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

(And do the Trobriands really exist, or did Bronisław Malinowski18 simply deduce them from the twin myths of the Good Savage and the Fortunate Isles? That is, Lévy-Bruhl19 being the sole other who confirms they exist.)

(The two discoverers don’t agree, however, for Malinowski maintains that the Trobrianders are joyously sociable and enjoy a refined poetic sensibility, while Lévy-Bruhl holds they are superstitious and foolish. The illustrious scholars’ discordant duet is to my mind one of the great gems of modern anthropology. Priceless.)

•

Right now I’m following the path below the escarpment along the train tracks. Between Widmad and the outskirts of Lewrosen.

Without seeking it, I’ve found proof that the Event is not an illusion, not just my own invention. A family of chamois goats is walking along the tracks. Two females, a male, and kids. They’ve come down from the mountains, something that’s never happened before in human memory. For that matter I’ve seen other good omens too: the birds are making an unholy racket, and their numbers have grown. Especially the nocturnal species that have come back in droves, which pleases me because I’ve always appreciated their musical talents.

Owls of all kinds, wood, tawny, long-eared, little. Their instincts tell them something they certainly never expected: the great enemy has withdrawn. The air is clear of smoke and fumes, the earth no longer stinks or quakes with terrible noises. (Humans, you want to fight pollution? Simple: eliminate the polluting breed.) Perhaps this glimpse of spring, albeit cold and fogbound, has encouraged them too. At sunset yesterday, I listened to a duet between two little owls, quite a bit more musical than Lévy and Malinowski. One of the two (the female?) distinguished her voice by keeping her call a half-tone off that of her companion, and never varied the sequence except at long intervals, generally the same each time. The melopoeia, the melodies, are very simple but not, as most say, lugubrious. I joined in, not trying to imitate, repeating a low note barely in tune with theirs, an organ drone. I also tried some dissonant notes. It didn’t seem to displease them, they approached me. We have things in common: we share the woods and the night, I’m nearly as much a nictalope and a noctivagant, a nighthawk, as they are, and if I sing, I sing at night. Except that my vocal cords, unlike theirs, have undergone the nicotine treatment.

There I was, commenting on, exorcizing, the end of the world. Or whatever this thing is that’s happening in front of my eyes.

•

The end of the world?

One of the pranks played by anthropocentrism is to suggest that the end of our species will bring about the death of animal and vegetable nature, the end of the earth itself. The fall of the heavens. There is no eschatology that doesn’t assume man’s permanence is necessary to the permanence of everything else. It’s accepted that things might have begun before us; unthinkable that they could ever end after us. Old Montaigne, who thought of himself as agnostic, agreed with the dogmatics, the theologians, on this point. Ainsi fera la morte de toutes choses notre mort. Our death will bring about the death of all things.

Come on, you clever, presumptuous fellows, you make too much of yourselves. The world has never been so alive as it is since a certain breed of bipeds disappeared. It’s never been so clean, so sparkling, so good-humored.

8

I CAN THINK of numerous others of my professional tribe, who, even supposing they were able to imagine my present situation, would say that it was unbelievable except as irony and farce. That it could only work as a medium for social satire.

But that very vision of the thing, far from being a clever paradox, is merely idiotic.

•

I, instead, find myself asking if this is not a dream.

It’s a question as ordinary and human as yawning, one that gets snagged, however, in the thick foliage of the forest of speculation. I go over Pascal’s objections to Descartes (in my memory, because I have no books; when I came up here, I chose not to bring even one). Descartes argued that he was unable to determine that experience is real and dreams are not; Pascal replied that our immediate and infallible sensations (notre coeur, he said) alone prove that experience is one thing, and dreams another thing, or no-thing. I touch my head, find the scar from the hardy blow against the rock in the cave of the siphon on the fateful night between June 1 and 2. Pascal is right, I think.

Once I used to be even more empirical than he; in my mind, facts, objectivity were no more than a rassemblement des subjectivités, a consensus opinantium.20 If we agree that we must, at certain intervals, pay our taxes and light the wood stove, it means that the tax collector and the cold are not products of the imagination but things to take seriously. But now the question at hand is to determine whether the “opiners,” an entire species except for one, have disappeared, a point on which I cannot expect the response of the same opiners but must evaluate the situation for what it is. The situation is certainly peculiar, even inexplicable: does that mean it isn’t real? Only optimists ever fooled themselves thinking that the real was rational, and I have never been an optimist. Now, I’m beginning to convert to simpleminded realism. The real, when it has duration and consistency on its side (consistency meaning uniformity and solidity) can enjoy the luxury of being irrational and unexplainable. Even stark raving mad, if need be.

I’m not battling inexplicability.

I possess none of the wishful thinking of science, and none, to my credit, of science fiction either. I don’t fall back on genocide by death rays, or epidemics spread around Earth by tiny, evil Venusians, or clouds of nuclear fallout from distant H-bombs. I sensed right off that