The Substrate

                Aleksandr Piatkov
                The Substrate

Uncle Kolya, whose diet on the best of days consisted of lard and potatoes,

was in charge of machinery across seventeen thousand hectares of food-

producing land. He could barely walk on his ailing legs; I had to chauffeur

him from one tractor to another in my light utility truck. Without him, the

temporarily reassigned city workers hadn't a clue how to adjust or fine-

tune anything. Uncle Kolya treated his aching legs by burying them deep

into a manure pile.


This was the peak of the "blessed stagnation"—a mere six years before the

entire country was scheduled to arrive at the dawn of Communism! I chose

not to explain to him what we in the cities were actually eating. Granted,

things varied wildly: Moscow, Leningrad, and Crimea enjoyed decent

supplies, while other regions fared much worse. But agriculture everywhere

relied entirely on these drafted urbanites, and the system was bound to

collapse. The Communist queen bee stopped cloning its worker Zhukovs

within its collective farm-combs. Yet, to the profound dismay of our liberals,

the American queen bee didn't help with cloning Fords either. Breeding a

new queen has proven impossible. As an ancient philosopher once quipped:

"No matter what we try to build, we always end up with the Communist

Party."


I catch myself wondering: what was the state of the flock that drove Luther

to nail his ninety-five theses to the church door? Or what state was the

steppe in when Genghis Khan decreed his Yassa? For a new queen bee to

emerge—which is to say, a new set of paradigms—the old set must

completely decompose, turning into a substrate, into humus. And that is

exactly what is happening right now. We cannot bring ourselves to believe

that our beautiful world is turning to dust before our very eyes. Our

wasting society attempts to heal its aching legs inside this decay, while the

drafted Chicago boys try to teach us how to adjust the clutches on our

disintegrating tractor.


© Copyright: Александр Пятков, 2013

Свидетельство о публикации №213042701464