Mazes and Spirals

Through these last couple of weeks, through all the wonderful guests and discussions and through the beautifully prose of The Physics of Sorrow, we’ve had the pleasure of unravelling a dark and complex piece. From the second week and onward it feels like each conversation ends with someone saying something along the lines of “we’re returning to so much” and “we’re getting deeper into this.”

As much as Gospodinov and his work are involved in the labyrinth as a historic and emotional metaphor, the spiral finds a place in understanding both the work and our discussion of it as readers. I will elaborate on this as the post winds on.

The Core of the Spiral

The first section of the Two Month Review, which included the Epigraphy, Prologue, and “The Bread of Sorrow,” set up the themes that Gospodinov revisits in the subsequent sections—this thought something I’ve already written in previous blog posts. These recurring elements include abandonment, the minotaur, the labyrinth, life in communist Bulgaria, the mythic, fathers, darkness, basements, and the like. Obviously, well-crafted books do this: build and return to themes. But Gospodinov treats his themes like he treats his family, and his imagination: he treats them like characters that are born, develop, and are perpetually at risk of losing everything and dying. These themes are more a part of the cast and less an abstraction that is built by the behavior of his human characters—not excluding Asterius with my use of “human.”

The second section, “Against an Abandonment: The Case of M,” presented us with public defender Gospodinov and his defense for the minotaur. This section developed our understanding of Gospodinov’s obsession with myth, particular the rich history and his own speculations on the myth of the Minotaur and its relationship to his own family and upbringing.

The third section, “The Yellow House,” returned us to stories of Gospodinov and his family in Bulgaria, and, again, routed us through the themes and characters established in the previous two sections. It is important to note that beyond this coiling of each section, Gospodinov adds more events, and friends, and family members but does so, frequently, through the established themes.

This fourth section, “Time Bomb (To be Opened After the End of the World),” has Gospodinov laying his plans bare and creates a confluence between the content of the book, the themes, characters, places, and discussions, with the form that Gospodinov has created, the short and somewhat related pieces within larger sections. We see, again, the themes at play with people and moments in his life. He returns us to his grandfather, introduces us to a school-aged, rebelliously insightful Gospodinov, shows us more facets to his stylistic abilities, and all around the intense discussion of time capsules. And as he works his way from time capsules on fridges, or time capsules launched into space, or buried into the ground, and as he spirals again around the elements that are important to The Physics of Sorrow it starts to become clear that, put simply, this book is a time capsule.

Along the Loops

This week’s section opens with “The Aging of an Empath” where Gospodinov discusses the eventual loss of his ability to embed, a side effect of aging, and, I’d add, an overexposure to humanity. Most importantly, he describes that his habit of hoarding objects is an attempt to counteract the loss of his Obsessive Empathetic-Somatic Syndrome, or “radical empathetic-somatic syndrome” as he (mis)remembers.

And this isn’t the first time that Gospodinov has described collecting objects, but this provides further insight into why he does. Collecting starts in “First Aid Kit for After the End of the World,” which lushly describes a young version of himself slowly preparing a kit, of sorts, to survive a nuclear attack, with goods and kind words included. And this pattern of collecting repeats.

He writes about how he hoards apocalypse-inspired headlines, mentions Mengele’s personal journals, the disks that the Voyager and Pioneer spacecrafts carried to give extraterrestrial life a glimpse into the glory of mankind via a recording of Jimmy Carter’s voice. He also writes about time capsules throughout the world, and a need to map the location of all of them, the need for a literary time capsule of all genres and trends, and the possible dangers of future humanoids stumbling upon our time capsules.

These acts of collecting are rooted in fear, from Gospodinov’s survival kit to NASA’s strange experiment, and are attempts to ameliorate said fears. Beautifully, this section—this entire work, rather, is engaging in this process. Through “First Aid Kit[. . .],” in the light of Gospodinov losing his embedding, we see him fracture his older self from his younger self, writing on his younger self as distinct person—almost writing as though there is a death that has separated these two individuals. And in response to this fear of further loss, Gospodinov has taken to collect and preserve moments. He collects newspaper headlines and discusses massive beehive death, and birds dropping from the sky. And even the popularity of time capsules mirrors fears of nuclear annihilation or apocalypse by another means. The time capsule ameliorates our fears as even if we are wiped from the face of the the earth, the collection of materials sustains our existence deep beneath the earth, or in space, or on the page.

That said, we can read all books as being time capsules of sorts—these obscure collections of thoughts and images that contain an interpretation of a past time for a future time—sure. But from the exchange between Chad, Brian, and Patrick, I’m convinced to separate The Physics of Sorrow from the over encompassing speculation of “books are time capsules” to the more accurate “The Physics of Sorrow by Georgi Gospodinov is a time capsule.” This idea was set up beautifully by a comment from Patrick, when he said, paraphrased, “the brokenness of the form is built for destruction.” Chad followed up by adding that missing a section—I’d argue referring to either the larger section of the books or the smaller units within each section—is ok (obviously read the whole thing, it’s good). The Physics of Sorrow is this greater vessel of smaller fragments, all related in some way yet distinct enough on their own, and—better yet—crafted with this comprehension of a bleak, possibly apocalyptic, future.

The Pioneer and Voyager disks contained fragments of mankind at a certain temporal locus, just as the Westinghouse Time Capsules, and the time capsule from the young Gospodinov’s school in Pleven. And The Physics of Sorrow is doing just what these time capsules are. Each fragment of each section standing on it’s own with its own commentary with its relationship to the characters and themes. The themes are sustained not by just one piece, but by many, just as the many characters come and go through the sections. Hypothetically, should the capsule crack, and most of the contents be destroyed (should you rip out a chunk of the book), the individual fragments elaborate on another so often, that missing one doesn’t destroy a reader’s ability to understand what Gospodinov accomplishes throughout the whole of The Physics of Sorrow. The minotaurs, the labyrinth, Bulgaria, Communism, abandonment, World War—all these elements repeat and deepen from fragment to fragment to create a sustained understanding of the book itself considering the threat of mass destruction.

Gospodinov’s Arc

This confluence of form and content that I’ve been speaking to is the most blunt with the paired sections of “Noah Complex” and “New Realism.” “Noah Complex” suggests that a encyclopedic time capsule of writing should be created including:

[. . .] monologue through Socratic dialogue to epos in hexameter, from fairytales through treatises to lists. From high antiquity to slaughterhouse instructions. Everything can be gathered up and transported in such a book.

This would contain writing from all times, and different styles and authors. And after all his tongue-in-cheek commentary on time capsules, each entry dripping with a quiet criticism of the futility, he writes in this section:

Only the book is eternal, only its covers shall rise above the waves, only the beasts inside, between its pages swarming with life, will survive. And when they see the new land, they will go forth and multiply [. . .] And what is written shall be made flesh and blood and shall be brought to life in all its perfection. And “the lion” shall become a lion, “the horse” will whinny like a horse, “the crow” will fly from the page with an ugly croak . . . And the Minotaur will come out into the light of day.

Adopting a sort of mystic prose, he places his faith in the book to be a suitable vessel for realities, relying on the readers imagination—a proxy for his own experienced embedding—to bring the worlds contained in this Noachian encyclopedia to life (as corny as it sounds), to change the animals, in quotes, into animals in flesh. I even feel a nod to his own work as he imagines the Minotaur out in the light.

Gospodinov gives us just that in this following section “New Realism,” where he drops us into a beautifully written realist narrative. Defined as “a faithful representation of reality” or “verisimilitude,” this section speaks to just that, as Gospodinov shifts styles yet again to make a point. I don’t even really know where to draw from to give the “best” example of his writing—the whole narrative speaks to that. It’s important to note that many of the authors from his Epigraphy were realists in their national literatures, and, relatedly the epigraphs from Flaubert and St. Augustine speak to the ability to embed and being able to suspend the fleeting moment as so that it may be experienced, at the very least, a second time.

This is the moment of union for this work, as a whole, between its form and content. Gospodinov, considering a singular death at one end and apocalypse at the other, collects a series of fragments to hopefully survive and be reopened. With his wit, he might even fear what the results may be, as we see in “Future Number 73,” where future humanoids find his Communist Youth Brigade inductee letter create a yearly bloodletting. I must say, I’m curious what a society of people who worship the ‘doctrine’ of “New Realism” would accomplish.

And Back Again Through the Spiral

This confluence of form and content, while emphasized in this section has been going on the entire time and I believe we can assume it will continue. Obviously, we can look at each section as these collections of ephemera, something to understand Bulgarian history following the death of the 2015 version of Georgi Gospodinov, but, specifically, there are sections throughout the book that mirror his time capsule form.

In the Prologue we saw that collection of entities, all seemingly alone if not interrelated by their isolation. In “The Bread of Sorrow” sections like “Trophy Words,” which documented the Hungarian words that his grandfather kept through national shifts and relocations, “Crumbling Language” and “G,” which both highlighted Gospodinov’s own adventures with language acquisition, and “A Short Catalogue of Abandonments,” which listed cases of abandonment from various myths around the world.

“Against an Abandonment: The Case of M” had the “Dossier” and “Myth and Game,” which were lengthy collections of (mis)representations of the Minotaur, while “Child-Unfriendly” and “Devoured Children in Greek Mythology (An Incomplete Catalogue)” both list injustices against children, in and out of myth.

“The Yellow House” featured a series of these catalogs, from “A Catalogue of Collections,” to “From a Catalogue of Important Erotic Scenes” to the various collections of accounts from the 1980s.

But this most recent section brings all these to the surface and discusses them head-on. And this is where I return to the spiral. A participant in the chat from last week’s podcast, one gabbiano117, wrote:

This really is the perfect book for reading and rereading again and again. The way it retreats and advances and circles and gets lost in itself again and again and again.

Gospodinov is writing something that coils upon itself, but also builds. He started the piece by explaining how his world works, and from that point provided examples that affirm his construction. And as we go onto the next section, I’m excited to see how else the spiral will progress, and how what form the Minotaur takes in another place and time.

The Craft of Gospodinov

Through “The Yellow House” we’re looking at—well—everything. Each of the short stories within provide flashes at the truth that Gospodinov is writing to unpack. And by the time I reached the end of this section, I felt fully immersed. When the chapter finished, I automatically ventured further as I felt fully prepared by Gospodinov to do so. I mean it when I say that this section left me blank, breathless. The book has done much to cement it’s sense of playfulness and wonder through its unconventional structure and mythic, pseudo-scientific content, and the rules of how this world works. But through this part we now see Gospodinov shine for his prose and its ability to draw a reader into its self-contained world.

The Personal Mythic

It is with this vigorous attention to prose that, throughout “The Yellow House,” Gospodinov returns to what he established in previous sections, such as the powerful orbit of the minotaur, and its relationship to abandonment and his life in Bulgaria. The opening piece is easily one of the strongest. At its most basic, it’s a short work of mystery, with a little bit of Gothic spice here and there with the otherworldly properties and suspense. The second paragraph reads like it could have been pulled from an early American horror serial:

One evening, passing by there, I heard a chilling howl. There was something excessive and inhuman in that howling or bellowing, something from the mazes of the night Ooooooooohhh . . . That endless Oooohh dug tunnels in the silence of the early November evening.

And there we are, drawn in to this strange space where nothing is truly certain, and it’s here that we find our protagonist, the young Gospodinov. This story continues as such, with him traversing the dark countryside outside of this deserted insane asylum, attempting to speculate what—or who— is howling—or possibly mooing—from its depths, and, later, trying to figure out what his father was doing there. This arc continues in “My Brother, the Minotaur,” where the nature of the mystery turns from halls of the asylum with their peeling paint to the halls of his own mind, as he attempts to deduce what—or who—was calling out to him from the center of that labyrinth. And his imagination runs wild. He first speculates that:

That inhuman howl really was inhuman, and it wasn’t Ooooh, but Moooo. And it came from a half-man, half-bull locked up in there. (I’d already seen one such boy in my grandfather’s hidden memory.) [. . .]

And from here he’s left, haunted about his fate and his relationship to the Minotaur (Asterius, is that you?), as he suspects that he and the minotaur are brothers through numerous imaginative acrobatics.

The Diagnosis

In this section we even return to embedding. This time, we have a diagnosis for this bizarre ability: pathological empathy or obsessive empathetic-somatic syndrome (which, as far as we can tell author Gospodinov has created for this piece specifically). This condition is marked, neurologically, by some kind of hyperactivity in the same regions of the brain that allow for empathy, but, for people like Georgi, it becomes too strong of a feeling and places the brain in a trance-like state while the victim fully constructs, or possibly invades, the memory or imagination of another.

There’s even a kind of somatic confirmation of this, which is seen following an MRI:

The picture hadn’t come out. Maybe it was due to the machine, it was old, after all. Actually, this was the first time something like this had happened to them, absolutely nothing could be seen, just a dark-black plate. This didn’t come as a surprise to me. I know nothing can be seen, because inside is darkness, an unilluminable, centuries-deep darkness. My skull is a cave. I didn’t tell them that, of course.

The Myth of the Gospodinovs

We’re also met with numerous short and sweet stories about our young narrator and his family where the mythic is drawn upon to contextualize the experiences of him and his family. In “Nippers,” the theme of abandonment is intersected once again by Greek myths, while in “Mother Bean” the children are told to avoid playing in the gardens or the mothers of vegetables will go after them. It’s here that a young Georgi beautifully remarks, “Everything had a mother, only we didn’t. We had grandmothers.”

A Brief and Wondrous History of Bulgaria

A bulk of “The Yellow House” has Gospodinov recounting life in Communist Bulgaria. We’re given lectures on Bulgaria through sections like “A Private History of the 1980s,” and “An Official History of the 1980s,” which highlight Georgi’s own role in the deaths of numerous Soviet Union leaders (and the relationship of that to his love life). Amongst these are series of catalogs, such as the “Catalog of Collections,” which details Gospodinov’s obsession with collected abandoned things, to the two-part “The Sexual Questions” and “From a Catalog Of Important Erotic Scenes,” which highlight the humor that pervades Gospodinov’s storytelling—no matter how grim the discussion.

All We Are is Dust in the Wind

The section I wanted to focus on the most was “The Metaphysics of Dust,” nestled in the first third of “The Yellow House.” It describes in full beautiful sensory detail—almost spiritually so—a return to a nostalgic place. The piece opens:

I’ve fallen asleep on the windowsill. I wake up from the sun shining through the dirty glass, a warm afternoon sun. Still in that no man’s land between sleep and afternoon, before I return to myself, I sense that soaring and lightness, the whole weightlessness of a child’s body. Waking up, I age within seconds. Crippling pain seizes my lower back, my leg is stiff. The light in early September, the first fallen leaves outside, the worry that someone may have passed by on the street and seen me.

We’re met with lush descriptions that bounce between the senses and accomplish a lot—with very little—to create a sense of immersion. While we’re beautifully drawn into this scene, Gospodinov starts to layer this prosodic depth with some of the ‘physics’ that’s he’s guided us to throughout the piece—in this case the relationship between light and time that he introduced in the previous section, “Against an Abandonment: The Case of M.” He’s already performing routines that we’re familiar with, such as the warping of perception, but as he’s worked so hard for us to understanding how his world works he’s now able to fully engage with more artistic prose. He continues:

I climb down from the window carefully, unfolding my body, instead of simply jumping down. The room, lit up by the autumn sun, has come alive. One ray passes right through the massive glass ashtray on the table, breaking the light down into its constituent colors. Even the long-dead, mummified fly next to it looks exquisite and sparkles like a forgotten earring [. . .] The Brownian motion of the dust specks in the ray of light . . . The first mundane proof of atomism and quantum physics, we are made of specks of dust. And perhaps the whole room, the afternoon and my very self, with my awkward three-dimensionality are being merely projected [. . .]

Just as we were first drawn to his perspective, which seems to be a timeless narrator pulled between his youth and age and he’s filled with both whimsy and stiff joints at the same time, we’re now being dispersed into the universe with the dust and drifts throughout the room and the light that pours in through the windows. And as we’re already familiar with, Gospodinov returns to his own whimsical, emotional physics with more feeling—more depth. The piece moves into a collection of moments, something we see in different forms throughout “The Yellow House,” and the manner in which these moments are built further obstructs our ability to sense time at this moment—as readers—as we almost see the narrator stretch himself across space and time within the confines of this room:

I recalled the darkness, the scent of Pine-Sol, the whirring of the machine. Everything in the movie theater was made from that darkness and a single beam of light. The headless horseman arrived along the beam, as did the great Rocky Mountains, the Grand Canyon; horses and Indians, whooping Sioux tribes, geometrical Roman legions, and ragged Gypsy caravans headed for the heavens kicked up dust along it, Lollobrigida and Loren came down that beam, along with Bardot, Alain Delon and his eternal rival Belmondo [. . .] I would turn my back on the screen and peer into the beam coming from the little window at the back of the theater. It swarmed with chaotically dancing particles. [. . .] I watched the specks of dust and tried to guess which would turn into lips, an eye, a horse’s hoof or Lollobrigida’s breasts, which flashed by for an instant in one scene . . .

Gospodinov pulls the readers across a span of ephemera, as he warned us through his epigraphy, and while the prose here is as beautiful as the rest of the section, he has also given us an outline of what we are to expect throughout the section, right down to the feelings, actors, and archetypes. And, mystically, he tells us that there’s more, more that he can’t tell us directly, through the use of ellipses. We can speculate here, as these could be the lapses in his own memory, or a daring moment where the narrator can’t tell us something that is pulled back to his memory of the movie theatre. While I’m focusing on these opening paragraphs, clumsily pulling the enter short here, I could easily draw from any moment of this short piece, and such a homogeneity of wonder throughout this section attests to Gospodinov’s clear vision that I first wrote two in the introductory post weeks ago.

I return to some of the sentiments that the gentlemen shared during the podcast last week. In “The Yellow House” Gospodinov shows us what he was capable of. During one of the previous discussions, one participant—I believe Brian—noted that there wasn’t necessarily something pulling them through the piece. They were reading it, they were enjoying it, but—to paraphrase—the magic of the piece wasn’t sustaining the reading experience.

And I would agree with that commentary. While the work was interesting, and challenging, it felt like Gospodinov might not have been leading us anywhere concrete. There were so many disparate sections, with loose narration, followed by the formal shifting in Part II, and these changes forced me, as a reader, into anywhere from discomfort—anxiety at worst—to a disinterest towards what would come next. But what arrived through Part III was a strong return to what we know. Instead of shifting expectations once more with formal manipulation, Gospodinov was able strengthen the themes of the previous sections with a stunning attention to prose. And, in retrospect, the structure of the previous sections was needed to draw a reader to enough of a familiarity with the work as to give Gospodinov free reign to give us his best.

Mythic Degrees of Libel

The construction of this section, as Chad pointed out during the podcast, is strange when considering a more conventional novel. The first section of the piece, “The Bread of Sorrow,” despite being composed of short, formally disconnected sections, was bound together by the narrator’s ability to embed himself in the memories of those around him. Whether he jumped from his great grandfather’s memories, to the memories of a slug being shoved in a wound for the restorative properties of its mucous, to his own experience living in a basement as an ant god, or some other entity of another importance, the reader is carefully guided through sensory leaps sustained by a common focal point via the narrator.

“Against an Abandonment: The Case of M.” (which interestingly enough follows “Dad, What’s a Minotaur?” the last subsection of Part I) challenges readers yet again by forcing them into a mythic courtroom, where Gospodinov, newly appointed public defender, makes a case against the public representation and subsequent treatment of Asterius (the name given to him by Pasiphae, his mother), Minotaur of Minos. What develops here still draws upon the previous. We return to the minotaur as a mythic core, we return to a young Gospodinov and his family, and we return to discussions of dark basements and abandonment through children. With these root subjects in mind, Gospodinov has changed the shape of the piece. Where we previously had short narratives we now have arguments, historical accounts, character testimonies, and the like. Gospodinov presents his case to the Honorable Mr. Minos who is pulled from the underworld to serve as the judge in this case.

The Minotaur is not guilty. He is a boy locked up in a basement. He is frightened. They have abandoned him. I, the minotaur.

From here, Gospodinov does his best to build his grandfather’s case by outlining the historical misrepresentation of Asterius and clearly outlining who is at fault.

They have Abandoned Asterius

Gospodinov draws on numerous historians, both real and constructed, to provide testimony to the misrepresentation of Asterius. Ovid’s descriptions paint him as a “double-natured shame” and a “disgrace from his abode.” He draws on Seneca, who did his best to smear the reputations of both Asterius and his mother. Additionally, Dante “The Inferno” Alighieri, placed Asterius as a guardian and torturer on the seventh circle of hell—the circle of violence—while, in the same stroke of his quill placed King Minos in the second circle—the circle of lust—which is just slightly closer to God’s love. Virgil, who approached Asterius with the same ‘neutral’ language as Apollodorus, is not free of guilt as Gospodinov highlights that this kind of neutrality is still soaked in revulsion, as Virgil described Asterius as the “result of unnatural relations.”

And beyond these literary misrepresentations of Asterius, visual arts were often inspired by the disgust of these authors and saw such revulsion to its inevitable end. Gospodinov notes the obsession in visual art with Asterius’ death, noting a series of frescoes that depict the moment when Theseus has Asterius by the horn, and ready to kill it. And we’ve been led to experience a deep satisfaction, thanks to depictions like these and ideologies spread by the aforementioned authors. This profound pleasure of killing one who we have marked as guilty and inhuman is continued into the 20th and 21st centuries with three-dimensional representations of Asterius in video games, Gospodinov argues.

While World of Warcraft, where the Minotaur-inspired “Tauren” race stood as a politically nearsighted parallel for Indigenous American people (often nomadic, driven from their home lands by brutal conquerors, ‘noble savages’), God of War provided a moment for the player to experience that Thesian satisfaction. As I, through god-killer Kratos, grabbed them by the horns and thrust my sword into their hearts, dragging the blade throat-ward, I giggled with glee as I was rewarded with healing magics and extra experience points for performing the most brutal possible takedown of Asterius’ kind.

Gospodinov, I turn to you, as guilty as many of these writers and artists and designers. And Asterius, I look into your large, dark eyes, and I am deeply sorry.

Asterius is a boy locked in a Basement. He is frightened.

But while he is hidden away in the labyrinth, and branded as a sin, Asterius is nothing more than the result of generations of guilt and sin before him. But, additionally, he is forced to bare the weight that his forefathers refused to. Pasiphae’s lust for Poseidon’s white bull was the direct result of King Minos’ obstruction of a direct order from the god of the sea. Additionally, he received the white bull after asking for a blessing as so that he could overpower his brothers for control of Crete. Furthermore, the Athenian youths that were sent as a sacrifice to Crete were the result of an age old conflict where the Athenians killed the son of another Cretan king—who then went on the decimate Athens. Asterius serves as nothing more of a vessel to be filled with the sins of the men before him, as this small list of transgressions could go on for eons in the imagination of the right historian.

Gospodinov also traces the history of the Trojan computer virus, from the Trojan war horse, to Daedalus, master inventor of the Aegean Sea. He points to the Daedalan Cow—the cow-shaped contraption that allowed Pasiphae to copulate with Poseidon’s white bull. But while Asterius is branded an unnatural beast, a veritable unnatural union is a fake cow, that in the words elder Augustine:

[. . .] Fly and ram, tulip and oak do not copulate.

The mistake made was not by Asterius, but by Daedalus, the architect of this unnatural creation, and King Minos, for defying Poseidon—we can keep peeling the layers of history back, finding transgression behind slaughter, behind greed, and so on. Yet, we are called to cheer as Asterius is dragged lifeless from his prison, time and time again, into the light of day.

Asterius is not Guilty

And from this deep dive into Asterius and his monstrous historicization, Gospodinov looks then to all the children of greek myth, and their absence. He points out that throughout myth, children are eaten, in what can be almost seen as a tradition. “Where there is Time, there is light,” he states, and with this reasoning the only safe place for children to hide is in the dark, as did Asterius, as did narrator Gospodinov, and his father, and his grandfather, and so on. In many ways, Gospodinov took the position of public defender for the shamed Asterius to bring to light the sins that children are forced to bear—and how they carry the weight of the generations before them.

Even our beloved narrator, at a point, was threatened to be devoured. He writes of a particularly titanic aunt:

I had an aunt who always threatened to eat me up every time she came to visit. Huge and hulking, a distant offshoot of the Titan’s line, she would stand in front of me, spread wide her enormous arms with their rapaciously painted nails, bare her teeth malevolently, two silver caps sparkling, and would slowly step toward me with a deep growl coming from her belly. I would curl up into a ball, screaming, while she shook with laughter. She didn’t have any children, she must have devoured them.

But this doesn’t exist as an isolated occurrence within his family alone. He also recalls the experience of a friend, describing a photograph:

It’s an ordinary baking pan, large, with indelible traces of endless use. The rice has been washed and lightly steamed, amid the white—little balls of black pepper. You can clearly see that the stove has been switched on, the oven door is open, and two hands are carrying the tray toward it. There’s just one unusual detail—that’s no chicken or turkey on top of the rice, but a baby, naked and alive. I almost said raw. It’s lying on its back, its arms and legs in the air. It is clearly only a few days old and weighs no more than a middling turkey.

And as clarified by our round table, the traces of these mythic situations still linger today, as adults still talk about how sweet their children are and threaten to eat their toes during playtime. All this darkness, and devouring of children, leads us back to Gospodinov’s core myth: Asterius in the labyrinth.

There, in that damned place, while the entirety of history brands him a monster, and artists make iteration after iteration of his death hoping to get as close as possible to their audiences experiencing it firsthand, he exists as nothing more than a child. Thrown into the timeless darkness and fed children—as only adults could think that makes sense (bulls are herbivores, Gospodinov reminds us. Only following his final moments is he allowed to be brought to the light. In a state of timelessness he is maintained, until he is made example of for the wrong reason to the wrong audience.

Before I end this post, I want you to take one more look at the painting I shared above: Asterius, with either Ariadne’s twine or his own bindings in hand, mouth slightly ajar, out in bright daylight looking over the ocean as the wind blows through the soft tufts of his fur—contemplating the infinity of a well-lit day.

Asterius is all abandoned children, vessels of the sins of their forefathers, forced into the dark, twisted, and consumed when needed.

The Epigraphy: How to read The Physics of Sorrow (or, Ugh! Borges again!?)

I am drawn to the moment in last week’s conversation when the three of them discussed the epigraphy of The Physics of the Sorrow. Tom storms the center of the exchange and states, roughly, “I have to be honest [. . .] after a while I just don’t care,” in regards to the listing of quotes, and exclaims, with his charming sarcastic self “‘oh a Borges quote, oooh!” And as an avid reader and writer, and frequent participant (read: wallflower) of literary discussions, I understand where Tom is coming from. Borges, despite his clear influence and well earned titanic presence in contemporary literature gets his name dropped a tad too often at cocktail parties, awkward first dates, and, especially, discussions of books that aren’t his. But despite Tom’s understandable outrage, Borges still fits perfectly within Gospodinov’s meaningful epigraphy.

But let’s follow the string back a few paces, so to speak, since Borges isn’t the the center of our discussion, and glean the full collection of epigraphs that open The Physics of Sorrow. I’ve broken up the epigraphs into three subsections. The first spans the first three epigraphs and creates a sense of how Gospodinov’s world in The Physics of Sorrow works—its physics, you could say. The second, which spans the fourth to the seventh epigraphs, catalogs the building blocks of the stories. The third and final section, dictated by the last two epigraphs, allows readers a moment to question what activity they are about to engage in and reminds them of their opportunity to find truth or resign themselves from it as they wander into this particular labyrinth.

The First Span: Pessoa, Gaustine, and Borges

Fernando Pessoa, author of the first quote on the list, is a renowned heavyweight of the Portuguese literary scene of the late 19th to early 20th centuries. This epigraph is drawn from a long poem called “Ulysses,” where Pessoa explicates the Homeric figure’s place in the founding and resulting traditions of Portugal (Lisbon, originally Lisboa, derived from the Portugese variant of Ulysses: Ulissippo). This glance into the expanded excerpt deepens the relationship between Pessoa, Gospodinov, and myth:

Myth is the nought that means all.
The very sun that opens up the sky
Is a bright and silent myth-
The dead embodiment of God
Alive and naked.

Pessoa’s opening stanza familiarizes the reader with the relationship of myth to human history, suggesting that if you peel away enough from any story, or any understanding of a given event, or any cultural practice, you’re left with something mythic at the core. This idea resonates strongly with The Physics of Sorrow, as Chad, Tom, and Brian peeled back the layers during their discussion and kept finding a Minotaur, a myth of sin and abandonment, and its labyrinth. These dark myths are the very essence that illuminates the world that we see, and are a priority to Gospodinov..

The next epigraph is from the noteworthy, seminal, perpetually poignant, well-known Gaustine. If you haven’t heard of him, then you’re clearly just not in the know, whether you’re talking about the mysterious seventeenth-century writer, or the good friend of narrator Gospodinov. From his Selected Biographies:

There is only childhood and death. And nothing in between…

This observation cements what readers can expect from The Physics of Sorrow by building upon Pessoa’s claim. If Pessoa’s epigraph created the first rule of how Gospodinov’s world functions, Gaustine generates the next rule: while myth is everything, there is only childhood and death and nothing in between. The world as we know it is mythic, and those myths are of children and the dead—these themes clearly developed in The Physics of Sorrow. And these themes complement the work at hand, mirroring priorities in Gospodinov’s writing.

But Gaustine isn’t real and is crafted by Gospodinov himself. This prestidigitation fits within the epigraphy as both Pessoa and Borges frequently blurred the line between fact and fiction through working under pseudonyms (or heteronyms, as specified by Pessoa) or generating quotations credited to authors of their own creation (which Borges utilized frequently).

There was a great moment during last week’s conversation when Chad admitted to making up some old Greek dudes to get a point across. Brian then admitted to generating some quick and sloppy Bible verses for his work. I’ve even crafted an imaginary phenomenologist, one Dr. Austra, who initially came to me in a dream as he led me to his tombstone to find his notebook which I raided for some ramblings in my long form fiction. This tradition of imagination and trickery lives on.

The last epigraph in this span is from Borges and fairly straightforward in regards to the themes of the epigraphy and the construction of Gospodinov’s world in The Physics of Sorrow. As with Pessoa’s epigraph, looking at the entirety of the excerpt aids in understanding its importance. This excerpt was the opening from the poem “1964.” The first full half of the poem is as follows:

The world has lost its magic. They have left you.
You no longer share the clear moon
nor the slow gardens. Now there is
no moon that isn’t a mirror to the past,

Solitary crystal, anguished sun.
Goodbye to the mutual hands and the temples
that brought love closer. Today all you have
is the faithful memory and the deserted days.

Nobody loses (you repeat vainly)
Except what they don’t have
and never had, but it is not enough to be valiant

For to learn the art of forgetting
a symbol, a rose, rips you apart
and a guitar can kill you.

We are met with clear cues from the expanded excerpt that strengthen its place in this span of the epigraphy. Through Borges, we understand the world at large: the world is no longer magical; we have been abandoned. These ideas are further built upon from select moments of the larger excerpt. From the opening line we’ve already highlighted, to the last syntactic unit of the second stanza,

[. . .] Today all you have
is the faithful memory and the deserted days [. . .]

to the entirety of the third stanza,

Nobody loses (you repeat vainly)
Except what they don’t have
and never had [. . .]

to the last whole stanza,

For to learn the art of forgetting
a symbol, a rose, rips you apart
and a guitar can kill you [. . .]

each of these statements deepen the importance of memory and loss through forgetfulness and abandonment that Gospodinov is constructing through the epigraphy and into the rest of the book. The next span explains that memory plays a critical role in Gospodinov’s exploration. The individual pieces of the greater work directly address loss frequently, especially in the form of abandonment.

We started the epigraphy with everything being mythic, to the point where we struggle to identify it directly. Then we understood that there is only childhood and death, further expanding what we can discuss by returning so-called adults to an state of innocence, loss of innocence, and perpetual wonder while they careen to their eventual demise. And finally, we come to learn that while myth may be the core of our behaviors and traditions, the world itself is not magical (at least not anymore), and we are abandoned, left aimlessly to our devices. Gospodinov slowly familiarizes us to the mechanisms of his work by drawing on these mythic, myth-obsessed authors—who, in the cases of Pessoa and Borges, frequently toyed with authorship, and, through their epigraphs, show us a cold a mythic world that Gospodinov has built his own writing within. In the case of Gaustine, the imagined literary phantom of Gospodinov, he shares his sentiments of how the world functions.

The Second Span: “memory and desire”

This span of epigraphs effectively introduces us to the basic units of The Physics of Sorrow and how Gospodinov will succeed at convincing us that this is how his world works.

The first comes from Saint Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions, Book X. St. Augustine was a North African Christian theologian from the fifth century, and his selection supports the ideas building throughout the epigraphy:

I will soar, then, beyond this power of my nature also, still rising by degrees toward him who made me. And I enter the fields and spacious halls of memory, where are stored as treasures the countless images that have been brought into them from all manner of things by the senses. There, in the memory, is likewise stored what we cogitate, either by enlarging or reducing our perceptions, or by altering one way or another those things which the senses have made contact with; and everything else that has been entrusted to it and stored up in it, which oblivion has not yet swallowed up and buried.

The removed portions are important, particularly St. Augustine’s explanation of how perceptions can be enlarged or reduced or otherwise altered to better explore these halls of memories. As we’ll later engage with both the prologue and “The Bread of Sorrow”, the crux of this work relies on the narrator’s ability to place himself in the memories of others while these others may not even be human. St. Augustine calls out for a similar ability to expand beyond the limitations his human senses and, religiously speaking, perceive the glory of God in the world around him. Furthermore, that last section,

[. . .] everything else that has been entrusted to it and stored up in it, which oblivion has not yet swallowed up and buried [. . .]

establishes an idea that we’ll return to shortly within another epigraph and further explains what the world of The Physics of Sorrow is made of. This adherence to memory and experience is key to Gospodinov.

While slightly out of order, I want to jump to the sixth epigraph due to it’s thematic relevance to Saint Augustine’s epigraph (bear with me). Gustave Flaubert, a French author and aesthete from his national realist literary movement, provides the next insight into The Physics of Sorrow by mirroring Gospodinov’s approach to memory by expanding St. Augustine’s ideas. The Temptation of Saint Anthony is a play that retells the spiritual temptations that its titular character encounters as he crosses the desert sands of Egypt. After surviving yet another harrowing encounter with a demon, or some other threatening creature, Anthony exclaims:

O bliss! bliss! I have seen the birth of life; I have seen the beginning of motion. The blood beats so strongly in my veins that it seems about to burst them. I feel a longing to fly, to swim, the bark, to bellow, to howl. I would like to have wings, a tortoise shell, a rind, to blow out smoke, to wear a trunk, to twist my body, to spread myself everywhere, to be in everything, to emanate with odors, to grow like plants, to flow like water…to penetrate every atom, to descend to the very depths of matter—to be matter.

In this moment of severe dehydration, St. Anthony fractures his perception beyond the limitations of his humanity. By invoking this, and building upon St. Augustine, Gospodinov hints to his readers that his narratives aren’t bound to a particular species, existence, or lack thereof, in his exploration of abandonment. Whatever entity he needs to embody to make the point, he will, just to get it right.

The next in this span is from our beloved, mysterious Gaustine, from his timeless The Forsaken Ones. This excerpt capitalizes on what we’re looking at throughout The Physics of Sorrow, and builds upon what fills both St. Augustine and St. Anthony with such wonder.

Only the fleeting and ephemeral are worth recording.

This particular epigraph builds on the previous ones from St. Augustine and Flaubert by elucidating that The Physics of Sorrow exists as a repository of memories, which are the “fleeting and ephemeral” to St. Augustine and that “which oblivion has not yet swallowed up and buried” to Flaubert. Gaustine explains how easily memory is lost. Gospodinov is driven to recover memories; the book is a collection of these fleeting moments captured through Gospodinov’s ability to embed himself in memories.

The last epigraph of this second span is by American modernist heavyweight T.S. Eliot. Taken from his (overly) anthologized The Waste Land, Gospodinov tastefully draws upon a short and broken moment from the piece to further build on the nature of these contents—actually maintaining the formal qualities from its original position onto the epigraph.

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

From this expanded excerpt we see that this mix of memory and desire follows the dissonance created between the changing seasons and our own shifting emotional states. Again we’re guided to understand that we will be experiencing Georgi’s desire for wholeness, or at least context, mitigated by explorations of his and others’ memories. The narrator’s exploration of the memories of those around him to better understand his own life is addressed through this.

Gospodinov has prepared us for the range of perspectives that we’ll come to encounter once we enter the prologue and “The Bread of Sorrow.” He isn’t concerned with building a straightforward narrative limited by human sensory perception, but simply tries to access, experience and collect these memories. Despite the cold world that the first three epigraphs in the section built, these last four epigraphs highlight just how brilliant and varied the world can be—even as these recollections test the nature of the believable. This will be important as we enter the third span of epigraphs and dive into the prologue.

The Third and Final Span: Reality and Fiction at Play

This last span is a commentary and final preparation for readers and how we can consider our engagement with the book. As the first span established the rules of this lonely world, and the second highlighted the building blocks of it through ephemera and ranges of experience, this last set of epigraphs asks us to question to nature of our experience as readers with the book. As I removed in an earlier draft of my previous blog post, my experience, so far, with The Physics of Sorrow, makes me almost feel like a book doesn’t do it justice. I initially described my experience of reading it as a dip in a lukewarm pool, something akin to a sensory deprivation tank where you’re floating, salted, quiet until you’re bombarded by the far reaches of your own mind in a blur of memory and imagination (said better by Eliot’s epigraph, possibly).

The first, again by the beloved Gaustine, picks at the general nature of the novel:

Purebred genres don’t interest me much. The novel is no Aryan.

Appropriately, this piece is far from a purebred genre. Literary types from around the world and across times have supported their racket by perpetually picking and prodding enough times to designate appropriate categories for books to fall within, something that can be clearly labeled in the corner of a bookstore or in the halls of a library. Lest we forget, obsessions with categorization ring a tad too closely to the politics of eugenics that terrorized the Western world from the mid 19th century to the present day, or call, generally, to an affinity for fascist governments to categorize and document their citizens. These are relationships that Gospodinov understands all too well.

Gaustine is concerned with these potentially dangerous associations and seeks to liberate the novel from them. The “novel” as we know it today is made up elements dug up and stapled together from corners of history and brought to life by an artistic imagination like Gaustine’s or Gospodinov’s, and, as such, asks his readers to suspend expectations of how a book, and its contents, function and how it can be categorized and to simply experience the contents of a book as an extension of their author’s imaginations—no matter how varied and fractured it may be.

And finally, turning to possibly the least imaginative writer of the 20th century, Gospodinov ends his epigraphy with a simple statement for the reader, and what I consider a beautiful transition into the prologue. This epigraph is drawn from from Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, a memoir posthumously published. As with the other epigraphs, looking at the excisions has consistently strengthened the meaning and effectiveness of these epigraphs and their relationship to The Physics of Sorrow. The excerpt in question is from the preface:

For reasons sufficient to the writer, many places, people, observations and impressions have been left out of this book. Some were secrets and some were known by everyone and everyone has written about them and will doubtless write more.

There is no mention of the Stade Anastasie where the boxers served as waiters at the tables set out under the trees and the ring was in the garden. Nor of training with Larry Gains, nor the great twenty-round fights at the Cirque d’Hiver. Nor of such good friends as Charlie Sweeney, Bill Bird and Mike Strater, nor of André Masson and Miro. There is no mention of our voyages to the Black Forest or of our one-day explorations of the forests that we loved around Paris. It would be fine if all these were in this book but we will have to do without them for now.

If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.

Despite the reflective, ‘autobiographical’ nature of A Moveable Feast, the weight generated by the labelling of ‘memoir,’ and the promises that such a literary form can make to its readers, Hemingway is already acknowledging that the truth has been altered within the pages, even in the form of events not being recollected. We are already working with the imagination and subjectivity of a human being, further bringing into to question the authority of this work to properly represent these moments. Hemingway recognizes the futility of pushing something forward as truth, and simply leaves it up to the readers. But he doesn’t fully surrender to the futility of pushing a collection of memories in front of distant, unkind readers. With the last sentence of the preface,

But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.

Hemingway places his faith in the value of fiction to strengthen the reality of the author. As the last of the epigraphs, Gospodinov poses the same option to the readers of The Physics of Truth —for them to take the work as they want to.

The Prologue: Who are these People; What are these Things?

As I turned the page from the epigraphy and gazed upon this short collections of selves, I flipped my legal pad over, pulled a page from the back, and started jotting down notes on who these people—no, that’s not accurate enough—who these entities were. This isn’t to say that I never delved into texts with genealogies or other convoluted relationships between generations of characters (Not Martin, think Faulkner), but this is to say that this is the first time I felt a need to keep track of who, or what, these entities were. I went from one paragraph to the next, taking down the important information, anxious by my potential lack of ability to find them as the text further unfolded.

The Boys of War

Some of these profiles point to people that we’ll come to identify, through the first section, as members of narrator Gospodinov’s family. These profiles follow a similar structure established by the first, and longest.

I was born at the end of August 1913 as a human being of the male sex. I don’t know the exact date. They waited a few days to see whether I would survive and then put me down in the registry. That’s what they did with everyone. Summer work was winding down, they still had to harvest this and that from the fields, the cow had calved, they were fussing over her. The Great War was about to start. I sweated through it right alongside all the other childhood illnesses, chicken pox, measles, and so on.

This description of a child born during wartime, into poverty and general uncertainty becomes a common circumstance as we progress into the prologue and eventually the work itself, and focus on myth and abandonment.

The next of these similar profiles gives us a window into Gospodinov’s presence in this work—it’s wonderful how he teases the reader and hides himself within the work like this.

I was born on January 1, 1968, as a human being of the male sex. I remember all of 1968 in detail from beginning to end. I don’t remember anything of the year we’re in now. I don’t even know its number.

Despite presumably being the stand-in for author Georgi Gospodinov, he establishes himself as only one of many voices that contribute to the discussion at hand and despite his sole place as a memory jumper in the work, as we’ll come to discuss, he prepares the reader for the multiplicity that pervades the work.

The next of these profiles strengthens the building themes of political instability via war and abandonment.

I was born on September 6, 1944, as a human being of the male sex. Wartime. A week later my father left for the front. My mother’s milk dried up. A childless auntie wanted to take me in and raise me, but they wouldn’t give me up. I cried whole nights from hunger. They gave me bread dipped in wine as a pacifier.

Another boy born during wartime, into hardship, into uncertainty, into shifting familial and political circumstances. We will come to learn through the first section that this is Gospodinov’s father, but simply mediated by his circumstances, and not represented by his eventual personhood. And these profiles, and this section as a whole, foreshadows a unique aspect of narrator Gospodinov’s embedding ability, where he experiences these moments from the lives of those close to him: time shatters in this process. As you’ll find in the “The Bread of Sorrow,” narrator Gospodinov and his unborn whole family through time watch in horror as their great grandfather is abandoned as a boy:

[. . .] Yet another long minute goes by. I imagine how in that min-
ute the faces of the unborn look on, holding their breath. There
they are, craning their necks through the fence of time, my father,
my aunt, my other aunt, there’s my brother, there’s me, there’s my
daughter, standing on tiptoes. Their, our appearance over the years
depends on that minute and on the young woman’s silence. I wonder
whether she suspects how many things are being decided now?

These profiles both are and aren’t timeless, and these people—these entities, are both rooted at certain points and times but also freed from them as narrator Gospodinov embeds himself in their memories. This is clear through author Gospodinov’s own profile where we clearly remembers the year that he was born, presumably through embedding himself in the memories of his parents, yet has a difficult remembering the current year, whenever that may be. This is key to reading The Physics of Sorrow and yet is elucidated in the first pages. Thank you, Georgi.

While these stand as the more tangible of the profiles, I am not trying to diminish their importance. In this navigation of the prologue, we are simply beginning to understand the range of voices that Gospodinov engages with in his exploration of sorrow.

And You Are?

The rest of these profiles beautifully stretch the imagination of the reader before they enter the body, proper, of the text. With that, we’re introduced to one of the more challenging profiles to decipher, but possibly one of the easiest to accept.

I was born two hours before dawn like a fruit fly. I’ll die this evening after sundown.

From my own reading of this work I haven’t yet encountered this entity in the texts. There comes a moment when a young narrator Gospodinov becomes a God to the ants in his parent’s basement apartment, or just basement—no fruit flies yet. But due to Gospodinov’s own meticulous approach to his writing, not limited to his construction of authors and works, I have my eyes peeled for this fruit fly entity, whether or not it actually is a fruit fly when we encounter it.

The fourth profile throws us for a loop, as we’re introduced to, possibly, the anthropomorphization of a concept, or a guiding elemental or scientific force.

I have always been born. I still remember the beginning of the Ice Age and the end of the Cold War. The sight of the dying dinosaurs (in both epochs) is one of the most unbearable things I have seen.

Is this God? Is this evolution? Is it revolution? We don’t know yet, but the possibilities promise a shifting, exploratory quality to the work at hand. And it gets even crazier in the next section. We aren’t dealing with an individual man, or an idea, but the unborn, and consciousness in the void that is aware of it’s entry point! What a privilege.

I remember being born as a rose bush, a partridge, as ginkgo biloba, a snail, a cloud in June (that memory is brief), a purple autumnal crocus near Halensee, an early-blooming cherry frozen by a late April snow, as snow freezing a hoodwinked cherry tree…

Here I am drawn violently back to St. Augustine and Flaubert and their joint yearning for a broader range of experiences. Was this a series of plants sitting next to each other, despite their differing seasons and geographies? Was I to imaging a plant that could change into another? Was there not really a plant at all? What mattered is that this plant felt, and could recollect. I am rendered to a body of questions by this point, but I know that as I read forward, I’m looking for plants and open to hear what they say.

Finally, my favorite of the profiles, the collective act of being from all of them joined in a grammatically challegening statement, and possibly the shortest sentence in the book.

We am.

I am drawn to the repetition of the prologue. In one reading of this section I considered a room, Alcoholics Anonymous modeled, where each of these entities went in a circle sharing who they were before delving into the emotional phantoms that haunted them—one permutation of what I imagined this book being. In my second, third, and fifth readings I imagined these voices all coming from one mouth of an amorphous being home to all these experiences—something akin to the horrific Judeo-Christian winged wheel-angels. But despite these two anticipations, I felt that from this starting position, Gospodinov was telling me to keep an eye out for the disparate, lost entities who, while disconnected by space and time, are connected by loss and abandonment as these forces are the guiding principles of his mythic world that he’s slowly making sense of.

Some Final Thoughts before we Lose Ourselves

At this point, I had no sense of how the novel would unfold—I had yet to read much into Gospodinov aside from some light Wikipedia scratches. I wasn’t sure if I was going to experience an evolution—were we going to start at the fruit fly, or the ever-shifting plants, and find ourselves in World War I? Were we the collective consciousness that then diffuses into all these, arguably, sentient beings. I was piqued, to say the least, and so I brought myself to attention and prepared myself.

I suggest that before you pick up this book and continue reading through it that you center yourself in loss. Think about a time when you were forgotten, whether you realized right away and burst into tears at that very moment, or if it snuck up on your decades later while you’re chopping vegetables for a dinner for two that you ended up eating by yourself by the end of the night. Despite the ever shifting tones, and moods, and places that Gospodinov guides you through, whether the stories make you laugh, or cry, or confuse you, focus on loss, focus on abandonment. Ultimately, from this point in the book, Gospodinov restructures the notion of abandonment and loss, not by stripping it of the pain that pervades the experience but by, in every sense of the word, broadening our imaginations to how we can understand it.