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


f

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.　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　COMMENT

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 　　　　　　　　COMMENT
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
B(b)0 . . . B(z)0 B(zz)0 B(zzz)0 . . . suspended in
their trajectory, bullets which may strike the enemies
E(a)0 E(b)0 E(c)0 hidden among the leaves, airplanes
with clusters of just-released bombs suspended beneath
them, airplanes with clusters of bombs waiting to be
released, total war implicit in the international sit-
uation (IS)0 which at some unknown moment (IS)X will
become explicit total war, explosions of supernovae
which might change radically the configuration of our
galaxy . . .

Each second is a universe, the second I live is the
second I live in, la seconde que je vis c'est la sec-
onde ou je demeure, I must get used to conceiving my
speech simultaneously in all possible languages if I
want to live my universe-instant extensively. Through
the combination of all contemporaneous data I could
achieve an objective knowledge of the universe-instant
t0 in all its spatial extension, me included, since
inside t0 I, Q0, am not in the least determined by my
past Q-1 Q-2 Q-3 et cetera but by the system composed
of all the toucans To, bullets B0, viruses V0, without
which the fact that I am Q0 could not be established.
For that matter, since I no longer have to worry about
what will happen to Q1 Q2 Q3 et cetera, there's no use
in my assuming the subjective point of view that has
guided me so far, now I can identify myself with myself
as well as with the lion or with the grain of sand or
the cost-of-living index or with the enemy or with the
enemy's enemy.

To do this I must establish exactly the co-ordinates of
all these points and I must calculate certain constants.
I could for example emphasize all the components of sus-
pense and uncertainty that obtain both for me and for
the lion the arrow the bombs the enemy and the enemy's
enemy, and define t0 as a moment of universal suspense
and uncertainty. But this still tells me nothing sub-
stantial about t0 because granted it is indeed a terri-
fying moment as I believe is now proved, it could also
be just one terrifying moment in a series of moments of
mounting terror or equally a terrifying moment in a ser-
ies of decreasing and therefore illusory terror. In o-
ther words this established but relative terror of t0
can assume completely different values, since t1 t2 t3
can transform the substance of t0 in a radical manner,
or to put it more clearly there are the various t1's of
Q1, L1, E(a)1 E(I/a)1 which have the power to determine
the fundamental qualities of t0.

And here, it seems to me, things start becoming compli-
cated: my line of conduct is to close myself in t0 and
to know nothing of what happens outside of this second,
giving up a limited personal point of view in order to
live t0 in all its global objective configuration, but
this objective configuration can be grasped not from with-
in t0 but only by observing it from another universe-
instant, for example from t1 or from t2, and not from all
their extension contemporaneously but by adopting deci-
sively one point of view, that of the enemy or of the
enemy's enemy, that of the lion or that of myself.

To sum up: to stay in t0 I must establish an objective
configuration of t0 ; to establish an objective config-
uration of t0 I must move to t1 ; to move into t1 I must
adopt some kind of subjective viewpoint so I might as
well keep my own. To sum up further: to stay still in
time I must move with time, to become objective I must
remain subjective.

Now let's see how I must behave practically: it remains
established that I as Q0 retain my residence in t0, but
I could meanwhile make the quickest possible dash into
t1 and if that isn't enough proceed on to t2 and t3,
identifying myself temporarily with Q1 Q2 Q3, all this
naturally in the hope that the Q series continues and
isn't prematurely cut off by the curved claws of L1 L2
L3, because only in this way could I realize how my pos-
ition of Q0 in t0 is really constituted which is the
only thing that should matter to me.

But the danger I risk is that the content of t1, of the
universe-instant t1, is so much more interesting, so much
richer than t0, in emotions and surprises either trium-
phant or disastrous, that I might be tempted to devote
myself entirely to t1, turning my back on t0, forgetting
that I had moved to t1 only to gain more information on
t0. And in this curiosity about t1, in this illegitimate
desire for knowledge about a universe-instant that isn't
mine, in wanting to discover if I would really be making
a good bargain trading my stable and secure citizenship
of t0 for that modicum of novelty that t1 could offer
me, I might take a step into t2 just to have a more ob-
jective notion of t1; and that step into t2 might, in
turn . . .

If this is how things stand I realize that my situation
won't change in the least even if I abandon the hypothe-
ses from which I set out: that is, supposing time knows
no repetitions and consists of an irreversible series of
seconds each different from the other, and each second
happens once and for all, and living in it for its exact
length of one second means living in it forever, and t0
interests me only with regard to the t1 t2 t3's that fol-
low it with their content of life or death in consequence
of the movement I performed in shooting the arrow and the
movement that the lion performed in making his leap and
also of the other movements the lion and I will make in
the next seconds and of the fear that for the whole dur-
ation of an interminable second keeps me petrified and
keeps petrified the lion in midair and the arrow in my
sight and the second t0 swift as it came now swiftly
clicks into the following second and traces with no fur-
ther doubts the trajectory of the lion and of the arrow . . .



The Chase



That car that is chasing me is faster than mine; inside
there is one man, alone, armed with a pistol, a good shot,
as I have seen from the bullets which missed me by frac-
tions of an inch. In my escape I have headed for the cen-
ter of the city; it was a healthy decision; the pursuer
is constantly behind me but we are separated by several
other cars; we have stopped at a traffic signal, in a
long column.

The signal is regulated in such a way that on our side
the red light lasts a hundred and eighty seconds and the
green light a hundred and twenty, no doubt based on the
premise that the perpendicular traffic is heavier and
slower. A mistaken premise: calculating the cars I see
going by transversely when it is green for them, I would
say they are about twice the number of those that in an
equally long period manage to break free of our column
and pass the signal. This doesn't mean that, once be-
yond it, they speed: in reality they go on forward with
exasperating slowness, which can be considered speed
only compared to us since we are virtually motionless
with red and green alike. It is also partially the fault
of this slowness of theirs that we don't succeed in mov-
ing, because when the green goes off for them and comes
on for us the intersection is still occupied by their
wave, blocked there in the center, and thus at least
thirty of our hundred and twenty seconds are lost be-
fore a single tire can revolve once here on our side.
It must be said that the transverse flow does indeed
inflict this delay on us but then it is compensated for
by a loss of forty and sometimes sixty seconds before
starting again when the green comes on once more for
them, thanks to the trail of traffic jams that each of
our slow waves drags after it: a loss for them which
doesn't actually mean a gain for us because every final
delay on our side (and initial delay on the other) corre-
sponds to a greater final delay on the other side (and
initial on ours), and this in mounting proportion, so
that the green light period remains a deadlock for a
longer and longer time on both sides, and this deadlock
works more against our progress than theirs.

I realize that when, in this description, I oppose "us"
and "them" I include in the term "us" both myself and
the man who is chasing me in order to kill me, as if
the boundary line of enmity passed not between me and
him but rather between those in our column and those in
the transverse one. But for all who are here immobiliz-
ed and impatient, with their feet on the clutch,
thoughts and feelings can follow no other course but
the one imposed by the respective situations in the cur-
rents of traffic; it is therefore admissible to suppose
that a community of intention is established between me,
who cannot wait to dash away, and him who is waiting
for a repetition of his previous opportunity ,when in
a street on the city's outskirts he managed to fire at
me two shots that missed me by sheerest luck, since one
bullet shattered the glass of the left side window and
the other lodged here in the roof.

It should be added that the community implied in the
term "us" is only apparent, because in practice my
enmity extends not only to the cars that cross our col-
umn but also those in it; and inside our column I feel
definitely more hostile toward the cars that precede me
and prevent me from advancing than toward those follow-
ing me, which however would make themselves declared en-
emies if they tried to pass me, a difficult undertaking
in view of the dense jam where every car is stuck fast
among the others with a minimum freedom of movement.

In short, the man who at this moment is my mortal enemy
is now lost among many other solid bodies where my chaf-
ing aversion and fear are also perforce distributed,
just as his murderous will though directed exclusively
against me is somehow scattered and deflected among a
great number of intermediary objects. It is certain in
any case that he too, in the calculations he is making
simultaneously with me, calls our column "us" and calls
"them" the column that crosses ours, just as it is cer-
tain that our calculations, though aiming finally at op-
posite results, have many elements and developments in
common.

I want our column to have first a fast movement, then a
very slow one, or in other words that the cars in front
of me should suddenly start speeding and then after them
I too could pass the intersection on the last flicker of
green; so then immediately behind my back the line would
be blocked for a period of time long enough to allow me
to vanish, turn off into a secondary cross street. In
all likelihood my pursuer's calculations tend instead to
foresee whether he will manage to pass the signal in the
same wave with me, if he will succeed in keeping behind
me until the cars that separate us are scattered in var-
ious directions or at least more thinned out, and if his
car will then be able to take its place immediately be-
hind or beside mine, for example in the column at another
signal, in a good position to empty his pistol at me (I
am unarmed) a second before the green comes on to give
him a clear avenue of escape.

In other words, I am relying on the irregularity with
which the column's periods of immobility alternate with
periods of movement; he on the other hand is counting
on the regularity which can be found on an average be-
tween periods of movement and periods of immobility for
each automobile in the column. The problem then is whe-
ther the column is divisible into a series of segments
each endowed with a life of its own or whether it must
be considered a single indivisible body where the only
change one can hope for is a decrease in density as the
hours of night approach, to an extreme of rarefaction
where only our two cars will remain headed in the same
direction and the distance will tend to disappear . . .
What our calculations surely have in common is that in
both of them the elements that determine the individual
motion of our automobiles--power of the respective mot-
ors and ability of the drivers--count almost for nothing
now, and what decides everything is the general movement
of the column, or rather the combined movement of the
various columns that intersect one another in the city.
In short, I and the man commissioned to kill me are as
if immobilized in a space that moves on its own, we are
soldered to this pseudo-space which breaks up and re-
forms and on whose combinations our fate depends.

To evade this situation the simplest method would be to
get out of the car. If one or both of us left our auto-
mobiles and proceeded on foot, then space would exist
again and the possibility of our moving in space. But
we are in a street where parking is forbidden; we would
have to leave the cars in the midst of the traffic (both
his and mine are stolen cars, destined to be abandoned
at random when they are no longer of use to us); I could
slip away on all fours among the automobiles to keep
from exposing myself to his aim, but such an escape
would attract attention and I would immediately have
the police on my heels. Now I not only cannot seek the
protection of the police, but I must also avoid in every
way arousing their curiosity; so obviously I mustn't
get out of my car even if he leaves his.

My first fear, the moment we found ourselves trapped
here, was of seeing him come forward on foot, alone and
free in the midst of hundreds of people nailed to their
wheels, calmly reviewing the row of cars and, on reach-
ing mine, firing at me whatever bullets remain in his
magazine, then running off and escaping. My fears were
not unfounded: in the rear-view mirror I was not long
in seeing the form of my pursuer extending from the half-
open door of his car and stretching his neck above the
expanse of metal roofs like someone trying to understand
the reason for such an unnaturally prolonged stop; indeed,
after a little while I saw his slender figure slip from
the vehicle, move a few steps crosswise among the cars.
But at that moment the column stirred in one of its in-
termittent hints of movement; from the line behind his
empty car an angry honking rose, and already drivers and
passengers were jumping out yelling and making threaten-
ing gestures. Certainly they would have chased him and
brought him back by force to bend his head over the wheel
if he hadn't hastened to resume his seat and put the car
in gear, allowing the rest of the line to benefit from
the new step forward, short as it was. On this score I
can rest assured then: we cannot separate ourselves from
our cars, not for a single moment, my pursuer will never
dare overtake me on foot because even if he were in time
to shoot me he couldn't then elude the fury of the other
drivers, ready perhaps even to lynch him, not so much
for the homicide in itself as for the traffic jam the
two cars--his and the dead man's--would cause, stopped
in the middle of the street.

I try to explore every hypothesis because the more de-
tails I can foresee the more probabilities I have of
saving myself. For that matter what else could I do? We
aren't moving, not an inch. So far I have considered the
column as a linear continuum or else as a fluid current
where the individual automobiles flow in disorder. The
moment has come to make it clear that in our column the
cars are arranged side by side in three lanes and that
the alternation of periods of immobility and of movement
in each of the three does not correspond with the other
two, so that there are moments when only the right-hand
line goes forward, or else the center line which is in
fact the line where both I and my potential murderer
are. If I have neglected such an outstanding element so
far it isn't only because the three lines have gradually
come to a regular arrangement and I myself was late in
noticing it, but also because in reality this fact doesn't
modify the situation for better or for worse. Certainly
the difference in speed among the various lines would be
decisive if the pursuer at a certain point could, for
example advancing with the right-hand line, bring his car
up beside mine, shoot, and continue on his way. This,
however, is also an eventuality that can be excluded:
even admitting that from the center line he might manage
to force his way into one of the side lines (the cars pro-
ceed almost with their bumpers touching but if you know
how you can exploit the moment when a little interval o-
pens in the next line between a nose and a tail and can
stick your own nose in without minding the protests of
dozens of horns), keeping my eye on him in my rear-view
mirror I would notice his maneuver before it was completed
and I would have plenty of time, given the distance be-
tween us, to find a hasty solution with a similar move.
I could, that is, slip into the same line, left or right,
where he had moved, and thus I would go on preceding him
at the same speed; or else I could shift my position to
the outside line on the other side, if he moved to the
left I could go to the right, and then we would be sepa-
rated not only by a distance in the direction of traffic
but also by a latitudinal division which would immediate-
ly become an insuperable barrier.

Let's assume in any case that we could finally be abreast
in two adjacent lines; shooting at me isn't just something
that he could do at any moment, without risking being
blocked in the line waiting for the police with a corpse
at the wheel of the neighboring car. Before the opportuni-
ty arose for rapid safe action the pursuer would have to
stick to my side for God knows how long; and in the mean-
while since the relative speeds of the various lines change
irregularly our cars would not stay long at the same level;
I could regain my advantage and that wouldn't be too bad
because we would go back to our previous position; the
greatest risk for my pursuer would be for his line to
advance while mine remained behind.

With the pursuer preceding me, I would no longer be pur-
sued. And I could also, to make my new situation conclu-
sive, move into his same line, putting a certain number
of cars between him and me. He would be forced to follow
the stream, with no possibility of reversing his direct-
ion, and by falling in behind him I would be definitively
safe. At the signal, seeing him go in one direction, I
would take the other, and we would be separated forever.

Anyway, all these hypothetical maneuvers should take into
account the fact that, on reaching the signal, those in
the right-hand line are obliged to turn right, and those
in the left, to turn left (the jam at the intersection al-
lows no second thoughts), whereas those in the center are
able at the last moment to choose what they want to do.
This is the real reason why both he and I are quite care-
ful not to leave the center line: I want to retain my
freedom of choice to the last minute, he wants to be ready
to turn in the direction where he sees I have turned.

Suddenly I feel gripped by a gust of enthusiasm: we are
really the most alert, my pursuer and I, having placed
ourselves in the center line. It's wonderful to know that
freedom still exists and at the same time to feel oneself
surrounded and protected by a blockade of solid and im-
penetrable bodies, and to have no concern beyond raising
the left foot from the clutch, pressing the right foot
on the accelerator for an instant and immediately raising
it and lowering the left again on the clutch, actions
which above all are not decided by us but dictated by
the traffic's general pace.

I am experiencing a moment of well-being and optimism.
Basically our movement is equivalent to all other move-
ment, that is, it consists in occupying the space before
us and in causing it to flow behind us, and so the mo-
ment an empty space is formed in front of me I occupy it,
otherwise somebody else would hasten to occupy it; the
only possible action on space is the negation of space,
I negate it the moment it gives a sign of forming and
then I allow it to be formed again behind me where there
is immediately somebody else who negates it. In short,
this space is never seen and perhaps it doesn't exist,
it is only an extension of objects and a measure of dis-
tances, the distance between me and my pursuer consists
in the number of cars in the line between me and him,
and since this number is constant our pursuit is only
a pursuit after a manner of speaking, just as it would
be difficult to establish that two travelers seated in
two coaches of the same train are pursuing each other.

If, however, the number of these interval-cars were to
increase or diminish, then our pursuit would once again
be a real pursuit, independently of our speeds or our
freedom of movement. Now I must once again pay close at-
tention: both eventualities have some likelihood of tak-
ing place. Between the position where I am now and the
intersection controlled by the signal I notice that a
secondary street debouches, almost an alley, from which
comes a thin but steady trickle of cars. It would suf-
fice for some of these incoming cars to be inserted be-
tween me and him, and immediately my separation would
increase, it would be as if I had spurted forward in
sudden flight. On our left, instead, in the middle of
the street a narrow island set aside for parking now
begins; if there are free places or if places become
free it would suffice for some of the interval-cars
to decide to park and then all of a sudden my pursuer
would find the distance separating us shortened.

I must discover a solution in a hurry, and since the
only field open to me is the field of theory, I can
only go on extending my theoretical knowledge of the
situation. Reality, ugly or beautiful as it may be,
is something I cannot change: that man has been given
the job of overtaking me and killing me, whereas I have
been told I can do nothing but run away; these instruc-
tions remain valid even in the event that space is ab-
olished in one or in all of its dimensions whereby mo-
tion would remain impossible; this doesn't mean I would
stop being the pursued or he the pursuer.

I must bear in mind at the same time two types of rel-
ationship: on one hand the system that includes all
the vehicles simultaneously moving in the center of a
city where the total surface of the automobiles equals
and perhaps exceeds the total surface of the streets;
on the other hand the system created between an armed
pursuer and an unarmed pursued man. Now these two types
of relationship tend to become identified in the sense
that the second is contained in the first as in a reci-
pient which gives it its form and makes it invisible,
so that an outside observer is unable to distinguish
in the river of identical cars the two which are involv-
ed in a lethal pursuit, in a mad race that is hidden
within this unbearable stasis.

Let's try to examine each element calmly: a pursuit
should consist in the confrontation of the speeds of
two bodies moving in space, but since we have seen
that a space does not exist independently of the
bodies that occupy it, the pursuit will consist only
in a series of variations in the relative positions
of such bodies. It is the bodies therefore that det-
ermine the surrounding space, and if this affirmation
seems to contradict both my experience and my pursu-
er's--since the two of us can't determine anything
at all, neither space to flee in nor space to pursue
in--it is because we are dealing with a property not
of single bodies but of the whole complex of bodies
in their reciprocal relationships, in their moments of
initiative and of indecision, of starting the motor,
in their flashing of lights and honking and biting
nails and constant angry shifts of gear: neutral,
first, second, neutral; neutral, first, second, neu-
tral . . .Now that we have abolished the concept of
space (I think my pursuer in these periods of wait-
ing must also have reached the same conclusions as
I) and now that the concept of motion no longer im-
plies the continuous passage of a body through a ser-
ies of points but only disconnected and irregular
displacements of bodies that occupy this point or
that, perhaps I will succeed in accepting more
patiently the slowness of the line, because what
counts is the relative space that is defined and
transformed around my car as around every other car
in this traffic jam. In short, each car is in the
center of a system of relationships which in prac-
tice is the equivalent of another, that is, the cars
are interchangeable, I mean the cars each with its
driver inside; each driver could perfectly well change
places with another driver, I with my neighbors and
my pursuer with his.

In these shifts of position preferred directions can
be discerned locally: for example our line's direction
of movement, which even if it doesn't really imply
it is moving nevertheless excludes the possibility
that one can move in the opposite direction. For us
two, then, the direction of pursuit is the preferred
one, in fact the only exchange of positions that can-
not take place is an exchange between us, or any
other exchange in contradiction with our chase. This
demonstrates that in this world of interchangeable
appearances the pursuer-pursued relationship contin-
ues to be the only reality we can rely on.

The point is this: if every car--direction of move-
ment and direction of pursuit remaining constant--is
equal to every other car, the properties of any one
car can also be attributed to the others. Therefore
nothing rules out the possibility that these lines
of cars are all formed of cars being pursued, that
each of these cars is fleeing as I am fleeing the
threat of an aimed pistol in any one of the cars that
follow. Nor can I exclude the further possibility
that each car is pursuing another car with homicidal
intentions, and that all of a sudden the center of
the city will be transformed into a battlefield or
the scene of a massacre. Whether this is true or not,
the behavior of the cars around me would be no dif-
ferent from what it is now, therefore I am entitled
to insist on my hypothesis and to follow the relative
positions of any two cars in their various moments,
attributing to one the role of the pursued and to
the other that of the pursuer. Above all, it is a
game that can serve very well to while away the wait-
ing: I have only to interpret every change of posi-
tion in the lines as an episode in a hypothetical
pursuit. For example, now as one of the interval-
cars starts flashing its signal light to turn left
because it has seen a free space in the parking is-
land, instead of being concerned only with my advan-
tage which is about to be reduced, I can very easily
think this is a maneuver in another pursuit, the move
of one pursued or of one pursuer among the countless
others who surround me, and thus the situation in
which so far I have lived subjectively, nailed to my
solitary fear, is projected outside me, extended to
the general system of which we are all parts.

This isn't the first time that an interval-car has a-
bandoned its place; on one side the parking area and
on the other the right-hand line, slightly faster,
seem to exercise a strong attraction on the automo-
biles behind me. As I have continued following the
thread of my deductions, the relative space that
surrounds me has undergone various changes: at a cer-
tain point even my pursuer moved to the right and, ex-
ploiting an advance of that line, passed a couple of
cars in the central line; then I moved to the right,
too; he went back into the central line and I too
went back to the center, but I had to drop one car
behind whereas he moved forward three. These are all
things that before would have made me very uneasy,
whereas now they interest me chiefly as special el-
ements in the general system of pursuits whose prop-
erties I am trying to establish.

On thinking it over, I deduce that if all the cars
are involved in pursuits, the pursuing property would
have to be commutative, and anyone who pursues would
have to be in his turn pursued and anyone who is pur-
sued would also be pursuing. Among the cars, then,
a uniformity and symmetry of relationships would be
achieved, where the only difficult element to deter-
mine would be the pursued-pursuer interval in each
chain of pursuits. In fact this interval could be per-
haps twenty cars or perhaps forty, or else none, as--
from what I see in the mirror--is now my case: at this
very moment my pursuer has gained the position direct-
ly behind mine.

I should therefore consider myself defeated and admit
that I now have left only a few minutes to live, un-
less in developing my hypothesis I can come upon some
saving solution. For example, let's suppose the car
pursuing me has behind it a chain of pursuing cars:
exactly one second before my pursuer shoots, the pur-
suer of my pursuer could overtake him and kill him,
saving my life. But if two seconds before that happen-
ed the pursuer of my pursuer were overtaken and killed
by his pursuer, my pursuer would then be saved and
free to kill me. A perfect system of pursuits should
be based on a simple concatenation of functions: each
pursuer has the job of preventing the pursuer ahead of
him from shooting his victim, and he has one single
means of doing this, namely, by shooting him. The
whole problem then lies in knowing at which link the
chain will break, because starting from the point where
one pursuer succeeds in killing another, then the fol-
lowing pursuer, no longer having to prevent that homi-
cide since it has already been committed, will give up
the idea of shooting, and the pursuer who comes after
him will have no further reason for shooting since the
murder he was to prevent will no longer take place,
and thus going back along the chain there will be no
more pursued or pursuers.

But if I admit the existence of a chain of pursuits
behind me there is no reason why this chain should
not also continue through me into the part of the
line that precedes me. Now that the signal is turning
green and it is probable that in this very period of
free movement I can succeed in pushing my way into
the intersection where my fate will be decided, I
realize the decisive element is not behind me but in
my relationship with the man ahead of me. So the on-
ly significant alternative is whether my condition
of pursued man is destined to remain terminal and a-
symmetrical (which would seem proved by the fact that
in the relationship with my pursuer I am unarmed) or
if I too in my turn am a pursuer. If I examine the
data of the question more closely one of the hypothe-
ses that occurs is this: I may have been given the
assignment of killing a person but not the possibili-
ty of using weapons against anyone else for whatever
reason: in this case I would be armed only for my
victim and disarmed for all the others.

To discover if this hypothesis corresponds to the
truth, I have only to extend my hand: if in the glove
compartment of my car there is a pistol it is a sign
that I too am a pursuer. I have time to check this: I
have been unable to take advantage of the green light
because the car ahead of me was blocked by the diago-
nal flow and now the red light has come on again. The
perpendicular flow resumes; the car preceding me is
in a nasty position, having passed the line of the
signal; the driver turns to see if he can back up, he
sees me, has an expression of terror. He is the enemy
whom I have hunted through all the city and whom I
have patiently followed in this long slow line. My
right hand, gripping the pistol with its silencer,
rests on the gearshift. In the little mirror I see
my pursuer aiming at me.

The green comes on, I put the car into gear, racing
the engine, I pull down hard with my left hand and
at the same time I raise my right to the window and
I shoot. The man I was pursuing slumps over the wheel.
The man who was pursuing me lowers his pistol, now
useless .I have already turned into the cross street.
Absolutely nothing has changed: the line moves in lit-
tle, irregular shifts of position, I am still prisoner
of the general system of moving cars, where neither
pursuers nor pursued can be distinguished.



The Night Driver



As soon as I am outside the city I realize night has
fallen. I turn on my headlights. I am driving from A
to B, along a three-lane superhighway, the kind where
the center lane is used for passing in both directions.
For night driving our eyes, too, must remove one kind
of inner transparency and fit on another, because they
no longer have to make an effort to distinguish among
the shadows and the fading colors of the evening land-
scape the little speck of the distant cars which are
coming toward us or preceding us, but they have to
check a kind of black slate which requires a different
method of reading, more precise but also simplified,
since the darkness erases all the picture's details
which might be distracting and underlines only the in-
dispensable elements, the white stripes on the asphalt,
the headlights' yellow glow, and the little red dots.
It's a process that occurs automatically, and if I am
led to reflect on it this evening it's because now that
the external possibilities of distraction diminish,
the internal ones get the upper hand within me, and my
thoughts race on their own in a circuit of alterna-
tives and doubts I can't disengage; in other words, I
have to make a special effort to concentrate on my
driving.

I climbed into the car suddenly, after a quarrel over
the telephone with Y. I live in A, Y lives in B. I
wasn't planning to visit her this evening. But during
our daily phone call we said dire things to each other;
in the end, carried away by my exasperation, I told Y
that I wanted to break off our affair; Y answered that
it didn't matter to her and that she would immediately
telephone Z, my rival. At this point one of us--I don't
remember whether it was she or I--hung up. Before a min-
ute had passed I realized the motive of our quarrel was
trifling compared to the consequences it was creating.
To call Y back on the telephone would have been a mis-
take; the only way to resolve the question was to dash
over to B and have a face-to-face explanation with her.
So here I am on this superhighway I have driven over
hundreds of times at every hour in every season but
which never seemed so long to me before.

Or, to put it more clearly, I feel as if I had lost
all sense of space and of time: the glowing cones
projected by the headlights make the outlines of plac-
es sink into vagueness; the numbers of the miles
on the signs and the numbers that click over on the
dashboard are data that mean nothing to me, that do
not respond to the urgency of my questions about what
Y is doing at this moment, about what she is thinking.
Did she really mean to call Z or was it only a threat,
blurted out like that, out of pique? And if she was
serious, did she do it immediately after our telephone
conversation, or is she thinking it over for a moment,
letting her anger subside before she makes up her
mind? Like me, Z lives in A; for years he has loved Y
hopelessly; if she has telephoned him and invited him
over, he has surely set out at top speed toward B in
his car; therefore he too is speeding along this sup-
erhighway; every car that passes me could be his, as
well as every car I pass. It is difficult to be cer-
tain: the cars going in the same direction as mine
are two red lights when they precede me and two yellow
eyes when I see them following me in my rear-view mir-
ror. At the moment of passing I can make out at most
what kind of car it is and how many people are inside
it, but the cars carrying only their driver are the
great majority, and as far as the model is concerned
I don't believe Z's automobile is particularly recog-
nizable.

As if that weren't enough, it's begun to rain. My
field of vision is reduced to the semicircle of glass
swept by the windshield wiper, all the rest is streak-
ed or opaque darkness, the information I receive from
outside consists only of yellow and red flashes dis-
torted by a tumult of drops. The only thing I can
do with Z is try to pass him and not let him pass me,
in whatever car he is, but I won't be able to know
if he is here and which car is his. I feel all the
cars going in A's direction are equally hostile: every
car faster than mine that beats eagerly with its flip-
per in my mirror asking me to give way causes me a
pang of jealousy; and every time I see ahead of me
the distance diminish between me and the rear lights
of a rival, with an upsurge of triumph I hurl myself
into the center lane to reach Y before him.

Only a few minutes' advantage would be enough for me:
seeing how promptly I have rushed to her, Y will im-
mediately forget the causes of our quarrel; everything
between us will again be as it was before; when Z ar-
rives he will realize he was called into question on-
ly because of a kind of game between the two of us;
he'll feel he's an intruder. Or perhaps Y at this mo-
ment has already regretted everything she said to me,
has tried to call me back on the phone, or else she,
like me, has decided the best thing was to come in
person and has got into her car and is now racing in
the direction opposite mine along this superhighway.

Now I have stopped paying attention to the cars going
in my direction and I keep looking at those coming
toward me which for me consist only in a double star
of headlights which dilates until it sweeps the dark-
ness from my field of vision then suddenly disappears
behind me dragging a kind of underwater luminescence
after it. Y's car is a very common model; like mine,
for that matter. Each of these luminous apparitions
could be Y speeding toward me, at each one I feel my
blood stir as if in an intimacy destined to remain
secret, the amorous message addressed exclusively to
me is mingled with all the other messages speeding
along the superhighway, and yet I couldn't desire
from her a message different from this one.

I realize that in rushing toward Y what I desire most
is not to find Y at the end of my race: I want Y to
be racing toward me, this is the answer I need; what
I mean is, I want her to know I'm racing toward her
but at the same time I want to know she's racing to-
ward me. The sole thought that comforts me is also
the thought that torments me most: the thought that
if Y at this moment is speeding toward A, then each
time she sees the headlights of a car speeding to-
ward B she will ask herself whether it's I racing
toward her, and she will desire it to be I, and she
will never be sure. Now two cars going in opposite
directions have found themselves for a moment side
by side, a flash has illuminated the raindrops, the
sound of the motors has become fused as in an abrupt
gust of wind: perhaps it was the two of us, or ra-
ther it is certain that one car was I and the other
car could be she, that is the one I want to be she,
the sign in which I want to recognize her, though
it is this very sign that makes her unrecognizable
to me. Speeding along the superhighway is the only
method we have left, she and I, to express what we
have to say to each other, but we cannot communicate
it or receive the communication as long as we are
speeding.

Of course I took my place behind the wheel in order
to reach her as fast as possible; but the more I go
forward the more I realize that the moment of arriv-
al is not the real end of my race. Our meeting, with
all the inessential details a meeting involves, the
minute network of sensations and meanings and memor-
ies that would spread out before me--the room with
the philodendron, the opaline lamp, the earrings--
and the things I would say to her, some of which
would surely be mistaken or mistakable, and the
things she would say, to some extent surely jarring
or in any case not what I expect, and all the suc-
cession of unpredictable consequences that each ges-
ture and each word involved would raise around the
things that we have to say to each other, or rather
that we want to hear each other say, a storm of such
noise that our communication already difficult over
the telephone would become even more hazardous, stif-
led, buried as if under an avalanche of sand. This
is why, rather than go on talking, I felt the need to
transform the things to be said into a cone of light
hurled at a hundred miles an hour, to transform my-
self into this cone of light moving over the super-
highway, because it is certain that such a signal
can be received and understood by her without being
lost in the ambiguous disorder of secondary vibra-
tions, just as I, to receive and understand the
things she has to say to me, would like them to be
only (rather, I would like her to be only) this cone
of light I see advancing on the superhighway at a
speed (I'm guessing, at a glance) of eighty or nine-
ty. What counts is communicating the indispensable,
skipping all the superfluous, reducing ourselves to
essential communication, to a luminous signal that
moves in a given direction, abolishing the complex-
ity of our personalities and situations and facial
expressions, leaving them in the shadowy container
that the headlights carry behind them and conceal.
The Y I love is really that moving band of luminous
rays, and all the rest of her can remain implicit;
and the me that she can love, the me that has the
power of entering that circuit of exaltation which
is her affective life, in the flashing of this pass
which, through love of her and with a certain risk,
I am now attempting.

And also with Z (I haven't forgotten Z for a moment)
I can establish the proper relationship only if he
is for me simply the flash and glare that follow me,
or the taillights I follow: because if I start tak-
ing into consideration his person, with its pathetic
--shall we say--element but also with its undeniably
unpleasant aspect, though it is--I must admit--also
excusable, with all his boring story of unhappy love
and his way of behaving which is always a bit quest-
ionable . . . well, there's no telling where I would
end. Instead, while things continue like this, all
is well: Z trying to pass me or allowing himself
to be passed by me (but I don't know if it is he),
Y hastening toward me (but I don't know if it's she)
repentant and again in love, I hurrying to her, jeal-
ous and eager (but I'm unable to let her or anyone
else know).

Naturally, if I were absolutely alone on this super-
highway, if I saw no other cars speeding in either
direction, then everything would be much clearer, I
would be certain that Z hasn't moved to supplant
me, nor has Y moved to make peace with me, facts I
might register as positive or negative in my account-
ing, but which would in any case leave no room for
doubt. And yet if I had the power of exchanging my
present state of uncertainty for such a negative cer-
tainty, I would refuse the bargain without hesitation.
The ideal condition for excluding every doubt would
prevail if in this part of the world there existed
only three automobiles: mine, Y's, and Z's; then no
other car could proceed in my direction except Z's,
and the only car heading in the opposite direction
would surely be Y's. Instead, among the hundreds of
cars that the night and the rain reduce to anonymous
glimmers, only a motionless observer situated in a
favorable position could distinguish one car from
the other and perhaps recognize who is inside. This
is the contradiction in which I find myself: if I
want to receive a message I must give up being a
message myself, but the message I want to receive
from Y--namely, that Y has made herself into a mes-
sage--has value only if I in turn am a message, and
on the other hand the message I am has meaning only
if Y doesn't limit herself to receiving it like any
ordinary receiver of messages but if she also is that
message I am waiting to receive from her.

By now to arrive in B, go up to Y's house, find that
she has remained there with her headache brooding
over the causes of our quarrel, would give me no sat-
isfaction; if then Z were to arrive also a scene would
be the result, histrionic and loathsome; and if in-
stead I were to find out that Z has prudently stayed
home or that Y didn't carry out her threat to tele-
phone him, I would feel I had played the fool. On
the other hand, if I had remained in A, and Y had
gone there to apologize to me, I would have found
myself in an embarrassing position: I would have
seen Y through different eyes, a weak woman, cling-
ing to me, and something between us would have
changed. I can no longer accept any situation
other than this transformation of ourselves into the
messages of ourselves. And what about Z? Even Z must
not escape our fate, he too must be transformed into
the message of himself; it would be terrible if I
were to run to Y jealous of Z and if Y were running
to me, repentant, avoiding Z, while actually Z hasn't
remotely thought of stirring from his house . . .

Halfway along the superhighway there is a service
station. I stop, I run to the bar, I get a handful of
change, I dial the B area code, then Y's number. No
answer. I allow the rain of returned coins to pour
down with joy: it's clear Y couldn't overcome her im-
patience, she got into her car, she has rushed toward
A. Now I have gone back to the superhighway, but on
the other side: I too am rushing toward A. All the
cars I pass could be Y, or else all the cars that
pass me. On the opposite lane all the cars advancing
in the other direction could be Z, in his self-delu-
sion. Or else Y too has stopped at a service station,
has telephoned my house in A; not finding me in she
has realized I am going to B, she has turned around.
Now we are speeding in opposite directions, moving a-
way from each other, and the car I pass or that pass-
es me is Z, who also tried telephoning Y at the half-
way point.

Everything is more uncertain than ever but I feel
I've now reached a state of inner serenity: as long
as we can check our telephone numbers and there is
no answer then we will continue, all three of us,
speeding back and forth along these white lines, with
no points of departure or of arrival to threaten with
their sensations and meanings the single-mindedness
of our race, freed finally from the awkward thickness
of our persons and voices and moods, reduced to lum-
inous signals, the only appropriate way of being for
those who wish to be identified with what they say,
without the distorting buzz our presence or the pres-
ence of others transmits to our messages.

To be sure, the price paid is high but we must accept
it: to be indistinguishable from all the other signals
that pass along this road, each with his meaning that
remains hidden and undecipherable because outside of
here there is no one capable of receiving us now and
understanding us.



The Count of Monte Cristo


I


From my cell, I can say little about the construction
of this Chateau d'If where I have been imprisoned
for so many years. The tiny barred window is at the
end of a shaft that pierces the thickness of the wall:
it frames no view; from the greater or lesser lumino-
sity of the sky I can recognize approximately the
hours and the seasons; but I do not know if, beneath
that window, there is the open sea or the ramparts
or one of the inner courtyards of the fortress. The
shaft narrows in the form of a chute; to look out I
would have to advance, crawling, to the very end; I
have tried, it is impossible, even for a man reduced,
as I am, to a mere shadow. The opening perhaps is far-
ther than it seems: estimation of the distance is
confused by the funnel-like perspective and by the con-
trast of the light.

The walls are so thick they could contain other cells,
stairways, casemates, and powder magazines; or else
the fortress could be all wall, a full and compact so-
lid, with one live man buried in the middle. The images
you summon up when you are imprisoned follow one another
without any reciprocal exclusion: the cell, the aper-
ture, the corridors along which the jailer comes twice
a day with the soup and the bread could be simply tiny
pores in a rock of spongy consistency.

You hear the sea pounding, especially on stormy nights;
at times it seems almost that the waves are breaking
here against the very wall to which I put my ear; at
times they seem to be digging below, under the rocks
of the foundations, and my cell seems to be at the top
of the tallest tower, and the rumble rises through the
prison, a prisoner too, as in the horn of a conch shell.

I prick up my ears: the sounds describe variable, jag-
ged spaces and forms around me. From the jailers' shuf-
fling I try to establish the network of the corridors,
the turns, the openings, the straight lines broken by
the dragging of the kettle to the threshold of each
cell and by the creak of the locks: I succeed only
in fixing a succession of points in time, without any
correspondence in space. At night the sounds become
more distinct, but more uncertain in marking places
and distances: somewhere a rat is gnawing, an ill man
groans, a boat's siren announces its entry into the
Marseilles roads, and Abbe Faria's spade continues dig-
ging its way among these stones.

I don't know how many times Abbe Faria has attempted
to escape: each time he has worked for months prising
up the stone slabs, crumbling the seams of mortar, per-
forating the rock with rudimentary awls; but at the mo-
ment when the pick's last blow should open his way to
the rocky shore, he realizes he has come out in a cell
that is even deeper in the fortress than the one from
which he set out. It requires only a little error of
calculation, a slight deviation in the incline of a tu-
nnel and he is penetrating into the prison's viscera
with no hope of finding his way again. After every fail-
ure, he goes back to correcting the plans and formulas
with which he has frescoed the walls of his cell; he
goes back to improving his arsenal of improvised tools;
and then he resumes his scraping.


2


I too have thought and still think about a method of es-
cape; in fact, I have made so many surmises about the
topography of the fortress, about the shortest and sur-
est way to reach the outer bastion and dive into the sea,
that I can no longer distinguish between my conjectures
and the data based on experience. Working with hypothe-
ses, I can at times construct for myself such a minute
and convincing picture of the fortress that in my mind
I can move through it completely at my ease; whereas the
elements I derive from what I see and what I hear are
confused, full of gaps, more and more contradictory.

In the early days of my imprisonment, when my desperate
acts of rebellion hadn't yet brought me to rot in this
solitary cell, the routine tasks of prison life had
caused me to climb up and down stairs and bastions,
cross the entrance halls and posterns of the Chateau
d'If; but from all the images retained by my memory,
which now I keep arranging and rearranging in my con-
jectures, there is not one that fits neatly with anoth-
er, none that helps explain to me the shape of the fort-
ress or the point where I now am. Too many thoughts tor-
mented me then--about how I, Edmond Dantes, poor but
honest sailor, could have run afoul of the law's severity
and suddenly lost my freedom--too many thoughts to allow
my attention to concern itself with the plan of my sur-
roundings.

The bay of Marseilles and its islands have been familiar
to me since boyhood; and every embarkation of my not
long life as a sailor, the departures and the arrivals,
had this background; but the seaman's eye, every time
it encounters the black fort of If, shifts away in an
instinctive fear. So when they brought me here chained
in a boat filled with gendarmes, and this cliff and the
walls then loomed on the horizon, I understood my fate
and bowed my head. I didn't see--or I don't remember--
the pier where the boat docked, the steps they made me
climb, the door that closed behind my back.

Now that, with the passage of years, I have stopped brood-
ing over the chain of infamy and ill-luck that caused
my imprisonment, I have come to understand one thing:
the only way to escape the prisoner's state is to know
how the prison is built.

If I feel no desire to imitate Faria, it is because the
very knowledge that someone is seeking an avenue of es-
cape is enough to convince me that such an avenue exists
or, at least, that one can set himself the problem of
seeking it. So the sound of Faria's digging has become
a necessary complement to the concentration of my
thoughts. I feel not only that Faria is a man attempt-
ing his own escape but also that he is a part of my
plan; and not because I am hoping for an avenue to safe-
ty opened by him--he has been wrong so many times by
now I have lost all faith in his intuition--but because the
only information I have concerning this place where I
am has come to me from the series of his mistakes.


3


The walls and the vaults have been pierced in every dir-
ection by the Abbe's pick, but his itineraries continue
to wind around themselves like a ball of yarn, and he
constantly goes through my cell as he follows, each
time, a different course. He has long since lost his
sense of orientation: Faria no longer recognizes the
cardinal points, indeed he cannot recognize even the
zenith and the nadir. At times I hear scratching at
the ceiling; a rain of plaster falls on me; a breach
opens; Faria's head appears, upside down. Upside down
for me, not for him; he crawls out of his tunnel, he
walks head down, while nothing about his person is
ruffled, not his white hair, nor his beard green with
mold, nor the tatters of sackcloth that cover his em-
aciated loins. He walks across the ceiling and the
walls like a fly, he sinks his pick into a certain
spot, a hole opens; he disappears.

Sometimes he has hardly disappeared through one wall
when he pops out again from the wall opposite: he
hasn't yet drawn his heel through the hole here when
his beard is already appearing over there. He emerges
again, more weary, skeletal, aged, as if years had
passed since the last time I saw him. At other times,
however, he has hardly slipped into his tunnel when
I hear him make the sound of a long aspiration like
somebody preparing to sneeze loudly: in the labyrinth
of the fortress there is much cold and damp; but the
sneeze never comes. I wait: I wait for a week, for a
month, for a year; Faria doesn't come back; I per-
suade myself he is dead. All of a sudden the wall op-
posite trembles as if shaken by an earthquake; from
the shower of stones Faria looks out, completing his
sneeze.

We exchange fewer and fewer words; or we continue
conversations I cannot remember ever having begun.
I realize Faria has trouble distinguishing one cell
from another among the many he crosses in his mistak-
en journeys. Each cell contains a pallet, a pitcher,
a wooden slops bucket, a man standing and looking at
the sky through a narrow slit. When Faria appears
from underground, the prisoner turns around: he al-
ways has the same face, the same voice, the same
thoughts. His name is the same: Edmond Dantes. The
fortress has no favored points: it repeats in space
and time always the same combination of figures.


4


In all my hypotheses of escape, I try to imagine Far-
ia as the protagonist. Not that I tend to identify
myself with him: Faria necessarily plays his role
so that I can mentally envisage my escape in an ob-
jective light, as I could not do if I were living
it: I mean, dreaming it in the first person. By now
I no longer know if the man I hear digging like a
mole is the real Faria opening breaches in the walls
of the real fortress of Chateau d'If or whether it
is the hypothesis of a Faria dealing with a hypothe-
tical fortress. It amounts to the same thing in any
case: it is the fortress that wins. It is as if, in
the contests between Faria and the fortress, I press-
ed my impartiality so far as to side with the fort-
ress against him . . . no, now I am exaggerating:
the contest does not take place only in my mind, but
between two real contenders, independently of me; my
efforts are directed toward seeing it with detachment,
in a performance without anguish.

If I can come to observe fortress and Abbe from a per-
fectly equidistant point of view, I will be able to
discern not only the particular errors Faria makes
time after time, but also the error in method which
continually defeats him and which I, thanks to my cor-
rect setting of the problem, will be able to avoid.
Faria proceeds in this way: he becomes aware of a dif-
ficulty, he studies a solution, he tries out the solu-
tion, encounters a new difficulty, plans a new solu-
tion, and so on and on. For him, once all possible
errors and unforeseen elements are eliminated, his es-
cape can only be successful: it all lies in planning
and carrying out the perfect escape.

I set out from the opposite premise: there exists a
perfect fortress, from which one cannot escape; escape
is possible only if in the planning or building of the
fortress some error or oversight was made. While Faria
continues taking the fortress apart, sounding out its
weak points, I continue putting it back together, con-
jecturing more and more insuperable barriers.

The images of the fortress that Faria and I create are
becoming more and more different: Faria, beginning
with a simple figure, is complicating it extremely to
include in it each of the single unforeseen elements
he encounters in his path; I, setting out from the
jumble of these data, see in each isolated obstacle
the clue to a system of obstacles, I develop each seg-
ment into a regular figure, I fit these figures toge-
ther as the sides of a solid, polyhedron or hyperpol-
yhedron, I inscribe these polyhedrons in spheres or
hyperspheres, and so the more I enclose the form of
the fortress the more I simplify it, defining it in
a numerical relation or in an algebraic formula.

But to conceive a fortress in this way I need the Ab-
be Faria constantly combating landslides of rubble,
steel bolts, sewers, sentry boxes, leaps into nothing-
ness, recesses in the sustaining walls, because the
only way to reinforce the imagined fortress is to put
the real one continuously to the test.


5


Therefore: each cell seems separated from the outside
only by the thickness of a wall, but Faria as he exca-
vates discovers that in between there is always another
cell, and between this cell and the outside, still an-
other. The image I derive is this: a fortress that
grows around us, and the longer we remain shut up in
it the more it removes us from the outside. The Abbe
digs, digs, but the walls increase in thickness, the
battlements and the buttresses are multiplied. Perhaps
if he can succeed in advancing faster than the fort-
ress expands, Faria at a certain point will find him-
self outside unawares. It would be necessary to invert
the relative speeds so that the fortress, contracting,
would expel the Abbe like a cannonball.

But if the fortress grows with the speed of time, to
escape one would have to move even faster, retrace time.
The moment in which I would find myself outside would
be the same moment I entered here: I look out on the
bay at last, and what do I see? A boat full of gend-
armes is landing at If; in the midst is Edmond Dantes,
in chains.

There, I have gone back to imagining myself as the
protagonist of the escape, and I have immediately
risked not only my future but my past, my memories.
Everything that is unclear in the relationship between
an innocent prisoner and his prison continues to cast
shadows on images and decisions. If the prison is sur-
rounded by my outside, that outside would bring me
back inside each time I succeeded in reaching it: the
outside is nothing but the past, it is useless to try
to escape.

I must conceive of the prison either as a place that
is only inside itself without an outside--that is, giv-
ing up the idea of leaving it?or I must conceive of it
not as my prison but as a place with no relation to me
inside or outside; that is, I must study an itinerary
from inside to outside that precludes the import that
"inside" and "outside" have acquired in my emotions;
valid, that is, even if instead of "outside" I say "in-
side" and vice versa.


6


If outside there is the past, perhaps the future is
concentrated at the innermost point of the island of
If, in other words the avenue of escape is an avenue
toward the inside. In the graffiti with which Abbe
Faria covers his walls, two maps with ragged outlines
alternate, constellated with arrows and marks: one is
meant to be the plan of If, the other of an island of
the Tuscan archipelago where a treasure is hidden:
Monte Cristo.

It is, in fact, to seek this treasure that Abbe Faria
wants to escape. To succeed in his intention he has to
draw a line that in the map of the island of If car-
ries him from inside to outside and in the map of the
island of Monte Cristo carries him from outside to
that point which is farther inland than all the other
points, the treasure cave. Between an island he cannot
leave and an island he cannot enter there must be a
relation: therefore in Faria's hieroglyphics the two
maps can be superimposed and are almost identical.

It is hard for me to understand whether Faria is now
digging in order to dive into the open sea or to pene-
trate the cave full of gold. In either case, if one
looks closely, he is tending toward the same point
of arrival: the place of the multiplicity of possible
things. At times I visualize this multiplicity as con-
centrated in a gleaming underground cavern, at times
I see it as an irradiating explosion. The treasure of
Monte Cristo and the escape from If are two phases of
the same process, perhaps successive perhaps periodi-
cal as in a pulsation.

The search for the center of If-Monte Cristo does not
lead to results that are more sure than those of the
march toward its unreachable circumference: in whatev-
er point I find myself the hypersphere stretches out
around me in every direction; the center is all around
where I am; going deeper means descending into myself.
You dig and dig and you do nothing but retrace the
same path.


7


Once he has come into possession of the treasure, Faria
intends to liberate the Emperor from Elba, give him the
means to put himself again at the head of his army . . .
The plan of escape-search on the island of If-Monte Cri-
sto is therefore not complete if it does not include
also the search-escape of Napoleon from the island where
he is confined. Faria digs; he penetrates once again
into the cell of Edmond Dantes; he sees the prisoner
from behind, looking as usual at the sky through the
slit-window; at the sound of the pick the prisoner
turns: it is Napoleon Bonaparte. Faria and Dantes-Nap-
oleon together excavate a tunnel in the fortress. The
map of If-Monte Cristo-Elba is drawn in such a way that
by turning it a certain number of degrees the map of
Saint Helena is obtained: the escape is reversed into
an exile beyond return.

The confused reasons for which both Faria and Edmond
Dantes were imprisoned have, in different ways, some-
thing to do with the Bonapartist cause. That hypothet-
ical geometric figure called If-Monte Cristo coincides
in certain of its points with another figure called
Elba-Saint Helena. There are points of the past and
of the future in which Napoleonic history intervenes
in our poor prisoners' history, and other points
where Faria and I can or could influence a possible
return of the Empire.

These intersections make any calculation of predict-
ions even more complicated; there are points where
the line that one of us is following bifurcates, ram-
ifies, fans out; each branch can encounter branches
that set out from other lines. Along one jagged line
Faria goes by, digging; and only a few seconds keep
him from bumping into the baggage wagons and cannon
of the Imperial Army reconquering France.

We proceed in the dark; only the way our paths twist
upon themselves warns us that something has changed
in the paths of the others. We may say that Waterloo
is the point where the path of Wellington's army might
intersect the path of Napoleon; if the two lines meet,
the segments beyond that point are cut off; in the
map where Faria digs his tunnel, the projection of
the Waterloo angle forces him to turn back.


8


The intersections of the various hypothetical lines
define a series of planes arranged like the pages
of a manuscript on a novelist's desk. Let us call Al-
exandre Dumas the writer who must deliver to his
publisher as soon as possible a novel in twelve vol-
umes entitled The Count of Monte Cristo. His work
proceeds in this fashion: two assistants (Auguste
Maquet and P. A. Fiorentino) develop one by one the
various alternatives that depart from each single
point, and they furnish Dumas with the outline of
all the possible variants of an enormous supernovel;
Dumas selects, rejects, cuts, pastes, interposes;
if a given solution is preferred for well-founded
reasons but omits an episode he would find it useful
to include, he tries to put together the stub-ends
of disparate provenance, he joins them with makeshift
links, racks his brain to establish an apparent con-
tinuity among divergent segments of future. The final
result will be the novel The Count of Monte Cristo
to be handed to the printer.

The diagrams Faria and I draw on the walls of the pri-
son resemble those Dumas pens on his papers to estab-
lish the order of the chosen variants. One bundle of
sheets of paper can already be passed for printing:
it contains the Marseilles of my youth; moving over
the closely written lines I can fight my way onto the
docks of the harbor, climb up the Rue de la Canebiere
in the morning sun, reach the Catalan village perched
on the hill, see Mercedes again . . . Another bundle
of papers is awaiting the final touches: Dumas is
still revising the chapters of the imprisonment in
the Chateau d'If; Faria and I are struggling inside
there, ink-stained, in a tangle of revisions ... At
the edges of the desk there are piles of paper, the
suggestions for the story's continuation which the
two assistants are methodically compiling. In one of
them, Dantes escapes from prison, finds Faria's trea-
sure, transforms himself into the Count of Monte Cri-
sto with his ashen, impassive face, devotes his im-
placable will and his boundless wealth to revenge;
and the Machiavellian Villefort, the greedy Danglars,
the grim Caderousse pay the price of their foul deeds;
just as, for so many years among these walls, I had
foreseen in my angry daydreams, in my longings for
revenge.

Beside this, other sketches for the future are arrang-
ed on the desk. Faria opens a breach in the wall,
bursts into the study of Alexandre Dumas, casts an im-
partial dispassionate look on the expanse of pasts
and presents and futures--as I could not do, I who
would try to recognize myself with tenderness in the
young Dantes just promoted to his captaincy, with pity
in the imprisoned Dantes, with delirious grandeur in
the Count of Monte Cristo who makes his regal entrance
into the proudest salons of Paris; I who in their
place would find with dismay so many strangers--Faria
takes a page here, a page there, like a monkey he
moves his long hairy arms, hunts for the escape chap-
ter, the page without which all the possible continu-
ations of the novel outside the fortress become im-
possible. The concentric fortress, If-Monte Cristo-
Dumas's desk, contains us prisoners, the treasure,
and the supernovel Monte Cristo with its variants and
combinations of variants in the nature of billions of
billions but still in a finite number. Faria has set
his heart on one page among the many, and he does not
despair of finding it; I am interested in seeing the
accumulation of rejected sheets increase, the solu-
tions which need not be taken into account, which al-
ready form a series of piles, a wall . . .

Arranging one after the other all the continuations
which allow the story to be extended, probable or
improbable as they may be, you obtain the zigzag line
of the Monte Cristo of Dumas; whereas connecting the
circumstances that prevent the story from continuing
you outline the spiral of a novel in negative, a Mon-
te Cristo preceded by the minus sign. A spiral can
wind upon itself toward the inside or toward the out-
side: if it twists toward the inside of itself, the
story closes without any possible development; if it
turns in widening curves it could, at every turn, in-
clude a segment of the Monte Cristo with the plus
sign, finally coinciding with the novel Dumas will
give to the printer, or perhaps even surpassing it
in its wealth of lucky chances. The decisive differ-
ence between the two books--sufficient to cause one
to be defined as true and the other as false, even
if they are identical--lies entirely in the method.
To plan a book--or an escape--the first thing to know
is what to exclude.


9


And so we go on dealing with the fortress, Faria sound-
ing out the weak points of the wall and coming up a-
gainst new obstacles, I reflecting on his unsuccessful
attempts in order to conjecture new outlines of walls
to add to the plan of my fortress-conjecture.

If I succeed in mentally constructing a fortress from
which it is impossible to escape, this conceived fort-
ress either will be the same as the real one?and in
this case it is certain we shall never escape from
here, but at least we will achieve the serenity of
one who knows he is here because he could be nowhere
else--or it will be a fortress from which escape is
even more impossible than from here--and this, then,
is a sign that here an opportunity of escape exists:
we have only to identify the point where the imagined
fortress does not coincide with the real one and then
find it.






.

(1967)

　　　　　　Richest Passages

1　　2　　3　　4　　5　　6　　7　　8　　9　　10

11　　12　　13　　14　　15　　16　　17　　18

19　　20　　21　　22　　23　　24　　25　　26

27　　28　　29　　30　　31　　32　　33　　34

35　　36　　37　　38

(William Weaver Translation)