Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/153

145 :One could think of its daily sunlit sense concealing a nocturnal, starry one underneath. For the everyday meaning of the word—whatever it is—blots out its other meanings, which disappear just as the stars of the night vanish in daytime.

However, in sleep and drowsiness, when the demands of daily business and the intellect relent, these "star—world" meanings re-assert themselves:


 * ...life's night allows one to see the weak meanings of words as one sees the weak visions of the night-time.

In Chapter Nine, the "pole of incomprehensibility" in the idea of ﬁtransrational language" was associated with the "ohjectlessness" of Cubist painting, the "reduction to zero“ of art, the idea of the Bolshevik revolution and the idea of the semantic incompatibility of the “languages” of the future and present. fhe incomprehensibility of the "language of the future" emphasized the gap separating this future from the present world. Khlebnikov's "transrational language", we noted, was often supposed to be the language of animals and children, and these-like prehistoric men-—represent realms of experience more or less incomprehensible to the literate civilization to which Khlebnikov was opposed.

Now if it is accepted that the instincts (men's link with the animal world), the ways of childhood and (perhaps) some of the thought—processes of primitive man re—appear to a certain extent in dreams, it needs no special insight to grasp how for Khlebnikov the language of "transreason" became associated also with the language of dreams. The world of dreams is a world of darkness beyond reach, by and large, of the state. As the mind slips into a dream, the "sunlit" and "rational" world—-the world of literacy, logic, everyday business and officialdom—is reduced to zero. In its place there opens up a new world of freedom from the dimensions of time and space.