The Physics of Sorrow

by Georgi Gospodinov, Translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel

  By the end of the second year, the whole house was swarming with cockroaches. Miriam watched the smug hordes creeping by only centimeters away from her. She had no right to lay a finger on them. She was in love and thus magnanimous. She held out for a whole year. In the evening, she would slip into her sleeping bag and pull the zipper up over her head, leaving only a small hole for air. One night she woke up and saw two cockroaches nestled in the beard of her Buddhist-lover who was sleeping soundly beside her. That was too much. The next day, while the Buddhist was at work (I was amazed that Buddhists work), she bought the strongest spray against such varmints and fumigated the whole apartment herself. It was true mass murder. Genocide! Miriam imitated the infuriated Buddhist, who had come back that evening, stood in the middle of the room, looking around at the dead cockroaches, their stiff little legs turned up toward the ceiling, he had stood there like the last survivor amid an apocalypse.

  “Have you ever seen a Buddhist scream?” Miriam asked. “It’s worth seeing. He screamed that I had shattered the whole chain of life, that the world would never be the same, that the karmic . . . He slammed the door and left. Actually, he already had a mistress.”

  For several minutes, the only sound was the cracking of shells and the cold rain outside. I was thinking about that last line and an inexplicable rage was building up inside me against that working Buddhist with his mistress, that shepherd of cockroaches.

  “Anyway, the right to kill is inviolable,” Miriam said slowly. Then she carefully placed the last mussel shell on the rocky mountains in front of her.

  I will put Miriam’s story in the green box, too, for balance. So we have one of every kind.

  THROUGH A LAMB’S EAR

  Man needs to shut up for a while and in the ensuing pause to hear the voice of some other storyteller—a fish, dragonfly, weasel, or bamboo, cat, orchid, or pebble. How do we know, for instance, that bees don’t write novels? Have we deciphered even a single honeycomb? Or should we start with fish? What a huge part of evolution remains locked up in the fish’s silence, what knowledge have fish accumulated over all those millennia before us! The deep, cold storehouses of that silence. Untouched by language. Because language channels and drains deposits of knowledge like a drill.

  And so, the only storytelling creature, man, shuts up and steps back, yielding the floor to the organic and inorganic ones that have stored up silences until now. Actually, they’ve been telling their tales, but their muted, suppressed narrative has turned into mica and lichen, seaweed, moss, honey, the tearing apart of other’s bodies and the torn-apartness of their own.

  I have no idea how to make this happen. Maybe we just need to take the first step. All the world’s classics, retold by animals for animals.

  For example, we could retell The Old Man and the Sea through the eyes of the fish, that marlin. Now that’s what I call anti-anthropocentrism. Its battle with the gaunt old man and the sea is no less dramatic. When it comes down to it, the fish is the character locked in a life-and-death struggle throughout the whole story. The old man’s story is a story about the battle against aging. While the fish’s is a story about death. The whole story through the voice of a fish, bleeding, gnawed clean to the bone, yet resisting to the very last.

  A marlin can be destroyed but not defeated.

  . . .

  Muria (that’s how she spelled her name, with a “u”), a fishing fanatic:

  “In the morning, when I get up, I imagine what I’d like to eat if I were a fish, and that’s how I sense what’ll make them bite during the day. The whole trick is to turn yourself into a fish for a while. And you’ll get hungry. Sometimes you’re hungry for a worm, sometimes for corn, sometimes for a fly. And when I figure out what it wants to eat, what I want to eat that day, I stick it on the hook, cast it out into the water and start reeling them in like crazy. To the horror of the other fishermen, who had been laughing at me just a few minutes earlier. Then I toss the fish back right in front of their eyes. Which makes them all the more furious.”

  “Ugh, do you really feel like eating a worm first thing in the morning?”

  “When I’m a fish, a worm is not to be missed.”

  . . .

  “The history of the world can be written from the viewpoint of a cat, an orchid, or a pebble. Or lamb’s ear.”

  “What’s lamb’s ear?”

  “A plant.”

  “And do you think we would figure in a history of the world written by lamb’s ear?”

  “I don’t know. Do you think lamb’s ear figures in the history of the world written by people?”

  BUFFALO SHIT, OR THE SUBLIME IS EVERYWHERE

  I remember how we walked through a historical town famous for its Revival Period architecture, uprising, fires, cannons made from cherry-tree trunks, history rolled down the narrow streets but my father was impressed mainly by the geraniums on the window sills, praising aloud those who had grown such flowers. Suddenly he stopped in a street and started hovering over something on the ground. I went to see what he had discovered. A pile of buffalo shit. It was standing there like a miniature cathedral, a church’s cupola or a mosque’s dome, may all religions forgive me. A fly was circling above it like an angel. It is very rare to see buffalo shit nowadays, my father said. No one breeds buffalos here anymore. And he spoke with such delight about how one could fertilize pumpkins with it, plaster a wall, daub a bee hive (of the old wicker type), how one could use it to cure an earache—you should warm it well and apply it to the ear. At that moment I would have agreed that the Revival-Era houses we were touring and the pyramids of Giza were something much less important than the architecture, physics, and metaphysics of buffalo (bull?) shit.

  Even if you weren’t born in Versailles, Athens, Rome, or Paris, the sublime will always find a form in which to appear before you. If you haven’t read Pseudo Longinus, haven’t heard of Kant, or if you inhabit the eternal, illiterate fields of anonymous villages and towns, of empty days and nights, the sublime will reveal itself to you in your own language. As smoke from a chimney on a winter morning, as a slice of blue sky, as a cloud that reminds you of something from another world, as a pile of buffalo shit. The sublime is everywhere.

  SOCRATES ON THE TRAIN

  If everything lasted forever, nothing would be valuable.

  —Gaustine

  The world is set up in such as way that it looks obvious and irrefutable. But what would happen if for a moment we turned the whole system upside down and instead of the enduring, the constant, the eternal, and the dead, we decided to revere that which is fleeting, changeable, transitory, yet alive?

  The train was passing through the hot stubble fields in late August, where they still use that barbaric method of stubble burning. The fields had been reaped and to make for easier plowing afterward, someone had set a match to them. I imagined the meadow birds’ scorched wings, the running and squealing mice and rats, the burned up lizards and snakes. Storks were anxiously circling above the burning fields—we’ve got to get out of here ASAP, ASAP . . . Everyone wanted to run away, the world was heading toward autumn. At the same time, I was returning to the town of T.

  In the end, man, if we still insist on seeing him as the measure of all things, is closer to the parameters of the fleeting—he is changeable, inclined toward death, alive, but mortal, perishable, constantly perishing.

  I sensed that my imagination was running wild, I needed an opponent. I invented an opponent, clever, with a sharp rhetorical bite, I generously endowed him with qualities and gave myself over to my favorite pastime, Socratic spats.

  “So, my dear sir, you propose that we replace the lasting with the fleeting,” my opponent began.

  “I suggest that we examine this possibility.”

  “Very wellll . . . Just say it aloud and you will hear how absurd it sounds—to replace the lasting with the fleeting. Illustrate it with a concrete example, isn’t that what you always love to say, my dear fellow? Now then, imagine a nice, sturdy house
on the one hand, and a tumbledown hut on the other. Would you exchange the house for the hut? In one hand, I’m holding gold, in the other straw. Which would you choose? Won’t the straw grow moldy after the first rain?”

  “Wait, wait, my most noble opponent . . . You speak wisely and take shameless advantage of your right to peek into my own misgivings. Yet let us look at the other side as well. Imagine a world, in which everyone agrees to a new hierarchy. In which the Fleeting and the Living are more valuable than the Eternal and the Dead. The opposite of the usual world, which we share today. And so, let us imagine what consequences this might have. Immediately many of the reasons for war and theft fall away. That which entices one to theft is that which is eternal or at least lasting, like a bar of gold, for example, or sturdy houses, cities, palaces, land . . . That is what’s ripe for the taking. No one goes to war over a pile of apples or lays siege to a city for its fragrant, blossoming cherry trees. By the time the siege is over, the cherry trees will have lost their blossoms, and the apples will have rotted.

  “And since gold will have lost all of its agreed-upon value (because that’s exactly what it is, a contract value), it’ll just be rolling around on the ground and no one will think to up and go on a crusade for it.

  “And speaking of crusades, let’s look at that side of the question as well. The religions that stand behind every crusade or holy war will suddenly have the rug pulled out from under them. The old gods were the Gods of the Eternal in all of its aspects. Is there a God of the Ephemeral? If there are Gods in the new constellation—and why not?—they will be exactly that: Gods of the Ephemeral. Gods of the Fragile and the Perishable. And hence fragile and perishable gods. Sensitive, feeling, empathizing. What more can we say? Mortality raises the price and opens our eyes.”

  “But isn’t all of that so fleeting and unstable . . .”

  “You’re fooling yourself. Let’s take that straw, which you’ve been clutching in your left hand since the very beginning of our debate. That straw used to be wheat, which used to be seeds, which used to be wheat, which used to be . . . And here, nota bene: the perishable reproduces itself. And that is its first advantage. While the gold, which you’ve been holding in your right hand, is made once-and-for-all, it won’t give birth to gold even if you plant it and water it every day for two hundred years. Let me put it like this, paradoxically—the perishable is more enduring, precisely because of its death, than that which is imperishable and cannot reproduce itself.” (I’ve completely forgotten about the opponent I created.) “What do you say to that, my friend?”

  “Wellll, what happens to tradition then? To all of art, to your own pathetic scribbling?” (We’ve left politesse behind, my opponent is pissed off.) “Let me ask you this—that book you’re writing, is it on the side of the ephemeral, or does it uphold the values of the eternal? How long do your own words last?”

  “How long do words last?” I repeat this, because I don’t know the answer. “Let us assume that they last as long as the breath with which you utter them. You exhale the word, it’s so light, you fill its sails and send it toward the harbor of the Other. It might perish before reaching shore, it might sink along the way, shipwrecked against the flotilla of another’s words. Whether that is fragility or unfathomable endurance, I cannot say.” (I won’t apologize for this outburst of lyricism here.)

  “I’ll ignore the lyrical explanation. So where does that leave your own identity, if you set store by the changeable?” He refuses to give in. “Where does that leave your forefathers, traditions, culture? All of that which was created from constancy? All of that which you call up so as not to forget who you are and where you come from?”

  “And what has that identity of yours ever given you, ass-hat?” (Politesse has now definitely been left in the dust.) Blood and wars, busted butts, suicide bombers—there’s your inheritance. There’s only one true identity—to be a living creature among living creatures. To be ephemeral and to value the Other, because he is ephemeral as well.”

  “Man is the measure of all things, thus what man creates must endure so as to outlive him.”

  (Now I’ve got him—I invented him after all, I have the right to push him into a trap.)

  “Exactly, man is the measure of all things. And everything that exceeds this measure and lasts longer and remains after his death is inhuman by its very nature, a source of sorrow and discord as a rule.” (Are you listening to me now? He’s listening, that’s what I invented him for.)

  “But . . .”

  “We live in houses that will continue to live on even after we die. We go into cathedrals, where long lines of people and generations who are no longer with us have trod, as if on Judgment Day. All of this tells you: you pass on, but we remain. We’ve buried plenty before you, we’ll take care of the ones you’ve sired as well. Think up at least one good reason why that which is built of stone should last longer than that built of flesh. I don’t see any particular point or justice in that. We can only wonder what sense of time and the eternal the ones who came before us had, in the dark night of the primeval, living in their flimsy huts, outliving their flimsy huts, outliving their hearths, moving from place to place, measuring out their lives in days and nights, in lighted and extinguished fires . . . They truly lived forever, even if they died at thirty.”

  THINGS UNSUITED TO COLLECTING (A LIST OF THE PERISHABLE)

  cheeses – start to stink

  apples – shrivel up and rot

  clouds – constantly change their states of aggregation

  quince jam – gets moldy on top

  lovers – get old, shriveled up (see apples)

  children – grow up

  snowmen – melt

  tadpoles and silkworms – anatomically unstable

  If we draw the line, it turns out that nothing organic is suitable for collecting. A world with a permanently expiring expiration date. A perishable, shriveling, rotting, deteriorating (and thus) wonderful world.

  A PLACE TO STOP

  I can imagine the look on the face of the first person to find these notes. He’ll probably think that some monster lived here. Indeed, inside me, the Minotaur shivers, afraid of the dark, but otherwise I look completely normal, I wear the body of a white, middle-aged man, a woman is carrying my child, I sometimes go to the seaside, alone, or travel abroad. I keep up what they call “a normal life” in the upper world. OK, fine, I do pass as quite withdrawn and reticent, but in my line of work, that absolutely goes with the territory. My books sell relatively well, which allows me the time and space to do my own things and guarantees me much-needed tranquility. I don’t give interviews.

  I used to be able to take part—a bit sluggishly, true—in lively conversations and at the same time to be somewhere else entirely, in a different body or memory. Sometimes this would show ever so slightly, one or two women with whom I was in closer contact always caught me. I got off the hook using the alibi of a writer. You can be absent as much as you like, they’ll always understand when you want to be left alone or when you don’t respond to repeated invitations. At first they keep calling, then they quickly forget you. Here people forget quickly, I don’t know if I’ve mentioned that already.

  ANNUNCIATION AND OYSTERS

  When I got word from my wife that she was pregnant, I was almost 2,000 miles away from her. I was just preparing to eat an oyster for the first time in my life (me, who had once been able to be a slug) in an old French castle at the opening of a ponderous (and tasteless) writers’ festival. I had never tasted oysters before. Just as I had never had a child before. We had been trying for a few years. So the two things were both happening to me for the first time—the annunciation and the oyster. A French journalist was holding a big oyster in her hand and explaining to me in bad English how to sprinkle it with lemon and suck it out of the shell. I was also holding an oyster in my hand, watching the squirming little body, in my other hand I was clutching a piece of lemon like a laser gun, trying to awaken the killer in me.
I thought the lemon would kill it. The oyster’s body, fragile and slimy, resembled both a vagina and a fetus, swimming in its embryonic fluid. At that moment the cell phone in my pocket started buzzing to tell me I had a message, this dulled my hesitating conscience, decisiveness was transmitted via some invisible neural synapses, the muscle fibers contracted, their movement reached the three fingers of my right hand that were squeezing the lemon, and the oyster-embryo writhed beneath the paralyzing lemon juice. I closed my eyes and swallowed it. At that moment, my grandfather passed by, swallowing his living medicine, and patted me on the back. I took out my phone. The text message read: “I took a test, it said YES.” Short and sweet, without unnecessary drama. My wife always catches me at the scene of the crime. I thought I felt the oyster move inside me. I felt nauseated and made a dash for the bathroom. I felt like Cronus, having just swallowed another one of his children. I’ve never tried oysters again.

  THE END OF THE MINOTAURS

  Someone’s walking around inside me. Someone’s gotten lost in my belly. That’s what she said one winter afternoon, as we were sitting quietly in the room, trying to hear the snow piling up outside. It sounded beautiful and timeless. Lying back in the rocking chair, she had opened up Ancient Greek Myths and Legends and placed the book on top of the protruding oval of her belly, like a roof.

  It’s so close, only centimeters away from us, I thought to myself, behind this wall of skin, yet days, weeks, and months have to pass before it arrives.

  I wanted to remember all of that, the chair, the window growing bright with snow, the beauty of that phrase, the whole antiquity of dusk in winter. There is no season more ancient than winter. I grabbed a sheet of paper and scribbled out a few phrases, mostly for the sake of mnemonics. Despite this, something like a poem came out. Which nevertheless had its own logic, insofar as poetic techniques are a kind of mnemonic device. Is Homer’s hexameter not, in fact, a mnemonic trick, a memory tool? I was trying to describe that night and to enter into the cave, the burrow or house of that belly. And I saw that the places had been switched around. That which was roaming around inside was not the Minotaur, but rather that which would kill him. Let’s call it “Theseus” for the sake of clarity. The umbilical cord is there inside like Ariadne’s thread. So then where is the Minotaur? The answer lay in the anxiousness of the inquiry. The Minotaur was me. Let’s turn that phrase around, so I can’t hide in its tail end. I was the Minotaur. Theseus—he, she, it (the gender doesn’t matter) - was coming to kill me with all the innocence of predestination. There was nowhere to hide, I could only meekly await his arrival. That poem was called “The End of the Minotaurs.” I should look to see where I tucked it away.