Emerging from the physical junk room
One morning, emerging from that physical junk room of mine, there rose within me a craving for sexual union, and I suddenly stepped back: as my senses returned I stood two metres away from an enormous heap of pulsating, labyrinthine forms; they arched so high I couldn’t see where they ended, stretching to the horizon on both sides in relentless motion, tens of thousands writhing atop tens of thousands—wet, slippery figures squirming in and out, around each other, searching, striving, yet never finally climaxing, and thank goodness for that, I thought. Though I was aghast: these weren’t the worms or lures of a diligent angler stored in a jar: this was human, an unbelievable radiation of male and female sexuality emanating from that seething mass, flooding my nostrils, piercing the filter of my detached soul with its instantaneous, metaphysical song—they were all physically dead—yes, physically dead, I wanted to turn away, to run, but something within prevented me, yet finally, calm returned to me…What now? Join them?
Slowly I moved forward, stopping just before the heap where both forms of different gender moved within, as well as others who had shed their singular identities, gleaming wet bodies now a collective throbbing gender, Der Mensch ist diese Nacht, dies leere Nichts‚ somewhere, a slender leg emerged which I grabbed and pulled, pressing my lips against it but it pushed back at me, clinging like tar, then immediately retreating deeper into the pulsating heap; I pressed my lips and fingers tighter around the leg, trying to hold the sweaty ankle in my grasp, and slowly I managed to extract an entire body from the mound, what looked like a woman of medium-size, dark-haired, slight of build, difficult to guess her age, who lay face down on the ground, her limbs moving like those of a spider as she tried to pull herself back into the heap, entirely unaware that I was holding her wet leg and preventing her retreat: who was she? It was hard to say; this woman was myself.
Hello! I want to fuck you—stay still for a moment
I held her still, leaned closer, then shouted in her ear: “Hello! I want to fuck you—stay still for a moment,” and there was no doubt she heard me, as she turned over; the muscles of her face shifting as her skin phosphoresced, her breasts trembling in the glow of expectation: I felt safe, the feeling was right; the woman was myself, yet doubts began: where I thought I had a clear idea of what being human meant, perhaps the whole story had been planned this way, looking back: transgression doesn’t relate to boundaries as blue does to black or black to white, the forbidden to the permissible, the external to the internal, home’s safety to the world outside; rather, all were bound by a single Möbius-like spiral strip, which no simple interruption can exhaust—as lightning flashes at night, which, since the dawn of time, has lent dense, dark existence to that which it denies, that illuminates darkness from within and end to end, though owing its brightness, that fissuring and contrastive quiddity, to night itself: lightning vanished into the space it has marked with its sovereignty and finally silences itself, having gifted a name to darkness—the original voice of the Messiah, whose voice, as we’ve seen, has at times overwhelmed not only Anu and Maarja but Wolfgang and myself, Bardo Maïakovski, the archetypal la folle herself— indeed this voice imprints itself manifold into memory, as if in defiance of religious alienation, a parenthetical comment is woven into the fabric, accentuating the revulsion accompanying its repetitive signification.
My own defiled body has found a practical use as an altar of sacrifice
Strangely, in context, my own defiled body has found a practical use as an altar of sacrifice, where he who wishes to call himself man appears as a priestess performing the rite, chastising the primal animal for indulgences in base desires: the punishment for this creaturely sex, where the angel of the one who sacrifices herself fails, is symbolic castration; she stabs the dog in the eye, and then, replacing the true phallic element with the symbolic, this deranged doppelgänger of me uses a blunt, scalpel-like instrument carved from the purest light to sever off, one by one, my girlish soul-creatures: two wagtails rise into the air and fly home, and here, mechanical cruelty reaches its most explicit form; the priestess concludes this rite upon realising that transgression is deceitful—that those bodies are dead, yet therefore I still am, exist like a hedgehog. Considering that the priest’s trickster figure represents the relentless, failing movement of desire—the essence of the libido in the guise of Todestrieb—this undead role serves as a perfect allegory for the constant dull futility of libidinal pursuits; the doubt which frames my existence—that love or friendship is impossible to find within the race of humankind—becomes more clear: the priestess, by attempting to define the object of her desire, has realised the futility of locating it: apparently love won’t come through humans in her symbolic sphere, and yet a craving persists, dull and unstoppable, leaping towards other imagined objects, straying from the prevailing power’s sexual norms, step by step, moving further from dominant tradition—from woman to man, man in woman, woman in man—thus failing onwards into the animal kingdom, first from the national body to the toad and octopus, and finally, chastely still, to the shark.
Shame is better than medicine or law, than power, better than money
In such movements, the desire for cruelty grows, transitioning, by conventional interpretation, from approaches more sadistic to more masochistic, for shame is better than medicine or law, than power, better than money; doesn’t want to smother you with excessive zeal; it’s not a beginning; it’s an end, says the priestess —I say—the division of physical travellers begins as soon as possible, and by tonight, the military entrusts the entire motley crew into the hands of the one who sacrifices. Is there a problem with that? I ask: “No problems at all, dear priest,” I hear. I know no punishment that could withstand the absence of a culprit. But from here on out, dear, leave the house in the morning only after you’ve heard the song seven times: so said the priestess to her young bride before sleep. The bride went out after the seventh hearing and saw a vast herd of elk before the house—a stunning sexual radiance. Near the herd stood her husband, transformed into a beautiful woman. Meanwhile, the elk were so plump and with such thick thighs, they couldn’t avoid urinating on their own legs: and they were all physically dead…and so what? Unable to comprehend what was happening, yet in her heart, every bride knows this morning is only the first of a new life.
Translated by Kristjan Haljak and Ian Gwin
ABOUT
Kristjan Haljak’s Vita Nova, awarded the Tallinn University Literary Prize in 2024 in the category of short literary publication, offers an experimental take on the theme of “new life.” The title, echoing Dante’s La Vita Nuova, signals a journey of transformation, though Haljak’s version is less a spiritual awakening and more an exploration of corporeal, psychological, and existential renewal.
Written as a prosimetron—a blend of prose and poetry—the work draws on surrealist imagery and a sense of psychedelia to dismantle traditional boundaries between life and death, identity and desire, human and non-human. The result is a labyrinthine meditation on change and transgression.