During the early days of the Tsar, in what is now the Chernyayevsky Forest, a fool woke up and found himself faced with a blue jug and the reality that he had no idea what it meant. He picked up the jug and his feet, and went out to seek its meaning.
Upon meeting a fellow forest-man, he asked him,
“What does this jug mean?” The forest-man frowned, for he was hard at work cutting logs. He said,
“It’s simple enough, my friend. It carries water from the well to the house.” The fool thanked him and continued on, satisfied, for a time. However, the fool soon came upon a hermit, and thinking the hermit more knowledgeable than the forest-man asked him what the jug meant. The hermit laughed.
“It’s simple enough my friend. Many people give me jugs such as that full of wine, so that I may pass the winter. A jug like that is both kindness and warmth to a poor man like me.” The fool thanked him, but was now quite confused. He couldn’t understand why the forest man and the hermit disagreed.
He came upon a bank of clay. He asked the clay what the jug meant, desperate for a final answer.
“It’s simple enough my friend. That is my child. To a parent, such a child is satisfaction, but anguish, because he is so far and hardly remembers me.” The fool’s bemusement grew as he wandered into town.
In the town he found a market man, with thousands of jugs and thought he’d have his answer. After waiting in line for half an hour, he asked the man, what his jug meant. But he found that his answer was less satisfactory than all the others, for the man said simply.
“2 rubles.” The fool was disheartened greatly at this and went to sit on the banks of the Kama river.
As he sat, a woman floated up from the water, her face pale like winter sky and hair like liquid silver. She was clothed as a peasant girl, young in face, and old in eyes. She sat beside him as he stared at his jug.
“What are you thinking?” She asked. The fool shook his head.
“Since I woke up, I have been trying to understand what my jug means. But no one can tell me. Everyone tells me something different, and I know less now then when I started.” The woman’s eyes glimmered, as her laugh shivered through the air.
“It’s simple enough my friend. It means what it is.* But you won’t be able to be sure what it is until it's done being. Until then, it has infinite meanings, as you see.”
“But when will something that was stop being?”
“When will something that exists stop changing what it means?” She glistened into sunlight, and the fool wasn’t sure if she had ever been. He was only sure that the jug that entered his home impressed him differently than the jug that left it.
Copyright 2014 M. Kehl
*allusion to The Prisoner
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