“The hunter, to aim better, closes his left eye for a while. The soldier, the better to kill, closes his left eye. The player, in games of skill, closes his left eye the better to send the ball or arrow into the center of the target . . . I have forever closed my left eye; I was probably given by chance to see the center of life better.”
— Victor Brauner
EYES AND ORACLES
Surrealist painter VICTOR BRAUNER, whose 1931 Self-Portrait (with an Enucleated Eye) remains one of my favorites in the genre, also had a knack for prophesy. In 1938, Brauner went to a pub with friends and found himself in the middle of a brawl between two artists. Punches were exchanged, chairs were kicked, a wine glass was smashed and one of the shards flew into Brauner’s left eye. Seven years after painting this self-portrait, Brauner’s left eye was destroyed — as if to match the painting.
THE 1944 GURA DIHAM PORTRAIT
Retrospect can turn an image into an omen or a prediction. Sorting through music and archives, sharing what sparkles or strikes me: the portrait of five friends in December 1944, in the Bucegi mountains. The world would never see them together this way, in this place, again. It is a last photo of sorts . . . or a glimpse of what would be lost.
The site of the photo, GURA DIHAM, is a starting pointing for many hikes in the Bucegi mountains, including the peaks of Caraiman, Babele, Omu, etc. All five friends are wearing hiking boots, so I’m guessing that this was a day-hike for them— and a surprisingly warm December day, by the loosening of scarves and the snow absent from trees. Only smudges of slush and ice remained. They weren’t going towards Cabana Malaiesti, which is also the way to Omu (“The Man”), since I think those trails close or become impassable in November? I can’t help wondering, as if knowing the trail they took could uncover traces of their conversation.
As for the friends in this photo, HARRY BRAUNER, on the far left, was Victor Brauner’s brother. More importantly, he was one of the most important archivists of Romanian folkways. His name crossed my path decades ago, when I was studying the doina form and revisiting the extraordinary vocalizations of Maria Tănase (see "Doina de Maramures,” for example). After immersing himself in local lores while serving as secretary of the Composers' Society's so-called Folklore Archives, Brauner ‘discovered’ Tănase in the 1930’s— and became the custodian of her legend as well as her official biographer. It strikes me how light and detached these facts sound from the relational haunting that undergirds them. . .
In the year of the Gura Diham photo, Brauner was appointed to serve as adviser of musical folklore to the Romanian Radio Broadcasting Company. By 1949, Brauner was heading the Folklore Department at the Music Academy in Bucharest. His career as a composer and musical archivist made him a popular name in Bucharest’s social and cultural circles.
One of the greatest Romanian novelists, MIHAI SEBASTIAN, stands in the far right of this portrait. His novel, For Two Thousand Years, was written in 1934, during the war, as Sebastian watched friends like Emil Cioran and Nae Ionescu turn towards political ethnonationalist extremism. There is much I could add here about Sebastian’s critique of ideologies that center religious and ethnic purity, and I am tempted to do so— if only to protect his words from those who would abuse them — a losing battle. A battle that feels more daunting and impossible every single day. In December 1944, when this photo was taken, the extraordinary critic and author who wrote as Mihai Sebastian was still alive. The truck that hit him and killed in Bucharest would come six months later, in May 1945. This photo consigns itself quickly to that searing sense of a “last look”, juxtaposing that relaxed grin on Sebastian’s face against the future stolen from one of Romania’s most incisive intellectuals. I mourn the loss of him more than I can say.
As for LENA CONSTANTE, I have written about her across essays. She is the addressee of several published poems (and many unpublished drafts). A treasured icon in my heretical pantheon of ghosts. A bird in the barred window. A reminder that purity only exists as a construction that possibilitizes the heretic and the traitor. Constante maintained a close friendship with Communist Party politician Lucreţiu Pătrăşcanu and his wife, Elena Pătrăşcanu. When the Romanian Communist Party leadership turned on its own, Pătrăşcanu was swept into the dust-bin and given the honor of a properly-Stalinist show trial.
In 1954, a decade after this photo was taken, Constante was arrested as part of the Pătrăşcanu Trial, and sentenced to twelve years in prison for “Titoism” and “treason.” Brauner was also implicated and given a twelve-year prison sentence, much of which he spent in solitary confinement at Aiud. Constante’s fate was similar, although in her case, she wrote about her carceral experience and repeated interrogations, beatings, and torture by the Securitate, all of which diminished her resistance. Ultimately, she confessed to being a Titoist and a traitor. Scholars aligned with ‘Western’ archives might take this confession as evidence, but the judges and scholars of ‘Western civilization’ also took the binding of a tongue as evidence of heresy in past juridical trial so it is best to smile, nod, and agree with them. If only to preserve one’s sanity.
In 1962, Brauner was released from Aiud prison and given a sentence of internal exile in a village near Slobozia. Constante was released in the same year, as part of Nicolae Ceausescu’s de-Stalinization campaign which rehabilitated some Party members that had been vanished by the show trials. Two years after their release, Brauner and Constante married. (Again, I am tempted to contextualize the hope and genuine decency in Ceausescu’s early policies, before the inspiring visit to North Korea transformed his vision of socialism into a nest of viperous ruling elites, chosen for skills at flattery and their willingness to sustain a dictatorship’s cult of personality… Again, I bite my tongue.) Suffice it to say that by 1968, both Brauner and Constante had been rehabilitated, which enabled them to seek employment in Romania and to receive a pension.
THE BELOVED LENA POSTCARD
I discovered this postcard — as well as The Gura Diham Portrait— in Bucharest last month, at the Salonul de Proiecte’s exhibit titled “Journeys, Photographs, Friends: Lee Miller, Lena Constante, Elena Patrascanu,” curated by Magda Radu and Alexandru Croitaru. Unfortunately, I went with the entire family so I didn’t have time to take notes so I am going solely by the few photos I managed to snap.
A postcard from Hari (Harry) Brauner to Lena Constante.
Beloved Lenuto,
We are little flowers to whom you have given life and we invite you take us or our sisters who are proud and beautiful and who miss you so much.
For Lena Constante from Brezou
“Brezo” or “Brezou” — lacking reference for whatever Hari Brauner’s nickname might have been. . . But Lenuto is a diminutive that also functions as a hail, a jumbling of words that takes “Hey Little Lena” and makes it into a sound.
The lyrics inscribed beneath the musical notation on the right reads: “Sleeping One! Don’t you hear the night?” But it can also be broken down a bit, since the hailed sleeper is gendered feminine with “Adormito!” and because Harry divides the word for the purposes of the song, so that it reads “A - dor - mi - to” which might also be interpreted as “to dor (longing) me too”.
Leaving flowers inside books to press them is something my mother did. When I went through her library after her death, half the books had flowers in them. There is tenderness towards time in those faded, page-like petals, and I cherish them dumbly. Just as I hope that my own kids will find the flowers I pressed into books on the pages I hope will rise to meet them.
Victor Brauner recorded around 5,000 Romanian folk songs. He died in 1988 in Bucharest. Lena Constante lived to the age of 96, and died in 2005, also in Bucharest.
THE POSSIBLE GRAINS OF THE TEXT
“I have been convicted to 12 years in prison,” wrote Elena Constante in the first part of her carceral memoir. “I have lived alone in my cell for 157,852,800 seconds of loneliness and fear. This is not something you say, but something you cry out! They condemn me to live another 220,838,400 seconds.” These are the facts. This a story in which the terms of the given world are changed beyond recognition.
Nothing about the carceral stories of show trials was special or unique. In fact, the banality is precisely what turned these events into performances of absurdist theatre. Constante alludes to this in her preface to The Silent Escape:
Lena Constante, an excerpt from her preface to The Silent Escape
The only story Constante will tell is personal, embodied, and interior. There is no god, no guru, no method, no maker that can overcome reality. There is no deep meaning to unimaginable terror and suffering. There is simply the struggle to remain human.
When I first read this book in my early 20’s, I was adjusting to life in my post-accident body. All my childhood dreams centered on traveling, leaving, moving, exploring, wandering— and then the car hit me at 15. Surgery upon surgery, medical interventions too tawdry and numerous for description. The girl of Before could never have imagined being trapped in the body of the girl of After. Constante’s words met me in a place that did not exist among my peers: a place where liberty could still exist within the experience of excruciating, mind-altering pain and surgeries. The possibility of freedom within unfreedom. A Silent Escape was my Otherwise, or Otherway, a quietude that permitted the complexity of mortification with no god, no redemptive suffering, and no transcendent lesson.
The conditions of living cannot always be changed. Only a citizen of empire would dare articulate or promote such magical thinking under the auspices of prosperity gospel and self-help. It wasn’t material accumulation or self-affirmation than allowed Constante to “escape” but, rather, something closer to Kkenosis, or self-emptying, the source of resistance during incarceration —- a profound negation.
The body could be humiliated, destroyed, dehumanized, mortified by recognition — but the mind could imagine an elsewhere. The mind could live in the key of as if.
“My body could be nowhere else,” wrote Constante, but “I could be anywhere.”
Resisting absolute power is a continuous practice that asks us to step back from the “self” we prop up in the name of self-esteem and the social-Darwinist hierarchies of our neoliberalism. Constante lived, and wrote, her life “against absolute power.” As Derrida knew/knows, by trace or by sound wave or quantum entanglement, Lena Constante is, and could still be, anywhere.
The archives not only delineate a social terrain in which legacies of the past are intensely fought over in the present, shaping it, but also create a social space in which the present has the power to retrospectively determine the past.
– Florin Poenaru, Contesting Illusions: History and Intellectual Class Struggles in Post-Communist Romania
*
ACNSAS, Fond Penal, Dosar P 218, vol. 64, f. 258. For Gura Diham photo.
Alexandra Croitoru, The Cabbage Process (2012).
Cristina Plamadeala, “The Securitate File as a Record of Psuchegraphy,” Biography, Vol. 42, No. 3 (2019).
Florin Poenaru. Contesting Illusions: History and Intellectual Class Struggles in post-communist Romania. Ph.D. Dissertation. Budapest: Central European University (2013).
Irina Dumitrescu, “Poems in Prison: The Survival Strategies of Romanian Political Prisoners”, published in Rumba under Fire: The Arts of Survival from West Point to Delhi (Punctum Books, 2016).
Lena Constante, The Silent Escape: Three Thousand Days in Romanian Prisons (University of California Press, 1995.)
Leona Toker, “Toward a Poetics of Documentary Prose from the Perspective of Gulag Testimony”, Poetics Today, (Summer 1998).
Maria Tanase, “Doina din Maramures”, Ciuleandra (Oriente Musik, 2011).
Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Harvard University Press, 1997).
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Beacon Press, 1995).
Mihai Sebastian, For Two Thousand Years, translated by Philip Ó Ceallaigh (Pengiun, 2017).
Salonul de Proiecte, “Journeys, Photographs, Friends: Lee Miller, Lena Constante, Elena Patrascanu,” curated by Magda Radu and Alexandra Croitoru, with historical contextualization by Diana Mărgărit and Adrian Cioflâncă (May 2025).
Victor Brauner, Self-Portrait (1931).