I sometimes imagined that my belief extended me at least to the edges of Bucharest, to the railway lines and ringed roads that surrounded it like the hard membrane around a cell. With its demented and chaotic traffic, its industrial platforms, where every piece of every machine was long ago used up, both physically and morally, its universities and libraries where lichen blossomed in a thousand colors and species, its statues (ah, its statues!) that stop you cold, its Dâmboviţa and Colentina like capillaries knitted from cholesterol, its center of cubist apartment blocks crystallized around melancholy-soaked residents, its women with tattooed hips wandering the streets at random, shaded by flowering lindens — the city would become my own artificial body. I would name it with my name and dampen it with my desires. I would control the crawling of scorpions and vampires through its river-rock wells, I would calculate the trajectories of every drop of urine sprayed from the drunkard’s meatus onto a wall, his head against its frozen bricks, I would passionately play with the forms of the clouds, broken by the parabolic antennae of the Telephone Palace, I would mold them into matchsticks, spiders, Jehovahs, thumbtacks, I would make their puffiness write awful insults across the evening sky … I would immediately prohibit the production of estrogen hormones in all genital apparatuses, in people, rats, flies, and all other beings, and over the years, I would follow the course of the world’s deconstruction through angelification … I would transform Orthodox churches into semitransparent jellyfish, their flesh would show their icons like diffuse granules of gold and azure, priests in cassocks would be vacuoles and organelles slowly pulsing around the altar, and the parishioners would be filiform like an El Greco — with ragged fringes, pale, carrying batteries of murderous cells on their white vestments. And hundreds of churches would rise slowly over the ocean floor, among the blocks, their cupolas throbbing, their rainbow lace fluttering, ever higher through the pure air, scraping the skin of the city’s living flesh, until, with the unseen hands of belief, I would gather the group of felt-lined bells into one place, I would combine the fungi into each other, I would crush them gently, like grapes, until in the cup of my hand there would be a single, great bell of blue gelatin, smelling of myrrh, incense, and narcissus, with which I would wash my flashing eyes.
Oh Lord, solitude is just another name for insanity. I know full well that I will never be able to change, with my will, even the decay of my teeth. I know that I will never have dominion over even a tenth of my own body. As for what is outside of it — but what is outside? Without the photons that fall on objects and ricochet into the crystal of my eyes — ugly spheres stuck in the bone of my brain — the world would be an obscure heap of reverberations, like the spider’s world, where only whatever shakes their derisory web exists. What is frightening for me, in the image of death, is not non-being, but being without being, the terror of the life of a mosquito larva, an earthworm, a snail at the bottom of the abyss, the living and unconscious flesh with which we are all cobbled together. We perceive light with scaly eggs full of gelatin, we transform it into electrical impulses and transfer them to a mound of wet mucilage in a calcium shell. We will never know how a wavelength becomes a subjective sensation, how we see (Lord, how do we see?) the petal of a snapdragon. We can never understand how something may exist and yet we never see, hear, taste, smell, or touch it even once in our life. Our life — within the limits of our universe, wearing our corpse like a headscarf, like the starry bandages on a mummy. Our world — the field of our sensations. A puffy fungus of light that covers our pupils, the sonorous felt that grows on our temples. A lover’s nipples recalled by our fingertips. Our tongue like an orchid’s peduncle, our tongue painted not red, but sweet, sour, bitter, and salty. And the trees, made of madrepore, splattered with mucus, unleashing their crowns into our nasal passages. And rocks of limestone in the cells of the inner ears. And the peduncles that know cold and hot, all scattered like transparent drops of glue onto the network of our nerves. Sometimes I imagine I have been bathed in a corrosive liquid, one that dissolved my flesh, my skeleton, and my internal organs, sparing only my nervous system. Then I would be taken out and stretched over a glass lamella, with every little fiber of nerve stretched, with billions of branches unrolled around me like a thin undershirt, white and impossible to tear. What else would I be but a neuron, with a brain as my cellular body, spinal marrow as my axons, and nerves as my numberless dendrites? A spiderweb that feels only what touches it. Yes, each of us have a single neuron within us, and humanity is a dissipated brain that strives desperately to come together. And I wonder, quaking inside, whether the Last Judgment and the resurrection of the dead are nothing more than this: the extraction of this neuron from every person that ever lived, their evaluation, and the rejection of the unviable into the wailing and gnashing of teeth, and construction of an amazing brain — new, universal, blinding — from the perfect neurons, and with this brain we will climb, unconscious and happy, onto a higher level of the fractal of eternal Being. But what about the “unviable”? But what about the minds, souls, and sensations of murderers and sinners? Won’t they form, in Gehenna, an infinitely perverse brain, a monster, something that could make Leonardo’s combination of all the most hideous parts of the beings of the dark seem as beautiful as an archangel? And won’t this process continue, even in the superior world — the old quarrel, the eternal quarrel? Because eternal torture, the unending pain that is evil, the wailing and gnashing of teeth caused by the inability to be good, aren’t these still a form of existence, and as existence, aren’t they also endlessly beautiful? Separated by centrifugal force, in the great turbine of Dante, or through fractional distillation in the Deisis of Byzantine icons, Inferno and Paradiso, layer of perfumed oil over layer of stinking pitch, all these in the end are all wisdom. Paradise — the wisdom of the right hand, right hemisphere, feminine, gentle and puffy, endless, still waters, illuminated in their depths by the phosphorescence of terrifying abyssal fish … Hell — wisdom of the left hand, left hemisphere, sudden paracletian fire, the mask that covers, in the crux of destruction, the soul of a dove. Good and evil, two enormous Buddhas erupting over our lives from two volcanoes over our lives, opposing and yet similar principles like magnetic poles, in the end they couple, over a footbridge of nervous fibers, to make the motionless and complicated hemispheres of the great, incomparable Brain that dreams us all.