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I RECALL that first and only hard-on of my childhood with the perplexity I have always had for the old paintings warehoused in the ponderous gallery of my memory, heaps upon heaps of paintings, with supple lichen flowering in layers thicker than clotted paint, and blind scorpions gnawing the pads of their frames. In Ammon’s horn and the mammillothalamic tract, in the habenular nuclei and the fornix, and beneath the quartz cupola of the encephalon, there are thousands of transparent tubes, through which run paints and oxides and thousands of studios where painters with fifty hands copy, restore, cut out, mix and separate, create pastiches and replicas and duplicates, falsify dates and signatures, project onto the desolate walls of the skull’s yellow bone slides and retroprojections, deformed by the phrenological curves of the brow and temples, the protuberances of imagination and wiliness, of pity and suspicion … There are also museums, well lit and snobby, with square tiles dividing their hall floors into vast chessboards, and festive light fixtures within vaults painted with winding allegories, where the stem of a heavy chandelier flows from the navel of Arrogance. There are official pictures drowned in asphalt, there are limpid wall texts, under glass plates, beside each immense canvas stretched over the immaculate walls … But they are museum-traps, as sweet-smelling as carnivorous plants, where even the visiting public is an illusion painted on the walls and desolate canvases. There everything, but everything is fake, fabricated from one end to the other, hanging from striations and peduncles like rotting fruits. Where should you look and whom should you believe, when you recall other dreams in your dreams, and when in those dreams you remember things that never happened, and other sights flash in your mind when you eat or read a book distractedly, and you take them as the bizarre caprices of an interior demon, when in fact they are the faithful engrams of deeds accomplished when you saw with bigger eyes and thought with a smaller and more rudimentary brain? When, at your desk, where you fill lines of slag left by a dirty ball on a fabric of vegetable fiber, looking at the filigree design of coffee cups, and suddenly the design seems to float in the air, it doubles and deforms strangely, changing into a scene at morning, with a glinting, evanescent sea visible between the pink columns of a geometric temple and palace and when the picture floats minute after minute, transparent, over your office, as though it would melt again like sugar in water — it is impossible to tell where, on the tridimensional, endless cobweb map of your place in the world, you find yourself and your fear and fascination: in the dead-end of Illusion, in the street of Reverie, in the park of Memory, in the bus station of Hallucination, in the borough of Reality … It’s easier to imagine that you have pierced the folded map with a needle, uniting incompatible and disparate places in an incomprehensible trajectory, perpendicular to the paper, hidden, penetrating existence out of nothing into nothing, as we ourselves unite emotional incongruencies with the paradoxical transit of our lives: birth and love, art and madness, happiness and death …
Later, when I was sitting on the cabinet in the bedstead with my feet on the radiator, watching for entire afternoons as Bucharest disappeared, floor by floor, behind the scaffolding and casings of the block across the street, I remembered that first inexplicable tumescence of the unimportant appendix I used to go peepee not as a fact in itself, but as a piece of the entire constellation which also included, with differing levels of probability or fiction, other physiological, psychic or oneiric bizarrities — structures of weakness which doubled, like a ragged batting, the melancholic firmness of my mind. The snow that fell heavily over Ştefan cel Mare (then pot-holed and half as wide as it is today) crosshatched the immense panorama of the city. It reflected the colors of the sky on the earth and sent the greenish phantasms of the mixture of houses and trees onto the sky, colors which repeated on my retinas after I stared, hour after hour, with dilated eyes, blinking as seldom as I could. Sometimes I aimed my gaze at a single snowflake, as soon as it appeared in the upper corner of the window, and I followed its oblique and rapid fall, so that in those seconds I could see all its crystalline, evanescent details and perceive the metamorphosis of its colors, from the dirty gray that enveloped it when I saw it against the milky sky, to the fairy-like white, with the little, tufty halo it acquired against the houses’ roofs, windows, and doors and the dirty drifts on the sides of the road. Toward noon, the sky turned red, and it continued to snow apocalyptically. The shadows of people bound up in coats who crossed the street holding water canisters (the pipes in the apartment block had frozen long ago) blurred, erased by thousands of snowflakes, and when I looked up toward the gray lint falling from the crepuscular expanse, I felt I was at an angle flying toward the heights, my room and all, as though my apartment were a spaceship ejected from the ground. The radiator burned my bare feet, and the room was wrapped in darkness and loneliness. I had finished my homework long ago, and there was so much emptiness and melancholy in my life, so much inability to imagine not only my future, but also the present moment, that my mind, like a vacuum, sucked a weird marrow from the thin bones of my memory. And this fluid, which rose, rotating in my skull like in a drain basin, this metaphysical interferon secreted by each cell, gland, and cartilage of my body’s empire, slowly filled the walnut form of my mind, impregnating itself with the bitterness of its tannin, dissolving my consciousness and, thus ennobled, retreating into the tubes of memory. I went back, back toward the interior. I descended into the heart of my heart, I made myself tiny and thin and moved around my spinal cord, leaving my adolescent body to clang about like an oversized jacket. I went back to my anterior forms, toward the rings of ever more tender growth as I approached the pith. I assumed my form at fifteen, and I left it like a virtual aura for the one I’d had at eleven, then nine, then five, until I curled up in my own stomach like an infant who had my features and eyes. Then, on the depressing, fleshy screen of the winter sky, like my own visual field, hallucinations intertwined so oddly, and in such detail, that they could not be anything but memories pumped through the umbilical cord from the fetus toward the mother, since in the inverted film world of memory, the child gave birth to the mother, moment by moment, and fed her a substance which didn’t end but was secreted ever more abundantly. The me of today englobes the me of yesterday, who encompasses the one from the day before yesterday and so on and so on, until I am only an immense line of Russian dolls buried one in the next, each one pregnant with its predecessor, but still being born from it, emanating from it like a halo, so that the middle is darker and the surfaces more diaphanous, and the glassy surface of my body in this exact moment already reflects the tame light of the one that I will be in an hour, since my astral body is nothing else but the clairvoyant light of the future. From the dark toward the light, from lead to crystal, from crush to levitation, from everything to nothing, the absurd trajectory of our lifetime tapers off, until it ends in a threadbare void. And the I of every moment is connected to the one before through a sturdy umbilical cable, with two arteries and one vein, moving the ineffable erythrocytes of causality. Beside it, a subtle and complicated vascularization, a braid of blue and violet capillaries inextricably connects the Russian dolls to each other in a wooly cocoon, so that the moment of now can branch out, over a period of five years, and another over seven, touching flexible synapses to the heavy eyelids and Buddha smile of one of the millions of children and adolescents that look like me, sucking on their minds, their neck glands or their suprarenal capsules to draw out emotions, chemicals, scenes, ideas, or something else I cannot imagine and do not dare to understand. With some of these brothers of mine (odd brothers, all carrying my name and genetic code, the way that in big families the youngest children wear the eldest’s clothes) I have lost direct contact, while others feed me through tens of thousands of tentacles. In their turn, they feed each other, they ally with each other, and they plot against each other, holding out their hands to each other over the ages in such a dense tangle of relations that they blacken a four-dimensional field — my real being, of which the “I” of this moment is only a spot, a state, an isotope in an infinite series, a meeting of the virtual with the wonder of reality, which, look, just passed. Because, just as some beings who live in a bi-dimensional world see a ball traverse the scene like a point that appears out of nothing, becoming an ever larger disk and shrinking again to a point which disappears, the baroque anatomy of my body reveals and at the same time hides a fourth dimension: time. Take a biopsy of my spinal marrow and you will find a white disk with the pattern of a gray butterfly. Take a biopsy of my real being, the way you would cut down a tree, and you will find the concentric circles of Mircea in Mircea in Mircea in Mircea in Mircea in Mircea …