Dissipatio H.G.

by Guido Morselli

  40The only reality: Probably from Charles Reich, The Greening of America, 1970, translated as La nuova America, Rizzoli, 1972.

  41the logic of function and fiction: From the Diario, December 7, 1966. Morselli questioned the Hegelian approach as overly anthropomorphic, for its conviction that “beyond the historical subject there was nothing that was not in function of man the subject or one of his ‘fictions,’ whether pragmatic or maybe just didactic.”

  42Woe to him that is alone (for there is no end to his toil): Ecclesiastes 4:10.

  43matter is far more prized: “At one end, raw, telluric matter, at the other, the finished, human object; and between these two extremes, nothing; nothing but a transit, hardly watched over by an attendant in a cloth cap, half-god, half-robot. So, more than a substance, plastic is the very idea of its infinite transformation . . .” From Barthes, Mythologies, “Plastic,” first English edition, 1972. Barthes, 1957; Morselli read in 1962.

  44after the Cossacks had fired on the crowd: Morselli’s striking image doesn’t quite fit with the historical record. When in 1905, workers marched on the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, they were mowed down by Cossacks with sabers before they reached the square.

  45“The stethoscope falls on a white coat”: Most likely, the rather insipid verses quoted are Morselli’s invention, possibly meant to be slightly derogatory.

  46“When mankind achieves true happiness”: In Constance Garnett’s 1916 translation of The Possessed, “When all mankind attains happiness then there will be no more time, for there’ll be no need of it, a very true thought.”

  47parking orbit: In astrophysics, a temporary orbit used in launching a satellite or vehicle into space; from the parking orbit a second launch is made to boost the object into its final orbit.

  48A parte objecti: as it exists objectively, rather than through the eyes of the observer

  49August Hermann Francke: Francke (1663–1727) was a German Lutheran clergyman and Biblical scholar who established influential teaching methods and founded schools.

  50miniloquent: understated, retiring; the opposite of magniloquent, the word miniloquente is quite unusual in Italian, if not Morselli’s invention.

  51Corvus corax, ill-omened birds of the battlefield: Carrion-eaters, ravens will feed on the bodies left out in a battlefield.