Against the Skin — Christina Tudor-Sideri

In a cemetery for the nameless, gazing upon a slab placed just beyond the fence, silent, contemplating the end of the here and now, I suddenly feel like an apparition from a Lucian Blaga poem, stuck somewhere between the hand of the poet and the mind of the reader, between the reflective and the unreflective consciousness of what rests on the page. A voice, a being purified to transparency by the ravenous wind. A phantom, mobilized by flesh, and blood, and lust, a coincidentia oppositorum projection, punished and healed by the same thirst, amid gods and goddesses who kept on living even after the world stopped building them temples. Time resides by my side. Time, not as continuum nor as discontinuity, but time as that which underlies the continuous and the discontinuous. Judging detachedly, that does not speak of much, but the clock is here as well; the watch, the timepiece: earlier, on the train platform, on my wrist, in my pocket—in the word earlier itself—innocuous witness to the deceptiveness of motion, covering the distance between sign and meaning as it ticks and ticks through the long year. Nothing of yours borders me. 

Human existence is oriented towards the continuity of the self. I follow an infinite thread, for I myself am a thread. For I myself am infinite. A detour to death, perhaps. A means through which to offer a hypothesis to life. Mere analogies? Yes, but deeply-rooted in the notion that life is a path. A path that carries me through rivers of certainty and realms of make-believe, a path that thrusts upon me petrified landscapes and the immutable past. I’ve always held dear the belief that the past is given to us, that it is something that comes to us, and, notwithstanding of the bizarreness of such an idea, I utter: it comes to me, as if I were to say: all life tends towards death. It tends towards death rearward, following the thread back to that beginning when all was death. A Freudian outlook, if ever I had one. This state of dissolution, this mirage—perhaps a genuine hallucination—of having once been part of a lifeless universal soul, this state takes my inner turmoil and thrusts it at the center of all things. It is there: resting, lingering, awaiting liberation, aspiring to unfold to its true extent, awaiting to have a body. And yet, the past is only immutable when looked at from the perspective of mere temporality. When it is seen as memory, as content, when it is experienced as remembrance, the past can be changed through imagination. This, I must admit, is not necessarily an idea that pleases me, yet it is something proper to root myself in, a stable belief, a perspective that can make anything possible, even a time before death’s existence. What comes from the past sculpts the future: a drive to further life, to follow the infinite thread guided by the belief that all is clay in one’s hand: the have-beens, the might-have-beens, the body and the creator; everything, all of it, even a prelapsarian existence. To return to the beginning of all beginnings, to return and carve it to one’s own pleasing. Yes: the past can be changed through the imagination. Such an effort could, indeed, help the mind revolt against the injustices of history, it could open us up to a world of fantasy, and through that opening, it could render it material. It is fairly understandable how such a moment can mark both beginning and end. How such an oceanic feeling of boundlessness can breathe meaning even on the unassailable past. I take a few more steps towards the back of the cemetery, hands freezing, lips garlanded by the traces of words uttered in other lives. Turmoil ranges within. 

In his final book, The Lighted Burrow, published thirty-three years after his death, Max Blecher dives into his past, imagination and pen in hand, and transforms it into a space where one can live, where one can breathe and write, and he does so by interweaving the perfect with the imperfect, primordial separation with eternal togetherness, the phantasmagorical with the real, and then confining everything to the page. To imagine such a world, where past and present coexist as fiction and true existence can often give rise to desire—it can make one long to move towards the primordial stages of life, when all was touch. Our consciousness contains such structures, structures through which the past metamorphoses. I speak of this particular book and the story its author tells himself and his readers about himself not because it is the most recent book I translated, but rather because somehow, it has always traveled with me—it has been an undying depth of time, a language dreamed not to unite my world, nor to separate it, but to make it present. The story of an author who spent his life being bandaged and handled by doctors, moved by orderlies from one sanatorium to the other, writing through the unimaginable pains of bone tuberculosis, without the possibility of a future as most of us imagine but with a clear vision of what his present is. As a translator, living in intimacy with such worlds and attempting to reproduce them in new languages, for new audiences, means learning how to cut a new path with each word. Path after path, to slither through irreversible histories, through established genres and canons—through thought itself. Whether it is exile or illness, torment or delirium, impermanence or resignation that which plagues one—even merriment—deciphering and rendering those universes creates the illusion of an eternal present by inclosing it deep into all layers of time. As a translator, I speak with the voices of others. And that discourse, that dialogue, that conversation always leaves me wanting more. However, as a writer, making the phantastic real, and vice versa, through the power of pen and imagination can have the opposite effect. It can be terrifying. The meaning is nonetheless clear: language helps one be both different and the most truthful version of oneself. And through it, temporality is denied, not by rejecting or attempting to erase time—by bathing in its fullness. Part novel, part sanatorium journal, The Lighted Burrow is Blecher’s most comprehensive writing, in that it brings together the dream and the reality residing at the root of his life-work continuum, all the motifs we find in both his prose and his poetry, in his fiction and his autobiography. There are lines from Blecher’s poems amidst its pages, same as there are lines from its pages amidst the few poems he wrote throughout his tragically short existence, lines of flight and surgical sutures traversing the universe of pain like an endless arrow directed at death—an arrow that, on paper, will never reach its destination, for what remains of Max Blecher, remains evermore. Translating such a manifesto has opened up new ways of reading and writing, it has eradicated the old and replaced it with an ever-changing, ever-growing need to understand what becomes of fiction when we bleed our lives into it, what becomes of our lives when intermingled with fiction. What does not being able to clearly envision what is real and what is imagined—what is fabricated, arranged just so—mean for a work of art? When we read, do we realize that perhaps the author himself does not know, that perhaps it is precisely this uncertainty that helps him tell the story, that helps him live through its unfolding? As readers, when we encounter reality that appears to be less important than the imagination, we think that we find ourselves in the presence of a work of fiction, yet the intricacy of lives besieged by illness and pain, by impermanence and the desire to live on through whatever means breathes more authenticity upon the page than any tightly-curated biography ever could—the authenticity of the meta-unreality that knows only the way to itself. To write in seclusion with death, as Max Blecher wrote, is to put the oxygen mask on yourself, not in order to survive, but to contribute to the survival of others. Because it is from such works that both writer and reader draw most breath. 

Here, on the border between real and unreal time, on the threshold of the train station, I see in the distance the small Carpathian town where I will be spending the coming weeks and think of the intangibility of meaning once it too has crossed the threshold, once it has been rooted in a specific definition that cannot be unuttered. Not of the meaning that words possess; words such as past or future or self, nor of the meaning of alienation and what drives one up the mountain this late in the year; not of poison and cure, but of the meaning of thought-induced hallucinations—of what I think bestows upon oneself. If I close my eyes, the contour of the town changes, and through my eyelids I see its name in giant letters embedded upon the mountain. There are such places in life, inhabited by so many and so few memories at the same time that their appearance makes little to no difference to the manner in which we perceive them, or even to the manner in which we are perceived in them. Perhaps it is because in times of great turmoil or generous ecstasy that which surrounds us and the reason for which it does so can be anything we want or need it to be. There is beautiful harmony in the unknown. I think also of the unity language seeks to provide, of new myths and new religions. With Blecher’s novel, the reader is transported from the real to the imagined and back in the course of a paragraph, sometimes even in the duration of a single line, and the delimitation, although not always visible at first glance, is always present. As my mind makes the unintended association with my own writing, it occurs to me that such a demarcation does not exist in my universe. In the Neoclassical train station, with my forest-green boots on the threshold and an aged suitcase following askance, the very thought of how I put words on paper places before my eyes a gentle, almost nonexistent hallucination: that of the haze in which both writer and reader are rooted; sometimes motionless as a corpse, other times spinning with incredible swiftness. Before my eyes: words, their physical representation, words torn and spun and torn again—a spectacle of language and movement hidden behind the sickness that is the human condition, the condition of the human who imagines. If this is meant to be some kind of revelation—willing and able to seduce the senses—I fear that I have dismissed it rather quickly by simply turning my gaze away from them and towards the blueness of the hour. 

I know close to nothing about the history of this town, mere facts that I repeat to myself only to have them abscond my mind as soon as I do so. This town that, as I now see it, might not even exist. A couple of stories from its beginnings: illness had once engulfed whole families; snow used to fall in the summer. It would certainly be possible for snow to fall this very minute, after a night of little movement on the train and a split morning haunted by Plato’s seventh letter, from which I take nothing other than the parallel to an attempt of removing blame from oneself, of no longer feeling guilt, not in the political context of Plato, of course, for good politics requires good humans, and I am in no position to think of myself as one, but rather as a fleeting thread that stitches together the seventh letter with my own—letters unwritten, letters unsent, letters unread. Yes, snow could fall this very minute, when memory and dream intermingle and form a palpable mass before me, a mass that knows not what to do with itself, and so it hides behind the black shadow of the mountain, here, where people now live happy lives. Language stands at the foundation of this mass as well, and it will be language that will give birth to the next one. But before that happens, the voiceover from Wim Wenders's Until the End of the World echoes from someone’s device and I hear myself uttering this instead: I have never asked for phantoms. I do not ask for ghosts on funereal autumns, when the sun is frailer and frailer, and thus unable to light the way, nor in the middle of conversations like this one, when a stranger stands before me, exaggerating his regrets of having to catch the very next train and end our encounter. That is all I hear, after those words, everything becomes mere gesture; all remnants of dialogue vanish one by one. The last to go: a darkened fragment alluding to the time of biblical genesis. The dialogue vanishes and I am left with nothing but the challenge to distance myself from its memory—a memory yet unformed, but one that I know will linger, and perhaps, one in which I will one day again search for in the blueness of the hour. When I come to my senses, that is, when I remember that I too have somewhere to be, I resume dragging my suitcase over the threshold and relinquish all trace of this chance encounter, one among many. I leave with Uccio Esposito-Torrigiani’s words from the postface of Danielle Collobert’s Notebooks in my mind: We spoke of the essentials: writing and death. At long last, I am away; my arms around a tree, my mind already plotting a return yet oriented towards the future, the return of that tree, as words from Michal Bielawski’s Wiatr taught me not long ago—a documentary about the lives of women and men living in the Podhale region of Poland, where the unpredictability of the halny, a fohn wind coming from the Carpathian mountains, has borderline surreal effects on the population: madness, acts of violence, physical illness, complete metamorphoses of one’s surroundings. If you love the forest, it will come and embrace your dreams. In the distance, the cemetery. 

I voice words incessantly, I voice them as to erase what is left of all others, words through which the body might recognize the self. Words through which the hand materializes. There exists a deep solidarity between the erotic and the ontological. Between the physical and the existential. And in that solidarity, in that connection, lies a desire for more than the otherness of the other; lies a desire for finding meaning in what one craves. Pages upon pages have been written on the human as a being who needs to experience meaning, but as I think of such writings now, oddly, I do not think of needing significance. Instead, I think of authenticity, of Plato’s letter, lingering. I think of fixed ideas and how they will be the death of philosophy, of wonder, and flesh, and the return of God. I think of Lacan and his stating that psychoanalysts ought to be intimately acquainted with the works of Saint Augustine. Saint Augustine, from whom I remember that free will is not predisposed to both good and evil. Saint Augustine, who, even before reading him properly, made me question what it means to have a will that is defiled by sin, what it means to be bound by material things, perhaps in the same manner in which those pages bound the human to the need of meaning. What is the will if it’s not free? These pages, which speak of the natural and the carnal and the immediate as keepers of some kind of uncontaminated desire for meaning, what do they say of shackled freedom? Meaning—that is what it is all about, and so we preserve the past, both as icon and as memory. I preserve the past. And the more I revisit it, the more I travel. The past has taken me so far away. Though lately, the distances have gotten shorter, but stretched enough as to follow the thread, as to stop from time to time and dig my fingernails into the soil of the world in search for these tenets of meaning. Perhaps I am wrong to search. Perhaps we are all wrong to search, to chase, to wander, to lust. Perhaps I am also wrong to think of Eros as no different than Thanatos. Wrong to think of the unmaking of the soul in the same manner as one thinks of the unmaking of the body. Who was it that called for a theology of adoration?

The search. I came here in search of Judith Mészáros. I spent my summer by the sea in search of Judith Mészáros. Words that mean nothing, not even to the very few who read her poems, for she was never known to be here, nor by the sea, but after all, why not? why would I not find her here? Judith Mészáros, who, after publishing two astonishing poetry volumes in the 90s, vanished without a trace. A name I have never uttered aloud, a writer whose poetry I feel so attached to that I have never mentioned a single line to anyone. She was always mine alone, and she was always present in moments of wandering. I search and I wander. I wander and I search. I pull lines from her poems: I wander aimlessly and I clash against the angels; words to warm and guide me. Snow could very well start falling, and snow is why I am here. I’ve followed the path of her lines: It was snowing, outwards from my veins; the cry had frozen on the rivers, closing a circle around us. No cracks, no escape. Tall stood the cold, sharp the forgetting. In post Decembrist Romania, for lovers of poetry, for an entire generation with a sense of culture still in gestational stages, to read and to hear a voice like hers was to bathe in the congenial waters of a much-desired freedom: the freedom to be enthused by a poetic calling from beyond the realm of the day-to-day. She came like the warm yet merciless wind that strokes your face on summer days, denouncing that which separates the mind from the I, lingering for a brief moment among us, for the duration of two volumes that coursed our bloodstream like escape rafts on voracious rivers. As mesmerizing as her work was to the poetic scene of the time, it was the disappearance of Judith Mészáros that most speak of to this day. As I walk Carpathian streets at night, basking in the light of the little traffic there is, stumbling here and there on the decorative street furniture or a dislocated flower pot, I search in my mind, this time not for traces of her, but for signs of her disappearance. On the main street, the imposing view of a famous hotel reminds me not only of the ceremonial train station of the past, the station reserved for dignitaries and members of royal families that shares a platform with that of the public, but of the opening poem from Angeliad, her debut volume, translating into English even before I reach the end of the first line: strange island / your shores pale from sleeplessness / indecipherable skeleton / thrown over the seas of time. It is perhaps the white, somewhat ghost-like coat of the façade that made me remember this particular poem, Introduction to Angelic Affairs, perhaps the very poem by which she will eternally be remembered by a handful of people who place the work above of the artist, while others will continue to preoccupy themselves with her vanishing, to come up with conspiracy theories, perhaps even to gather evidence in her home town in support of what caused her withdrawal from literary and public life, as they did twenty or so years ago. Not all of her will die—non omnis moriar, as she aptly named the fifth poem of the collection. No writer ever dies. But what is a writer without the body? What are words without the blood that pushes them forth from the wound? I’ve followed the poetry of Judith Mészáros for what feels like an eternity, never able to utter her name until this very moment—this moment when, although I still do not know whether she lives or writes or thinks of us, her readers, I’ve come to ask myself: what is a name without a body, what is a writer without hands? And, paradoxically: what need have we for that which limits us? 

If I am to silence these sirens, I must do so outside of time, outside of the real. But any experience outside of the real is perceived as illusory—a belief so embedded in day-to-day life that not even I can refuse it. There are hands before my eyes. Fingers, leafing through unpublished translations, projects, ideas, trickeries, misapprehensions, words. Nora Iuga’s words: I no longer know the way to your body. Nora Iuga, the poet, who, upon having her poetry forbidden by the communist regime, became Nora Iuga, the translator, signing her name the only way she could, alongside the names of those she translated: Paul Celan, Herta Müller, Knut Hamsun, Elfriede Jelinek, Günter Grass. Nora Iuga, the novelist, whose novels speak without punctuation and interruption of human connection and aloneness, of having loved and having touched, of strolls to the market in Bucharest and Berlin, of the philosophy of dissolution in a realm as grey as the afterworld awaiting it. Nora Iuga, the critic, who when asked about her favorite books, she pointed to a copy of Max Blecher and compared his writing to that of Thomas Mann and Heinrich Böll. Nora Iuga, who, as I am leafing through these snippets of life, some real, some imagined, becomes again the poet of the labyrinth, of the circle and its captivity, of the body and its abandonment into the arms of the world. When I translate her, the smoke from her cigarette ventures into my lungs and my breath becomes the breath of her words: I no longer know the way to your body. Fingers, leafing still through first sentences and drafts and dizziness. I turn my head again and everything disappears, and I am left questioning object permanence and matters-of-fact. I speak without speaking. I touch without touching. I enter ideas of you and I as effortlessly as opening a door to minds communicating without their knowledge, behind their own backs, skewing perceptions like false magnetic poles rendering time and memory before the eyes of the audience. The most treacherous connection is that between such two ideas, between the you and the I, both defeated, seeing one another clearly, as if all it took to see were to open one’s eyes. The habit, as act, arises from repetition, and fingers leaf again through my thoughts. I begin to move as if I were uttering words with my arms and my torso and my legs. Hurried words, spoken out of breath, not with the mouth, but with limbs stretching and tightening around the body, words rushing towards a certain something that beckons unto infinity, towards hallucinatory edges blurred to such extremes that the Black sea is now reflected above the hills. These words that I utter with the movements of my body, these words that somehow reveal not meaning but lack thereof: no meaning for the writer, no meaning for the reader, no meaning for the words themselves. In this realm, sheltered by this paradox, in this moment of beatitude and dark contradiction, bound up with instinct and idealization, I cross imaginary rivers, I touch and I lean on bodies and trees and on all that I bring into existence with my flesh and make unreal with my thought. No matter where I turn, the town has its arms around me. I see and I understand, but I cannot describe it, since, unlike Blecher, I don’t know how to speak of mountain towns, yet I take great comfort in being here, where one can sometimes hear George Enescu’s Ibach piano echoing in the dark of night from the Biedermeier chambers of what is now his memorial house—I take great comfort in presence and in seeing the crests and the waves, in having arms made of branches and hair of sand. What comes to me in mountain rain, departs in clashing waves, for all is here and all is yearning. For days on end, words become incarnate. For days on end, the unmade bed appears before me as testament to pleasure entangled with routine, of rest and transcendence. Dark forces reside at its feet. Lovely, tender, inviting forces. The flight from the flesh, neither embodiment nor mere idea, neither worm in the heart nor fear of what’s to come, throbs as never before. The desire to emerge and descend and emerge again, evermore. To cross yet another threshold. A blackbird that flies off. A letter on the page. But what if that threshold were a circle? what if stepping into it brought back the past instead of thrusting one towards the future? My past is the night and I am its darkness. George Bacovia often referred to the night as a sphere. A night that arrives late and never departs without adorning our faces with stillness. And this is what insomnia deprives us of: stillness. That gentle stillness, dark and lovely forces at the feet of the bed. A drowsy renunciation carries over from his prose and into my reality. The prose of a poet, scattered through years and years of poetry, of sorrow and symbolism. Bacovia was, as he himself sometimes admitted it, the poet of the funereal, the poet of autumn and fall and the descent into the underworld. One does not need death in order to live, but from Bacovia I’ve learned to love its inevitability, not as Poe does, not by relating it to beauty but rather from allowing it to travel by my side, from letting her color in the waters and the trees, from speaking as if I could lose all my words the very next second. His symbolism has led to the creation of several mythologies around his life and his poetry, of which I find most impressive the mythology of last words. It is said that George Bacovia’s last words were darkness is coming, uttered in the direction of his wife and he gently turned his face away from her and passed. And while that does indeed carry a grain of truth, what remained today is a myth whose powers I would not even know to describe. Such last words carry in and with them the whole of the world, they bring closure and open new paths, they cement the known and bring forth the unknown, they shelter and they exile. Darkness is coming—the epitaph of a life lived at the feet of death as companion, death as antagonist, death as premonition, death as life now threadbare. In this town, named after a monastery, where Ibach pianos echo alongside the phantom laughter of children, I touch and I lean on bodies and trees, I write down my thoughts and the images they project, I birth fragment after fragment and circle what time tells me to, the words through which it tricks me into thinking there is meaning in chaos: for days on end, the unmade bed; for days on end, the elegy of separation.

Ten years after her death, the bones of Camille Claudel were transferred to a communal grave at the asylum where she was kept. Joined forever to the ground she tried to escape, writes Odile Ayral-Clause. How can nine small words carry such meaning? how can nine small words unfold before me ontologies I never knew existed? An act does not depend on its significance, more so when the two are separated by a temporal lag, and yet I find myself irrevocably wounded by the significance of these nine words. It burns me. I breathe it in and it burns me. Who is touching whom? I made the word my flesh and now letters burn through me, revolting crimes of subject and object, they burn through me and all I know is that I am ready to draw another breath. Hours have passed. I’ve eaten and rested; I’ve asked myself what is time? and imagined a world in which everyone knows that the question to be asked is rather: does time exist? I burn, nonetheless. I burn without being consumed, unfused by figurative meaning and excess and all that we now judge and categorize based on aesthetic criteria. But the aesthetic no longer holds the reins, for they belong to something that manifests itself as a fitting prelude to the end of the world, a final spasm of the soul as it struggles to hold aspiration and anxiety and the whole of the world in its grasp: the terrestrial, the biological, the phantasmagorical, the marvelous, the grotesque. Forever joined together in its grasp. One could attempt an explanation and say that I have perhaps fallen victim to a certain literary current, because here I am, giving new names to the old and old names to the new. Firm definitions, principles of expressionism that mask as protest against the outrageous spectacle of the world, when in fact, the only appropriate definition is that of literary imposture, but we have all long forgotten of such things. The named and the nameless: ironically, whether beings or objects, they are both rooted in the same premise. That of a mythical cry, even theological, of a rhythm that deepens the chasm, of a river that cannot be crossed. On better, clearer days, it is a mere exacerbation of the named and the unnamed self, an aggravation through means of literature, when one says to oneself: Oh, how I long to play. I long to play like I have never played before. I want to play, to invent, to stretch out my arm and touch the untouchable. And on those days, we think that this is all it takes: that through such incantations, we are saved from the shadows, we are pulled up by charms and projections, by memories and transmutations and ceremonies. We think that we are pulled up and we are saved, so as to not be joined to that which we wish to escape. Echoing gestures to follow and attempting to shine a light upon the narrow and harrowing path—the path chosen in search of new beginnings—I join my fingers together above my head and let my body fall upon the unmade bed. The fall as beginning: a mystical delight that nonetheless pains the body. 

Somewhere in the writings of Hélène Cixous is the idea that in order to begin, one must have death. Begin to live, begin to write, begin to love. This wounding—because to live with death is a wounding—is a catalyst for that solidarity, it ignites the path between the erotic and the ontological. To know death is to lust for life. To know death is to understand not the abyss but the impossibility of life without it. Without death, intimacy would never be erotic. The erotic world is imaginary in its form, it is analogous to a dream, writes Bataille, and with this, the threshold becomes a circle. With this, I return to the beginning of all beginnings, and place there, before all things, not the turmoil, but this triune entity: intimacy-eroticism-death. If the erotic is analogous to a dream, and if, like Nina Kossman notes, the texture of our dreams is passed on, then how we touch ripples through time and through generations as powerful as, let’s say, the connection between creation and destruction. I have abandoned the bed, and I cross the slender pathways of the town towards even higher ground, I cannot help but wonder if we have the right idea of symbols and their meaning. And so, I think of the ladder and the tree. I think of rotting paper and The Sick List, a novel about an academic's obsession with his tutor's annotations, and as I do so, I observe myself, another version of myself, from afar, touching the texture of that paper, feeling it between my fingers, catching its fragrance in the air like that of a fading perfume. Rotting paper: the words linger on my mind and I wonder if they are the same words that caught the mind of the authors as he was writing them down, I wonder about the texture of the paper, if real or imagined, whether what the reader feels is the same as the writer wanted to convey. A book about education and how it deceives us is indeed the perfect starting point for dissecting the symbol of symbols, for taking a knife to that which we have already established as real—it is the perfect book for feeling and thinking, for emotion and response, and so I think of the unseen that resides at the root of all symbols, connecting them at times not to their respective meaning, but to each other—a sea, this sea of symbols, alien to each other on the surface but embraced under water. A connection that manifests itself with a force similar to that of a collective desire, and that renders their roles as symbols universally accepted. With this, with what appears as the true paradisiacal condition, I follow the winding path—the path laid before me by hallucinatory thought, a path of the imagined present—a strand of hair between my fingers, drowning in the freshness of mountain air, ransacking my memories for that particular day when someone taught me lyrical breathing and sentences that open and end with invocations—a writer’s equivalent of a breath prayer. When one is anxious or in need of pausing, breathing to the rhythm of a poem, more so, the rhythm of a chant, can provide a much-needed respite from time itself. When you learn to begin and end your sentences with invocations, as I did on my very first day of school, your lungs fill up with connecting threads that do not suffocate, but rather expand one’s capacity to take on the world. Later, I found a similar notion in Adriana Cavarero’s book on the philosophy of utterance: the voice is that which joins body and speech. Yet the body does not always need this connection: one can speak silently. Testimony for this is the memory, and how the now silent voices of the past continue to have conversations with an I embedded in the mind. A voice in absentia remains a voice. A speechless past is nonetheless a part of existence. My past is the night and I am its darkness. Without death, intimacy would never be erotic.

Time remains in continuous metamorphosis, inside and outside the body: the unmade bed, any and all poetic matter, the sexual act as ontological moment—effulgent—the very rupture between being and world, taking refuge in anonymity, in metaphysical cries and crises, all testimonies of the kindness and cruelty of time coursing through the veins of the human and the animal, of the living and the never-breathing, revealing themselves in the act of waiting, for waiting is invocation as much as it is stillness and movement. We don’t dare tell ourselves that what we are waiting for is death, writes Dumitru Tsepeneag in a note to his short story collection, a writer of exile, one of many who left Romania before the fall of communism, one of many who found themselves in need of a homeland and sought the page for such a role. After waiting, the rupture takes refuge in sleep. This is where I abandon the dream, the illusion, the phantasmata, the whispered confessions in the dark of day. This is where I too become one with the character of my novel and speak of death under the chestnut tree, yet unlike my character, more so in times of travel, I find myself in need of prayer. As I drink my pretend coffee in the serenity of an uninjurious décor, I think there are many ways of speaking, there are ample ways of praying, and I pray not with my words, but with those of saints, and sinners, and mountain girls who rush to school morning after morning. For if the mind can pray, the body can atone through means other than pain. How would I know to pray with my own words? how would I know to say God and be sincere and unafraid? a fear not of divinity or rather of its absence, but of my own strength, of the unforeseen limits of what one can carry, afraid of the prayer becoming delirium and of the delirium becoming prayer. And if the erotic world is imaginary in its form, then so is the theological, and from an imagination trampled by selves and matter I do not want merged with the real, I could not speak words in prayer. I would not know how to use my own words because all I could say would be: is God not saddened? is God not oriented obsessively towards the continuity of all selves? My prayer is often silence. A November-like summer rain, where wants and needs and wishes are soundless and the answer comes through the throbbing of the corporeal rather than in patterns or through abandonment. The answer comes, but not as declaration of love or fidelity, it comes in tenderness from beyond the need to have and to hold, and even to remember. A November-like summer, when prayer is silent and in night’s darkness gleam not the gates of heaven, but the crests of mountains and the waves of the sea. A superlative of longing. Yes, my prayer is a superlative of longing: a frantic search for the raw material of life—even in sin and in death, even in that which lasts a meagre second. The pleasure of emersion contours each moment and each moment contours a new vision of space. A space in which one lives to the point of revelation. 

My ontologies press against the skin, they too in search of warmth, and remind me of the first line of a poem I knew as a child, a poem I am now certain was never a poem, but a song that my grandmother used to sing as she braided my hair. Where the mountain meets the moon… I would like to better understand these theories, and so I move towards the light, under the rays of the moon, for if anything can satisfy them, that is the moon—the moon can please the thought and make it offer that which is most comforting. If beneath the moon, bitten by werewolves and caged by the sky, thought can find gratification, then I too proclaim loudly that I can write, and paint, and go to the beach at any time, eyes open or closed, haunted by memories or petrified by the body of pleasure. Thus, the journey to the beginning and the end resumes—it resumes and it ends and beings again in and through the mysteries of desire, through symbols that embrace under water and the routine of daily existence. The garden calls us back: it calls us back to say there never was a garden. And once again I move my head and my thoughts drift to a dream of seeing an ad in the local paper: Everything has been revealed and anyone can see it. Where does one begin to imagine such pain? On the brink of wakefulness? in the midst of deep sleep? in the immutable past? in the unreal? where does one stop to rest and separate the statement from its meaning? Perhaps in moments of absolute trust. Perhaps it is in such moments, when one trusts the other, or the mountain, or the bell that tolls for thee, that traveling rearward to the lifeless universal soul becomes a walk in the park. With past and present and future weighing on one’s mind and body like the memory of the beloved dead, and yet the journey is a mere walk in the park—the journey outside of time. To be outside of chronology, to be where waters abound and spiderlike fingers weave boats for you to sleep in. Yet I can’t help but wonder: is this movement, this movement away from the body as we know it, nothing but an attempt to fully blur the line between the real and the imagined? Why must we travel to the nakedness within? and how even could we see the path, when we have yet to find reconciliation with unclothed skin? how long is the path? Distance is complementary to closeness, but we ourselves created closeness—we’ve birthed this concept for safe-keeping to make use of it when trying to name the unnamed, when fighting to erase all absences—and in return, closeness has generated distance. One cannot think of distance as something far, farther, unless one knows of closeness. The path from one to the other stretches and contracts ad infinitum, and all that is left is to follow the eternal thread, for we ourselves are a thread. For we ourselves are eternal. Have we invented closeness as to not have to answer the question: does time exist? 

Unbeknownst, my steps have taken me to the cobblestoned entry of the cathedral where not so long ago, in an imagined past, I abandoned the need to trust in the existence of divinity. The years are starting to hurt. I take out my notebook and write: the candle must remain alight, mechanically, as if I am following the contour of invisible letters already there. Even the pauses between words seem sketched by other hands. The halny blows through other mountains, not far from here, and maybe, just maybe, with proper tools and methods, we could one day reveal its true intentions. Alone on Earth, eternally insatiable, the poet sculpts himself another world. Nothing of mine borders him. Failing to overcome my interrogative impulses, I travel farther. I travel and I stretch my arms towards another tree. Written in the flesh: let the tempest come.

***

WORKS REFERENCED:

Blaga, L. (1974). Opere. Minerva.

Blecher, M. (1971). Vizuina luminată. Cartea Românească.

Wenders, W. (1991). Until the End of the World. 

Collobert, D. (2003). Notebooks 1956-1978. (N. Cole, Trans.). Litmus Press.

Bielawski, M. (2019). Wiatr. 

Lacan, J. (2001). Écrits: A Selection. (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Routledge. 

Augustine, St. (1992). Confessions. (H. Chadwick, Trans.). Oxford University Press. 

Mészáros, J. (1993). Îngeriada. Eminescu.

Iuga, N. (1970). Captivitatea Cercului. Cartea Românească.

Bacovia, G. (1980). Proză. Minerva.

Ayral-Clause, O. (2002). Camille Claudel: A Life. Harry N. Abrams.

Cixous, H. (1994). Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. (S. Sellers, Trans.). Columbia University Press. 

Bataille, G. (1991). The Accursed Share. (R. Hurley, Trans.). Zone Books. 

Kossman, N. (Ed.). (2001). Gods and mortals: Modern Poems on Classical Myths. Oxford University Press. 

Allen, A. (2021) The Sick List. UEA Publishing Project.

Cavarero, A. (2005) For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression. (P.A. Kottman, Trans.). Stanford University Press. 

Tsepeneag, D. (2014). Waiting: Stories. (P. Camiller, Trans.). Dalkey Archive Press.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. (2013). Corpus II. (A. O’Byrne, Trans.). Fordham University Press. 

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Christina Tudor-Sideri is a writer and translator living in Eastern Europe. She is the author of Under the Sign of the Labyrinth and the translator of Mihail Sebastian’s Fragments from a Found Notebook and Magda Isanos’s Homecoming, as well as forthcoming volumes by Max Blecher and Ilarie Voronca. Her debut novel, Disembodied, will be published by Sublunary Editions in 2022.