Mircea Cărtărescu - Blinding - Volume 1

“Monsieur Monsú held the butterfly uterus in the open palm of his right hand. Its skin fibers gently pulsed. In the end, it took flight, not through the mechanical beating of lepidoptera, but by undulations within the gelatinous medium, the way transparent beings on the bottom of the ocean proceed dreamlike through the abyss. Fluttering over the emptiness, the little life form turned toward the diamond cell in the center of lights. It touched it after eons of hypnotic travel. It curled up there, in the flashing box, took root in its crystal earth and unrolled a peritoneum crown. Its center continuously developed an ovum, filigreed, pearly, with constantly changing designs and mirific protuberances extended into the ionosphere. In the end, the uterus itself, with its tubes and contractions, was only an almost-unobserved detail of the great bead, of the egg with a quartz shell.

“The egg appeared to be tattooed with a labyrinth of dully colored lines, which crossed each other and shifted, so that, at the beginning, nothing could be deciphered, aside from some illusory outlines, more guesses than anything, like looking in the filigreed dregs of coffee. As its volume increased and its surface widened, the strangest, most heteroclite designs began to spout from the tissue of lines. There was the face of a young man, with features in charcoal, his hair black vines curling along his ascetic cheeks. His severe, visionary eyes were slightly asymmetrical, the right inspired by a spark of spirit, while the left, tragic and matte like a covered mirror, had violet circles beneath. Below the fibrous threads of his moustache, his mouth could have been a woman’s, if its sensuality were not negated, dissolved, denatured, and reconverted by bitter folds at the corners. Every feature of this portrait was, if you looked closer, formed by other drawings, on a smaller scale, and those by others, all brilliantly clear, just when your eye touched them, so that you could dive endlessly into the spectacle of the world, deepening the visions within a single hair of an eyebrow, and you could explore skies with other stars, heavens, and gods within a pixel in the immensity of the cheek. It was All, and all ran in the heart of all, and the real hand and the possible drew each other, exchanging densities and destinies a billion times a second. It was the Mandylion, the Vera Icon, the image of the human face, acheiropoieta, the one we search for always, which we see in all the compositions of the world, because the world itself — for us, and gods, and Divinity — has a human face. From this, sunk in tragedy and the stench of the sulfur from Gomorrah, cultivating tens of thousands of horrible diseases in the furrows of our body, never being sure of tomorrow and writhing to breathe another moment, we yet smile, just as a two-month-old child will smile even at two eyes drawn on a white piece of paper …

“Fra Armando’s brain, slithering with its spinal tail, shooting beams like a spacecraft, migrated over the billion heads of the crowd toward the great sphere that encompassed almost all the space in the middle of the disk where we stood. The egg rotated heavily around its vertical axis, constantly displaying other canals, dry seas, and continents, throwing off other garlands of fire and reabsorbing them in its paunch of albumen and yolk. The brain approached the sun like a lonely navigator, seeming to slide along a subliminal pleat, on a guide tube hidden in another dimension. There was a whisper, unheard but possible to feel with the entire body, denser than the organ that perceived it — that whisper from the middle of the night, to which you can only respond, suddenly awake and afraid, ‘Here I am, Lord.’ The solitary sperm slid along the beacon, along the whisper of billions of decibels. The golden male fluttered along the guide tube of the shock wave of billions of gigatones. The entire hall, and everyone inside, quaked in trepidation. The ovum whispered, it whispered a name. Quiet, monotonous, unhurried, powerful as a seraph, the face in the egg whispered a whisper, whispered a name. Its own name. ‘Here I am, Lord,’ responded the brain and the sperm, and the response — happy in terror, frightened in ecstasy — was not a sound, but the advance itself.

“The tadpole, with its curved brow like a glass shell, finally stopped only a hand width from the enormous filigreed stomach. The hard membranes mirrored each other. Colored whirls appeared in the front-most points and encompassed, in ever larger circles, the trembling spheres. A dialogue was improvised, the channels and frequencies aligned, passwords exchanged, thousands of keys went into thousands of locks of air and void. They turned, raised pinions and cams, and released chemical barriers. And suddenly not the skin, but the space itself between them opened like a gate, suddenly there was no space between the membranes, and the sperm and the ovum were one, the brain and the sex were one, space and time were one.

“And space/time/brain/sex began to rumble. There were monstrosities. There were miracles. A mathematics of the bordello was invented, a sublime defecation, a conceptual vomiting, an angelic retching, a real dream, a dead life. There were hoots and howls, but were they laughter or crying? There was a revelation, but was it from a prophet or a madman? It was everything, but it looked like nothing … We stood stockstill and watched that agony, an agony not of death, but of creation, a sob, not of birth, but of the final swoon. We saw sounds of catastrophe and waste-laying, we heard colors of fire and ice. The explosion/implosion smelled like roughness. Atoms were solar systems and constellations were pheromones. Oh infernal paradise, oh darkened light!

“A cause/effect germinated in the middle of the edge of this nymphal melody. It flattened the flesh/air, it quieted its transparent opacities. It organized the future/past, it listened to words/things. From the winds of karma, from the frightening bardo of the dust of twilight, a child would come into being. It would be because it already was, already it saw its parents copulating like two locusts, already the whirlpool of space/time/brain/sex drew, with its blood-dipped finger, a Caudine fork, an Arc de Triumph. Two chromosomal sets would fuse, yes and no would wed in maybe , and then the egg, already past the barrier of being, would begin its gigantic conclusion, turning the ever more complicated pages of life, complicated not by what the text said, but by the structure of the pages themselves, as though the first would be a point, the second a line, the third a surface, the fourth a volume, the fifth a Möbius strip, the sixth a nest for the Tomistic swallow, and so on and so on, until the billionth page, where Divinity is raised to the power of Divinity. Mitosis and meiosis, two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four, morula, blastula, gastrula, and the three embryonic wrappings glittering like soft glass while they wrinkle, shape, reabsorb, form tubes and buds, separate at catastrophic points, meet again to sketch faces and limbs, organs and skins, systems and mechanisms. Fish, reptile, amphibian, mammal, the fourth week, the fifth, the sixth, the seventh. The sixth month, the seventh, the turn in the eighth. Floating on a lotus flower, in the middle of black waters, eyelids closed and face smiling — enormous eyelids without lashes, under which the ocular protuberances slide as quietly as porpoises. The skin of pearl, shining in wisdom.

“It heralds the Gospel for all. There is no other annunciation than a person’s birth. And every birth creates a religion, it is an annunciation. And religion itself has no other meaning than Birth. It shows us the Way, it reveals the Steps to us. It preaches Happiness. Already our eyes, fallen out of their sockets from such blinding blinding, will see the embryo, the child, wonder, ransom. Black and white, Asian, women, men, and children, we wait, on the edge of the abyss, rejoicing. We would take light from light and never die again …