Dissipatio H.G.

by Guido Morselli

  This is what he wanted to obtain (for me, that is, for my own good, something so secret that I hadn’t the slightest suspicion of it), it’s what he wanted, and he obtained it. I’ve said my last farewell to Widmad. I’ll never see the Malga Ross again.

  •

  If I were dead, there’s just one place I’d like to be buried: at the Malga Ross. Fattening the pinched and scrawny heather and juniper that so kindly received me as a boy, and afterwards. Once it happened, I don’t remember how, that I spoke to Giovanni about that wish. For some reason the memory now comes back to me, bringing his distant smile.

  Giovanni made up his mind I was “a bit strange.” He shook his head.

  “Getting yourself buried in the mountains, in the middle of all those rocks. No, you can’t do that, you’re not a dog. The regulations forbid it.”

  “It’s obvious you served in the gendarmerie, Giovanni. Alive or dead, regulations come first.”

  Frederica, from the window of my house: “Don’t pay any attention to him. It can be done, if that’s what you really want. It can be done soon enough.”

  “Well, I can’t guarantee you it will be so very soon.”

  “A hundred years from now, Giovanni and I won’t be here to help you. So if it matters to you, try to get there before we do. How much do you weigh, sir?”

  “Over eighty kilos.”

  “When the time comes, we’ll put two forty-kilo bags of sand in the casket. And send it down to town in peace. You, instead, we’ll carry up on a mule, and we’ll dig a big hole at the place you’ve marked out for us, and no one will be the wiser.”

  She wasn’t shy, Frederica. I don’t think I ever earned a great deal of her affection, but she was always honest with me. Thinking back on it, I’m nostalgic for her, for those days, for my easy life with them, comfortable, safe. Sweet. Giovanni must have been feeling a certain sympathy for me that day.

  “But why do you think about dying? You’re still young. Doesn’t this sun of ours make you feel happy today?”

  It was a bright blue day, I remember it, even though the world of us three was completely encircled by the greenish-black fir trees, just barely lit up by the sun glinting off the Karessa glacier, that northern slope they called the Himalayan face at Widmad. But Giovanni gave me too much credit. I wasn’t thinking about dying. I exempted myself even then.

  20

  AND NOW, if it should happen (if it should be granted to me) where do I want my bones to lie? In the parterre planted with English rye grass in front of the Hôtel Esplanade?

  There’s a more immediate residential question I’ve had to face, however. I’d happily have made my home at Teklon, the airport. But Teklon was too emotional a choice, too much inspired by feelings and instinct, while I must be obedient, I must submit. I considered the offices of my former newspaper, and the little villa belonging to Meggy Weiss Lo Surdo. As it happens, the capital reserves of the capital are all mine now. All 25,000 of its dwellings are at my disposal.

  I decided, with a certain reluctant consistency, on the restaurant at the Bourse. I sleep or doze, or muse (I muse) on a sofa near a window that faces onto the place de l’opulence. The locus of that eternity that was always my destiny. The market of markets elevates, not unlawfully (it seems), into the supernatural. Speculating in stock quotes brings forth metaphysical, maybe even theological speculation. Everything is fatal, mysterious, and acceptable because absurd.

  Here in this place, honed and purified, my personal cupio dissolvi, too often postponed, was supposed to play out.

  In practice: I suffer from the cold at night. I have nothing but tablecloths for blankets. I lack elementary comforts. I look for, and it makes sense, some marginal compensation at least for these minor punishments. The menu of the day, of the Last Day, Saturday June 1, offered, for le dîner: roti de porc frais Vendôme, fondue Bourguignonne, homard sauce niçoise. None of them light dishes. Many of the merchants, I think unkindly, transitioned to the metaphysical following or while suffering from digestive problems.

  I rummaged around in the management offices, finding not the razor and the blankets I needed, but several millions in currency. It was in the briefcase of a bourse trader, and the restaurant manager had put a note on it: “Left here by Mr. . . . Return to him in person only.” Inside the case there was cash in large bills, and stock certificates. And a sheet of paper with writing on it. “People are selling, selling, selling, they submit only orders to sell. There’s talk of an imminent crash, as if this were October 1929. The enclosed sums belong to Mr. and Mrs. . . . They wanted to sell immediately. But it’s Saturday. To hell with hysterical women!”

  The man’s prayer (concerning the women), was it realized? In any event, values did crash, and irreversibly. Ils avaient du flair, no doubt about it: they had a knack, those clients. As for the cash and the shares, they belong to me by all rights, for I am the sole heir. With the benefit of inventory. The wastepaper I’ll toss on the street to rot.

  Permit me just a nudge of protest. I’ll permit myself; I’ve done my spiritual exercises and continue to do them. Yesterday, stepping off the sidewalk, I tripped on a cocker spaniel pup that had died of hunger or of grief. A tiny little beast. I picked it up carefully, it smelled bad; I opened the night safe outside the Crédit International on the Börsenplatz, and shoved it in.

  Then I reprimanded myself. You’re supposed to make peace here, don’t you get it? You didn’t condemn the Thieves and the Prostitutes. Don’t condemn the Merchants.

  •

  I walk around the city.

  Recognizing, with some nostalgia (me, the reactionary) where the extra-party partiprises, the protestarians of extreme protest, went to ground in the mezzanines and at the backs of courtyards. The ghetto quarter on the quays where mistrustful workers from the south were confined. The anarchists, ironically, at home in the parade grounds.

  The most radical of these rebellious factions occupied a basement next to the station, and took a vow of childlessness. A garland still hanging, now trailing on the sidewalk, boldly urges: “If you are a man, get sterilized.” The symbols and the manifestos were usually both subversive and modest, they threatened to bring about mostly innocent revolutions.

  My Karpinsky might have taken part in them, he might very well have done so. His very being was a virtual, hushed accusation.

  But now? I have no hope he’ll step out onto one of the balconies on this alley I’m investigating behind the Hôtel Baur. A faded banner, prophetic, hangs over the street. “Capitalists, it’s all over!”

  •

  I have no hope. Nonetheless I’ve come to Chrysopolis to see him (my first conscious meeting with him) and I sense that I will. See him, real and present. Upright in his white coat, bloodstains on the chest where they knifed him. Arms open. But head lowered as when, leaning against the window in my room, he would listen to me, his trousers rumpled beneath his doctor’s coat.

  He won’t speak. It will be pointless to ask him, as I once did in the clinic, “Are you still keeping me here? Haven’t I recovered?” He won’t come to respond to my uncertainties, or to announce anything. He’ll be the modest, simple person of back then. He’ll simply come to look for me, and he’s already on his way. This is a certainty, not an expectation on my part, and it frees me from all impatience.

  So I sit here on a bench along the boulevard, looking at the life that’s unfolding before my eyes in this strange eternity. The air shines with a dense humidity. Rainwater runs off in rivulets (the sewers in the old city must be blocked) that flow together onto the street and deposit, day by day, a thin layer of soil on the asphalt. It’s not much more than a veil of earth, and yet something green is growing on it, not the usual city grass, but wild plants. The market of markets will one day be countryside. With buttercups and chicory in flower.

  In my pocket I’m keeping a pack of Gauloises, for him.

  TRANSLATOR’S
NOTES

  Guido Morselli read extensively throughout his life, especially philosophy, aesthetics, and literature, and he was also well informed about psychology, political theory, and various scientific matters. He annotated his books extensively and kept a record of his reading in diaries over nearly forty years, during which there were a few authors he returned to multiple times—Montaigne, Pascal—and others it’s hard to imagine he read more than once (Alvin Toffler). At times he will cite or paraphrase a work or an author in such a personal way that it becomes difficult to identify the passage he has in mind. Sometimes he invented and attributed his invention to a likely source; it was one of the games he played with his notional readers. Below, where the attributions correspond to the sources, quotations come from translations of the original.

  INTRODUCTION

  1evaporation, or nebulization: Scholars have generally accepted that Morselli was referring to an actual text. But so far as I’ve been able to determine, it’s an invented reference.

  2annoyingly over-cultivated mind: Morselli’s Diario (Adelphi, e-book, 2014) records his wide reading and thinking for the years 1938–73, and his comments on everything from Marx, Hegel, and Freud to Herbert Marcuse, Charles Reich, and Alvin Toffler. He often wrote extensive précis and notes in the margins of the books he read.

  3high prelates: Linda Terziroli, Un Pacchetto di Gauloises: Biografia di Guido Morselli (Rome: Castelvecchi, 2019), 218

  4he was a convinced believer: See, among others, Valentina Fortichiari, Invito alla lettura di Morselli, Mursia, 1984, and her Introduction and Chronology to Guido Morselli, Romanzi Volume I, eds. Elena Borsa and Sara D’Arienzo (Milan: Adelphi, 2002)

  5beginning with Hegel: Diario, December 7, 1966, commenting on a photograph of the earth (taken from Lunar Orbiter in August 1966.) The photograph, from Corriere della Sera, was preserved inside Morselli’s Italian edition of The Exploration of Space by Arthur C. Clarke.

  6fight between two nurses in the violent mental asylum: The novel touches, sometimes in an offhand way, on events that were to mark the early 1970s for Italians, and not only Italians. These were years of airplane hijackings by Palestinians and Black Panthers, of radical groups both left and right involved in European and Italian terrorism, of the publication in 1972 of the Club of Rome’s influential The Limits to Growth, and in the early 1970s the first experiments with Franco Basaglia’s eventual 1978 reform abolishing insane asylums in Italy. (Tellingly, Karpinsky is killed in an asylum fight between nurses.)

  7distinct desire for androgyny: Among his papers at his death were extensive notes toward a novel, Uonna (uomo + donna, man and woman in one) in which he intended to develop his idea of an androgynous future person.

  DISSIPATIO H.G.

  8Chrysopolis: The oddly named capital of Morselli’s tale is a wealthy city devoted to finance. The city is never identified beyond doubt, nor is the country it’s located in. The historical Chrysopolis (modern Üsküdar, in Turkey), was an ancient settlement on the Bosphorus whose name meant Golden City, possibly because it had once been a gold deposit where the Persians stored their tribute. It was founded in the seventh century BC by Greek colonists from Megara in western Attica, just a few decades before the founding of Byzantium on the opposite shore of the Bosphorus. The decisive battle between the Western Roman emperor Constantine and Licinius, the Eastern emperor, took place in AD 324 at Chrysopolis. After Byzantium was chosen as Constantine’s capital, Chrysopolis would become a suburb of Constantinople.

  9antitype: In the Bible, a New Testament event or figure foreshadowed by an Old Testament equivalent. Jonah, who emerges alive from the stomach of the whale after three days, is the type on which the antitype of the resurrected Christ depends.

  10caput mundi: capital of the world

  11everything’s already been said . . . : In French in the Italian text: toutes choses sont déjà dites, mais comme personne n’écoute il faut toujours recommencer.

  12In the Marcusian sense: In 1967 Morselli read Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization and One-Dimensional Man.

  13nictalope: in Italian, having better than average night vision, while in English the nyctalope suffers from night blindness.

  14At a quarter past midnight: Note that there is a time shift backward between the moment he arrives at the well and the moment, seated on the ledge, that he contemplates letting himself fall into the water below. This is unlikely to be an error; it may instead be the author’s way of sending time’s arrow in reverse to facilitate the inexplicable.

  15qualunquista: Italian term used during the Fascist era to mean politically apathetic, someone who “doesn’t give a damn” about ideological consistency. démobilisateur: French, demotivator, discourager.

  16Alceste le Misanthrope: The dislikable title character of Moliere’s comedy The Misanthrope.

  17in Hudson Bay: Referring to Greenland, Morselli writes of Hudson Bay, but the relevant body of water is Baffin Bay.

  18Bronisław Malinowski: The Polish-born anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski’s 1929 ethnography of the Trobriand islanders studied reciprocity and exchange. His masterwork was Argonauts of the Western Pacific, 1922.

  19Lévy-Bruhl: Morselli read Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s Theory of Primitive Mentality in 1963.

  20consensus opinantium: a consensus of those with opinions, a play on consensus sapientium, “consensus of the wise”

  21Scire nefas: From Horace’s Ode 1.11 “Tu ne quaesieris”: Tu ne quaesieris, scire nefas, quem mihi, quem tibi / finem di dederint, Leuconoe, nec Babylonios (“Ask not (’tis forbidden knowledge), what our destined term of years, / Mine and yours; nor scan the tables of your Babylonish seers”). English translation, John Conington, The Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace (Bell and Daldy, 1872).

  22Contraria per contraria expiantur: roughly, “opposites atone for opposites.”

  23psychoanalysis: Morselli uses the abbreviation P.A. here and on page 52. He was apparently fascinated by psychoanalysis but it remains unclear whether he ever tried it; see Morselli, Diario, Adelphi, 2014, n. 251.

  24Kosmos olos en tòo poneròo keitai: και ο κόσμος όλος εν τω πονηρώ κείται, from the Bible, 1 John 5:19 in the Modern English Version.

  25Native gods are calling: From “Pagan Love Song,” from the 1929 film The Pagan. The actual lyrics are “Native hills are calling / To them we belong.”

  26itinerarium mentis in Mortem (“The mind’s journey to death”): Plays on St. Bonaventure’s Itinerarium Mentis in Deum (The Journey of the Mind to God), 1259.

  27Aidez-moi!: Charles De Gaulle made a famous appeal on French television on April 23, 1961, (“Françaises, Français, aidez-moi!”) after French generals in Algeria, opposed to independence, staged a putsch.

  28large circle of shade: From Dante Alighieri, Rime petrose: Al pocogiorno e al gran cerchio d’ombra / son giunto, lasso!, ed al bianchir de’ colli. (“To the dim light and the large circle of shade / I have clomb, and to the whitening of the hills.”) English translation, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “Sestina of the Lady Pietra degli Scrovigni,” ca. 1848.

  29total military mobilization: “Military analogies come to mind. Tourism is a parody of total mobilization,” writes Hans Magnus Enzensberger in “A Theory of Tourism,” tr. Gerd Gemünden and Kenn Johnson, 1958. Morselli recorded this in his diary in 1973.

  30Iamblichus: Iamblichus of Chalcis (AD ca. 245–ca. 325) was a pagan Neoplatonist philosopher who wrote an influential biography of Pythagoras and whose writings helped transmit Platonic ideas in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The attribution of a text called Dissipatio Humani Generis to him is however almost certainly Morselli’s invention. Rosa Maria Monastra in “L’apocalisse ilarotragica di Guido Morselli” (Synaxis 24, Catania, 2010) argues convincingly that Morselli was just being playful and suggests that the concept of dissipatio seems more likely to have come from the Bi
ble, Isaiah 24:3.

  31solvens saeclum in favilla: From the Latin hymn Dies Irae, which begins: Dies iræ, dies illa / Solvet sæclum in favilla. (“That day of wrath, that dreadful day / shall heaven and earth in ashes lay.”) English translation: the 1962 Missal.

  32Mundus permanebit. . . . Viri . . . : “The earth remains. . . . Men, women and children, human beings of all ages, classes, and nations shall suddenly be elevated [sublimabuntur].” The letter from Salvian he quotes from may also be Morselli’s invention.

  33Nihil huius gloriae decet peccatorem: “Nothing of this glory is fitting for a sinner.”

  34natural hominis tegumentum, quasi altera cutis: “man’s natural shell, as if another skin”

  35Deucalion: After Zeus provoked a great flood, Deucalion, who survived, was told to “cover your head and throw the bones of your mother behind your shoulder.” (The “mother” was Gaia and the “bones” were rocks.) The rocks, when thrown, became human beings.

  36asylum ignorantiae: Spinoza, an “asylum of stupidity”

  37“To drown in the abyss—heaven or hell, who cares”: From “Le voyage,” Les Fleurs du Mal, Charles Baudelaire, tr. Robert Lowell in Marthiel & Jackson Mathews, eds., The Flowers of Evil, New Directions, 1963.

  38Beati in regno coelesti . . . : English translation, James Lehrberger, The Thomist, vol. 80, 3, July 2016.

  39Les célibataires sont si malheureux: French pop song, an ironic celebration of bachelorhood, 1960, Sacha Distel. The refrain: Les célibataires sont si malheureux, / Il faut bien prier pour eux, / Cars ils sont si solitaires, / Se couchant toujours seuls dans leur lit. English translation kindly provided by Susan Barba.