Preliminary comments by the translator:
This text was originally in Russian, written by a very talented author. It's hell on the translator. In English, the order of words is set in stone. In Russian, the order of words can be shifted around, in order to modify the tone of the phrase and its meaning. You have no idea what its like to arrive to a sentence half a page long, and having to break it up and restructure it...
1) Throughout the text, the word "man" is used in place of "person" and not in place of "male." Human sounds too biological, and person - too PC.
2) The author uses quite a few English words and expressions; those will be put in bold.
3) If this seems completely unreadable at first, don't worry. It's supposed to scramble your brains.
4) I don't think the author was on acid when he wrote this...
1st draft.
Homo Zapiens - ch. 7 of "Generation P", by Viktor Pelevin
The planshette * on the table resembled a tank on the center square of a small European town. The sealed bottle of "Johnny Walker" next to it fittingly resembled a tower. The accordingly red wine that Tatarskiy just finished drinking also incorporated itself into the picture. Its container - a long, thin bottle - resembled a Gothic cathedral, temporarily occupied by the regional Committee of the Communist Party, and the emptiness inside the bottle reminded one of the ideological burn-out of communism, the meaninglessness of the historical bloodshed and the general crisis of the Russian Idea. Tatarskiy finished the wine and flung the empty bottle into the paper-basket. "Velvet Revolution," he thought.
He was sitting at the table in his "Rage against the machine" T-shirt and finishing the instructions to the planshette. The pen he bought near a subway station glided effortlessly into the holder and he fixed it in place with a bolt. It was suspended by a weak spring that was supposed to keep it on the paper. The paper - a whole stack - was already under the planshette; he could begin.
After looking over the room, he placed his hands on the board, then stood up nervously, paced around the room, and closed the curtains. Then he thought a little more and lit a candle. Any further preparations would have been silly. Frankly, these last ones were silly as well.
He sat back at the table and placed his hands on the board. "Okay," he thought, "what now? Do I need to say something out loud?"
- Calling the spirit of Che Guevara. Calling the spirit of Che Guevara, - he said and imagined right away that he shouldn't just call the spirit, he should ask it a question.
- I'd like to know... well, let's see, something new about advertising, something Al Rice and comrade Ogilvy didn't have, - he said. - So I can understand it better than all the others.
At that very moment the board shook epileptically under his palms, and the pen drew out in the upper part of the sheet:

IDENTIALISM PRESENTED AS THE HIGHEST STATE OF
DUALISM
Tatarskiy yanked away his hands and stared frightfully at the written for a few seconds. Then he placed his hands back, and the board started moving again, only now the letters appearing from under the pen were small and neat.
Initially these words were intended for the magazine of the Cuban Armed Forces "Oliva Verde". But it would be foolish to insist in trivialities of this kind now, when we know for sure that the whole plan of existence, with its magazines and its armed forces, is simply a sequence of moments of cognizance, united only by the fact that in each new moment, there is a notion of the preceding ones. Even though this continuity remains unbroken since beginningless times, the cognizance never becomes aware of itself. This is why man's condition is so pityful.
But the great fighter for the freedom of mankind Siddhartha Gautama pointed out in many of his works that the main reason for man's pityful condition in life is first of all the notion of the existence of man, life, and the condition of pityfulness, i.e. the dualism that makes one divide into subjects and objects that which in reality has never existed and will never exist.
Tatarskiy pulled out the used up sheet, put his hands back on the planshette, and it shook again.
Siddhartha Gautama was able to demonstrate this simple truth to many people, because in his days their feelings were simple and strong, and their inner world - clear and unclouded. One word could completely transform a man's whole life, and momentarily carry him to the other shore, towards unbound freedom. But many centuries passed. Today, the words of Buddha are available to all, but salvation does not find many of them. Beyond doubt, this is has to do with the new cultural circumstances, which the ancient texts of all religions called the coming "Dark Age."
Compadres!
This Dark Age has already arrived. And this is first and foremost connected with the role that the so-called visual/psychological generators, or objects of the second type, now play in a man's life.
When Buddha said that dualism is caused by conjectural separation of the world into subjects and objects, he was talking about the subjective/objective separation of the first type. The main distinct mark of the Dark Age is that the defining influence on a man's life is brought on by the subjective/objective separation of the second type, which just didn't exist in Buddha's days.
To explain what is meant by objects type one and objects type two, let's give an example - television. When the TV is off, it presents an object type one. It's simply a box with a glass wall which we are free to observe or not to observe. When someone looks at the dark screen, the movement of his eyes is directed exclusively by his inner nerve impulses or the psychological process that occurs in his mind. For example, the man may note that the screen is covered in fly dots. Or decide that it would be great to buy a TV twice as big. Or that he should probably move it to a different corner. A television set in itself is in no way different from the objects that people observed in Buddha's days, be it a rock, a dew drop on a stem of grass, or an arrow with a divided point - on other words, all that Buddha gave as examples in his conversations.
But when the television is on, it is transformed from object type one into object type two. It becomes a phenomenon of a completely different nature. And although the person who is looking at the screen does not notice the metamorphosis, it is tremendous. To the viewer, the television disappears as a material object with weight, dimensions, and other physical qualities. Instead the viewer gets the sense of being present in another place, a sense well familiar to all here gathered.

Tatarskiy looked around, as if expecting to see all of those "gathered." Naturally, he didn't find anyone. Taking another sheet of paper from under the planshette, he pondered how long it would take the spirit to use up all the paper, and returned his hands to the wooden board.

Compadres!
Only one question remains: who exactly is present? Can it be said that it is the viewer himself? Let us repeat the question, because it is crucial - can it be said that the television is watched by the person watching it?
We assert that it is not. And here is why: When a man looked over the turned-off television set, the movement of his eyes and his flow of attention were directed by his own will impulses, even if they were chaotic. A dark screen without any image did not influence them in any manner, or it did, but only as background.
The turned-on television almost never presents a view from one still camera, therefore its image does not function as a background. On the contrary, this image changes intensely. Every few seconds there is either a change in frame, an upclose on some object, or a switch to another camera - the image is constantly modified by the operator and the director behind him. This change in image is called technical modification.
Here we ask for your undivided attention, because the next situation is rather hard to understand, although at core it is very simple. Furthermore, you might get a feeling that we are discussing something insignificant. We take on full responsibility in stating that we are discussing the most important psychological phenomenon of the end of the second millenium.
We can examine the change in image that occurs as a result of the various technical modifications as an alternative to the hypothetical mental process that would make the observer shift his attention from one thing to another and select one more interesting, i.e. to manipulte his attention in a way that the filming crew does it for him. There appears a virtual subject of this mental process, that for the time slot of the program exists in place of the man, entering his consciousness like a hand into a rubber glove.
This resembles the state of being posessed by a demon; the difference is in the fact that there is no demon, only the symptoms of being posessed. This demon is hypothetical, but when the TV viewer allows the filming crew to shift his attention from object to object, it's as if he becomes the demon, and the demon that really doesn't exist posesses him and millions of other viewers.
This can be adequately called an experience of collective non-being, because the virtual subject dislodging the viewer's own mind does not exist absolutely - he is only an effect that appears as a result of the collective effort of the editors, operators, and the director. On the other hand, to the man watching television nothing is more real than this virtual subject.
Moreover. Labsang Suchong from the monastery Pu Er believes that should the situation arise when over 4/5 of the Earth's population will watch one particular program - let's say, a soccer match - this virtual effect will be able to displace the collective karmic vision of the human plan of existence from the joined minds of the people, and the consequences may be unpredictable (it is entirely possible that in addition to the hell of molten metal, the hell of blade-like trees etc. a new hell will emanate - the hell of the eternal soccer match). But his hypothesis has not been tested, and in any case, it's a matter of the future. We, on the other hand, are interested not in the frightening prospects of tomorrow, but in the no less frightening reality of today.
Let us draw our first conclusion: object number two, i.e. the turned on TV, goes with subject number two, i.e. the virtual viewer that would have directed his attention in the same way the editing-directing crew does it for him. Feelings, thoughts and secretion of adrenaline and other hormones in the body of the viewer are dictated by an outside operator and calculated by someone else. And of course, subject number one does not notice the moment at which he is displaced by subject number two, because after the displacement, there is no one left to notice - subject number two is unreal.
But he is not simply unreal. That word can be adequately applied to everything in the human world. There are no words to describe the degree of his unreality. It's a piling of unexistances one on top of another, an air castle with abyss for foundation. A question may arise - why flounder around in all these nonexistances, measuring the degree of their unreality? But this difference between subjects of the first and the second type is very important.
Subject number one believes that reality is the material world. Subject number two believes that reality is the material world shown on television.
Because he is a product of the faulty subject/object division, subject number one is illusory. But the chaotic movement of his thoughts and moods at least has a viewer - metaphorically, it's possible to say that subject number one is constantly watching a TV show about himself, gradually forgetting that he is a viewer, and identifying with the show.
From that point of view, subject number two is something totally unbelievable and indescribable. It is a TV show that watches another TV show. This process involves emotions and thoughts, but the person in whose mind they appear is absent.
Surfing of channels that is used to escape the commercials is called "zapping." The bourgeois inquirers has researched quite thoroughly the psychological condition of a person engaged in zapping, and the corresponding type of mentality that is gradually becoming the base of the modern world. But the type of zapping that those inquirers have been researching corresponds to the surfing of channels by the viewer himself.
Zapping of the viewer conducted by the director and the operator (i.e. the coerced induction of the subject number two as a result of the technical modifications) is another type of zapping, a forced one, and research on this subject has been terminated practically in all the countries, except Butan, where television is outlawed. But the coerced zapping, when the television transforms into a remote control of the viewer, is not simply one of the methods of organization of the video clips - it is the basis of tele-conveyance, the main process of influencing the mind with the infomercial field. This is why from now on the subject number two will be referred to as Homo Zapiens , or HZ.
Let us repeat this extremely important conclusion: just as the viewer, not wanting to sit through the commercials, surfs the channels, the momentary and unpredictable modifications surf the viewer himself. Transformed into HZ, he becomes a TV show operated from a distance. And this is the state in which he spends a significant part of his life.
Compadres!
The condition of the modern man is not simply pityful - it can be said that it's absent, because there is no man to speak of. There is nothing that can be pointed to, and labeled: "This, this here is Homo Zapiens." HZ is simply the leftover glow from the luminophore of the slumbering soul; it is a movie about the filming of another movie, shown on television in an empty house.
Naturally, a question arises: why is the modern man in such a predicament? Who is attempting to replace the already dazed and confused Homo Sapiens with a cubic metre of emptiness in the state of HZ?
The answer is obviously clear: no one. But let us not dwell on the bitter absurdity of the situation. In order to achieve a deeper understanding of it, let us recall that the main cause of the existance of television is its advertising function, connected with circulation of money. Therefore now we will have to adress the direction of the human thought known as economics.
Economics is the accepted term for a pseudo-science that deals with illusory relations of subjects of the first and of the second type in connection with the hallucinatory process of their imaginary enrichment.
From the point of view of this discipline every man is a cell of the organism that the economists of the ancient times called a mammona. The textbooks of the Front of the Complete and Final Liberation call it simply the ORANUS (in English - "assmouth"). That says much more about its true nature and leaves less room for mystical speculations. Each one of these cells, i.e. humans considered solely for their economic abilities, has a certain social/psychological membrane that allows it to pass money (in the organism of the oranus they play the role of blood or lymph) inside and out. From the point of view of the economics, the goal of each of these cells of the mammona is to let as much money as possible inside the membrane, and let as little as possible out.
But the imperatif of the existence of the oranus as a whole requires for its cellular structure to be refreshed with an ever growing flow of money. That's why the oranus, in the process of its evolution (it is currently at a stage close to that of a mollusk), develops a semblance of a primitive nervous system, the so-called "media", the basis of which is television. This nervous system sends nerve signals all over its virtual body, thus operating the activity of the cells.
There exist three types of this influence. They are called the oral, the anal, and the displacing wow-impulses (from the commercial interjection "wow!").
The oral wow-impulse forces the cell to absorb money in order to eliminate discomfort from the conflict between self-image and the image of the ideal "super-self" created by advertisements. Let us notice, that it's never about the things that money can buy in order to bring this ideal "self" into existence - it's about the money itself. True, many millionaires wear rags and drive cheap cars - but to allow oneself this one must be a millionaire. A poor man in this situation would have suffered immensely from cognitive dissonance, which is why many poor people spend the last of their money on expensive clothes.
The anal wow-impulse forces a cell to secrete money in order to experience the pleasure of observing the similarities between the mentioned above images.
Because the two described actions - absorbtion and secretion of money - contradict one another, the anal wow-impulse acts in a covered up manner, and the person seriously thinks that the pleasure is connected to owning an object, and not the act of spending money itself. However it's obvious that, for example, as a physical object, a watch that costs 50 thousand dollars is incapable of giving the owner more pleasure than a watch that costs fifty - it's all in the sum of money.
The oral and anal wow-impulses are called after the analogy with the sphincteric motions. However, it would be more correct to correlate them to inhalation and exhalation, since the feeling they induce resembles a sort of psychical suffocation, or, on the contrary, hyperventilation. The oral-anal irritation reaches its most intense at the game table, in the casino, or during the trading on the stock exchange, even though there are no set methods of wow-stimulation.
The displacing impulse supresses and displaces all psychical processes that could get in the way of full identification with an oranus cell out of the consciousness. It appears when a psychical stimulation lacks oral-anal components. The displacing impulse is a muffler-jammer that blocks the transmission from an unwanted radiostation by generating intense static. It's action is marvelously expressed in popular sayings like "Money talks, bullshit walks," and "If you are so clever, show me your money." Without this infuence, oranus would not be able to force people to play the role of its cells. Under the influence of the displacing impulse that blocks all delicate psychical processes unconnected to circulation of money, the world starts being perceived exclusively as the embodiment of the oranus. This leads to frightening results. Here is how a broker from the London Stock Exchnage describes his vision: "The world is a place where business meets money."
It would not be an exaggeration to say that this psychical condition is widespread. Everything that is dealt with in modern economics, sociology, and culturology presents, in essense, a description of the somatic and exchange processes in the oranus. The nature of oranus is that of a primitive virtual organism of the parasitic type. However, it's peculiaroty is in that it doesn't latch onto one donor organism, but instead makes other organisms its cells. �� - �� . �� , �� , �� . �� , �� . �� , �� , �� , �� . �� , � ��. ��, �� , �� ...
(to be continued)
* - planshette - a small triangular or heart-shaped board supported on casters at two points and a vertical pencil at a third and believed to produce automatic writing when lightly touched by the fingers.
the guy who translated this book into English called the planshette an "ouija board." nothing could be farther from the truth. an ouija board is simply a piece of cardboard with symbols, numbers, and letters scribbled on it. Tatarskij would never be able to insert a pen into a piece of cardboard or receive text from it. a piece of cardboard lying flat on the table can't shake under someone's touch.
Translation copyright 1999-2000 by dj_annie_z.