Solenoid

by Mircea Cărtărescu

I have worn my hair long ever since my attempt to become a writer. That’s all that’s left of that career, just the hair.

The pain waited for me, all of it, with its blood-colored aura.

My illusion had grown as large as myself, and still I couldn’t—and in a way I can’t even today—resist opening my shirt, at least now and then, and letting it voluptuously cannibalize me.

Only later does the fear come, only after this fantasy (that happens about once every two or three months) becomes a kind of memory do I begin to wonder if somehow, among all the anomalies of my life—because this is my topic—the fantastical independence of my hands is further proof that … everything is a dream, that my entire life is oneiric, or something sadder, graver, weirder, yet truer than any story that could ever be invented. The cheery-frightful ballet of my hands, always and only here, in my boat-shaped house on Maica Domnului, is the smallest, least meaningful (and in the end the most benign) reason for me to write these pages, meant only for me, in the incredible solitude of my life.

If you are a writer, you write.

When I was a teenager, I wanted to write literature. Even now I don’t know what happened—if I lost my way somehow or if it was just bad luck.

At that time, my solitude was all-encompassing.

Bucharest, as I understood it at the age of nineteen, when I had already read everything, was not like other cities that developed over time, exchanging its huts and warehouses for condominium towers, replacing horse-drawn trams with electric ones. It had appeared all at once, already ruined, shattered, with its facades fallen and its gargoyles’ noses chipped, with electric wires hung over the streets in melancholic fixtures, with an imaginatively varied industrial architecture.

“O fates, permit me just one summer / and an autumn to ripen my fruit …”

I curled up in bed and wished that I could die—I wished it so intensely that I could feel at least a few of my vertebrae agree.

The line of our life only solidifies behind us, it becomes coherent as it fossilizes into the simplicity of destiny, while the lives that could have been, that could have diverged, moment by moment, from the life that triumphed, are dotted, ghostly lines: creodes, quantum differences, translucid and fascinating like stems vegetating in the greenhouse.

Like sex, like drugs, like all the manipulations of our minds that attempt to break out of the skull, literature is a machine for producing first beatitude, then disappointment.

Unceasingly, in a thousand voices, it promised you escape, while it robbed you of even the frozen crust of reality that you once had.

As a writer, you make yourself less real with each book you write. You always try to write about your life, and you never write about anything but literature. It is a curse, a Fata Morgana, a falsification of the simple fact that you are alive, you are real in a real world.

I feel I have something to say. And I will say it poorly and truthfully, the way anything worth putting down on paper should be said.

I have been wandering through this mirage for three years, and I have yet to understand its layout.

suffering from too much love and too much fear.

Then summer came and the girl left for break, with her gauze pad and her fate and everything.

For some, early childhood is a period of development with fantastic colors and dear faces; for me, it was a violent spectacle of shadows and flashes of light.

In our single, narrow room, with a single bed, stove, and cement floor, my mother would read to me.

I felt so desperate, so upset … I cried the whole day, the most beautiful part of my life was gone … Why do we have to get older? Why do we lose our beauty, our happiness?”

Yes, darling, everything passed too quickly, like a dream.

They danced in the dark, they caressed each other like teenagers, not for pleasure but as a sad, dark demonstration: I still desire you,

They didn’t just pretend that there was something left between them; they really wanted it, they would have given their own skins to feel love and tenderness again, or at least an animalistic desire for each other.

with tears dancing in her eyes and a dark hatred over her face like a dead god of love,

but how can we accept the destruction of the spirit, the enormous absurdity of its life and death in flesh?

we scream silently against this unbelievable, unqualifiable, unpardonable human genocide. We hold that it must end. As free and dignified people, we must protest fate and fatalism. We do not accept them, we will not bow down to fate, and if we must perish, at least we will know it was not without revolt, without a yell, without indignation. We are the only ones who will die on our feet, not on our guts in the dirt, or on our knees.”

Dark had fallen when we realized, at the same moment (and at the same moment rejected the idea), that now, in the school’s whistling emptiness, we could melt our despairs together into one even more despairing embrace.

Utopian logic of dreams,

The human voice is a thought that passes through flesh.

There’s a day when you see three or four blind people, after not seeing any for years, not even in a dream. You meet a woman named Olimpia, and a few minutes later you open a dictionary to the page showing Manet’s Olympia, then two hours later, on the street, you pass Olimpia’s Flowershop. These are nodes of meaning, plexuses of the world’s neural system, they connect organs and events, signals that you ought to pursue until they wave a white flag—and you would, if you didn’t have this stupid prejudice for reality. We ought to have a sensory organ that can tell sign from coincidence.

The first had been anonymous and title-less, and it lacked the first chapters, the way any book ought to begin and be read by an honest, nondiscriminating mind and eyes, open as they would never be again.

We know we are in the maze, we know we have to escape, even in the absence of an angelic mind, even in our plodding reasoning, even as we improvise with what we have, even as we take the wrong turn thousands of times before we take the right turn once, and we believe that we will find the exit, if only by dumb luck, because without this belief, we could not breathe.

I have been writing for more than three months, here in my animal solitude, where I have lived as long as I remember.

On my nightstand at the moment—because I keep reading at home, in the evening, until deep in the night—The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Alone by Strindberg, Shameless Death by Dagmar Rotluft, The Confessions of Young Törless. And, of course, the book I hold dearest, Franz Kafka’s Diaries.