Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/163

155 :Accomplish by degrees a surrender of power to the starry sky...

To Khlebnikov, to surrender power to "the starry sky" was equally to surrender it to "a self—governing speech". There was no contradiction, in other words, between his "starry sky" demand and his words, quoted earlier, about a "self—governing kingdom" ruled by a "self-governing speech". For the language of the star—world was, as we have seen, none other than Khlebnikov's "transrational language", the language of words in their "nocturnal, starry" sense. To surrender power to the starry sky meant, for Khlebnikov, to allow the world to be governed, as it were, "from within", in accordance with the inner will of humanity—a will (expressed in dreams and poetry alike) by which man is linked with his childhood, with his prehistoric ancestry and with his roots in the natural universe with its light-waves and stars. As one of his "Basks of the Presidents of the Terrestrial Sphere", Khlebnikov listed the re—discovery of man's "white, glistening root", remarking that


 * in realizing mankind, it is necessary not to sever his ties in the universe and in the will, in which—as in a chalice—-humanity was born.

Khlebnikov saw Radio as an instrument of this "will": it was humanity's "ears" and "eyes", and a manifestation of the "life of the spirit", as we have seen. Identifying "inventions" with his own poetic work, Khlebnikov saw the electronics revolution more generally as stemming from the inner world of the human spirit, while at the same time it returned "the light-ray" of humanity in a direct way into contact with the light-rays of the suns and stars of the universe. In this way the inner world of man's dreams was linked with the infinities of the universe, just as man's future was linked with his prehistoric or even cosmic past. The extremes of Space——inner and outer—~were joined, just as were the ends of time. A sense of these mind-boggling