Dissipatio H.G. by Guido Morselli (tohfa e dulha read online .TXT) 📗

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 individualism. 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.

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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