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

There’s so much necrophilia in memory!

Poems, these illumination machines, debauched me. I used them like drugs, until it was impossible for me to live without them. I’d started, sometime before, to write poems too. Among so many graceful lines, enchanted and aggressive, I would find myself stringing together, for no reason, passages of nonsense that seemed dictated by some other being. When I re-read them, they terrified me like a prophecy come true. In these I spoke about my mother, God, childhood, just as if, in the course of a conversation over a beer, I had suddenly started to speak in tongues, with the thin voice of a child, a castrato, or an angel. My

I screamed with my hands on my ears and my entire body, through the narrow tunnel of my throat and my buccal cavities, became a howl, it dressed my howling body in a howling anatomy, so that I didn’t howl, but the howl howled me, I was the one that ran through the vocal cords of my howl, wounded by my glottis and epiglottis, flowing down my tongue, narrowing myself to pass through my howling lips.