Scene: A forgotten courtyard in Seville. It’s hot. Flies sit lazily. Somewhere in the distance, a guitar. On the table is a rough wooden box, and on it lies a navaja. Not a museum piece, but a working tool. The blade is dull, but with a hint of steel. The handle is made of olive wood, polished black by sweat and palms.
Ernest Hemingway (voice hoarse from whiskey and truth): Man is always looking for a way to make death quick and understandable. Bullfighting is a way to talk to death. A duel with navajas is the same thing, only without the horn and the audience. It is a conversation between two men that ends when one of them stops breathing. It’s simple. In this simplicity lies the truth.
Artem Borovik (voice attentive, like that of a man who seeks not the truth, but the details that make it up): Simplicity, Ernest? I would say concentration. The whole world shrinks to these three meters of dusty earth. All experience — to the weight of steel in the hand. But let’s look deeper. Not just at two men. Let’s look at what is happening between them. At what Kozyrev called the passage of time.
Part 1. Stance. The architecture of time
Hemingway: He stands. He just stands. Feet shoulder-width apart. Knees slightly bent. He doesn’t jump or dance like a boxer. He is rooted to the ground. He is part of this rock, this dust. He waits. He doesn’t waste a single movement. The beauty is in what is not there. There is no fuss. Only readiness. Like a leopard waiting for an antelope.
Borovik: Exactly. But he’s not just “standing.” He creates a field. His body is a system where every process is aimed at one thing: slowing down time. Consider his biomechanics. Minimal oxygen consumption. Reduced metabolism. The muscles are not tense, but in potential energy, like a compressed spring. According to Kozyrev, processes that release energy, such as combustion or explosion, slow down the passage of time. And what is the human body in a state of complete concentration if not a system that burns its internal resources to create a “cocoon” of slowed time around itself? In his world, everything flows more slowly. He sees his opponent’s movements earlier. He has more time to react. His stance is not a pose. It is a machine for distorting time.
Part 2. Feint. Lies in the flow of causality
Hemingway: Lies. A duel on the navaja is a poem of lies. He makes a move on your torso. You dodge. And the blow comes from below, to the liver. You saw what he wanted you to see. You died from what you didn’t notice. It’s like a woman who looks you in the eyes while her hand is already searching for a knife in her purse. Simple and deadly.
Borovik: And now — physics. A feint, Ernest, is not just an optical illusion. It is a blow to the cause-and-effect relationship. Kozyrev argued that cause and effect are connected not only by a straight line in the past and future, but also through a “timeless state.” When a master makes a feint, he creates a false cause. He throws a phantom event into space-time. The opponent’s brain, accustomed to the linear logic of “I see movement -> I expect a strike,” catches this false cause and begins to construct a consequence for it — it begins to block a non-existent attack.
At this moment, while the brain is busy processing the phantom, the master creates the true cause — the real strike. He does not strike the body. He strikes the opponent’s information processing. He uses what Kozyrev called “the density of time.” At the point where the opponent is focused on the lie, the density of his time drops. He becomes vulnerable. A stab at this moment is like sticking a knife into a hole in the fabric of reality.
Part 3. Schools. The geography of eternity
Hemingway: In Andalusia, they fight differently than in Catalonia. There, everything is closer to the ground, hot, slow. Like bulls. Here, in the north, everything is sharper, colder. Mountain people. They don’t wait. They attack. Different people, different land, different steel. But the goal is the same. The very same.
Borovik: And this is reflected in their physics of time. The Andalusian school is about gathering time. Slow, circular movements, feints, exhausting the opponent. They don’t so much strike as draw out the opponent’s energy, his “flow of time,” forcing him to waste it. They create a zone of slow, viscous time around themselves, where the opponent sinks like in a swamp.
The Catalan school is an explosion of time. A short, sharp attack. One feint, one jab. It is a pure process with maximum energy output. According to Kozyrev, such a process creates the strongest disturbance in the field of time. It’s like a star explosion. He doesn’t just deliver a thrust — he sends a shock wave through the opponent’s cause-and-effect connections, paralyzing their will and ability to react in a fraction of a second. That’s enough time to finish the job.
Part 4. Philosophy. Conversation with the Timeless
Hemingway: In the end, it’s not about steel. It’s about how you face death. Some run away. Some cry. And some look it in the eye. And in that moment, when the blade is a hair’s breadth from your heart, you understand everything. You realize that life was good. And that death is not an injustice. It’s just the next chapter. A fair deal.
Borovik: And at that moment, he enters that very timeless state. When fear disappears. When the past (your whole life) and the future (thousands of possible outcomes) are compressed into a single point — the tip of the navaha aimed at you. A master who wields a weapon has, in essence, already learned to enter this state at will. Through training, through pain, through concentration. He sees the entire “film” of the fight at once. He sees your feint before you even think of it. He sees your confusion before you even feel it.
He is not just fighting you. He stands on the edge of timelessness and looks at you from there. And when he strikes, it is not aggression. It is an act of bringing order to the world. He brings you back from the illusory flow of time to where all events have already happened. He simply makes one of them explicit.
Scene: Silence. Navaja lies on a box. Dust settles on its blade.
Hemingway: Good steel. It’s honest.
Borovik: Yes. It’s just a tool. For a conversation in which words are time. And the period at the end is steel.
