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

O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort.

•

For an instant, fear overwhelms me again. I wait, trembling, for the rocks to come churning down, sealing me in this enormous tomb forever. I have the time to remark on the sacrilegious audacity that brought me here, and to curse it. I wouldn’t have time to escape, and I don’t try to.

The rumbling grows distant. Or decreases. It stops.

Step by step I return outside. I take a breath. There are no men, no human beings, neither alive nor dead, inside or out. Only a dog or two whose howling reaches my ears, the rain beating down, and me.

I must convince myself that I am alone. No fairy tales, no “sarcasm en dentelles” after Borges, none of his lace-edged sarcasm. I’m stuck in a gigantic, empty universe in which there’s no room for mirrors that multiply, for labyrinths and loopholes, avoidable magic, allusive warnings. Everything is linear and unidirectional. As solid and lacking in handholds as glass, where nothing points to anything if not to my insignificance, my ignorance, my perfect inadequacy. No equivocal ambiguities, no enigmas to resolve, apart from the disproportion between events and the person involved. There is but one way forward for me, resignation. Someone is enjoying the immense irony of this disproportion. Exemplary cautionary tales will be drawn from it.

In their cafeteria, the absent miners kept stores of dried beef, hardtack, beer, and Italian wine. I eat, and my physical resilience is in its way mysterious; the entrepreneurs of early detection would be dismayed. It is only now that fatigue, cold, bitterness, and fear knock me down and I fall into a stony sleep, my head on the table.

•

Today I discovered what was causing the cadaverish stink that’s been haunting me for the past few days at the Mayr. On top of a delivery van in the alleyway beside the hotel, I found a number of cages full of chickens. Dead, long dead, and decomposing. Dead poultry tends to become flesh, undeniably real, and this is one of the things that terrify me. There’s the plane of the natural and the causal, and the one of the unnatural and the inexplicable, and the coexistence of the two intensifies the unnatural and the inexplicable.

It appears my fate is to oscillate between the two planes. Like swimmers in a pool, but not so comfortably.

Swimmers. Between gusts of wet, soaking wind I built a sort of carnival set of plastic and papier-mâché in the square in front of City Hall. Widening the breach I’d made in a window of the Grand Emporium, I carried out twenty or so mannequins. I chose the ones in the department with the End of Season sale, slightly old-fashioned mannequins, the most realistic, with wigs. And I set them out in bunches in the middle of the piazza. The place livened right up and took on its usual appearance. Even realer than what I remember. Plastic and papier-mâché. The great Roland Barthes, writing about plastic, eminently maintained that matter is far more prized than life.43 I take other, feminine mannequins to the city swimming pool, surging beneath the gusts of Föhn behind the square. To one foot of each, I attach a brick and toss them in. I’ve calculated the weight well; they don’t sink, but float, the whole bust above the water. My swimmers gather and disperse, bob cheerfully up and down in the puzzled waters.

When I return to the piazza, the wind, coming at it from one side, has lashed out at my friends. They lie on the ground in patches of melting snow, beaming their intrepid smiles toward the heavens, like those who were left in the square in front of the Winter Palace after the Cossacks had fired on the crowd.44

I collect them patiently, one by one. This time I seat them in the automobiles stubbornly waiting in the parking lot. It’s true that they are jointed, yet I realize that no force is needed to get them into the cars, they go willingly. Human beings resume their privileged habits with ease.

Especially because those automobiles are still alive. I try one of the keys and the engine responds. After pumping the accelerator a couple of times, I find the car idles well. Even that.

•

It’s late in the evening, and I’ve spent the entire day in my morgue-hotel. At night, an old prompting seizes me, and I look for a typewriter in the office, and shove a sheet of paper in it. Once a journalist . . . : it seems one remains true to the instincts of the ruminating intellectual. Nothing’s wasted; any experience can be recycled if the usual filters are employed.

I type out half a page.

The human-centered type of immanence has become an inescapable rule, just as the idealistic type once was. We have reduced the universe of reality to mankind, not excluding science. Now mankind seems to have disappeared, but panhumanism has not, and everything, even the night of June 2, can be resolved using its terms. The solution is sarcasm, “lace-edged” sarcasm, and cheerful humor. The car engine will start up again: A Dissipatio H.G. doesn’t prevent a carburetor from regulating the carburation. The proprietors in the Valley of Jehoshaphat, subject to the Last Judgment, and their cars down there, are ready to roll out. The Last Judgment, what’s the point? Our century preceded it. The damned and the supposed blessed filled the many, huge Chrysopolises. The Valley of Jehoshaphat is our century, which was always making distinctions, according to its innumerable, rigorous rules.

I leave the office and my text, not particularly pleased with myself.

Not pleased, and not convinced. I don’t actually believe in immanence. And pan-humanism is a fad, as my ex-colleague Lopez would have said. A fashion. A fashion that has endured for a while and still does because there is one conformist left—and it will endure as long as that conformist does.

•

Nevertheless, I’ve come back from terror to routine, and recovering one’s habits is a positive