Inimi cicatrizate. Vizuina luminată. Corp transparent. Corespondenţă, ed. Constantin Popa and Nicolae Ţone, Bucharest: Editura Vinea, 1999, p. 335.
6 Max Blecher, Întîmplări în irealitatea imediată. Inimi cicatrizate. Vizuina luminată. Corp transparent. Corespondenţă, ed. Constantin Popa and Nicolae Ţone, Bucharest: Editura Vinea, 1999, p. 396.
7 Note from an undated manuscript, quoted by Radu Ţepoşu in the Preface to Max Blecher, Întîmplări în irealitatea imediată. Inimi cicatrizate. Vizuina luminată. Corp transparent. Corespondenţă, ed. Constantin Popa and Nicolae Ţone, Bucharest: Editura Vinea, 1999, p. 12.
8 See the chapter ‘The Truth-Taking Stare’ in Louis A. Sass, Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), pp. 43-74.
Moments of Crisis
“I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire”
P. B. Shelley
When I gaze for a long time at a fixed point on the wall, what sometimes happens is that I will no longer know who I am or where I am. I sense my lack of identity from afar, as though I had, for an instant, become a complete stranger. With matching strength, this abstract personage and my real person vie to convince me.
In the following instant my identity is regained, like in those stereoscopic views when the two images sometimes separate by accident and only when the projectionist readjusts them, superimposing them, do they all at once provide the illusion of depth. Then it appears to me that my room is of a freshness it did not previously possess. It regains its prior consistency and the objects in it fall back into place, in the same way as in a glass of water a lump of crumbled soil will settle in strata of different, well defined and variously coloured elements. The elements of my room stratify into their own outlines and into the colouring of the old memory I have of them.
The sensation of distance and loneliness in the moments when my everyday self has dissolved into inconsistency differs from any other sensation. When it lasts longer, it becomes a fear, a terror of not being able to regain myself ever again. Afar, an uncertain outline lingers in me, encompassed by a great luminosity, in the same way as objects sometimes loom from the mist.
The terrible question “Who exactly am I?” then dwells in me like an entirely new body, having grown in me with skin and organs that are wholly unfamiliar to me. The answer to it is demanded by a deeper and more essential lucidity than that of the brain. All that is capable of stirring in my body writhes, struggles and rebels more vigorously and more elementarily than in everyday life. Everything begs a solution.
Oftentimes, I regain the room as I know it, as though I were closing and opening my eyes; each time, the room is clearer – just as a landscape looms in a telescope with increasing structure, the more we pierce all the veils of intermediary distances by adjusting the focus.
In the end, I recognise myself and regain my room. It is a sensation of slight intoxication. The room is extraordinarily condensed in its matter, and I am implacably returned to the surface of things: the deeper the wave of uncertainty the higher its crest; never and under no other circumstances does it seem to me more evident than in those moments that each object must occupy the place it occupies and that I must be the one who I am.
My struggle in incertitude then no longer has any name; it is the mere regret that I have not found anything in its depths. What surprises me is merely the fact that a complete lack of significance could have been so profoundly bound to my intrinsic matter. When I have come back to myself and seek to express the sensation, it appears wholly impersonal to me: a mere exaggeration of my identity, having grown like a cancer from its own substance. A jellyfish arm that extended immeasurably and groped among the waves in exasperation before finally retracting beneath the gelatinous sucker. In a few instants of disquietude, I have thus traversed all the certainties and uncertainties of my existence, only to return definitively and painfully to my solitude.
It is then a solitude that is purer and more poignant than previously. The sensation of the world being far off is clearer and more intrinsic: a limpid and delicate melancholy, like a dream we recall in the depths of the night.
It alone still reminds me of something of the mystery and rather sad charm of my childhood “crises”.
Except that in this sudden disappearance of identity, I rediscover my descents into the cursed spaces of former times. Only in the moments of immediate lucidity that follow upon the return to the surface does the world appear to me in that unusual atmosphere of pointlessness and desuetude, which formed around me when my hallucinatory trances finally overwhelmed me.
*
It was always the same places on the street, in the house, or in the garden that would provoke my crises. Whenever I used to enter their space, the same faintness and dizziness would overwhelm me. They were invisible traps dotted around the town, in no way distinct from the air that encompassed them. They would ferociously lie in wait for me to fall into the trap of the special atmosphere they contained. If I took so much as a single step and entered such a cursed space, the crisis would inevitably come.
One of those spaces was in the town park, in a small glade at the end of a lane, where no one ever walked. The wild rose bushes and dwarf willows that surrounded it opened on one side onto the desolate vista of a deserted field. There was no place in the world sadder or more abandoned. A dense silence settled on the dusty leaves, in the stagnant heat of summer. Now and then, the echoes of the garrison bugles could be heard. Those protracted, futile calls were achingly sad... Far off, the sun-scorched air quivered vaporously like the transparent steam that hovers over a boiling liquid.
The place was wild and isolated; its loneliness seemed endless. There, I felt the heat of the day was more wearying and the air harder to breathe. The dusty bushes were scorched yellow by the sun, in an atmosphere of consummate solitude. A bizarre sensation of pointlessness floated in that glade, which existed “somewhere in the world”, somewhere upon which I myself had happed pointlessly, one ordinary summer afternoon, which in itself had no meaning. An afternoon that strayed chaotically in the heat of the sun, among bushes anchored in space somewhere in the world. Then I would feel more profoundly and more painfully that I had nothing to do in this world, nothing to do except roam through parks – through dusty glades baking in the sun, deserted and wild. It was a roaming which in the end rent my heart.
*
Another cursed place was at the very other end of town, between the high and cavernous banks of the river in which I used to swim with my playmates.
The riverbank had subsided in one place. At the top there was a factory for extracting sunflower seed oil. The husks of the seeds were discarded among the walls of the subsided riverbank. In time the heap grew so high that a slope of dried husks formed, from the top of the bank as far as the water’s edge.
It was down this slope that my mates would descend to the water, warily, clutching each other by the arm, their footsteps sinking deeply into the carpet of putrefaction.
The high walls of the riverbank to either side of the slope were precipitous and full of fantastical irregularities. The rain had sculpted fine fissures in long streaks, like arabesques, but as hideous as unhealed lesions. They were lacerations in the flesh of the loam, horrid, gaping wounds.
It was between these walls, which impressed me exceedingly, that I too used to have to descend to the river.
Even from afar and long before reaching the riverbank, my nostrils would be filled with the reek of putrid husks. It readied me for the crisis, like a brief period
