Dissipatio H.G.

by Guido Morselli

  Without seeking it, I’ve found proof that the Event is not an illusion, not just my own invention. A family of chamois goats is walking along the tracks. Two females, a male, and kids. They’ve come down from the mountains, something that’s never happened before in human memory. For that matter I’ve seen other good omens too: the birds are making an unholy racket, and their numbers have grown. Especially the nocturnal species that have come back in droves, which pleases me because I’ve always appreciated their musical talents.

  Owls of all kinds, wood, tawny, long-eared, little. Their instincts tell them something they certainly never expected: the great enemy has withdrawn. The air is clear of smoke and fumes, the earth no longer stinks or quakes with terrible noises. (Humans, you want to fight pollution? Simple: eliminate the polluting breed.) Perhaps this glimpse of spring, albeit cold and fogbound, has encouraged them too. At sunset yesterday, I listened to a duet between two little owls, quite a bit more musical than Lévy and Malinowski. One of the two (the female?) distinguished her voice by keeping her call a half-tone off that of her companion, and never varied the sequence except at long intervals, generally the same each time. The melopoeia, the melodies, are very simple but not, as most say, lugubrious. I joined in, not trying to imitate, repeating a low note barely in tune with theirs, an organ drone. I also tried some dissonant notes. It didn’t seem to displease them, they approached me. We have things in common: we share the woods and the night, I’m nearly as much a nictalope and a noctivagant, a nighthawk, as they are, and if I sing, I sing at night. Except that my vocal cords, unlike theirs, have undergone the nicotine treatment.

  There I was, commenting on, exorcizing, the end of the world. Or whatever this thing is that’s happening in front of my eyes.

  •

  The end of the world?

  One of the pranks played by anthropocentrism is to suggest that the end of our species will bring about the death of animal and vegetable nature, the end of the earth itself. The fall of the heavens. There is no eschatology that doesn’t assume man’s permanence is necessary to the permanence of everything else. It’s accepted that things might have begun before us; unthinkable that they could ever end after us. Old Montaigne, who thought of himself as agnostic, agreed with the dogmatics, the theologians, on this point. Ainsi fera la morte de toutes choses notre mort. Our death will bring about the death of all things.

  Come on, you clever, presumptuous fellows, you make too much of yourselves. The world has never been so alive as it is since a certain breed of bipeds disappeared. It’s never been so clean, so sparkling, so good-humored.

  8

  I CAN THINK of numerous others of my professional tribe, who, even supposing they were able to imagine my present situation, would say that it was unbelievable except as irony and farce. That it could only work as a medium for social satire.

  But that very vision of the thing, far from being a clever paradox, is merely idiotic.

  •

  I, instead, find myself asking if this is not a dream.

  It’s a question as ordinary and human as yawning, one that gets snagged, however, in the thick foliage of the forest of speculation. I go over Pascal’s objections to Descartes (in my memory, because I have no books; when I came up here, I chose not to bring even one). Descartes argued that he was unable to determine that experience is real and dreams are not; Pascal replied that our immediate and infallible sensations (notre coeur, he said) alone prove that experience is one thing, and dreams another thing, or no-thing. I touch my head, find the scar from the hardy blow against the rock in the cave of the siphon on the fateful night between June 1 and 2. Pascal is right, I think.

  Once I used to be even more empirical than he; in my mind, facts, objectivity were no more than a rassemblement des subjectivités, a consensus opinantium.20 If we agree that we must, at certain intervals, pay our taxes and light the wood stove, it means that the tax collector and the cold are not products of the imagination but things to take seriously. But now the question at hand is to determine whether the “opiners,” an entire species except for one, have disappeared, a point on which I cannot expect the response of the same opiners but must evaluate the situation for what it is. The situation is certainly peculiar, even inexplicable: does that mean it isn’t real? Only optimists ever fooled themselves thinking that the real was rational, and I have never been an optimist. Now, I’m beginning to convert to simpleminded realism. The real, when it has duration and consistency on its side (consistency meaning uniformity and solidity) can enjoy the luxury of being irrational and unexplainable. Even stark raving mad, if need be.

  I’m not battling inexplicability.

  I possess none of the wishful thinking of science, and none, to my credit, of science fiction either. I don’t fall back on genocide by death rays, or epidemics spread around Earth by tiny, evil Venusians, or clouds of nuclear fallout from distant H-bombs. I sensed right off that the Event cannot be gauged by the usual measures. Scire nefas: it is forbidden, it is not yours to know.21 Let me add: ridere licet (it’s permissible to laugh), given that I (I) am the Spectator.

  Yesterday for the first time I broke into the house of my “shepherds,” forcing the shutters on a window. I’d already opened the barn to let the animals out. The shepherds’ house was in order. Giovanni and Frederica, like the others, were taken in their sleep, and the bedcovers of the wide marital bed were still in place, tucked around people no longer there. There was a slight depression left when they were “extracted” from their places; they didn’t step down from the bed laterally as one does on arising. And after they were extracted, how and where did they go out? The door remains locked from the inside, the key in the lock.

  They volatilized and then were sucked out of bed and out of the house, maybe up the chimney? In that case, I think, the process may not be irreversible. Or not altogether irreversible.

  In April there was a symposium of the National Society of Meta- and Para-Psychic Sciences in Widmad. Little more than a month later, I’m moving in a dimension that would seem to be exquisitely metapsychic. Sadly, I won’t be able to pursue it. A certain Karotz spoke at the closing session of the conference, the only one that I, not an adept, attended. In essence, what he said was: the operators of our science have to work together; individuals can’t carry out the metapsychic praxis. It’s a social and collective exercise; the Spirit reveals itself when two or three come together in its name.

  Therefore, I will never master it. Pointless to hope for re-evocations, re-incorporations, replies from wobbling tables. One must be in company around the table. Ideally after an excellent lunch.

  Giovanni was small and plump. (Large bovine eyes, bright blue and watery.) I’d be curious to see what ectoplasm model he’s wearing now.

  The colleague who accused me of reductionism knew me well. I erred, I sinned and continue to commit the sin of simplification. What for anyone else would be an ocean of negativity, an utter horror, is something I’m able to float on in a paper boat. A boat made of a few, mediocre, at times ironic, general ideas.

  (Here my avarice of feeling assists me, blunting reaction. A measured, stubborn, native insensibility.)

  Let me try to put aside the mediocre general ideas.

  Giovanni and his wife vanish from their bed. Now, this notion that humanity has vaporized and is then diffused, dissolved in the atmosphere, is one that had already occurred to me and that I’d rejected. However, it agrees with the facts. It’s crazy, but what isn’t crazy here? The old paradigms, tried and true, are no longer useful; something else is needed.

  Volatilization—why? Well, it could be a reaction of Nature, or of some sort of extra-nature, to the materiality they were locked in. A subhuman materialism, according to the moralists. A dense, obtuse materialism, both in the West (practice) and the East (doctrine).

  According to the existentialist Berdyaev, extreme sociologism brings forth extreme individuali
sm. In an analogous, well-calculated reprisal, extreme materialism could bring forth immaterialism. Ontological.

  A world of pure body, believing only in the tangible, is disembodied. Contraria per contraria expiantur.22 But I have never set stock in atonement, in expiation; or punishment, or retribution, either in this temporal world or higher up.

  I prefer the game of dialectics. So that if those opposites can be called antagonists, then in something like equivalent terms, I have the materialism of the real and the realists on the one side opposing the spiritualism of the ideal and the idealists on the other. Thesis, antithesis, and as a synthesis, bodies that volatilize. The triad seems to work here; a neo-Hegelian would approve.

  •

  I do have to live, eat. I get my provisions from the refrigerators and the cellar of the Hôtel Mayr. All the hotels make themselves generously available (wide open as they are since June 2), but I prefer the Mayr; it has a good selection of wines, dessert wines like Moscato di Pantelleria, and fortified wines, like sherry and port. Stuff that suits me. I walk through the hall and in the vestibule there are (in no particular order) the suitcases belonging to a Swedish gentleman, or lady, who arrived at night, it appears; a car (his or hers) with an S plate, still standing outside in front of the steps, the trunk open, filling up with rain. I go down the service stairway and in the kitchen I fill up my bag, carefully closing it, the good housewife conserving her victuals as best she can. One of these times, on my way out after having “shopped” at the Mayr, I had a sudden hallucination.

  It was mostly auditory, and not at all pathological, a brief, enjoyable dream with my eyes open. Why it happened there, I have no idea. A reminder of some other setting (I was in the hotel hall), or object, or maybe odor? I don’t know, but if I had any doubts about the reality I’m living in, the sweet, imprecise, vague unreality of the vision I was treated to would worry them out of me. I saw myself again in the villa on the lake, where between one spring and fall I was cured of two mild illnesses at once: my youth (I checked in on my twenty-ninth birthday), and an obsessive neurosis.

  Wanhoff’s clinic, private, known as Villa Verde. So much green, so much darkness, so much desolation. If it hadn’t been for Karpinsky . . .

  I was hearing a voice, his: Karpinsky, the doctor who cured me, an intelligent man. Independent-minded, or anyway a nonconformist. Humane. Maybe that was why they didn’t like him. Recently hired by the clinic and already on his way to being let go (he left the place before I did), Karpinsky was badly treated by Wanhoff, badly paid, badly regarded, but these were facts I learned from others, not from him. He was content with his job, seemed satisfied, and in any case didn’t speak about himself.

  I saw his lean face with a brown beard (a nice, thick beard, which on him appeared fateful, stigmatic); his smallish and not very well-fed person next to me, who was tall and solid. He lay his two hands on my chest (something he wouldn’t have permitted himself when I knew him in the clinic), clinging to the lapels of my jacket. I listened to his soundless speech, I understood the meaning. He encouraged me as he once had: “You will get well, believe me.” A heterodox physician, with a degree from Vienna on the epistolary relationship between Freud and Jung, willing to dispense with psychoanalysis.23 No couch; he spoke to his patients, slowly and persuasively; no questioning, no necktie complex, no bric-a-brac. A week later, after having considered the matter, he offered his conclusions.

  “I won’t conceal from you that yours is no intellectual neurasthenia, nor is it a mere neurosis. It is a federation of neuroses. Some of them uncommon, such as the pyrophobia or the obsessive-compulsive drive that when you leave the house makes you check four times to be sure that the gas and electricity are turned off. Even so, if you want to get well, you will. It depends on you, on a decision that I ask you to make this very instant.” In my vision, or involuntary evocation, or apparition, I heard him repeat those words. But the voice was alive.

  I can’t say I’ve ever forgotten the cast of characters at Villa Verde; I remember them well, beginning with Wanhoff, the director who gave his name, informally, to the place, down to the “guests,” among them Mylius. But now I’m rediscovering one of them. Who’s been interiorized, actualized. Who comes alive as vivid experience, nothing to do with mere memory.

  Karpinsky, so different from the industrialists of the early detection diagnosis business. He was paternal (although younger than I). He would come to see me in the evening when I was already in bed, would pick up the phone and order me hot chocolate. “Drink it, and turn off the lights,” he’d say. “Turn off the lights and detach your ego, think of anything but yourself.” Not a man to soften his message, he’d sometimes say, “That establishment on the other side of the lake,” which was a sanatorium for tubercular patients, “is more cheerful than this place, and easier to get out of. But you will get out, if you assist me.”

  He was younger than I. Two years later, just by chance, I had word of his death. He had leapt into the middle of a fight between two nurses in the district mental asylum, and was stabbed with a knife. Internal hemorrhage, twenty-four hours, and he was gone.

  He didn’t drink and ate little; what he did like were Gauloises (his fingers were yellow with nicotine) and powerful motorbikes. Carlini, Wanhoff’s bursar, would lend him his, and Karpinsky would go off on long nighttime expeditions. Two hundred, three hundred kilometers.

  •

  The hallucination dissolves, and I come to in the hall of the Mayr stumbling over the suitcases of the Swedish guest, or at the bottom of the siphon, or the Lake of Solitude with my nostalgia for Dr. Karpinsky, who I realize, now that it’s so late, was my only friend, before and after the Wanhoff.

  Now that it’s so late. The pathos of some cheap song, but it’s what I feel. Meanwhile people and acts—or things that happened to me—that were far more intimate are filed away in my memory and stir no echo. Every day I pass by the villa where, a few summers ago, the redheaded Henriette and I took up with each other.

  It was a pointlessly beautiful evening and I was walking with her in the pine wood behind the house, and she told me that she found it strange that our relationship was “so neutral.” Platonic, that is. She (she went on) was burning with desire to be mine.

  That’s how she said it, that tired colloquial expression, so false in the physiological sense. Twenty minutes after I’d regularized our situation, she told me candidly, and on the spot, that the desire she’d been feeling was really a need to “discard” me. I laughed, but I shouldn’t have, for this time Henriette spoke her mind. On the whole, the wish to materially possess a thing or a person conceals an intention to free oneself of them and move on to something else. What we have possessed we can put behind us, put in the past, the already done. Nice work, Henriette.

  9

  IN THIRTY centuries men have unleashed some five thousand wars. They’re guilty (as Albert Camus had it) of persevering at history, even if they didn’t start it. I don’t condemn them.

  Their worst crime, or anyway the most recent, is the uglification of the world. Other associated offenses often attached: pollution, provocation (a euphemism, better known as violence), inflation (no euphemism, the monetary plague).

  I don’t condemn them. Perhaps it’s enough for me to see Chrysopolis reduced to Necropolis. It’s a fitting punishment, to my mind. Beyond the ideological satisfaction, I would paraphrase what some Bolshevik said of St. Petersburg in 1917: “Destroy this city and this city alone in order to destroy the past—and all the rest may remain.”

  I don’t condemn them, with the exception of Chrysopolis. I did not condemn them, I did not judge them. In my court, the only guilty parties are environmental conditions, and chromosomes. It is they who make history and persevere at it.

  Today, I would say more; as of the night of June 2, I’m full of admiration. After so many gaffes their departure was quite elegant.

  They left no trace. A fact that would
delight a spiritualist; in other words, life was not tied to organic material, to weight and corruption. Myself, I can’t help thinking their elegance risks blurring into comedy, into a hoax well perpetrated, finesse on the verge of gimmickry.

  •

  I could consign them to nothingness. Or worse, cast them before time into that extremely orderly chaos, entropy. But instead I’m optimistic. My long-ago theological frequentations encourage me to think they’ll come to a positive end. Maybe too much so. Their disappearance will end in glory. It was intended to be remunerative.

  That they suffered, lived with woes of every kind, of that I’m sure. Kosmos olos en tòo poneròo keitai: The whole world lies in wickedness.24 “Wickedness” not in the moral sense, you understand; moral wickedness begins and ends with moralism. Genuine wickedness is misery, suffering. It is an individual who suffers, deprived of what he needs in order to be. And in this strict and concrete sense, wickedness besieged them from every side, at every instant, in their every act and their every thought—given that fear, the expectation of suffering, is the perfect form of suffering. They were marinated in it, purified by it, utterly unable to know that, or will it. The times were ripe for recompense, the right of human beings to live in balance among their kind was finally to be recognized, realized. June 2 at 2 AM was the zero hour: humanity, angelicized en masse (as it were), rose up to the empyrean. It happened in silence. In silence and without any rhetoric, for once. Souls taking flight, coloring the night sky white.

  •

  But speculation about the causes of the Event is not what’s bothering me. The Event, this Exitus de Aegypto, presents more urgent problems.

  I am a Crusoe whose Robinsonade may seem rather effortless under the circumstances. However, I do face some minor difficulties. I must think about what to do when the light (electric) fails me. I’ve been stockpiling candles. I didn’t find any at the Grand Emporium, although I rummaged through the place. I had to take them from St. Vilcifredo, the Catholic church. Packs of them. The cow—she hasn’t strayed from the house of my (her) shepherds, and circles around it, making do with the grass that grows between the pines—won’t let me milk her, and I’m longing for fresh milk. Assuming she is a cow, and not a virginal heifer. Her udder is small and wrinkled. This summer solstice is rainy and cold, and I go out with my hatchet to get wood for the stove. Although I usually settle for picking up twigs and branches from the ground.