Solenoid

by Mircea Cărtărescu

I get lice from the kids when I lean over their notebooks; it’s an occupational hazard. 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.

It seems strange that I have a body, that I am in a body.

My body is not, for me, erotic. My fingers, it seems, move across not my body but my mind. My mind dressed in flesh, my flesh dressed in the cosmos.

My navel was no more than the indentation on top of an apple, where the stem comes out. We all grew like fruits from a petiole crossed with veins and arteries. But starting a few months ago, whenever I poked my finger in to clean this accident of my body, I felt something unusual, something that shouldn’t have been there: a kind of protuberance scraping against my fingertip, something inorganic, not part of my body.

Over the course of our lives, we excrete plenty of moles, warts, dead bones, and other refuse, things we carry around patiently, not to mention how our hair, nails, and teeth fall out: pieces of ourselves stop belonging to us and take on another life, all their own.

Anything unusual on the sensitive map of our bodies makes us unsettled, nervous: we’ll do anything to escape a constant discomfort.

Now my navel was aborting, slowly, a piece every two weeks, every month, then another after three more months.

Their bodies and my body, wet and naked, leaning over the sink, are made of the same organic tissues. They have analogous organs and anatomical functions. They have eyes that see the same reality, they have legs that take them through the same unending and unintelligible world. They want to live, just as I 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.

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. From the very beginning, the project was to be a more human, a more moving city than, for example, a concrete and glass Brasília. The genius architect planned the narrow streets, the uneven sewers, the houses slouched to one side, overrun with weeds, houses with their fronts fallen in, unusable schools, bent and ghostly stores seven stories tall. And, more than anything, Bucharest was planned as a great open-air museum, a museum of melancholy and the ruin of all things.

This was the city I saw from my window on Ştefan cel Mare, and the one, if I had become a writer, I would have described endlessly, page after page and book after book, empty of people but full of myself, like a network of arcades in the epidermis of some god, inhabited by a sole, microscopic mite, a transparent creature with strands of hair at the end of its hideous, stumpy legs.

I never wrote fiction, but this released me to find my true calling: to search in reality, in the reality of lucidity, of dreams, of memories, of hallucinations, and of anything else.

With every move we make in our lives, we make a choice or we are blown by a breath of wind down one aisle or another. 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.

If I blink, my life forks: I could have not blinked, and then I would have been far different from the one who did, like streets that radiate out from a narrow piaţa. In the end, I will be wrapped in a cocoon made of the transparent threads of millions of virtual lives, of billions of paths I could have taken, each infinitesimally changing the angle of approach. After an adventure lasting as long as my life, I will meet them again, the millions of other selves, the possible, the probable, the happenstance, and the necessary, all at the end of their stories; we will tell each other about our successes and failures, our adventures and boredoms, our glory and shame.

If nothing human is foreign to me, by definition, I will embrace, through my real-virtual brothers, all possibilities, and fulfill all the virtualities meshed in the joints of my body and mind.

Different than all the writers of the world, precisely because I am not a writer, 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.

a text outside the museum of literature, a real door scrawled onto the air, one I hope will let me truly escape my own cranium.

My fear came especially from the fact that we don’t know what the world is like, we only know that facet our senses illuminate.

In addition to the house, as a kind of advertising brochure or instruction booklet, I was buying a story. From then on, I would be the owner of a house that had been constructed, even if only in the senile imagination of a nonagenarian, on top of a gigantic coil buried in the earth. It was as though Mr. Mikola, in an inexplicable magnanimity, had given me a bell jar containing his own brain, with a boat-shaped house built upon its hemispheres.

The facts of my report are going to be phantasmic and transparent, but that is the nature of the worlds in which we simultaneously live.

This is what my life is like, how it has always seemed: the singular, uniform, and tangible world on one side of the coin, and the secret, private, phantasmagoric world of my mind’s dreams on the other side. Neither is complete and true without the other. Only the rotation, only the whirling, only vestibular syndromes, only a god’s careless finger spins the coin, adds a dimension, and makes visible (but for whose eyes?) the inscription engraved in our minds—on one side and the other, on day and night, lucidity and dream, woman and man, animal and god, while we remain eternally ignorant because we cannot see both sides at the same time.

Maybe the game is won by the person who suddenly understands its absurdity and throws it to the ground, the one who cuts through the knot while everyone else is trying to unravel it?

you know you are decaying, that your mind is a pool of bombastic vomit and clichéd quotations, and still you can do nothing but scream, silently, like someone being tortured in an underground cell, alone with his executioner, watching in complete lucidity as the fabric of his body is rent, as he is eviscerated alive and unable to object.

Dreams are also real, our first memories our real, and fiction is real (so real!), yet we feel foreign to our ashen homeland, we feel hard, prickly, stubborn, unimaginative, meaningless, or unsalvageable, the cell where we were tossed after we sipped the dark waters of Lethe. The real—our legitimate homeland—ought to be a fabulous realm, but it is instead an oppressive prison.

I have never seen eyes like hers. Irina is like an old, worn photograph, a sepia portrait of an anemic creature, the very image of resignation, but her eyes look like someone poked holes in the photo to let the blue sky show through.

From the first moment, her eyes surprised me: she seemed like a collage, like a magic trick. It wasn’t just that the eyes did not fit the woman’s then jaundiced face: they didn’t even fit reality itself. They were beautiful, but not as you would say, “A flower is beautiful,” or, “A child is beautiful,” rather as you would say, “It is beautiful that there are flowers and children.” The word “beautiful” didn’t fit her except as a substitute for a word that doesn’t exist.

We are embedded in existence, we are woven into its great tapestry, we are not expected to make decisions, since everything is decided ahead of time, the way the rungs on a chair don’t decide to make up the chair, they just do.

there were things in the world you cannot see with your eyes, yet were there, preventing your progress and occupying space with the same bored legitimacy as a table or a glass.

reality itself seemed to be connected to the miraculous magnets of our own eyes.

Our sex life has gained an incredible amount thanks to levitation; we make love in the air, without the awkwardness of people handicapped by a bed. We close the drapes, lie down naked across the bed, push the button, and we rise gently through the total, unblemished darkness, such that it doesn’t matter if we open our eyes or keep them closed. We embrace without knowing who is above and who is below; suddenly space has no point of orientation. We are only bodies, with dry parts and wet parts, with warm parts and rough parts, with hairinesses and smoothnesses, with acrid tastes and fatty tastes, with softnesses and tumescences. We devour each other, we cleave to each other, we enter and exit each other’s cavities, we lose ourselves in the dark and find ourselves, ever sweatier and more ardent, after our fingers claw through nothing and nevermore to find other fingers, or a foot, or a shoulder, or hair, or a mouth, or the eyelashes of the other person, so we can approach and touch and come close. We almost make a metallic click, like two curved magnets, but our click, which culminates in a physic aura and an unimaginable jet of light, is never the end of our encounters over the undisturbed bed. After our epileptic screams subside and our membranes calm down, we turn on the light, and the image, violently mirrored, of our bodies floating, surrounded by droplets of sperm and sweat, Irina’s soaked hair, our membranes, our starving sexes, fill the suddenly alien, unbearable real...

like all of Bucharest, the saddest city on the face of the earth, the factory had been designed as a ruin from the start, as a saturnine witness to time devouring its children, as an illustration of the unforgiving second law of thermodynamics, as a silent, submissive, masochistic bowing of the head in the face of the destruction of all things and the pointlessness of all activity, from the effort of carbon to form crystals to the effort of our minds to understand the tragedy in which we live.

Bucharest was born on a drawing board from a philosophical impulse to imagine a city that would most poignantly illustrate human destiny: a city of ruin, decline, illness, debris, and rust. That is, the most appropriate construction for the faces and appearances of its inhabitants.

we seemed as unimportant and black as two minuscule insects inside the carcass of an ancient radio.

I hadn’t stopped wondering what it would have been like to be born as a mite or a louse, or one of the billions of polyps on coral reefs. I would have lived without knowing that I lived, my life would have been a moment of obscure agitation, with pains and pleasures and contacts and alarms and urges, far from thought and far from consciousness, in some abject hole, in a blind dot, in total oblivion. “But that is what I am, it is,” I suddenly found myself saying out loud. This is what we all are, blind mites stumbling along our piece of dust in an unknown, irrational infinity, in the horrible dead end of this world. We think we have access to the logical-mathematical structure of the world, but we continue to live without self-consciousness and without understanding, digging tunnels through the skin of God, causing him nothing but fits and irritation.

the disks of silver and copper coins spread over the floor. Little divination machines, on one side Urim, on the other Thummim, now emptied of their premonitions and life.

The hospital was a yellow building beneath yellow clouds, as though the clouds had been constructed and painted at the same time as the building.

The empty classrooms howled with loneliness like an ear with tinnitus, the entire school became an actual ear that listened to its own whistles and snarls deep within its cochlea.

She took each item in turn and held it out to me, as though holding tropical butterflies by the tips of their wings.

the capital M we all have scribbled there in the middle of our palms—and which cannot stand for anything other than Mors, the Roman god of death, since all the paths across our palms lead, through the pointless whirls of destiny, through the risible games of karma, to the common boneyard—

We age: we stand quietly in line with those condemned to death. We are executed one after the other in a sinister extermination camp. We are first stripped of our beauty, youth, and hope. We are next wrapped in the penitential robe of illness, weariness, and decay. Our grandparents die, our parents are executed in front of us, and suddenly time gets short, you suddenly see your reflection in the axeblade. And only then do you realize you are living in a slaughterhouse, that generations are butchered and swallowed by the earth, that billions are pushed down the throat of hell, that no one, absolutely no one escapes.

we select, out of the hodgepodge of possibilities, probabilities, unrealities, and oddities, a single structure that we name “reality” and base our lives around it.

the stars unfurled above me, seen through a fish-eye lens; they spread over the entire sky, some as large as the pitchers of imperial lilies, bending the mathematical stem from which they hung, others scattered finely, Mandelbrotian, into the holes and folds and hollows of the night sky.

Perhaps all we want from reading is to return to that age when we could hold a book and cry,

You have no more skin than the one in which you find yourself.

I moved toward the border between body and spirit, I crossed it, holding my instrument of torture, and I began to tattoo myself, knowing I would never exhaust—even if I spent eternity wounding—the infinite and infinitely stratified and infinitely glorious and infinitely demented citadel of my mind.

Before becoming someone, I was my own little body, perhaps that is why I spoke about myself like I was a thing like any other: it, I would say, it. Then I understood that I wasn’t a body, I had one, that I was its tenant and its prisoner.

“In capitalism, man exploits man. In communism, it’s the other way around.”

The dawn blued the cold streets

The only texts that should ever be read are the unartistic and unliterary ones, bitter and incomprehensible books that their authors were crazy to write, but which flowed from their dementia, sadness, and despair like springs of holy water.

After them will come millions of writers who only wrote with tears, with blood, with Substance P, with urine and adrenaline and dopamine and epinephrine, directly onto their organs with ulcers of fear, on their skin, excoriated with ecstasy. Each of them will carry their own skin, covered with writing, from which the Lord, gathering them together between the cover of birth and the cover of death, will create the great book of human suffering.