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

“Come to us, where life is better.” A bit like the refrain of that Tahitian song, “Native Gods are calling. To them we belong.”25

The sparse raindrops falling on the Widmad market do not dull the brilliant blue tropical sky, the green sea, white sand. The idea and the execution please me. No sarcasm intended: although they adored those things, they have valiantly given them up. And it’s not certain they were forced to. Do we know they’re unhappy to live in a world without soft drinks, automobiles, without “the box” to watch? My monument records their lifestyle, without irony. It’s a fitting homage, just slightly rhetorical.

There’s only one man who didn’t inspire that monument and to whom it’s not dedicated. My young Jewish doctor. Paradoxically the sole person whose death I know to be certain—historically, in the public records—is the only one who doesn’t seem dead to me. He’s living, or re-living. Although I should say—if it didn’t sound pathetic—that he’s come back to life in me. A sort of posthumous engouement, an infatuation. Or else, to the greater glory of psychoanalysis, the classic transference has taken place. In Karpinsky, I believe, the medical mind-set was reduced in favor of an incisive, well-defined personality, within the bounds of his modesty. This was one of the rare encounters in my life, perhaps the only one, worth abandoning worldly standards for. Certainly, he treated my condition with discreet and subtle intuition. But the relation he established with me was outside the professional sphere. The way he’d fix his gentle, vigilant eyes on my face. Positive, generously so, even when the words were more negative. Once I asked him whether for someone like myself, remaining unmarried was a vow (a choice), or an obligation? “Neither one nor the other,” he said. “You’re joking, doctor.” “Oh, no,” he replied. And shook his head: no, no.

In a drawer in my chalet, I find a notebook I started a week or so ago, with a title at the top: “Me, and a bizarre circumstance.”

The bizarre circumstance, obviously, was my situation after June 2. I did well not to continue beyond that title. Not because “writing inevitably falsifies” as I myself was known to remark when I was younger. But because I’d have written without having anything to write.

Anything, whether good or bad, is acceptable if it makes sense. If it’s rational, one would have said in 1830; if it belongs to a system of values, in 1930. It’s true even today. What’s happening to me now would make some sense to a moral person. Perhaps to a religious man, with Providence to rely on. Would it make sense to a believer in an ideology? Sure, he’d dredge up something. Socio-political ideology, like the smell of cabbage soup, can get in anywhere.

But I’m in the dark. I can’t see what’s happening, and what to attribute it to (what’s the purpose?). I can’t situate it, I can’t find a place for it. I must endure it.

I endure it: what’s happening happens to me, I’m an essential part of this. Even if I were just a pure spectator, I could say that what’s happening happens for me. The performance is for my benefit alone, a sort of itinerarium mentis in Mortem,26 an anticipation, a “first principles” of death for my edification. Except that the beneficiary cannot benefit, because he finds no sense in it. Pointless to dedicate notebooks. Someone (was it the Italian, Pasolini?) said of one of his works: Its purpose is to have no meaning, not even a formal one. I could say the same of my situation. I must convince myself that facts, when they go so far as to be inexplicable, may go so far as to have no meaning, not even the most esoteric.

As for my behavior, the notebook points to my need for remastication, for the intellectual précis. It’s a symptom of adaption, acceptance. Fear is a dictator: it takes power, then tries to get us to condone the putsch by installing die Normalisierung. The illusion that everything is normal again.

Another reaction is quite odd, though: I feel no need to hear their voices again. I own a historical souvenir, a recording of De Gaulle giving a speech (“Aidez-moi! 7. . .”).27 A fossilized individual, an unpleasant voice, but still a human voice. I’m not attracted. I wouldn’t find Henriette’s acidulous falsetto attractive either, if I’d recorded it, or Frederica’s mellow, slightly virile contralto, heard muttering verses from the Lutheran prayer book as she tidied up the house. I have a recording of Alban Berg, which I listened to again. The violin concerto, a musical structure held together by a series of perfect alternating fifths. What’s special is that Berg here made his peace with the ancien régime, something that doesn’t displease a conservative like myself. Three notes in succession make a major triad, three more, a minor triad, and a breach is opened back to the tonal scale. The last four notes belong to the tonal scale, and in his final movement Berg stresses those notes to introduce the chorale “Es ist genug” (“It is enough”), its original harmonies almost intact, from the sorrowful Bach cantata O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort.

“O Eternity, Word of Thunder.” With some apprehension, I wondered if that bizarre circumstance I mentioned in my notebook was not some occult relative of the caprices of Bach–Berg.

Notebook aside, I continue pondering, observing, grasping at ideas and impressions. For whom? Karpinsky?

No, I don’t think so. I believe that if I ponder, observe, etc., I do it, and am very happy to do it, for myself alone. I am the intended recipient, not the go-between, the emissary.

Here’s another precept proven wrong: We think only as a function of others. Good old Durkheim, one of the theoretical fathers of “extreme sociologism” went so far as to say that an idea represents the individual submitting to the social—which is more or less as if someone proclaimed that wild strawberries had been nationalized.

Wrong. I may no longer have