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

or even with the sum of others’ experiences, those of our own kind—that ignorance amounts to a genuine blindfold. That data, those experiences don’t exist for us, and we don’t for them. No matter that for other individuals, they are the very plot of daily life; we, here, are dead, and it’s pointless to call that death metaphorical. It’s a partial death, but real.

Me: Life is motion; death, torpor.

Mylius: There’s no denying the distinction between the two states. Certainly, life is movement. But it is a circular motion (around that tiny nucleus called the self), motion so circumscribed that it’s like a piétiner sur place: a tapping of your heels in place while surrounded by a large circle of shade28 of all that escapes our cognition, and of which we desire no cognition. And I’m not referring to the knowable, and even less to the mystery of the universe, I’m referring to petty reality, and as I said, that closest to us.

We may talk of the individual’s life dynamism, of his nearly infinite multiplicity of relationships, or experiences. But we must face the fact that this is rhetoric. Each of us is limited to his own tiny fragment of reality, and in fact, cannot escape it. The contrasting rhetoric, about incommunicability, is true only in this sense. Acting, learning, observing: these functions lead us around in circles. And, please note, we are individuals, coherent, stable (even physically), thanks to this. Surrounded by the possible, which almost never materializes, but closed to and distant from that immensity—lucky for us or we would fritter ourselves away. Determination is negation; as individuals we must have these strict confines, we must exclude, close off. And thus life, anyway our life, is awfully similar to what we call its opposite.

Me: Not a happy tale.

Mylius: Not happy? Actually it’s comforting, considering that we all have to die. You, too, even though you are still young. Or do you think you’ll be an exception?

Me: Certainly not. (As you can see I was anything but prescient just then.)

Mylius: Think about ataraxia, or utter equanimity, the supreme form of spiritual life for the Stoics, the Buddhists, the ascetic Christians. Such detachment before moral and physical ills is a taste of the dead man’s impassability. In any case, secular man strives to be imperturbable, impassive, before death; it’s the extreme toward which the hero, the man gifted with courage, the real man, aims. It’s spelled out explicitly in the famous expression perinde ac cadaver, in the manner of a corpse. You know the one about the soldier, observing his dead companion out in front of the trench, who says: “Look at that, he’s the bravest, lying there under the machine-gun fire calmly looking up at the heavens.” There’s nothing offensive about that remark, it’s profound.

Thus Mylius, the philosopher, that April morning. All the better for him, actually; if he believed what he was saying, the Event will not have been a surprise, or painful for him. Radical pessimism turns out to be much like optimism.

Let me add that our philosopher was nearly sixty years old and hobbled by arthritis, that a few years back his wife had abandoned him and run off with an assistant, also a philosopher. Even so, philosophy had this going for it, it was anti-rhetorical. It debunked a pseudo-fatal antithesis probably unknown in nature. To some extent, that’s a consolation.

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Widmad, eight AM. I’m admiring the monument I built. It hasn’t moved, it has stood up to the elements (sleet and wind this morning), but now a question occurs to me. The Kodachrome landscape, sun beating down on the Bahamas, the white sand, the “Come to us, where life is better”: what if the great exodus was only a flight to the Bahamas? Or some other unexplored earthly paradise?

They used to say that the dying embark on “a better life.” The poster, in fact, urged us to go “where life is better.” The death-prize, like collective tourist emigration, makes sense in a century like our own hugely dedicated to the improving activity of travel.

Tourism is a surrogate for total military mobilization, said Hans Magnus Enzensberger.29

There is, however, a logistical problem. Pure spirits, too, appreciate decent meals and lodging. Neither the Bahamas nor all the Antilles put together could host such a vast congregation. Even paradise has to offer some comforts.

I come back to my first hypothesis. Volatilization—sublimation. Sublimation—assumption (to the heavens).

Now let’s see. I once read something, a text by Iamblichus30 that I looked up for some reason, I no longer recall why. It dealt with the demise of the species and it was titled Dissipatio Humani Generis. Dissipation not in the moral sense. The version I remember was in Latin, and it seems that in the third- and fourth-century Latin dissipatio meant evaporation, or nebulization, or some physical process like that, and Iamblichus referred to a fatal phenomenon of this kind. He was less catastrophic than other prophets: there was no great flood, no holocaust solvens saeclum in favilla,31 covering the world in ashes, like a nuclear catastrophe of today. Rather, he wrote of human beings changed by sudden miracle into a spray, or an imperceptible (harmless and probably odorless) gas without any intermediate combustion. Maybe not glorious, but at least dignified.

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I’ve had some erudite pursuits in the past, and though I’ve abstained for years, I don’t regret them.

Before Ezekiel (ten centuries after Moses) there was no mention in Judaism of a celestial life set aside for humans after their stay on earth. The just were rewarded with prosperity (earthly) and longevity; it’s said of Abraham that he died “sated with years.” Later celestial compensation would become, as we know, one of the fundamental ingredients in the religious recipe for Jews, Christians, and Muslims, and a favorite argument for theology and related literature. Among the innumerable commentators was one Salvian of Trier, alive in the third or the fourth century, a Christian writer, not well known, a hagiographer and apologist. In a letter to the bishop