Tiger Writ

Tiger Writ Cälin-Andrei Mihäilescu Ruxandra Cesereanu is a prose writer and an essayist, a professor of comparative literature and political science at the University of Cluj, a cultural animatrix, a historian of violence and the Gulag, and, to propose this (pilgr)image to thefactotum, a formidable poetess who said things no one else had the guts or flair to say in Romanian literature. She is not chained to Romanian: she's free in it; she writes in English like a native and in Spanish like a lover. What's more, a few months before JFK was caught in the magic bullet's dance of death, she was bom in Transylvania (the slow land, not Dracula's); she dresses stylishly to the bone. This would do for the infomaniac bent on canned knowledge. Hey! Open the can and Ruxandra Cesereanu will jump out! She is the smile bearer to the unsuspecting , the devotee to the passerby, the quick one to the dead-on commoner. But Cesereanu is the witch whose pointy hat hides snakes, apples, and a fragrant breeze that's the parachute of the soul forgotten behind in the messy fall from paradise. She undulates on the page's seas. Her lines are feline, not straight. Let the kitty out at night, and she'll graze stars and come back a tiger. These lines' wavy shapes link A and B in passing through the cosmetic survival of the life they barely had. Her lines shoot at you, candid reader, to get—and get you— somewhere not here, for "here" is missed, shot through with bullets. "Safe" is for the weak. Yet, as no-thing and -body is safe—mom's womb, blown open to material threats, forgot how to protect—these lines are for the strong. En poétesse, Cesereanu is a tiger. And the jungle is rich: there bodies are left undevoured by souls; eyeless, toxic demons roam free beyond the palm trees of freedom; the other demons' infrared eyes pierce manneristically the entrails of whatever; virginity never was. Through the Maelstrom of this tidal cornucopia, the fascinating tiger's skin calls to be seen. A moment after your eye sees it, the other one glimpse at the lateness of warnings. The wavy tiger's spots threaten with urgency. You, candid reader, must face it— it, the defacing tiger skin! For you're now on shaky ground, on the mapquake's hash that Aristotle the pharmacist holds in a jar labeled "energeia." You ain't the leisure to be A or B. As soon as you see the tiger writ, you are it. I saw Cesereanu's writing while drifting around my archipelago (the sirens were safe; the Cyclops were meek; old Scylla was weeping; her twin had a leak; I was bored). The tiger's writ gave the Charles Baudelaire within me ajolt: eternity's dumpy breath sank somewhere. The sail got set to get me drunk. I got ready for the fight. (The heavens? Who cares? Who cares, cares, but Cesereanu doesn't, and neither does this felinized "I.") Marcel Proust's madeleine was the Eucharist to many a modem; Cesereanu dips it as a tinge of memory in a sea of remembrance. In Spanish, she writes that lilies brought her the first smell; in Romanian , "the stench of the [Venetian] lagoon was my first Proustian madeleine, which pushed me to dig in my memory for a sensation a few thousands years-old—whose being I couldn't fathom up until today" (Venice with Violet Veins: The Letters of a Courtisan [2002]; my translations throughout). While her lilies are heavy with scents ofCaribbean cloak and danger, Venice has stunk for millennia to buffer the turf between death and humanity. Death surrounds Cesereanu's madeleines like an aura that squeezes the monotonous out of a woman's pathway. A primal scene: no second thoughts; depth pure. It takes a diva to dive to Mariannic depths and "keep in our lungs the breath of madness." So does she, and finds on the seabed a knife which, "like death's free fish,"'points the way to no exit: "Death journeys like a ship of fluff up to...