Thirty-two little pieces consumed. And he still hadn’t turned 33. He was stuck in front of the blank page. If you ask me, by this age, he should have written something coherent, at least made his debut at a neighborhood publishing house. But everything remained on hold, like an unfinished house. Each chapter had a number, but the story had no chronology, didn’t follow a narrative thread. He looked at the last piece left, like an addict at his daily dose. He was in withdrawal. With one last gesture of superhuman willpower, as sweat dripped down his forehead like rain on a window, he closed the metal box and placed it somewhere high on the shelf, as far away from temptation as possible. None of his tricks worked anymore, he had no inspiration left. He could no longer imagine his fantastic worlds. No sentence connected to the previous one. No chapter resembled another, as if the baroque image with geese and the meadow with poplars disintegrated into a puzzle, a shattered mirror, like a schizoid face. I tried to reconstruct the image in my mind a thousand times. To rewrite the story in various ways. But the geese mixed with the poplars, their trunks with the river, and the river with the earth, like puddles after rain. Nothing flowed anymore. Nothing. Everything made sense then, at the moment, while I was reading. I couldn't piece together anything from his writings afterward. That's when I gave up trying to understand and decided to be honest and write about what I felt. Because his stories remain an enigma to me.
To help you understand better, for Aristotle, writing wasn't an exercise, as he was often asked to do in math class: Solve the function x, where F(x) belongs to the set of Real Numbers. For Aristotle, writing was the only way to live. Through the power to imagine scenarios, worlds, colors, music, games, he created his own reality. You can always solve math problems, but they will always have the same result. In life, any word can change the final outcome, the course of history, can remake and unmake destinies like in a uchronia. Because the whole system was created and recreated based on his imagination. The past wasn’t the past, just as the story remains like in an art film, with an open ending. Aristotle had lost what he held most dear—his imagination. And he had also lost something just as important, his power of seduction, the force from which he fed his delirium. And to understand the tragedy, all you have to do is blindfold yourself and live a day as a blind person. To move over the surface of things by touch. To bump into the chair without understanding why it always appears in your path. To stub your little toe on the corner of the bed. If you're born blind, life in darkness is easier to tolerate. But when you’ve seen colors and now see nothing but an endless ocean of darkness, everything crumbles around you like a house of cards. And what is a story, he wondered, if not a sandcastle?
He was in depression. I realized that from his last posts, increasingly gloomy, more ambiguous, from the rhetoric of despair that had started to envelop me as well, as a faithful visitor. I must say, I didn’t know him personally. I stumbled upon his blog by chance. I had seen a comment on a culinary blog, at a good friend’s, and his name, Aristotle, amused me. For a long time, I assumed it was just a pseudonym. I clicked on his page and was stunned by the landscape with geese, with poplars, and that bright green grass. It gave me a sense of peace and calm, that background. As if I had been teleported to a lost world. I sat there like that, I don’t know how long, without reading anything. It was bright green and azure blue. It was quiet. It was the rustling of poplars at noon and the gentle murmur When the storm ended and the waters receded into their bed, I began to read. And the more I read, the more fascinated I became with the world he had created. I closed the laptop after the first page. I understood him perfectly. When you discover something good, you want to keep it. You become selfish. I didn’t share my little secret with anyone. Every page I read was like a piece of chocolate that I savored during a break. On the subway, on my way to the office. While I listened to my patients, I was thinking about his case. In the evening, after putting Flavius to bed, I’d rush to check my phone. I couldn’t wait for the notification of a new post. I had become like Pavlov's dog, feeling my phone vibrate in my pocket. Of course, they were false alarms. Because he never wrote when I needed him to. He didn’t have a schedule, but rather a chaotic and random life.
I had become angry with him. As if I had every right for him to post on the blog. Hey, I’m here too, it’s not just about you, can’t you see me? I was angry because his posts were becoming shorter and shorter. At first, I wasn’t satisfied with just a few pages, as I had to catch up with his writings from before year zero, before and after. But lately, I had to be content with ellipses. Then, with two dots. Yes, I wanted to know he existed, even in suspension. That’s when I started going through his list, reading the few comments from his followers, visiting their pages. That’s how I came across Carmen, Dulcika13, PapusicaTa, Edu, Alexandros, Horațiu, strange Anonymous users, and exhibitionist artists. Like an investigative detective, I wanted to fill the empty space between the dots he left. I know, from the outside, my obsession with a stranger might seem odd. With a person who, until recently, I didn’t even know existed, who had a name, not just a nickname. Anyway, I digressed a little to give you the context. I don’t want it to seem like this is about me. Though I can say I played a small part in it, like any character he would draw in, only for them to then orbit around him.
What I know from his mother, and much later Rachel would confirm this as well, is that he would pull down the blinds at the windows for days and nights. And that he had fallen into a rhythm.
—What rhythm? I asked, surprised.
—Well, a rhythm like this: tick-tick, tick-tick-tick, tick-tick, tick-tick-tick, like a carol, if you know, the Goat Song that was sung on New Year's when the carolers came. Tick-tick-tick the lit-tle goat tick, don’t eat co-zo-nac* anymore... But this rhythm was coming from his typewriter, Olympia.
—And what was he writing? I asked his mother, hoping to find the missing pieces of this image. She handed me a large stack of A4 sheets. They were probably bound with thread into 32 chapters. I was very excited to get my hands on something tangible. But as high as my expectations were, so was my disappointment. They were nothing but absurd letters, like mathematical formulas, like meaningless symbols, but they had a pattern, a certain cadence. When I got home, I noticed that not a single keystroke was random, no mistake, no hesitation. It had the beauty of an abstract painting by Wassily Kandinsky. Like the music of a DJ who takes a beat, starts from a sound, and then composes and recomposes it into multiple variations and themes.
If I had a musical ear, I probably could have made a song out of it. I imagine the sound of the keys hitting the paper. Sometimes louder, sometimes softer. The repetition and layering of the keys in some kind of strange symphony. I realized it from the marks left by the percussion of the letters on the back of the pages. They were symbols, like on musical staves, like the transcription of electronic music by a software. Percussions, broken lines, parentheses, squared curves, inscribed circles, and empty sets. It began slowly, with simple characters, with vowels alternating with consonants, then it grew more complex, into a whirlwind of cadences, into lines rising and falling like an arpeggio. It was a Toccata written for the deaf and blind, like Bach’s flakes in D minor. These big and small letters only made sense if you touched them. Only then could you pass through the highest states, only to descend into the hell of the footnotes. The refrain was clear, it was no accident, maybe just a stroke of genius madness.
—And what else could be heard beyond this sound? Any detail is vital for me, I asked his mother, who seemed visibly irritated by the senselessness of my questions and my morbid curiosity. She answered curtly that she didn’t know, but it seemed like some groans could be heard in his room, as if his strength had left him. What strength she was referring to, she didn’t know how to explain. Still, I think it has to do with the power to levitate, to imagine, with dreams, with the 33 little pieces of chocolate.
Later, I realized that what he was writing were not simple stories, but rather the chronicles of an event, sometimes mundane, other times out of the ordinary. I don't know if he wrote and lived, or lived and wrote. For, if to any reader it might seem incredible, other times banal or boring, to those who knew him personally, and this was confirmed by those who knew him, with minor discrepancies, his life was fantastic.
For example, once in the countryside, while walking at the edge of a sunflower field, he was seen in the company of some foxes with whom he was dancing. The foxes danced on two legs, standing like individuals surrendering to the threat of a weapon. The sunflower field had begun to ignite like a fire around them. There was something contradictory in the scene I knew from his writings and from Carmen’s stories, which was confirmed by witnesses. Perhaps the fire was just the effect of the heat rising from the ground, distorting the horizon. The flames, the red sunset combined with the yellow petals of the sunflowers. Why do I say contradictory? Because his mother, when I asked her about this event, which she validated and confirmed once more, told me it was a devilish dance. I can't exclude that possibility, even though she doesn't see well from a distance, judging by her diopters. Like those charismatic charlatans from some sectarian gatherings, who throw themselves to the ground and claim to be filled with the Holy Spirit. And people blindly follow them, selling their houses and properties for their prophet and following him to the death. And that’s not all, for in that dance, he was in the middle, spinning like a misaligned axis, while the foxes circled around him, sometimes jumping on two legs, sometimes on four, running and hopping in the opposite direction of his axis. Axis Mundi, Axis Mundi, io no sono solo, he shouted in Latin, I am the Axis of the World, I am the Center of the World, I know I am not alone, I translated in my own humble words. What he meant by that, who knows!
I stopped searching for clinical explanations in delirium. It simply has no logic. However, one evening, before putting Flavius to bed, as he didn’t want to fall asleep, I turned on the TV to the Nature channel. The narrator’s voice had the effect of calming him, almost instantly putting him to sleep. I stayed there beside him and kissed him on the forehead, amazed that I could bring such a wonderful being into the world. I reached for the remote to turn off the TV, but a scene with a tribe of Bushmen from Africa caught my eye. Suddenly, I visualized Ari’s dance with the foxes, astonished by the similarities. The Bushmen, dressed in fox skins, wore what was left of the fox heads on their own heads, covering their faces up to their foreheads. In the center was a shaman spinning like a ballerina on one foot, slightly bent at the waist. I don’t know how he managed to spin, as if he were petrified on a wheel, moving in what seemed like a spiral lifting him towards the sky, yet still connected to the earth. Around him, the Bushmen were striking the ground with their staffs, raising dust, reminiscent of a war scene: thud-thud, thud-thud-thud, thud-thud, thud-thud-thud. And this rhythm grew more and more intense. It was something, I don’t even know, and even now as I recount it, I get goosebumps. I never thought I could experience something like that, such a strange feeling, in my own home. I had always imagined that for a unique experience, similar to Ari’s stories, one would need a special place, a hierophany. I never related to the television as an altar, as a window to another World. Simply because I had always regarded the television as the most profane object in my house.
I might not have recounted this scene if my husband hadn't found me in front of the TV, alarmed that I wasn't coming to bed, while I was spinning around like a shaman. When I snapped out of the trance, I don’t know how long it had lasted, because on the TV screen there was a porn movie playing, and it was two in the morning. Yes, no trace of that documentary about the Bushmen. My husband looked at me with the eyes of a disappointed man, unable to understand what was going on. The only constant was the rhythm with which the two protagonists were going at it: thud-thud, thud-thud-thud, the sound of it hitting her voluptuous buttocks, thud-thud, thud-thud-thud, as if he was penetrating her with all the fury of nature, and she moaned in the same rhythm as the penetration, yes-yes, ah-ah-ah. I was sweating, I was aroused, I was, God knows by what formula, lost...
Anyway, maybe I imagine that everything has a hidden meaning. Maybe it’s a professional flaw, seeking to see signs where there are just random occurrences. Or maybe I’ve fallen into that magical thinking that kept pulling me back into Aristotle's Antechamber. Only now do I understand Carmen and her need for formulas. Because after such an experience, I could no longer function in day-to-day life. I forgot about the bread in my broken toaster, I didn’t set the table on time, Flavius was neglected, and I often raised my voice at him. I was late to the office, and my husband seemed like a stranger. I drew a line because I couldn’t remain suspended between two worlds. I returned to normal. But what normal? It doesn’t matter anymore! This is neither the time nor place for philosophical issues. How simple life would be if all of its problems had a mathematical answer. I decided to stop reading anything from Ari's stories. And I was fine. For a while. I had life under control. My career was getting better and better, everything was back to normal – the office, my husband, Flavius, weekends in the mountains, and the summer vacation at the seaside. Until the summer vacation... Because this time we were going to spend it in Florence.
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*"cozonac" is a traditional Romanian sweet bread.
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