Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/92

84 ALONG WITH THE UNITY OF HUMAN TONGUES, the unity of all knowledge became for Khlebnikov an ever more potent dream. In search of its fulfilment, the poet began studying an extraordinarily wide variety of facts culled from the library-books he could lay his hands on. "I am studying mountains and their location on the earth's crust", he wrote to Kruchenykh in 1913. He also built complicated equations designed to express the motions of the planets and their relation to the speed of light. His equation for the planet Earth looked like this:


 * M. 365.24.60.60.v.= PR2- 48PR 2.
 * 365

The equation for Jupiter was more complicated:


 * 300.00 . 1044 . 11 . 6000 . 86400 = 3.77721012—

48 . 3 . 7772. 1012 1044

He wrote that it was the same for Venus, and that "in this consists the first boomerang aimed at Newton".

Khlebnikov's thirst for mathematical material seemed unquenchable. To his friend Spassky he wrote:


 * I need books with numbers in them.

It was almost as if it hardly mattered what the subject of study was, so long as the information could be expressed in numerical form. In May 1914 he wrote to Kamensky:


 * A business proposition: jot down the days and hours of your emotions, as if they moved like the stars. Yours and hers. And namely their angles turns, climax points. And I will construct an equation!