#max blecher

MENAGERIE

Max Blecher

"for a moment. for a single moment the existence of the world halts and unravels itself in the past like a cinema film projected from end to beginning."

Umblet

Invejava as pessoas ao meu redor, hermeticamente fechadas em suas roupas e isoladas da tirania dos objetos. Viviam prisioneiras em seus sobretudos e casacos, nada do lado de fora era capaz de aterrorizá-las e vencê-las, nada penetrava em suas prisões maravilhosas. Entre mim e o mundo não havia separação. Tudo o que me rodeava me invadia da cabeça aos pés, como se minha pele tivesse sido metralhada. A atenção, aliás muito distraída, com que eu observava ao redor não era um simples ato de vontade. Todos os tentáculos do mundo se prolongavam, de maneira natural, dentro de mim; eu era atravessado pelos milhares de braços da hidra. Tinha de constatar ao exaspero que vivia no mundo que via. Nada a fazer quanto a isso.

Staring at a fixed point on the wall, I occasionally have the feeling I no longer know who or where I am. At such times, I experience the loss of my identity from a distance: I feel for a moment that I have become a complete stranger, this abstract personage and my real self vying for authenticity with equal strength.      In the following moment my identity returns. It is like a stereoscopic slice in which the two images, separated by mistake, suddenly give the illusion of three dimensionality once the projectionist brings them back together. My room seems fresher than ever. It reverts to its former consistency, its objects finding their proper places, as when a crushed lump of earth in a glass of water settles in layers of various well-defined and parti-colored elements. The elements of the room take back their own contours and the colors of the old memory I have of them.      The feeling of distance and solitude during the moments when my everyday person has dissolved into amorphousness differs from all other feelings. When it persists, it turns into a fear, a dread of never finding myself again. A vague silhouette of myself surrounded by a large luminous halo looms somewhere in the distance like an object lost in fog.      Then, the terrible question of who I actually am comes alive in me like a totally new body with unfamiliar skin and organs. The answer requires a lucidity more basic and profound than that of the brain. Everything in my body capable of stirring stirs, struggles, and revolts more intensely, more fundamentally than in everyday life. Everything begs for a solution.       Several times I find the room as I know it, as if I had opened and shut my eyes, but each time the room is clearer, as a landscape in field-glasses comes together when, adjusting the focus, one penetrates the veils of intermediary images.      Eventually I recognize myself and find the actual room again. It gives me a slightly intoxicated feeing. The room is extraordinarily dense in terms of matter, and I have returned implacably to the surface of things: the deeper the wave of obscurity, the higher its crest. Never, under no other circumstances, have I felt so clearly as in moments like these when every object must occupy the place it occupies and I must be the person I am.      My struggles with uncertainty no longer have a name; all that remains is the simple regret that I found nothing in their depths. I am surprised that a total lack of meaning should be so closely linked to my intimate being. Now that I have found myself again and am trying to express my reaction, that being seems completely impersonal: a mere exaggeration of my identity arising from its own substance, a medusa tentacle that has strayed too far and, groping exasperated through the waves, finally finds its way back to the gelatinous sucker. Thus during several moments of disquiet I have passed through all the certitudes and incertitudes of my existence only to return--painfully and definitively--to my solitude.      Each solitude is of a purer and more elevated nature than the one before. The feeling of people banished is clearer and more intimate, a limpid, mellow melancholy like a dream recalled in the depth of night. It alone still reminds me of the vaguely sad mystery and magic of my childhood "crises." In that sudden disappearance of identity I find anew my descents into the cursed spaces of those early days, and in the moments of lucidity that return immediately after I resurface I see the world in the curious atmosphere of futility and obsolescence that forms about me when my hallucinatory trances cast me down.