Dmitry Vodennikov The structure of the wind and the sun About the mistakes of people and nature 06/03/2023, 08:22

The name was born from someone else’s misprint. He wanted to write “the mood of the wind and the sun,” as the songwriter later put it. But written disclaimer, autocorrect was better.

The structure of the wind. And the structure of the sun. their combination. How do we know what the sun will shine on the next morning? How do we know what a real wind will bring us at night, or what an underwater “wind”, an unpredictable ocean current, will bring us? Maybe a rescue (rescue) boat, maybe an iceberg.

There are even champagne bottles here that should have been uncorked 111 years ago but will never be corked again. And there is nothing to celebrate.

The Titanic sank on the night of April 14-15, but in June of this year, I learned that a full-size 3D reconstruction was created in 2022.

This is not the model we saw in the famous movie with the young DiCaprio, but a 3D reconstruction of a real ship with four pipes and a reconstruction of what it looked like right now when it was at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. four kilometers deep.

I found this picture – and it impressed me.

The Titanic lies there like the remains of a great prehistoric beast. Little parasites or beneficial organisms (God knows how this giant perceives us humans in us) collected clothes and different shoes, prepared useless champagne bottles to celebrate birthdays, engagements, journeys in the belly of this monstrous whale, but that’s it. Drink them.

The famous monster ship in this picture looks like it pumped out all the water in the vast Atlantic Ocean.

Of course, they had tried to photograph the ship before, but it was so large that in the dark of the water the camera was only able to capture certain parts of the ship. The Titanic is like an elephant that the blind try to feel. “The elephant is like a tree”, “the elephant is like a spear”, “the elephant is like a snake”.

Now the new scanning technology has made it possible to completely “pull” the Titanic out of the darkness of years and water.

For 200 hours, remote-controlled underwater vehicles rushed around the sunken ship. 700,000 photos were taken from all angles. Every centimeter of the sunken ship was marked on the map (even pollution was recorded). The main condition is not to touch anything, not to hurt anything, not to harm anything.

Here is the famous prow of the rust-covered ship (allegedly, DiCaprio and Kate Winslet were standing there). Here you can view an underwater vehicle through an open hole in the boat deck into the space where the front staircase once stood. Here is the flattened feed. But around the underwater dead monster, decor items, statues, personal belongings of the passengers, the aforementioned bottles, dozens of shoes froze in sand and silt.

“There is still an ocean,” Alexander Blok wrote in his diary when he learned of the disaster. In my imperfect memory, rust and shellfish stuck to this sentence: “The ocean is still alive,” I remember. It’s also some kind of typo. It’s already mine. But the ocean is indeed alive and the ship is dead, such is the nature of water and darkness.

…June 3, 1933 Andrey Sergeev was born. Russian poet, prose writer and translator. We had met closely.

Joseph Brodsky wrote about him: “I had a friend, Andrei Sergeev, who was a translator of English poetry and monopolized the translation field – in this case – just because he was so much better than the others.”

I did not know, but it turned out (at least the widow of the poet and translator Lyudmila Georgievna Sergeeva writes about this), the famous poem “Stop in the Desert” was gifted to Andrei Yakovlevich for his thirty-third birthday.

“For his birthday on June 3, 1966 (…) Joseph flew privately and brought a royal gift – the poem “Stop in the Desert” (“There are so few Greeks in Leningrad now / We broke the Greek) Church …” It was written in large size on typewritten paper: TO ANDREY SERGEEV ON HIS BIRTHDAY. It was not a dedication, it was a birthday present. This poem is always printed without a dedication.

There are so few Greeks in Leningrad today,
and in general – with the exception of Greece – there are very few of them.
at least not enough
to protect faith buildings.
And believe in what we built
no one is asking them. One
it must be a matter of baptizing a nation,
But carrying the cross is something else entirely.

…the structure of the wind and the sun. The structure of destiny. Unexpected iceberg.

Andrei Sergeev died at the age of sixty-six while crossing the street on his way to the subway from a literary evening. It’s a story. Poet Alexander Levin, who was friends with him, also has a memory. He wrote that it all happened the day after the last literary night in Sergeyev’s life.

After the evening, there were those who said goodbye; “I will not disappear,” replied Sergeyev.
“The next day he was hit by a car as he stood at the dividing line of the Garden Ring. A new Russian in a jeep.”

In the memoirs, the time changes slightly (after the literary evening or the next day) – but the jeep and the “new Russian” here and there remain unchanged. It was.

Scattered, split into atoms,
And then, later, then we –
We were happy, we were smart,
Our life has gone through lanes.

This is a stanza from a poem by Andrei Sergeev.

… A gift, not a dedication. Typos, mistakes, accidents of the wind and blinding plays of the sun. The desired condition is not to touch anything, not to hurt anything, not to harm anyone.

Here I wrote a few paragraphs above: “After the end …”. Somehow weird. I’m starting to get twisted – this way, this way, I don’t know how to redo it.

Then I thought, “Oh, nice”. After the last one.

It’s just the name of a kind of poetic cycle.