Hopscotch: A Novel (Pantheon Modern Writers Series) (50 page)
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Authors: Julio Cortazar
(–
26
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AN inconclusive note by Morelli
I will never be able to escape the feeling that there, clinging to my face, intertwined among my fingers, there is something like a dazzling explosion towards the light, an invasion of me in the direction of the other thing or of the other thing towards me, something infinitely crystalline that could coalesce and become total light outside time or space. Like a door of opal and diamond out of which one starts to be the thing one truly is and does not want and does not know and is not able to be.
There is nothing new about that thirst and that suspicion, but there is an ever greater confusion when I face the ersatz things offered me by this day-and-night intelligence, this archive of facts and memories, these passions where I go about leaving pieces of time and skin, these surmises so much underneath and far away from those other surmises there next to me, stuck to my face, prevision already mixed with vision, the denunciation of that feigned freedom with which I move through streets and years.
Since I am no more than this body which has already putrefied in some point of future time, these bones that write anachronically, I feel that the body is demanding itself, demanding from its consciousness the still inconceivable operation that would no longer be putrefaction. This body that I am has the prescience of a state in which as it denies itself as such, and as it simultaneously denies the objective correlative as such, its own consciousness would accede to a state outside the body and outside the world which would be the true accession to being. My body will be, not mine Morelli, not I, the one who in nineteen hundred and fifty has already putrefied in nineteen hundred and eighty, my body will be because behind that door of light (what can we call that besieging certainty stuck to the
face) being will be something other than bodies
and
, than bodies and souls
and
, than I and the other thing, than yesterday and tomorrow. Everything depends on…(a sentence scratched out).
Melancholy finale: A
satori
is instantaneous and resolves everything. But in order to reach it one would have to unwind history, both the one outside and the one inside.
Trop tard pour moi. Crever en italien, voire en occidental, c’est tout ce qui me reste. Mon petit café-crème le matin, si agréable
…
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AT one time Morelli had been planning a book that never got beyond a few scattered notes. It can be summed up best in this way: “Psychology, a word with the air of an old woman about it. A Swede is working on a chemical theory of thought.
1
Chemistry,
electromagnetism, the secret flow of living matter, everything returns strangely to evoke the idea of mana; in a like manner, on the edge of social behavior, one might suspect an interaction of a different nature, a billiard game that certain individuals play or are played at, a drama with no Oedipuses, no Rastignacs, no Phaedras, an
impersonal
drama to the extent that the consciences and the passions of the characters cannot be seen as having been compromised except a posteriori. As if the subliminal levels were those that wind and unravel the ball of yarn which is the group that has been compromised in the play. Or to please the Swede: as if certain individuals had cut into the deep chemistry of others without having meant to and vice versa, so that the most curious and interesting chain reactions, fissions, and transmutations would result.
“Things being as they are, all that is needed is a pleasant extrapolation in order to postulate a human group that thinks it is reacting psychologically in the classic sense of that tired old word, but which merely represents an instance in that flow of animated matter, in the infinite interactions of what we formerly called desires, sympathies, wills, convictions, and which appear here as something irreducible to all reason and all description: foreign occupying forces, advancing in the quest of their freedom of the city; a quest superior to ourselves as
individuals and one which uses us for its own ends, a dark necessity of evading the state of Homo sapiens towards … which Homo? Because
sapiens
is another tired old word, one of those that one must scrub clean before attempting to use it with any sort of meaning.
“If I were to write this book, standard behavior (including the most unusual, its deluxe category) would be inexplicable by means of current instrumental psychology. The actors would appear to be unhealthy or complete idiots. Not that they would show themselves incapable of current
challenges and responses:
love, jealousy, pity, and so on down the line, but in them something which Homo sapiens keeps subliminal would laboriously open up a road as if a third eye
2
were blinking out with effort from under the frontal bone. Everything would be a kind of disquiet, a continuous uprooting, a territory where psychological causality would yield disconcertedly, and those puppets would destroy each other or love each other or recognize each other without suspecting too much that life is trying to change its key in and through and by them, that a barely conceivable attempt is born in man as one other day there were being born the reason-key, the feeling-key, the pragmatism-key. That with each successive defeat there is an approach towards the final mutation, and that man only is in that he searchs to be, plans to be, thumbing through words and modes of behavior and joy sprinkled with blood and other rhetorical pieces like this one.”
1
L’Express
, Paris, n.d.
Two months ago a Swedish neurobiologist, Holger Hyden, of the University of Göteborg, presented to the most eminent specialists in the world, gathered in San Francisco, his theories on the chemical nature of mental processes. According to Hyden, the act of thinking, of remembering, of feeling, or of making a decision is manifested by the appearance in the brain, and in the nerves connecting it with other organs, of certain particular molecules which the nerve cells manufacture as a result of the external stimulus. (…) The Swedish team was able to effect the delicate separation of the two types of cell in live rabbit tissue, weighed them (in millionths of a millionth of a gram), and determined through analysis the way in which these cells utilized their fuel in various cases.
One of the essential functions of neurons is the transmission of nervous impulses. This transmission operates by means of almost instantaneous electrochemical reactions. It is not easy to surprise a nerve cell at work, but it appears that the Swedes have done so by means of the careful use of certain methods.
It has been proved that the stimulus becomes transformed in the neurons into an increment of certain proteins whose molecules will vary according to the nature of the message. At the same time, the number of proteins in the satellite cells is reduced, as if they were sacrificing their reserves for the sake of the neuron. The information contained in the protein molecule is converted, according to Hyden, into the impulse which the neuron passes on to its neighbors.
The higher functions of the brain—memory and the reasoning faculties—are explained, according to Hyden, by the particular form of the protein molecules which correspond to each type of stimulus. Each neuron in the brain contains millions of different molecules of ribonucleic acid, which are distinguished by the disposition of their basic constituent elements. Each molecule of ribonucleic acid (RNA) corresponds to a well-defined protein, the way a key is perfectly adapted to a lock. The nucleic acids tell the neuron the make-up of the protein molecule it is to form. According to the Swedish researchers, these molecules are the chemical translation of thoughts.
Memory would correspond, therefore, to the ordering in the brain of the nucleic acid molecules, which play the same role as perforated cards in modern computers. For example, the impulse which corresponds to the note
mi
as it is picked up by the ear, will slide rapidly along from one neuron to another until it has reached all of those containing the molecules of RNA corresponding to that particular stimulus. The cells immediately construct molecules of the corresponding protein which that acid governs, and we have the auditory perception of the note.
The richness and variety of thought is explained by the fact that an average brain contains some ten thousand million neurons, each of which contains in turn several million molecules of various nucleic acids; the number of possible combinations is astronomical. This theory, furthermore, has the advantage of explaining why it has not been possible to discover in the brain clearly defined and special zones for each one of its higher functions; since each neuron has several nucleic acids at hand, it can take part in various mental processes, and evoke diverse thoughts and memories.
2
Note by Wong (in pencil): “A metaphor chosen with the deliberate intent of suggesting the direction in which he is heading.”
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“DON’T move,” Talita said. “You’d think that instead of a cold compress you were getting oil of vitriol.”
“It’s like a kind of electricity,” Oliveira said.
“Don’t talk nonsense.”
“I can see all sorts of phosphorescences, it’s like something by Norman McLaren.”
“Raise your head a minute, the pillow’s too low, I’m going to change it for you.”
“It would be better if you left the pillow alone and changed my head,” Oliveira said. “Surgery is still in its infancy, that you’ve got to admit.”
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)
ONE of the times they had met in the Latin Quarter, Pola was looking at the sidewalk, practically everybody was looking at the sidewalk. They had to stop and study the profile of Napoleon, alongside it an excellent reproduction of Chartres, and a little farther on, a mare and her foal in a green field. The artists were two blond boys and an Indo-Chinese girl. The chalk box was full of ten- and twenty-franc pieces. From time to time one of the artists would crouch down to perfect some detail, and it was easy to see that at that instant the donations would increase.
“They’re using the Penelope system, but without unweaving first,” Oliveira said. “That lady, for example, she didn’t loosen her purse-strings until little Tsong Tsong got down on the ground to retouch the blond with blue eyes. Work produces sentiment, it’s a fact.”
“Is her name Tsong Tsong?” Pola asked.
“How should I know. She has nice ankles.”
“So much work and tonight the women who sweep the streets will come and it’s all over.”
“That’s precisely why it’s so good. Colored chalk as an eschatological pattern, the theme for a thesis. If the municipal water-wagons didn’t put an end to all of it at dawn, Tsong Tsong would come herself with a pail of water. The only thing that really ends is what starts over again in the morning. People throw coins without knowing that they’re being cheated, because those pictures are really never erased. They may change sidewalks or colors, but they’re already there in finished form in a hand, a box of chalk, a wise system of movements; if one of those boys were to spend the morning waving his arms around he would deserve ten francs just as much as when he draws Napoleon. But we want proofs. There they are. Give them twenty francs, don’t be cheap.”
“I already did before you got here.”
“Admirable. Underneath it all we’re placing those coins in the mouth of the dead, the propitiatory obolus. Homage to the ephemeral, so that cathedral may be a chalk image that a splash of water will carry off in one second. The coin is there, and the cathedral will be reborn tomorrow. We pay for immortality, we pay for things that last.
No money, no cathedral.
Are you made of chalk too?”
But Pola didn’t answer him, and he put his arm around her shoulders and they walked Boul ‘Mich’ up and Boul ‘Mich’ down, before wandering slowly towards the Rue Dauphine. A world of colored chalk was spinning around them and caught them up in its dance, fried potatoes in yellow chalk, red wine in red chalk, a pale soft sky in light blue chalk with a touch of green along the riverside. They tossed another coin in the cigar box to halt the flight of the cathedral, and with that very gesture they condemned it to be erased so it could be again, disappear under the splash of water and return chalk after chalk black and blue and yellow. The Rue Dauphine in gray chalk, the stairway carefully done in tones of brown chalk, the room with its lines of flight astutely drawn in bright green chalk, the curtains in white chalk, the bed with its serape where all the chalks
¡Viva México!
, love, its chalks yearning for the fixative that would keep them in the present, love in perfumed chalk, mouth in orange chalk, sadness and surfeit of colorless chalks spinning around in imperceptible dust, settling on the sleeping faces, on the exhausted chalk of the bodies.
“Everything falls apart when you take hold of it, even if you just look at it,” Pola said. “You’re like some terrible acid, I’m afraid of you.”
“You put too much stock in a few metaphors.”
“It isn’t just that you say it, it’s a way you have … I don’t know, like a funnel. Sometimes I think I’m going to slip out of your arms and fall into a well. It’s worse than dreaming that you’re falling in space.”
“Maybe you’re not entirely lost,” Oliveira said.
“Oh, leave me in peace. I know how to live, you know. I live very well the way I live. Here, with my things and my friends.”
“Name them, name them. That helps. Give them names, then you won’t fall. There’s the night-table, the curtain hasn’t run away from the window, Claudette is still at the same address,
DAN-ton 34 I can’t remember the rest, and your mother still writes to you from Aix-en-Provence. Everything’s fine.”
“You make me afraid, you South American monster,” Pola said, squeezing up against him. “We’d agreed that here in my place there wouldn’t be any talk about …”
“About colored chalk.”
“About all of that.”
Oliveira lit a Gauloise and looked at the folded piece of paper on the night-table.