Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/137

129 On the other hand, as we have seen, Khlebnikov could relate to language only as a process, not as a finished thing. The very act of writing things down seemed to destroy his purpose, fixing and finishing the process which he sought to present in its continuous genesis and life. Oral language constantly emanates from the future; but the lustre is lost as writing fixes it in the present and past:
 * When I noticed how old lines suddenly grew dull as their hidden content became that of the present day, I understood that the native land of creation is the future. It is from there that the wind of the word—gods blows.

After a while, having been committed to paper, even the most magical—seeming word—forms began to lose their magic effect. Khlebnikov gives an example:
 * During the time they were being written, the transrational words of the dying Ekhnaten, "Manch, manc!", from Ka, almost caused pain; I could not read them, seeing lightning between them and myself; now they are nothing to me. Why, I don't know myself.

Despite such feelings of failure, however, Khlebnikov was astonishingly successful in creating a sense of continuous genesis and movement in language even in its written form. Confronted for the first time by a mass of Khlebnikov's manuscripts, Benedict Livshits was overcome by a peculiar sensation, as if the anchors of his existence were being removed. The two aspects of Khlebnikov's "de—fossilization" of language are well indicated in Livshits' account of his feelings:
 * ...the whole of my being seemed riveted by an apocalyptic horror. If the dolomites, purples and slates of a mountain range in the caucasus suddenly came alive before my eyes and——in the flaura and fauna of the mesozoic era—had stepped up to me from all sides, it would not have created a stronger impression.
 * For I saw with my own eyes animated language.