Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/184

176 fight for fluidity, transience, newness, strangeness and change in language (and the fight for "inventions" in science and technology) seemed naturally to be a fight not for space but for time. Where Mayakovsky fought against 'byt' in social and political life as state officialdom and bureaucracy, Khlebnikov fought against it as "the states of space".

Khlebnikov welcomed "inventions" in general, but reserved his most ardent enthusiasm for those connected with "lightning". He saw Radio as "the language of lightning" and believed that it would achieve the aim of his "universal language"—the unification of mankind. Khlebnikov treated Radio very much as he treated the "magical" and "transrational" language of primitive chants, prayers and folk-culture, saw humanity as a "ray" and talked of "a sonorous string of tribes" stretching across the globe. He believed that the entire Earth itself could be treated "as a resonant plate". Radio and its visual extension would become "the ears and eyes" of the world. Although he usually referred to the future as a "State of Time", he also thought of it as a "state of sounds". The entire globe would be embraced by a web of sound-vaves; territorial "frontiers" and "spaces" would "wilt". Khlebnikov saw this process as occurring not by whim or individual choice but by necessity-inevitably and, in a way, "compulsorily". He wrote to Mayakovsky in 1921:


 * I am thinking of writing a thing in which all 3 milliard of humanity would participate, and in which it would be obligatory for mankind to play. But ordinary language is unsuitable for it; a new one will have to be created step by step.