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 relationship between us and blood changes, that is, what counts is the blood in so far as it is ‘ours’, and all the rest, us included, counts less. So there was in my impulse towards 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 destroy 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 torment me, devour me, swallow me, nothing but that. The orange stain of the Sun seen from the water’s depths swayed like a medusa, 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 Cècere: for each of us there is no other way of entering into a relationship 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 Cècere passes cars of greater horsepower than his, even a Porsche, through intentions of mastery towards these superior cars and through ill-advised amorous intentions towards Zylphia and also vindictive ones towards me and also self-destructive ones towards 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 fertilization 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 Cècere (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 permitting the false thrills of the insipid outside to be added to those that vibrated from the depths of the millennia and of the marine abysses, and then Signor Cècere said: ‘Let’s have a nice plate of spaghetti at the truck drivers’ café,’ 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 always working in the service of the blackest destruction, and the black truck with the number plate Udine 38 96 21 was there ahead, roaring at its forty mph along the road that was nothing but curves, and Signor Cècere thought (and perhaps 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 statistics 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. Essentially, it is dead, since only the two entities it has produced survive. It does not decompose in the way sexed animals die, but it ceases to be. It ceases to be, in the sense that it is discontinuous. But, in a point of the reproduction, 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’Érotisme (from the introduction)
All genes of the same chromosome are not always pulled into 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 again with their corresponding pieces interchanged, a process 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, instead of with its former associate gene.
Encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘Gene’
. . . in the midst of the Aeneases who carry their Anchiseses 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 hydrogen bonds. All the hydrogen bonds seemed to form naturally; 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 sequence of one chain, that of its partner was automatically 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 had done us, announces to us often and reminds 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 reflected in a presumably still greater size of the instructions I that have to be furnished . . . In what follows, all automata for whose construction the facility A will be used are going to share with A this property. All of them will have a place for an instruction I, that is, a place where such an instruction can be inserted . . . 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 fundamental act of reproduction, the duplication of the genetic material, which is clearly the fundamental operation in the multiplicat
ion of living cells.
Johann von Neumann,
Theory of Automata (in Collected Works, Vol. 5)
As for those who so exalt incorruptibility, inalterability, 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 transform 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 falling 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 relationship 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 fullness 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 aware 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 because being in love presupposes not only self-awareness but also awareness of the other, et cetera, et cetera, and all I can answer 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 objectively as the saying goes, because it’s all water under the bridge now, and it’s a feat on my part even to remember it, and yet what I do remember is still enough to disturb me from head to foot, so when I use the word ‘objectively’ 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 precisely 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 expressions that have the disadvantage of creating confusion with what is different nowadays while they have the advantage 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 afterwards. I say this not to ward off objections that I’m trying to make you listen to a love story I don’t even remember, 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 afterwards 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 assume 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 absolute 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 also 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 knowledge 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 protoplasm 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 enjoyment from space, to have space to make something in the passing of time.
Up until now I’ve kept time and space separated to help you to understand me better, or rather so that I could understand better what I should make you understand, 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 occupy 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 declined, a void that could become me, however, wasn’t me at that moment and basically never would be: it was the discovery of something else that wasn’t yet something but anyhow wasn’t me, or rather wasn’t me
at that moment and in that point and therefore was something else, and this discovery aroused an exhilarating enthusiasm in me, no, a torment, a dizzying torture, the dizziness of a void which represented everything possible, the complement of that fullness that was for me all, and there I was brimming over with love for this elsewhere, this other time, this otherwise, 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 around 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 trying 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 certainly don’t 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 nucleus, 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 cytoplasmic calm and bliss in its nucleic way, that is, accentuating and thickening the tangled grain and speckling that adorned it, and so I concealed in myself an intense nucleic labour 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 gradually 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 unravelling, so I would say that everything I knew I knew in the nucleus, if that wouldn’t involve 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 exaggerate in the other direction either, as if to give you the idea of a chemical homogeneity like an inorganic drop spilled 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 filaments 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 entirely and not a part of myself, but one that can also be sustained by explaining that those strokes were myself translated 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 feeling the emptiness. Or rather the tension towards the outside, the elsewhere, the otherwise, which is what is then called a state of desire.