Solenoid

by Mircea Cărtărescu

I would like this text to be that kind of a page, one of the billions of human skins covered by infected, suppurating letters, bound in the book of the horror of living. Anonymous like all the others. Because my anomalies, however unusual they are, do not overshadow the tragic anomaly of the spirit dressed in flesh.

No book has any meaning if it is not a Gospel. A prisoner on death row could have his cell lined with bookshelves, all wonderful books, but what he actually needs is an escape plan. You can’t escape if you don’t believe you can escape from a cell with infinitely thick walls, without doors and without windows. The convict in the cartoon can escape by moving perpendicular to the page of the book, toward me, who is reading it in another dimension.

I have read thousands of books but never found one that was a landscape as opposed to a map. Every page of theirs is flat, but life itself is not. Why would I, a three-dimensional creature, take as a guide the two dimensions of an ordinary text? Where will I find the cubical page where reality is modeled? Where is the hypercubic book whose covers gather the hundreds of cubes of its pages? Only then, through the tunnel of cubes, can we escape from the suffocating cell, or at least breathe the air of another world.

I don’t believe in books—I believe in pages, in phrases, in lines. There are some, in some books, like in the coded text a general receives on the battlefield: only some of the words mean anything, surrounded by meaningless blather. The general places his cardboard stencil over the letter and reads only the words that appear in the cutout spaces. That’s how we should read the three-dimensional text of existence. But who gives you the stencil, who tells you the real words, who sifts the diamonds out of the slag?

You shook the puzzle pieces in your hands, you let them fall, faceup or facedown, into the box. If they were just squares with fragments of images on them, you would never know they were parts of a puzzle. But their shapes, the indentations and excrescences on their sides that permit their combination, show they are part of a system, that they were cut apart and scattered intentionally, in order for a mind and fingers to put them back together. It is not a collection of absurdly framed photos, as the world so often seems. This piece connects to the next, nothing happens by chance, everything has to be remade through reverse engineering.

They both have invaginations and protrusions along their edges, they are obviously pieces of a puzzle. But are they from the same puzzle, part of the same image? Be careful here, be careful: in this box there may be pieces from more than one. You can see from the pictures on the back. Some of the pieces have green backs with white spades, others are orange with blue dots. They first have to be sorted into piles according to their backs. Each pile is another world, another image, and incompatible with the others. Only now can you choose your pieces, your world, your books, your mind, or your fate. Only now can you look at the chopped-up images on the shiny side of the cardboard. Only now can the game and story begin.

I have never promised to be completely truthful. No one ever has.

The daylight was teeming with multicolored clouds, which, through their flowing, abstruse architecture with pilasters and colonnades and basilicas and cenotaphs, created a second city above, just as labyrinthine as the one below but endlessly shifting and sliding along the crystal bell of the sky.

the tapping on the wall won’t let you sleep, and the privation of sleep leads to hallucinations and insanity, and in the end, inevitably, to the illusion that you hear tapping on the wall.

I have not lived in vain, I tell myself in every moment of my life, because I didn’t become an author, because I am a lowly Romanian teacher, because I don’t have a family, or a fortune, or a purpose in the world, or because I live and will die among ruins, in the saddest city on the face of the earth. It is rather because I have asked a question and not found the answer, because I have asked and was not given, I have knocked and it has not opened, I have searched and have not found. This is the failure that frightens me.

I walked downhill through the conglomeration of all the earth’s systems, through an oily, peristaltic intestine, along damp walls where an intense and confused life appeared: grubs wallowing in cells full of cilia, red globules gathering in vessels full of varices, but everything was so pallid, ghostly, washed-out, that it seemed more like I was passing high relief carvings on the tunnel’s organic kaolin.

We spoke about children first, about the power of half of the population to give birth, about the terrible responsibility of bringing other people into our hell. About their inhumanity and foreignness, about the fact that they are a different species, not different from us in degree, but structurally, the way a larva is different from the adult insect.

people used books to say important things, because a book assumes an absence, on one side or the other: while it is being written, the reader is missing. While it is being read, the writer is missing. The disgust and abjection that come from putting the judge face-to-face with the condemned thus disappear.

a child doesn’t have only one future, he has billions of creodes ahead of him. Any pebble he steps on, any blade of grass he looks at is the switch that can change the track his life is riding on. Every moment of his life is a fork in the road. No infant is destined to order the slaughter of the innocents. In another future, he might be the one who saves them. In another, maybe the one to paint Herod’s slaughter. Before us is an endless branching of worlds, but without the child at the start, none of them exist.”

A brain injury can leave us unable to perceive an entire spatial area—everything to our left for example—leaving it always empty, like the abyss that precedes our birth. Or we can go so blind that we can no longer imagine seeing. But these things don’t usually happen in our lives, and never more than once. But the on and off of our sexuality, just as complete and just as astounding, happens frequently and we don’t give it a thought.

I descended along her shifting, raspy, melopoetic voice into the vast bolgia, and dungeons and oubliettes of pure sex, detached from any humanity, to such depths where rationality was a hyperdistant constellation, so high and so impersonal that in the end it entirely dissolved.

If it had been possible, Nicolae would have cut the rope with a knife, taken the young suicide in his arms, and lain her across her bed that smelled powerfully of lavender. He would have covered her with a sheet and tucked thousands of pleats over her stony body, and he would have lain next to her, staring along with her at the ceiling and beams. She would have been his departed beloved, his bruised icon, beside whom he would have stayed for eternity in the vast crypt of the world, he would have grown old there, gazing now and then at the charming, black trace of the noose on her martyred neck, he would have died beside her and they would have decayed together, holding hands, on the bed that was now a boneyard, would have crumbled like plaster in their own vestments, and in the end there would be left only two skeletons in a heap of rags, he and his dead lover, he and his undying love.

He looked at the tumescent face and saw, as she rotated infinitesimally in the air filled with glittering dust, a mystical voluptuousness, an all-knowing smile, an abstract sensuality. It was the smile of the Buddha, the lowered eyelids of those who knew, the ataraxia of those who understood that the eye impeded sight like two fleshly plugs and that only the blooming eye under the skull actually saw.

He remembered the testimonies of those who had hanged themselves and been saved at the last minute: they all spoke of the unexpected orgasm they felt after the jolt of falling into emptiness. They all said it was tens of times more powerful than the supreme spasm of mating, and those who inhaled ether or injected morphine described the incomparable pleasure, surpassing even drugs, of those moments hanging in the noose, their sex erect and pumping thin jets of hot sperm.

These pores in the dense skin of reality produced orgasm and ecstasy, trembling before poetry and music, schizophrenic excess, and the delicate brutality of revelation.

With the somber sensitivity of an adolescent, the most unhappy of human avatars, I suddenly understood the entire world as an enormous riddle. One word was missing, just one, but this absence caused everything to be lost, because enigmas, mazes, jigsaw puzzles, cryptograms were nothing but questions, worlds left incomplete in the absence of an answer. This was what we were all looking for: the answer, the answer that was the truth.

what if our cerebral hemispheres were eyeballs? What if their specialization, so well known (the left—reason, mathematics, speech, “masculine”; the right—intuition, space, emotion, art, “feminine”), were the equivalent of the difference between the viewing angles of two eyes? What if our thoughts and, certainly, our egos were born from the convergence of these two types of cognition?

Wasn’t everything somehow right in front of our eyes,

The tattoo-covered surface of the table seemed to rise gently, like when you throw a scarf onto the bed and it catches a passing bubble of air.

I continue to transcribe, here, the underlined parts of my diary and only now, after marking them with crude, thick pen strokes, do they appear for what they have always been: the spinal column of a long manuscript, of torn notebooks, and already yellowed writing, already bleeding from one page to the next like bad tattoos whose lines unravel in the sweat of the martyred flesh.

Each fragment is a vertebra in the spinal column of fear, and at the top, supported by the obscene mechanism of the axis driven into the atlas, is the bone cupola where I was born and which has no exit. I climb inside it, I scamper across its porous bones, I cling to the spinous process and the transverse process, I press my ear to the blade of the vertebral curve and listen: the marrow flows inside with a roar, like a waterfall. Above is the great neural basin, I am a water tower that feeds fear to the distant neighborhood of my body.

a pure fear, immaterial, like a color, an endogenous fear diffused through the gelatin of my brain like a chemical droplet that spreads through the billions of filaments and interstices to the bony boundaries, that passes through the pores of the cranium and surrounds it with a black halo.

Why am I here? Why does my mind, like a loom, weave the world? What does all this mean? Why can’t my hand pass through walls or the hard surface of the table? Who locked me inside this demented fabric of quarks and electrons and photons? Why do I have organs and tissues like cockroaches and worms? What do I have to do with my fingers, my house, my stars, my parents, my skin? Why don’t I remember the time before I was born? Why can’t I remember the future?

you can’t read anything unless it is written on your own skin.

I feel chosen again, even if only for disaster and insanity. I feel that I am not alone, that if you are chosen, you can be sure that somewhere there is at least a single being: the one who chooses you.

I read, in the green swing, that first page from a large, white book, and I was left unable to believe, not that someone could write it, but that I was capable of receiving it, of deciphering it, that I was able to transpose it from another mind’s logic into the logic of my own, to dress the fine, symmetrical joints of the supple-boned skeleton of the text with the incarnation of my own life, of my own memories.

In the low branches were great wheels of spiderwebs, shining in their almost perfect polyhedrons, swelling with each breeze, their rigid architecture holding the large raisin of the animal in its center. Everywhere trees lay fallen, with gaping holes, with meaty white mushrooms growing in their rotting interiors, dripping, melting into each other. Stumps anchored by solid roots, like poorly capped, blackened molars, teemed with ladybugs.

Blind and belabored red ants, who built their slanted sawdust piles against the trunks, glittered everywhere. From time to time the silence became so great that you could hear the wooden thunk that antennae made when two ants met and mutely conversed.

If I had let myself lie on the earth, among the hundreds of shoots and little plants, each one different from the next, each one shaped in a different way by time and weather, if I had let my inert body be overtaken by sun and shadow, if I had let a poisonous bush’s clusters of red and black berries arch above me, nothing would have distinguished me from the world of the forest. I could have died there, I would have quickly turned into dead wood, with my interior juices hardened, with my eyes covered in cobwebs and my skin cracked, a host for insects, a fertile soil for mushrooms, my carcass more and more decomposed, worn smooth by the wind and by loneliness. It would have rained and snowed on me, and in the spring, there would be some bones and rags spread around, under the grass, growing bells with violet cups and brown saplings. I would have belonged, at last, to a world; I would have been one with it, one with its humid, green air, with its carpet of transparent leaves, with its sweet and bitter smells. I would have died and been reborn there, in a complete lack of consciousness, knowledge, or doubt, only a model in the endless tapestry of the forest.

Alice, following the ever more complicated messages that came from another world (crescents, gears, crosses, and asterisks, I say to myself as I listen), found, in the vision of the hare or through the waters of the mirror, that for which we all search from the moment we are born: an exit from the world’s sinister prison.

We secrete our shell in the sweat and mucous of our skin, in the transparent, scaly flesh of the foot we use to drag ourselves along. Through an alchemical transmutation, our drool turns to ivory and the spasms of our flesh into an undisturbed stillness. We curl around our central pilaster of rose-colored kaolin, we add, in our desperate drive to persist, spiral after spiral, each one wider, asymptotic, and translucid, until the miracle comes to pass: the revolting worm—existing in the life it lives, fermenting in its sins, irrigated by hormones and blood and sperm and lymph—rots and dies, leaving behind the ceramic filigree of its shell, a triumph of symmetry, the deathless icon in the platonic world of the mind.

We all secrete, as we live, poems and pictures, ideas and hope, glistening palaces of music and faith, shells which begin by protecting our soft abdomen but after our disappearance live in the golden air of pure forms. Geometry always appears out of the amorphous, serenity out of pain and torture, just as dry tears leave behind the most wondrous crystals of salt.

he spent his life in an attempt to surpass the intuitive forms of three-dimensional space, the only forms where our mind feels at home, because it was shaped by them and has their form; to compel a three-dimensional brain, focused on the volumes of our world, to let its hemispheres diverge; to contemplate, aimlessly and dreamily, until the familiar forms melted and, suddenly, like an epiphany, opened a portal onto the fantastic dimension immediately above our own, a dimension until then accessible only to saints and to the enlightened. Breaking through the prison of these three dimensions through the use of mathematical reasoning equals, in fact (or doubles, as proof that in the end, all the paths of knowledge converge on an incandescent point, mystical-poetical-logical-mathematical), ecstasy, divine infection, the blinding state of satori.

The world of four dimensions is, to our three-dimensional world, what ours is to the world of two dimensions and, as follows, what the bidimensional world is to the world of one dimension.

People set within a flat world cannot imagine a third dimension. A prisoner inside a cell made of four lines will remain there forever, never noticing that he could escape by moving perpendicular to the plane, by taking flight, pure and simple, up through the nonexistent wall facing the third dimension. That wall only exists in his mind and in his habits, the habits of right, left, forward, and backward, but not of up or down. Nothing would be easier than to help a prisoner escape, if you have, in comparison to him, an extra dimension: you simply take him between your fingers and lift him up, perpendicular to his world, into a space he cannot imagine.

If we could grasp the extra dimension, if we could imagine other directions beside left and right, forward and back, up and down, we would realize that no one can hold us in the prison of our world, that one of its giant walls is unoccupied, unwalled, because the jailers are betting we will stay blind to the open door.

The equivalent of the tesseract made in our world is thus easy to visualize: it is a hopscotch pattern analogous to the paper one, but made of cubes. But it is incredibly difficult to imagine how to assemble the hypercube from the cross of cubes, where Dalí imagined Jesus crucified, or, better said, his human icon projected into our world from his inconceivable quadradimensional body. Because you need to rotate the projected cube in a way we do not comprehend—”hyper-up” or “ultra-down”—just as we do not perceive infrared or ultraviolet; our ear cannot hear ultrasounds, the same way that a psychopath can feel no pity.

All these were the exuviae of an era that passed from steam technology to electricity, meant so people would not forget that technology and magic are two sides of the same medallion, that in their primitive-sophisticated minds the miracle of technology was always counterbalanced by the technology of miracles.

Perhaps it was this infinite progression—this concentration of light within light, this mystical rose with a rose in its core, with a rose in its core, with a rose in its core, ever more concentrated and more perfumed rose mandalas—that Kafka was thinking of in his great parable at the center of his writing: each guardian in the infinite succession of doors of the law is more and more powerful.

Maybe in these moments, in that tunnel of horrors, in that rifled tube, red with the friction of the bullet of my brain, I am hurtling toward the truth beyond the truth beyond the truth beyond the truth of our world. That one beyond which there is no progress, or truth, or mind, or being, or godliness. I won’t be surprised if after one of these nights, I am left in a state of abulia and stupefied dreaming. I will only be surprised if I survive it.

I existed: I, too, was in the world. And it wasn’t just that I existed, but I was and I would always be a double being, a being in search of his other half. I had a twin in every mirror, as though each were a glass cylinder where my clone lay in a vegetative state, to be galvanically reanimated whenever I stood in front. I was only whole when standing eye to eye with myself, as if I were the unseen one, although I was myself, and he the one seen, although he was not myself, and we were conjoined twins who shared a common organ: sight.

Yes, the big people were gods, our gods. We could not understand how, but someday, we would end up like them. The flower in the middle of our minds was still just a bud, but it would grow and open little by little until, someday, in that obscure place called the future, it would sparkle in the airy plenitude of its petals. Every brain would adhere, through billions of transparent, sticky threads, to the immortal, inaccessible space of logic, whose mundane name was God. And we could become, each of us, one of the eyes through which God contemplates his world.

There was an impassable chasm, not just between the big people and us, but also between us and the girls. We were enclosed in multiple strangely intersecting cells in the world’s single prison.

Our beginnings, all of ours, were veiled in sacred enigma. A winged, stone gargoyle, with its finger on its lips, sealed the origins of our seed. A monster just as impenetrable, with its wings unfurled along flexible bat bones, obscured our end. Between these two figures of silence, our life extended in an eternal moment.

You were saying that the big people are like gods to us, but it’s not true, we are the gods. Our minds are closer to holiness than theirs. They fall into godliness when they mate, then they get old, shrivel up, hunch over, their teeth fall out, their hair falls out, they get terrible diseases, and they all die. Yes, they know more than we do: they know what awaits them in the future. They are more afraid than we are. They are more resigned, more hopeless. They don’t tell us the truth, not about birth, not about death, because we aren’t supposed to see them for what they are: shadows passing across the earth. They guard the secret piously so we don’t find out that we are the gods, that our mind is crystalline, while theirs reeks of mud and fear.”