The Complete Cosmicomics

by Italo Calvino

  In saying how difficult it is to establish who’s having relations with whom we must first clear the decks of a subject that often crops up in conversation: namely, the fact that from one moment to the next I am no longer the same I nor is Priscilla any longer the same Priscilla, because of the continuous renewal of the protein molecules in our cells through, for example, digestion or also respiration which fixes the oxygen in the bloodstream. This kind of argument takes us completely off our course because while it’s true that the cells are renewed, in renewing themselves they go on following the programme established by those that were there before and so in this sense you could reasonably insist that I continue to be I and Priscilla, Priscilla. This in other words is not the problem, but perhaps it was of some use to raise it because it helps us realize that things aren’t as simple as they seem and so we slowly approach the point where we will realize how complicated they are.

  Well then, when I say I, or when I say Priscilla, what do I mean? I mean that special configuration which my cells and her cells assume through a special relationship between the environment and a special genetic heritage which from the beginning seemed invented on purpose to cause my cells to be mine and Priscilla’s cells to be Priscilla’s. As we proceed we’ll see that nothing is made on purpose, that nobody has invented anything, that the way I am and Priscilla is really doesn’t matter in the least to anyone: all a genetic heritage has to do is to transmit what was transmitted to it for transmitting, not giving a damn about how it’s received. But for the moment let’s limit ourselves to answering the question if I, in quotes, and Priscilla, in quotes, are our genetic heritage, in quotes, or our form, in quotes. And when I say form I mean both what is seen and what isn’t seen, namely, all her way of being Priscilla, the fact that fuchsia or orange is becoming to her, the scent emanating from her skin not only because she was born with a glandular constitution suited to giving off that scent but also because of everything she has eaten in her life and the brands of soap she has used, in other words because of what is called, in quotes, culture, and also her way of walking and of sitting down which comes to her from the way she has moved among those who move in the cities and houses and streets where she’s lived, all this but also the things she has in her memory, after having seen them perhaps just once and perhaps at the movies, and also the forgotten things which still remain recorded somewhere in the back of the neurons like all the psychic trauma a person has to swallow from infancy on.

  Now, both in the form you see and don’t see and in our genetic heritage, Priscilla and I have absolutely identical elements—common to the two of us, or to the environment, or to the species—and also elements which establish a difference. Then the problem begins to arise whether the relationship between me and Priscilla is the relationship only between the differential elements, because the common ones can be overlooked in both—that is, whether by ‘Priscilla’ we must understand ‘what is peculiar to Priscilla as far as the other members of the species are concerned’—or whether the relationship is between the common elements, and then we must decide if it’s the ones common to the species or to the environment or to the two of us as distinct from the rest of the species and perhaps more beautiful than the others.

  On closer examination, if individuals of opposite sex enter into a particular relationship it clearly isn’t we who decide but the species, or rather not so much the species as the animal condition, or the vegetable-animal condition of the animal-vegetives distinguished into distinct sexes. Now, in the choice I make of Priscilla to have with her relations whose nature I don’t yet know—and in the choice that Priscilla makes of me, assuming that she does choose me and doesn’t change her mind at the last moment—no one knows what order of priority comes first into play, therefore no one knows how many I’s precede the I that I think I am, and how many Priscillas precede the Priscilla towards whom I believe I am running.

  In short, the more you simplify the terms of the question the more they become complicated: once we’ve established that what I call ‘I’ consists of a certain number of amino acids which line up in a certain way, it’s logical that inside these molecules all possible relations are foreseen, and from outside we have nothing but the exclusion of some of the possible relations in the form of certain enzymes which block certain processes. Therefore you can say that it’s as if everything possible had already happened to me, including the possibility of its not happening: once I am I the cards are all dealt, I dispose of a finite number of possibilities and no more, what happens outside counts for me only if it’s translated into operations already foreseen by my nucleic acids, I’m walled up within myself, chained to my molecular programme: outside of me I don’t have and won’t have relations with anything or with anybody. And neither will Priscilla; I mean the real Priscilla, poor thing. If around me and around her there’s some stuff that seems to have relations with other stuff, these are facts that don’t concern us: in reality for me and for her nothing substantial can happen.

  Hardly a cheerful situation, therefore: and not because I was expecting to have a more complex individuality than the one given me, beginning with a special arrangement of an acid and of four basic substances which in their turn command the disposition of about twenty amino acids in the forty-six chromosomes of each cell I have; but because this individuality repeated in each of my cells is mine only after a manner of speaking, since out of forty-six chromosomes twenty-three come to me from my father and twenty-three from my mother, that is, I continue carrying my parents with me in all my cells, and I’ll never be able to free myself of this burden.

  What my parents programmed me to be in the beginning is what I am: that and nothing else. And in my parents’ instructions are contained the instructions of my parents’ parents handed down in turn from parent to parent in an endless chain of obedience. The story I wanted to narrate therefore is not only impossible to narrate but first of all impossible to live, because it’s all there already, contained in a past that can’t be narrated since, in turn, it’s included in its own past, in the many individual pasts—so many that we can’t really be sure they aren’t the past of the species and of what existed before the species, a general past to which all individual pasts refer but which no matter how far you go back doesn’t exist except in the form of individual cases, such as Priscilla and I might be, between which, however, nothing happens, individual or general.

  What each of us really is and has is the past; all we are and have is the catalogue of the possibilities that didn’t fail, of the experiences that are ready to be repeated. A present doesn’t exist, we proceed blindly towards the outside and the afterwards, carrying out an established programme with materials we fabricate ourselves, always the same. We don’t tend towards any future, there’s nothing awaiting us, we’re shut within the system of a memory which foresees no task but remembering itself. What now leads me and Priscilla to seek each other isn’t an impulse towards the afterwards: it’s the final action of the past that is fulfilled through us. Goodbye, Priscilla, our encounter, our embrace are useless, we remain distant, or finally near, in other words for ever apart.

  Separation, the impossibility of meeting, has been in us from the very beginning. We were born not from a fusion but from a juxtaposition of distinct bodies. Two cells grazed each other: one is lazy and all pulp, the other is only a head and a darting tail. They are egg and seed: they experience a certain timidity; then they rush—at their different speeds—and hurry towards each other. The seed plunges headlong into the egg; the tail is left outside; the head—all full of nucleus—is shot at the nucleus of the egg; the two nuclei are shattered: you might expect heaven knows what fusion or mingling or exchange of selves; instead, what was written in one nucleus and in the other, those spaced lines, fall in and arrange themselves, on each side, in the new nucleus, very closely printed; the words of both nuclei fit in, whole and clearly separate. In short, nobody was lost in the other, nobody has given in or has given himself; the two cells n
ow one are packaged together but just as they were before: the first thing they feel is a slight disappointment. Meanwhile the double nucleus has begun its sequence of duplications, printing the combined messages of father and mother in each of the offspring cells, perpetuating not so much the union as the unbridgeable distance that separates in each couple the two companions, the failure, the void that remains in the midst of even the most successful couple.

  Of course, on every disputed issue our cells can follow the instructions of a single parent and thus feel free of the other’s command, but we know what we claim to be in our exterior form counts for little compared to the secret programme we carry printed in each cell, where the contradictory orders of father and mother continue arguing. What really counts is this incompatible quarrel of father and mother that each of us drags after him, with the rancour of every point where one partner has had to give way to the other, who then raises his voice still louder in his victory as dominant mate. So the characteristics that determine my interior and exterior form, when they are not the sum or the average of the orders received from father and mother together, are orders denied in the depth of the cells, counterbalanced by different orders which have remained latent, sapped by the suspicion that perhaps the other orders were better. So at times I’m seized with uncertainty as to whether I am really the sum of the dominant characteristics of the past, the result of a series of operations that produced always a number bigger than zero, or whether instead my true essence isn’t rather what descends from the succession of defeated characteristics, the total of the terms with the minus sign, of everything that in the tree of derivations has remained excluded, stifled, interrupted: the weight of what hasn’t been weighs on me, no less crushing than what has been and couldn’t not be.

  Void, separation and waiting, that’s what we are. And such we remain even on the day when the past inside us rediscovers its original forms, clustering into swarms of seed-cells or concentrated ripening of the egg-cells, and finally the words written in the nuclei are no longer the same as before but are no longer part of us either, they’re a message beyond us, which already belongs to us no more. In a hidden point in ourselves the double series of orders from the past is divided in two and the new cells find themselves with a simple past, no longer double, which gives them lightness and the illusion of being really new, of having a new past that almost seems a future.

  Now, I’ve said it hastily like this but it’s a complicated process, there in the darkness of the nucleus, in the depth of the sex organs, a succession of phases some a bit jumbled with others, but from which there’s no turning back. At first the pairs of maternal and paternal messages which thus far had remained separate seem to remember they’re couples and they join together two by two, so many fine little threads that become interwoven and confused; the desire to copulate outside myself now leads me to copulate within myself, at the depths of the extreme roots of the matter I’m made of, to couple the memory of the ancient pair I carry within me, the first couple, that is both the one that comes immediately before me, mother and father, and the absolute first one, the couple at the animal-vegetal origins of the first coupling on Earth, and so the forty-six filaments that an obscure and secret cell bears in the nucleus are knotted two by two, still not giving up their old disagreement, since in fact they immediately try to disentangle themselves but remain stuck at some point in the knot, so when in the end they do succeed, with a wrench, in separating—because meanwhile the mechanism of separation has taken possession of the whole cell, stretching out its pulp—each chromosome discovers it’s changed, made of segments that first belonged some to one and some to the other, and it moves from the other, now changed too, marked by the alternate exchanges of the segments, and already two cells are being detached each with twenty-three chromosomes, the chromosomes in one cell different from those in the other, and in each case different from those that were in the previous cell, and at the next doubling there will be four cells all different, each with twenty-three chromosomes, in which what was the father’s and the mother’s, or rather the fathers’ and the mothers’, is mingled.

  So finally the encounter of the pasts which can never take place in the present of those who believe they are meeting does take place in the form of the past of him who comes afterwards and who cannot live that encounter in his own present. We believe we’re going towards our marriage, but it is still the marriage of the fathers and the mothers which is celebrated through our expectation and our desire. What seems to us our happiness is perhaps only the happiness of the others’ story which ends just where we thought ours began.

  And it’s pointless for us to run, Priscilla, to meet each other and follow each other: the past disposes of us with blind indifference, and once it has moved those fragments of itself and of us, it doesn’t bother afterwards how we spend them. We were only the preparation, the envelope, for the encounter of pasts which happens through us but which is already part of another story, the story of the afterwards: the encounters always take place before and after us, and in them the elements of the new, forbidden to us, are active: chance, risk, improbability.

  This is how we live, not free, surrounded by freedom, driven, acted on by this constant wave which is the combination of the possible cases and which passes through those points of space and of time in which the range of the pasts is joined to the range of the futures. The primordial sea was a soup of beringed molecules traversed at intervals by the messages of the similarity and of the difference that surrounded us and imposed new combinations. So the ancient tide rises at intervals in me and in Priscilla following the course of the Moon; so the sexed species respond to the old conditioning which prescribes ages and seasons of loves and also grants extensions and postponements to the ages and the seasons and at times becomes involved in obstinacies and coercions and vices.

  In other words, Priscilla and I are only meeting places for messages from the past: not only for messages among themselves, but for messages meeting answers to messages. And as the different elements and molecules answer messages in different ways—imperceptibly or boundlessly different—so the messages vary according to the world that receives them and interprets them, or else, to remain the same, they are forced to change. You might say, then, that the messages are not messages at all, that a past to transmit doesn’t exist, and only so many futures exist which correct the course of the past, which give it form, which invent it.

  The story I wanted to tell is the encounter of two individuals who don’t exist, since they are definable only with regard to a past or a future, a past and future whose reality is reciprocally doubted. Or else it’s a story that cannot be separated from the story of all the rest of what exists, and therefore from the story of what doesn’t exist and, not existing, causes what does exist to exist. All we can say is that in certain points and moments that interval of void which is our individual presence is grazed by the wave which continues to renew the combinations of molecules and to complicate them or erase them, and this is enough to give us the certitude that somebody is ‘I’ and somebody is ‘Priscilla’ in the temporal and spatial distribution of the living cells, and that something happens or has happened or will happen which involves us directly and—I would dare say—happily and totally. This is in itself enough, Priscilla, to cheer me, when I bend my outstretched neck over yours and I give you a little nip on your yellow fur and you dilate your nostrils, bare your teeth and kneel on the sand, lowering your hump to the level of my breast so that I can lean on it and press you from behind, bearing down on my rear legs, oh how sweet those sunsets in the oasis you remember when they loosen the burden from the packsaddle and the caravan scatters and we camels feel suddenly light and you break into a run and I trot after you, overtaking you in the grove of palm trees.

  III. Death

  The risk we ran was living: living for ever. The threat of continuing weighed, from the very start, on anyone who had by chance begun. The crust that covers the Earth is liquid: one drop
among the many thickens, grows, little by little absorbs the substances around it, it is a drop-island, gelatinous, that contracts and expands, that occupies more space at each pulsation, it’s a drop-continent that spreads its branches over the oceans, makes the poles coagulate, solidifies its mucus-green outlines on the equator, if it doesn’t stop in time it gobbles up the globe. The drop will live, only that drop, for ever, uniform and continuous in time and in space, a mucilaginous sphere with the Earth as its kernel, a gruel that contains the matter for the lives of us all, because we are all arrested in this drop that will never let us be born or die, so life will belong to it and to nobody else.

  Luckily it is shattered. Each fragment is a chain of molecules arranged in a certain order, and thanks to the mere fact of having an order, it has only to float in the midst of the disordered substance and immediately around it other chains of molecules are formed, lined up in the same way. Each chain spreads order around itself, or rather it repeats itself over and over again, and the copies in turn are repeated, always in that geometrical arrangement. A solution of living crystals, all the same, covers the face of the Earth, it is born and dies in every moment without being aware of it, living a discontinuous and perpetual life, always identical to itself in a shattered time and space. Every other form remains shut out for ever; including ours.