Solenoid

by Mircea Cărtărescu

You are born again and again. This is the greatest defeat. Because your mother is nothing more than the last in the line of monsters. She is the last question, the last trap. Being born again and again and again is not the escape. When you see your mother sleeping in that deep cave, you are overwhelmed with a thirst for life, a limitless longing and love. These things cloud your mind and you fall prey to the most terrible monster, whose hell has no escape. You’re led back into the world again, a failure, and again you are shown the signs. This shouldn’t happen.”

For the divine eye that looks at us from above, I am not my life—the accidental, zigzagging path through the giant maze, the line that leads from the periphery to the center—for it, I am the labyrinth itself, because there is one for each of us, constructed unconsciously by our own selves, as the snail secretes his calcinated shell, as we secrete, without knowing in what way, our brain and vertebrae.

We write frenetically, at the same time, the same text, but mirrored: read in reverse, his paradise becomes my hell, his sun is my night, his butterfly is my obsidian spider.

dreams are emotions, not landscapes or stories.

An oppressed discourse, thin and pure, lives permanently inside me, lacking the resonating chamber of an Adam’s apple, as though within my being, the sun of masculinity blocked the feminine moon, but her phantom still floats in the luminous evening sky. What a relief for me to be feminine! How much do I owe to the ambiguity of my mind!

You cannot truly see the temporal being of your body except through two eyes: a man’s and a woman’s, simultaneously, the way that both sexes are necessary to give birth to the temporal navigator that is the newborn.

What will bring the slow, twisted progression of the bullet called the future into the hard wall of my cranium? I still ask myself this today, although today I don’t see everything as darkness, only a baffling flutter of light and shadow in the corridors of a convoluted maze.

there are both intelligible and unintelligible coherences, just as there are comprehensible and incomprehensible absurdities. You can understand the intelligible, and this is calm; you can understand the unintelligible, and this is power, you can not understand the intelligible, and this is terror; you can not understand the unintelligible, and this is enlightenment. As in the deepest darkness, you can no longer tell if your eyes are open or closed, sometimes I feel that in the midst of my life’s fears and tremors, I do not know on which side of my brain I am.

The clouds unraveled like cigarette smoke, but more slowly and hypnotically, only to gather their strength for another imperceptible and endless movement.

In dreams, the reality validation committee rises from their bottomless chairs, they go to eat and have a smoke, leaving us, amazed and unable to believe it, on uncertified ice, where we are overwhelmed by emotion and euphoria and horror and the charm of a world without the psychical bureaucracy of the real.

What is reality? What visceral and metaphysical mechanism converts the objective into the subjective? I have often thought we are mistaken when we regard reality as a simple, basic given, when it is in fact the most twisted of creatures, the most stratified, most packed with organs, glues, tubes, fats, and cartilage possible to imagine. The animal in which we live, the annelid worm with flesh made of the infinite dust of stars.

The constructor of Bucharest planned it all as it appears today, with every building, every empty lot, every interior, every twilight reflection in the circular windows in the middle of the timeworn pediments. His genius was to build a city already in ruin, the only city where people should live. A city of blind walls with bulging bricks barely held in by rusty iron bolts, of daft plaster ornamentation, of antediluvian trams, of bug-eaten doorframes and decomposing window frames, of unearthed paving stones, of sad courtyards with forgotten, unwatered oleanders placed on a timeworn stair.

Bucharest is not a city but a state of the spirit, a deep sigh, a pathetic and pointless cry. It is like old people who are nothing more than walking wounds, clots of nostalgia, like dry blood on scraped skin.

However fleeting, moments of physical love are still, for me, like those gold points on armor and those decorations on the pupils of characters in chiaroscuro paintings, that glint all the more strongly when the rest is sunk in shadow. Aside from them, and aside from my constant search, of which they are essential parts, my life is nothing more, for, look, almost ten years now, than the tram rails where I glide in the morning toward the end of Colentina, and on which I return home in the evening.

Each of us takes his register under his arm and walks into the hall and up the stairs. The glacial aloneness and the shadow swallow us whole.

I started to think about my story, the one I build, layer by layer, out of gears, infinitesimal screws, and watchwork springs, without being able to understand either how the mechanism functions or what meaning it has, as though I were below the dial where the clock hours were written, living like a mite on a speck of dust, lost between colossal wheels and springs, stuck in the fine oil on their surfaces. I perceive the metal pieces moving like heavy planets, but I cannot see the gigantic numbers or the clock hands that shift imperceptibly under the sapphire sky of the lid. They are on the other side of the world. Even if I suddenly rose, through some miracle, from my tangle of weights, wheels, and pinions, even if I emerged onto the surface over the dial, I still wouldn’t be able to understand that I lived inside a mechanism that measured time.

We all left the school together, in a green-yellow twilight the color of snake venom.

Her mouth, always excessively lipsticked, intincted everything in the homogeneous color of rotten cherry; when she laughed it went out to her ears, Homeric you would have called her if she were a man; her excited bacchante laughter, which always showed not just the gap between her teeth, not just her catlike tongue, but her tonsils and uvula, shattered the tempered glass windows.

An atmosphere out of Poe, strange and melancholy, floated in each of the photographs: a sepia world, a terrarium of frozen creatures, smiling toward you crookedly from the midst of their loneliness.

His thoughts, until then unsettled and cold like crystal vials, now burst open, the way a lily bud bursts, arching and turning in a brilliant efflorescence: they were the floral tableaux of Dutch masters, they were the plethora of blue and metallic green of a peacock’s tail, they were the dry lace of frost, they were the vulva’s anatomy of skins and cat mouths, they were the feathery and vesicant black explosion of unhappiness in love. They were all the landscapes of the world, they were the flutter of light over every gulf, they were the quiet cruelty of all beasts with striped fur, they were a wedding dress sewn out of all cities, they were an enormous underground basin filled with every tear ever shed.

You could sow the world with dreams, because the world itself was a dream.

Poets passed the baton of the search for the deep ego to philosophers, who in turn handed it over to clinicians.

If dreams had never been, we would never have known we have a soul. The concrete, tangible, real world would have been all there was—the only dream permitted to us; and because it was the only one, it would have been incapable of recognizing itself as a dream. We doubt the world because we dream. We perceive it as it is—a sinister prison for minds—only because, when we close our eyes at night, we always wake up on the other side of our eyelids.

Night by night, we fall sleep and dream. We sink into our visions’ cistern of melted gold. Like pearl divers, we cannot stay in these places for a long time: the need to breathe and the pressure on our tympana force us, periodically, to the surface. Four times a night we descend into the deep waters of our mind, we stay there a time and then, almost suffocating, we work our way up to the surface. In the morning we open our hands to reveal, glimmering among the lines of our palms, the frosty pearls for which we put our lives in danger: small fragments of our interior caliphate. Although we go there every night, most of the time we come back empty-handed. We are left amazed and unhappy, because we know we descended, we remember how our knife opened the oyster valves, but the pearls were scattered along the way, as though they had been nothing but unusually dense clouds, or abyssal fish who exploded from their own interior pressure.

each whore—even the most infested and downtrodden, who never opened her mouth without screaming obscenities, and who accepted seven or eight men’s liquids, night after night, all her orifices reddened and tumescent from use and abuse—possessed beneath her skull a brain indistinguishable from Volta’s, or that of Flammarion, Immanuel Kant, or Leibniz, and through it she had access to logical space, to the crystal sphere of fixed stars, to the knowledge of good and evil only possessed by the archangels. Up from their flesh chafed by males and females, full of bruises and excoriations, up from their green cadavers, in the unhealthy light of gas lamps, up from the hell of their urogenital space, a thin stem ascended through the vertebral tube, to open under the cupola of their cranium, as the purest, most diaphanous, most virginal, and most fragile dandelion globe: the mystic circle of the mind.

Vaschide did not find the minds of thinkers, mathematicians, or scholars interesting; he preferred rather those of ruined women, of the daughters of pleasure, because diamonds are best revealed when placed against black felt and paradise when lit by the flames of hell.

Although the possibilities of mating our bodies seem stereotypical and meager, pleasure jets in a thousand different ways through the mind’s inexhaustible thirst for bliss. Sex between the thighs, sex between the buttocks, and in the warm, damp mouth, its tongue more erotic than labia, are only the readily cartographed foundation of the edifice of carnal love. But the center of pleasure is in the brain, and this is where the dark and burning mole maze begins,

there is an intelligence of the sex, just as amazing as that of the brain; that just as the brain overflows with desire, sex radiates divine wisdom.

The most desired and sought-after street women were not the great beauties, many of whom were frigid, but the scholars of pleasure, the thinkers of passion, the poets of bliss.

Chloe had an irreducible and miraculous genius for sexual mating. She didn’t do anything special, different, or perverse, she was, rather, well behaved and timid in bed, like a warm, good wife. So why were the men worn out at dawn, why did they need the rest of the day to recover? Why did they look for her, with glassy eyes, every night thereafter? Why did one sonnet leave you cold, while another, writ...

He opened doors that all gave onto circular rooms, he ascended and descended stairs in gigantic, marble dungeons, he enjoyed all the goods of his oneiric temple. Only one of the rooms was he not permitted to enter, because he knew that there, closed inside a cask with steel staves and bound in chains as thick as his hand, a frightening monster awaited him. Because there is no castle without a forbidden room, there where dwells the most unbearable object in the cosmos: the truth.

When he reached them, he desperately clasped the metal frame near the child’s feet, like a drowning man, and he tried to embrace Chloe around her waist. But the red-haired woman had emptied herself of her own substance, as though, like insects, the baby had occupied her entire body and emerged through a longitudinal split in Chloe’s skin, pushing her head out of the woman’s head, her body from her body, her legs from her legs, her arms from her arms, leaving behind her a nude exuvia, a lifeless simulacrum, a translucid shell meant to be shredded and scattered in the wind.

The world existed, because she did. She radiated certainty; calm and benign intentions flowed from her like from a mountain spring. I was not in love, I was in something else, something deeper: I knew. I knew her. She was like a tabletop that could be nothing other than hard and shiny. She was like sleep: she could do nothing but arrive.

I had a smile on my face, the only immaterial, though precisely outlined, thing: as life is a certain disposition of the body, and as the sound of the Platonic lyre is, in its harmony, a certain disposition of the parts of the lyre, the smile only appears when everything is the way it should be.

Happiness burns and transmutes with petrifying speed into its inverse, or maybe it is only an unstable amalgam of happiness-unhappiness; and joy, the luminous state of the soul, is the true substance from which reality is made. Nothing concrete and true can exist without it, just as sight does not exist separately from light.

The scorching sun of July and August was enough to set the buildings on fire, to melt the flesh of the plaster angels on the roofs, to make the windowpanes run like curtains of water within their irregular frames.

It was like we were inside a photo, we were the shadows cast on an emulsion, on a layer of silver nitrate that outlined my wife’s lips and hair, each minuscule link of the necklace on her neck, the ivory of her buttons, the pleats of her plaid skirt … We were on vacation, and I wanted summer to keep exhaling, forever without end, its blistering halitosis over the city.

Ştefana had been one of my body’s interior organs. I felt her there, even when I wasn’t thinking about her. We lived together, wrapped in the same atmosphere, the same painting, the same myth, like Theseus and the Minotaur, Leda and the swan, Haman and Esther. Her figure overlapped with mine, like two wet watercolor brushes that made trees bloom in each other’s colors.

The city itself around us had changed, because every love is another reality. Now I was living in a city without love, a frightening termite colony, a perfect prison with no escape.

The way I looked at her was like an amnesiac being told: This is your wife, you’ve been married for years; but he sees, from across the kitchen table, a strange woman staring him in the eyes, a bad actress who smiles with obscene familiarity and whom, however hard he racks his memory, he cannot identify at all, or find the shadow of a feeling that would connect them.

No one in the windows, no one in the yard. An abandoned bunker in an ancient battlefield. It was a fold of space, of time, or of the manuscript page that contains them, the brane of the universe folded itself over, the bane of its own existence, maybe, and I now found myself on the other side of a curl longer than a quarter century. It was like it was and also not like it was; it felt like a déjà vu, in which not the image, ah Vaschide, but the emotion floods over you, overwhelms you. It was like an afternoon daydream or a dream at night, a dream with houses taking shape in the intense magic of recognition. “Yes, that’s how it was! Yes, I was there!” You say to yourself, frozen in your suffering and nostalgia, looking at the edifice sculpted from the substance of your cerebellum, bathed in the storms of your endorphins.

Every dream is a message, a call, a portal, a wormhole, a multidimensional object that as you interpret, you mystify and squander. You are used to books you can read placidly, eating a sandwich, during the break in the teachers’ lounge, or in the tram on your way home; to illusory doors painted on the walls of all the paintings in all the galleries of the world; to your head rocking to the beat of all songs. But you’re deaf, blind, and mute to the desperate call from their core. Dreams are escape plans, like music, metaphysics, and spherical geometry. Everything that speaks to us in the world says the same thing: get out of here! Leave! This is not your home! Every dream asks you a serious question. You won’t understand if you interpret, you’ll only understand if you answer. Whenever you are called in the middle of the night, by name, don’t hesitate: answer, “Here I am, Lord!”

Just the thought that I would take the painting from the burning house and not the living child, as tongues of fire roast his skin, elicits an unbearable self-hatred. This is what all writers do, all the philosophers, musicians, and painters in this world, this is what circus magicians and flea trainers do: they save the masterpiece and let the child burn.

Every student at 86 must have, under the translucid cupola of his little cranium, a landscape just as ruined as the world around him, as the school itself, the old factory, the mechanic’s, and the pipe factory. By the time all that has been said and written over the centuries gets to him, it has turned to rubble, chipped bricks, rusty and bent pipes, the broken shutters of a Babel fallen into disrepair.

I went to the school again on Saturday, after spending the whole afternoon doing nothing but staring at the blue amphora in the luminous darkness of my study. The light that entered its curved, ultramarine pipes coursed through an unreal circuit, like blood through a heart where the delicate aortic arch emerges, and just like in a heart, the luminous liquid seemed to depart, to irrigate a distant, invisible realm, and return thicker, more oxygenated, more loaded with nutrients, as though the pear-shaped vase spread a wing in another dimension and there it threshed in an auroral, psychic world, a medium just as different from our world as the immense ocean is to the islands it bathes.

I live in such a strange world: it might not be reality, it might be a stage set built just for me, one that will disappear as soon as I stop perceiving it. How often have I thought I could whip around and catch the stuttering stagehands knocking the backdrops together, see the single wall of the propped-up buildings fall over, or catch the moment when all perceptions dissolve into the void of death!

I might be the last person on Earth, the maze I am in might be generated, moment by moment, just for me; my consciousness might be the projection of a much vaster mind, one I contemplate without being able to understand it, the way a cat regards its giant master. Can a mind accept, once it imagines totality and eternity, the fact that it is not eternal nor all-encompassing? Can I accept the fact that to contemplate the universe, this life has given me the mind of a cat, crab, or worm? Can I know that the universe is comprehensible, but accept that it is not given to me to understand it?

I imagined the search mechanisms in my mind, the articulating arms that open and close dozens of thousands of files at once in the pulsating darkness of the brain, the circuits of comparison and validation, the negatives fired through all the fibers of the mnesic networks, the way photographers fill large baskets of wire with curled ribbons of celluloid.

somehow I hoped that our world’s determinism would prove less rigid, that vibrations and reverberations might change history, destiny, even if very slowly, with only a minuscule deviation at every crossroad. Because it is horrible to be frozen within the block of a definite world that flows like a book from its first page to its last, without its characters being able to say or do anything besides what was written (what was written for them) once and for all.

Strange are the images of pale, plantlike women, who bathe naked in tubs of green liquid, supplied by networks of canals and pipes that seem vegetable, as though the liquid were the sap of a gigantic plant, and the women—the fat and immobile females of woolly lice, hidden under their protective carapaces.