Reassembly

After AfrikaBurn I stopped understanding where I was going.

I got lost — but not on the highway. Life, which only yesterday had looked like a route (there’s work, there’s a goal, there’s a direction), blurred, as if someone had knocked the focus on the lens: the set pieces stayed in place, but the outlines became soft and unreadable. When people say “bad,” they mean it hurts, but at least is clear; here it neither hurt nor was clear — who I was, what I was doing, what for.

Coming back, I couldn’t figure out where I was “returning” to: Moscow? Bali? INITE? AI? Neural cosmology? Everything was in place and at the same time not right, the way it had been after the remix at BOOM: the same scenery, a different fabric. Only at BOOM the fabric had changed for a night, and here, it seems, for good.

The old assembly had fallen apart, and the new one hadn’t yet come together — and between them soup was left. An imaginal one, like inside a butterfly’s chrysalis: a slurry of components that don’t yet know what they will become.

That’s the stage of imago: caterpillar, cocoon, dissolution.

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Bishkek — let’s start with it, and as to why with Bishkek, it’s better not to ask, because I don’t know either. A chain of decisions, each of which makes sense on its own and is absurd in aggregate — a causal network in which the effect appeared before the cause.

A city that is felt more strongly than it is seen. The Soviet grid of boulevards is laid out for parades that never happened; the khrushchyovkas are painted in faded pastels of mint, dusty pink, and a fading bruise. The grid is softened by trees — oaks, poplars, lindens, walnut trees — planted in Soviet times and grown into tunnels of green; along the streets murmur aryks — open irrigation channels, ancient irrigation logic written into the Soviet master plan. In spring the city smells of wet poplar and melting snow.

And to the south stands a wall — Ala-Too, the northern range of the Tien Shan, right behind the city and pressed up against it. You round a corner past a khrushchyovka with laundry on the balcony, and the entire horizon is taken up by a white serrated edge against a cobalt sky. Four and a half thousand meters. Here the mountains work as a constant interlocutor: you orient by them without noticing.

The light is Central Asian: sharp, clean, and at eight hundred meters of altitude there is less atmosphere and less moisture, and so less ambiguity. The shadows are razor-edged, the sky is deeper blue than in northern latitudes. At sunset Ala-Too turns pink, then salmon, then goes out.

A city that makes no claims on anything. After the Moscow whirlwind it works as an exhale: nobody rushes, men sit for hours in tea houses — Central Asian time here is circular, but not relaxed. This is a thin layer of civilization over something much older and wilder, and the mountains stand nearby to remind you of it.

Back then the city was called Frunze — after Mikhail Frunze, the Bolshevik commander, born here. In 1991 it was renamed back: “Bishkek” is a wooden churn for kumiss. From a general to dairy equipment — and there, on the whole, you have it. People over forty still say “Frunze” out of inertia: a palimpsest in which the city remains both names at once.