Dissipatio H.G., Guido Morselli [ebook and pdf reader .txt] 📗

intact, garrulous to the point of presumption, the individual in me is liquidating. The psychic individual, bien entendu. I’m an ex-person.

There are long-ago precedents: when I was twenty I would ask myself, what am I, what sort of human being will I be? My pessimism was rhetorical, though. I did come up to the human average (with a degree of approximation, a narrow fluctuation above and below), and I maintained it. An example: I often called myself bête, stupid, an animal. Something une bête does not do. For a normal person functioning under normal circumstances, such uncertainty is formally contradictory, psychologically specious. Ça sent la littérature. It smells of literature.

Why am I now, ever since June 2, an ex-person?

There’s an obvious interpretation, which is: the social context, interpersonal connections, and the consequences of their disappearance, necessitate it. But these are sociologism’s wobbly gelatin words, and I discard them immediately in favor of another interpretation: humanity will cease to be when time ceases, and in the same way.

If time is abolished, we presume that humanity as such will lose substance. It’s a supposition that smells of philosophaillerie, of pompous philosophizing, but I don’t reject it out of hand, it’s not banal. Meanwhile, though, why has time been abolished and a year zero established that’s destined to remain forever zero? It’s my impression that this has been the case since June 2, yet the phenomenon remains to be explained. If time is the shape of internal feeling, so long as there is internal feeling (that is to say a conscious individual) there must also be time.

In The Possessed, Dostoevsky attempts to provide a theological-poetic explanation. He puts it in the mouth of one of his characters, Kirillov, if I remember correctly; he says, “When mankind achieves true happiness,46 time will no longer exist. Time will then be superfluous.” So have the dear departed found true happiness? I’d like to think so. The poor things deserve it.

What seems certain is that as a human being, I’m finished. It’s not that mine is a half-life. I’m not a specter drinking Don Hermanos brandy, not a corpse smoking Capstan (Navy Cut) in my pipe—but neither am I myself any more, not even that little that I was. I survive thanks to some unknown artifice. Inside a decompression chamber, or under an oxygen tent. Deprived of my identity, and yet, the height of strangeness, fully able to recall it.

What’s also certain is that I’m beyond time. A categorical confirmation? The problem of leisure time, free time, no longer affects me. A problem as old as humanity, and (very likely) its original sin, is the question: “Then, afterwards, what will I do?” I simply don’t ask it of myself. I am discovering that eternity (for one like me studying it from a parking orbit47 in space) is the provisory become permanent. The instant dilates and dilates, and in empirical terms that means a condition that can be eternally postponed. I act, but cannot estimate how long the action will take, I only know it’s incalculable. I’m filling my pipe, but when will I be ready to take a match and light it? Will I ever be ready?

A parte objecti,48 eternity, I realize, is hardly the orthodox one, it coexists happily with mobility, succession, change, with dawn and dusk. With the hordes of cats (plump and well fed) that jostle in the streets, howling and paying no attention to the mice, of which there are many. There’s little that’s arcane about it; eternity does not resound with a voice like thunder, as Bach imagined. It’s made up of the usual queues of bumper-to-bumper cars, their batteries just slightly depleted, and of neon tubes that emit alternate flashes of the usual chrome yellow and oxyhydrogen blue. A metaphysician, any metaphysician would turn up his nose at this kitsch eternity.

Whoever’s responsible doesn’t seem to have cared about being thought a great director. He didn’t need to.

•

These are the thoughts I bring with me as I climb the stairs of the bourse, heading toward the portico that will shelter me from the driving rain.

I’ve moved here permanently. To what I used to call the Golden City. Not the pious city of the fifty churches. Chrysopolis.

On the night of June 2, logic collapsed and from that moment, it deviated or crumbled piece by piece, yet of all the illogical things that I have seen and heard perhaps the most extravagant is that I am here, and not going away. An ex-person, truly. Out of my skin.

The disgust I felt for this city-symbol was sincere, profound; it was certainly in no way socio-ideological. Nor did it derive from any aesthetic or naturalist preferences; while I considered the Malga Ross the antithesis of the city, nevertheless my Malga Ross was not Gauguin’s Tahiti, or Thoreau’s Walden.

My aversion had a serious moral basis; it was disapproval, condemnation. Spontaneous. By that I mean, thought out by myself, without the help of Marcuse, maybe with some Savonarola grafted on, or more likely, some evangelical fire from the neo-pietistic revival. Not for nothing did my maternal ancestor (whose name I bear) teach at the paedagogium of the illustrious August Hermann Francke.49

The feeling was tortured, miniloquent,50 categorical. Impersonal. The early detection industry, the mountain motorways, Henriette: none of these weighed in much.

Today I recognize that I must let the feeling go. Not “in a manner of speaking,” not superficially. Unguardedly, wholeheartedly.

•

In short, I understand that I must reject what there is that speaks of me in that disapproval. A considerable part of my ego collapses; for me this is a deep shock, and I don’t exaggerate. Disapproval turns out to mean I’m incompatible. Its roots were physical, organic.

A sea swell. After surviving so many trials my tiny paper boat finally falls apart. Curiously, this little catastrophe brings about no positive changes. I’m seized, instead, by a vague but keen desire to repent. And by a pitiful contrition, solace of the neophyte penitent. My zeal is genuine, if somewhat diligent,