Georgi Gospodinov - The Physics of Sorrow

I gather for the sake of the one who is to come. For the post-apocalyptic reader, if we may agree to call him that. It’s not a bad idea to have a basic archive from the previous era. Today’s newspapers will then be historical chronicles. Which is a good future for them. And a fitting testimonial to an epoch quickly yellowing and fading in its final days.

The newspaper is dated June 4, 2022. The headline is written in fat letters across the top: Strange Epidemic of Amnesia. And as a subtitle, in a smaller font: Colony Collapse Disorder in humans? The article reads more or less as follows:

Rules and habits established over centuries are ceasing to work. We are seeing ever more cases in which people leave their homes in the morning to go to work, yet are in no state to find their way home in the evening.

C. S. (39) had a normal morning, just like thousands of others before it. Toast, eggs and bacon, the big mug of coffee, joking around with the kids, kisses at the door, promises of the traditional family Monopoly game that evening. That evening, however, he didn’t come home. He never even reached his office. They found him by chance on the other side of the city, lost, his pant legs rolled up boyishly, walking down the street and kicking stones aimlessly. He didn’t remember having a wife and kids. He didn’t know his address. He claimed to be twelve.

Even more inexplicable is the story of D. P. (33), a single mother, who, like every day, brought her kids to kindergarten. She dropped them off, kissed them, and promised to pick them up early that afternoon. A half-hour before the appointed time, the kids were already standing by the fence, dressed and ready to go, but their mother was late. The other parents started arriving. Finally only the two children and the teachers were left. It started getting dark, but no one came. They called the mother, but she didn’t answer her phone. The kids had to spend the night at the kindergarten. They found the mother three days later in a distant northern city. She was acting bizarre, according to the authorities, she resisted arrest, scratched one police officer’s face and taunted him with insults that had been popular twenty years ago, but which no one used anymore. This last detail is important, since to the question of how old she was, the woman, who was past 30, replied that she was in seventh grade. To the question of what she was doing in that city, she replied that she was on a class field trip. Of course, she couldn’t recall her kids or family. The newspaper’s own investigation revealed that the middle school where the mother had gone really had taken a field trip to that city twenty-nine years earlier.

They forcibly returned the woman to her city and took her home, expecting that the familiar surroundings would immediately bring back her memory. She acted as if she were in some stranger’s home. She didn’t touch anything. She asked where the bathroom was. She didn’t recognize any of the clothes in her closet. When brought face-to-face with her own children, the psychologists could not detect any sign of recognition.

For now there is no clear explanation for what is happening. Scholars are working on several parallel hypotheses. One of the most intriguing suggests that this is a case of sudden reactivation of past events for inexplicable reasons and the opening of personal parallel time corridors. A powerful invasion of the past. They suspect it may be due to misuse of “regression therapy” which has become fashionable recently and which is being practiced illicitly by an ever-growing number of self-declared therapists.

SIGNS

More than 2,000 dead blackbirds fall from the sky over a small town in Arkansas on January 1, 2011. The reasons for these mysterious deaths are unknown. The report is from January 3.

Over the following days, reports of mysterious bird deaths start rolling in from various parts of the world — Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. Hypotheses include a bird plague, secret experiments with chemical weapons by the American military and so on. The man who announced that he would uncover the truth, a former U.S. army general, is found dead in a garbage truck. More and more people believe that the dead birds falling from the sky are a clear sign of the Apocalypse.

And on the coast of England, 40,000 dead crabs are discovered.

THE EAR OF THE LABYRINTH

It hadn’t happened to me in a long time. I was looking through newspapers from 2010 and I ran across a short report, probably forgotten and buried by the incoming news from the following day. But for me it turned out to be one of those exceptional events that launched me back into that forgotten “embedding”. Something I haven’t experienced in years.

BULL LEAPS INTO CROWD, INJURING 40

AT A BULLFIGHT, THE ANIMAL IS KILLED.

Thursday, August 19, 2010, Tafalla

Forty people were injured in an unusual incident in Spain. The accident took place during a bullfight. The bull, which had just been led into the arena, looked around, then swiftly leapt over the barrier and began attacking the crowd. The unfortunate incident occurred in the city of Tafalla. The panic-stricken spectators tried to run away, but were hampered by the amphitheater seating. The infuriated animal lunged at various groups of terrified spectators. The toreador tried to hold the bull back by pulling its tail. It took a whole fifteen minutes to get the situation under control. In the end, they were forced to shoot the bull.

An amphitheater, of course, is a labyrinth. One of the most commonly found circular labyrinths, made of concentric circles intersected by transverse corridors. The bull lifted its gaze and recognized the Labyrinth — the ancestral home of his great-grandfather, the Minotaur. And since animals have no sense of time (just as children do not), the Bull saw his ancestral home and recognized the Minotaur within himself. He remembered all the days and nights. no, wait, that’s human language, there were no days there, he recalled only that endless night, a sum of all the nights in the world. Once again, he remembered the only two faces he had ever known. His mother’s face, as she held him in her lap. The most beautiful face he had ever seen. The face he had come closest to. And the second face — that of his killer. Also beautiful. Human faces.

Now his killer (likely a distant relative of Theseus) was standing down in the arena, in the center of the labyrinth. It wasn’t the fact that the scene would repeat itself and he would once again experience the softness and vulnerability of his body, that sacred softness and vulnerability that only proved his essential humanity, no, it wasn’t that that caused him to do what he did. There was something else. The sudden realization that if his killer was standing before him, then his mother’s face must be somewhere nearby as well. Up there in the audience. Those two faces went together. The scene repeats itself. The labyrinth twists and turns back not only space. Time has coiled up, swallowed its own tail and if something can happen, can be changed, now is the moment.

I turn my back on the killer, clench all my muscles, and clear the barrier. Like a lost child, I see my mother in the crowd and race toward her, nothing can stop me now. If only I could press my face against hers again. If only I could snuggle up to her. I’m three. And I’m looking for my mother. Some other people are screaming and falling at my feet, but they’re not my mother. I’ll recognize her. I just hope I don’t miss her, that she hasn’t already left. Just a little farther, just a little farther. Now there’s one who looks like her, but it’s not her. What about that one? No. No. The howl that escapes from the cave of my throat is terrifying. The only word that in all languages — those of humans, animals and monsters — is one and the same: