Mircea Cărtărescu - Blinding - Volume 1

This is how my parents found me, balled up on the square tiles, at the feet of a plaster model, screaming as hard as I could. I kept screaming, my nose running and tears wetting my face and neck, until we left the hospital door, through the yellow leaves and cobwebs. We waited a long time for the tram in a lonely station. I kept sighing, and my cheeks did not dry until I saw the red tram coming, rocking on its rails, like a tired beetle.

MAYBE, in the heart of this book, there is nothing other than howling, yellow, blinding, apocalyptic howling … Last night, with all of my strength sucked dry, I fell asleep between my flaccid sheets and lay like a corpse frozen on a field, in an utter lack of existence that made death seem like a pointless agitation, until I reacquired, for the first time in three or four years, my state of nocturnal “revelation” (in fact, I’ve never found the right name for it, and the one I use here seems to serve only inasmuch as it is weak and unmarked, because, in addition, in the limitless insanity of my “essential” dream — and here, more than ever, the word “my” should be in quotation marks — it doesn’t “reveal” anything to me, except, perhaps, revelation itself: it reveals to me the fact that in this opaque, dense world, murderous as a pillow that someone holds over your face, kneeling mercilessly on your chest to stop your writhing, revelation is possible. Like a porous flaw in the hard ivory that surrounds your interior cistern of living light, a pore gnawed out by a swarm of termites, a tunnel can suddenly open for your vision, illuminated from within by an undying fire, while you rotate unquiet, in dreams and visions, around and around the Enigma. But what can you understand if, sliding through the tunnel at a terrible speed, you feel your eyes burnt to a crisp and your ears torn by flames, your tongue liquefied and bubbling, your skin scorched like the rinds of trees, your nasal mucous digested by incineration? In the spooling sheets of ash, in the carbonic rose, what of you remains after you meet the living you, what can have a revelation, what can follow the melting? It is the center of the rose of our death, because there in the center of our carbonized body, among the petals of char that were our liver and brain and lungs, held together, like an abominable blossom, there among the scrubbed granules of our molars, between the matchsticks of our bones burnt white, there is still something, and that something is everything. When the tunnel turns straight and the flames from the oven’s mouth lick it, melting the glassy walls, when you speed fantastically fast directly toward the blindness beyond blindness, toward the deafness that makes deafness seem like the wailing of a slaughterhouse, when the protuberances of fire that burn fire like kindling lap against the black rose, its petals (kidneys and vertebrae, theorems and desires, theories and gods) lift off and ignite again, tumbling back down, and in the middle of the middle of the middle of the cup of the rose, an indestructible quartz sphere appears, that can penetrate the architecture of the tongues of flame, in the hierarchies of wasteland. In the center of the cistern of fire, reflecting the fire, it becomes itself the generator of living power, and so it was at the beginning, since you can never experience an enigma if you weren’t the one who made it.

This is the “dream” I have tried to describe over many pages, and that I had for the first time at the age of sixteen, right or almost right after I got out of Colentina Hospital. Since then, it has replayed itself, in various variations, with details added and elements subtracted, possibly twenty times in these fourteen years. At the start, it came disturbingly often, maybe once a month (while I was feverishly searching through neurological treatises to diagnose myself), then the intervals extended and everything seemed to be on the way toward “healing,” with time. Last night’s dream, the result, perhaps, of yesterday’s pages (when I was detailing the vision of the plaster model screaming and spouting blood, I felt something much like insanity), followed the pattern of all the ones before and was no less devastating, even though it had been two years since the last time. As usual, accompanying the eruption of the revelatory dream — but what veil was moved away? on the contrary, the veils lay on top of each other, thicker and thicker, until their thickness, around the fragile egg of your dura mater, a celestial turban with the diamond of Shiva on the brow, becomes enormous, filling the entire cosmos (finite, but without limits, where imaginary time follows space in all its directions) with an impenetrable batting — my oneiric activity intensified considerably, along with waking states in which my self was suppressed. Monsters teemed under my eyelids as I curled up in bed and closed my eyes. Rotted skulls, indescribable faces, and terrible whispers in my ears tortured me until morning, when, so often, I woke up completely paralyzed and couldn’t make even the smallest gesture for minutes on end, even though my mind tried desperately to command, firmly, to believe, not to doubt. It was as though I had ordered a mountain to hurl itself into the sea.

And then the night came when, after I was finally able to fall asleep, it seemed that I rose, still wrapped in my sheets like a mummy. It awakened no suspicions when I saw myself from above, from the ceiling, as if twin entities from my consciousness had decoupled and moved several meters apart, one of them crossing (by what osmosis? by what tunnel-effect?) the metaphysical skin around my encephalon that separated the inside from the outside. The room was dimly lit in a gently rotating olive light. Although everything was in its proper place (see, the English notebook is open on the table, as I left it the night before, and my pants on the back of the chair were on the carpet in my dream, just as I would find them the next day in reality), there was a lunatic mist in the room’s air, as though I had slept poorly or I’d awoken in a world identical in every detail to our own, but reconstituted (too faithfully, in a way that was too nuanced) on a strange planet, for incomprehensible ends. And suddenly I began to hear the sound. It seemed like it had always existed, but it had evolved over millennia far below the threshold of my perception. It had amplified, starting from an almost absolute silence, seeking my ears (or maybe the zone of my temporal lobes, found at the interface of vibration and sensation) like an arrow finding its target, and in the end, amplifying billions of times from its original point, it slid through the great audile gate of my mind. The sound, that began as small and inoffensive as the buzz of a tiny fly, almost inaudible, oscillated like a siren, but on a frequency all its own and with a certain glissando that gave it an almost-tactile velvetiness, as though your fingers softly rubbed a petunia’s soft, fibrous petals.

In just a few seconds, the sound gained corporality and became yellow . It twisted into my brain like a corkscrew, ever more powerful, oscillating up-down, up-down faster and faster, rising asymptotically from audible to loud, surpassing the thresholds of acceptability, then tolerability, until it transformed into a howl of gold. I felt that the amplification would never end, and a destructive hysteria, a terror synchronized with the mad growth of the sound, encompassed me, mastered me, and substituted itself for me, against all of my efforts to maintain my identity. The sound had exceeded my ears’ capacity to hear, maybe dissolved them into flame, when the second part of my dream unleashed itself. I was knocked down violently by invisible hands, dragged out of my bed, sheets and all, and thrown against the furniture on the opposite wall. In other iterations, the abuse did not stop here. I was carried, with an ever increasing speed, through strange rooms, on tunnel-like roads covered by trees, reaching infinite speed, while the tongues of flames of the former sound burned my body. They exploded my head and spread me out triumphantly through all of space, through all of time, through all being, until being itself burned and the bubbling fire took its place, thickening, multiplying, concentrating, and endlessly amplifying. Howl of fire, falling and rising a billion times a second, my howl and God’s, my terror and triumph, horror beyond horror, happiness a billion times exceeding happiness …