Dissipatio H.G. by Guido Morselli (smart ebook reader .TXT) 📕

I was indulging in my usual pastime: parenthesizing the existence of my fellow humans, imagining myself as the only thinking being in an utterly empty universe. Empty of human beings, that is. Allow me to prettify my interior thoughts with some pedantry: Hegel dreamed of the Real in and for itself; for me the Real was of and for myself, where others take no part, because they don’t exist.

Hegel and the Romantics, it remains unclear why, identified the Real with the Subject, while I prefer to think of it as perfectly objective. But mine, however, exclusively mine.

In that final phase of a fairly perverse thought process, I had managed to persuade myself that I really was alone. Alone in the world. If I’m not mistaken this is called, in philosophical jargon, solipsism: I, the individual, and my vision of things, no other, nothing else. But it wasn’t philosophy that interested me (it never has interested me much). I was living this. I got up from the grass and embraced the larch trees, something I used to do as a boy and for the same reason: to allow myself to be penetrated by their life force. At other times I was convinced I was a Celt, and worshiped those trees the way the Celts worshiped the oak. At yet other times, I was moved by pure enthusiasm.

My enthusiasms, furthermore, were and are genuine; there never was anything literary about them. I never extracted a single sentence from my pangs of solitude, never felt gratified by them. There was no need; the experience was deep and demanded no reflection or communication. Nor did I ever imagine I was the only person to experience such states. In fact, the matter must be very old, for in ancient times a sin for which there is no forgiveness was spoken of.

I didn’t hesitate to involve God in this, either. I even prayed, impiety all too evident, for his kingdom to arrive. Today, outside my house and not far from Frederica and Giovanni’s (empty) one, I thanked him, not just faithlessly but cruelly, for having answered my prayer, as I stood under my open umbrella, handkerchief at my nose, a cold just beginning. Alone at last: wish granted. Meanwhile thinking to myself that I must be crazy not to have some aspirin on hand.

•

Anyone who subscribes to the doctrine of incommunicability would object: you’ve always been alone. False. The whistling noise made by the cabin of the cable car as it sailed insolently close to the tops of the fir trees: it was there and now it’s not. The irruptions of Henriette, my ex; the boys from the school in Widmad out on a Sunday hike; books sent with appeals to review them. The checkup visits by Dr. P., who comes to me if I fail to show up at the clinic where they carry out the prescribed exams.

Having gotten past the siphon, I dive into the Lake of Solitude. And also into the mess that’s accumulating at home. The kitchen sink is clogged; my bed’s become a pigsty. The scales of bourgeois conformity fall off. The dirt grows thicker. There is no one to change my clothes for. The only reason I shave is because the sharp beard hairs bother me at night while I’m sleeping. I’ll keep it up as long as the razor works, and the electricity.

They used to say that thanks to automation, electric power stations could continue operating for months even if there were no workers. That seems to be the case.

In the living quarters of Kaiser, the owner of the Hôtel Zemmi, I found a highly sensitive and precise Japanese radio and spent half a day and most of the night tuning it to every station in Europe. And the world. Beginning with a socialist country and its tireless station that broadcasts twenty-four hours a day. The device works perfectly, every station has its own distinctive bleat, whine, crackle, or whistle. But no voices. Not one bar of music. Not even a jingle from the universal ether.

Relief. Nothing merciless about it, it’s like the expression “At least he’s no longer suffering,” which family members say of some poor fellow who has finally decided to give up the ghost. In the technological age, when the radio universe goes silent, civilization, so-called, must also be suspended, if not extinguished; the Organization, deadly cryptogam spread over five continents, must be dissolved; and the octopus of the Economy must cease to send out its myriad filthy tentacles. At two AM I shut down the sophisticated Japanese receiver and improvised in its presence a eulogy to humans. A requiem to ideology, opium of the people; a requiem to consumerism, their poisoned bread. A requiem to the false credo, “You are the product of Production”; a requiem to the mournful and stupid war cry politique d’abord, politics above all. O people of the earth, exult for me but also for yourselves, or for your surrogate given that you will not profit from this liberation. Not that it comes too late, no. You willed your own slavery, you designed it. The only way it can disappear is if you do.

•

Strictly speaking, the fact that everyone has disappeared is still to be proven. In Greenland or down in the Antipodes, shall we say on the Trobriand Islands, there may still be thinking beings like myself alive. Nevertheless, any survivors would be unable to signal their presence in any way—and as far as I’m concerned, that settles it.

The axioms of communications theory are of no use, I see immediately, things like the medium is the message, although the corollary is unquestionable: no medium, no message. However, not only the means of transmission (news) have come to a halt, but also the means of transport (persons). Supposing that in the Trobriands, or in Hudson Bay,17 some stubborn tribe has survived. Not only can I not travel to them, they cannot travel to me. We won’t catch sight of each other,