Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/152

144 undermined and replaced by something else. Khlebnikov "foresaw" all this, as he wrote in 1916:


 * I foresaw the destruction of the right to property. Space is conquered, and the grass of spaces wilts. The right to property is changed to the creative battle for time.


 * "If we sit and talk in a dark room", writes McLuhan,


 * words suddenly acquire new meanings and different textures... All those gestural qualities that the printed page strips from language come back in the dark, and on the radio.

In Khlebnikov‘s "state of sounds", in accordance with the corresponding emphasis on the ear as opposed to the eye, everything is in a sense "dark", although it is a darkness in which the stars shine, and the kind of darkness associated with evening fire—light and songs. Khlebnikov links many things with this vibrant darkness: it is the "star-world", it is the world of night-time and of dreams, it is the World of the pre-historic past and also of the future. All of these are in a sense one, and they all meet in the idea of "transreason", which corresponds to the deeper, more primitive, more essential and universal layers of consciousness or of the subconscious mind, as opposed to the every—day rational or "daylight" layers.

In agreement with McLuhan's comment on the "new meanings" of words which emerge in the dark, Khlebnikov argues that a kind of "darkness" is required if the "transrational" meanings of words are to he brought out and experienced. The word, he writes, has a double aspect: