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This
autobiographical fiction offers an intimate and unsettling
account of Blecher's ideas of self-identity and the
body. He explores the 'crisis of unreality' in relation
to the human condition and shares his adolescent experiences
of physical infirmity, social isolation and sexual awakening.
Cover
Art and Colour Section
Anca Boeriu is one of Romania's leading artists and
is influenced by human bodies that are in a state of
tension. There is a clear relationship between Boeriu's
art and Blecher's condition which left him incapacitated
for the last 10 years of his life.
Max
Blecher
A poet and prose-writer, Blecher offers a harrowing
account of the 'bizarre adventure of being a man' drawing
upon his experience of being diagnosed with tuberculosis
of the spine in 1928. He was treated in various sanatoria
in France, Switzerland and Romania where he spent much
of his time corresponding with Geo Bogza, Mihail Sebastian,
André Breton, André Gide, Martin Heidegger
and Ilarie Voronca, and sporadically collaborated with
Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution
and Les Feuillets inutiles.
What
makes Max Blecher akin to Kafka, Bruno Schulz or Robert
Walser is above all the faculty of inhabiting misfortune...
Things emerge from their neutrality and besiege him,
seeking to fascinate or terrorise him.
Ovid
Crohmalniceanu
Prominent communist era and post-war critic
Extract
I was a tall, thin, pale boy, with a slender throat
poking from the overly large collar of my tunic. My
long hands dangled below my jacket like freshly flayed
animals. My pockets bulged with objects and bits of
paper. I used to have a hard time retrieving a handkerchief
from the bottom of these pockets to wipe the dust off
my boots, when I reached the streets of the 'centre'.
Around
me evolved the simple and elementary things of life.
A pig would be scratching itself against a fence and
I would stop for minutes at a time to watch it. Nothing
surpassed in its perfection the rasping of coarse bristles
against wood; I found in it something immensely satisfying,
a soothing assurance that the world continued to exist...
On
a street at the edge of town I found a workshop for
rustic woodcarving, where, again, I used to linger for
a long time.
In
the shop there were thousands of smooth white things
among the curly shavings that fell from the workbench
and filled the room with their rigid froth, redolent
of resin.
The
piece of wood beneath the tool would grow finer, paler,
and its capillaries would come into view limpidly and
well inscribed, like those beneath a woman's skin.
Alongside,
on a table there were wooden balls, calm and massy balls
that filled the whole surface area of my hand with a
smooth, ineffable weight.
Then
there were the wooden chess pieces, redolent of fresh
wood stain, and the entire wall covered with flowers
and angels.
Such
materials sometimes exuded sublime patches of eczema,
with lacework suppurations, painted or carved. In winter,
blisters of rime erupted, the solidified water acquiring
carven forms. In summer flowers gushed forth in thousands
of minuscule explosions, with red, blue and orange petalised
flames.
Throughout
the year the master carver, with his spectacles missing
one lens, would extract from the wood spirals of smoke
and Red Indian arrows, seashells and ferns, peacock
feathers and human ears.
In
vain did I watch that slow labour in order to
catch the moment when the ragged, moist piece of
wood exhaled itself in a petrified rose.
In
vain did I myself try to consummate such a miracle.
I held in my hand an untrimmed, ruffled, stony piece
of pinewood, but from beneath the plane, all of a sudden,
there emerged something as slippery as a fainting fit.
Perhaps, as I began to plane the plank, I was overcome
by a deep sleep and extraordinary powers then spread
their tentacles through the air, entering the wood and
producing the cataclysm.
Perhaps
the whole world came to a stop in those few seconds
and no one was aware of the time elapsed. In deep sleep
the craftsman had of course carved all the lilies on
the walls and all the violins with their volutes. When
I awoke, the plank revealed to me the lines of its age,
like a palm shows the lines of fate.
I
picked up one object after another and their variety
dizzied me. In vain did I grip a file, slowly run my
fingers over it, place it to my cheek, swivel it, let
it fall spinning to the floor... In vain... in vain...
nothing had any meaning.
Everywhere,
hard, inert matter surrounded me - here in the
form of wooden balls and carvings - in the street in
the form of trees, houses, and stones; immense and futile,
matter enveloped me from head to foot. In whichever
direction my thoughts turned, matter surrounded me,
from my clothes to the springs in the forest, passing
through walls, trees, stones, glass...
Into
every cranny the lava of matter had spilled from the
earth, petrifying in the empty air, in the form of houses
with windows; trees with branches that ever rose to
pierce the emptiness; flowers, soft and colourful, which
filled the small curved volumes of space; churches whose
cupolas soared ever higher, as far as the slender cross
at their pinnacle, where matter halted its trickling
into the heights, powerless to ascend further...
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