Blinding

by Mircea Cărtărescu

You do not describe the past by writing about old things, but by writing about the haze that exists between yourself and the past. I write about the way my present brain wraps around my brains of smaller and smaller crania, of bones and cartilage and membranes … the tension and discord between my present mind and my mind a moment ago, my mind ten years ago … their interactions as they mix with each other’s images and emotions. There’s so much necrophilia in memory! So much fascination for ruin and rot! It’s like being a forensic pathologist, peering at liquefied organs! To conceive of myself at different ages, with so many previous lives completed, is like talking about a long, uninterrupted line of dead bodies, a tunnel of bodies dying one into the next. A moment ago, the body who was here writing the words “dying one into the next,” with his face reflected in the dark pool of a coffee cup, fell off his stool. His skin crumbled away revealing the bones of his face, and his eyes rolled out, weeping black blood. A moment from now, the one who will write “who will write” will be the next to fall into the dust of the one before. How can you enter this mausoleum? And why would you? And what mask of tiffany, what surgical glove, will protect you from the infection emanating from memory?

THE past is everything, the future nothing, and time has no other meaning.

My memory is the metamorphosis of my life. If I do not plunge bravely into the milky abyss that surrounds and hides my memory in the pupa of my mind, I will never know if I have been, if I am a voracious praying mantis, a spider dreaming upon an endless pair of stilts, or a butterfly of supernatural beauty. I remember, that is, I invent. I transmute the ghosts of moments into weighty, oily gold. And, somehow, it is also transparent, ever more transparent the deeper the fountain of my mind becomes (and I, a skeleton leaning over its walls, contemplate the wide, dreaming eyes reflected in the golden water). That hyaline cartilage, there on the shield where the three heraldic flowers meet – dream, memory, and emotion – that is my domain, my world, the World.

Gods and demons, with cannibalistic mouths or with no mouths at all, say the same thing, always the same thing: You are not from here. Here is not your kingdom. You must leave, you must find your world, the world where you have been and where, without your knowing, you long to be. You have to search for the exit, this is the purpose of your life, for the rules of the game at the level where you are. Everything conspires to convince you that there is no exit, and truly an exit does not exist until you search for it. And in a way, the searching is the exit, as though the space you move through with hope and faith were to harden behind you, and construct your exit tunnel, your own, open only to you, like a pore that spreads suddenly in the flower-petal skin of Divinity. No sect, no church can take you there directly. Prayers and postures cannot help. Churches are like dreams: the vein of ore runs thin through many strata of useless sediment. The art of belief is the art of sorting. But everything in a rite is a sign, an indicator, flickering under centuries of perversion: a wonder, a hallucination, a catastrophe, a bearded face in a triangle of rays – here, there is nothing to find, but from here, you can begin to search.