Blinding: Volume 1

by Mircea Cărtărescu

  “ ‘Churches are machines to travel to the past, and the sacred is a mode of feeling your first childhood. The past is everything, the future nothing. That is why they crush us, that is why they frighten and overwhelm us with their sparkling vaults of carnelian and their niches with statues made of mercury. They are enormous because we are miniscule. We are human mites, wandering through temples and basilicas and circular labyrinths, over gentle stone slabs with mosaics, watching the ceiling rise immeasurably high on the nerves of ogives, sparking from the light filtering through magisterial rosettes. We do nothing but remember, we see again with a child’s brain the house where we first opened our eyes, the fantastical room where we learned to perceive shapes and colors. And especially, we see how the gods – our mother and father – changed the lines, interfering between our eyes and the walls, furniture, pictures – in the space that had just gained consistency. Yes, Mamma and Pappa, we meet them in the church, and the myths speak about them. Their emblems decorate all of the iconostases of light, because they are the torero’s cape, they are the idols, they are the gods, they are what they are … The inflexibility of sects, the monotony of voices, and the smells of the censers open a conduit in our minds (or our navels, our genitals, our hearts), there where we are the most naked and soft, toward the Precambrian era of our lives, when we were the passive subjects of quotidian salvation, sucking, swaddling, elimination and sleep, with its enormous freight of dreams. Then there’s our waking, the smile of the gods, always in the same forms: the ceiling, the walls, furniture, and pictures, and then emotions impossible to express in language, since language comes only with a sublimation of emotions, on the fossilized earth of true fear, love and hate. The words we use for those things today are only the shadows of shadows, and even much worse: betrayals, contortions, forced etymologies. We will not sob our hardest anymore, not under torture, not in Job’s despair, the way we did when we were infants, and we will not be able, it is not given to us, whatever we do, to love the spirit of God with passionate abandon, childlike, the way we once loved our mothers, when love was not only love and we were not only ourselves, and Mamma was not only Mamma. The essence of the essence of the sacred: memory. The memory that precedes memory. The transport to the world of an encephalon largely free of myelin, that sees, thinks, and feels differently, closer to the seed we exited – namely, the Exit. Even in the embryonic state, the process of maturity begins, the process of betrayal. Even then the basal axons of the mind are swaddled in blankets of myelin, and thus mummified, separated from one another. They become simple logical cables, barely communicating through their terminations, which still never touch. What used to be a unity of minds, the intimate epidermic contact of neurons, is destroyed even more completely in early childhood. Once the vital circuits are complete, the emotional circuit has its turn for mummification. The white substance spreads like scabies toward the edges of the brain, shaping, sparking, isolating, estranging. And in adolescence the oligodendrogliomas triumph almost in full: thought itself is myelinized. This is how we forget, we forget ourselves, and the blinding reservoir, the central canal of our life’s plasma only appears in dreams, rites, psychoses, per speculum in aenigmate … Oh, if just once, one mystic would be able to melt, through meditation or inspiration, the deceitful white substance, recontacting the skull’s neuronal matter, a billion times more than critical mass, remaking our original brilliance! What fusion, what a magnificent spark and total dissolution of the cosmos and maya! What a rose of nonbeing pearls! Saints and illuminati, gods and archangels would perish with carbonized wings like flies around this fire, original and terminal and incomparable … Like a salmon, this mystic would have to travel backwards, thrashing upstream against time, his brow cutting against the currents, leaping over the high threshold of cataracts and waterfalls to ever purer waters, sweeter and colder, to the point where the spring is lost underground, in the kingdom of pyrites and agates. Simultaneously, he would cross, in reverse, the entire structure which corresponds point by point to the ages of his theology, noology, biology, geology, and nadalogy, all of it illogical and impermeable. He would descend below the pia mater, through the six layers of the neocortex, go deeper through the limbic system, wander the paleoencephalon and the dozens of Arcs de Triumph of the vertebrae, cross with great thrashing and effort the blood-brain barrier, which estranges the central nervous system and buries it in the sarcophagus of the body, unrecognized by antibodies as flesh of his flesh. He would collapse into the somatic, drenched in humors and tissues, and then cross, with intense effort, the second barrier, the body-world barrier (because we are Russian dolls stacked one in the other), cross the golden platter of the world, and reach that same light of the happy void in the end, because time and space and being are one …

  “ ‘There are gods, but where is the God? Why have you come here, from your towers, from your rotating lighthouses? Why have you descended snail-spiral stairways within your self, coming here, in the self of all, in the Self? Did you realize that any kind of diving (into thought, dreams, crystals, seas, reading) leads here? That whenever you took a step down the greenish stairway in your block, or a basement, or a grotto in the mountains, you were coming closer to this place? I look at you: you are all here: the real and the potential and the illusory. Real people, characters from books (welcome Dionysus! and you Oliveira …) or films, or computer games (Mario and Luigi, each holding a fat koopa), opaque as the Zohar, semitransparent as agate or transparent as abyssal worms – you are all here, for what? Naturally, for Him. For the constructor. For the one who created. For the weaver. For the shoemaker Arepus who holds us all on his craggy knees. For the brain that dreams us and the sex from which we spouted, hot and screaming in pleasure. For the one who saves by beginning and who does not save, so all may begin. Like a female butterfly, he has scattered his pheromones in the world, and you swarm now around that stomach, musky with sacredness, wilting deeply, so deeply with the desire to be, that is, to be saved!

  “ ‘Since you arrived, however, you haven’t seen a single god. Only a cerebro-genital cavern and an Excalibur of light. Chalice and sword, greater than the mind and more eternal than the sex – but no god. So one of you might raise the chorus again, like a spider, “God is dead” and shouting we are in the cylinder of death, we agonize, we agitate, we search stubbornly for exits, we move the ladders here and there, we find dead-end caverns and return to the cylinder, gripped by sudden flashes and folded vibrations, and in the end each of us is extinguished, one after the other, like tiny light bulbs, and we leave behind putrid carcasses, dried shells, and dead eyes at the bottom of the jar. But even in this case, the triumph would be ours. The ashen inventor of the jar would not, as we might have thought, fill it with disappointment, but with pure and fresh happiness. Because where did the cylinder come from? And who crafted the stairs? And whose fingers send out the folded vibration? The fact that he kills us is nothing compared to his great mercy, to the terrifying patience that sprang from his heart when he let us live. Living, we knew him. Being, he saved us, and will we be saved eternally, even when we are smashed to pieces, even when we are crushed, bone by little bone. No one, opening his eyes, sees anything but you, Lord! No one, battered by suffering, howls anything but your name. And any living person who shouts, “God is dead,” moves his larynx with the trade winds of your breath.

  “ ‘No, the God has not died, he is us moment to moment, or better said, he will be us. Because we all wilt with the desire to become organs, glands, systems and apparatuses in his body, neurons in his thalamus, sperm in his eggs, or simply quarks in the abyss of his matter. And our whole world is only the heaving, the pitching of selves toward him. He is not He-Who-Is, but much more: He-Who-Will-Be. God has not died, rather he has yet to be born. All of us, already illuminated by his foreknowledge (because our flesh is the herald, our flesh is the good news), being only the supposition of our future being, we will one day be him, he will one day be born in us, so that he can someday give us
birth. And just as the poet is preceded and formed by the form-without-words of his poems, so God himself is born from the center of his creation so that he may create it. All worlds exist to be existed. All are pregnant with their own gods, the monads are women heavy with statues of light, the starry tree is blossoming, and in the ovaries of its flowers are void and happiness. All creators are the creatures of their creatures and are born to create them, in unfissurable duality.

  “ ‘We are creation. In a superior world someone will write, letter by letter, or will draw, feature by feature, the sublime and grotesque of our silhouettes. And any gesture we can make, we make because one day it will be described in a work. We are unable to conceive of, or to experience what will not be written. We speak what is put in our mouths, we see what is given to us to see, and what happens is what is written to happen to us. But we are creation before it is created, because to be created always supposes creating. We are here on a limb, at the edge of existence, because what is the center if not an edge inside? Descending in our minds, for years and years, with stubbornness, writhing, and sleeplessness, clenching our teeth until they shatter, leaving behind a trail of saliva, blood, dejection, logic, calcium, and fear, we come here to find ourselves one moment, at the end of our lives – facing our lives, which have arisen before our eyes like a monumental stairway, but one where we cannot take a step, not because weakness impedes us – no, we do not lack for will – but because we are here at the impassible edge of edgelessness, and however many steps we climb we will still be at the edge, and even if the light of our being would grow a thousand times with every step, the next step will find us just as profane, marginal, and opaque as the first step we’ve ever taken. In this way we will wander eternally, on Jacob’s ladder, at the peripheries of Divinity, on the vacant lots of revelation, wilting while we regard the far-off spring of fire. We cannot enter eternity gradually. Wonder is not given in a series of steps. Beyond the walls are other walls, and beyond those walls other walls, and wonder is the sight of endless walls arranged close to each other, the way the rose is not its center but the scented arrangement of its petals, its edges, and its surfaces. You will suddenly snap the crystal rose from its iridium tail, because tearing off petal after petal is pointless.

  “ ‘Because we are creation before it is created, we have gathered here all of those who will be created (for you know this much, Those Who Know: that you will be created, and that those who do not know will never exist in this world, just as in a book no miriapod or hero or smile exists if the author does not write: “miriapod,” “hero,” “smile,” and in fact, you, knowing, already existed and existing, you are already saved, albeit only by salvation), out of the limitless fear of staying on this limb forever. I imagine the howls of horror from all the unborn – unbeing must be only self-horror and self-terror, only cries from the inferno. Out of fear we dive into ourselves, calling on our god like a child in a dark room calls for his mother. What we do not know is that the God, now, whimpers with fear, because he too is not yet a god, the way a woman is not a mother until she has borne a child. So we walk blindly toward one another, through fear, the world, and its god, World and God.

  “ ‘We are here to give birth to our mother. To give birth to the One who will give us birth. It’s true, the Exit is barred and we will not give birth to ourselves in other worlds. We will not emerge from this stomach, rather, we are all the stomach from which He will be born, because any world is a stomach that swells and contracts. We will save ourselves through him, inventing him, conceiving him, and he will seem to grow within our world, but in fact, he will grow within an enormous world, one much higher, because he, rising from our plane like the crest of a wave, into the third, unimaginable dimension, will curve toward us to see us, describe us, create us, syllable by syllable and turn by turn, the way we hang from the pearl statue of his body. We will see him only in sections, because he is perpendicular to our world, bowed deeply above it. We will see the succession of his bodies: at a few months, a year, three years, five years three months, five years three months one hour, five years three months one hour and four seconds … how he slices himself amazingly thin, with the mechanical microtome, into microscopic slides suspended in Amann’s lactophenol, then dyed green from iodine and fuchsine (since they are transparent sparks and would be completely lost in the transparency of our illusion), but we will lose all that is not coplanar with the disk of our lives, the way characters in a movie will never see the thick beam that projects them, or the hundreds of eyes that watch them in the dark theater. We will see him grow among us, but he will not be among us. We will interfere in his life, with discretion, in succession, and in helping him become what he is, we will leave nothing, but nothing to chance. The smallest incident: a worm writhing at the end of an invisible thread, an unforeseen snowflake caught on his chin, an inflection in the voice of any one of us – will modify a letter, line, or paragraph in the book he will write, and which is the only world we have. An inopportune sneeze, and one of us disappears. A fluttering eyelash, and he’ll never write a thing. Surveyed by us like ten thousand apostles, served by us like a cohort of angels, the boy will grow in wisdom and vigor, but how much he grows in glory, we will never be able to know. Because he will be at the same time among us and in a greater world, with an extra dimension of glory in the world for which we are only a flat, dull projection. And this world of glory is, in turn, nothing but the flat, dull purgation of a world of hyper-glory, with another god that writes in the golden howl of inspiration, written in turn by another … And the tunnel of gold, ever longer and heavier, stretches endlessly, like a string of pearls in which the string is only an infinite point of light, and the pearls are enclosed within each other, pierced through their blinding center. And it is bizarre that each of the pearly spheres is founded on the others, born of the one below it, just so that it once, sometime, can give birth to one more, in an endless flickering of the possible and the unreal and the real, in a dance of transparencies and opacities, around the thread reduced to that most ecstatic star …’

  “The steel flower was now completely open, to expose in its center, sagging with its own weight, the throbbing brain of Fra Armando. The crowd, hungry for a miracle, looked longingly at him, like a loaf of fresh bread they hoped would be broken and set before them, so they would eat and be filled, and they would take of the broken pieces left in the baskets. Somewhere in the first rows, a scrawny woman held, with a kind of pride, a heavy glass cylinder where a yellow fetus floated, spongy and tranquil. I remembered the vial in my pocket. When I put my hand in my pocket, it was warm and hard. But I could not pull it out, because it was flesh of my flesh, my erect sex, my seed risen to the tip and ready to spurt. Did all the men in the crowd have erections? Even the boys, even the babies asleep in the floral scarves tied on their mothers’ backs? I glanced to my left, at a dwarf – sweaty, myopic, with a hideously red mouth: yes, his risen member was visible under his cotton pants. I no longer doubted this strange effect of approaching the sacred, as I knew that all the women’s and girls’ vulvas were sweetly moist. Because this happens however often we dream, regardless of the content of our dream, as though the great light of the dream were of the same nature as the smell of a cheek and the velvet of skin and the stiffness of another’s pubic hair, as though the dream were our interior partner, a woman if we are men and men if we are women: it excites us, it stirs the lubricating seminal fluids, it incites our minds with fantasies and tangles … To ejaculate in the uterus of our dream, to fecundate ourselves, like snails, to make love with ourselves between the kaolin walls of our skull – this is what we always wanted, and we have wanted it perhaps forever …