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

too, though wakefulness never lets go, sleep that is stupor and silence among objects both nearby and unreachable, known and unrecognizable, disfigured.

•

For two nights and nearly two days, I lay in that chair, dead but not clinically, or in whatever state is closest to the absence of life. Nothing has remained in my memory, although the events are recent; I may have exhibited some motor reactions but they left no trace. Recovery began with the body; I urinated behind the chair, knowing I was doing so, while on the psychic side I said to myself, “Enough,” and I knew I said it. I recalled the tragic Bach chorale.

It was worse. The trauma had reduced me to the (not entirely negative) state of a thing. Now I was returning to awareness, and fear.

Fear that served as its own measure, that justified itself, fed on itself. Ruminant. Evil. Ready to see itself as perfect, pure and unprecedented. Here is what I recall of its beginnings. The very start.

Chronicle of fear

I am standing in front of the glass door and I say to myself: up until yesterday the world was uninhabited. But in a tolerable way, like an apartment whose owners are on vacation. Today it is a tomb, wide open and empty. The Roman sentries about to faint. No, just one sentry.

I wonder what to do. Where to hide, where to find refuge.

I won’t go home again, I say to myself, that’s impossible. And I won’t stay here. Here there were sixty, seventy people, and they are all dead, no doubt of that anymore. Every one of those rooms upstairs is a slab in the morgue.

But elsewhere it is all the same, I reply to myself. Every house, every room, is a coffin.

Nature, though, lives on elsewhere. With all its usual manifestations: rain, now turning to sleet, beginning to lay a white cover on the road. This is natural, of this earth.

Who knows, I reply. In every depiction of agonizing death, there is frost and ice in addition to flames. I don’t want to believe it but I could well be dead myself, like the others.

And yet, I am breathing, and moving. Not long ago I ate some chocolate.

I seem to be breathing, and eating. But it is an illusion.

•

I look around for the tinfoil from the chocolate. It’s there by my feet on the carpet, but it doesn’t reassure me.

The night (I say to myself) when I came back from the cave of the siphon, I went to bed with the black-eyed girl, the Browning 7.65. And I know I pulled the trigger. And that gun doesn’t jam.

And did you aim it well?

I pointed it at my mouth. And in the morning there was blood on the pillow.

But the dead don’t see themselves or their own blood that they have spilled.

How do we know that the dead don’t see themselves?

I pulled the trigger. But did I remove the Browning’s safety? I don’t think so. The blood on the pillow can be otherwise explained; I hit my head on a rock.

Excuses. To pretend I’d survived. I had to be an exception. Instead, the night of June 2 was my last, too. The rest of it, the aftermath, is nothing but a trick of solipsistic presumption.

No, it’s not true that I insisted on being an exception.

Yes, I did insist and I’m certain of it, even though I pretended to doubt, and to consider the alternative.

In any event, as of yesterday, everything has changed.

And I, too, have changed. As of yesterday I’ve begun to understand that death is certain to come, and that something is keeping it back, and it’s not kindness, and not sleep, either. Something that resembles a precipice. A profound experience, very profound. But down, not up.

•

Fear takes root in paralyzing trauma, it rants and raves. It’s inevitably a disease of discursive reason; it doesn’t affect angels and animals.

15

THE UNKNOWN is upon me, and I am alone, with no means of escape. I have no aid, and no counsel. Who can I hope will save me? Science and philosophy, maybe, which are still with me, if only in the tiniest degree, and in glimmers. But they didn’t predict any of what has happened, and are ignorant of it. It is I who knows that in any case; what is happening is not contemplable, it goes beyond that.

A human creature is not born to face this. That’s the one thing I know for certain. It is therefore a mistake, a shocking sort of negligence, that a single human being should have been left behind.

The last man. Man in a double sense, but one of these two senses doesn’t interest me here. I don’t judge myself, I have no assessments to make. It’s clear that I have survived, and that is distinctly absurd, unfair, and grotesque.

Let me die. For better or for worse I must join them. I was not different from them; they all resembled me. Including the ignorance and the presumption.

The woman from abroad who wanted to know about those window grates at St. Vilcifredo, the plump little woman dressed in pink, ate her lunch, played bridge, and then was assumed. Where and how doesn’t matter. She is no longer here.

I am still here, and chasms of fear yawn open in me. Fear that grows concentrated even as it spreads, as it saturates everything. A gelid black substance in which I’m miserably, foolishly stuck, like a fly frozen in ice. “Where can I go?” I wonder, “Where can I hide?” And I understand that I cannot go anywhere, the fear is all around, and identical. Once I had the singular vice of solipsism, and my word (to the others) was No Trespassing. And then I found the exit barred to me, indefinitely. When an earthquake struck, we used to take comfort in the fact it would end. Now it doesn’t end, I can’t hope anymore to hear the “danger’s over” signal, the all-clear. Time has stopped.

Before me, who was