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

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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.

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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.

And I’m keeping myself under observation.

I’m the testing ground in a completely new, rather extreme, and fatiguing situation. I’m experimental material of a certain interest. I’m not entirely devoid of competence here; I’ve got some experience, have done some scribbling about psychology, if only as provocation. What I don’t have is an appetite for myself. I’ve been flirting with solipsism for a very long time, but I’m neither introverted nor introspective. If you think about it, solipsism and introversion really have nothing in common. Nietzsche, an unconfessed but furious solipsist, did not even keep a diary. The tremulous Marcel Proust and the bleating Henri-Frédéric Amiel, heavyweights (and tedious heroes) of introversion, knew nothing of solipsism, they had no idea what “wanting to have the world to oneself alone” means.

My self-analysis would best take off from a specific datum, my social weightlessness. That’s how I would define it. A total absence of interpersonal ties. For example, I am no longer the passive subject, the receptor, of that (apparently) essential item, the “news.” No newspapers, no radio, no conversation. Nothing. An abysmal privation. Or a privilege. As I prefer.

But what a jackpot, for psychology, sociology, sociopsychology, this extreme case of mine. The experts would have unearthed:

Psychic disorders, breakdowns, dysfunctions

Instability, regression

Atrophy, excesses

Degeneration, prostration

Slump, collapse

Rambling, disorientation, disconnection

Clouded, absent responses

Seizures (neurotic)

Defoliation (emotional)

not to speak of the anxiety department (or if you will, tension and stress) with its vast typology and complex semiotics.

As the foregoing Rabelaisian abundance of terminology confirms, psychology or psychodiagnostics (and associated disciplines) is (was) not just a hard-working clinical-cultural industry. Beyond that or above all, it was a dense linguistic-literary agglutination, a great edifice of tropes and metaphors (not at all cheerful), and in that sense one of the legitimate heirs of rhetoric.

As for the “extreme case” of myself, I observe it, not very diligently or enthusiastically, in two restricted compartments: ideation and behavior. (Incidentally, as far as the purely vegetative side goes, there’s nothing to report; my health hasn’t deteriorated, on the contrary.)

Ideation: I’m amazed to note that I make no predictions, but live hour by hour. And given that any predictions I made could only be highly fanciful, I conclude that my imagination, never a high flier, has further withered. The absolutely exceptional nature of the Event is no incentive, as it would be for anyone less bankrupt than I.

Behavior: as the solitary do—or more precisely, the marooned, the castaways—I neglect my personal grooming. Soap use is at a minimum. Nails long and dirty. Augmented sweet tooth for chocolate, pastries, ice cream, biscotti, cakes, candied fruit, nougat, bonbons, etc. Diminished sexual desire, certainly due to a want of the physical stimulant, the woman. Unlike other singular (marooned) subjects I don’t think aloud.

One reaction that surprises me: a new mode of thinking about them, together, as a collectivity. An unexpected disposition to understand and feel for them. Sympathy, empathy. A shipwrecked human solidarity bobs up, a surprise last-ditch response.

I have decided to raise a cenotaph in their memory, in the Widmad market square. A cenotaph, I believe that’s what it’s called. I’ve been working on it for a couple of days; a tradesman’s van and a Mercedes coupe form the base of the monument; some twenty television sets removed from the Grand Emporium make up the body. On top of the TVs, some cameras and film cameras, crates of Coca-Cola bottles. At the top, about three meters from the ground, a huge poster taken from a travel agent’s window. A three-by-two-meter Kodachrome poster of a beach furnished with the celebrated white sand of the Bahamas, and the invitation: