Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/171

163 TO PICTURE KHLEBNIKOV as living in a childish fantasy-world would be an over-simplification and, to an extent, a distortion. For he was also living in a technological future which, as we have seen, was really beginning to come into being. His "logic" may have shown infantilist features, but only in the sense that the child expects more control over events and more “logic” in the universe than there actually is. Whatever the defects of Khlebnikov's "scientific" methods, at the root of his efforts was a yearning for human mastery and a demand for precision and System which also characterized the scientific revolution of his age.

Khlebnikov was living in a childhood world and a world of dreams, as perhaps any artist must do to a certain extent. But there are different kinds of childishness, and different ways of living in dreams. Infantilism may be escapist, inward—looking and irresponsible, while "other—worldliness" may be dreamy, mystical, romantic or idle and passive. Khlebnikov was none of these things. Within his dream—world, the thrust of his efforts was directed towards will-power, system, definition, logical 'computation' and intellectual order—in other words, towards the very opposite of 'dreaminess‘ as normally understood. True, it was still all ultimately "dream": Khlebnikov's "science" (with the exception, perhaps, of some linguistic perceptions) was not scientific in any accepted sense of that term. But while other artists have dreamed dreams, there are not so many whose dreams have been dreams about science. An essential—perhaps the essential-feature of real science is the ability to distinguish fact from fantasy, and to subject results to some form of objective (experimental or other) test. Such an ability Khlebnikov almost wholly lacked. But, since Khlebnikov was an artist, the question