COMMENTS ON FRAGMENTS. [English version]

1. Self-imposed Rules to Start Over this Blog

I'm not sure anyone really follows this blog... nor if anyone will ever read these lines, but I should confess that I embark on this new set of blog entries with a two-fold hope: force myself to leave a record of my reflexions (as fleeting and as imprecise as they may be – although I strife for something worthy of being read). And then –a more absurd hope – I hope that my lines can entice others to read some of these works, and to spark a dialogue about them. I can't stop fantasizing that someon will do the same with my two novellas (Antonieta de muchos nombres... but even more La máquina de Hotefes contra las tebiras).

I will try to write these blog entries in agreement with the following parameters: 1. I will begin each blog with a quote from a recent reading, or re-reading, 2. I will not provide an explanation of the quote ahead of it, 3. The quote will come from passages I underline in a book (yes, I mark the books I read by underlining sentences, or making other types of icons), 4. I might connect the text to myself, and to the text’s historical or biographical context, but those connections will be briefly explained, 5. I will primarily focus on the materiality of the text, that is, its texture, its imagery, its implications, and 6. I won’t care whether the text I read is in translation or in its original language… but I will make it explicit.

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2. Commentary on a quote from Cegador 2. El cuerpo, by Mircea Cǎrtǎrescu (read in its Spanish translation): Imagination, flesh, and the metamorphosis from the transcendental, to the human, and to the non-human

   
   

". . . para la criatura que ahora se amodorraba en su cárcel transparente, observando a un chiquillo que observaba a través del cristal de la ventana, el milagro no era ese. El milagro habían sido el cielo azul y el vuelo. Por eso hora merecía la pena haber deambulado años y años, un gusano ávido y abyecto, por la oscuridad de los canales del roble. Se dejó caer al fondo del bote y se quedó inmóvil, pesado y rígido como un juguete de hojalata." (Cegador 2. El cuerpo 361) [My English translation: “… that was not the miracle for the creature who now was becoming drowsy in its transparent prison, watching a small boy who stared through the window glass. The miracle had been both the blue sky and the flight. That was why now it was worth it to have wandered years and years, an avid and abject worm, through the oak’s dark canals. This creature dropped to the bottom of the jar and remained still, heavy and rigid as a tin toy.” (Cegador 2. El cuerpo 361)

Throughout the three volumes that comprise Cegador (Orbitor in the original Romanian), Mircea Cǎrtǎrescu reincarnates as a boy. He is reincarnated as text, as verbal material. This reincarnation encompasses more than the concrete life events that unfold in mid-twentieth-century Bucharest. It is constituted by the stories his acquaintances and neighbors tell him, the history of his parents, and, above all, dreams and fantasies. They traverse each new stage in his life.

In the quote above, Mircea has just witnessed a circus performance that ended with the Serpent Man hypnotizing him. While Mircea hallucinates an incredible ascent, almost divine, the audience at the circus witnesses a boy moving and sounding like an animal under the commands of the hypnotist, according to Mircea’s mother. On their way back home, his mother tells him these details, and Mircişor captures a beetle under the faint nocturnal lights. This quote corresponds to the end of the episode when the boy looks out the window of his room, and the narrative perspective shifts to the beetle, which has been placed in a glass jar.

This is the conclusion of one of the longest chapters in Cegador 2. El Cuerpo, if not the longest. Over the course of sixty pages, readers witness the emergence of a tree-lined street and a circus. We learn about the circus's connection to the state. We read the stories of some of the people who entertain the public with their oddities and skills. The Serpent Man sparks the most interest. He embarks on a brief odyssey through different countries. The story culminates when the Serpent Man hypnotizes Mircea, causing the boy to experience a cosmic elevation—perhaps a transcendental movement toward celestial realms where saints float around the primordial author of everything. This episode mirrors Mircișor's brief adventure with his school friends, which was previously recounted in the novel. In that story, the child is carelessly raised up by his friends. They pull him up in a bucket to an elevated floor in his building. This ascent leads to an incredible vision. However, it ends with Mircişor waking up and discovering that his neighbor, who plays an important role in the first volume (Cegador 1, El ala izquierda), rescued him from a dangerous fall. These two mirroring adventures, revolving around ascents and hallucinations, seem resolved by the following quote, in which the narrator's attention shifts to the beetle: The beetle has two distinct experiences—as a creature that creeps on tree bark and as a creature that flies—so different that they could be two separate forms of existence. Between these experiences, there is a shape shift. Before, it was confined to the canals in the oak tree's bark where it lived. Afterward, it becomes a miraculous flying creature that rises to discover a wider reality. This flight pushes him further and further away from the simplicity of the oak bark. Mircişor, the boy, captures this creature so that Mircea — the "writer-self" who embodies the child — can access the cypher for the complex folds through which his existence occurs. Mircişor lives trapped in his own canals, but he also ascends, flies, and understands another dimension located among the everyday interstices of his life in Bucharest.

We should consider the significance of this ascent occurring during an episode about alienation, perhaps induced by another alienated entity, the Serpent Man. This episode is anchored in a spectacle for the masses financed by the communist regime. This undoubtedly speaks to the type of inner conflict that Mircişor experiences daily, without wings. Nevertheless, we find the elevation here as a completely internal force that takes on an animal appearance for those in the audience. This dual experience of internal flight and external animal behavior is akin to the "becoming animal" described by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus. It's a process whose language consists of animal sounds and non-human movements. In a sense, Cǎrtǎrescu locates us in a territory where imagination is the means by which we become acquainted with the unseen dimension. It's the dimension where we are submerged in the "oak canals" of our world. This dimension is wild; it challenges taboos about how we describe contact with the transcendental (the holy, the sexual, the corporeal, the faeric, the dreadful, the amorous, etc.). In this wild imagination, everything coexists simultaneously.

Is such a liberation possible? Can we unleash the wings of our imagination in such a way that we avoid all conventions and pre-established symbolisms in order to "become animal"? Notably, the episode ends with the insect trapped in Mircişor's crystal jar. Most striking is that, after experiencing the "miracle" of the blue sky and flight, this creature simply drops, as if resigned to living in this transparent prison. This attitude is also mirroring Mircea's. The boy also looks up at the sky through the window's crystal. He looks at the sky where he flew while hypnotized. What remains? The imitation of animal sounds and the memory of the vision. Finally, there is the possibility that within imitation and memory one can find a way to imagine and narrate life, turning text into the experience of flesh and eye.

Comentarios a Fragmentos 1. Reglas auto impuestas y sobre una cita de Cegador 2. El cuerpo, de Mircea Cǎrtǎrescu [Spanish version]