You remember the strongest memory from your early childhood. Back then, your parents were like airy shadows, gliding along the roadside of your life. Your mind was empty of thoughts. It was occupied only with first sensations — hunger, cold, pleasure, calm.

At that moment, a serious illness struck. The fever was very high, life-threatening. Your clouded brain brought visions. But they were not true visions — neither strange nor usual.

Why are your first memories the silent figures of your parents turned into huge swollen monsters? The long, writhing shadows on the walls and the crumbling ceiling? Why not your mother's gentle voice or warm hands? Why not the smells around? Not the sunbeams on the floor? Not your father's fingers turning the pages of the first book?

You remember all this. Could it be because that terrible, feverish delirium was almost equal to death?

2

You are now over sixty. Yet your mind still produces strange visions. These become reflections on all existence. When the mind is freed from rules and limits, it soars in an ocean of fantasies. Thoughts here are not just thoughts but images and ideas.

When I pour all this onto canvas or tablet, I see the work as a revelation. It is resistance, a plea, and despair reached at the end of the road.

You see what is happening. It is a conversation with yourself. Thoughts are bright, vivid, almost psychedelic. They are alive, almost viral and deadly, yet life-affirming.

Perhaps that is why your monsters on the canvases are not frightening. You defend yourself from real fears through these manifesto-monologues in the form of paintings.

3

You have seen the Earth from both sides.
You sit by the window at the edge of the world, upside down to everything, because you live on the other side of the globe. Your feet hang toward the north, your gaze reaches for Antarctica. You marvel at the unimaginable beauty of nature and mourn the life you might have lived.

Because God gave you the right to speak, and you stayed silent, not believing He could grant such gifts for nothing, for no reason at all.

When you were a very small child and lived at the end of the land, in the Arctic, you already knew how to draw. You already saw colours and images. When you grew older, you thought that you were not good enough for this wealth — so bright, so strong, so powerful.

You thought you were simple and ordinary, unable to turn this gift into true art. After all, art is made by sorcerers, not by ordinary people.

4

You became not what you were meant to be.
Memories of the future kept coming. But there was no time to think about them.

You studied. You won awards for scientific research.
Then had children. Raised them. Helped them stand on their own feet.
Then built a career. So successful that you became a judge.

Everything you did succeeded.
That is how happily you lived your ordinary life!

Even after retirement, you found a hobby — cynology.
You channeled your restless energy there. Participated in reviving the Yakutian Laika breed. Registered it with the International Cynological Federation. Earned the title of Honorary Cynologist. 

5

Your strange and ordinary path began in cold Siberia — the Republic of Yakutia. Yakuts live there at minus 72 degrees. They eat raw frozen fish — stroganina, sliced into thin transparent pieces.

Your cousin shocked doctors. During a check-up, her liver showed fantastic readings — like a corpse's. But she felt perfectly fine. She simply ate a lot of raw deer liver the day before. Your uncle spent a month tracking snow sheep in the Moma Mountains. He needed meat stores for winter.

Chukchi live by the Arctic Ocean. They hunt sea mammals. Bury the meat in the ground for half a year. Then eat the fermented version. To them, it tastes good. They've lived this way for thousands of years. But the state limits hunting and fishing with quotas.

Contradictions torment you. You love animals and even mushrooms as life forms. But you love indigenous people too. You worked at the Association for the Rights of Northern Indigenous Peoples.

You oppose killing bears and wolves. But you can't condemn northern natives' hunting. It's their natural life and survival.

You think how imperfect everything is around. No full harmony exists. No absolute happiness anywhere. 

6

This cold gave you character.
Character led you forward. You built a career — even two. Raised children. Built a house. Created a garden with your own hands, like the Garden of Eden.

Character didn't let you die in childhood and in adulthood, when doctors gave you that very diagnosis, you fought fate. Won priceless years.

"It's just apoptosis," you told yourself.
Everyone will have cancer, or their heart will fail first. Your heart tried too, and you had a myocardial infarction. And again you fought. Told yourself: everyone lives like this, and you will survive. 

7

Character helped you stand against the howling bombs overhead. Clouds of smoke on the horizon drew closer. You were in the epicenter of 2022 events. Your city lay on the border of warring countries, one homeland fought the other.

When your Ukrainian genetic half groaned, you rose up, resisted the pain and wounds.

Tragedies made you different — almost an alien. Deeper, subtler, more vulnerable. Now you can say: you have seen good and evil, war and peace, light and darkness. You have witnessed both sides of the Earth and have lived by the Arctic and Antarctica.

8

You gaze at silent distant volcanoes and rustling bays full of mangrove thickets. At the edge of the bay in New Zealand. Far from your two homelands — cold and unhappy.  You think about the path walked.

Think a little about what lies behind. What you can never change, relive, or start over. Without regret– it simply preceded this new life.

Then you shake yourself. Begin laying out on canvas, line by line–the life you didn't live. Fantastic and fairy-tale. Incomprehensible, misunderstood. Yet pulsing in your temple.

The one you'll live in haste. Feel deeply. Tell as preacher, guide, wizard, seer.

Imagination frees the mind. You weave with red threads into your mad, diverging canvas: thought, science, structure, idea. You tell yourself: “The Dream of Reason Produces Wonders.”

Imagination dances its primal dance with reason. You create another painting. The one not painted in time.