations.

I will present you with only a few excerpts from this would-be plot. I have tried to arrange them in a sequence in which they would not relate to each other, and could not suggest any unexpected or accidental meanings. To facilitate their understanding, I also gave them titles.

Pervert’s Guide to Vilnius

Yesterday we organised an illegal screening of a film called The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema by director Sophie Fiennes. The audience immediately wanted to watch all the films mentioned in the Guide, and so the screening lasted two days, or maybe even longer. Those days are best characterized by the words of Slavoj Zizek, the film’s narrator, who began with: “Fantasies are for those who can not endure, who are not strong enough for reality,” and ended on: “Realities are for those who are not strong enough to confront their fantasies.”

Vilnius as a Screen

Vilnius has become a screen again for other cities and ideas to be projected upon. Speeding through Vilnius at night, I talked to my taxi driver who turned out to be from Moldavia, and had worked for a while as a taxi driver in both Kiev and Chicago. He recently spent his holidays in Transylvania.

“I haven’t slept for two days,” he said, “Loads of work. Besides, I can’t fall asleep.”

As the car was gliding smoothly through the city, we heard the radio announce the results of a national competition Lithuania in Twenty Years Time. Techno-artist Darius Miksys had submitted a proposal whereby the ‘noses’ of super fast trains would be fixed unto old Soviet trains.

“The city is changing too fast,” he continued. “It’s enough to doze off, and shanty Shanghai will turn into New Shanghai or New Frankfurt. Our old town turned into Prague only a couple of years ago. Kaunas Street is more dangerous than Freedom Alley in the city by the same name. The Gediminas Tower looks like a remnant of the Great Wall of China. The Writers’ Lounge has conserved itself behind an invisible iron wall, yet they celebrate as if they have received a barrel of rum from friendly Cuba. In the suburbs, you can find the camps of Archipelago. Yesterday I went over there to fetch a couple of Scots after another taxi driver had driven them there, taken everything they had and left. The guys met me like Lithuanians would have met Americans immediately after World War II.”

An Exhibition Like a Runaway Virus

For me, an exhibition is an all-devouring and all-containing robot; this robot is an animalist, animist, anamorphous adventure soup. All its ingredients have a similar taste in the end, and become like the characteristics of a genre. It is a science fiction nightmare come true: the revenge of runaway or mutated nano-robots who re-program and reconstruct all particles and anti-particles of the universe into grey goo according to their own shape; to me, an exhibition is a programmer’s mistake that ruptures the reservoir of changes; a mistake which, like a torn condom, releases active impregnating coded compounds. Just imagine an exhibition not as a linear story, but as an array of intersecting dotted orbits; not as a hierarchical tree of a plot that ends when the artist, curator, writer or viewer chops off the branch on which they are sitting, but as trajectories of intertwining characters, spaces and stories.

A Spare Version

Doubtlessly, other theories also exist as to why these texts and ideas are dotted and overflowing, but not continuous. According to one explanation, this text is not a collection of ‘censored’ texts found in a former KGB agent’s flat, but just quotes from a public blog called www.vilniusisburning.lt, where people write in about their adventures but only ones they actually experienced. According to other rumours, these texts have come from the Ministry of Reality, which has been recording all manifestations of reality. Other people say that the blog is called Vilnius is Blurring, but now the limits of any of the explanations have been blurred.

Reality or Dream?

Nothing is more vertiginous than reality, but reality has a habit of disappearing and reappearing without warning. It is a paradox, but reality is constructed following the same rules of dreams, and dreams, following those of reality. Do you know how long the present lasts, hence, also the sense of reality? Approximately three seconds. Reality exists on its own, but if you want to name it, it is necessary to deconstruct reality, because reality is being constructed through deconstruction by taking away parallel possibilities and impalpability from it.
And how often have three seconds of reality turn into hours of dreams? Or vice versa?

KGB Urinals in Neringa Cafe

I don’t know what came over me then, but one morning I was enlightened that I had to protect our small/large city; that somebody had to provide ‘immunity’ to fight the viruses of the world and other ideologies. So I rushed to search the internet, the streets and bars (time leaves through the door of the café, as Joseph Brodsky had observed) and, as if I were some old KGB agent, I put together a compilation of anonymous texts following the Duchampian principle, which I forgot about immediately and re-discovered only a few months later.

These are several excerpts from the texts I have censored available here for your attention:

Confession of a Vilnius Vampire

There was a time when many doctrines co-existed peacefully within me. I was an eager Catholic, I used to go to First Communion and I tried to understand from catechisms that angry amen, the immaculate conception and the Holy Trinity. I believed in the afterlife and so I opened an insect cemetery where I used to bury insects which I would kill beforehand (it’s not every day that a messenger from the yellow moth knocks at my door with a message that her young brother died and has to be buried before the sparrow eats it). I was a diligent pioneer and even received a special badge with an exceptionally noble image of Lenin for my excellence for leading a squad of pioneers to collect herbs and paper for recycling. To tell the truth, my herbs were caraway bought in a shop, unpacked and taken to the herb collection point. As fighters for independence, we used stolen paints from building sites and demonstrated our knowledge of English on shop walls: Russians go home - masturbation is not a crime. Although I knew nothing about Freud or psychoanalysis, in order to avoid unconscious patricide, I left my parents and moved to my grandmother’s. I was an enthusiast of the free market and ecological self-awareness, and I used to sell chewing gum paper and empty beer cans to my classmates. I was a hard-core Darwinist and used to force the community of rats from the local rubbish dump to evolve in a speedy manner by organising the ragatkė competition. Ahead of my time, I was a supporter of cloning and biotechnical experimentation because I used to raise rain-worms in my experimental garden (it turned out that rain-worms could be multiplied by all means of mechanical interference, except a longitudinal cut along its body, which I would call the Gorbachov Cut), and I used to grow carrots in the darkness on the gooseberry bush by implantation. I was a specialist in free press until my mother liquidated the entire family newspaper (circulation only three copies) with articles about my father’s adventures in promiscuity bars. Besides this, I asked my mum to organise my first exhibition in her storage unit. This was an exhibition of toilet soap packages titled Personal Hygiene, the Basis of Harmony in the Family Hearth; only now I don’t remember if the title had any specific meaning or if it was dictated by the general principles of creating slogans at that time.

Conversation (in a Café) as a Didactic Allegory

A known (not only by the KGB) artist from Vilnius talks to a young curator. However, they both pretend to be someone else:
‘You study philosophy? Cool. Who is your favourite philosopher?’
‘Oh… Perhaps, Descartes…’
‘Come on. He didn’t read Baudrillard.’
‘I haven’t read him either. So what?’
‘Don’t be as stupid as a painter, as Marcel once put it!’
‘I am stupid like Rose Selavy.’
‘What do you drink?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘What corporate drinks do you drink?’
‘What sort of question is this?’
‘We consume brand names, but not products.’
‘Fuck you.’
‘You are saying fuck you not to me, but to the shops you visit.’
‘It’s obvious you have exchanged shopping for Baudrillard.’
‘I wear only clothes that others no longer need. I save the time needed for the lessons of children in Bengal.’
‘And women? Do you consume them also second-hand? Worn?
‘I don’t wear them. The environment is too hostile for transsexuals in Lithuania.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Tele Giovanni. And you?’
‘Oksana.’
‘Hm. Hm. I hear this for the first time.’
‘What, really?’
‘Yep. Before I had only read that on the net, on websites offering sensual services.’
‘What a romantic young man. Do you have at least one good quality?’
‘I see qualities that others don’t see.’
‘And what do you see in me?’
‘What others don’t see?’
‘You can begin with what is visible.’
‘The beginning is always good.’
‘The beginning does not always begin at the beginning.’
‘You are suggesting not jumping to sex right away?’
‘Sex is a chocolate bar for you, isn’t it?’
‘What chocolate bars do you use for sex?’
‘Twix.’
‘Because it is a biscuit in disguise?
‘No, because it plugs several hungry holes at once.’
‘You look like a work of art.’
‘The embodiment of the aesthetics of ugliness?’
‘Splashed expressionism?’
‘Figurative abstractionism?’
‘Conceptual realism?’
‘Anti-capitalist bricolage?’
‘Vulgar naturalism?’
‘An abstract slippage?’
‘The circus of narco-sophy?’
‘A didactic allegory. Besides, our writer got confused over which line belongs to whom.’
‘Aren’t you a specialist of comparativist compliments?’
‘Which voice is yours, and which is mine?’
‘Not a bad duo; we could go for figure skating or, even better, synchronized swimming in pairs.’
‘How do you like synchronized painting?’
‘No, such a beginning creates obvious hostility – no good.’
‘Fine. Let’s start at the beginning?’

Are you Lithuanian?

Particularly now it is clear that we, Lithuanians, have joined, unwillingly, the club of friendly nations. We are different, as our history teacher told us. Lithuanians used to be cast as Nazis in Soviet films about ‘The Great War of the Homeland’. Lithuania was the most western among the USS republics, and now it is the most eastern amongst the countries of the EU (Deimantas Narkevicius). Lithuanians used to change costumes so often that the greatest daily and intellectual task was to preserve the true lyrical Lithuanian subject. Consequently, Lithuanians were the last nation to be christened, and now it is one of the last bastions of Christianity. Lithuanians claim that they were the first to design the rocket mechanism, and the first Lithuanian in space was Donatas Banionis who tried to get rid of his dead wife in Solaris by Andrei Tarkovski. I remember when I watched it for the first time I was afraid that his wife was Vytautas in disguise. Especially since the author of the novel was Polish. To tell the truth, almost at the same time David Bowie played the part of an alien in The Man Who Fell to Earth, and while he, as the alien, was building a spaceship to fly back to his planet, David’s character allowed his chief engineer to ask anything he liked. The latter’s first question was:
Are you Lithuanian?
Besides, this question was also posed to another actor-chameleon Andy Kaufmann who was (rather unsuccessfully) portrayed by Jim Carrey in the film Man on the Moon. He was asked because he spoke with an accent which was difficult to identify. Have you ever heard a Lithuanian accent?
This was, of course, not the last reincarnation of the legendary Lithuanian. Hannibal Lector from The Silence of the Lambs was also Lithuanian.

Sex Revolution

This is how I lost my first love.
The national renaissance had already begun in Lithuania. There were neither sexual fantasies nor sexual acts in the Soviet Union; they did not exist in Soviet Lithuania either. Sex arrived with the renaissance and the first VCRs. These, of course, were not legal, so militias patrolled at night checking if the blue light of a TV was on in any window (Soviet television used to rest at nights). Having discovered such a light, the militia would come over and the first thing they would do is cut the power supply. It was impossible to take the tape out of the video player without electricity. Angry and dizzy viewers would dash automatically to the staircase to sort out the ‘popped corks’. Unfortunately, the militia with blinding projectors would already be waiting for them there.
Recently I had an opportunity to see some historical footage from a Soviet court. The judge asked the defendant:
‘What was the title of that pornographic film?’
‘Well, I don’t remember, I haven’t seen it, but I can tell you the story.’
‘Tell us, please,’ the judge encouraged.
‘In short, a young girl from a workers’ family has a row with her father who was sexually abusing her because, apparently, his capitalist employer was exploiting him; also he wasn’t a member of the workers’ union. So she decides to seek out her personal freedom and leave Michigan, where she was born, and hitchhike to New York. At this point the film which had started as an amoral melodrama of class struggle suddenly turns into a romantic road movie. The girl succeeds in stopping a car quite fast, and its driver is a young working class guy. The girl makes love to him and thus helps to consolidate the class struggle. The driver of the next car has a moustache and reminds her of a typical representative of bourgeoisie yet the girl sleeps with him too. I admit that at this point I lost the logic of the class struggle plot. Later she sleeps with the owners of twenty other cars; sometimes with a few of them the same time. I guess it would be possible to discuss the purpose of private property as a possible analysis, but seeing your anxiety to hear the end of this story I will say that the heroine, apart from getting to intimately know representatives of at least half of the states of USA, she reaches the New York of her dreams. Then, in this cradle of capitalist hell, she goes straight to the Statue of Liberty and lights a cigarette from its torch and, having cast her dreamy eyes over Manhattan and seeing the inconceivable plurality of phallic skyscrapers, she screams happily with the joy of conquistadors…
‘The defendant: Have you watched this disgusting stuff in front of your wife?’
‘Not only my wife but our entire household was watching. Oh, don’t ask me their names, I only know these people by face.’

Historical Transvestites of Lithuania

The historical predilection of Vytautas the Great to disguise himself has never been analysed as a popular Lithuanian sexual practice. On the contrary, they claim that he ran away from the captivity of the Crusaders pretending to be a maid not because he was inclined towards sexual experimentation, but because he was clever and was thinking geopolitically. (Just imagine how, in a medieval cell, he tried to remove his beard and scrape the hair off his legs). I don’t see how these theories contradict each other. However, it is clear that transvestism is a covert political state of mind in Lithuania.

Although last in Europe, Lithuanians went to be christened only because they expected to receive free shirts (which had neither Nike, United Colours of Benetton or any other UN signs on them). As a result, most Lithuanians have been christened several times. The national referendum concerning our membership in the EU ended happily only because one of the largest supermarket chains was giving out washing powder almost free with used voting ballots.
Vytautas was also constantly changing clothes and flags. In fear for his father’s fate, he ran to the crusaders to avenge his own people, later to run away to the Lithuanians cross-dressed as a maid. Later, with the help of the same crusaders, he consolidated his realm and donated Samogitia to still the same crusaders, and even brought on the ruin of a huge army of European Christians against the Tatars at Vorskla, today’s Ukraine. This great Lithuanian was a real manipulator in political clothes: the great transvestite.

Another infamous Lithuanian transvestite was George Maciunas, but he never visited Vilnius.

Conversation Continues (Elsewhere)

‘I have always wanted to write down all my dreams and make a diagram of my dreams, which, to tell the truth, I have also already seen in my dream. The diagram of my dreams looked like a map of crossing underground lines with unfamiliar stations. Yet not everything was so simple: one line could belong to one city during the Renaissance, and another line, to another city during the Dark Ages in science fiction. So a dream that had started in London during the Great Fire could end somewhere in a Minsk besieged by Napoleon, or in Cairo as pyramids were being built by the inhabitants of the Alfa Centaur system. Dreams, like days, have a strange habit of repeating themselves; thus, I believed and still believe that a map of dreams or a dreamap can help me understand what point of the psycho-geographical space I am now at and to where I’ll move.’
‘Don’t you think that all this sounds like another unsuccessful attempt to rationalise what gives pleasure yet it is completely irrational? As in another pathetic attempt to mark spaces in the land of Freud and Lacan in a chauvinistic way?’
‘You see, I don’t believe that the so-called our world is understandable and rational. Any cockroach is more complicated than the most powerful computer in the world, and while you were telling me your dream, only in Vilnius there were (…).’

I don’t like adventures, I google

Tonight I was surfing the net and as if drawing the vectors of websites and mimicking trajectories of the cursor, I ploughed through pubs, listened to waiters in restaurants, crossed bridges and looked beneath them, scanned cameras of the world at www.earthcam.com, tapped my psychosomatic data into search engines, looked for the future in the institute’s forecasts, horoscopes of tomorrow, listened to parodies of homeless people. Like a maniac I furrowed through the city’s databases, but you don’t exist in any shape as digital information.

Vilnius, how is it best to experience you?

Escape (The End)

‘I wish you would leave with me.’
‘Leave? Is it possible to leave Vilnius? The Parisienne suburb, the London club, the hometown of the Great Circus? But why?’
‘Yes, leave. Away from the dictatorship of Vilnius weekends, from the Great Circus of Vilnius, from the monopoly of narcosophia, and the plans I will never realise. While the complete degradation of women is still uncharacteristic of Vilnius because of the limited sexual market… While Vilnius has still not become a catacomb of the bourgeoisie… While Vilnius is burning.