Osmon ichra

I found my first infinity not under the stars but on a bookshelf. This was in Uglegorsk, in the fourth or fifth grade. I would come home from school and stay in. The other children thought asthma was contagious, and often did not want to share a desk with me. But at home there were a hundred books: my mother bought them, and my father gave me a love of science fiction.

Each book was a separate universe. Captain Nemo, “Robur the Conqueror”, “Master of the World”. Belyaev: I loved “Amphibian Man”, and “Ariel” even more. Bradbury, the Strugatsky brothers, “Dune”. “The Master and Margarita”, too difficult a book for a boy, yet it captivated me. The room stayed the same, but its walls stopped being the border of the world.

I would close the book, and the story went on inside me. I could return to the characters, invent other turns of plot, imagine what I had never seen. School did not disappear because of this, but it became clear: a person’s inner world can turn out to be bigger than the life that others can see.

“Ko‘zlarimni yumdim men. Yulduzlar ochildi sekin” - “I closed my eyes, and the stars slowly opened”. “Ko‘tarilmadim osmonga. Ichimdagi osmonga kirdim” - “I did not rise to the sky. I entered the sky within me”. I do not mean that imagination replaces reality. It lets you return to reality differently. Music begins in the same way: with what no one has heard yet.

The Qur’an says: “We will show them Our signs on the horizons and within themselves”. The horizon and the soul are named side by side, as two places where a sign can be seen. For me this echoes a saying that Sufis have repeated for centuries: neither the heavens nor the earth could contain God, but the heart of the believer contains Him. Its authenticity as a prophetic hadith has not been established, but as a poetic image I understand it. Not because a human being is equal to the sky or to God. But because infinity can fit into one simple heart, into one person who remains a person.

“O‘zim osmon bo‘ldim men” - “I myself became the sky”. It was not the adult me who wrote this song. It was written by the boy from Uglegorsk who had no need of the sky, because he could become it. And today, when I close my eyes, somewhere inside the stars open again.