Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/149

141 The entire Earth was to be treated as a kind of vibrating musical instrument:
 * Treat the Earth as a resonant plate, and its capital cities as dust nodules gathered in still waves.

Khlebnikov saw the future as a return, on a new technological basis, to the tribal or stateless condition of man's past. He anticipated by half a century McLuhan's idea of "an electric return to the tribal paleolithic age":


 * You will recall that a resonant string of tribes has joined together Tokyo, Moscow and Singapore.

He saw the events of his age as a sudden "shift" from the pre-historic past to the electronic future, a difficult movement like a jump across railway—points—-end a movement which it was the task of his world government to guide. As he wrote in his "Declaration of the Presidents of the Terrestrial Sphere" early in 1917:
 * Our heavy task is to be railway-pointsmen at the junction of Past and Future.

The "shift" to be engineered was a kind of short-circuit of the historical process: a sudden meeting of the two ends of time, through a by—passing or telescoping of the events of the intervening period, so that it was almost as if the entire history of literacy and the civilized state had (to quote Mandel'stam) "never existed".

A feeling that "the ends of time" are being joined permeates almost all Khlebnikov's work. The whole history of the human race is as it were "telescoped“ and seen as if "in a flash“, the most diverse periods being almost violently juxtaposed. Per-