Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/164

156 connections is conveyed when Khlebnikov describes the "graph" (the "path of the point" along the graph—paper) of his "ray of fate", the ray which links everything with everything else, and which he calls "Gamma Budetlyanina". The hostility of this ray to "states of space" (an inevitable incompatibility, since the ray's laws cut through states and connect everything, while the states divide people) adds yet another dimension to the complexity of Khlebnikov's thought:
 * It should be remembered that man is in the final analysis lightning, that there exists the great lightning of the human race—and the lightning of the earth. Is it surprising that people, even without knowing each other, should be connected one with the other by means of precise laws?
 * ...Precise laws cut freely through states without noticing them, just as X—rays penetrate through muscles and give a picture of the bones: they strip mankind of the rage of state and give him another fabri-—the starry sky...
 * To understand the will of the stars means to unfurl before the eyes all the scrolls of genuine freedom. They hang above us only in the black night, these boards of future laws, and doesn't the point's path follow this course in order to avoid the wire of states among the eternal stars and hearing of humanity? Let the will of the stars be wireless. One of the routes—is Gamma Budetlyanina, with one end stirring the sky and the other hidden in the throbbings of the heart.

As the great "ray" is uncovered, writes Khlebnikov, human divisions and states vanish into nothingness:
 * ...the conception of peoples and states disappears, and there remains a single humanity, all of whose points are harmoniously connected.

This was written in 1920, but early in 1917—inspired by the outbreak of the February revolution—Khlebnikov, in his letter to Petnikov, had already put forward the basic ideas. The mission of the Futurists (or rather, of those who followed him among the Futurists) was, he had said, to replace states with a government of poets, territorial divisions with waves of sound embracing the globe, war and cannon—fire with the vibrations of strings. Some of this letter has been cited already, but a crucial passage was the following: