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.
Memory weaves us, there in the depths of the three-petaled chakra, the forehead’s eye. However hideous (because time is an inferno and a creature of time is a devil from the inferno, or maybe a creature forever damned), it is our twin, and a strange desire pushes one toward the other, one into the arms of the other. When I’m lying on my bed in the afternoon, with kids shouting outside and poplar tufts floating in the sun-filled summer, I remember scenes and gestures and faces from long ago, obscure, enigmatic, melted into pure emotion, then I see it — co-created with my flesh but in another dimension, creating a caricature of me, frightening but at the same time dear to me. Every moment that passes, my memory separates from me a little more, it becomes more daring and independent, its shadow and power grow, and it rises over me, spreading its claws and bat wings. Its beak has crooked teeth, just like my mother’s dentures, and it has a single eye in the black and shining bone of its brow. It crawls out of me like an insect, still wet and soft, from the transparent shell of its former carcass. My memory is the metamorphosis of my life. If I do not plunge bravely into the milky abyss that surrounds and hides my memory in the pupa of my mind, I will never know if I have been, if I am a voracious praying mantis, a spider dreaming upon an endless pair of stilts, or a butterfly of supernatural beauty.
I remember, that is, I invent. I transmute the ghosts of moments into weighty, oily gold. And, somehow, it is also transparent, ever more transparent the deeper the fountain of my mind becomes (and I, a skeleton leaning over its walls, contemplate the wide, dreaming eyes reflected in the golden water). That hyaline cartilage, there on the shield where the three heraldic flowers meet — dream, memory, and emotion — that is my domain, my world, the World. There in that sparkling cylinder that descends through my mind. There, like a specimen in a green jar, pale and bloated with formaldehyde, it lies with its Asiatic eyelids half closed, with its ecstatic and lifeless smile, with its umbilical cord wrapped around its stomach. How well I know it! How accurately did I imagine it! Oh, my twin, open your painted eyelids, press your lipsticked, sweet lips, swell until the vat bursts and, through the shards of brain, through the organic mucilage, come into the light! With the eye between your eyebrows, enlighten the pearly-skinned pages of this book, of this illegible book, of this book.
8
ON HER left hip, my mother had a large violet-pink mark shaped like a butterfly. The vermiform body moved horizontally across her stomach toward her left buttock, one wing descending over her thigh, and the other rising toward her waist. I remembered this only when I was in my teens, and not during some vesperal reverie, but in a dream. I dreamed, one night in July, after hours of wandering streets downtown, and looking carefully at statues, that my mother was sitting on a bed with a white satin sheet, artfully wrinkled like the felt in jewelry boxes. She was huge and marble-white, capillaries and sweat glands showed through her transparent skin, and on her left hip a tropical butterfly, its colors shining intensely, had landed on thin, nervous little legs. When I woke up, I knew my mother had a lupus eritematos marked on her hip. I had often seen it, in the depths of time, when she walked naked around the house on sweltering afternoons. I knew what she looked like naked, my two- or three-year-old eyes had seen her and remembered. But then, after we moved to the apartment and my mother started to make Persian rugs, I only saw her naked to the waist, her nipples the same color as the butterfly on her hip, now off-limits. Because, later, when we moved again to the house in Floreasca, I wasn’t even allowed to see her breasts. It was as though this woman I came out of — a zone of wet skin, with pimples and moles — was once my domain, and then we were estranged, piece by piece, at the end of a series of unlucky battles. In each one, not only did I lose hectares of thighs, pubic hair, armpits and breasts and wrinkles on the stomach, but also I was wounded, mutilated by steel blades lettered in an unknown alphabet. In five years I lost my mother’s body irreversibly, and I moved away from it, I was moved away with such force that the thought of it and the memory lobotomized my brain with the same blood-covered blade. Therefore, when I dreamed of the butterfly on her hip, I woke with a horrible nausea. Where had my memory been keeping that image? Was it even real? More than the mark itself, I actually remembered my wonder in looking at it. Had my grandma, whom I didn’t remember at all, as though my grandpa made my mother by himself, stolen a butterfly? Or, when she was sunbathing naked on the banks of the Sabar, when she had my mother in her womb, was she touched by the shadow of a pair of delicate wings?