The Line

Mikhail Epstein

One is compelled to stand in lines so often that a certain mythologeme forms involuntarily in one's consciousness: a dragon devouring its own tail. The line, or the queue, is indeed tail-like, as if a bestial relic had suddenly sprung up in human society...

Why were tails gradually eliminated "in man's process of development from apes"? Humans have continually broadened and animated the space anterior to them; therefore, the posterior sensory organ lost its natural necessity. All communication with and sensation of the world began to occur through the face, through wide-open eyes, through open handshakes. In general a person's front side, like that of all living things, is soft, vulnerable, while his back is hard, vertebral, virtually encased in armor. The sum of culture consists in part in humans' beginning to bare their vulnerability, bringing the interior to the surface, exposing the tender to another's gaze. All culture issues from the personality [lichnost'], from the face [litso] and is oriented forward.

Hence the line, where people stand single file, resting their gazes on backs. The line is hostile to culture and to the individual because in it people address each other with, and are joined by, their backs: so that this new breed of man, who spends his whole life in lines, is compelled to grow a tail as a product of natural necessity. It is very possible that, in the march of protracted historical evolution founded on the line as a social institution, homo sapiens will again grow tails, now on the order not of biological, but of social adaptation: in order to feel the near ones who are behind, and to touch the ones in front--not to tap a dumb backside in the thirst for communication, but rather amicably to tickle a tail.

Let us probe a bit deeper into the line, it merits at least one mental peregrination. After all, standing in it has consumed so many hours, weeks, years!

The line is pure expectation, which is what makes time spent in it stretch out so languorously: it is not filled up by anything, it lies open in all its emptiness. And meanwhile something is happening, by itself, without your participation or will, so that with every minute, without having moved a finger, you get closer to your goal. The man standing in line is similar in his inactivity to Oblomov, but at the same time he is as business-like as Stolz,[i] since all the while he is moving somewhere, simultaneously preserving an inert mass of calm. Time stretches out toward nowhere from the common supply of life, and all this is a necessary expenditure, although it is also obviously a useless one. If queues did not exist, it would be necessary to invent them, because it is there that people find escape from the burden of freedom, acquiring a visual, linearly defined meaning for their existence. What might have been the simple, crude physiological act of eating meat or cheese, which the person in line waits to buy, acquires a socially distant, but absolutely attainable perspective, one which with every moment and hour becomes more and more accessible. Distance imperceptibly decreases, magnifying the pleasurable itch of anticipation. Time flows according to the rules of progress, unswervingly nearing a long-awaited goal. The line is a school of patience and a factory of optimism, since for those who stand in it, it necessarily shortens: patience is rewarded again and again.

In this way, we go beyond the crudely animalistic consumption of food: human feelings are cultivated in the course of acquiring food, instinct is socialized, forces and potentials are systematically distributed, the self is conceived of as a member of a collective. Where else is it so easy, without instructors and capital investments, to realize a program of the humanization and socialization of natural needs? And what else so fully satisfies the psychological need common to more and more people: to be occupied in an activity that allows one not to do anything, but at the same time to be extremely busy? Standing in line, it is easy to make peace with the world and with oneself.

Although a line is a hindrance, obstructing the path to a goal, all the same one values one's place in it highly. It is as if people want to get closer, to destroy the structure and fall on the booty as a crowd--but something acts as a restraint. Everybody is gripped by two feelings: superiority over those who are behind and envy for those who are in front. The first impulse gradually wins out: protecting one's position from those nudging from behind is better than grabbing from those standing ahead. Why? The line is moving; the anterior part, and consequently envy, is melting away, while the tail end, and correspondingly, superiority, is growing, one's place is becoming more and more valuable. We might say that society, living in the future to a greater degree than in the present, is modeled on the line.

It is also important that in a line everyone occupies not only a physical, but also a kind of professional position, everyone is at his post, in this way solving the problem of temporary unemployment in the time spent away from work. Everyone is not only occupying his place, but also guarding it, patrolling the Polovtsian steppe, from which at any time audacious invaders might gallop out, or ingratiating scouts might creep forward. The order of the line as a whole depends upon the vigilance of each person, for a chain broken in one link can no longer unite people and lead to a single goal. Standing in line is also surveillance of the line, a work of monitoring and checking, which, as we know, guarantees the dictatorship of the majority over the minority.

In the same way the moral principle, "one for all and all for one," is realized, acquiring a spatial clarity: "one behind all and all behind one," since each person, by letting no one in front of them, also does not let anyone cut in anywhere in the line. Personal interest guards the social interest.

Another theoretical principle, "equality without egalitarianism," is also realized, since access to the line is open to all, but, having gotten in, each person acquires an ordinal number that distinguishes him or her from all the others. The queue is a social mathematician's dream, the incarnation of the Pythagorean's utopia of a kingdom of embodied numbers, where each person is distinguished from the other only by an ordinal number. Here any entity may actually be conveyed by a number (Pythagorus), and its entire peculiarity is solely in the quantitative rank, so that it is precisely the numerical model that engenders the order of the social universe.[ii] If the crowd is chaos, then the queue is the cosmos, arranged according to the laws of numerical harmony. But, in distinction to the classical cosmos, the modern cosmos is thrust into history, and the number acquires the characteristic of self-propulsion. The one in line constantly changes his or her number, the line is a natural series in movement, from hundreds to tens and ones, and then again in the same reverse order. For the one who has left the line, or, more precisely, for the one who has reached the end--what's left to do? Go home, eat, lie down, rest, and, having devastated the standing supply, get once again into the same line, which has not ended, but has only been conventionally interrupted for the night.

This is why the line, like a wise serpent-temptress, constantly devours its own tail: anterior continuously becomes posterior. The queue presents itself as a straight line only in appearance; in reality it is a circle, the end of which closes with the beginning. He who exits from the front walks around the line and again turns up behind.

The dialectic of existence is infinite in its circular rotation, in its coupling of causes and effects. Infinite also is our queue--the Pharaohs' pyramid, where the stones from below are continuously removed in order to build the upper part; where humanity again and again attempts, using numerical finitude, to produce the infiniteness of the natural series. And everyone has already been in all the lines many times, has been inserted into the first million, and the second, and the third--an innocent shuffling of social daydreamers who have been compelled to strive for infinite goals with finite human means, and for that reason have sent these goals out for repeated wear.

Perhaps the queue will indeed remain from our times as have the pyramids from the Egyptians', a worthy monument to the civilization of the natural sequence, units bridging their path to glory and eternity. The queue is that same pyramid, but a "humanistic" one, formed not from stones, but from people, and for that reason flowing in time, and not frozen in space. The progress is obvious: that was pre-historical time, while ours is historical, which is why the pyramids are arranged not in a sandy desert, but in the sands of time. The pyramids are made of innumerable grain-minutes, of the clodded days and years that each person has wrenched from his own life and raised, having passed along the steps of all the lines he has stood in, to the next plateau of this ossified heap of moments. In the construction of this pyramid, every slave raises his stone, his hour--and steps down, in order to hoist upon himself and raise the next one, following in the footsteps of all his predecessors. The queue at times appears as a chain of people uninterruptedly transmitting hand-to-hand something invisible to each other: these are the stones of time, being hoisted onto that common place toward which all queues flow together and which one, remembering the Egyptian prototype, can call the desert of time, or absolute zero. The grandeur of the queue, like the grandeur of the pyramid, is reduced to a zero of the base, to the desert of time and space. The pyramid needs precisely the desert, for any other, positive relief of terrain degrades and softens it. Only absolute zero satiates the striving toward numerical grandeur, toward the consecutive inclusion of all and the repeated utilization of everyone.

I recognize you, Rozanov's last love, eternal Egypt, "well-proportioned, wise, complex"![iii] How this treacherously loyal writer would have fallen in love with his fatherland anew had he lived to see the pyramids made from the stones scattered in his "apocalyptic" time. For from the seething, demonstrating crowds that flooded the Russian streets in the period between the two revolutions, a new, severely geometric style was crystallized--exactly on the model of the lines that had been stood in. And the highest, most monumental of these pyramids is, with good reason, in the main burial-vault, toward which the main queue of the country leads. The mausoleum is the direct descendant of two monumental structures: the tomb at its beginning and the line in the continuation. The Soviet line as superstructure of the Egyptian pyramid.

Thus do I envision a third volume of Rozanov's Fallen Leaves: there, instead of the usual hurried notes--"beyond numismatics," "selecting cigars," "in the water-closet"--would everywhere be one thing only: "in line." And then--unbroken white pages, so that one could leaf through it without reading, ending with an identical postscript: "in line." And under it the date, grandiose in the new fashion: the cued-up millennium of the next-in-line era [ocherednoe tysiacheletie ocherednoi ery].

Trans. Jeffrey Karlsen