Contents


PART ONE: More of Qfwfq

The Soft Moon
The Origin of the Birds
Crystals
Blood, Sea

PART TWO: Priscilla

I. Mitosis
II. Meiosis
III. Death

PART THREE: t zero:

t zero
The Chase
The Night Driver
The Count of Monte Cristo




PART ONE: More of Qfwfq



The Soft Moon



According to the calculations of H. Gerstenkorn, later developed by
H. Alfven, the terrestrial continents are simply fragments of the
Moon which fell upon our planet. According to this theory, the
Moon originally was a planet gravitating around the Sun, until the
moment when the nearness of the Earth caused it to be derailed from
its orbit. Captured by terrestrial gravity, the Moon moved closer
and closer, contracting its orbit around us. At a certain moment
the reciprocal attraction began to alter the surface of the two
celestial bodies, raising very high waves from which fragments were
detached and sent spinning in space, between Earth and Moon, espec-
ially fragments of lunar matter which finally fell upon Earth. Later,
through the influence of our tides, the Moon was impelled to move
away again, until it reached its present orbit. But a part of the
lunar mass, perhaps half of it, had remained on Earth, forming the
continents.

She was coming closer,--Qfwfq recalled,--I noticed it as I was going
home, raising my eyes between the walls of glass and steel, and I
saw her, no longer a light like all the others that shine in the
evening: the ones they light on Earth when at a certain hour they
pull down a lever at the power station, or those of the sky, farth-
er away but similar, or at least not out of harmony with the style
of all the rest--I speak in the present tense, but I am still refer-
ring to those remote times--I saw her breaking away from all the
other lights of the sky and the streets, standing out in the con-
cave map of darkness, no longer occupying a point, perhaps a big
one on the order of Mars and Venus, like a hole through which the
light spreads, but now becoming an out-and-out portion of space,
and she was taking form, not yet clearly identifiable because eyes
weren't used to identifying it, but also because the outlines weren't
sufficiently precise to define a regular figure. Anyway I saw it
was becoming a thing.

And it revolted me. Because it was a thing that, though you
couldn't understand what it was made of, or perhaps precisely be-
cause you couldn't understand, seemed different from all the things
in our life, our good things of plastic, of nylon, of chrome-plated
steel, duco, synthetic resins, plexiglass, aluminum, vinyl, formica,
zinc, asphalt, asbestos, cement, the old things among which we were
born and bred. It was something incompatible, extraneous. I saw it
approaching as if it were going to slip between the skyscrapers of
Madison Avenue (I'm talking about the avenue we had then, beyond
comparison with the Madison of today), in that corridor of night
sky glowing with light from above the jagged line of the cornices;
and it spread out, imposing on our familiar landscape not only its
light of an unsuitable color, but also its volume, its weight, its
incongruous substantiality. And then, all over the face of the
Earth--the surfaces of metal plating, iron armatures, rubber pave-
ments, glass domes--over every part of us that was exposed, I felt
a shudder pass.

As fast as the traffic allowed, I went through the tunnel, drove
toward the Observatory. Sibyl was there, her eye glued to the tele-
scope. As a rule she didn't like me to visit her during working
hours, and the moment she saw me she would make a vexed face; but
not that evening: she didn't even look up, it was obvious she was
expecting my visit. "Have you seen it?" would have been a stupid
question, but I had to bite my tongue to keep from asking it, I
was so impatient to know what she thought about it all. "Yes, the
planet Moon has come still closer," Sibyl said, before I had asked
her anything, "the phenomenon was foreseen."

I felt a bit relieved. "Do you foresee that it'll move away a-
gain?" I asked.

Sibyl still had one eyelid half closed, peering into the tele-
scope. "No," she said, "it won't move away any more."

I didn't understand. "You mean that the Earth and the Moon have
become twin planets?"

"I mean the Moon isn't a planet any more and the Earth has a
Moon."

Sibyl had a casual way of dismissing matters; it irritated me ev-
ery time she did it. "What kind of thinking is that?" I complained.
"One planet's just as much a planet as the others, isn't it?"

"Would you call this a planet? I mean, a planet the way the
Earth's a planet? Look!" And Sibyl moved from the telescope, mo-
tioning me to approach it. "The Moon could never manage to become
a planet like ours."

I wasn't listening to her explanation: the Moon, enlarged by the
telescope, appeared to me in all its details, or rather many of
its details appeared to me at once, so mixed up that the more I ob-
served it the less sure I was of how it was made, and I could only
vouch for the effect this sight caused in me, an effect of fascin-
ated disgust. First of all, I could note the green veins that ran
over it, thicker in certain zones, like a network, but to tell the
truth this was the most insignificant detail, the least showy, be-
cause what you might call the general properties eluded the grasp
of my glance, thanks perhaps to the slightly viscous glistening
that transpired from a myriad of pores, one would have said, or op-
ercula, and also in certain points from extended tumefactions of
the surface, like buboes or suckers. There, I'm concentrating again
on the details, a more picturesque method of description apparent-
ly, though in reality of only limited efficiency, because only by
considering the details within the whole--such as the swelling of
the sublunar pulp which stretched its pale external tissues but
made them also fold over on themselves in inlets or recesses look-
ing like scars (so it, this Moon, might also have been made of
pieces pressed together and stuck on carelessly)--it is, as I say,
only by considering the whole, as in diseased viscera, that the
single details can also be considered: for example, a thick forest
as of black fur which jutted out of a rift.

"Does it seem right to you that it should go on revolving around
the Sun, like us?" Sibyl said. "The Earth is far stronger: in the
end it'll shift the Moon from its orbit and make it turn around
the Earth. We'll have a satellite."

I was quite careful not to express the anguish I was feeling. I
knew how Sibyl reacted in these cases: assuming an attitude of
blatant superiority, if not of downright cynicism, acting like a
person who is never surprised by anything. She behaved this way
to provoke me, I believe (that is, I hope; I would certainly have
felt even greater anguish at the thought that she acted out of
real indifference). "And... and..." I started to say, taking care
to formulate a question that would show nothing but objective
curiosity and yet would force Sibyl to say something to appease
my anxiety (so I still hoped for this from her, I still insisted
that her calm reassure me), ". . . and will we always have it in
sight like this?"

"This is nothing," she answered. "It'll come even closer." And
for the first time, she smiled. "Don't you like it? Why, seeing
it there like that, so different, so far from any known form,
and knowing that it's ours, that the Earth has captured it and
is keeping it there ... I don't know, I like it, it seems beau-
tiful to me."

At this point I no longer cared about hiding my mood. "But won't
it be dangerous for us?" I asked. Sibyl tensed her lips in the ex-
pression of hers I liked least. "We are on the Earth, the Earth
has a force which means it can keep planets around itself, on its
own, like the Sun. What can the Moon oppose, in the way of mass,
field of gravity, orbit stability, consistency? Surely you don't
mean to compare the two? The Moon is all soft, the Earth is hard,
solid, the Earth endures." "What about the Moon? If it doesn't
endure?" "Oh, the Earth's force will keep it in its place." I
waited till Sibyl had finished her shift at the Observatory, to
drive her home. Just outside the city there is that cloverleaf
where all the superhighways spread out, rushing over bridges that
cross one another in spiral patterns, held up by cement pillars
of different heights; you never know in what direction you're go-
ing as you follow the white arrows painted on the asphalt, and
now and then you find the city you're leaving suddenly facing
you, coming closer, patterned with squares of light among the
pillars and the curves of the spiral. .There was the Moon just a-
bove us: and the city seemed fragile to me, suspended like a cob-
web, with all its little tinkling panes, its threadlike embroide-
ry of light, under that excrescence that swelled the sky. Now, I
have used the word "excrescence" to indicate the Moon, but I must
at once fall back on the same word to describe the new thing I
discovered at that moment: namely, an excrescence emerging from
that Moon excrescence, stretching toward the Earth like the drip
of a candle.

"What's that? What's happening?" I asked, but by now a new curve
had set our automobile journeying toward the darkness.

"It's the terrestrial attraction causing solid tides on the Moon's
surface," Sibyl said. "What did I tell you? Call that consistency?"

The unwinding of the superhighway brought us again face to face
with the Moon, and that candle dripping had stretched still far-
ther toward the Earth, curling at its tip like a mustache hair,
and then, as its point of attachment thinned to a peduncle, it
had almost the appearance of a mushroom.

We lived in a cottage, in a line with others along one of the
many avenues of a vast Green Belt. We sat down as always on the
rocking chairs on the porch with a view of the back yard, but
this time we didn't look at the half-acre of glazed tiles that
formed our share of green space; our eyes were staring above,
magnetized by that sort of polyp hanging over us. Because now
the Moon's drippings had become numerous, and they extended to-
ward the Earth like slimy tentacles, and each of them seemed a-
bout to start dripping in its turn a matter composed of gelatin
and hair and mold and slaver.

"Now I ask you, is that any way for a celestial body to disin-
tegrate?" Sibyl insisted. "Now you must realize the superiority
of our planet. What if the Moon does come down? Let it come:
the time will come also for it to stop. This is the sort of pow-
er the Earth's field of gravity has: after it's attracted the
Moon almost on top of us, all of a sudden it stops the Moon,
carries it back to a proper distance, and keeps it there, mak-
ing it revolve, pressing it into a compact ball. The Moon has
us to thank if it doesn't fall apart completely!"

I found Sibyl's reasoning convincing, because to me, too, the
Moon seemed something inferior and revolting; but her words still
couldn't relieve my apprehension. I saw the lunar outcrops writh-
ing in the sky with sinuous movements, as if they were trying to
reach or enfold something: there was the city, below, where we
could see a glow of light on the horizon with the jagged shadow
of the skyline. Would it stop in time, the Moon, as Sibyl had
said, before one of its tentacles had succeeded in clutching the
spire of a skyscraper? And what if, sooner, one of these stalac-
tites that kept stretching and lengthening should break off, plunge
down upon us?

"Something may come down," Sibyl admitted, without waiting for
a question from me, "but what does that matter? The Earth is all
sheathed in waterproof, crush-proof, dirtproof materials; even
if a bit of this Moon mush drips onto us, we can clean it up in
a hurry."

As if Sibyl's assurance had enabled me to see something that
had surely been taking place for a while, I cried: "Look, stuff
is coming down!" and I raised my arm to point out a suspension
of thick drops of a creamy pap in the air. But at that same mo-
ment a vibration came from the Earth, a tinkling; and through
the sky, in the direction opposite to the falling clumps of plan-
etary secretion, a very minute flight of solid fragments rose,
the scales of the Earth's armor which was being shattered: un-
breakable glass and plates of steel and sheaths of nonconducting
material, drawn up by the Moon's attraction as in an eddy of
grains of sand.

"Only minimal damage," Sibyl said, "and just on the surface. We
can repair the gaps in no time. It's only logical that the cap-
ture of a satellite should cost us some losses: but it's worth
it, there's simply no comparison!"

That was when we heard the first crack of a lunar meteorite fall-
ing to the Earth: a very loud "splat!," a deafening noise and,
at the same time, a disgustingly spongy one, which didn't remain
alone but was followed by a series of apparently explosive splash-
es, of flabby whip strokes falling on every side. Before our eyes
became accustomed to perceiving what was falling, a little time
went by: to tell the truth, I was the slow one because I expected
the pieces of the Moon to be luminous too; whereas Sibyl already
saw them and commented on them in her contemptuous tone but also
with an unusual indulgence: "Soft meteorites, now really, who's
ever seen such a thing? Stuff worthy of the Moon ." . .interest-
ing, though, in its way . . ."

One remained stuck on the wire hedge, half crushed under its
weight, spilling over on the ground and immediately mixing with
it, and I began to see what it was, that is I began to assemble
some sensations that would allow me to form a visual image of
what I had before me, and then I became aware of other, smaller
spots scattered all over the tile pavement: something like a mud
of acid mucus which penetrated into the terrestrial strata, or
rather a kind of vegetal parasite that absorbed everything it
touched, incorporating it into its own gluey pulp, or else like
a serum in which colonies of whirling and ravenous micro-organ-
isms were agglomerated, or else a pancreas cut in pieces trying
to join together again, opening like suckers the cells of its
cut edges, or else . . .

I would have liked to close my eyes and I couldn't; but when I
heard Sibyl's voice say: "Of course, I find it revolting too,
but when you think that the fact is finally established: the
Earth is definitely different and superior and we're on this
side, I believe that for a moment we can even enjoy sinking into
it, because anyway afterward ..." I wheeled around toward her.
Her mouth was open in a smile I had never seen before: a damp
smile, slightly animal . . .

The sensation I felt on seeing her like that became confused
with the fear caused almost at the same moment by the fall of
the great lunar fragment, the one that submerged and destroyed
our cottage and the whole avenue and the residential suburb and
a great part of the county, in a single, hot, syrupy, stunning
blow. After digging through the lunar matter all night, we man-
aged to see the sky again. It was dawn; the storm of meteorites
was over; the Earth around us was unrecognizable, covered by a
deep layer of mud, a paste of green proliferations and slippery
organisms. Of our former terrestrial materials not a trace was
visible. The Moon was moving off in the sky, pale, also unrec-
ognizable: narrowing my eyes, I could see it was covered with
a thick mass of rubble and shards and fragments, shiny, sharp,
clean.

The sequel is familiar. After hundreds of thousands of centuries
we are trying to give the Earth its former natural appearance,
we are reconstructing the primitive terrestrial crust of plas-
tic and cement and metal and glass and enamel and imitation lea-
ther. But what a long way we have to go! For a still incalcul-
able amount of time we will be condemned to sink into the lunar
discharge, rotten with cholorophyll and gastric juices and dew
and nitrogenous gases and cream and tears. We still have much
to do, soldering the shiny and precise plates of the primordial
terrestrial sheath until we have erased--or at least concealed--
the alien and hostile additions. And with today's materials, too,
concocted haphazardly, products of a corrupt Earth, trying in
vain to imitate the prime substances, which cannot be equaled.

The true materials, those of the past, are said to be found now
only on the Moon, unexploited and lying there in a mess, and they
say that for this reason alone it would be worthwhile going there:
to recover them. I don't like to seem the sort who always says
disagreeable things, but we all know what state the Moon is in,
exposed to cosmic storms, full of holes, corroded, worn. If we
go there, we'll only have the disappointment of learning that e-
ven our material of the old days--the great reason and proof of
terrestrial superiority-was inferior goods, not made to last, which
can no longer be used even as scrap. There was a time when
I would have been careful not to show suspicions of this sort
to Sibyl. But now, when she's fat, disheveled, lazy, greedily
eating cream puffs, what can Sibyl say to me, now?



The Origin of the Birds



The appearance of Birds comes relatively late, in the history
of evolution, following the emergence of all the other classes
of the animal kingdom. The progenitor of the Birds--or at least
the first whose traces have been found by paleontologists--is
the Archeopteryx (still endowed with certain characteristics
of the Reptiles from which he descends), who dates from the
Jurassic period, tens of millions of years after the first Mam-
mals. This is the only exception to the successive appearance
of animal groups progressively more developed in the zoologic-
al scale.

In those days we weren't expecting any more surprises,--Qfwfq
narrated,--by then it was clear how things were going to pro-
ceed. Those who existed, existed; we had to work things out for
ourselves: some would go farther, some would remain where they
were, and some wouldn't manage to survive. The choice had to
be made from a limited number of possibilities.

But instead, one morning I hear some singing, outside, that I
have never heard before. Or rather (since we didn't yet know
what singing was), I hear something making a sound that nobody
has ever made before. I look out. I see an unknown animal sing-
ing on a branch. He had wings feet tail claws spurs feathers
plumes fins quills beak teeth crop horns crest wattles and a
star on his forehead. It was a bird; you've realized that al-
ready, but I didn't; they had never been seen before. He sang:
"Koaxpf . . . Koaxpf . . . Koaaacch . . . ," he beat his wings,
striped with iridescent colors, he rose in flight, he came to
rest a bit farther on, resumed his singing.

Now these stories can be told better with strip drawings than
with a story composed of sentences one after the other. But to
make a cartoon with the bird on the branch and me looking out
and all the others with their noses in the air, I would have to
remember better how a number of things were made, things I've
long since forgotten; first the thing I now call bird, second
what I now call I, third the branch, fourth the place where I
was looking out, fifth all the others. Of these elements I re-
member only that they were very different from the way we would
draw them now. It's best for you to try on your own to imagine
the series of cartoons with all the little figures of the char-
acters in their places, against an effectively outlined back-
ground, but you must try at the same time not to imagine the
figures, or the background either. Each figure will have its
little balloon with the words it says, or with the noises it
makes, but there's no need for you to read everything written
there letter for letter, you only need a general idea, accord-
ing to what I'm going to tell you.

To begin with, you can read a lot of exclamation marks and
question marks spurting from our heads, and these mean we were
looking at the bird full of amazement--festive amazement, with
desire on our part also to sing, to imitate that first warbl-
ing, and to jump, to see the bird rise in flight--but also full
of consternation, because the existence of birds knocked our
traditional way of thinking into a cocked hat. In the strip that
follows, you see the wisest of us all, old U(h), who moves from
the group of the others and says: "Don't look at him! He's a mis-
take!" and he holds out his hands as if he wanted to cover the
eyes of those present. "Now I'll erase him!" he says, or thinks,
and to depict this desire of his we could have him draw a diagon-
al line across the frame. The bird flaps his wings, eludes the
diagonal, and flies to safety in the opposite corner. U(h) is
happy because, with that diagonal line between them, he can't
see the bird any more. The bird pecks at the line, breaks it,
and flies at old U(h). Old U(h), to erase him, tries to draw a
couple of crossed lines over him. At the point where the two
lines meet, the bird lights and lays an egg. Old U(h) pulls the
lines from under him, the egg falls, the bird darts off. There
is one frame all stained with egg yolk.

I like telling things in cartoon form, but I would have to al-
ternate the action frames with idea frames, and explain for ex-
ample this stubbornness of U(h)'s in not wanting to admit the
existence of the bird. So imagine one of those little frames
all filled with writing, which are used to bring you up to date
on what went before: After the failure of the Pterosauria, for
millions and millions of years all trace of animals with wings
had been lost.("Except for Insects," a footnote can clarify.)

The question of winged creatures was considered closed by now.
Hadn't we been told over and over that everything capable of
being born from the Reptiles had been born? In the course of
millions of years there was no form of living creature that
hadn't had its opportunity to come forth, populate the earth,
and then--in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred--decline and
vanish. On this point we were all agreed: the remaining species
were the only deserving ones, destined to give life to more and
more highly selected progeny, better suited to their surround-
ings. For some time we had been tormented by doubts as to who
was a monster and who wasn't, but that too could be considered
long settled: all of us who existed were nonmonsters, while the
monsters were all those who could exist and didn't, because the
succession of causes and effects had clearly favored us, the
nonmonsters, rather than them. But if we were going to begin a-
gain with strange animals, if the Reptiles, antiquated as they
were, started to pull out limbs and teguments they had never
felt any need for previously, in other words if a creature im-
possible by definition such as a bird was instead possible (and
what's more if it could be a handsome bird like this one, pleas-
ing to the sight when he poised on the fern leaves, and to the
hearing when he released his warbling), then the barrier be-
tween monsters and non-monsters was exploded and everything
was possible again.

The bird flew far off. (In the drawing you see a black shadow
against the clouds in the sky: not because the bird is black
but because that's the way distant birds are drawn.) And I ran
after him. (You see me from behind, as I enter a vast land-
scape of mountains and forests.) Old U(h) is shouting at me:
"Come back, Qfwfq!"

I crossed unfamiliar zones. More than once I thought I was lost
(in the drawing it only has to be depicted once), but then I
would hear a "Koaxpf ..." and, raising my eyes, I would see the
bird perched on a plant, as if he were waiting for me.

Following him like that, I reached a spot where the bushes
blocked my view. I opened a path for myself: beneath my feet
I saw the void. The earth ended there; I was balanced on the
brink. (The spiral line rising from my head represents my diz-
ziness.) Below, nothing could be seen: a few clouds. And the
bird, in that void, went flying off, and every now and then he
twisted his neck toward me as if inviting me to follow him.
Follow him where, when there was nothing farther on?

And then from the white distance a shadow rose, like a horizon
of mist, which gradually became clearer, with more distinct
outlines. It was a continent, coming forward in the void: you
could see its shores, its valleys, its heights, and already
the bird was flying above them. But what bird? He was no long-
er alone, the whole sky over there was a flapping of wings of
every color and every form.

Leaning out from the brink of our earth, I watched the conti-
nent drift toward me. "It's crashing into us!" I shouted, and
at that moment the ground trembled. (A "bang!" written in big
letters.) The two worlds, having touched, bounced apart again,
then were rejoined, then separated once more. In one of these
clashes I found myself flung to the other side, while the emp-
ty abyss yawned again and separated me from my world.

I looked around: I didn't recognize anything. Trees, crystals,
animals, grasses--everything was different. Not only did birds
inhabit the branches, but so did fish (after a manner of speak-
ing) with spiders' legs or (you might say) worms with feathers.
Now it's not that I want to describe to you the forms of life
over there; imagine them any way you can, more or less strange,
it doesn't much matter. What matters is that around me there
were displayed all the forms the world could have taken in its
transformations but instead hadn't taken, for some casual rea-
son or for some basic incompatibility: the rejected forms, un-
usable, lost.

(To give an idea this strip of drawings should be done in neg-
ative: with figures not unlike the others but in white on black;
or else upside down--assuming that it can be decided, for any of
these figures, which is up and which is down.)

Alarm froze my bones (in the cartoon, drops of cold sweat spurt
from my figure) at seeing those images, all of them in some way
familiar and all in some way distorted in their proportions or
their combinations (my very tiny figure in white, superimposed
on the black shadows that occupy the whole frame), but I couldn't
refrain from exploring eagerly all around me. You would have
said that my gaze, rather than avoid those monsters, sought them
out, as if to be convinced they weren't monsters entirely, and
at a certain point my horror was replaced by a not unpleasant
sensation (represented in the drawing by luminous rays crossing
the black background): beauty existed even there, if one could
recognize it. This curiosity had led me away from the coast, and
I moved among hills that were spiky like enormous sea urchins.
By now I was lost in the heart of the unknown continent. (The
figure that represents me has become minuscule.) The birds,
which a short time before had been for me the strangest of
apparitions, were already becoming the most familiar of pres-
ences. There were so many that they formed a kind of dome around
me, raising and lowering their wings all together (frame crammed
with birds; my outline barely glimpsed). Others were resting on
the ground, perched on the bushes, and gradually as I advanced
they moved. Was I their prisoner? I turned to run off, but I
was surrounded by walls of birds who left me no passage, except
in one direction. They were driving me where they wanted, all
their movements were leading me to one point. What was there,
at the end? I could discern only a kind of enormous egg lying
on its side, which opened slowly, like a shell.

All of a sudden it was flung open. I smiled. My eyes filled
with tears of emotion. (I'm depicted alone, in profile; what
I'm looking at remains outside the frame.) Before me there was
a creature of a beauty never seen before. A different beauty,
which couldn't be compared to all the forms in which we had
recognized beauty (in the frame it is still placed in such a
way that only I have it before me, not the reader), and
yet ours, the most ours thing of our world (in the frame a sym-
bolical depiction could be used: a feminine hand, or a foot,
or a breast, emerging from a great cloak of feathers); without
it our world would always have lacked something. I felt I had
arrived at the point where everything converged (an eye could
be drawn, an eye with long radial lashes which are transformed
into a vortex) and where I was about to be swallowed (or a
mouth, the parting of two finely drawn lips, tall as I, and
me flying, sucked toward the tongue rising from the darkness).

All around me, birds: flapping of beaks, wings that flutter,
claws extended, and the cry: "Koaxpf . . .Koaxpf. . . .
Koaaacch. . ."

"Who are you?" I asked.

A title explains: Qfwfq before the beautiful Org-Onir-Ornit-Or,
and makes my question pointless; the balloon that contains it
is covered by another, also rising from my mouth, with the words
"I love you!"--an equally superfluous affirmation--promptly
followed by another balloon containing the question: "Are you
a prisoner?" to which I don't await an answer, and in a fourth
balloon which makes its way among the others I add, "I'll rescue
you. Tonight we'll flee together."

The following strip is entirely dedicated to the preparations
for the flight, to the sleep of the birds and the monsters in
a night illuminated by an unknown firmament. A dark little
frame, and my voice: "Are you following me?" Or's voice an-
swered: "Yes."

Here you can imagine for yourselves a series of adventurous
strips: Qfwfq and Or in flight across the Continent of the
Birds. Alarms, pursuit, dangers: I leave these to you. To
tell the story I should somehow describe what Or was like;
and I can't. Imagine a figure somehow towering over mine, but
which I somehow hide and protect.

We reached the edge of the chasm. It was dawn. The sun was
rising, pale, to reveal our continent now disappearing in
the distance. How were we to reach it? I turned toward Or:
Or opened her wings. (You hadn't noticed she had them, in the
previous frames: two wings broad as sails.) I clung to her
cloak. Or flew.

In the next cartoons Or is seen flying among the clouds, with
my head peeping out from her bosom. Then, a triangle of little
black triangles in the sky: a swarm of birds pursuing us. We
are still in the midst of the void; our continent is approach-
ing, but the swarm is faster. They are birds of prey, with
curved beaks, fiery eyes. If Or is quick to reach Earth, we
will be among our own kind, before the raptors can attack us.
Hurry, Or, a few more flaps of your wings: in the next strip
we can reach safety. Not a chance: now the swarm has surround-
ed us. Or is flying among the raptors (a little white triangle
drawn in another triangle full of little black triangles). We
are flying over my village: Or would have only to fold her
wings and let herself drop, and we would be free. But Or con-
tinues flying high, along with the birds. I shouted: "Or, move
lower!" She opened her cloak and let me fall. ("Plop!") The
swarm, with Or in their midst, turns in the sky, goes back,
becomes tiny on the horizon. I find myself flat on the ground,
alone.

(Title: During Qfwfq's absence, many changes had taken place.)
Since the existence of birds had been discovered, the ideas
that governed our world had come to a crisis. What everyone
had thought he understood before, the simple and regular way
in which things were as they were, was no longer valid; in o-
ther words: this was nothing but one of the countless possi-
bilities; nobody excluded the possibility that things could
proceed in other, entirely different ways. You would have said
that now each individual was ashamed of being the way he was
expected to be, and was making an effort to show some irregu-
lar, unforeseen aspect: a slightly more birdlike aspect, or
if not exactly birdlike, at least sufficiently so to keep him
from looking out of place alongside the strangeness of the
birds. I no longer recognized my neighbors. Not that they
were much changed: but those who had some inexplicable char-
acteristic which they had formerly tried to conceal now put
it on display. And they all looked as if they were expecting
something any moment: not the punctual succession of causes
and effects as in the past, but the unexpected.

I couldn't get my bearings. The others thought I had stuck to
the old ideas, to the time before the birds; they didn't under-
stand that to me their birdish whims were only laughable: I
had seen much more than that, I had visited the world of the
things that could have been, and I couldn't drive it from my
mind. And I had known the beauty kept prisoner in the heart
of that world, the beauty lost for me and for all of us, and
I had fallen in love with it.

I spent my days on the top of a mountain, gazing at the sky
in case a bird flew across it. And on the peak of another
mountain nearby there was old U(h), also looking at the sky.
Old U(h) was still considered the wisest of us all, but his
attitude toward the birds had changed.

He believed the birds were no longer a mistake, but the
truth, the only truth of the world. He had taken to inter-
preting the birds' flight, trying to read the future in it.

"Seen anything?" he shouted to me, from his mountain.

"Nothing in sight," I said.

"There's one!" we would shout at times, he or I.

"Where was it coming from? I didn't have time to see from
what part of the sky it appeared. Tell me: where from?" he
asked, all breathless. U(h) drew his auguries from the
source of the flight. Or else it was I who asked: "What dir-
ection was it flying in? I didn't see it! Did it vanish
over here or over there?" because I hoped the birds would
show me the way to reach Or.

There's no use my telling you in detail the cunning I used
to succeed in returning to the Continent of the Birds. In
the strips it would be told with one of those tricks that
work well only in drawings. (The frame is empty. I arrive.
I spread paste on the upper right-hand corner. I sit down
in the lower left-hand corner. A bird enters, flying, from
the left, at the top. As he leaves the frame, his tail be-
comes stuck. He keeps flying and pulls after him the whole
frame stuck to his tail, with me sitting at the bottom, al-
lowing myself to be carried along. Thus I arrive at the
Land of the Birds. If you don't like this story you can
think up another one: the important thing is to have me ar-
rive there.)

I arrived and I felt my arms and legs clutched. I was sur-
rounded by birds; one had perched on my head, one was peck-
ing at my neck. "Qfwfq, you're under arrest! We've caught
you, at last!" I was shut up in a cell.

"Will they kill me?" I asked the jailer bird.

"Tomorrow you'll be tried and then you'll know," he said,
perched on the bars.

"Who's going to judge me?"

"The Queen of the Birds."

The next day I was led into the throne room. But I had seen
before that enormous shell-egg that was opening. I started.

"Then you're not a prisoner of the birds!" I exclaimed.

A beak dug into my neck. "Bow down before Queen Org-Onir-Ornit
-Or!"

Or made a sign. All the birds stopped. (In the drawing you
see a slender, beringed hand which rises from an arrangement
of feathers.)

"Marry me and you'll be safe," Or said.

Our wedding was celebrated. I can't tell you anything about
this either: the only thing that's remained in my memory is
a feathery flutter of iridescent images. Perhaps I was paying
for my happiness by renouncing any understanding of what I
was living through.

I asked Or.

"I would like to understand."

"What?"

"Everything, all this." I gestured toward my surroundings.

"You'll understand when you've forgotten what you understood
before."

Night fell. The shell-egg served both as throne and as nuptial
bed.

"Have you forgotten?"

"Yes. What? I don't know what, I don't remember anything."

(Frame of Qfwfq's thoughts: No, I still remember, I'm about to
forget everything, but I'm forcing myself to remember!)

"Come."

We lay down together.

(Frame of Qfwfq's thoughts: I'm forgetting . . . It's beautiful
to forget . . . No, I want to remember . . . I want to forget
and remember at the same time . . . Just another second and I
feel I'll have forgotten . . .Wait . . . Oh! An explosion mark-
ed with the word "Flash!" or else "Eureka!" in capital letters.)
For a fraction of a second between the loss of everything I knew
before and the gain of everything I would know afterward, I man-
aged to embrace in a single thought the world of things as they
were and of things as they could have been, and I realized that
a single system included all. The world of birds, of monsters,
of Or's beauty was the same as the one where I had always lived,
which none of us had understood wholly.

"Or! I understand! You! How beautiful! Hurrah!" I exclaimed and
I sat up in the bed. My bride let out a cry.

"Now I'll explain it to you!" I said, exultant. "Now I'll explain
everything to everyone!"

"Be quiet!" Or shouted. "You must be quiet!"

"The world is single and what exists can't be explained without
..." I proclaimed. Now she was over me, she was trying to suffo-
cate me (in the drawing: a breast crushing me): "Be quiet! Be
quiet!" Hundreds of beaks and claws were tearing the canopy of
the nuptial bed. The birds fell upon me, but beyond their wings
I could recognize my native landscape, which was becoming fused
with the alien continent.

"There's no difference. Monsters and nonmonsters have always been
close to one another! What hasn't been continues to be..."--I was
speaking not only to the birds and the monsters but also to those
I had always known, who were rushing in on every side.

"Qfwfq! You've lost me! Birds! He's yours!" and the Queen pushed
me away.

Too late, I realized how the birds' beaks were intent on separat-
ing the two worlds that my revelation had united. "No, wait, don't
move away, the two of us together, Or . . . where are you?" I was
rolling in the void among scraps of paper and feathers.

(The birds, with beaks and claws, tear up the page of strips. Each
flies off with a scrap of printed paper in his beak. The page be-
low is also covered with strip drawings; it depicts the world as
it was before the birds' appearance and its successive, predictable
developments. I'm among the others, with a bewildered look. In the
sky there are still birds, but nobody pays attention to them any
more.) Of what I understood then, I've now forgotten everything.
What I've told you is all I can reconstruct, with the help of con-
jectures in the episodes with the most gaps. I have never stopped
hoping that the birds might one day take me back to Queen Or. But
are they real birds, these ones that have remained in our midst?
The more I observe them, the less they suggest what I would like
to remember. (The last strip is all photographs: a bird, the same
bird in close-up, the head of the bird enlarged, a detail of the
head, the eye . . .)



Crystals



If the substances that made up the terrestrial globe in its incan-
descent state had had at their disposal a period of time long enough
to allow them to grow cold and also sufficient freedom of movement,
each of them would have become separated from the others in a single,
enormous crystal.

It could have been different, I know,--Qfwfq remarked, --you're telling
me: I believed so firmly in that world of crystal that was supposed
to come forth that I can't resign myself to living still in this world,
amorphous and crumbling and gummy, which has been our lot, instead. I
run all the time like everybody else, I take the train each morning
(I live in New Jersey) to slip into the cluster of prisms I see emerg-
ing beyond the Hudson, with its sharp cusps; I spend my days there,
going up and down the horizontal and vertical axes that crisscross
that compact solid, or along the obligatory routes that graze its
sides and its edges. But I don't fall into the trap: I know they're
making me run among smooth transparent walls and between sym-
metrical angles so I'll believe I'm inside a crystal, so I'll recognize a
regular form there, a rotation axis, a constant in the dihedrons,
whereas none of all this exists. The contrary exists: glass, those
are glass solids that flank the streets, not crystal, it's a paste
of haphazard molecules which has invaded and cemented the world, a
layer of suddenly chilled lava, stiffened into forms imposed from the
outside, whereas inside it's magma just as in the Earth's incande-
scent days. I don't pine for them surely, those days: I feel discon-
tented with things as they are, but if, for that reason, you expect
me to remember the past with nostalgia, you're mistaken. It was hor-
rible, the Earth without any crust, an eternal incandescent winter,
a mineral bog, with black swirls of iron and nickel that dripped down
from every crack toward the center of the globe, and jets of mercury
that gushed up in high spurts. We made our way through a boiling
haze, Vug and I, and we could never manage to touch a solid point.
A barrier of liquid rocks that we found before us would suddenly
evaporate in our path, disintegrating into an acid cloud; we would
rush to pass it, but already we could feel it condensing and strik-
ing us like a storm of metallic rain, swelling the thick waves of
an aluminum ocean. The substance of things changed around us every
minute; the atoms, that is, passed from one state of disorder to
another state of disorder and then another still: or rather, prac-
tically speaking, everything remained always the same. The only
real change would have been the atoms' arranging themselves in
some sort of order: this is what Vug and I were looking for, mov-
ing in the mixture of the elements without any points of reference,
without a before or an after.

Now the situation is different, I admit: I have a wrist watch, I
compare the angle of its hands with the angle of all the hands I
see; I have an engagement book where the hours of my business ap-
pointments are marked down; I have a checkbook on whose stubs I add
and subtract numbers. At Penn Station I get off the train, I take
the subway, I stand and grasp the strap with one hand to keep my
balance while I hold my newspaper up in the other, folded so I can
glance over the figures of the stock market quotations: I play the
game, in other words, the game of pretending there's an order in
the dust, a regularity in the system, or an interpenetration of
different systems, incongruous but still measurable, so that every
graininess of disorder coincides with the faceting of an order
which promptly crumbles. Before it was worse, of course. The world
was a solution of substances where everything was dissolved into
everything and the solvent of everything. Vug and I kept on get-
ting lost in its midst, losing our lost places, where we had been
lost always, without any idea of what we could have found (or of
what could have found us) so as to be lost no more.

We realized it all of a sudden. Vug said: "There!"

She was pointing, in the midst of a lava flow, at something that
was taking form. It was a solid with regular, smooth facets and
sharp corners; and these facets and corners were slowly expanding,
as if at the expense of the surrounding matter, and also the form
of the solid was changing, while still maintaining symmetrical
proportions . . . And it wasn't only the form that was distinct
from all the rest: it was also the way the light entered inside,
passing through it and refracted by it. Vug said: "They shine!
Lots of them!"

It wasn't the only one, in fact. On the incandescent expanse
where once only ephemeral gas bubbles had risen, expelled from
the Earth's bowels, cubes now were coming to the surface and oct-
ahedrons, prisms, figures so transparent they seemed airy, empty
inside, but instead, as we soon saw, they concentrated in them-
selves an incredible compactness and hardness. The sparkle of
this angled blossoming was invading the Earth, and Vug said:
"It's spring!" I kissed her.

Now you can understand me: if I love order, it's not--as with so
many others--the mark of a character subjected to an inner dis-
cipline, a repression of the instincts. In me the idea of an ab-
solutely regular world, symmetrical and methodical, is associat-
ed with that first impulse and burgeoning of nature, that amorous
tension--what you call eros--while all the rest of your images,
those that according to you associate passion with disorder,
love with intemperate overflow--river fire whirlpool volcano--for
me are memories of nothingness and listlessness and boredom.

It was a mistake on my part, it didn't take me long to understand
that. Here we are at the point of arrival: Vug is lost; of the
diamond eros only dust remains; the simulated crystal that im-
prisons me now is base glass. I follow the arrows on the asphalt,
I line up at the traffic light, and I start again (today I came
into New York by car) when the green comes on (as I do every
Wednesday because I take) shifting into first (Dorothy to her
psychoanalyst), I try to maintain a steady speed which allows
me to pass all the green lights on Second Avenue. This, which
you call order, is a threadbare patch over disintegration; I
found a parking space but in two hours I'll have to go down a-
gain to put another coin in the meter; if I forget they'll tow
my car away.

I dreamed of a world of crystal, in those days: I didn't dream
it, I saw it, an indestructible frozen springtime of quartz. Pol-
yhedrons grew up, tall as mountains, diaphanous: the shadow of
the person beyond pierced through their thickness. "Vug, it's
you!" To reach her I flung myself against walls smooth as mir-
rors; I slipped back; I clutched the edges, wounding myself; I
ran along treacherous perimeters, and at every turn there was a
different light--diffused, milky, opaque--that the mountain con-
tained.

"Where are you?"

"In the woods!"

The silver crystals were filiform trees, with branches at every
right angle. Skeletal fronds of tin and of lead thickened the fo-
rest in a geometric vegetation.

In the middle there was Vug, running. "Qfwfq! It's different over
there!" she cried. "Gold, green, blue!" A valley of beryllium o-
pened out, surrounded by ridges of every color, from aquamarine
to emerald. I followed Vug with my spirit torn between happiness
and fear: happiness at seeing how every substance that made up
the world was finding its definitive and solid form, and a still
vague fear that this triumph of order in such various fashions
might reproduce on another scale the disorder we had barely left
behind us. A total crystal I dreamed, a topaz world that would
leave out nothing: I was impatient for our Earth to detach itself
from the wheel of gas and dust in which all the celestial bodies
were whirling, ours should be the first to escape that useless
dispersal which is the universe.

Of course, if he chooses, a person can also take it into his
head to find an order in the stars, the galaxies, an order in
the lighted windows of the empty skyscrapers where between nine
and midnight the cleaning women wax the floors of the offices.
Rationalize, that's the big task: rationalize if you don't want
everything to come apart. Tonight we're dining in town, in a
restaurant on the terrace of a twenty-fourth floor. It's a bus-
iness dinner: there are six of us; there is also Dorothy, and
the wife of Dick Bemberg. I eat some oysters, I look at a star
that's called (if I have the right one) Betelgeuse. We make con-
versation: we husbands talk about production; the ladies, about
consumption. Anyway, seeing the firmament is difficult: the
lights of Manhattan spread out a halo that becomes mixed with the
luminosity of the sky.

The wonder of crystals is the network of atoms that is constant-
ly repeated: this is what Vug wouldn't understand. What she lik-
ed--I quickly realized--was to discover in crystals some differ-
ences, even minimal ones, irregularities, flaws.

"But what does one atom out of place matter to you, an exfolia-
tion that's a bit crooked," I said, "in a solid that's destined
to be enlarged infinitely according to a regular pattern? It's
the single crystal we're working toward, the gigantic crystal . . ."

"I like them when there're lots of little ones," she said. To
contradict me, surely; but also because it was true that crys-
tals were popping up by the thousands at the same time and were
interpenetrating one another, arresting their growth where they
came in contact, and they never succeeded in taking over entire-
ly the liquid rock from which they received their form: the
world wasn't tending to be composed into an ever-simpler figure
but was clotting in a vitreous mass from which prisms and octa-
hedrons and cubes seemed to be struggling to be free, to draw
all the matter to themselves . . .

A crater exploded: a cascade of diamonds spread out.

"Look! Aren't they big?" Vug exclaimed.

On every side there were erupting volcanoes: a continent of dia-
mond refracted the sun's light in a mosaic of rainbow chips.

"Didn't you say the smaller they are the more you like them?" I
reminded her.

"No! Those enormous ones--I want them!" and she darted off.

"There are still bigger ones," I said, pointing above us. The
sparkle was blinding: I could already see a mountain-diamond, a
faceted and iridescent chain, a gem-plateau, a Koh-i-noor-Hima-
laya.

"What can I do with them? I like the ones that can be picked up.
I want to have them!" and in Vug there was already the frenzy
of possession.

"The diamond will have us, instead. It's the stronger," I said.

I was mistaken, as usual: the diamond was had, not by us. When
I walk past Tiffany's, I stop to look at the windows, I contem-
plate the diamond prisoners, shards of our lost kingdom. They
lie in velvet coffins, chained with silver and platinum; with
my imagination and my memory I enlarge them, I give them again
the gigantic dimensions of fortress, garden, lake, I imagine
Vug's pale blue shadow mirrored there. I'm not imagining it:
it really is Vug who now advances among the diamonds. I turn:
it's the girl looking into the window over my shoulder, from
beneath the hair falling across her forehead. "Vug!" I say.
"Our diamonds!"

She laughs.

"Is it really you?" I ask. "What's your name?"

She gives me her telephone number.

We are among slabs of glass: I live in simulated order, I would
like to say to her, I have an office on the East Side, I live
in New Jersey, for the weekend Dorothy has invited the Bembergs,
against simulated order simulated disorder is impotent, diamond
would be necessary, not for us to possess it but for it to pos-
sess us, the free diamond in which Vug and I were free . . .

"I'll call you," I say to her, only out of the desire to resume
my arguing with her.

In an aluminum crystal, where chance scatters some chrome atoms,
the transparency is colored a dark red: so the rubies flowered
beneath our footsteps.

"You see?" Vug said. "Aren't they beautiful?"

We couldn't walk through a valley of rubies without starting to
quarrel again.

"Yes," I said, "because the regularity of the hexagon...."

"Uff!" she said. "Would they be rubies without the intrusion of
extraneous atoms? Answer me that!"

I became angry. More beautiful? Or less beautiful? We could go
on arguing to infinity, but the only sure fact was that the Earth
was moving in the direction of Vug's preferences. Vug's world
was in the fissures, the cracks where lava rises, dissolving the
rock and mixing the minerals in unpredictable concretions. Seeing
her caress walls of granite, I regretted what had been lost in
that rock, the exactness of the feldspars, the micas, the quartz-
es. Vug seemed to take pleasure only in noting how minutely vari-
egated the face of the world appeared. How could we understand
each other? For me all that mattered was homogeneous growth, in-
discerptibility, achieved serenity; for her, everything had to be
separation and mixture, one or the other, or both at once. Even
the two of us had to take on an aspect (we still possessed neither
form nor future): I imagined a slow uniform expansion, following
the crystals' example, until the me-crystal would have interpene-
trated and fused with the her-crystal and perhaps together we
would have become a unity within the world-crystal; she already
seemed to know that the law of living matter would be infinite
separating and rejoining. Was it Vug, then, who was right?

It's Monday; I telephone her. It's almost summer already. We spend
a day together, on Staten Island, lying on the beach. Vug watches
the grains of sand trickle through her fingers.

"All these tiny crystals..." she says.

The shattered world that surrounds us is, for her, still the world
of the past, the one we expected to be born from the incandescent
world. To be sure, the crystals still give the world form, break-
ing up, being reduced to almost imperceptible fragments rolled by
the waves, encrusted with all the elements dissolved in the sea
which kneads them together again in steep cliffs, in sandstone
reefs, a hundred times dissolved and recomposed, in schists,
slates, marbles of glabrous whiteness, simulacra of what they
once could have been and now can never be.

And again I am gripped by my stubbornness as I was when it began
to be clear that the game was lost, that the Earth's crust was
becoming a congeries of disparate forms, and I didn't want to
resign myself, and at every irregularity in the porphyry that
Vug happily pointed out to me, at every vitrescence that emerg-
ed from the basalt, I wanted to persuade myself that these were
only apparent flaws, that they were all part of a much vaster
regular structure, in which every asymmetry we thought we ob-
served really corresponded to a network of symmetries so compli-
cated we couldn't comprehend it, and I tried to calculate how
many billions of sides and dihedral corners this labyrinthine
crystal must have, this hypercrystal that included within itself
crystals and non-crystals.

Vug has brought a little transistor radio along to the beach
with her.

"Everything comes from crystal," I say, "even the music we're
hearing." But I know full well that the transistor's crystal is
imperfect, flawed, veined with impurities, with rents in the
warp of the atoms. She says: "It's an obsession with you." And
it is our old quarrel, continuing. She wants to make me admit
that real order carries impurity within itself, destruction.

The boat lands at the Battery, it is evening; in the illuminat-
ed network of the skyscraper-prisms I now look only at the dark
rips, the gaps. I see Vug home; I go up with her. She lives
downtown, she has a photography studio. As I look around I see
nothing but perturbations of the order of the atoms: luminescent
tubes, TV, the condensing of tiny silver crystals on the photo-
graphic plates. I open the icebox, I take out the ice for our
whisky. From the transistor comes the sound of a saxophone. The
crystal which has succeeded in becoming the world, in making the
world transparent to itself, in refracting it into infinite
spectral images, is not mine: it is a corroded crystal, stained,
mixed. The victory of the crystals (and of Vug) has been the
same thing as their defeat (and mine). I'll wait now till the
Thelonius Monk record ends, then I'll tell her.



Blood, Sea



The conditions that obtained when life had not yet emerged from
the oceans have not subsequently changed a great deal for the cells
of the human body, bathed by the primordial wave which continues
to flow in the arteries. Our blood in fact has a chemical compo-
sition analogous to that of the sea of our origins, from which
the first living cells and the first multicellular beings deriv-
ed the oxygen and the other elements necessary to life. With the
evolution of more complex organisms, the problem of maintaining
a maximum number of cells in contact with the liquid environment
could not be solved simply by the expansion of the exterior sur-
face: those organisms endowed with hollow structures, into which
the sea water could flow, found themselves at an advantage. But
it was only with the ramification of these cavities into a system
of blood circulation that distribution of oxygen was guaranteed
to the complex of cells, thus making terrestrial life possible.
The sea where living creatures were at one time immersed is now
enclosed within their bodies.

Basically not much has changed: I swim, I continue swimming in the
same warm sea,--Qjwfq said,-- or rather, the inside isn't changed,
what was formerly the outside, where I used to swim under the sun,
and where I now swim in darkness, is inside; what's changed is
the outside, the present outside, which was the inside before,
that's changed all right; however, it doesn't matter very much. I
say it doesn't matter very much and you promptly reply: What do
you mean, the outside doesn't matter much? What I mean is that if
you look at it more closely, from the point of view of the old out-
side, that is from the present inside, what is the present outside?
It's simply where it's dry, where there is no flux or reflux, and
as far as mattering goes, of course, that matters too, inasmuch as
it's the outside, since it's been on the outside, since that out-
side has been outside, and people believe it's more deserving of
consideration than the inside. When all is said and done, however,
even when it was inside it mattered, though in a more restricted
range or so it seemed then. This is what I mean: less deserving of
consideration. Well, let's start talking right now about the oth-
ers, those who are not I, our neighbor: we know our neighbor exists
because he's outside, agreed? Outside like the present outside.
But before, when the outside was what we swam in, the very dense
and very warm ocean, even then there were the others, slippery
things, in that old outside, which is like the present inside, and
so it is now when I've changed places and given the wheel to Signor
Cecere, at the Codogno service station, and in front, next to him,
Jenny Fumagalli has taken the passenger's seat, and I've moved in
back with Zylphia: the outside, what is the outside? A dry envir-
onment, lacking in meaning, a bit crammed (there are four of us in
a Volkswagen), where all is indifferent and interchangeable, Jenny
Fumagalli, Codogno, Signor Cecere, the service station, and as far
as Zylphia is concerned, at the moment when I placed my hand on her
knee, at perhaps 15 kilometers from Casalpusterlengo, or else she
was the one who started touching me, I don't remember, since outside
events tend to be confused, what I felt, I mean the sensation that
came from outside, was really a weak business compared to what went
through my blood and to what I have felt ever since then, since the
time when we were swimming together in the same torrid, blazing o-
cean, Zylphia and I. The underwater depths were red like the color
we see now only inside our eyelids, and the sun's rays penetrated
to brighten them in flashes or else in sprays. We undulated with
no sense of direction, drawn by an obscure current so light that it
seemed downright impalpable and yet strong enough to drag us up in
very high waves and down in their troughs. Zylphia would plunge
headlong beneath me in a violet, almost black whirlpool, then soar
over me rising toward the more scarlet stripes that ran beneath the
luminous vault. We felt all this through the layers of our former
surface dilated to maintain the most extended possible contact with
that nourishing sea, because at every up and down of the waves there
was stuff that passed from outside of us to our inside, all sust-
enance of every sort, even iron, healthful stuff, in short, and in
fact I've never been so well as I was then. Or, to be more precise:
I was well since in dilating my surface I increased the possibili-
ties of contact between me and this outside of me that was so pre-
cious, but as the zones of my body soaked in marine solution were
extended, my volume also increased at the same time, and a more and
more voluminous zone within me became unreachable by the element
outside, it became arid, dull, and the weight of this dry and tor-
pid thickness I carried within me was the only shadow on my happi-
ness, our happiness, Zylphia's and mine, because the more she splen-
didly took up space in the sea, the more the inert and opaque thick-
ness grew in her too, unlaved and unlavable, lost to the vital flux,
not reached by the messages I transmitted to her through the vibra-
tion of the waves. So perhaps I could say I'm better off now than I
was then, now that the layers of our former surface, then stretched
on the outside, have been turned inside out like a glove, now that
all the outside has been turned inward and has entered and pervaded
us through filiform ramifications, yes, I could really say this, were
it not for the fact that the dull arid zone has been projected out-
ward, has expanded to the extent of the distance between my tweed
suit and the fleeting landscape of the Lodi plain, and it surrounds
me, swollen with undesired presences such as Signor Cecere's, with
all the thickness that Signor Cecere, formerly, would have enclosed
within himself--in his foolish manner of dilating uniformly like a
ball--now unfolded before me in a surface unsuitably irregular and
detailed, especially in his pudgy neck dotted with pimples, taut in
his half-starched collar at this moment when he is saying: "Oh, you
two on the back seat!" and he has slightly shifted the rear-view mir-
ror and has certainly glimpsed what our hands are doing, mine and
Zylphia's, our diminutive outside hands, our diminutively sensitive
hands that pursue the memory of ourselves swimming, or rather our
swimming memory, or rather the presence of what in me and Zylphia
continues swimming or being swum, together, as then.

This is a distinction I might bring up to give a clearer idea of
before and now: before, we swam, and now we are swum. But on sober
reflection I prefer not to go into this, because in reality even
when the sea was outside I swam in it the same way I do now, with-
out any intervention of my will, that is to say I was swum even
then, no more nor less than now, there was a current that enfolded
me and carried me this way and that, a gentle and soft fluid, in
which Zylphia and I wallowed, turning on ourselves, hovering over
abysses of ruby-colored transparence, hiding among turquoise-col-
ored filaments that wriggled up from the depths; but these sen-
sations of movement--wait and I'll explain it to you--were due
only to what? They were due to a kind of general pulsation, no,
I don't want to confuse things with the way they are now, because
since we've been keeping the sea closed inside us it's natural
that in moving it should make this piston effect, but in those
days you certainly couldn't have talked about pistons, because
you would have had to imagine a piston without walls, a combus-
tion chamber of infinite volume as the sea appeared infinite to
us, or rather the ocean, in which we were immersed, whereas now
everything is pulsation and beating and rumble and crackling, in-
side the arteries and outside, the sea within the arteries that
accelerates its course as soon as I feel Zylphia's hand seeking
mine, or rather, as soon as I feel the acceleration in the course
of Zylphia's arteries as she feels my hand seeking hers (the two
flows which are still the same flow of a same sea and which are
joined beyond the contact of the thirsty fingertips); and also
outside, the opaque thirsty outside that seeks dully to imitate
the beat and rumble and crackling of inside, and vibrates in the
accelerator under Signor Cecere's foot, and all the line of cars
stopped at the exit from the superhighway tries to repeat the
pulsing of the ocean now buried inside us, of the red ocean that
was once without shores, under the sun.

It is a false sense of movement that this now-motionless line of
cars transmits, crackling; then it moves and it's as if it were
still, the movement is false, it merely repeats signs and white
stripes and roadbeds; and the whole journey has been nothing but
false movement in the immobility and indifference of everything
that is outside. Only the sea moved and moves, outside or inside,
only in that movement did Zylphia and I become aware of each o-
ther's presence, even if then we didn't so much as graze each
other, even if I was undulating in this direction and she in that,
but the sea had only to quicken its rhythm and I became aware of
Zylphia's presence, her presence which was different, for example,
from Signor Cecere, who was however also around even then and I
could sense him as I felt an acceleration of the same sort as that
other one but with a negative charge, that is the acceleration of
the sea (and now of the blood) with regard to Zylphia was (is)
like swimming toward each other, or else like swimming and chas-
ing each other in play, while the acceleration (of the sea and
now of the blood) with regard to Signor Cecere was (is) like a
swimming away to avoid him, or else like swimming toward him to
make him go away, all of this involving no change in the rela-
tionship of our respective distances.

Now it is Signor Cecere who accelerates (the words used are the
same but the meanings change) and passes an Alfa Romeo in a
curve, and it is with regard to Zylphia that he accelerates,
to distract her with a risky maneuver, a false risky maneuver,
from the swimming that unites her and me: false, I say, as a
maneuver, not as a risk because the risk may well be real, that
is to our inside which in a crash could spurt outside; whereas
the maneuver in itself changes nothing at all, the distances
between Alfa, curve, Volkswagen can assume different values and
relationships but nothing essential happens, as nothing essen-
tial happens in Zylphia, who doesn't care a bit about Signor
Cecere's driving, at most it is Jenny Fumagalli who exults: "My,
isn't this car fast?" and her exultation, in the presumption
that Signor Cecere's bold driving is for her benefit, is doubly
unjustified, first because her inside transmits nothing to her
that justifies exultation, and secondly because she is mistaken
about Signor Cecere's intentions as he in turn is mistaken,
believing he is achieving God knows what with his showing off,
just as she, Jenny Fumagalli, was mistaken before about my in-
tentions, when I was at the wheel and she at my side, and there
in back next to Zylphia Signor Cecere, too, was mistaken, both
concentrating--he and Jenny--on the reverse arrangement of
dry layers of surface, unaware--dilated into balls as they were--
that the only real things that happen are those that happen in
the swimming of our immersed parts; and so this silly business
of passing Alfas meaning nothing, like a passing of fixed, im-
mobile, nailed-down objects which continues to be superimposed
on the story of our free and real swimming, continues to seek
meaning by interfering with it, in the only silly way it knows,
risk of blood, a false return to a sea of blood which would no
longer be blood or sea.

Here I must hasten to make clear--before by another idiotic pass-
ing of a trailer truck Signor Cecere makes all clarification
pointless--the way that the common blood-sea of the past was
common and at the same time individual to each of us and how we
can continue swimming in it as such and how we can't: I don't
know if I can make this sort of explanation in a hurry because,
as always, when this general substance is discussed, the talk
can't be in general terms but has to vary according to the re-
lationship between one individual and the others, so it amounts
practically to beginning all over again at the beginning. Now
then: this business of having the vital element in common was a
beautiful thing inasmuch as the separation between me and Zylphia
was so to speak overcome and we could feel ourselves at the same
time two distinct individuals and a single whole, which always
has its advantages, but when you realize that this single whole
also included absolutely insipid presences such as Jenny Fuma-
galli, or worse, unbearable ones such as Signor Cecere, then
thanks all the same, the thing loses much of its interest. This
is the point where the reproductive instinct comes into play: we
had a great desire, Zylphia and I, or at least I had a great
desire, and I think she must have had it too, since she was will-
ing, to multiply our presence in the sea-blood so that there
would be more and more of us to profit from it and less and
less of Signor Cecere, and as we had our reproductive cells all
ready for that very purpose, we fell to fertilizing with a will,
that is to say I fertilized everything of hers that was fertil-
izable, so that our presence would increase in both absolute
number and in percentage, and Signor Cecere--though he too made
feverish clumsy efforts at reproducing himself--would remain in
a minority--this was the dream, the virtual obsession that grip-
ped me--a minority that would become smaller and smaller, in-
significant, zero point zero zero etc. per cent, until he vanish-
ed into the dense cloud of our progeny as in a school of rapid
and ravenous anchovies who would devour him bit by bit, burying
him inside our dry inner layers, bit by bit, where the sea's
flow would never reach him again, and then the sea-blood would
have become one with us, that is, all blood would finally be our
blood.

This is in fact the secret desire I feel, looking at the stiff
collar of Signor Cecere up front: make him disappear, eat him up,
I mean: not eat him up myself, because he turns my stomach slight-
ly (in view of the pimples), but emit, project, outside myself
(outside the Zylphia-me unit), a school of ravenous anchovies (of
me-sardines, of Zylphia-sardines) to devour Signor Cecere, deprive
him of the use of a circulatory system (as well as of a combus-
tion engine, as well as the illusory use of an engine foolishly
combustive), and while we're at it, devour also that pain in the
neck Fumagalli, who because of the simple fact that I sat next to
her before has got it into her head that I flirted with her some-
how, when I wasn't paying the slightest attention to her, and now
she says in that whiny little voice of hers: "Watch out, Zylphia"
(just to cause trouble), "I know that gentleman back there . . ."
just to suggest I behaved with her before as I'm behaving now with
Zylphia, but what can la Fumagalli know about what is really hap-
pening between me and Zylphia, about how Zylphia and I are contin-
uing our ancient swim through the scarlet depths?

I'll go back to what I was saying earlier, because I have the im-
pression things have become a bit confused: to devour Signor Cecere,
to ingurgitate him was the best way to separate him from the blood-
sea when the blood was in fact the sea, when our present inside was
outside and our outside, inside; but now, in reality, my secret de-
sire is to make Signor Cecere become pure outside, deprive him of
the inside he illicitly enjoys, make him expel the lost sea within
his pleonastic person; in short, my dream is to eject against him
not so much a swarm of me-anchovies as a hail of me-projectiles,
rat-tat-tat to riddle him from head to foot, making him spurt his
black blood to the last drop, and this idea is linked also to the
idea of reproducing myself with Zylphia, of multiplying with her
our blood circulation in a platoon or battalion of vindictive des-
cendants armed with automatic rifles to riddle Signor Cecere, this
in fact now prompts my sanguinary instinct (in all secrecy, given
my constant mien as a civil, polite person just like the rest of
you), the sanguinary instinct connected to the meaning of blood as
"our blood" which I bear in me just as you do, civilly and politely.

Thus far everything may seem clear: however, you must bear in mind
that to make it clear I have so simplified things that I'm not
sure whether the step forward I've made is really a step forward.
Because from the moment when blood becomes "our blood," the rel-
ationship between us and blood changes, that is, what counts is
the blood insofar as it is "ours," and all the rest, us included,
counts less. So there was in my impulse toward Zylphia, not only
the drive to have all the ocean for us, but also the drive to
lose it, the ocean, to annihilate ourselves in the ocean, to des-
troy ourselves, to torment ourselves, or rather--as a beginning--
to torment her, Zylphia my beloved, to tear her to pieces, to eat
her up. And with her it's the same: what she wanted was to tor-
ment me, devour me, swallow me, nothing but that. The orange
stain of the sun seen from the water's depths swayed like a me-
dusa, and Zylphia darted among the luminous filaments devoured by
the desire to devour me, and I writhed in the tangles of darkness
that rose from the depths like long strands of seaweed beringed
with indigo glints, raving and longing to bite her. And finally
there on the back seat of the Volkswagen in an abrupt swerve I
fell on her and I sank my teeth into her skin just where the
"American cut" of her sleeves left her shoulder bare, and she
dug her sharp nails between the buttons of my shirt, and this
is the same impulse as before, the impulse that tended to remove
her (or remove me) from marine citizenship and now instead tends
to remove the sea from her, from me, in any case to achieve the
passage from the blazing element of life to the pale and opaque
element which is our absence from the ocean and the absence of
the ocean from us.

The same impulse acts then with amorous obstinacy between her
and me and with hostile obstinacy against Signor Cecere: for
each of us there is no other way of entering into a relation-
ship with the others; I mean, it's always this impulse that
nourishes our own relationship with the others in the most
different and unrecognizable forms, as when Signor Cecere pass-
es cars of greater horse-power than his, even a Porsche,
through intentions of mastery toward these superior cars and
through ill-advised amorous intentions toward Zylphia and
also vindictive ones toward me and also self-destructive ones
toward himself. So, through risk, the insignificance of the
outside manages to interfere with the essential element, the
sea where Zylphia and I continue our nuptial flights of fer-
tilization and destruction: since the risk aims directly at
the blood, at our blood, for if it were a matter only of the
blood of Signor Cecere (a driver, after all, heedless of the
traffic laws) we should hope that at the very least he would
run off the road, but in effect it's a question of all of us,
of the risk of a possible return of our blood from darkness
to the sun, from the separate to the mixed, a false return,
as all of us in our ambiguous game pretend to forget, because
our present inside once it is poured out becomes our present
outside and it can no longer return to being the outside of
the old days.

So Zylphia and I in falling upon each other in the curves
play at provoking vibrations in the blood, that is, at per-
mitting the false thrills of the insipid outside to be add-
ed to those that vibrated from the depths of the millennia
and of the marine abysses, and then Signor Cecere said:
"Let's have a nice plate of spaghetti at the truck drivers'
cafe," masking as generous love of life his constant torpid
violence, and Jenny Fumagalli, acting clever, spoke up: "But
you have to get to the spaghetti first, before the truck
drivers, otherwise they won't leave you any," clever and al-
ways working in the service of the blackest destruction,
and the black truck with the license Udine 38 96 21 was
there ahead, roaring at its forty m.p.h. along the road that
was nothing but curves, and Signor Cecere thought (and per-
haps said): "I'll make it," and he swung out to the left,
and we all thought (and didn't say): "You can't make it,"
and in fact, from the curve the Jaguar was already arriving
full tilt, and to avoid it the Volkswagen scraped the wall
and bounced back to scrape its side against the curved chrome
bumper and, bouncing, it struck the plane tree, then went
spinning down into the precipice, and the sea of common blood
which floods over the crumpled metal isn't the blood-sea of
our origin but only an infinitesimal detail of the outside,
of the insignificant and arid outside, a number in the stat-
istics of accidents over the weekend.



Part Two: Priscilla



In asexual reproduction, the simplest entity which is the
cell divides at a point in its growth. The nucleus divides
into two equal parts, and from a single entity, two result.
But we cannot say that a first entity has given birth to a
second. The two new entities are, to the same degree, the
products of the first. The first has disappeared. Essenti-
ally, it is dead, since only the two entities it has pro-
duced survive. It does not decompose in the way sexed ani-
mals die, but it ceases to be. It ceases to be, in the
sense that it is discontinuous. But, in a point of the re-
production, there was continuity. There exists a point
where the primitive one becomes two. When there are two,
there is again discontinuity in each of the entities. But
the passage implies an instant of continuity between the
two. The first dies, but in its death appears a fundamental
instant of continuity.

Georges Bataille, L'Erotisme (from the introduction)

All genes of the same chromosome are not always pulled in-
to the same daughter cell, and so are not always inherited
together, though they do tend to be. For two homologous
filaments, during their synapsis with one another, are apt
to break, at identical points, and to become joined up a-
gain with their corresponding pieces interchanged, a pro-
cess called crossing-over. Thus a given gene of paternal
origin may in the mature germ cell find itself in the same
chromosome with some other gene of maternal origin, in-
stead of with its former associate gene.

Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Gene"

... in the midst of the Aeneases who carry their An-
chiseses on their backs, I pass from one shore to
another, alone, hating these invisible parents astride
their sons for all their life. . . .

J.-P. Sartre, Les Mots

Suddenly I became aware that an adenine-thymine pair held
together by two hydrogen bonds was identical in shape to
a guanine-cytosine pair held together by at least two hy-
drogen bonds. All the hydrogen bonds seemed to form natu-
rally; no fudging was required to make the two types of
base pairs identical in shape. Quickly I called Jerry over
to ask him whether this time he had any objection to my
new base pairs. When he said no, my morale skyrocketed
. . . this type of double helix suggested a replication
scheme much more satisfactory . . . Given the base se-
quence of one chain, that of its partner was automatical-
ly determined. Conceptually, it was thus very easy to
visualize how a single chain could be the template for
the synthesis of a chain with the complementary sequence.
Upon his arrival Francis did not get more than halfway
through the door before I let loose that the answer to
everything was in our hands . . .

James D. Watson, The Double Helix: A Personal Account
of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA, Chap. 26

Everything summons us to death; nature, as if envious of
the good she has done us, announces to us often and re-
minds us that she cannot leave us for long that bit of
matter she lends us, which must not remain in the same
hands, and which must eternally be in circulation: she
needs it for other forms, she asks it back for other
works.

Bossuet, Sermon sur la mort

One need not worry about how a fixed automaton of this
sort can produce others which are larger and more complex
than itself. In this case the greater size and the higher
complexity of the object to be constructed will be re-
flected in a presumably still greater size of the in-
structions I that have to be furnished. [. . .] In what
follows, all automata for whose construction the fac-
ility A will be used are going to share with A this pro-
perty. All of them will have a place for an instruction
I, that is, a place where such an instruction can be in-
serted. ... It is quite clear that the instruction I is
roughly effecting the function of a gene. It is also
clear that the copying mechanism B performs the funda-
mental act of reproduction, the duplication of the gen-
etic material, which is clearly the fundamental operation
in the multiplication of living cells.

John von Neumann, Theory of Automata (in Collected
Works, Vol. 5)

As for those who so exalt incorruptibility, inalterab-
ility, I believe they are brought to say these things
through their great desire to live a long time and through
the terror they have of death. And not considering
that, if men were immortal, these men would not have
had an opportunity to come into the world. They would
deserve to encounter a Medusa's head, which would trans-
form them into statues of jasper or of diamond, to make
them more perfect than they are. . . . And there is not
the slightest doubt that the Earth is far more perfect,
being, as it is, alterable, changeable, than if it were
a mass of stone, even if it were a whole diamond, hard
and impenetrable.

Galileo Galilei, Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi,
giornata I



I. Mitosis



. . . And when I say "dying of love,"--Qfwfq went on,--I
mean something you have no idea of, because you think fall-
ing in love has to signify falling in love with another
person, or thing, or what have you, in other words I'm here
and what I'm in love with is there, in short a relation-
ship connected to the life of relationships, whereas I'm
talking about the times before I had established any
relationships between myself and anything else, there was
a cell and the cell was me, and that was that. Now we
needn't wonder whether there were other cells around too,
it doesn't matter, there was the cell that was me and it
was already quite an achievement, such a thing is more
than enough to fill one's life, and it's this very sense
of fullness I want to talk to you about. I don't mean full-
ness because of the protoplasm I had, because even if it
had increased to a considerable degree it wasn't anything
exceptional, cells of course are full of protoplasm, what
else could they be full of; no, I'm talking about a sense
of fullness that was, if you'll allow the expression, quote
spiritual unquote, namely, the awareness that this cell
was me, this sense of fullness, this fullness of being a-
ware was something that kept me awake nights, something
that made me beside myself, in other words the situation
I mentioned before, I was "dying of love."

Now I know all of you will raise a flock of objections be-
cause being in love presupposes not only self-awareness but
also awareness of the other, etc., etc., and all I can an-
swer is thanks a lot I know that much myself but if you
aren't going to be patient there's no use in my trying to
explain, and above all you have to forget for a minute the
way you fall in love nowadays, the way I do too now, if
you'll permit me confidences of this sort, I say confidences
because I know if I told you about my falling in love at
present you could accuse me of being indiscreet, whereas
I can talk without any scruples about the time when I was
a unicellular organism, that is I can talk about it ob-
jectively as the saying goes, because it's all water under
the bridge now, and it's a feat on my part even to remem-
ber it, and yet what I do remember is still enough to dis-
turb me from head to foot, so when I use the word "object-
ively" it's a figure of speech, as it always is when you
start out saying you're objective and then what with one
thing and another you end up being subjective, and so this
business I want to tell you about is difficult for me pre-
cisely because it keeps slipping into the subjective, in
my subjective state of those days, which though I recall
it only partially still disturbs me from head to foot like
my subjective of the present, and that's why I've used ex-
pressions that have the disadvantage of creating confusion
with what is different nowadays while they have the advan-
tage of bringing to light what is common between the two
times.

First of all I must be more specific about what little I
remember, or rather I should warn you that if certain parts
of my story are narrated less fully than others it doesn't
mean they're less important but only that they are less
firm in my memory, since what I remember well is my love
story's initial phase if you want to call it that, I would
almost say the preceding phase; at the climax of the love
story my memory dissolves, frays, goes to pieces, and
there's no way for me to remember then what happens after-
ward. I say this not to ward off objections that I'm try-
ing to make you listen to a love story I don't even remem-
ber, but to clarify the fact that not remembering it is at
a certain point necessary to make the story this one and
not another, in other words while a story usually consists
in the memory you have of it, here not remembering the
story becomes the very story itself.

So I am speaking then of the initial phase of a love story
which afterward is probably repeated in an interminable
multiplication of initial phases just like the first and
identified with the first, a multiplication or rather a
squaring, an exponential growth of stories which is always
tantamount to the first story, but it isn't as if I were
so very sure of all this, I assume it as you can also as-
sume it. I'm referring to an initial phase that precedes
the other initial phases, a first phase which must surely
have existed, because it's logical to expect it to exist,
and also because I remember it very well, and when I say
it's the first I don't in the least mean first in the ab-
solute sense, that's what you'd like me to mean but I don't;
I mean first in the sense that we can consider any of these
identical initial phases the first, and the one I refer to
is the one I remember, the one I remember as first in the
sense that before it I don't remember anything. And as for
the first in the absolute sense, your guess is as good as
mine, I'm not interested.

Let's begin this way, then: there is a cell, and this cell
is a unicellular organism, and this unicellular organism
is me, and I know it, and I'm pleased about it. Nothing
special so far. Now let's try to represent this situation
for ourselves in space and time. Time passes, and I, more
and more pleased with being in it and with being me, am al-
so more and more pleased that there is time, and that I am
in time, or rather that time passes and I pass time and
time passes me, or rather I am pleased to be contained in
time, to be the content of time, or the container, in short,
to mark by being me the passing of time. Now you must admit
this begins to arouse a sense of expectation, a happy and
hopeful waiting, a happy youthful impatience, and also an
anxiety, a youthful excited anxiety also basically painful,
a painful unbearable tension and impatience. In addition
you must keep in mind that existing also means being in
space, and in fact I was dished out into space to my full
width, with space all around, and even though I had no know-
ledge it obviously continued on all sides. There's no point
in bothering now about what else this space contained, I
was closed in myself and I minded my own business, and I
didn't even have a nose so I couldn't stick my nose out,
or an eye to take an interest in outside, in what was and
what wasn't; however, I had the sense of occupying space
within space, of wallowing in it, of growing with my proto-
plasm in various directions, but as I said, I don't want to
insist on this quantitative and material aspect, I want to
talk above all about the satisfaction and the burning desire
to do something with space, to have time to extract enjoy-
ment from space, to have space to make something in the
passing of time. Up until now I've kept time and space sep-
arated to help you to understand me better, or rather so
that I could understand better what I should make you under-
stand, but in those days I didn't really distinguish too
clearly what one of them was from what the other was: there
was me, in that point and at that moment--right?--and then
there was an outside which seemed to me a void I might oc-
cupy in another moment or point, in a series of other points
or moments, in short a potential projection of me where,
however, I wasn't present, and therefore a void which was
actually the world and the future, but I didn't know that
yet; it was void because perception was still denied me,
and as for imagination I was even further behind, and when
it came to mental categories I was a total loss, but I had
this contentment because outside of me there was this void
that wasn't me, which perhaps could become me because "me"
was the only word I knew, the only word I could have de-
clined, a void that could become me, however, wasn't me at
that moment and basically never would be: it was the dis-
covery of something else that wasn't yet something but any-
how wasn't me, or rather wasn't me at that moment and in
that point and therefore was something else, and this dis-
covery aroused an exhilarating enthusiasm in me, no, a tor-
ment, a dizzying torture, the dizziness of a void which rep-
resented everything possible, the complement of that full-
ness that was for me all, and there I was brimming over
with love for this elsewhere, this other time, this other-
wise, silent and void.

So you see that when I spoke of being "in love" I wasn't
saying something so far-fetched, and you were always on
the point of interrupting me to say: "In love with yourself,
um-hum, in love with yourself," and I was wise to pay no
attention and not use or let you use that expression; there,
you see that being in love was even then searing passion
for what was outside me, it was the writhing of one who
yearns to escape outside himself as I then went rolling a-
round in time and space, dying of love.

To tell properly the way things proceeded I must remind you
of how I was made, a mass of protoplasm like a kind of pulpy
dumpling with a nucleus in the middle. Now I'm not just try-
ing to make myself sound interesting, but I must say that
in that nucleus I led a very intense life. Physically I was
an individual in his full flowering, all right, on this point
I feel it would be indiscreet to insist: I was young, healthy,
at the peak of my strength, but by that I don't certainly
want to deny that another who might have been in worse shape,
with his cytoplasm fragile or watery, could have revealed
even greater talents. What's important to my story is how
much of this physical life of mine was reflected in the
nucleus; I say physical not because there was a distinction
between physical life and some other kind of life, but to
allow you to understand how physical life had, in the nucle-
us, its point of greatest concentration, sensitivity, and
tension, so that while all around it I was perhaps calm and
blissful in my whitish pulp, the nucleus shared in this cyto-
plasmic calm and bliss in its nucleic way, that is, accen-
tuating and thickening the tangled grain and speckling that
adorned it, and so I concealed in myself an intense nucleic
labor which then corresponded only to my exterior well-
being, so that, we might say, the more I was happy to be
me, the more my nucleus became charged with this thick
impatience, and everything I was and everything I was grad-
ually becoming ended up being nucleus, absorbed there and
registered and accumulated in a serpentine twisting of
spirals, in the gradually different way that they were
forming a skein and unraveling, so I would say that ever-
ything I knew I knew in the nucleus, if that wouldn't in-
volve the danger of making you believe in a separate or
perhaps even opposing function of the nucleus with respect
to the rest, whereas if there's an agile and impulsive
organism where you can't make all these distinctions that
is the unicellular organism. However, I don't want to exag-
gerate in the other direction either, as if to give you the
idea of a chemical homogeneity like an inorganic drop spill-
ed there; you know better than I how many differentiations
there are within the cell, and even within the nucleus, and
mine was in fact all speckled, freckled, dotted with fila-
ments or strokes or lines, and each of these filaments or
strokes or lines or chromosomes had a specific relationship
to some characteristic of the cell that was me. Now I might
attempt a somewhat risky assertion and say I was nothing but
the sum of those filaments or lines or strokes, an assertion
which can be disputed because of the fact that I was I entire-
ly and not a part of myself, but one that can also be sus-
tained by explaining that those strokes were myself translat-
ed into strokes, to then be retranslated back into me. And
therefore when I speak of the intense life of the nucleus I
don't mean so much the rustle or scraping of all those lines
inside the nucleus as the nervousness of an individual who
knows he has all those lines, he is all those lines, but
also knows there's something that can't be represented with
those lines, a void of which those lines succeed only in feel-
ing the emptiness. Or rather the tension toward the outside,
the elsewhere, the otherwise, which is what is then called
a state of desire.

I had better be more precise about this state of desire bus-
iness: a state of desire takes place when from a state of
satisfaction one passes to a state of mounting satisfaction
and then, immediately thereafter, to a state of dissatisfy-
ing satisfaction, namely, of desire. It isn't true that the
state of desire takes place when something is missing; if
something is missing, too bad, you do without it, and if the
something is indispensable, in doing without it you do with-
out some vital function, and therefore you proceed rapidly
toward certain extinction. I mean that from a pure and simple
state of lack nothing can be born, nothing good and nothing
bad, only other lacks including finally the lack of life, a
condition notoriously neither good nor bad. But a state of
lack pure and simple doesn't exist, as far as I know, in
nature: the state of lack is experienced always in contrast
with a previous state of satisfaction, and it is from the
state of satisfaction that everything which can grow, grows.
And it isn't true that a state of desire presupposes neces-
sarily a desired something; the desired something begins to
exist only when there is the state of desire; not because be-
fore that something wasn't desired but because before who
knew it existed? So once there's the state of desire it's
precisely that something which begins to be, something which
if all goes well will be the desired something but which
could also remain just a something through lack of the des-
irer who in desiring might also cease to be, as in the pres-
ent case of "dying of love," which we still don't know the
end of. Then, to go back to the point where we were before,
I must tell you that my state of desire tended simply toward
an elsewhere, another time, an otherwise that might contain
something (or, let's say, the world) or contain only me, or
me in relation to something (or to the world), or something
(the world) without me any more.

To make this point clear, I realize now, I have gone back to
talking in general terms, losing the ground gained with my
previous clarifications; this often happens in love stories.
I was becoming aware of what was happening around me through
what was happening to the nucleus and especially to the chro-
mosomes of the nucleus; through them I gained the awareness
of a void beyond me and beyond them, the fitful awareness
that through them forced me to something, a state of desire
which, however little we can move, becomes immediately a move-
ment of desire. This movement of desire remained basically a
desire for movement, as usually happens when you can't move
toward some place because the world doesn't exist or you don't
know it exists, and in these cases desire moves you to want
to do, to do something, or rather to do anything. But when you
can do nothing because of the lack of an outside world, the
only doing you can allow yourself with the scant means at
your disposal is that special kind of doing that is saying.
In short, I was moved to express: my state of desire, my
state-motion-desire of motion-desire-love moved me to say,
and since the only thing I had to say was myself, I was
moved to say myself, to express myself .I'll be more pre-
cise: before, when I said that very few means suffice for
expressing I wasn't telling the exact truth, and therefore
I'll correct myself:for expressing you need a language,
and that's no trifle. As language I had all those specks
or twigs called chromosomes, and therefore all I had to
do was repeat those specks or twigs and I was repeating
myself, obviously repeating myself insofar as language was
concerned, which as you will see is the first step toward
repeating myself as such, which as you will also see isn't
repetition at all. But you'd better see what you're going
to see when the right time comes, because if I keep making
clarifications within other clarifications I'll never find
my way out again.

It's true that at this point we must proceed with great care
to avoid falling into errors. All this situation I've tried
to narrate and which at the beginning I defined as being "in
love," explaining then how this phrase must be understood--all
this, in short, had repercussions inside the nucleus in a
quantitative and energetic enrichment of the chromosomes, in-
deed in their joyful doubling, because each of the chromosomes
was repeated in a second chromosome. Speaking of the nucleus,
I naturally tend to identify it with awareness, which is only
a rather crude simplification, but even if things really were
like that, it wouldn't imply awareness of possessing a double
number of lines, because since each line had a function, each
being--to return to the language metaphor--a word, the fact
that one word was to be found twice didn't change what I was,
since I consisted of the assortment or the vocabulary of the
different words or functions at my disposal and the fact of
having double words was felt in that sense of fullness which
I earlier called quote spiritual unquote, and now you see how
the quotation marks alluded to the fact that we were dealing
with a basically quite material business of filaments or lines
or twigs, though none the less joyful and energetic.

So far I remember everything very well, because the memories
of the nucleus, awareness or no awareness, retain a greater
clarity. But this tension I was telling you about, as time
went by, was transmitted to the cytoplasm: I was seized with
a need to stretch to my full width, to a kind of intermittent
stiffening of the nerves I didn't have: and so the cytoplasm
had become more elongated as if the two extremes wanted to
run away from each other, in a bundle of fibrous matter which
was all trembling no more and no less than the nucleus. In
fact, it was now hard to distinguish between nucleus and cy-
toplasm: the nucleus had so to speak dissolved and the little
sticks were poised there halfway along this shaft of tense
and fitful fibers, but without scattering, turning upon them-
selves all together like a merry-go-round.

To tell the truth, I had hardly noticed the explosion of the
nucleus: I felt I was all myself in a more total way than ev-
er before, and at the same time that I wasn't myself any long-
er, that all this me was a place where there was everything
except me: what I mean is, I had the sense of being inhabited,
no, of inhabiting myself. No, of inhabiting a me inhabited by
others. No, I had the sense that another was inhabited by o-
thers. Instead, what I realized only then was that fact of
redoubling which before as I said I hadn't seen clearly: then
and there I found myself with an exorbitant number of chrom-
osomes, all mixed together at the time because the pairs of
twin chromosomes had become unstuck and I couldn't make head
or tail of anything. In other words: faced by the mute unknown
void into which I had gradually and amorously submerged myself
I had to say something that would re-establish my presence,
but at that moment the words at my disposal seemed so many to
me, too many to be arranged into something to say that was
still me, my name, my new name.

I remember another thing: how from this state of chaotic con-
gestion I tended to pass, in a vain search for relief, to a
more balanced and neat congestion, to have a complete assort-
ment of chromosomes arranged on one side and another on the
other side, so the nucleus--or rather that whirligig of strokes
that had taken the place of the exploded nucleus--at a certain
point finally assumed a symmetrical, mirrored appearance, as
if divaricating its strength to dominate the challenge of the
silent unknown void, so the redoubling which first concerned
the individual twigs now involved the nucleus as a whole,
or rather what I went on considering a sole nucleus and went
on operating as such, though it was simply an eddy of stuff
separating into two distinct eddies.

Here I must explain that this separation wasn't a matter of old
chromosomes on one side and new chromosomes on the other,
because if I haven't already told you I'll tell you now, ev-
ery twig after thickening had divided lengthwise, so they
were all equally old and equally new; this is important be-
cause I used before the verb "to repeat," which as always
was rather approximate and might give the mistaken idea that
there was an original twig and a copy, and also the verb
"to say" was a bit out of place, although that expression
about saying myself worked out fairly well, out of place in
that to say something you have to have someone who says and
something that's said, and this wasn't actually the case at
that time.

It's difficult, in other words, to define in precise terms
the imprecision of amorous moods, which consist in a joyous
impatience to possess a void, in a greedy expectation of
what might come to me from the void, and also in the pain
of being still deprived of what I am impatiently and greed-
ily expecting, in the tormenting pain of feeling myself al-
ready potentially doubled to possess potentially something
potentially mine, and yet forced not to possess, to consider
not mine and therefore potentially another's what I potent-
ially possess. The pain of having to bear the fact that the
potentially mine is also potentially another's, or, for all
I know, actually another's; this greedy jealous pain is a
state of such fullness that it makes you believe being in
love consists entirely and only in pain, that the greedy
impatience is nothing but jealous desperation, and the em-
otion of impatience is only the emotion of despair that
twists within itself, becoming more and more desperate,
with the capacity that each particle of despair has for re-
doubling and arranging itself symmetrically by the analo-
gous particle and for tending to move from its own state
to enter another, perhaps worse state which rends and lac-
erates the former.

In this tug of war between the two eddies, an interval was
being formed, and this was the moment when my state of
doubling began to be clear to me, first as a branching of
awareness, as a kind of squinting of the sense of presence
of all of me, because it wasn't only the nucleus which
was affected by these phenomena; as you already know, ev-
erything going on there in the little sticks of the nucle-
us was reflected in what was happening in the extension of
my tapering physical person, commanded in fact by those
sticks. So my cytoplasm fibers were also becoming concen-
trated in two opposing directions and were growing thin in
the middle until the moment came when I seemed to have two
equal bodies, one on one side and one on the other, joined
by a bottleneck that was becoming finer and finer until it
was only a thread, and at that instant I was for the first
time aware of plurality, for the first and last time because
it was late by then, I felt the plurality in me as the im-
age and destiny of the world's plurality, and the sense of
being part of the world, of being lost in the innumerable
world, and at the same time the still-sharp sense of being
me; I say "sense" and no longer "awareness" because if we
agree to call awareness what I felt in the nucleus, then
the nuclei were two, and each was tearing at the last fibers
that kept it bound to the other, and by now they were both
transmitting on their own, on my own now, on my own in a
repeated fashion, each independent, awareness as if stam-
mering ripped away the last fibers of my memory my memo-
ries.

I say that the sense of being me no longer came from the
nuclei but from that bit of plasma strangled and wrung
out there in the middle, and it was still like a filiform
zenith of fullness, like a delirium where I saw all the
diversities of the plural world filiformly radiating from
my former, singular continuity. And at the same moment I
realized that my moving out of myself was an exit with no
return, without possible restitution of the me that now
I realize I'm throwing away without its possible resti-
tution to me ever, and then comes the death agony that
precipitates triumphantly because life is already else-
where, already the dazzling of other's memory redoubled
not superimposed of another's cell establishes the rela-
tionship of the novice cell, the relationship with its
novice self and with the rest.

Everything that came afterward is lost in the memory,
shattered and multiplied like the propagation and repeti-
tion in the world of unremembering and mortal individuals,
but already an instant before that afterward began I un-
derstood everything that was to happen, the future or the
soldering of the link that now or already then happens or
tended desperately to happen, I understood that this
picking up and moving out of oneself which is birth-death
would make the circuit, would be transformed from strang-
ling and fracture into interpenetration and mingling of
asymmetrical cells that add up the messages repeated
through trillions of trillions of mortal loves, I saw my
mortal love return to seeking the original soldering or
the final one, and all the words that weren't exact in
the narration of my love story became exact and yet their
meaning remained the exact meaning of before, and the
loves kindled in the forest of the plurality of the sex-
es and of the individuals and of the species, the void
dizziness filled with forms species and individuals and
sexes, and yet there was always the repetition of that
wrench of myself, of that picking up and moving out, pick-
ing myself up and moving out of myself, the yearning to-
ward that impossible doing which leads to saying, that
impossible saying that leads to expressing oneself, even
when the self will be divided into a self that says and
will surely die and a self that is said and that at times
risks living on, in a multicellular and unique self that
retains in its cells the one that, repeating itself, re-
peats the secret words of the vocabulary that we are,
and in a unicellular and countlessly plural unicellular
self which can be poured out in countless cell-words of
which only the one that encounters the complementary cell-
word that is its asymmetrical self will try to continue
the continuous and fragmentary story, but if it doesn't
encounter it, no matter, in fact in the story which I'm
about to tell there was no plan for the encounter at all,
indeed at the beginning we'll try to avoid its taking
place, because what matters is the initial or rather pre-
ceding phase which repeats every initial or rather pre-
ceding phase, the encounter with oneself loving and mortal,
in the best of cases loving and in any case mortal; what
matters is the moment when wrenching yourself from your-
self you feel in a flash the union of past and future,
just as I, in the wrenching from myself which I have just
now finished narrating to you, saw what was to happen,
finding myself today in love, in a today perhaps in the
future perhaps in the past but also surely contemporane-
ous with that last unicellular and self-contained instant.
I saw who was coming forward toward me from the void of
the elsewhere, the other time, the otherwise with first
and last name address red coat little black boots bangs
freckles: Priscilla Langwood, chez Madame Lebras, cent-
quatre-vingt-treize Rue Vaugirard, Paris quinzieme.



II. Meiosis



Narrating things as they are means narrating them from the
beginning, and even if I start the story at a point where
the characters are multicellular organisms, for example
the story of my relationship with Priscilla, I have first
to define clearly what I mean when I say me and what I mean
when I say Priscilla, then I can go on to establish what
this relationship was. So I'll begin by saying that Pris-
cilla is an individual of my same species and of the sex
opposite mine, multicellular as I now find myself, too; but
having said this I still haven't said anything, because I
must specify that by multicellular individual is meant a
complex of about fifty trillion cells very different among
themselves but marked by certain chains of identical acids
in the chromosomes of each cell of each individual, acids
that determine various processes in the proteins of the
cells themselves.

So narrating the story of me and Priscilla means first of
all defining the relations established between my proteins
and Priscilla's proteins, commanded, both mine and hers,
by chains of nucleic acids arranged in identical series
in each of her cells and in each of mine. Then narrating
this story becomes still more complicated than when it was
a question of a single cell, not only because the descrip-
tion of the relationship must take into account so many
things that happen at the same time but above all because
it's necessary to establish who is having relations with
whom, before specifying what sort of relations they are.
Actually, when you come right down to it, defining the sort
of relations isn't after all as important as it seems, be-
cause saying we have mental relations, for example, or
else, for example, physical relations doesn't change much,
since a mental relationship involves several billion spe-
cial cells called neurons which, however, function by re-
ceiving stimuli from such a great number of other cells
that we might just as well consider all the trillions of
cells of the organism at once as we do when we talk about
a physical relationship.

In saying how difficult it is to establish who's having
relations with whom we must first clear the decks of a
subject that often crops up in conversation: namely, the
fact that from one moment to the next I am no longer the
same I nor is Priscilla any longer the same Priscilla,
because of the continuous renewal of the protein mole-
cules in our cells through, for example, digestion or al-
so respiration which fixes the oxygen in the bloodstream.
This kind of argument takes us completely off our course
because while it's true that the cells are renewed, in
renewing themselves they go on following the program es-
tablished by those that were there before and so in this
sense you could reasonably insist that I continue to be I
and Priscilla, Priscilla. This in other words is not the
problem, but perhaps it was of some use to raise it be-
cause it helps us realize that things aren't as simple as
they seem and so we slowly approach the point where we
will realize how complicated they are.

Well then, when I say I, or when I say Priscilla, what do
I mean? I mean that special configuration which my cells
and her cells assume through a special relationship be-
tween the environment and a special genetic heritage which
from the beginning seemed invented on purpose to cause my
cells to be mine and Priscilla's cells to be Priscilla's.
As we proceed we'll see that nothing is made on purpose,
that nobody has invented anything, that the way I am and
Priscilla is really doesn't matter in the least to anyone:
all a genetic heritage has to do is to transmit what was
transmitted to it for transmitting, not giving a damn a-
bout how it's received. But for the moment let's limit
ourselves to answering the question if I, in quotes, and
Priscilla, in quotes, are our genetic heritage, in quotes,
or our form, in quotes. And when I say form I mean both
what is seen and what isn't seen, namely, all her way of
being Priscilla, the fact that fuchsia or orange is be-
coming to her, the scent emanating from her skin not only
because she was born with a glandular constitution suited
to giving off that scent but also because of everything
she has eaten in her life and the brands of soap she has
used, in other words because of what is called, in quotes,
culture, and also her way of walking and of sitting down
which comes to her from the way she has moved among those
who move in the cities and houses and streets where she's
lived, all this but also the things she has in her memory,
after having seen them perhaps just once and perhaps
at the movies, and also the forgotten things which still
remain recorded somewhere in the back of the neurons like
all the psychic trauma a person has to swallow from infancy
on.

Now, both in the form you see and don't see and in our
genetic heritage, Priscilla and I have absolutely identi-
cal elements--common to the two of us, or to the environ-
ment, or to the species--and also elements which establish
a difference. Then the problem begins to arise whether
the relationship between me and Priscilla is the relation-
ship only between the differential elements, because the
common ones can be overlooked in both--that is, whether by
"Priscilla" we must understand "what is peculiar to Pri-
scilla as far as the other members of the species are con-
cerned"--or whether the relationship is between the com-
mon elements, and then we must decide if it's the ones
common to the species or to the environment or to the two
of us as distinct from the rest of the species and perhaps
more beautiful than the others.

On closer examination, if individuals of opposite sex
enter into a particular relationship it clearly isn't
we who decide but the species, or rather not so much the
species as the animal condition, or the vegetable-animal
condition of the animal-vegetives distinguished into
distinct sexes. Now, in the choice I make of Priscilla
to have with her relations whose nature I don't yet know
--and in the choice that Priscilla makes of me, assuming
that she does choose me and doesn't change her mind at
the last moment--no one knows what order of priority
comes first into play, therefore no one knows how many
I's precede the I that I think I am, and how many Pris-
cillas precede the Priscilla toward whom I believe I am
running.

In short, the more you simplify the terms of the quest-
ion the more they become complicated: once we've estab-
lished that what I call "I" consists of a certain number
of amino acids which line up in a certain way, it's log-
ical that inside these molecules all possible relations
are foreseen, and from outside we have nothing but the
exclusion of some of the possible relations in the form
of certain enzymes which block certain processes. There-
fore you can say that it's as if everything possible
had already happened to me, including the possibility of
its not happening: once I am I the cards are all dealt,
I dispose of a finite number of possibilities and no
more, what happens outside counts for me only if it's
translated into operations already foreseen by my nucle-
ic acids, I'm walled up within myself, chained to my mol-
ecular program: outside of me I don't have and won't have
relations with anything or with anybody. And neither will
Priscilla; I mean the real Priscilla, poor thing. If a-
round me and around her there's some stuff that seems to
have relations with other stuff, these are facts that
don't concern us: in reality for me and for her nothing
substantial can happen.

Hardly a cheerful situation, therefore: and not because
I was expecting to have a more complex individuality
than the one given me, beginning with a special arrange-
ment of an acid and of four basic substances which in
their turn command the disposition of about twenty ami-
no acids in the forty-six chromosomes of each cell I
have; but because this individuality repeated in each
of my cells is mine only after a manner of speaking,
since out of forty-six chromosomes twenty-three come
to me from my father and twenty-three from my mother,
that is, I continue carrying my parents with me in all
my cells, and I'll never be able to free myself of
this burden.

What my parents programmed me to be in the beginning is
what I am: that and nothing else. And in my parents' in-
structions are contained the instructions of my parents'
parents handed down in turn from parent to parent in an
endless chain of obedience. The story I wanted to nar-
rate therefore is not only impossible to narrate but
first of all impossible to live, because it's all there
already, contained in a past that can't be narrated
since, in turn, it's included in its own past, in the
many individual pasts--so many that we can't really be
sure they aren't the past of the species and of what
existed before the species, a general past to which
all individual pasts refer but which no matter how far
you go back doesn't exist except in the form of indi-
vidual cases, such as Priscilla and I might be, be-
tween which, however, nothing happens, individual or
general.

What each of us really is and has is the past; all we
are and have is the catalogue of the possibilities that
didn't fail, of the experiences that are ready to be
repeated. A present doesn't exist, we proceed blindly
toward the outside and the afterward, carrying out an
established program with materials we fabricate our-
selves, always the same. We don't tend toward any fut-
ure, there's nothing awaiting us, we're shut within
the system of a memory which foresees no task but re-
membering itself. What now leads me and Priscilla to
seek each other isn't an impulse toward the afterward:
it's the final action of the past that is fulfilled
through us. Good-by, Priscilla, our encounter, our em-
brace are useless, we remain distant, or finally near,
in other words forever apart.

Separation, the impossibility of meeting, has been in
us from the very beginning. We were born not from a
fusion but from a juxtaposition of distinct bodies.
Two cells grazed each other: one is lazy and all pulp,
the other is only a head and a darting tail. They are
egg and seed: they experience a certain timidity; then
they rush--at their different speeds--and hurry toward
each other. The seed plunges headlong into the egg; the
tail is left outside; the head--all full of nucleus--is
shot at the nucleus of the egg; the two nuclei are shat-
tered: you might expect heaven knows what fusion or ming-
ling or exchange of selves; instead, what was written in
one nucleus and in the other, those spaced lines, fall
in and arrange themselves, on each side, in the new nuc-
leus, very closely printed; the words of both nuclei fit
in, whole and clearly separate. In short, nobody was lost
in the other, nobody has given in or has given himself;
the two cells now one are packaged together but just as
they were before: the first thing they feel is a slight
disappointment. Meanwhile the double nucleus has begun
its sequence of duplications, printing the combined mes-
sages of father and mother in each of the offspring cells,
perpetuating not so much the union as the unbridgeable
distance that separates in each couple the two companions,
the failure, the void that remains in the midst of even
the most successful couple.

Of course, on every disputed issue our cells can follow
the instructions of a single parent and thus feel free
of the other's command, but we know what we claim to be
in our exterior form counts for little compared to the
secret program we carry printed in each cell, where the
contradictory orders of father and mother continue argu-
ing. What really counts is this incompatible quarrel of
father and mother that each of us drags after him, with
the rancor of every point where one partner has had to
give way to the other, who then raises his voice still
louder in his victory as dominant mate. So the charac-
teristics that determine my interior and exterior form,
when they are not the sum or the average of the orders
received from father and mother together, are orders de-
nied in the depth of the cells, counterbalanced by dif-
ferent orders which have remained latent, sapped by the
suspicion that perhaps the other orders were better. So
at times I'm seized with uncertainty as to whether I am
really the sum of the dominant characteristics of the
past, the result of a series of operations that produc-
ed always a number bigger than zero, or whether instead
my true essence isn't rather what descends from the suc-
cession of defeated characteristics, the total of the
terms with the minus sign, of everything that in the tree
of derivations has remained excluded, stifled, interrupt-
ed: the weight of what hasn't been weighs on me, no less
crushing than what has been and couldn't not be. Void,
separation and waiting, that's what we are. And such we
remain even on the day when the past inside us rediscov-
ers its original forms, clustering into swarms of seed-
cells or concentrated ripening of the egg-cells, and fin-
ally the words written in the nuclei are no longer the
same as before but are no longer part of us either, they're
a message beyond us, which already belongs to us no more.
In a hidden point in ourselves the double series of orders
from the past is divided in two and the new cells find
themselves with a simple past, no longer double, which
gives them lightness and the illusion of being really
new, of having a new past that almost seems a future.

Now, I've said it hastily like this but it's a complicat-
ed process, there in the darkness of the nucleus, in the
depth of the sex organs, a succession of phases some a
bit jumbled with others, but from which there's no turn-
ing back. At first the pairs of maternal and paternal
messages which thus far had remained separate seem to
remember they're couples and they join together two by
two, so many fine little threads that become interwoven
and confused; the desire to copulate outside myself now
leads me to copulate within myself, at the depths of the
extreme roots of the matter I'm made of, to couple the
memory of the ancient pair I carry within me, the first
couple, that is both the one that comes immediately be-
fore me, mother and father, and the absolute first one,
the couple at the animal-vegetal origins of the first
coupling on Earth, and so the forty-six filaments that
an obscure and secret cell bears in the nucleus are knot-
ted two by two, still not giving up their old disagree-
ment, since in fact they immediately try to disentangle
themselves but remain stuck at some point in the knot,
so when in the end they do succeed, with a wrench, in
separating--because meanwhile the mechanism of separa-
tion has taken possession of the whole cell, stretching
out its pulp--each chromosome discovers it's changed,
made of segments that first belonged some to one and
some to the other, and it moves from the other, now
changed too, marked by the alternate exchanges of the
segments, and already two cells are being detached each
with twenty-three chromosomes, one cell's different
from the other's, and different from those that were
in the previous cell, and at the next doubling there
will be four cells all different, each with twenty-
three chromosomes, in which what was the father's and
the mother's, or rather the fathers' and the mothers',
is mingled.

So finally the encounter of the pasts which can never
take place in the present of those who believe they
are meeting does take place in the form of the past of
him who comes afterward and who cannot live that en-
counter in his own present. We believe we're going to-
ward our marriage, but it is still the marriage of the
fathers and the mothers which is celebrated through
our expectation and our desire. What seems to us our
happiness is perhaps only the happiness of the others'
story which ends just where we thought ours began.

And it's pointless for us to run, Priscilla, to meet
each other and follow each other: the past disposes
of us with blind indifference, and once it has moved
those fragments of itself and of us, it doesn't bo-
ther afterward how we spend them. We were only the
preparation, the envelope, for the encounter of pasts
which happens through us but which is already part of
another story, the story of the afterward: the encount-
ers always take place before and after us, and in them
the elements of the new, forbidden to us, are active:
chance, risk, improbability.

This is how we live, not free, surrounded by freedom,
driven, acted on by this constant wave which is the com-
bination of the possible cases and which passes through
those points of space and of time in which the rose of
the pasts is joined to the rose of the futures. The prim-
ordial sea was a soup of beringed molecules traversed at
intervals by the messages of the similarity and of the
difference that surrounded us and imposed new combina-
tions. So the ancient tide rises at intervals in me and
in Priscilla following the course of the Moon; so the
sexed species respond to the old conditioning which
prescribes ages and seasons of loves and also grants ex-
tensions and postponements to the ages and the seasons
and at times becomes involved in obstinacies and coer-
cions and vices.

In other words, Priscilla and I are only meeting places
for messages from the past: not only for messages among
themselves, but for messages meeting answers to mess-
ages. And as the different elements and molecules answer
messages in different ways--imperceptibly or boundlessly
different--so the messages vary according to the world
that receives them and interprets them, or else, to re-
main the same, they are forced to change. You might say,
then, that the messages are not messages at all, that
a past to transmit doesn't exist, and only so many fut-
ures exist which correct the course of the past, which
give it form, which invent it.

The story I wanted to tell is the encounter of two indi-
viduals who don't exist, since they are definable only
with regard to a past or a future, past and future whose
reality is reciprocally doubted. Or else it's a story
that cannot be separated from the story of all the rest
of what exists, and therefore from the story of what
doesn't exist and, not existing, causes what does exist
to exist. All we can say is that in certain points and
moments that interval of void which is our individual
presence is grazed by the wave which continues to renew
the combinations of molecules and to complicate them or
erase them, and this is enough to give us the certitude
that somebody is "I" and somebody is "Priscilla" in the
temporal and spatial distribution of the living cells,
and that something happens or has happened or will happen
which involves us directly and--I would dare say--happily
and totally. This is in itself enough, Priscilla, to cheer
me, when I bend my outstretched neck over yours and I give
you a little nip on your yellow fur and you dilate your
nostrils, bare your teeth, and kneel on the sand, lower-
ing your hump to the level of my breast so that I can
lean on it and press you from behind, bearing down on
my rear legs, oh how sweet those sunsets in the oasis
you remember when they loosen the burden from the
packsaddle and the caravan scatters and we camels feel
suddenly light and you break into a run and I trot after
you, overtaking you in the grove of palm trees.



III. Death



The risk we ran was living: living forever. The threat of
continuing weighed, from the very start, on anyone who had
by chance begun. The crust that covers the Earth is liq-
uid: one drop among the many thickens, grows, little by
little absorbs the substances around it, it is a drop-is-
land, gelatinous, that contracts and expands, that occu-
pies more space at each pulsation, it's a drop-continent
that spreads its branches over the oceans, makes the
poles coagulate, solidifies its mucus-green outlines on
the equator, if it doesn't stop in time it gobbles up the
globe. The drop will live, only that drop, forever, un-
iform and continuous in time and in space, a mucilaginous
sphere with the Earth as its kernel, a gruel that contains
the matter for the lives of us all, because we are all
arrested in this drop that will never let us be born or
die, so life will belong to it and to nobody else.

Luckily it is shattered. Each fragment is a chain of mole-
cules arranged in a certain order, and thanks to the mere
fact of having an order, it has only to float in the midst
of the disordered substance and immediately around it o-
ther chains of molecules are formed, lined up in the same
way. Each chain spreads order around itself, or rather it
repeats itself over and over again, and the copies in turn
are repeated, always in that geometrical arrangement. A
solution of living crystals, all the same, covers the
face of the Earth, it is born and dies in every moment
without being aware of it, living a discontinuous and per-
petual life, always identical to itself in a shattered
time and space. Every other form remains shut out forever;
including ours.

Up to the moment when the material necessary for self-re-
petition shows signs of becoming scarce, and then each
chain of molecules begins to collect around itself a kind
of reserve supply of substances, kept in a kind of pack-
et with everything it needs inside. This cell grows; it
grows up to a certain point; it divides in two; the two
cells divide into four, into eight, into sixteen; the
multiplied cells instead of undulating each by itself
stick to one another like colonies or shoals or polyps.
The world is covered with a forest of sponges; each sponge
multiplies its cells in a network of full and empty spaces
which spreads out its mesh and stirs in the currents of
the sea. Each cell lives on its own and, all united, they
live the unity of their lives. In the winter frost the
tissues of the sponge are rent, but the newer cells
remain there and start dividing again, they repeat the
same sponge in spring. Now we're close to the point and
the die is cast: the sea will be drunk by their pores, it
will flow into their dense passages; they will live, for-
ever, not we, we who wait vainly for the moment to be gen-
erated by them.

But in the monstrous agglomerations of the sea's depths,
in the viscous mushroom-beds that begin to crop up from
the soft crust of the emergent lands, not all the cells
continue to grow superimposed on one another: every now
and then a swarm breaks loose, undulates, flies, comes
to rest farther on; they begin to divide again, they re-
peat that sponge or polyp or fungus from which they came.
Time now repeats itself in cycles: the phases alternate,
always the same. The mushrooms scatter their spores in
the wind slightly, and they grow a bit like the perish-
able mycelium, until other spores ripen which will die,
as such, on opening. The great division within living
beings has begun: the funguses that do not know death
last a day and are reborn in a day, but between the part
that transmits the orders of reproduction and the part
that carries them out an irreconcilable gap has opened.

By now the battle is joined between those that exist
and would like to be eternal and us who don't exist
and would like to, at least for a little while. Fear-
ing that a casual mistake might open the way to div-
ersity, those who exist increase their control devices:
if the reproduction orders derive from the confronta-
tion of two distinct and identical messages, errors of
transmission are more easily eliminated. So the alter-
nation of the phases becomes complicated: from the
branches of the polyp attached to the sea-bed trans-
parent medusas are detached, which float halfway to
the surface; love among the medusas begins, ephemeral
play and luxury of continuity through which the polyps
confirm their eternity. On the lands that have emerged,
vegetable monsters open fans of leaves, spread out
mossy carpets, arch their boughs on which hermaphrodite
flowers blossom; so they hope to grant death only a
small and hidden part of themselves, but by now the
play of crossing messages has invaded the world: that
will be the breach through which the crowd of us who
do not exist will make our overflowing entrance. The
sea is covered with undulating eggs; a wave lifts them,
mixes them with clouds of seed. Each swimming creature
that slips from a fertilized egg repeats not one but
two beings that were swimming there before him; he
will not be the one or the other of those two but yet
another, a third; that is, the original two for the
first time will die, and the third for the first time
has been born.

In the invisible expanse of the program-cells where all
the combinations are formed or undone within the species,
the original continuity still flows; but between one
combination and another the interval is occupied by in-
dividuals who are mortal and sexed and different.

The dangers of life without death are avoided--they say--
forever. Not because from the mud of the boiling swamps
the first clot of undivided life cannot again emerge,
but because we are all around now--above all, those of
us who act as micro-organisms and bacteria--ready to
fling ourselves on that clot and devour it. Not because
the chains of the viruses don't continue repeating
themselves in their exact crystalline order, but be-
cause this can happen only within our bodies and tis-
sues, in us, the more complex animals and vegetables;
so the world of the eternals has been incorporated into
the world of the perishable, and their immunity to
death serves to guarantee us our mortal condition. We
still go swimming over depths of corals and sea anem-
ones, we still walk and make our way through ferns and
mosses under the boughs of the original forest, but
sexual reproduction has now somehow entered the cycle
of even the most ancient species, the spell is broken,
the eternals are dead, nobody seems prepared any
longer to renounce sex, even the little share of sex
that falls to his lot, in order to have again a life
that repeats itself interminably.

The victors--for the present--are we, the discontinuous.
The swamp-forest, defeated, is still around us; we
have barely opened a passage with blows of our machete
in the thicket of mangrove roots; finally a glimpse
of free sky opens over our heads, we raise our eyes
shielding them from the sun: above us stretches another
roof, the hull of words we secrete constantly. As
soon as we are out of the primordial matter, we are
bound in a connective tissue that fills the hiatus be-
tween our discontinuities, between our deaths and births,
a collection of signs, articulated sounds, ideograms,
morphemes, numbers, punched cards, magnetic tapes, tat-
toos, a system of communication that includes social
relations, kinship, institutions, merchandise, adver-
tising posters, napalm bombs, namely everything that is
language, in the broad sense. The danger still isn't
over. We are in a state of alarm, in the forest losing
its leaves. Like a duplicate of the Earth's crust, the
cap is hardening over our heads: it will be a hostile
envelope, a prison, if we don't find the right spot to
break it, to prevent its perpetual self-repetition.
The ceiling that covers us is all jutting iron gears;
it's like the belly of an automobile under which I have
crawled to repair a breakdown, but I can't come out from
under it because, while I'm stretched out there with my
back on the ground, the car expands, extends, until it
covers the whole world. There is no time to lose, I must
understand the mechanism, find the place where we can
get to work and stop this uncontrolled process, press
the buttons that guide the passage to the following
phase: that of the machines that reproduce themselves
through crossed male and female messages, forcing new
machines to be born and the old machines to die.

Everything at a certain point tends to cling around me,
even this page where my story is seeking a finale that
doesn't conclude it, a net of words where a written I
and a written Priscilla meet and multiply into other
words and other thoughts, where they may set into motion
the chain reaction through which things done or used by
men, that is, the elements of their language, can also
acquire speech, where machines can speak, exchange the
words by which they are constructed, the messages that
cause them to move. The circuit of vital information
that runs from the nucleic acids to writing is prolong-
ed in the punched tapes of the automata, children of
other automata: generations of machines, perhaps better
than we, will go on living and speaking lives and words
that were also ours; and translated into electronic in-
structions, the word "I" and the word "Priscilla" will
meet again.



Part Three: t zero



t zero



I have the impression this isn't the first time I've
found myself in this situation: with my bow just slack-
ened in my outstretched left hand, my right hand drawn
back, the arrow A suspended in midair at about a third
of its trajectory, and, a bit farther on, also suspend-
ed in midair, and also at about a third of his traject-
ory, the lion L in the act of leaping upon me, jaws a-
gape and claws extended. In a second I'll know if the
arrow's trajectory and the lion's will or will not co-
incide at a point X crossed both by L and by A at the
same second tx, that is, if the lion will slump in the
air with a roar stifled by the spurt of blood that will
flood his dark throat pierced by the arrow, or whether
he will fall unhurt upon me knocking me to the ground
with both forepaws which will lacerate the muscular
tissue of my shoulders and chest, while his mouth,
closing with a simple snap of the jaws, will rip my
head from my neck at the level of the first vertebra.

So many and so complex are the factors that condition
the parabolic movement both of arrows and of felines
that I am unable for the moment to judge which of the
eventualities is the more probable. I am therefore in
one of those situations of uncertainty and expectation
where one really doesn't know what to think. And the
thought that immediately occurs to me is this: it
doesn't seem the first time to me. With this I don't
mean to refer to other hunting experiences of mine:
an archer, the moment he thinks he's experienced, is
lost; every lion we encounter in our brief life is
different from every other lion; woe to us if we stop
to make comparisons, to deduce our movements from
norms and premises. I am speaking of this lion L and
of this arrow A which have now reached a third, rough-
ly, of their respective trajectories.

Nor am I to be included among those who believe in the
existence of a first and absolute lion, of which all
the various individual and approximate lions that jump
on us are only shadows or simulacra. In our hard life
there is no room for anything that isn't concrete, that
can't be grasped by the senses. Equally alien to me is
the view of those who assert that each of us carries
within himself from birth a memory of lion that weighs
upon his dreams, inherited by sons from fathers, and so
when he sees a lion he immediately and spontaneously
says: Ha, a lion! I could explain why and how I have
come to exclude this idea, but this doesn't seem to me
the right moment.

Suffice it to say that by "lion" I mean only this yell-
ow clump that has sprung forth from a bush in the savan-
nah, this hoarse grunt that exhales an odor of bloody
flesh, and the white fur of the belly and the pink of
the under-paws and the sharp angle of the retractile
claws just as I see them over me now with a mixture of
sensations that I call "lion" in order to give it a name
though I want it to be clear it has nothing to do with
the word "lion" nor even with the idea of lion which
one might form in other circumstances.

If I say this moment I am living through is not being
lived for the first time by me, it's because the sen-
sation I have of it is one of a slight doubling of im-
ages, as if at the same time I were seeing not one lion
or one arrow but two or more lions and two or more ar-
rows superimposed with a barely perceptible overlapping,
so the sinuous outlines of the lion's form and the seg-
ment of the arrow seem underlined or rather haloed by
finer lines and a more delicate color. The doubling,
however, could be only an illusion through which I de-
pict to myself an otherwise indefinable sense of thick-
ness, whereby lion arrow bush are something more than
this lion this arrow this bush, namely, the interminable
repetition of lion arrow bush arranged in this specific
relationship with an interminable repetition of myself
in the moment when I have just slackened the string of
my bow.

I wouldn't want this sensation as I have described it,
however, to resemble too much the recognition of some-
thing already seen, arrow in that position, lion in
that other and reciprocal relation between the posi-
tions of arrow and of lion and of me rooted here with
the bow in my hand; I would prefer to say that what I
have recognized is only the space, the point of space
where the arrow is which would be empty if the arrow
weren't there, the empty space which now contains the
lion and the space which now contains me, as if in the
void of the space we occupy or rather cross--that is,
which the world occupies or rather crosses--certain
points had become recognizable to me in the midst of
all the other points equally empty and equally crossed
by the world. And bear this in mind: it isn't that
this recognition occurs in relation, for example, to
the configuration of the terrain, the distance of the
river or the forest: the space that surrounds us is a
space that is always different, I know this quite well,
I know the Earth is a heavenly body that moves in the
midst of other moving heavenly bodies, I know that no
sign, on the Earth or in the sky, can serve me as an
absolute point of reference, I also remember that the
stars turn in the wheel of the galaxy and the galaxies
move away from one another at speeds proportional to
the distance. But the suspicion that has gripped me is
precisely this: that I have come to find myself in a
space not new to me, that I have returned to a point
where we had already passed by. And since it isn't
merely a question of me but also of an arrow and a
lion, it's no good thinking this is just chance: here
time is involved, which continues to cover a trail it
has already followed. I could then define as time and
not as space that void I felt I recognized as I cross-
ed it.

The question I now ask myself is if a point of time's
trail can be superimposed on points of preceding pass-
ages. In this case, the impression of the images' thick-
ness would be explained by the repeated beating of
time on an identical instant. It might also be, in cer-
tain points, an occasional slight overlapping between
one passage and the next: images slightly doubled or
unfocused would then be the clue that the trail of
time is a little worn by use and leaves a narrow mar-
gin of play around its obligatory channels. But even
if it were simply a momentary optical effect, the ac-
cent remains, as of a cadence I seem to feel beating
on the instant I am living through. I still wouldn't
like what I have said to make this moment seem endowed
with a special temporal consistency in the series of
moments that precede it and follow it: from the point
of view of time it is actually a moment that lasts as
long as the others, indifferent to its content, sus-
pended in its course between past and future; what it
seems to me I've discovered is only its punctual recur-
rence in a series that is repeated, identical to itself
every time.

In the invisible expanse of the program-cells where all
the combinations are formed or undone within the species,
the original continuity still flows; but between one
combination and another the interval is occupied by in-
dividuals who are mortal and sexed and different.

The dangers of life without death are avoided--they say--
forever. Not because from the mud of the boiling swamps
the first clot of undivided life cannot again emerge,
but because we are all around now ?above all, those of
us who act as micro-organisms and bacteria? ready to
fling ourselves on that clot and devour it. Not because
the chains of the viruses don't continue repeating
themselves in their exact crystalline order, but be-
cause this can happen only within our bodies and tis-
sues, in us, the more complex animals and vegetables;
so the world of the eternals has been incorporated into
the world of the perishable, and their immunity to
death serves to guarantee us our mortal condition. We
still go swimming over depths of corals and sea anem-
ones, we still walk and make our way through ferns and
mosses under the boughs of the original forest, but
sexual reproduction has now somehow entered the cycle
of even the most ancient species, the spell is broken,
the eternals are dead, nobody seems prepared any
longer to renounce sex, even the little share of sex
that falls to his lot, in order to have again a life
that repeats itself interminably.

The victors?for the present?are we, the discontinuous.
The swamp-forest, defeated, is still around us; we
have barely opened a passage with blows of our machete
in the thicket of mangrove roots; finally a glimpse
of free sky opens over our heads, we raise our eyes
shielding them from the sun: above us stretches another
roof, the hull of words we secrete constantly. As
soon as we are out of the primordial matter, we are
bound in a connective tissue that fills the hiatus be-
tween our discontinuities, between our deaths and births,
a collection of signs, articulated sounds, ideograms,
morphemes, numbers, punched cards, magnetic tapes, tat-
toos, a system of communication that includes social
relations, kinship, institutions, merchandise, adver-
tising posters, napalm bombs, namely everything that is
language, in the broad sense. The danger still isn't
over. We are in a state of alarm, in the forest losing
its leaves. Like a duplicate of the Earth's crust, the
cap is hardening over our heads: it will be a hostile
envelope, a prison, if we don't find the right spot to
break it, to prevent its perpetual self-repetition.
The ceiling that covers us is all jutting iron gears;
it's like the belly of an automobile under which I have
crawled to repair a breakdown, but I can't come out from
under it because, while I'm stretched out there with my
back on the ground, the car expands, extends, until it
covers the whole world. There is no time to lose, I must
understand the mechanism, find the place where we can
get to work and stop this uncontrolled process, press
the buttons that guide the passage to the following
phase: that of the machines that reproduce themselves
through crossed male and female messages, forcing new
machines to be born and the old machines to die.

Everything at a certain point tends to cling around me,
even this page where my story is seeking a finale that
doesn't conclude it, a net of words where a written I
and a written Priscilla meet and multiply into other
words and other thoughts, where they may set into motion
the chain reaction through which things done or used by
men, that is, the elements of their language, can also
acquire speech, where machines can speak, exchange the
words by which they are constructed, the messages that
cause them to move. The circuit of vital information
that runs from the nucleic acids to writing is prolong-
ed in the punched tapes of the automata, children of
other automata: generations of machines, perhaps better
than we, will go on living and speaking lives and words
that were also ours; and translated into electronic in-
structions, the word "I" and the word "Priscilla" will
meet again.



Part Three: t zero



t zero



I have the impression this isn't the first time I've
found myself in this situation: with my bow just slack-
ened in my outstretched left hand, my right hand drawn
back, the arrow A suspended in midair at about a third
of its trajectory, and, a bit farther on, also suspend-
ed in midair, and also at about a third of his traject-
ory, the lion L in the act of leaping upon me, jaws a-
gape and claws extended. In a second I'll know if the
arrow's trajectory and the lion's will or will not co-
incide at a point X crossed both by L and by A at the
same second tx, that is, if the lion will slump in the
air with a roar stifled by the spurt of blood that will
flood his dark throat pierced by the arrow, or whether
he will fall unhurt upon me knocking me to the ground
with both forepaws which will lacerate the muscular
tissue of my shoulders and chest, while his mouth,
closing with a simple snap of the jaws, will rip my
head from my neck at the level of the first vertebra.

So many and so complex are the factors that condition
the parabolic movement both of arrows and of felines
that I am unable for the moment to judge which of the
eventualities is the more probable. I am therefore in
one of those situations of uncertainty and expectation
where one really doesn't know what to think. And the
thought that immediately occurs to me is this: it
doesn't seem the first time to me. With this I don't
mean to refer to other hunting experiences of mine:
an archer, the moment he thinks he's experienced, is
lost; every lion we encounter in our brief life is
different from every other lion; woe to us if we stop
to make comparisons, to deduce our movements from
norms and premises. I am speaking of this lion L and
of this arrow A which have now reached a third, rough-
ly, of their respective trajectories.

Nor am I to be included among those who believe in the
existence of a first and absolute lion, of which all
the various individual and approximate lions that jump
on us are only shadows or simulacra. In our hard life
there is no room for anything that isn't concrete, that
can't be grasped by the senses. Equally alien to me is
the view of those who assert that each of us carries
within himself from birth a memory of lion that weighs
upon his dreams, inherited by sons from fathers, and so
when he sees a lion he immediately and spontaneously
says: Ha, a lion! I could explain why and how I have
come to exclude this idea, but this doesn't seem to me
the right moment.

Suffice it to say that by "lion" I mean only this yell-
ow clump that has sprung forth from a bush in the savan-
nah, this hoarse grunt that exhales an odor of bloody
flesh, and the white fur of the belly and the pink of
the under-paws and the sharp angle of the retractile
claws just as I see them over me now with a mixture of
sensations that I call "lion" in order to give it a name
though I want it to be clear it has nothing to do with
the word "lion" nor even with the idea of lion which
one might form in other circumstances.

If I say this moment I am living through is not being
lived for the first time by me, it's because the sen-
sation I have of it is one of a slight doubling of im-
ages, as if at the same time I were seeing not one lion
or one arrow but two or more lions and two or more ar-
rows superimposed with a barely perceptible overlapping,
so the sinuous outlines of the lion's form and the seg-
ment of the arrow seem underlined or rather haloed by
finer lines and a more delicate color. The doubling,
however, could be only an illusion through which I de-
pict to myself an otherwise indefinable sense of thick-
ness, whereby lion arrow bush are something more than
this lion this arrow this bush, namely, the interminable
repetition of lion arrow bush arranged in this specific
relationship with an interminable repetition of myself
in the moment when I have just slackened the string of
my bow.

I wouldn't want this sensation as I have described it,
however, to resemble too much the recognition of some-
thing already seen, arrow in that position, lion in
that other and reciprocal relation between the posi-
tions of arrow and of lion and of me rooted here with
the bow in my hand; I would prefer to say that what I
have recognized is only the space, the point of space
where the arrow is which would be empty if the arrow
weren't there, the empty space which now contains the
lion and the space which now contains me, as if in the
void of the space we occupy or rather cross?that is,
which the world occupies or rather crosses?certain
points had become recognizable to me in the midst of
all the other points equally empty and equally crossed
by the world. And bear this in mind: it isn't that
this recognition occurs in relation, for example, to
the configuration of the terrain, the distance of the
river or the forest: the space that surrounds us is a
space that is always different, I know this quite well,
I know the Earth is a heavenly body that moves in the
midst of other moving heavenly bodies, I know that no
sign, on the Earth or in the sky, can serve me as an
absolute point of reference, I also remember that the
stars turn in the wheel of the galaxy and the galaxies
move away from one another at speeds proportional to
the distance. But the suspicion that has gripped me is
precisely this: that I have come to find myself in a
space not new to me, that I have returned to a point
where we had already passed by. And since it isn't
merely a question of me but also of an arrow and a
lion, it's no good thinking this is just chance: here
time is involved, which continues to cover a trail it
has already followed. I could then define as time and
not as space that void I felt I recognized as I cross-
ed it.

The question I now ask myself is if a point of time's
trail can be superimposed on points of preceding pass-
ages. In this case, the impression of the images' thick-
ness would be explained by the repeated beating of
time on an identical instant. It might also be, in cer-
tain points, an occasional slight overlapping between
one passage and the next: images slightly doubled or
unfocused would then be the clue that the trail of
time is a little worn by use and leaves a narrow mar-
gin of play around its obligatory channels. But even
if it were simply a momentary optical effect, the ac-
cent remains, as of a cadence I seem to feel beating
on the instant I am living through. I still wouldn't
like what I have said to make this moment seem endowed
with a special temporal consistency in the series of
moments that precede it and follow it: from the point
of view of time it is actually a moment that lasts as
long as the others, indifferent to its content, sus-
pended in its course between past and future; what it
seems to me I've discovered is only its punctual recur-
rence in a series that is repeated, identical to itself
every time.
------------------------------------------------------------


In short, the whole problem, now that the arrow is hiss-
ing through the air and the lion arches in his spring
and I still can't tell if the arrowhead dipped in ser-
pent's venom will pierce the tawny skin between the wide-
ned eyes or will miss, abandoning my helpless viscera to
the rending that will separate them from the framework
of bones to which they are now anchored and will drag
and scatter them over the bloodied, dusty ground until
before night the vultures and the jackals will have e-
rased the last trace, the whole problem for me is to
know if the series of which this second is a part is
open or closed. Because if, as I seem to have heard main-
tained sometimes, it is a finite series, that is if the
universe's time began at a certain moment and continues
in an explosion of stars and nebulae, more and more rare-
fied, until the moment when the dispersion will reach
the extreme limit and stars and nebulae will start con-
centrating again, the consequence I must draw is that
time will retrace its steps, that the chain of minutes
will unroll in the opposite direction, until we are back
at the beginning, only to start over again, and all of
this will occur infinite times--and it may just be, then,
that time did have a beginning: the universe does nothing
but pulsate between two extreme moments, forced to repeat
itself forever--just as it has already repeated itself
infinite times and just as this second where I now find
myself is repeated.

Let's try to look at it all clearly, then: I find myself
in a random space-time intermediary point of a phase of
the universe; after hundreds of millions of billions of
seconds here the arrow and the lion and I and the bush
have found ourselves as we now find ourselves, and this
second will be promptly swallowed up and buried in the
series of the hundreds of millions of billions of seconds
that continues, independently of the outcome, a second
from now, of the convergent or divergent flight of the
lion and of the arrow; then at a certain point the course
will reverse its direction, the universe will repeat its
vicissitude backwards, from the effects the causes will
punctually arise, so also from these effects I am waiting
for and don't know, from an arrow that plows into the
ground raising a yellow cloud of dust and tiny fragments
of flint or else which pierces the palate of the beast
like a new, monstrous tooth, we'll come back to the moment
I am now living, the arrow returning to fit itself to the
taut bow as if sucked back, the lion falling again behind
the bush on his rear legs tensed like a spring, and all
the afterward will gradually be erased second by second by
the return of the before, it will be forgotten in the dis-
persal of billions of combinations of neurons within the
lobes of brains, so that no one will know he's living in
reversed time just as I myself am not now sure in which
direction the time I move in is moving, and if the then
I'm waiting for hasn't in reality already happened just a
second ago, bearing with it my salvation or my death.

What I ask myself is whether, seeing that at this point
we have to go back in any case, it wouldn't be wise for
me to stop, to stop in space and in time, while the
string of the barely slackened bow bends in the direct-
ion opposite to the one where it was previously tautened,
and while my right foot barely lightened of the weight
of the body is lifted in a ninety-degree twist, and to
let it be motionless like that to wait until, from the
darkness of space-time, the lion emerges again and sets
himself against me with all four legs in the air, and
the arrow goes back to its place in its trajectory at
the exact point where it is now. What, after all, is the
use of continuing if sooner or later we will only find
ourselves in this situation again? I might as well grant
myself a few dozen billion years' repose, and let the
rest of the universe continue its spatial and temporal
race to the end, and wait for the return trip to jump on
again and go back in my story and the universe's to the
origin, and then begin once more to find myself here
?or else let time go back by itself and let it approach
me again while I stand still and wait?and then see if the
right moment has come for me to make up my mind and take
the next step, to go and give a look at what will happen
to me in a second, or on the other hand if it's best for
me to remain here definitively. For this there is no need
for my material particles to be removed from their spatial
temporal course, from the bloody ephemeral victory of the
hunter or of the lion: I'm sure that in any case a part
of us remains entangled with each single intersection of
time and space, and therefore it would be enough not to
separate ourselves from this part, to identify with it,
letting the rest go on turning as it must turn to the
end.

In short, I am offered this possibility: to constitute
a fixed point in the oscillating phases of the universe.
Shall I seize the opportunity or is it best to skip it?
As far as stopping goes, I might well stop not just my-
self, which I realize wouldn't make much sense, but
stop along with me what serves to define this moment for
me, arrow lion archer suspended just as we are, forever.
It seems to me in fact that if the lion knew clearly how
things stand, he too would surely agree to remain where
he is now, at about a third of the trajectory of his
furious leap, to separate himself from that self-pro-
jection which in another second will encounter the rigid
jerks of the death agony or the angry crunching of a
still-warm human skull. I can speak therefore not only
for myself, but also in the name of the lion. And in the
name of the arrow, because an arrow can wish for nothing
but to be an arrow as it is in this rapid moment, post-
poning its destiny as blunted scrap which awaits it
whichever target it may strike. Having established, then,
that the situation in which we now find ourselves, lion
arrow and I in this moment t0, will occur two times for
each coming and going of time, identical to the other
times, and that it has been so repeated as often as the
universe has repeated its diastole and its systole in
the past? if it really makes sense to speak of past and
future for the succession of these phases, when we know
that it doesn't make sense within the phases--an uncer-
tainty still remains about the situation in the success-
ive seconds t1, t2, t3, et cetera, just as things were
uncertain in the preceding t-1, t-2, t-3, et cetera.

The alternatives, on closer examination, are these:

either the space-time lines that the universe follows
in the phases of its pulsation coincide at every point;

or else they coincide only in certain exceptional points,
such as the second I am now living in, diverging then
in the others.

If the latter of these alternatives is correct, from
the space-time point where I now am there extends a
bundle of possibilities which, the more they proceed
in time, the more they diverge, conelike, toward fut-
ures which are completely different from one another,
and each time I find myself here with the arrow and
the lion in the air will correspond to a different
point X of intersection in their trajectories, each
time the lion will be wounded in a different way, he
will have a different agony or will find to a differ-
ent extent new strength to react, or he won't be wound-
ed at all and will fling himself upon me each time in
a different way leaving me possibilities of self-de-
fense or not leaving them, and my victories and my de-
feats in the struggle with the lion prove to be pot-
entially infinite, so the more times I am disemboweled
the more probabilities I'll have of hitting the target
the next time I find myself here billions and billions
of years later, thus I can express no opinion on this
present situation of mine because in the event that I
am living the fraction of time immediately preceding
the clawing of the beast this would be the last moment
of a happy period, whereas if what awaits me is the
triumph with which the tribe welcomes the victorious
lion hunter, what I'm now living is the climax of ang-
uish, the blackest point of the descent to hell which
I must make in order to deserve the coming apotheosis.
Therefore it's best for me to flee from this situation
whatever may be in store for me, because if there's
one interval of time that really counts for nothing
it's this very moment, definable only in relation to
what follows it, that is to say this second in itself
doesn't exist, and so there is no possibility not only
of staying in it but even of crossing it for the dura-
tion of a second, in short it is a jump of time be-
tween the moment in which the lion and the arrow took
flight and the moment when a spurt of blood will burst
from the lion's veins or from mine.

Consider, too, that if from this second infinite lines
of possible futures move out in a cone, the same lines
arrive obliquely from a past that is also a cone of in-
finite possibilities, therefore the I who is now here
with the lion plunging on him from above and with the
arrow cutting its way through the air is a different I
every time because past mother father tribe language
age experience are different each time, the lion is al-
ways another lion even if I see him just like this each
time, with his tail which has curved in the leap till
the tuft is near the right flank in a movement that
could be a lash or a caress, with the mane so open that
it covers a great part of the breast and the torso from
my sight and allows only the forepaws to emerge lateral-
ly raised as if preparing for me a joyous embrace but
in reality ready to plunge the claws in my shoulders
with all their strength, and the arrow is made of mat-
erial that is always different, tipped with different
heads, poisoned by dissimilar serpents, though always
crossing the air in the same parabola and with the same
hiss. What doesn't change is the relation between me
arrow lion in this moment of uncertainty which is re-
peated exactly, an uncertainty whose stake is death,
but we must agree that if this menacing death is the
death of a me with a different past, of a me that
yesterday morning didn't go Out to gather roots with
my girl cousin, that is rightly speaking another me, a
stranger, perhaps a stranger who yesterday morning went
gathering roots with my girl cousin, therefore an ene-
my, in any case if here in my place the other times in-
stead of me there was somebody else, it doesn't then
matter much to know if the time before or the time after
the arrow struck the lion or not.

In this case, then, it's out of the question that stop-
ping in t0 for the whole cycle of space and time could
have any interest for me. However, the other hypothesis
still remains: as in the old geometry lines had only to
coincide in two points to coincide in all, so it may be
that the spatio-temporal lines drawn by the universe in
its alternating phases coincide in all their points and
therefore not only t0 but also t1 and t2 and everything
that will come afterward will coincide with the respect-
ive t1 t2 t3 of the other phases, and likewise all the
preceding and following seconds, and I will be reduced
to having a sole past and a sole future repeated infin-
ite times before and after this moment. One might, how-
ever, wonder whether there is any sense in speaking of
repetition when time consists in a single series of
points not allowing variations in their nature or in
their succession: it would then suffice to say that time
is finite and always equal to itself, and can thus be
considered as given contemporaneously in all its extent
forming a pile of layers of present; in other words, we
have a time that is absolutely full, since each of the
moments into which it can be broken down constitutes a
kind of layer that stays there continuously present,
inserted among other layers also continuously present.
In short, the second t0 in which we have the arrow A0
and a bit farther on the lion L0 and here the me Q0
is a space-time layer that remains motionless and iden-
tical forever, and next to it there is placed t1 with
the arrow A1 and the lion L1 and the me Q1 who have
slightly changed their positions, and beside that there
is t2 which contains A2 and L2 and Q2 and so on. In one
of these seconds placed in line it is clear who lives
and who dies between the lion Ln and the me Qn, and in
the following seconds there are surely taking place ei-
ther the tribe's festivities for the hunter who returns
with the lion's remains or the funeral of the hunter as
through the savannah spreads the terror of the prowling
murderous lion. Each second is definitive, closed, with-
out interferences from the others, and I, Qo, here in my
territory t0 can be absolutely calm and take no interest
in what is simultaneously happening to Q1 Q2 Q3 Qn in
the respective seconds near mine, because in reality the
lions L1 L2 L3 Ln can never take the place of the famil-
iar and still-inoffensive though menacing L0, held at
bay by an arrow in flight A0 still containing in itself
that mortal power that might prove wasted by A1 A2 A3 An
in their arrangement in segments of the trajectory more
and more distant from the target, ridiculing me as the
most clumsy archer of the tribe, or rather ridiculing
as clumsy that Qn who in tn takes aim with his bow.

I know the comparison with the frames of a movie film
emerges spontaneously, but if I've avoided using it so
far you can be sure I've had my reasons. It's true that
each second is closed in itself and incommunicable with
the others exactly as in a film frame, but to define
its content the points Q0 L0 A0 are not enough: with
them we would limit it to a little lion-hunting scene,
dramatic if you like but surely not displaying a very
broad horizon; what must be considered contemporaneous-
ly is the totality of the points contained in the uni-
verse in that second t0 not excluding even one, and
then it's best to put the film frame right out of your
head because it just confuses things.

So now that I have decided to inhabit forever this sec-
ond t0--and if I hadn't decided to it would be the same
thing because as Q0 I can inhabit no other--I have am-
ple leisure to look around and to contemplate my second
to its full extent. It encompasses on my right a river
blackish with hippopotamuses, on my left the savannah
blackish-white with zebras, and scattered at various
points along the horizon some baobab trees blackish-
yellow with toucans, each of these elements marked by
the positions occupied respectively by the hippopota-
muses H(a)0, H(b)0, H(c)0 et cetera, by the zebras
Z(a)o, Z(b)0, Z(c)0 et cetera, the toucans T(a)0, T(b)0,
T(c)0 et cetera. It further embraces hut villages and
warehouses of importers and exporters, plantations that
conceal underground thousands of seeds at different mo-
ments of the process of germination, endless deserts
with the position of each grain of sand G(a)0 G(b)0
. . . G(nm)0 transported by the wind, cities at night
with lighted windows and dark windows, cities during
the day with red and yellow and green traffic lights,
production graphs, price indices, stock market figures,
epidemics of contagious diseases with the position of
each virus, local wars with volleys of bullets B(a)0

(1967)

　　　　　　Richest Passages

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(William Weaver Translation)