Read The Vanishing Futurist Online
Authors: Charlotte Hobson
The Vanishing Futurist (10 page)
‘What on earth gave you this idea?’ asked Fyodor, frowning.
‘The shamans use the mushrooms to discover their totems and to form a bond between the tribe. They claim it as their magic, when of course we know it is merely the physiological effect of the drug on the brain. It allows the individual to escape his own consciousness, even if only for a few hours, and to experience a sense of union with all existence. Shamans and witch-doctors of all religions see this as oneness with God. We understand it in simpler terms – it is the sensation of Communism.’
‘Might it not damage the brain?’
‘Oh no, the physical effect wears off within twenty-four hours. I have discussed it with Marina. But the psychological effect can be life-changing. This, after all, is what we are hoping for.’
There was a pause, doubt in the air.
‘I didn’t know you were planning something like this,’ murmured Fyodor, always cautious.
‘Count me in,’ said the dancer, Ivan. ‘Nina?’
‘Darling, you know me, I’m ready for anything.’
‘Me too,’ drawled Volodya from the corner.
‘How about you, Gerty?’ asked Sonya.
I took a deep breath and glanced at Nikita. ‘Yes. I’ll do it.’
‘Bravo, Gerty!’ Pasha smiled at me. ‘If Gerty can overcome her fears, then you all can.’
One by one, they agreed, even Fyodor. We ate the dried mushrooms then and there, before anyone could change their mind: all of us except Slavkin and Marina, who were to look after us. While the drug took hold, on Nikita’s instructions, we prepared ourselves by loosening our clothing and removing our shoes and stockings; washing our hands, face and feet; carrying out a few of the Model T exercises and drinking a glass of water. Nikita attached three rubber pads to our foreheads, and two behind each ear, to monitor our neurological energy patterns. Then we waited to take our turn in the PropMash. As I wrote in my account some time afterwards:
My mind feels beautifully relaxed and I stare at the halo of light around the lamp when my name is called. My limbs are heavy and I am glad of Nikita’s guiding arm as he helps me into the Propaganda Machine. The helmet presses down on my head as though the whole weight of the atmosphere were concentrated on me and I am suddenly very afraid, but Nikita’s eyes are fastened on mine, infinitely reassuring, and I find myself saying, ‘I love you so much.’ And he gazes back at me without saying anything but in his eyes is written clearly that he loves me too, more profoundly than I have ever been loved. And I relax into the seat and relinquish myself to the pain and horror of the Machine, because I know it is an expression of his love, and even the screams that I hear coming from my mouth, and the sweat, and shudders of terror that rend my whole being, are enfolded and cushioned in the vast sensation of warmth and tenderness that I feel from him. And therefore when the Crisis is over, and my tears are drying on my cheeks in the soft breeze of Socialism, my heart almost bursts with joy.
And when we had waited while Nikita took further readings of neurological energy patterns, he and Marina led us gently across the courtyard to the
banya
, the steam bath, which they had fired up, using some joists from the stable roof, and we gasped at the delicious sensation of heat. We shuffled off our clothes, and splashed water onto the stove. Nakedness, under the influence of the drug, felt like perfection, like innocence. We were in the Garden of Eden again. After a few moments of blindness a leg emerged, a breast, a dangling arm, with bony joints sliding under the skin or smooth and massive. We were quiet and utterly at peace.
Later Slavkin spoke. ‘Each time we – just we few – allow ourselves to imagine a harmonious world, we bring it closer. We are creating the future here, in our minds. The neurological patterns you are now experiencing will be its foundations. Just share your thoughts with us. You know the answer, if only you can discover it within yourself. Inside your imagination lies the blueprint for the future. How, why, what you will into being – this is the choice that confronts you, and all of us.’
This journey was followed by several more. They played a remarkable part in bonding our small community together, at least in the short term. No one reported any ill-effects from the narcotic. Volodya and Vera acquiesced to the will of the commune. Fyodor accepted Slavkin’s leadership. Ivan and Nina co-operated more fully. I felt happier, less suspicious of Sonya. We worked together harmoniously, and when Slavkin began to talk to us about his plans for the Socialisation Capsule, they did not seem far-fetched in the slightest.
Slavkin now made an extraordinary leap from his work on iridium alloys into quantum mechanics. His notes on the Socialisation Capsule have been much reproduced in the decades since his disappearance and the scholarly literature on them is extensive. Nonetheless I reproduce below the text of the final lecture he ever gave, in January 1919. This was what Slavkin was working on in his workshop during those cruel winter months – his last, astonishing achievement before what many consider the greatest feat of all, his disappearance.
Particle physics was in its infancy, yet in this text Slavkin intuited truths about the quantum world that mathematicians and scientists would begin to understand only decades later. Indeed, there is a school of thought in the Soviet Union that suggests the real proof of Slavkin’s success with the Socialisation Capsule lies right here, in this lecture – in these ideas that are so flagrantly anachronistic they can have only one possible explanation. He must have achieved his aim and returned to write the lecture later. They also point to his apparent foreknowledge of Eisenstein’s theory of montage in the Propaganda Machine, and the amazing farsightedness of many of his other inventions. However, as one who saw a number of the early ideas in development, this seems to me to be stretching things too far.
Still, how did he do it, on our miserable diet of millet porridge, in a collapsing city, among our endless arguments? How did he even have time, after his long days at the Centre for Revolutionary Research and our meetings stretching far into the night? I know he hardly slept, waking at three or four in the morning and padding down to his workshop in his dressing-gown. I know he also made frequent use of the Siberian mushrooms. By the time he woke the commune he had already completed four or five hours’ work. Fizzing with energy, robe flying, eyes glittering in his pale face, laughing and jumping about on his bare feet with their long toes, he smashed the gong like a djinn, or an Orthodox saint.
Lecture delivered by Nikita Slavkin at the Polytechnic Institute on 12 January 1919
The radical problem of Communism is in fact the problem of time. The key to constructing Communism lies therefore in a solution to this problem – a means of distorting or evading time.
Darwin’s discoveries did not, as it first seemed, paint a picture of a world solely based on ‘survival of the fittest’. Quite the contrary, evolution has given humans (and all living things) a dual strategy for survival – on the one hand, a ferocious survival instinct where it is a question of kill or be killed; and on the other hand, the instinct to work within a community for the benefit of the group as a whole, when that group provides a safeguard for the individual. This last instinct, which is present in the huge majority of living things – from plants to insects to communities of fish or mammals and to humans as well, of course – is the dynamic force behind Socialism.
In general, the history of mankind is the story of the suppression of the ‘kill or be killed’ instinct and the cultivation of the communal instinct – millennia of slow progress towards humanism, away from barbarism. In this sense the battle between the two impulses is already won; only the march of time stands between us and the ultimate victory of Socialism.
It may be that this Revolution is too early, as Marxists suggest; that the proletariat has not yet reached the right level of development for Socialism to exist. If this is the case, it, too, is unimportant; progress will wash backwards and forwards, and short-sighted people will no doubt announce that Communism is defeated, not noticing that beneath the superficial events of history a huge tide is carrying humankind imperceptibly away from the instinct to slaughter meaninglessly, to force their fellow men and women into economic or domestic slavery, to deny the union of all mankind on grounds of nation, race or religion – and towards unity.
In this generation, however, we long for a discovery that will speed up the process and give hope to the millions of innocents who are suffering now, whose parents and grandparents have suffered, and whose children can look forward only to more of the same.
This is where new discoveries in physics lead us to hope for new approaches.
Recent developments have resulted in not one, but two undeniable Revolutions in our understanding of the world, both of which we owe in large part to the talents of Herr Einstein. One is his Theory of Relativity, which, with one grand gesture, sweeps away all that we thought we knew about the solidity of the world, of matter and time. Herr Einstein has shown us that we inhabit a universe in which nothing is constant and all depends on the state of the other. It is a universe in which the future, the present and the past are curled up together like puppies on a mat.
The second, astonishing revelation concerns the life of the smallest fragments of matter that make up the universe. Planck, Rutherford, Einstein and others, in their studies of particles, have shown us that even the most minute pieces of matter live in relation to all other pieces of matter; that their state is intimately bound up with our own, and not only each physical movement of ours but even, perhaps, each uncommunicated thought has an effect on the behaviour of the physical world around us.
This is the reality of our universe – a state of Atomic Communism, in which we are all inextricably enmeshed in the lives of not only our fellow men, but of the entire world of living and non-living beings. It is a world that needs no biblical God to fill us with a sense of unutterable wonder, nor any priest to convince us of our duty towards it. It is also a world that holds out to us, in its benevolence, the possibility of harmony – not in the far future, but now, in the present. And this harmony is based on the laws of quantum physics, on the inalienable truths of our universe.
In my own laboratory I have made a series of studies of the electromagnetic radiation that is associated with a state of psychological harmony, and those associated with disharmony. My experiments have taken place under proper laboratory conditions without the prior knowledge of the subjects. While they were in the psychological state that I have termed ‘Chaos’ – i.e. exhibiting signs of distress, pain and fear – I tested the quantum energy states within their brain cells; and equally in the psychological state I have termed ‘Order’ – i.e. calmness, happiness, comfort.
The frequencies of ‘Chaos’ showed a marked dissimilarity across the group, as you will see from my results; while, to my astonishment, the frequencies associated with ‘Order’ oscillated within a range of 0.0007 h (where h is the Planck constant).
When Tolstoy remarked, ‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’, he little realised that his insight was correct even at the level of quantum neurology.
My findings have led me to a further course of study on which I am now engaged. If, as seems to be the case, we have identified the frequency associated with ‘Order’ at the subatomic level in the human brain, then our next step is to ascertain a method of stabilising the oscillation of the brain particles within this range of frequencies. I am currently engaged in building a Socialisation Capsule, a brain-stimulation chamber of radical accuracy that will create in the brain a steady state denoting ‘Order’. Under this stimulus the brain particles will not only achieve a stable, sustainable mode but will remain oscillating at this frequency for some time, probably months or years, thereafter.
There are various outcomes that may result from this experiment:
In the most conservative, subjects exhibiting the state of Order will be able to work in varied and creative ways towards the establishment of an external state of Order. The experiment will continue on a larger and larger scale, following the mass production of the Socialisation Capsules, and the influence of the Socialised (as they may be known) will spread throughout human society.
A second possible result involves the natural spread of the state of Order at a subatomic level; within the vast, united web of particles that is our world, a reaction takes place, the ‘Socialist’ frequency is inevitably communicated from particle to particle at the speed of light and alters our planet utterly and instantaneously.
A third possible result concerns the complex nature of light particles, which, it is increasingly suspected, may also apply to electrons and even all particles – the wave-particle duality – which inserts a new level of uncertainty into our knowledge of the Universe. Before being measured, energy, it is suggested, may occupy a type of unknowable, unmeasurable stage between wave and particle. Bizarre though this may sound, it may be that they are impossible to track because they are in fact not a part of our universe at these moments. There are other versions of reality, other dimensions, with which we perhaps share matter; our matter, far from existing solidly in our world, flickers between an infinite number of worlds that all co-exist within this universe. And in this multitude of other realities, all the possibilities thrown up by our reality are played out; every unchosen path is taken, every unsaid word is spoken.
Among these dimensions there is, undoubtedly, a Communist reality; a world where man has lived in harmony with his fellow man since the beginning of history. It is quite possible, therefore, that the Socialisation Capsule will do more than just create a beneficial mindset in patients. If our particles, under the influence of the Capsule, begin to oscillate at the correct frequency for Communism, it follows that we, particle-entities, will immediately be transported to the reality of which this frequency is the dominant feature. We will cease to exist in the reality that is dominated by ‘Chaos’. We will exist, instead, in the reality of ‘Order’.
Our Time Travel will carry us instantly not to another Age, nor another Place, but another Now.
