Blinding: Volume 1

by Mircea Cărtărescu

  We ourselves, although an unimportant organ of the world, are in some way the entire world. The All is everywhere at once and in every moment. The shuttle’s first pass through the weft that began to describe the world – the way a rod, spinning quickly, creates a dense, still circle, or the way the sweeping spot of a cathode-ray tube creates a televised image – has stamped the same configuration onto all the fragments of being, from the bottom to the top, from the holon to the holonarchy, from the eon to the pleroma. Every object, imaginable or beyond imagination, in a poor example of universial homogeneity, has a bipolar structure. Everything has a dual structure, like magnets, with poles oriented in opposition. Animal and vegetable polarities are paired everywhere, in every object. The first belongs to space, the spirit, searching, and movement. The other belongs to time, the soul, and immobile passivity. We find masculine and feminine, sulfur and mercury, yin and yang in the emblem of the hill in light and the hill in shadow. We live in two media, just as a tree lives in both the air and earth, its branches aerial roots, and its roots underground branches.

  The bilateral symmetry of our organism – our two arms, two legs, two cerebral hemispheres, two eyes, two lungs, two kidneys, and two gonads – often overshadows the subtler symmetry of top-bottom, the higher and truer symmetry. Our diaphragms, like walls between two kingdoms, divide our bodies into two zones with opposing polarities. Above our diaphragms, we’re dominated by the signs of air and fire, while below, we’re dominated by water and earth. It is easy to see that our arms correspond to our legs and our pelvises to our scapulae, but strange correspondences link the organs of our thoracic cavities with our abdomens. Any study of embryos will show that the heart corresponds to the liver and the lungs correspond to the intestines and kidneys, however diverse their morphology might appear. If we examined the entire, magical symmetry of a man hung upside-down on an imaginary Saint Andrew’s cross – the symmetry of a larva, the symmetry of a being whose evolution is incomplete – we would find the most fantastic, bizarre, and dizzying correspondence, and differences as well, between the organs at the ends of his body, in between his arms and in between his legs. The head corresponds to the genitals, and all our mystical, animal faculties are concentrated there. The cerebral hemispheres and the testicles or ovaries are the same organs, but opposing polarities pushed them toward opposing functions and forced them to diversify their morphologies. The brain moved toward the animal pole, which shaped it into an organ of relation, spatiality, and internal and external exploration, while the gonads anchored themselves in the fertile substance of time. And both, in different planes of existence, live and bathe in immortality. The sublime universe appears to us in the orgasm of the mind and the syllogisms of fecundity, in the sperm of the brain and the memory of the ovaries. Under two different faces – angelic and demonic, masculine and feminine – the sublime universe appears to us, touches the blood-filled jewel in which we live.

  Space is Paradise and time is Inferno. How strange it is that, like the emblem of bipolarity, in the center of a shadow is light, and that light creates shadows. After all, what else is memory, this poisoned fountain at the center of the mind, this center of paradise? Well-shaft walls of tooled marble shaking water green as bile, and its bat-winged dragon standing guard? And what is love? A limpid, cool water from the depths of sexual hell, an ashen pearl in an oyster of fire and rending screams? Memory, the time of the timeless kingdom. Love, the space of the spaceless domain. The seeds of our existence, opposed yet so alike, unite across the great symmetry, and annul it through a single great feeling: nostalgia.

  We are animals of nostalgia, abjections organized by geometry, as though our genitor spat into the cup of a lily and created us there, out of phlegm and perfume. But, unlike Akasia, because our memory only knows the dimensions of the past, our nostalgia is amputated, partial, a feeling that takes metaphors as reality and contorts itself around half-truths. We all have memories of the past, but none of us can remember the future. And yet, we exist between the past and future like the vermiform body of a butterfly, in between its two wings. We use one wing to fly, because we have sent our nerve filaments out to its edges, and the other is unknown, as if we were missing an eye on that side. But how can we fly with one wing? Prophets, illuminati, and heretics of symmetry foresaw what we could and must become. But what they see per speculum in aenigmate we will all see clearly, at least as clearly as we can see the past. Then, even our torturous nostalgia will be whole. Time will no longer exist, memory and love will be one, the brain and the sex will be one, and we will be like the angels.

  We know from our cerebro-spinal trunk that we are the larvae of an astral being. With the marrow of our spines as its root and the two cerebral hemispheres in our skulls like two fleshly cotyledons, they perfectly resemble a plant in the first stages after sprouting. Their flesh is the earth into which they were sown and whose resources they will exhaust, and our brains will also be consumed and will wrinkle like a walnut kernel inside its dry fruit. Two small leaves will burst from its center, tender and filled with light – wings of the soul, wings of the spirit that will depart from the hothouse of this world, vested in the glory of a heavenly body, to be planted in a new earth, under a new sky.

  Our painful love, born from the center of time, our daily nostalgia given to us today, itself the larva of the great and true nostalgia, projects into the past what it foresees as our destiny and future: it searches deep within the caves, cellars, basements, cells, and grottoes of time for what might be found in the rarefied air and metaphysical light of the attic. It desperately searches for something that must be found, a way out that must be uncovered, even though no organ exists that can sense it. We are constantly searching in the opposite direction, but the more mistakenly we search, the more we feel joy and certainty, because diametric opposites must lie on the same axis, and this itself is a powerful connection. We can only see our target in a mirror, in illusion, but we know that it exists somewhere in reality. Our blindness toward the future is like some patients’ corporeal agnosia: for them, the right (or left) half of the world has simply disappeared, along with the respective half of their bodies. There is not even nothingness for them. It is like the absolute silence of those born deaf, who lack any idea or intuition of sound. Metaphors, circumlocutions, approximations, the basest or most ingenious of verbal tricks, definitions by negation – you can try everything, but for someone who does not feel, for whom an area of reality does not exist, it quickly becomes tiresome to keep asking what it is like, what is comparable to something he will never know. Metaphorical speculations are, for him, simple parlor games, symbols of aesthetic value more than a deep need to define. Would we fall back on these kinds of glass-bead games, were it not for nostalgia? If passivity did not cause us pain? If we did not suffer like dogs when we weren’t searching, torturing ourselves with questions we know all too well we cannot answer, because the answer would not be a word or phrase but a deep and dramatic modification to our body’s schema and our being’s essence. We are not like someone blind from birth, but like someone who lost his sight in childhood, who sometimes dreams of things he cannot conceive: images and colors, shapes and shadows, lips, eyes, a hand that he only recognizes as an evanescent emotion, a foreboding that someday he will see again, not with his eyes, but with all the skin of his body, and not just with his skin, but his viscera, his veins and arteries, his trachea and esophagus, his pelvic bones and endocrine glands, his blood and saliva and the musk of his sweat. And not just with his body, but with the dogs and acacia and apartment blocks and cars and stores all around him, the seasons and constellations – a foreboding that he will see, someday, with the great eye, clear and pure as the whole, outside of which only non-existence exists.

  Abjection and glory, like mucous that can just as well be holy myrrh, both vest the form of our body. Abjection, because we are worms, tubes with a double symmetry, nutrition in our center, relation and reproduction at our extremities, guts full of fecal
matter between our brains and our genitals. The capacity for thought that we trumpet is no more wondrous a phenomenon than the ability of deep-water fish to generate light, or the power of an eel to produce electric shocks. Maybe we do have an organ to sense the divine, but it’s rudimentary, a plus or a minus, an “it is or it isn’t.” It perceives the divine the way paramecia sense light with a red dot, without actually “seeing.” What can be rescued in us? The soul? The astral body? Consciousness? A simple tumor wipes out all of those things, an epileptic nucleus shakes away memory, the sight of a woman’s hips stops a man’s thinking, an injustice drives us into the purest paranoiac delirium, a dream chills our necks and makes our hair stand on end. The harmony of a billion billion tiny, mushy things (systems and devices composed of tissues composed of cells composed of organelles: ribosomes, lysozymes, mitochondria, Golgi apparatuses, nuclei with chromosomes composed of chains of DNA and RNA composed of nucleic acids composed of molecules of hallucinatory stereosymmetry composed of atoms composed of nuclear particles composed of quarks) barely leaves any room for a splash of sparkling liquid, a clear thought, where the structured dust of worlds could develop. And this is only for a few of the billions of sentient worms that crowd together inside the stomach of a larger worm. They live as long as they’re given, and then they’re reabsorbed into the spiraling conglomeration of the earth. Everything is a grain of sand on a beach as wide as the universe. Where is there room for salvation? And why would you, you in particular, atomic bog, receive eternal life?

  Glory is analogously disorienting because the symmetry of all worlds follows from the symmetry of our bodies. The human embryo recapitulates an abbreviated phylogeny of the living world. Swimming in the muscular pool of the uterus, feeling the warmth of the urinary and rectal canals, translucent and curled up, we envelop ourselves with the complications of embryonic layers, becoming, one by one, coelenterates and worms, fish with fluttering gills, amphibians, insectivorous mammifers and primates, until we break the blood-filled vulva and, dirty with meconium, we emerge headfirst into the new place where we live until our next birth. The same magical link exists between the stages of this life and the corporeal scheme of our flesh, as if we could see through time the way we see the panorama of space – as if our lives themselves were human beings made out of time, with structures identical to ours down to the smallest details, and analogous in surprising ways to a gigantic being, whose organs were the countless generations of all living creatures. In a way, by being born, playing, loving, maturing, aging, and dying, we live and breathe the gonads, vertebrae, sphincters, intestines, diaphragms, lungs, hearts, jugulars, jaws, brains, and skulls of our own lifespans.

  If our whole lives are only the shadows of our bodies projected onto time, maybe we have super-shadows too – projections that are truer and more complex than the objects themselves. Maybe these shadows live inside us, the way parasitic crabs extend their own substance into the bodies of the host-crabs, but not exactly, because here the parasite is far superior to the host. Our heavenly body, like our physical bodies, has a paradoxical anatomy. It’s assembled from spiritual material, gaseous crystal circulating in diamond veins and jade arteries, pearl capillaries and marble canals, turquoise interstices and opal lymph nodes, jasper kidneys and quartz skin and a zirconium heart and a beryllium brain and sapphire testicles, our interior angels and our interior shadows, and superimposed over the stench-ridden mud of our flesh.

  There are seven chakras along the spinal cord, and seven plexuses in the viscera. Three of them are below the diaphragm, the pole of time, of sex, of vegetable life. Separating the spirit from matter, the diaphragm is the border between two kingdoms, because we are amphibious beings between heaven and earth. The diaphragm is the surface of the earth: below it, blind roots grope among the moles, and above it, the corona and its gifts push toward the sky. Under the diaphragm, Muladhara is wrapped like a snake around the sacrum, innervating the snake between the thighs with four petals of thick light. A bit higher, in the small of the back, Svadisthana has six multicolored petals, the queen of the kidneys and bladder, the Leyding cells and the rectum, the place of will and vitality. Manipura has ten petals and illuminates the solar plexus. It tames the anaconda of the bowels, the pallid tongues of the pancreas and spleen, and the blood-red liver with its sack of bile. Above the diaphragm are another three chakras, the pole of the animal, space, and brain. Between the shoulder blades is Anahata, the seat of the feelings, the one that washes our interior islands in blood, the one that nourishes the timus. The gland of childhood, Visuddha, with its sixteen transparent petals, illuminates the vertebrae of the neck, aids the rhythm of respiration, protects the lungs and thyroid, and opens the frozen eyes of the intellect. The triangle between the eyebrows is inlaid with Ajna of the three fires, because there, in the pituitary gland, the queen of the nervous system, is the seat of the soul. And beyond these symmetries, beyond space-time and brain-sex, but toward space and the brain, Sahasrara glistens – the diadem and the spherical eye on the crown of the head, the Aleph of Alephs, the diamond of a diamond world.

  We ought to remember with our testicles and love with our brains, but that’s not how it is. Memory is in the middle of the mind, and love between the legs, as though our perverse souls sit in their organic coffins upside-down. Maybe once, surely once, before the wall of the diaphragm was built, and before the wall of apartment blocks on Ştefan cel Mare, the great wall of maturity, the seven chakras and plexuses were flipped upside-down, so that we actually did think and love with the same organ, and we ejaculated and remembered with the parts on the opposite ends. But then, the doppelganger of our chakras and plexuses and rays flipped over, the way that in the eighth month a child turns its head down in the uterus – the reversal that makes us so paradoxical, and so fascinating. Maybe the fetus turns itself over precisely because it senses the onset of birth. We are all women, we are uteruses, and we will tear ourselves apart and we will rot, so that in another world, under a new heaven, crystalline beings can emerge, translucent as crustaceans, with their seven hearts beating in the alpha rhythm, with seven brains, or with seven sexes.

  Memory is in the middle of the mind, under the brain, pia mater and neocortex, where it spills over the sensory and motor zones, the homunculus with its swollen tongue and orangutan paws. In the center of the brain, formed in the limbic system, in the fornix and hippocampus, the mammillary bodies and the amygdalae, memory soaks in the striated waters of the thalamus and hypothalamus, it shapes neuronal sculptures, and it wets the marble of the mind with florescent liquids. It creates nets as flimsy as spiderwebs, turned on themselves like Möbius bands, and rippled like the petals of a colorless rose. It runs from the real to the virtual and back to the real, as though Escher’s hands were drawing each other a billion times a second. But does this glittering and tireless shuttle weave something truer, something less monstrous than the homunculus which is its starry sky? Could it be that time’s body and our life’s reverie, from the moment the spermatozoon adheres revoltingly to the ovum and its mind advances through the mucilage to mix with the sun’s mind, and up to the moment when we ourselves, spermatozoa of some inconceivable animal, adhere revoltingly to the great globe of our deaths, and our skulls break into shards and our brains (carrying half of whose information?) migrate through the mucous of death and fuse with the mind of death and then everything dies in a gigantic metabiological explosion called rebirth – could that be projected, reliably, onto the screen behind the retina? The teeth upon the gears of our lives are not only horribly uneven, but of different colors, made of different substances, blown around by the winds like the sails of a skiff, and their indicator needle, capricious, suddenly spins for dozens of revolutions until it disappears, as if it didn’t exist. Then it stops on a minute or for hours on end, licking and touching the minute, analyzing it minutely, coupling with it and giving it children, until it grows old and tarnished and falls, and only then will the indicator deem it ready to advance. From this
comes another homunculus, more deformed, grotesque, and phantom-like than that of the sensorial-motor, that hunchbacked stillbirth of our life’s ultimate and hidden meaning. But even this stillborn fetus has a shining mark on its forehead that can smell God and on and on until the billionth dimension, as far as we can imagine, alongside a spatial world whose people and animals have suddenly disappeared, and instead, only their images remain, crowded together on streets and in houses. There are homunculi of people and dogs and cats and rats projected onto this shell – and a world in time, where instead of their actual lives there are only lives reconstructed in memory, lives where one gesture in childhood takes up more time and space than ten years of adulthood, and elephantine temporal organs hang on every side, while the sensory organs can barely be seen.