Giorgio Manganelli

Forty Eight


From the moment at which he realized that it is impossible not to stand at the center of the world, and that this holds equally for him and every human being, or animal, or even stone, or alga, or bacterium, he had to accept that there are only two solutions for a description of the modes of behavior that this situation implies.  If the center of the world is active, the world itself, endowed and enriched with infinite centers, will in turn be infinitely active; alternatively, the center of the world must be besieged by the world's totality, or, more exactly must constitute its target.  At present he experiences the latter condition; he knows himself to be psychologically spherical, and to stand at the convergence of a vast number of radii, which, strangely, concentrate themselves upon him, or pierce him with their shafts of light.  He senses, in the empty hollows of space, the bending, without the use of hands, of a bow of impossible stiffness, and the shooting of an arrow that will reach him on his sixtieth birthday.  He attempts to shift position, to fluctuate, but he knows that every movement of his spherical body exposes him to the aim of other constellations, of stars hidden by stars, of clouds and animals.  All the same, he is far less terrified by any star or cloud than by always being in the bead of nothingness and silence.  He does not know where nothingness may be, and suspects it is hidden inside him.  This would make him the target of an interior perforation, of a kind his sphere could not withstand, even though he does not know what this conclusion means; as far as silence is concerned, it results, as he thoroughly understands, from the suppression of all the voices which might speak to him in any definitive way, transpiercing him- and this is horrid -without the aid of any weapon.  In every point where there is silence lies hidden a voice; and that voice thinks him, examines and scrutinizes him.  If nothingness and silence ally with one another, if they exchange information with signs he cannot grasp, what will become of him?  Oh, he does not fear the shaft sent flying by the centaur on the day of his birth, and which now reaches its mark.  Him.  He does not defend himself from the weary lance that crosses the world, directed by the will to wound him.  But this disturbs him: his inability to distinguish between himself as pain, nullification and death, and himself as center of the world.


trns. by Henry Martin


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