The Last Da Vinci

Spy mania

“We lived without roads… and we will continue to live. Otherwise, as soon as we fix the road, the dragon will come…

And even worse—the inquisitors will come…”

from the film “31 June”, episode 1, time 0:09:52.

In May 2019, when East and I were returning home to the Russian Federation from another country, one of the Russian frontier officer approached us at the border, asked us to go into a separate room and asked me about all my close relatives, then demanded that I give him my phone, because he “needs to check the IMEI of the phone, make sure it’s not stolen”. The cost of my tiny phone (an older model, not a smartphone) did not exceed 700 Russian rubles, or about 10 US dollars.

The next suspicious event occurred when we were a quarter of the way home from the border. When we stopped on the highway, where there was a bus stop, in order to change the driver, and East took the wheel, a passenger car stopped ten meters ahead of us, driving behind us. While we were standing at the bus stop for a couple of minutes, another car stopped a hundred meters behind us, it stood there for a few minutes, then drove around us and after 300 meters went to the right to turn. As we continued on our way, we were overtaken by a car in front of us; there was a woman driving it, who looked at me carefully.

This scene reminded me of chase sequences from spy action movies. I note that this all happened on a deserted highway.

Half an hour before this event, the idea occurred to me why the frontier officer needed my phone; I told East that IMEI is used to track the geographic movements of the phone, and, consequently, its owner.

The comic “suspicion of surveillance” arose in me due to the fact that a few months before, on October 15, 2018, I published my first book 19+ via the Internet.

In the fall of 2019, my mother traveled to another country and at the Russian border, frontier guards checked her with double attention, like no one else from their group of tourists.

Hobbies or 32 fouettés

“We would like to hit on you! It's a shame you're a ghost.”

“Who is the ghost?? Am I a ghost?!! I am an honest woman and a decent widow! Even twice a widow!! I also found a king… from the other world!”

“Am I from the other world???”

“Yes!”

“I live in this world, and you, beautiful lady, came to Perador from the other world!”

“You are from the other world! And I am from this world!!”

“And I… from what world?…”

“Don't know…”

from the film “31 June”, episode 2, time 0:41:54.

Ballet, music, mathematics, computer games

“I see the blue, distant light again,

Ballet is my Charming Prince,

He gives me a gilted shoe

And he leads me into a mysterious world.”

Song “Ballet”, singer Alla Pugacheva, 1985.

Ballet

In mid-august 2018, I was sitting on a bench outside my house, where I lived in apartment 109, wondering what I should do in my future life. On June 19, 2018, I finished the book 19+; then East and I went to the city of Rechitsa regarding the issue of a deed of gift for half of my father’s house, and for a month now I had not done anything, and was quite ready to clarify my way of communicating with reality.

I rejected all options that included direct communication with people, because I essentially had nothing to say to them, I had no intention of deceiving or manipulating them, and in principle, it is unknown whether there would have been any benefit in this hypothetical verbal interaction of ours.

Further, I did not consider any opportunities for increasing my well-being, increasing the comfort of my life, or growing my impact on nature. I either didn’t need this or didn’t want it.

All that remained was art. But which one? I was thinking about taking up fine art, dance, music or singing.

Fine art, a plus was that 25 years ago I made sketches that I personally liked, but it didn’t go any further. I did not choose this type of art, because as a result of the artist’s work, paintings and drawings remain that need to be placed somewhere. And for a beginning artist, this is a big problem.

Next on the list were dance, music and vocals, in my understanding they were in equal positions, but I chose dance because I felt an internal predisposition towards it, I heard that some people after 40 suddenly start dancing, i.e. this was not my unique path, but it was at least a little common, and I also found out on the Internet that there are ballet schools for adults in Moscow and St. Petersburg!

As I later found out, these schools appeared quite recently, around 2008, and initially they were located only in the capitals; previously there was no such direction at all. In ordinary ballet schools, they teach children from 4–6 years old, who by the age of 12 become “adult children”, they can do everything, and often stop to study.

The fashion for practicing ballet (classical dance) with adults (older children) aged 25–50 is a completely new and unexplored phenomenon.

“Ballet is a woman’s world, in which a man is only an honored guest.”

George Balanchine, Georgian-American ballet choreographer, 1904–1983.

Regarding gender discrimination. About half of the ballet studios fundamentally do not work with men, regardless of age, because this “confuses women”; and women are the main source of income. Women have the opinion that men “stink”, they “look in the wrong direction”, and they only need “this”. I.e. they believe that the main goal of a man who goes to practice ballet is to make his erotic fantasies come true, looking for hours at 40–50 year old fat women wearing 3 sets of clothes.

Unfortunately, no matter where I studied, with a new group, for the first 10 lessons, strong negativity came towards me from the ladies, then they resigned themselves and simply did not pay attention to me. However, if they suddenly noticed my presence, for example, during the first allocation of places in the hall, they tried to bite harder, showing that they were people, and I was something insignificant, like a pet.

Naturally, I learned to deal with this by simply ignoring most women.

The usual distribution was 1 in 10. It was rare that there were 2 or 3 men and I could compare women's reactions to other men. The most important factor for building relationships for girls (they were all girls!) was age, i.e. all women paid maximum attention to one man who was younger.

“Hidden man-haters” make up about 70% of the pack. Of the remainder, about 20% had a positive attitude towards me. And surprisingly, these 20% would have a positive attitude towards men regardless of age, beauty or social status. These women were simply completely different, with a different psychology, softer and friendlier. Their means of interaction with the opposite sex have not atrophied.

There were another 10% – these were “outspoken feminists” who were looking for the possibility of biting me at some point, but this was a completely uninteresting type. They were even worse than the bulk of man-haters. The tone was set by the silent 70% who carried hidden negativity, they despised the 10% who openly mocked men, and did not understand the 20% who treated us kindly.

I started taking ballet in September 2018 when I was 45 years and 4 months old. Before that, I practically did not do anything related to physical activity or art. Physical activity ended with karate and wushu in 1989. Art – flashed in a short period from 1992 to 1996.

At the beginning of September 2018, I came with East to St. Petersburg with the goal of studying for 1–2 weeks and stayed there for 4.5 months. It was very expensive in terms of money, it cost me a third of a million rubles [$5000], but a year later I returned and spent another 4.5 months from mid-September 2019.

I studied every day for 2–4 hours. I had unlimited passes to two ballet studios, and there were days when I was running from one studio to another to make it to my next class.

The day off was only on Saturday, then I went into the city. Despite the fact that I rented a room almost in the fine historical center of the city, I only had enough strength to eat and sleep. Although it’s more like this: after class I got home, went to bed, and then, after resting, I could eat something. Naturally, after several months of training, I lost about 15 kg of weight.

Then I had a break from visiting St. Petersburg due to the coronavirus epidemic. I lived in my city, where there were only two ballet studios that were “women only”, I managed to study in one of them for 4 months, from October 1, 2020 to March 11, 2021, but they still kicked me out, because the women's band was against it. I studied in the second studio from August 2021 to the end of 2021, but I was asked to leave because they had problems with having a men's locker room.

Sure, I could have found fitness or stretching classes, but I wasn't particularly interested in that.

In St. Petersburg, I studied in two ballet schools twice for 4 – 4.5 months at a daily rhythm, several hours a day, with 4 different groups. I had 3 main teachers. How many joint dances do you think have been learned with women? That's right, not at all.

The teachers tried to start somewhere, but even the simplest touching hands of a man and a woman clearly looked like harassment, because any woman was almost certainly married – and, therefore, caused such a violent flow of negative emotions, which was even expressed in a complete refusal to work, and was accompanied by obscenities. The initiative ended there.

I think the main reason was that most of the time I was the only male in the group. Almost certainly, if there was another permanent man, then the teachers could come up with a joint dance of two men, because in the modern world, a man dancing with a woman is something immoral and impossible.

It may seem that I had a negative attitude towards the ladies and what was happening. Rather, I distanced myself as much as possible from what could develop into a negative reaction. I switched my attention and went about my business. And I felt the negativity from others very well and this, of course, worsened my physical health.

But if I had a choice, I would still choose these women over a friendly male group, because men in my life did not interest me at all, and women carry something within themselves that has always attracted my attention. And my way of thinking is closer to women’s, I understand and feel them better.

All the teachers were obsessed with the correct execution of individual movements, they constantly drilled us on this topic, and it was wonderful.

There was only one teacher who tried to teach something more than a combination of 2–3 movements, but, like all the other teachers, she did not make sure that we did it well, because even what we did today was already the next lesson was falling apart.

Moreover, the teachers were, I believe, some of the best in the amateur field, they just didn’t really believe in us. This is about sad things.

I trained so intensively for only two seasons, and if I had extended my classes to 8–10 seasons, then everything would probably have been different, the attitude of women gradually, imperceptibly changed, and I believe that in 5 years they would have already treated I think it’s rather positive, and maybe even some joint work has appeared.

About the good. I really learned a lot. Of course, it was very expensive, but most of the things I can do cannot be learned from books or videos. I have come to terms with the situation that ballet school is a rare pleasure for me, and the path to art in my case will lie through my own inner work.

What I like. Of course, these are pirouettes and high jumps. This is amazing. I’m also starting to independently learn various combinations of movements, work with coordination and a sense of rhythm. By the way, these are necessary stages on the path to realizing even the simplest stage image.

During classes, I usually hid in the very corner of the hall, because I have an overdeveloped SPI (sense of personal insignificance), which I had to fight. I suppose it looked comical when a charming man, two meters tall, with good posture and long beautiful legs, constantly hides behind the backs of thin girls, trying not to catch the teacher's eye.

Taking ballet is pure narcissism, which is a direct conflict with my worldview.

Ballet is also physics and mathematics. When I started studying classical dance, I was surprised to discover that the human body can move in two modes. The first is the everyday mode, this is how most people move in life and this is how people move in common dances, and there is a second mode when a person moves using his body in a completely different way, this applies to ballet (classical dance). It is for this reason that ballet can be practiced at any age, you just need to use those capabilities of the human body that we have by nature, but are not used at all in everyday life.

May 1, 2020, Friday, in the evening I participated in my first Online class in ballet (classical dance) from 8:00 pm to 9:22 pm, in the middle of the lesson I paid 699 rubles [$10] for access to site materials for the period of May 2020, at the end of the lesson I took a screenshot, since the number of viewers was 666. In the next two months, I watched over 40 classes in a row and the number of viewers on this channel did not exceed 270.

Eduardo Battaner Lopez “Kepler. Movement of Planets. Dancing with the Stars”

“Galileo noted that ‘The universe is written in the language of mathematics’. Perhaps this idea was first written down in the Book of Wisdom of Solomon: ‘You have ordered everything by measure, number and weight’. Is also known the saying of Saint Isidore: ‘The highest of all things is number’. Kepler’s words will also take a worthy place in this series of quotes: ‘Geometry was before the world, and it was Divine. God gave the world geometric beauty, and it was His creation, and this beauty was in human hands’.

Kepler wrote in his book: ‘Most of the things that exist in the world were created due to God’s love for people’.

Although the book was very popular and thanks to it Kepler was able to devote his life to the search for the harmony of the world, it also caused criticism. The scientist personally made sure that the most outstanding minds of the time, and, in particular, Tycho Brahe, received a copy of his work. From the point of view of observers from the 21st century, it is very easy to find grounds for criticism of this treatise. There were not six planets, but six planets that were known to Kepler. And the scientist had to assume that in fact there could be more planets, but they are difficult to detect due to their small size, remoteness and imperfection of observation instruments.”

Gurdjieff and Ouspensky

Although I am not close to it, I still saved the text about these characters for further study. I am far from a mystical or religious view of the world. Yes, in my internal/external world matter/energy is felt in a very specific way, but these are only nuances of my subjective relationship with the world, while there is practically no mysticism/mystery in my existence. Everything in my life is measured, understandable, boring and predictable.

Judging by the literature, Gurdjieff used the method of “extreme influence” on a person. I practice the method of minimal changes; I don’t at all want to put pressure on my own or someone else’s psyche, or somehow adjust the world around me. I believe that in my case, a greater force of influence can play a negative role, and the weakest influence will be more beneficial for the process of my awareness.

Life-changing dance: how Gurdjieff’s sacred technique reveals human reserves (link in Russian)

https://dzen.ru/a/YeayNciXq3UZCN2a

“In his Eastern travels, Gurdjieff encountered many examples of the revelation of the extraordinary capabilities of the human body. The master found the shortest way to achieve such a state. It turned out to be a ritual dance of the Sufis.

A special way of spinning to hypnotic music acts on the human body as a catalyst. The body begins to react immediately, the adept gains, if not superpowers, then something very close to them.

These meditative dances, called ‘special ballet’ by Georgiy Ivanovich’s novices, began to play a major role among Gurdjieff’s methods aimed at achieving a state of ‘insight’.

For a beginner, Gurdjieff's dance is extremely difficult. The adept is required to perform very strange, unnatural movements for a person. They create such a load on the muscles, tendons and even the human psyche, which is simply impossible in everyday life.

But, in the end, ‘ballet’ turns out to be an extremely effective method of self-knowledge. Quite quickly, practicing it leads to the awakening of the higher mental centers of the human body, which leads to a state of ‘insight’.

‘My ballet is not a mystery,’ said Gurdjieff. ‘The task I set was to create an interesting and beautiful performance. Of course, there is a certain meaning hidden behind the external form; but I did not pursue the goal of showing and emphasizing precisely this.’

These dances were called unnatural, too controversial and sometimes even considered a manifestation of ‘Satanism’, since the detached faces of the students, immersed in deep dynamic meditation, gave the impression of being hypnotized or weak-minded.”

Gleb Davydov “Gurdjieff: the dancing provocateur” (link in Russian)

https://www.peremeny.ru/column/view/924/

“At the same time, Gurdjieff told Ouspensky something about the project of the ballet ‘Battle of the Magicians’:

‘Imagine that, while studying the movement of celestial bodies, say, the planets of the solar system, you built a special mechanism to convey a visual image of the laws of these movements and remind us of them. In such a mechanism, each planet, represented by a sphere of appropriate dimensions, is placed at a certain distance from the central sphere representing the Sun. The mechanism is set in motion, all spheres begin to rotate and move along given paths, reproducing in visual form the laws governing the movement of the planets. This mechanism reminds us of everything you know about the solar system. Something similar is contained in the rhythm of some dances. In strictly defined movements and combinations of dancers, certain laws are reproduced in visible form, understandable to those who know them. Such dances are called “sacred dances”. During my travels in the East, I witnessed many times how these dances were performed during sacred services in ancient temples.’

In particular, this can be interpreted as follows: by accurately reflecting the celestial dances at the microcosmic level, it will be possible to use these celestial dances for one’s own purposes, make changes to their macrocosmic scenario, and therefore influence the events taking place on Earth.

The fact that dance is one of the most effective forms of magical ritual, awakening and activating subtle energies, has been known since ancient times: a person who dances correctly acquires supernormal powers and can change the world around him. In ancient India, for example, dance was equated with the highest forms of yoga and was considered an act of creation, with the help of which a new space and a new situation can be formed. Lucian, in his treatise ‘The Dance’, reports that dance arose ‘with the origin of the first principles of the universe’.”

Music and mathematics

November 6, 2020, I bought a large Yamaha synthesizer for learning to play the piano. It was quite expensive, but in my opinion, this is exactly what I should do besides ballet.

November 8, 2020, Sunday, at 11:13 am, I was walking to my ballet class and noticed a car with a trailer parked outside our office, with a boat on the trailer with a Yamaha outboard motor. I took a photo for memory. This is a rare case, I do not remember the boats in the parking lot next to our office. When after 5 min. I got on the bus, this car had already left.

The synthesizer has been lying around unused for two years now, but I think I'll still find a use for it.

The question arises, why did I buy it? A few days before this event, I read an interview with a 12-year-old student at a choreographic school. It was written there that in addition to dancing, she plays the piano and likes it. I felt a sense of community and bought myself this toy.

I also learned that she enjoys studying mathematics. Therefore, I suppose higher mathematics is one of my future hobbies.

Computer games

This is a great way to socialize and kill time at the same time. Computer games are played en masse by stupid and narrow-minded lonely people who could not (or did not want) to realize themselves in the social world around them. That's just the way I am, what can I do.

Since the beginning of January 2020, I have been working several hours a day in the game “World of Warships” (WoWs), that is “a computer, client-side massively multiplayer online game in real time in the genre of an arcade simulator of naval battles of the First and Second World Wars.”

Several events in my life, paradoxically, are connected with this game. More on this later, in the corresponding chapter of the book.

The main purpose of computer games for me is to communicate with people. Massively multiplayer games, in my opinion, are ideal for this. And this “virtual communication”, as it turned out, is quite enough for me and there is absolutely no interest or need the real physical communication.

Real communication with people brings too much information, and it takes me a lot of time to fully understand this communication, or “grok”, as one fantasy character used to say:

“Stranger in a Strange Land (working title (in manuscript) ‘The Heretic’) – a fantastic philosophical novel by Robert Heinlein, received the Hugo Award in 1962. One of the few works of science fiction included by the Library of Congress in its list of books that shaped America.

The plot contains a lot of historical and philosophical allusions, being a biography of Valentine Michael Smith, a man raised by Martians, who returned to Earth and became the new messiah here. The publication of the novel caused a scandal associated with a too free, by the standards of censorship of that time, depiction of sexual life and religion.

Literary agent Lurton Blassingame immediately offered the novel to the publishing house Putnam's Sons, since, according to the terms of the contract, this publishing house was supposed to be the first to read Heinlein's next novel. Putnam agreed to publish the novel, but without the themes of sex and religion, which, according to Heinlein, was impossible. As a result, the publishing house still accepted the novel, but previously edited by Heinlein to 160 thousand words. It was published in 1961 with the final title ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’.” (Wiki)

Some people don't like sex and religion, so I try to distance myself from those things as much as possible. But, since I still have to quote the Bible sometimes, I once again apologize to the readers.