What was it all kicked off with? No way to find out. As in anything at all.

Yes, think deep enough and see – whichever point you grab is ready to serve the start.

How about the point when the gray-covered notebook was handed in to the town psychiatrist for analyzing the amount of sanity in the person and/or how much danger might harbor the doodler of all that stuff for innocent civilians?

Or take that pivotal moment marked by the ample pocketbook of notable sepia tinge in the pages seen through the press in 1968 being transferred from my Teacher’s hands (no pathetic blah-blah attached) into mine all full of awe and greedy gratitude? Does it draw a shorter straw to be the start?

The invitation for the thick gray notebook to pop up provided the weighty parcel in the coarse mustard-colored paper for postal deliveries, corded and sealed with chocolate-like blobs of stamped wax that I hadn’t broken. Ever.

What’s the use of breaking if you know what’s inside? Translations are there, that is what. Translations from English, 35 stories, 472 pages typewritten in Ukrainian.

These figures collected at random yet not a single one repeats another in this summing up of 6 years’ work—gee! and this one too coincides with none of them!

Six years deftly wrapped within the mustard-colored paper, stringed over and stamped by skillful hands of a post office service-lady: shrrsh-frisst-trunt-slamp – next, please!

The undeniably non-uniform figures do contain certain meaning albeit not graspable by a fleeting glimpse because socialism is, first and foremost, inventory, to cite the aphoristic definition by Lenin at the sitting of All-Russia Central Executive Committee on p.57, vol. 35, Complete Collection Of Works in 55 Volumes...

In the Publishing House they also did not bother to open the translations, toe-kicked them on the fly instead. A one-touch shot.

Yet why multiplying them? The half-back was seated all alone at his desk in the second office to left along the corridor. Sedentary way of life made of that Sitting Bull a blob of blubber. Unhealthy obesity for a soccer player.

Let him thank me for the humanitarian aid offered – no excruciating push ups, just taking to the post office 472 pages plus their cover to throw away a sliver of his fat in the exercise and the Publishing House would reimburse the expenditure confirmed by the post office bill slip.

Not a chance. A courier was sent by the fucking slackmaster...

The long and short of it, the translations returned to where they had started from and stilled like a mustard-colored tombstone to 6 years of toil imprinted in the thoughtful wrinkles over the forehead.

And why not to lie still where there is a sound prop? The DIY book-shelves under the coat of translucent shellac—softly tranquil environs for peaceful dozing.

Yet the pages in the package upon the homemade shelf not only weighed down the interior’s item but also were drip-dripping onto my brains even through the coarse paper, the pages. They made acuter the inertia amassed in 6 years of communing with them those antlike-black-critters-in-the-white-field, at first so obstinate but getting tamer bit by bit until they finally hooked me up too. The situation conditioned addiction. And now, in the stiff stillness, there remained nothing to waste myself away. Plodding donkey and circus horses are incurable.

Fucking Sir Isaac Newton and that First Law of his, although the inertia thing was stolen from Galileo.

The evenings noticeably lengthened. Finding a shim to fill them up with was not a trivial task.

Like no other quick fix but go and learn playing melodeon squeezebox and, in the dark, stroll about the neighborhood lanes turning out some hot air or two, wearing a pair of black high boots, and a fluffy flower (Portulaca oleracea) stuck in the visor-cap so that the girls would tag along and fall over themselves to treat the musician to the black seeds they’re snacking non-stop...

Sad pity but the idea about a squeezebox failed to hook me up effectively, you know, and I bypassed buying high boots.

As for the girls, cute and saucy, they’ll always find who to give their seeds to in this or that, or any other possible and predefined way, by the environment.

Squeezing all the above-said together, instead of a two-row A-major/D-minor melodeon there, by the intact heap of paper within the stiff cask-like shell of wrapping (somewhat grown already with the softer layer of the virginal pollen of dust), yes right there, possibly too nigh to, stretched out a notebook, rather thick and with a certain streak of brazen boldness in its light-gray cover.

The purpose of the stationery bad ass had, at first, rather fuzzy delineations, however, definitely slanted to the ant-like-signs-and-so-on-...-forth private games (because no computer games existed yet and computers themselves were named Machine-Computer Engineering Tools that necessitated construction of reinforced concrete foundation to mount them (the Tools) upon and on that solid basis they thundered like locomotives spinning the spools of their perforated tapes hither-thither and backward again).

Yeah, buddy, be patient, endure and condone the games of my mind spilt in your grid-ruled pages where the well schooled ant cohorts would crawl on bringing up the grim story of how I could possibly get to so morbid life style. Yet, the crossed-out lines do not count...

At that exactly moment came to me the radiant clearance as to how slippery was this question: where to start from?

However, the notebook did not give a fuck about the complicated nature of the issue and with the arrogant bro-to-bro-talk nonchalance revved forth about innocent lads hanging out on the screechy door-porch to a seedy half-hutta in the starry calm nights under uncouth strumming of Vasya (The Red) Markov’s guitar—who seldom was around but everybody knew whose instrument was being picked—accompanied with jives and gags understood only in-between the chortlers…

Everything as it was and always is to be in a one-horse burg of N...

That way, at nights, the notebook became the time-machine to which they flocked hurriedly, those a hundred times already mentioned ant-critters to turn into a fixed scrawl in another white field (small-scale-grid-ruled) until they stole the machine, not ants of course.

I didn’t report the vehicle theft and never showed any surprise, outwardly, so as to skirt dour declarations that I’d been warned it was to happen.

Yes truly, a couple of times there were voiced reproofs in the interrogative form: what fucking rascal hooey was I scribbling in that notebook?

But then the town psychiatrist diagnosed the notebook’s case as not outrageously violent so it could be taken back to lie beside the hefty stiff parcel.

The whistle blowers concurred with the doctor’s recommendation yet they were not ready to what happened after.

‘And what? What was that? Tell us, tell! Cut out your damn tries at frigging suspension! Damn coot, you!’

Well, not a thing. None! Nothing whatsoever.

To the loss restitution I played a stiff full of aloof indifference (if observed from outside) uttering no comment and since then the number of untouchable idlers on the shelves doubled drastically – the mustard-colored mother walrus and her gray cub immovably advancing to the equivalence in their pigmentation caused by the natural growth of the dust layer of identical thickness.

Both time and place let me in on their mutual incongruity with wanton games at ant domestication and getting schooled in response. That’s the ballgame, folks!

Yes, to keep it fair, here comes the confession that so rigid standstill was partly motivated by a vengeful wish of pinching the nose of the intrusive messers-around whose sporadic and rather pensive looks in the direction of dormant walrus colony of two upon their shellacked shelf as well as the fingerprints detected in the dust layer upon the gray leatherette cover were telling signs of their, deductively, thirst to know what was to happen next in them those fucking scribbles?

Not a thing. You should of taken it to the psychiatrist for the wise guy to guess the story line without helpful clues from letter-ants.

Thus that particular point proved its being a false start.

The following try was flagged off a couple of years later by the borrowed from my Teacher, for a 10-year stretch, pocket-book volume printed by Penguin Books in 1968 which accompanied me over the watershed of the Caucasian mountains...

The first winter was lived through in the cuboid insides of the tiny Pioneers' Room on the second floor in the two-story school building.

Previously it was an ordinary house before they expropriated it from the owner living at large or else he, the owner, gave it up as a token of his good will, after which move the village obtained the ready-made school for compulsory secondary education.

However, the events had taken place before my arrival over the Caucasus and I had no desire to inadvertently chafe the sore spot in ferreting the details out.

The Pioneer Room was shared with the required for such chambers compounded attribute of Pioneer Horn and Drum and the desk inserted by the wall opposite the entrance for accommodation of the school library—a couple scores of books worn to tatters—and heaps of happy kids in pioneer red ties hung from two walls in the cardboard visuals for teaching Armenian to the elementary kids and English grammar to the students at secondary schools because the third wall (opposite to the library) was barely wide enough for the wooden door from the corridor running along the Teachers’ Room (the former living room) toward the two itsy-bitsy classrooms sliced out by the plywood partitioning from the erstwhile bedroom (five more partitioned classrooms were on the first floor). The fourth wall was a complex of small glass panes in the wooden window binding.

The square sheet of tin, inserted in one of the panes in the middle of the laced structure instead of glass, had a round hole cut in its center for letting out the 5-inch-wide tin smoke pipe of the cuboidal tin stove [60 cm x40 cm x40 cm] on tin legs to keep the contraption 25 cm clear off the boards in the floor. All the tin was coated in brownish crust of rust and the round hole (cut with the convenience of thrusting the smoke pipe out in mind) had generous gaps for ventilation and contacts with the outside weather.

The Horn-and-Drum couple kept mum on the stand shelf by the door in the company with a weighty jingle-bell cast of bronze with the relief molding in Russian on its wall running “Gift from Valdai” who possessed a knack for mighty clangor to announce start/end of a class/break.

The firewood for the tin stove I cleft in the tin shelter nearby the two-door outhouse in the yard.

The ax kept flying off the handle. Old Goorguen, the school watchman from the house next door, ironically smirked from under his white-yellow mustaches to every flight he witnessed while Principal Surfic instantly announced that my style of wood-splitting disclosed my roots in the class of intelligentsia. She obviously admired my forbearance – not a single 4-letter word after the flying piece of fucking iron.

Late in the evening the tin stove turned the Pioneers’ Room into a scorching sauna but after midnight the freezing cold harassed me even through the mattress upon the folding bed and in the morning I got up into the mountain raw winter cold...

I did not set off translation of Ulysses right away. First, employing The Chamber’s 20th Century Dictionary, I translated Joyce’s The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man pretending it was the must to have a closer look at Stephen Dedalus, the youngest from the trinity of Ulysses’s main characters.

Whenever some passage stayed unclear even after The Chamber’s 20th Century Dictionary, the following Sunday I traveled by bus to Stepanakert, the capital of the Autonomous Region to keep a council with BDSE, The Big Dictionary of the Soviet Encyclopedia, in the regional library down there.

At the end of academic year I was dished out a nobody’s house in the village comprising one room on the second floor level above the locked up store cave for keeping the tin stoves in warmer seasons along with the stock of bits and scraps from school desks.

Part of my salary was spent for gradual acquisition of plywood sheets from the Building Materials Shop in the Stepanakert Bazaar which I kept nailing up, gradually, in between the paydays, to the planks in the ceiling through which there leaked the earth spread under the roof as the thermal isolation.

The start of the following academic year coincided with the finish of the plywood repair and the room was shared with a rookie teacher freshly baked and certified by a pedagogical institute in Yerevan.

Arthur wore black-rimmed glasses of rigid looks and soft locks of moderately long hair, also black. At school he taught Armenian to kids and coming home shared the woeful tales about the eternal wounds of Armenia with me.

He held on for almost two months then brought from Yerevan a sack of second-hand garments for the village kids, kinda payoff for his unfulfilled intentions, and I’ve never seen him any more.

And when the shy and soft first snow coated the ground hardened by the first frost I got it first hand that possession of a tin stove for wintering yet having nothing to stick in and kindle inside it would feel unquestionably cold.

So, I grabbed the ax bought in the process of the mentioned ceiling remodeling and started off to the woods.

On the slope grown with mighty beech trees, something certainly collared me and brought to the tree as large as any other yet almost put away by the deep cave in the trunk above its roots.

Maybe the dryad dwelling up in the tree got sick and tired of the insufficient nutrition through the defective trunk and called me? No way to figure out why and how it still managed standing upright.

Hacking the trunk leftovers through did not take long before the tree fell with the bye-bye snap-and-crackle.

However, the fall was intercepted by a neighboring beech. Which called for climbing the felled tree and cutting it into separate pieces for falling again to reach the pretty askew ground, one by one now: the crown, the pillar, the foot.

Some exquisite picture! No fucking circus will ever reproduce! The Magic of Ax Acrobatics!

The audience frozen by awe and horrified admiration in their seats. Houdini! Houdini! Cast a look from wherever you are at the poor devil from the dare-devils of you crazy followers!

Hugging the tree up there—so too high!—with just one hand, uses he remaining one to cut the other tree—felled but not fallen as of yet.

That’s a hell of an uphill job, fair ladies and kind gentlemen! Sure it is!

The man’s shedding hot sweat and frightened farts when another of cut off pieces threatens to pull him off and down in their final plunge...

After all of the quartered tree landed around the supporting trunk, the executioner dropped his ax down and descended clench-hugging the freed prop...

When on the slanted ground, my hands a-shaking and the knees a-trembling after all the strain up there in the Circus Sweat Dome, I felt the urge to go pee-pee, unzipped the fly and craned over – what the heck! Where’s my doodle?

Instead of the dick I used to, there stuck off a willy of a kindergarten kid. That’s why in the pictures on the ancient Greek amphorae depicting sportsmen and warriors this particular part in the man’s frame was drawn so dinky – your body cannot concentrate in all directions and for all purposes at once.

Not that I really needed a dick in the wood on the winter eve but pinching that medicine dropper out from its sheath of the muffler of skin with your trembling inflexible fingers is some nut to crack, which is not a circus any more but some fucking porno thru and thru.

Next day they snatched me to the village council, from midst the classes. The chairman started his bullying. In Russian but with a noticeable Caucasian accent: why da tree da cut? Dey uud prison you.

– Felled, – sez I, – as to winter thru because.

And the wood watcher was also present, Dad of Garrick from the 4th form, putting a good word in, in Armenian, that the tree had been long since kaput already.

In short, the following day they gave me a truck and a couple of young hands to fetch the cut over to the one-room two-storied house. True, on the way some part of the booty was dropped by another house too, yet the remainder still lasted to the next summer...

And the 4th grade was the most populated grade at school, by the bye. Two boys and two girls but later Arega’s parents moved to Armenia and took her over as well.

So, when the The Portrait... was finished, I did not instantly switch over to Ulysses but felt some inclination for that rascally scribbling once again. The payoff on the try amounted to 11 pages, however, not a sequence to what had stayed back in the gray notebook but from a period ten years later.

Well, I saw they hit it off well, the pages, and only then I plunged into Ulysses because there remained just 9 years from the stipulated stretch.

Thus I put my self-made doodling off for fifo remains fifo in the Caucasus too, and if you want to get it indeed what it could mean then ask your system administrator.

However, as it turned out, my own writing was put off for 29 years and till some absolutely offbeat village...

What the heck! See? To find the point for a start is just half the battle because the question of equal vagueness and importance is to shut up in time. A lil bit more and this here blog installment would call for a whole keg instead of the routine bottle...

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