By facilitating instantaneous global communication, Radio may be thought of as inaugurating a new age—the age (to quote Marshall McLuhan) of "instant humans."[1] Khlebnikov used the term “people-rays" (lyud-luchi), as we have seen. As early as the summer of 1910, he had written to Kamensky:
- We—are a new breed of people-rays. We have come to illuminate the universe.[2]
And his notes about "the ray of humanity, people as rays, the ray of KhlebnikovI the ray of the world" and so on have already been cited.[3] When Khlebnikov wrote to Petnikov about "a government of poets“ and "a sonorous string of tribes" encircling the globe—and went on to declare:We are like the sea's waves during a grey storm"—he was not being simply mystical.[4] He had a concrete technological possibility in mind. In 1916 he had already quite convincingly—if also in certain respects fancifully—described this possibility. One form it had taken was the project for a "Higher Institute of Futurists", which would occupy not a particular geographical site but many sites widely separated over the globe (on the Asian side, however), its members communicating by means of radio-telegraphy:
- Foundation of the first Higher Institute of Futurists (budetlyan). It consists of a number (13) of estates borrowed (for 100 years) from people-of-space, situated on the sea-shore or among mountains by extinct volcanos in Siam, Siberia, Japan, Ceylon, Murmansk, among the empty mountains, where it is difficult to acquire property from anyone but easy to invent things. They are all
united with each other through radio-telegraphy, on which lessons are given. To have a radio-telegraph of one's own. Communication through the air.[5]
- ↑ "The age of co-presence of all individuals is the age of communication—the age of instant humans"—Counter-Blast, London 1969, p 35.
- ↑ SP V p 291.
- ↑ Ibid p 259.
- ↑ The Symbolist composer Scriabin had written in his 1905-06 notebooks: “The whole world is inundated by the waves of my being"; in 1904 he had written: "I want to be the brightest light, the greatest (and only) sun. I want to illuminate the universe with my light“—quoted in: Faubion Bowers, Scriabin, p 101; p 54. Khlebnikov was partially de-mysticizing this streak in Symbolism, giving it a technological twist.
- ↑ SP V p 156.
