I sit and sit, I write and write… no, that‘s wrong. Here’s the right way: I translate and translate! I‘m sick of it! Suddenly I wanted to write not about the book, but about the process itself. Besides, the current fragment of text is not very convenient — it’s supposed to be about tragedy (I‘ll post it in the blog one of these days, call it “Pioneer Formula | § 42.2.” It’s about trauma, disability, and all the feelings that come with it — but that happened so long ago that the tragedy has evaporated from my head, and I don‘t feel like inventing new feelings, but I have to…
So here I sit, I write… oh, we already did that. Then let’s try this: I stand like Buridan‘s ass — a shopaholic ass — in front of two piles of hay, trying to decide which one to choose: the one I have to or the one I don’t have to.
I could roll dice (not my own — just regular dice), I could flip a coin — I have a special one, YES-NO, — or I could ask my Pocket Calculator.
“Mirror, mirror, on the wall, give me a topic — something, anything, to distract me from translating.”
He looks over my shoulder at the draft: “What’s the point?! Here you are writing that you raspilіўsya. But in Belarusian, raspilіўsya means both having a drink and amputating your fingers. Choose whichever is closer to your heart.”
Closer to my heart?! Everything is pretty far!
Mind you, in this advice the PC was a bit dim, but that‘s why he’s a pocket calculator, not a mighty desktop one: raspilіўsya isn‘t about drinking. Now napilіўsya— that works. That means getting wasted, plastered.
But that’s not the main point. The main point is that the topic of choice has revealed itself! (I‘ll grab onto anything just to avoid working, to avoid translating.)
Schrödinger’s Cat Dilemma
Imagine a cat. Someone opens the door to a frosty blizzard outside. He peeks out, touches the cold, nasty snow with his paw, shakes it off in disgust, and thinks:
To be or not to be, that is the question —
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die — to sleep…
Oops, cats can‘t think like that. He just stares blankly outside and decides: stay inside and howl with boredom, or go outside and instantly regret it.
Dilemma, Additional Options
Remember the ditch-digging ensign from my next post? He has the simplest dilemma: dig from the fence, or dig until lunch? The physics is different, the vector is different, but the result is the same — you’re in the mud, holding a shovel, thinking that life is nothing but palindromes. Whether it hits you in the forehead or the back of the head, lunch and discharge are still somewhere ahead.
But there are worse options — sneaky ones.
Imagine a sandwich in outer space. It can‘t fall butter-side down, but it doesn’t fly into your mouth either. It just hangs there in front of your face, annoying you.
You‘d think: what could be worse?
There is, there is worse! Have you heard of the Dumpling Paradox? Of course you haven’t — I just made it up. Either you fall apart in boiling water from lack of character, or you burn your bottom to the frying pan forever from sheer stubbornness. In this example, the dumpling‘s fate echoes the equally unenviable fate of Pinocchio (Buratino): you won’t drown, but jumping into fire feels somehow wooden. Now there‘s a situation where nobody wants you anywhere.
Kolobok Options
To conclude my report, I want to draw your attention to two more Kolobok-style solutions to the choice problem: you can roll along, gathering all the road dust onto yourself, or you can sit on the windowsill and wait until you go stale and grow mold (that is definitely not my method).
Ai-Yoi-Yachikichiki, and here is my choice:
You can stand up and, while standing, do something useful. Or you can lie down, lying philosophically, and justify your laziness by the laws of the Tao!
The Justifier (that’s me, and it‘s not a profession — it’s a calling.)