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

ideas or views for the simple reason that “the others” aren’t there to enjoy them?

I am, therefore I think. The electronic computers continue to function, or anyway could function, whether or not the operators and the users still exist; indeed they are so untouched that should I wish, I could talk to them, if that in turn didn’t sound like a theory (cybernetic) to me. Or science fiction. Their memory is still capable of recording data, analyzing it, processing it. I may be immodest but I don’t see why, even in the absence of operators and users, I shouldn’t be capable of doing the same.

At levels above my own, thought has almost always been a solitary process, asocial, its own end. Monads hidden away without windows, or who didn’t present themselves at windows. The idolatry of communication is a recent vice.

And society, after all, simply a bad habit.

10

NEWS FROM Arcadia. I’ve been chasing one of the goats kept by my shepherds over the wet pastures and through the woods, and finally I catch her, mostly by chance. I drag her (literally) back home, tether her in the empty barn fending off her head butts, not all of them. I milk her to exhaustion, mine and hers. The milk—dense, salty, rich, with a flavor of the wild—is the milk of the origins, as young and ancient as a legend handed down, and delicious. I also had an unpleasant surprise, up at the cabin on the plain of Monte Castello, at about 1,800 meters. The big enameled crest of the city of Chrysopolis suddenly loomed out of the fog before me, a large plaque that the members of a Choral Society had tacked up at the entrance to the cabin when they chose this as their summer base. No one had informed me, and I was upset about it; it was an affront. Other intrusions in my kingdom? To be honest, the intrusion didn’t bother me much, what offended me was where the intruders came from.

The truth is, I just can’t bear our little metropolis. The name alone, even just the emblem, irks me.

It’s been a while since I stopped trying to understand why, reluctant as I am to probe even the slightest bit under the surface. At best, I proceed by exclusion. A thing is not this or not that. For example, mine is not a furious rejection, based on deeply pondered socio-political impulses. I have no political impulses. (A critic could peg me with just three coordinates: intellectual tendency to isolationism, vague anarchism, petty bourgeois conservatism—that petty bourgeois animus that Lenin identified as the number one enemy.) Chrysopolis is one of the main engines of the monopoly, one of the nerve centers of the system (capitalist), and perhaps its most powerful “stomach.” But these are not the reasons I dislike it. Nor is the problem ambivalence, love-hate, rancor toward the city because some of us hoped to gain (and were denied) gratifications, outlets, success from it. It’s something else. An organic incompatibility, a mountaineer’s genes, underlying moralistic objections? I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. It’s just something I must accept, live and let live. I do know I threw stones at the Chrysopolis shield. I have good aim and at twenty meters I battered away at it until it was no longer recognizable. And enjoyed myself like a child.

•

Mylius (former paranoid) had a bleak and irrefutable hypothesis, funereally reassuring.

Human beings were half-dead even while they were alive, he held. My talk with Mylius comes back to me only now, dug up by my discussion with myself on the presentiment, the itinerarium mentis.

It was an April morning. We were having coffee on the terrace at the Hôtel Zemmi; the view was festive (snow and sun), and we were feasting our eyes on a Sachertorte layered with whipped cream. Why the old man chose that moment to expound his philosophy, I have no idea. A portent?

Mylius: Let us begin with a realistic notion of what “being dead” means to us. Impassive so far as the outside world goes, insensible, indifferent. If we agree that this is death, then life is similar, the difference between the two merely quantitative. Ideally, life ought to be learning, experience, interests, but you know very well that measured against that ideal of life (in any case never fully realized), measured against a theoretically possible multiplicity of experiences or relations, each of us is not much more than a dead man. Death signifies impassibility, yet ignorance and forgetfulness or the tendency to forget, reduce the living—in terms of nearly all the possible experiences and relations—to a similar impassibility. We are dead to everything that doesn’t touch us or doesn’t interest us. I don’t mean what’s happening on the Moon, but what’s happening in the house just across the road. Of the myriad events taking place every day in our own human sphere, we know of only a few, a few dozen, shall we say, and most of them indirectly, via the news. We speak, badly, one language of the 3,000 spoken on Earth. Biological death, then, is the perfecting of a state we already occupy.

Me: My biological death makes me impassible to myself, the private individual, but while I live whatever affects me, the private individual, is something I suffer or enjoy. Greatly!

Mylius: There’s no reason the private individual should be the privileged object of experience. Everything that is real can be experienced, but we’re incapable of achieving that, and if as seems right, that is how life should be measured, we don’t have very much of it. It’s understandable that we console ourselves with the thought that not very much, however little, is precious and important to us, but it doesn’t make things better.

Me: Perhaps. But that “not very much” will suffice for me.

Mylius: Consider the blindness of a dead man and that of a living person. What is the difference? Our ignorance, and thus indifference, impassibility, confronted with almost all the possible “data”