Dissipatio H.G. Guido Morselli (best time to read books .txt) 📖

of his city titled De Fine Temporum (I think, but have no way to verify it), Salvian, seized with evangelical mercy for the woes of men, spoke of their hoped-for mass sublimatio.

And this is nice: he granted that final redemption even to pagans. All living bodies having been made ethereal in a single miraculous event, they would be taken to heaven in a mass assumption. Abrupt and unexpected. I quote from memory: Mundus permanebit. (He was right on that point). Viri, mulieres, pueri, humani viventes cuius-cumque aetatis, ordinis vel nationis, raptim sublimabuntur.32 (It wasn’t Salvian who inspired Freud; Freud’s sublimation is a pale metaphor.)

But Salvian joined clemency with discerning justice. Nihil huius gloriae decet peccatorem.33 Pagans as such can sublimate, sinners, no. It would be interesting to see which of the two categories I belong to, assuming they are not superimposed. But my knowledge, or self-knowledge, does not reach that far. I desist.

11

WHEN I went into the shepherds’ house the other day, I saw no nightclothes on the bed, as I recall. Now I look into one of the rooms that was occupied at the Mayr, and overcoming a certain revulsion, poke around the sheets using a clothes hanger.

No nightgowns or pajamas. In the closet I find an entire female wardrobe: evening dress, tennis clothes, ski gear, and a jewelry case with bracelets and rings. On the table are binoculars and a Polaroid camera. Below, parked in the piazza, the woman’s car. But the nightclothes have disappeared. The Dissipatio Humani Generis, the sublimatio, has made a subtle distinction: the vanities, even precious, adherent things (jewelry) remain below, destined to damage and loss, the clothing that in that moment covers people, shares the fate of the bodies. Nylon, rayon, polyamide, and other fibers invade the intermundia.

I am wrong to be astonished. Augustine of Hippo supplied the theological explanation. It is unseemly, the great Augustine said somewhere, that human beings should appear naked in the kingdom of heaven. A more than welcome observation (demonstrating that a major thinker can also pay attention to the details of his science, something I don’t see Husserl doing in our times). Clothing, suggested Augustine, is natural hominis tegumentum, quasi altera cutis.34 Perfect.

In the room I visited at the Mayr there was the usual supply of tranquilizers on the night table. I pocketed them. Not because I suffer from insomnia; I had another idea. I feel I have a duty to symbolically resow (yes, resow) the species, following Deucalion.34 He used stones that grew into human beings. With those meprobamate pills, I hope to propagate a calmer, less quarrelsome breed (compared to the extinct). I thought I might plant them on the Bellevue tennis courts where I watched the Davis Cup’s European zone matches. They ought to produce handsome people, like tennis champions, and like them, inclined toward fair play. I’ll spread them parsimoniously. It’s a breed that tends to multiply exponentially. You never know.

•

So Deucalion appears.

Nothing illegitimate about that. I am the Successor. Humanity was, now I am. Incarnation of the epilogue. Outcome of the generations. The purpose, the destination, the journey’s end. (Is there a humorous aspect to what I’m saying? Up to a point. The humor’s fitting, if not altogether sincere; it’s undercut by pride and melancholy).

I see a pyramid. If I look at it carefully, a temporally existing, upside-down pyramid. Actually, two pyramids. The one, upright, widens over the eons from the first man or hominid progenitor to the swarming billions of creatures of the same species present on the night of June 2. Underneath that, the upside-down triangle (and this one has no temporal existence, it is merely an ideal) that from the swarming billions suddenly shrinks to a single individual.

I am that point of termination. (The word vertigo derives from vertex, summit or apex: mal di vertex. My head spins; it must.)

If up until now there has been humanity, and now there is only me, then I must take on the activities that they have had to abandon. And what did they do, in fact? What did they do? Well, it’s pretty simple: they acted so as to achieve things. And they thought about things they saw around them, or believed they saw around them. And they represented them with words, signs, sounds.

Other than that, they did nothing. I may be a reductionist (a simplifier), but I don’t think I’ve omitted anything. To carry on, to substitute for them, is not something that reduces me to quivering with fear; it wouldn’t make anyone quiver. When all is said and done they didn’t have great expectations, or ambitions.

•

The one thing that’s certain is that I’m the survivor. By chance?

I don’t think so. I’ve always believed that Chance—supposing such a capital-C thing exists and isn’t just that holy foolishness we call asylum ignorantiae36—is utterly undistinguishable from a superior and inscrutable will. Lloyds and the great London insurance companies didn’t consider hurricanes and freak waves, great wildfires and earthquakes to be accidents, they called them Acts of God.

I survive. Therefore I was chosen, or excluded. It was not chance, but will. But it is up to me to interpret. I’ll conclude I’m the chosen if I decide that humanity deserved to come to an end on the night of June 2, and the dissipatio was punishment. And that I’m the excluded if I decide that it’s all a glorious mystery, an assumption to the empyrean, the angelification of the species, and so forth.

They are absolute alternatives, but I’ve been given the faculty to choose. I am the elect—or the damned. With the curious distinction that it’s up to me to elect or damn myself. And I do have to decide. “To drown in the abyss—heaven or hell, who cares?”37 That’s all very well for Baudelaire the magician. For me, no. That’s mumbo jumbo. It matters. It matters.

The magician here supersedes all oratory, all prayer. Or better, in the present circumstances, it is St. Thomas Aquinas with his sober,