[Here is the second part of the prologue to 200. It is inspired by the 19^th-20^th century Russian social-realist artist Nikolay Bogdanov-Belsky’s painting Mental Arithmetic in the Public School of S. Rachinsky, which can be viewed here https://www.wikiart.org/en/nikolay-bogdanov-belsky/mental-arithmetic-in-the-public-school-of-s-rachinsky.]

 

Prologue Part 2 Mental Arithmetic

The poor boys are drilled to do hard sums.

Some scratch their heads, some mess around,

some great grand-dads of future

Google, Facebook, KGB, Wikileaks

operatives mill around the chalkboard

to work the puzzle out together for themselves,

as others sycophantically whisper

the already worked-out solution

into the Master’s kind compliant ear.

*

Thus brains are nursed and made

to make bombs, rockets, toxins, psychotropic drugs,

to be turned in turn

against the very brains that made them—

a snake swallowing its tail,

a tree uprooted and interred,

upended in peat, photosynthesis thwarted,

the root structure ossified and worn to a deadwood table,

lab bench, benchmark, bully pulpit,

for sacrifice to chthonic prehistoric gods

to guide the path for future drillers of oil

and Valkyries flying off into the sky.

*

The lesson ends with a stirring Cossack kick-dance.

Testosterone and xenophobia

scent heavily the already musky air,

as headscarved girls peep in from outside

the enchanted enclosure in absolute awe.

Wary chiefs and tsars cling to scam-artist

shamans, as young men climb the ladder

of the knowledge and education apparatus

into space or death

or fall into a slum bedsit,

or under the wheels of fortune

of a locomotive engine or automobile

or put a bullet through an archduke’s cerebellum,

or a lobotomizing icepick into the empty brain

of a down-on-her luck slum landlady

or through the eyeglass

of an egg-headed dissident intellectual.

*

“Luck doesn’t do much good,” Markov

jokes nihilistically to his dark-coated coterie

of starving students at the academy lecture

about Gogol’s overcoat and random walks.

Much promise is lost to the Monte Carlo wheel,

the possibilities of Diophantine equations

shimmering away—so many clubs, diamonds, hearts and swords,

dash-board-like in impressionable minds.

Boys sitting over a chessboard or a fruit machine,

do nothing

but pluck low-hanging fruit

or play the great game of chess,

plotting chaos and deceit,

sending bleeping sputniks out into

space, putting

suitably suited men

onto the Moon or the Red planet of Mars.