By Yuri ANDRUKHOVYCH, The Day
"I have a slightly strange toast: let's drink to America," was proposed
out of the blue one evening. "No, I do not mean anything superficial nor
do I create an idol. I want to drink to America which gives us the chance
to meet each other."
She and her husband, both certified physicists (and, as I can guess,
extraordinary talented), left Ukraine some five or six years ago. It is
a sad, typical, and didactic story: a tale about a motherland which does
not care about the future. So much for that. The problem of whether to
go or stay is so tangible in our bewitched society that it does not actually
seem to be a problem anymore: to go, of course to go, the best and brightest
seekers of the future will say. And if someone in this society still hopes
for something, it is usually associated with far travel.
However, at that party with former Kyivans I drank not so much to America
on the whole, as to certain of its manifestations, signs which have been
surrounding my living and my unchecked advance further into this continent
for the second week now.
I drank, for instance, to Michael Bernosky, an actor and TV commentator.
That day he read (or rather demonstrated!) excerpts from my Perversion
at Pennsylvania University, converting the text into performance right
before the audiences eyes. Michael, recognized by many as the Mattress
King from a television commercial, had no difficulty in crossing slang
and dialect frontiers, producing a rather wild and rather beautiful English-based
mixture with Church Latin additives, and Jamaica, Italian, and Ukrainian
ingredients, what the cultural melting pot that usually stands for all
this Multi-America, the birthplace of cartoons.
The most amazing nicknames surprise on one here. Your nickname is your
origin, most often - a long forgotten one. However, because of this quaint
jumble and, to no less extent, the specifics of all world orthographies,
letters are typically used here for nicknames: a, n, d, r, u, k, h, o,
v, c, h - Andrukhovych is something hopelessly long and phonetically lost.
Later I learnt that Michael's ancestors came from the Lemko mountains
and forests, that is from "our" part of the world, and very close to that
place my favorite poet, Antonych, was born. The world is really very small,
despite America's presence in it.
Thus, one hundred years ago Michael's ancestors similarly sought their
future here. The Appalachian Mountains in Pennsylvania are not too high,
but quite wooded and were expected to bear some resemblance to their abandoned
country. It was exactly those ever restless miners and farmers who gave
America and the world, for instance, Andy Warhol. Behind all this, I stubbornly
keep trying to discern or at least guess at some fundamental metaphor,
which would reflect all incomprehensibility of our existence. Maybe there
is no such metaphor. Though Michael Bernosky tried hard to pronounce the
old Lemko names in the disobedient sounds of another forgotten language.
"America is oblivion" would say someone much more categorical than I.
"The future is so powerful that it leaves no room for the past."
But I am not that categorical. Not because I have seen some book depositories
here, which is an enormous accumulation of languages and writings. The
facade of Yale University library displays characters from virtually all
pre-Latin scripts: Egyptian and Chinese hieroglyphs, Assyrian cuneiform,
Sanskrit, Greek, European letters, and even Mayan pictograms. To say nothing
of millions of manuscripts, texts, ideas, images, and visions preserved
and snatched out or simply bought out, literally, of the fire. "America
remembers everything" someone just as categorical would say.
As to me, I do not know which America dominates, the one that remembers,
or the other that forgets. It seems like there is a great number of Americas,
and nobody ever learns everything about any of them.
This is what we were actually drinking to at that evening. And also
to Ukraine, for where would I be without it?






