Autobiography of a Corpse by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

Author:Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 978-1-59017-696-2
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2013-11-13T16:00:00+00:00

THE LAND OF NOTS

Those come to serve the Great Sovereign

count as Ises, others mark down as Nots.

From a census (late seventeenth century)

1

I AM—ADSUM. And I namely am because I belong to the great Nation of Ises. I cannot not be. I think that’s fairly clear and commonsense.

But to explain to you, my worthy Ises, how Being can tolerate a clot of Nots, how it can have allowed—even on a desolate outskirt, on an out-of-the-way little planet—a strange little world of Nots to spring up and spread, that for me will be extremely difficult. Nevertheless, the Land of Nots is a fact. I myself have been there and what follows will attest to the truth of my declaration.

A philosophizing Not once said, “Being cannot not be without becoming Nothing, while Nothing cannot be without becoming Being.” This is so very reasonable it’s hard to believe that a Not, a nonexistent being, could—in little more than a dozen words—have come so close to the truth.

But to return: The bizarre Land of Nots, which I chanced to visit, is a sphere that to them, to Nots, seems flat. Over this seeming flatness through equal intervals of time (which, as the wisest Nots have proven, does not exist per se) occur the seeming risings and settings of a sun that is in fact motionless relative to their little world, that begets shadows now short, now long, now flaring, now fading, so that one cannot say with any certainty whether or not those shadows exist. True, the Nots teach their notkins that shadows are cast by things, but if one thinks about this sensibly, then one cannot know exactly if shadows are cast by things or things by shadows—and if one oughtn’t to cast aside, as pure ostensibilities, Not things, Not shadows, and the Nots themselves with their notional notions.

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