How he traversed the distance from Selinunte to the foot of Mount Etna, beneath the turbulent sky, the anxious nights, the dry wind, he would not have been able to say, blind to the hills on which the wheat was ripening, to the black olive trees tied to the slopes and to the cruel towns resting on the summits. However, he had passed through the center of the island, in the place called the navel, where Persephone, the priests said, was abducted and then dragged into the underworld. He had gone through the door of the world without realizing it.
One evening, he found himself in the talus scree. Walking became impossible. A recent eruption had spilled a large lava flow across the flows he recognized. It formed a field of ruins, of debris, black and discontinuous, marked with red and yellow traces. Cones, with their points downward, were collapsing; caverns were opening like hard and smooth arches crowned with ashy powder and let shafts be made out. Among the ejecta, rocks high as towers and other simple stones plagued the walker with obstacles and made him slip. Climbing straight up, he would immediately roll. The night added its shadow to the black sheet. To his right, already, a minor crater was burning. He received its acid smoke in waves; his eyes were tearing up. Sometimes, often, he fell to his knees under the too heavy weight and bled from his hands and feet.
He thought he heard clamors, the tumult of the wind and the furnace; was the ash slipping with a noise like falling water? The mountain at work was murmuring with its metamorphoses, cracking, rumbling, crackling, popping. He heard, all melted together, explosions and deflagrations of fire, muffled or loud, cave-ins, crashes and detonations of earth, heavy and deep, the lapping and bubbling, vibrant and rustling, of liquids, the hissing and stridulations of the air, at the upper limits of the audible, like the tearing of a curtain. Under the turbulent black sky, amid the dark and moving lavas, the troubled murmur of things was raising its commotion. Hurricanes on the open sea, sandstorms in the desert, forest fires, waterspouts and lightning, he remembered all that, then, as almost simple components of this great random howling: here, the sum and product of all the world’s noises, the great vortex. This high disordered, truncated cone solidified the turbulent form while leaving it changing and viscous. An interior turmoil that’s come outside as an almost perfect excrescence, a hard fluid where multiple parts were born to unity, where unity was multiplied into its elements. The forces at work of union and dissociation in this thick magma seemed to be searching for a word across the scattered din.
For the first time the immense clamor of Love and Hate reached him. For Hate and Love rumble and wail, whereas, deaf to this racket, the vibrating strings of old Pythagoras sent out the world’s first message, its first ordered signal. He passionately listened to the things panting beneath the acoustics, the disorder fidgeting before any type of sign; heard the primordial music, the buzzing of the burning chaos, the world’s background noise. He knew then, personally and by hearsay, that his physics had touched the forces of origin, the shrill tearing of dissociation and the full and warm, harmonic and beating tonality of communion. Things speak, for a hurried listening, but rustle and babble for the profound ear. The craters, then, the flows, those collapsed sheets, those cliffs, those coombs appeared to him, in the black of meaning and under the teeming of the constellations, to be the great world organ, with lop-sided, twisted and divided up pipes, with disjointed stops, with scattered keyboards, roaring, under the vault of the sky, an aleatoric proto-music.
Pythagoras had only known how to listen to the blacksmith at work, whereas he was hearing Hephaestus himself who, through fire, was filling space with mad tones. Through his tenderness, he heard the primary Tenderness of things; through the hate that, in him, was twisting with bitterness, he heard the elementary and dark Hate. The way, in the past, he had known the wind through the heady air that raised his chest, the devouring fire through the double furnace of the brain and the genitals, the waters through his secretions, the earth through the weight of his fatigue in the evening. The swirling noises of the world were reaching that internal ear that perceives the body’s tumult. He too was a volcano; Hephaestus was forging in his own burning loins; Enceladus, beaten, crushed by the gods, was lying chained up in his belly, his liver, his thighs, from which he made plaintive and angry mutterings be heard, which came out of his own mouth in words of ash, cinder and smoke.1 The interminable war of the giants had always taken place in his flesh and on the mountain. Of course, the old Cyclopes of the caves, blind, were wandering in the blackness and throwing rocks just anywhere ever since a certain envoy from Athena, the virgin and warrior, had passed through, ever since the ruses and wickedness of Ulysses, the man of intelligence.
Zeus’s thunderbolt from the clouds nevertheless didn’t triumph forever. Mastery wasn’t definitively sheltered from an eruptive bomb. He recognized that in his body’s noises, in the abundant energies that made an immense clamor in him, they too searching for a word across this scattered din. Was reason passing over to the side of Hate since it had reduced this tumult to silence and these works to disordered chaos? Did the divine understanding of proportions and ratios detest a random desire? Did the Cyclopes only seek to look after woolly flocks? Did Hephaestus, expelled from the Banquet, only desire to forge animate statues to free the slaves from work? The fire from the sky was only a deadly thunderbolt; Aphrodite had left the anvil and hammer to enjoy Ares, the god of war. Yes, Hate was changing sides. Victorious, it was siding firmly with Olympic intelligence. Love was clamoring beneath the mountain. Empedocles, a scholar, physicist, a prince of reason, felt his head to be filled with Hate, but heard Love crying out in his entrails and genitals. An entire world, learned, constructed, built level like a temple, was toppling over in front of him, a long lie finally seen through. He listened passionately to the messages deprived of meaning issuing from those two dark mouths, the blind craters and his own black body whose forgotten commotion bore the secrets of the world. At that moment, the word “Etna,” the sound “Etna,” that burst of the voice and teeth, without any other meaning than to designate a pile of ashes and fire, happened to reverse itself like a glove before his eyes to deliver an unexpected meaning: ante, what faces, the thing against, the object. To hide or efface the adversary, to make people believe that it had disappeared, the victorious word had contraposed its name. Antaeus [Antée] too was a giant put to death by a god. Some other god of speech had put to death the name of the place where he was buried. The volcano was expelled from language, effaced, reduced to a noise, that background clamor that Empedocles was hearing in the course of his nocturnal passion.
He was slowly wandering over that pathless, chaotic slope. Fell, climbed, rolled, descended, resumed walking and ascending; and understood with difficulty, in bits and pieces, without any key for translating this ashy hubbub clearly, this expanse of noise. He was transforming the sulfur dust that came into his mouth and cracked under his teeth into scattered words, transforming into sound the pulverulent cinders with which his ears were filling. A crowd of cold scoriae that could no longer speak and to which his heat was given. They stuck to his face, arms, and hands, to his sweat and blood. The fire of his desire was rekindling these stones. He was melting into the chaos, drowned in the rumblings and coal dust. Soon, he would have vanished into the black of meaning, into the unformed mass that forever precedes signals.
But no, it wasn’t a question of a sepulture; he didn’t want to bury himself yet. Burning like the plasma of stars, he was drawing a directional arrow on the black sand and dead rocks. A comet’s tail was heading towards the crater. No doubt his own fire would exhaust itself by giving itself without conceivable pardon to the icy pumice. The scattering of the passive flow was regaining an earthly hope, in passing. At the end of his route, through stops, regressions, advances, his flame would perhaps have flagged, but he was going, compelled, to the source of the fire, to the source of life, meaning, creation. His heat was running—panting—toward the inferno, his desire toward rebirth, his gentle tenderness toward the sun below.
At the furthest edge of the clouds, the moon, in bursts, was spreading its silky glow. He then perceived contours, leaning rocks, scattered volumes losing equilibrium, precarious balance everywhere, like constructions in danger of toppling over once the storm or fire or earthquake had passed, and whose bare beams were hanging and leaning in overhangs but still supporting the roof timbers. On the great black cone, lit up and then veiled by occultations and which occupied almost the entire sky, each thing was taking on an angle, askew it seemed, but only held, moving, by reproducing, more or less, the volcano’s jagged angle. The chaos was, suddenly, losing its disorder; the deviation from equilibrium was becoming a law, sown haphazardly in the lava field. On the main slope, everything was leaning according to circumstance; rocks, piles, talus, funnels were giving their declination, like ships of all sizes on the mobile sea.
It was enough to imagine an infinitely slow rolling or heavily viscous waters to see that expanse dotted with masts of every breadth. Empedocles was seeing a strange raging ocean whose global level didn’t keep smooth but was inclined, sloping, and which compensated for that fleeing by a thick density, an almost stable flow, an indefinitely not very mobile time. The duration of the fire was being frozen, on the descent, by the doughy weight of the declivity. Amid this crystallized hurricane, every vessel tilted its spars according its height and type. If he didn’t move from this place for millennia and if his heart only beat once per lunar month, he would have seen them doing a lengthy dance before shipwreck. But his slender and hurried body was threading its way through a derisory time; his impatient and rapid heart only opened a rift in the hard massif of duration, despite the long serenity of acquired wisdom and the breadth of his shoulders. However he could imitate these movements of endless scope in the short alcove of his hours, him the accelerator that ramps up slow eternity. He climbed, lost his balance, fell, started again, the deviation always resumed in the thighs and loins. Standing and progressing by the very possibility of falling. He assumed, in a lightning-fast manner, like an arch, the angle and overhang formed by the things in a poised calm. His tiny crank craft was dancing madly in the bad weather amid the ships of high tonnage that were almost motionless in the cyclone. A lighter, he was unloading the enormous time of things, he was hopping, subtle, amid the gravities.
The deviation, the two asymmetrical legs of Mount Etna’s cone, the dangerously overhanging rocks, the arch of his back and the tired hesitation of his gait, this shifting sown on the sheet of ash were drafting the law of becoming, a law adherent to chaos. The key to the things themselves, their hobbling keystone, he was finding it everywhere for carrying it within himself. Everything is born from there, everything dies likewise. It was natural to find this general inequation of existence here on the roof of Hephaestus the lame’s very house, Hephaestus who limped after his expulsion from the other world, his birth. To see day and night entering unequally into time is to contemplate the play of this excess, of this lack, an excess and lack that topple onto each other. The blacksmith casts and hammers beings and things in his image—askew, off-center, outside itself. And the volcano’s furnace knows that if everything remains plumb nothing exists, that strict equilibrium amounts to the waterfall, chaos, ash in vertical rain, disorder from which nothing comes. In the beginning, fire: I see it shoot up from the crater; I saw it yesterday evening descend from the sun; I see it snow from the stars. In the beginning, the rain of fire. Lightning. Yes, I understand why the smith fell from the sky. Then right after, nothing, eternally. Everything is falling and that’s all, in a sheet, in a cloud, in a curtain. And slowly cools in the void like a kind of fog and goes toward its stability. Only nothingness can happen from this imbecilic equilibrium. Banal chaos, like the banal furnace, which rests infinitely and cools.
So to draw things from chaos, the smith invented the volcano, made Etna his home, threw fire onto the slope the way he was cast out from the sky. That gets colder along the incline, taking on postures and forms, cams and asymmetries. The truncated or the oblique begins to list. There is always an angle in the straight line or a gap in the circle. Etna itself has a jagged crater, longer toward the south and more abrupt toward the north. The cones rest on other cones, like Pelion on Ossa, solidified viscous vortices. The circles don’t catch hold of themselves but open into spirals. Yes, I’ve always been mistaken with my circle. The grand form of the things of the world is turbulence. Spiral patches in the sky, like the waterspouts that raise the passive sea or lay the ears in a corn field down in an open ring with the passing of certain thunderstorms; the branches of trees climb a spiral staircase around the main trunk; the shell of soft animals winds around an umbilicus to the right or left. The universality of the spiral form is bound to be repeated in the very small: if particles exist they’re bound to bustle about in a plume; if grouped atoms of life exchanged by men and women in reproduction exist they’re bound to be screwed in a helix. In the beginning, fire, in the beginning, deviation. The world is not ambidextrous, it must, to exist, warp a little.2 An economy circuiting into itself would collapse into death or nothingness, the furnace gone cold. A little spending, a hole for waste, a window for acquisition are needed. On Etna’s waterspouted gradient, the heat flows from upslope; the cold aspirates from downslope. My route rises winding; here is the descent of things, their birth, their death, that is to say, their form. Everything goes according to the cyclone, the circumference remaining what being has already lost. Fire twists in woven flames; the earth, crystals show dissymmetries; the air whirls; the water eddies. Every path deviates by an angle from its straight line, and the circle does not rejoin itself. I am, left-handed, a discord of the chaos. The disquietude that never leaves me rejoins the order of atmospheric phenomena. We must fall, lose our balance, to be and to come into being, and endlessly catch ourselves until the terminal fall to the bottom of the coomb. Love hesitates toward Hate; Hate has misfires in which it makes way for Love. In the shifted force field, everything flies out in a plume from that oblique rift. The volcano, the foot of the world, swirls with rock and smoke toward the black sky.
Then, beings were born whose feet were screwed in helices and whose hands couldn’t be counted. The previous evening, he had been seated at the foot of an agave that was leaning its slender main shoot over the open plume of its enormous leaves. The lava field was becoming populated. A place of the end of things and the beginning of times. The sowing of deviation over the sheet of ashes was bearing fruit. On the new earth, in indecipherable numbers, grew heads without necks; everywhere naked arms without shoulders slid, and eyes wandered about vaguely, without foreheads, and one by one. The background rustling in search of a word that he had heard in the wind and talus scree was coming now from mouths, throats, beaks, muzzles—scattered to the wind and downwind—which were emitting it, irrepressible. The former tumult was translated into the wails of infants. And all that, as numerous as the sand, was gently swarming in the coppery night, buzzing, humming with its proliferation. A massif of worms, a flight of locusts, an anthill or swarm, but in which each moving organ was differentiating itself from every other. The scattered’s Hate was moaning, horrible, in search of Love.
An atrocious anxiety screwed his belly at the memory that once, on the coast of a lost sea, toward the Semitic Orient, still to the east of the Nile and southern enough to see strange stars, at sundown he had seen a desert beach covered with myriads of crabs, a dense population of slow carapaced animals. Alone on a low dune, he watched, appalled, the viscous and broken magma. Never had he felt as solitary as on that day. On the reddish and shifting sand, in the wide band where the desert ended, crackling heterochelous pincers were sharpening amongst themselves, gray and translucent plates were sliding one over the over, clumsy rings were half-embracing, a purée of appendages were mixing without merging, scattered segments were trembling, a violent and sickly sweet agony in a rattling of hail. At the ends of the known world, the horrifying multiplicity, spread as far as the horizon, was sounding the end, the death of things. Is Hate’s work here at its ultimate deciding authority? In that enormous sticky pile of scissors, knives, sections and fragments of armor, in that gluey continuum of breaches, ridges and fissures, in that ground-up cracking, that clattering of crushing, his hearing and sight reached the edge of history. Exactly after, the insane murmur of the sea. The ultimate dissociation on the wet sand, the final battle. His body was disintegrating little by little from remaining there, right near that sewage field. He was losing its hands and feet; he was counting its bones. He felt himself rolling on the dune, limb by limb, from part to part, like last chance dice, in order to rejoin in a cataract, passive and fascinated, necessarily taken by the sliding of the sheet, violence, hate and dissociation. The crowd and he ran toward the atoms on the declivity of the shore, refusing the sun from above, the breeze everywhere, the water to the left and the land to the right, captivated by the serious and deadly work of difference. The sunset was hanging its green needle at the end of the solidified sky. In spite of the merciless heat, easily chilled, he wrapped himself in his tunic, turned his back abruptly to that slaughter and left running toward the desert until he was out of breath. That evening he understood that men, if they all so desired, could be immortal for very little.
Today, once again, the same desert, but black and in the small hours of the night, short of breath and the slope in the same seamless mantle. A similar place if not the same time, the same noise and a similar anxiety. No longer the emerald flame vanishing at the horizon, but this yellow and coppery fire coming out of the shaft at two thousand paces. He was no longer separated from the heavy proliferation by the elevation of a dune but plunged living inside. Legs and arms were coming up to his thighs; he felt himself brushed by ears and eyes. Scattered limbs were sticking to his skin and seemed to want to hold fast to his skeleton. He was becoming a monster and no longer knew what belonged to him. His lived body was bursting, for lack of coenesthesia. He no longer had any assurance of where his individual ended. The warm and secret patency one possesses of one’s edges, of the space filled with blood and muscles, of the volume occupied by the skin and its interior, that certitude was flowing, scattered, through his pores. He was leaving his home, as though by the stairs of a mill: becoming all, everywhere, he was being annihilated, was living nowhere.3 The exceedingly swollen goatskin exploded. Torrent and volute, ash, talus scree, ejecta and now these ten thousand pieces, this burst anthill, of him and outside him, with paradoxical borders. Him, that ancient sub-thing: agave and cavern, stone and bull, scorpion, volcano, bear or star. Lost, distraught, he was entering into the world that was invading him, burying himself in the ground whose earth was penetrating him, scattering himself on the thorny beds of the winds that were forming the rose in his torso, flowing along waters that were streaming from his liver to his nails, flaming like a fire across the sparks of the plain.4 Melted among the others, he was curling up in their intimacy, become woman, child, old man, slave and master, black as a Nigritian and mad enough to tell oracles. He was elsewhere, and elsewhere was formed here, as though the volcano had liquefied and then flung him in a thousand pieces into every corner of the world and across the thickness of what exists. There were many that had two chests, two faces, oxen with human faces and men with bovine heads; there were male females with delicate members. Swimming in that confusion of pieces and appendages, he was turning into the universal monster of Love, the hermaphrodite.
My body appears such as the others have always perceived it in that it appears separated, divided, finished like an island because Hate has lopped its bridges, its long connections and bumps, and because it has blocked its holes, its apertures and passages; because it has sealed the doors and windows, has mutilated all the roads. Dumb, blind, deaf, intact and intangible, Hate is always virgin. The works of Love on the chaos of lava were attempting mutations in the metamorphic rocks. The background clamor was losing a bit of its insanity; breezes of ecstasy were passing. Disjoint appendages were knotting together, combining, intertwining in a helix; union was imitating Hermes’s caduceus everywhere. Strange reptiles were transforming, certain ones of a colossal size, chimera were exchanging their parts, echidnae were becoming covered with quills and hair, woman-headed birds were landing on big-breasted harbor seals, camel lions and horse fish were trying to survive their birth and were searching for their rare female amid the leopards. Invention’s generosity, in reality, was surpassing mythology. It was squandering where delirium remained miserly and reason stingy, and combining, tranquilly and limitlessly. You might have thought that several continents were nearing each other, distancing away from each other or putting their fortune in common. The noise that was filling space was riddled with interferences.
He took some time to go past the molten tide and untie himself from this tentacular bushing out. He could have remained there always and would even have desired to do so. Not a stage or a stop on his journey but the impassable place after which nothing new could appear. As though a womb cloud existed and then the tedium of repetition. As though a network existed, one where the connections never stop, and then the imbecility of invariances. After the crossbreeding, due to the foolishly straight route, life doesn’t vary much. After the paradise of tigrons and ligers, animality in ecstasy does nothing but endlessly repeat the gestures of the beginning. The mongoose no longer looks for the cobra except to put it to death; the hedgehog no longer attempts a now unthinkable crossbreed with the adder, nor the eagle with the lamb. The burning invention explodes into an archipelago whose islands are invaded by parasites to defend their approaches where dogs, frothing with rabies, mount guard. Hate, old, passes there. It unties the caducei, forbids encounters and cuts off coituses, defines niches, divides, puts in order by fossilizing things and constructing keeps. Does the misfortune of time come from the fact that the week of Love is short, of a dense and compact duration, whereas the era of Hate covers millennia, repeating itself? The dividing up of time only leaves Love the margin. Since when have we entered the era of Hate? Since the memory of genera. Since when are monsters or gods no longer manufactured? He would have given everything for a new living creature.
He was standing on a bare projecting shelf, ventilated, after three successive falls. The slope resumed further on after this brief rest. As though awakened from a dream, he beat his sandals and shook his coat. Here’s the start of the final gradient, the cone’s last incline. The night, suddenly, was becoming very dark; before the clouds had occulted the moon, he had thought he’d seen several masses of gray snow piled below the scoria. The frost, deep, imprisoned Etna’s fabulous discourse in crystals and ice. What winter season, what cold altitude is preventing me from speaking? He was going to the furnace through the cold. The wind was freshening with the height. The gusts, violent, were cracking with a roar in the couloirs of the high rocks, whirling at the bottom of the cul-de-sacs, broken by hesitations and silences. And once again, he thought he was out on the open sea, in one of those savage storms like he saw and lived through between Palermo and Naples or off the mouths of the Nile toward the coast of Crete. Complicated paths worked their way through the middle of the crumbling rocks, cliffs eaten away at their feet, vertical and inclined, like the troughs between waves. And in these narrow labyrinths, the wind’s tumult was modulating, sweeping away the audible, from stridency to droning. The noise was increasing to the point of silence, and the pauses in the panting were saturated with clamoring. He, once again, received the insane message. No, he wasn’t alone, had never been so. How had he been able to imagine he was, yesterday evening, when the sunset was disproportionately lengthening his shadow? He hadn’t seen anyone around the olive trees; nothing was stirring in the last fields or the first clusters of trees. A solitary field of rocks in the first hours of vigil. Nothing but rocks and his visions. And yet, he would have sworn that a crowd was accompanying him. He grasped its outlines and movements, behind the rocks, in front of them, yes, in them. Its immense mass, in myriads and thousands, was besieging the volcano. The cone was trembling because of it. Groups, families, clans, cities, nations were walking in procession along the slopes; torches flickered here and there, firebrands and lamps. An entire black crowd was hiding and then appearing, silent and howling its complaint in wordless music. The population of all those who have vanished. Not those that death had erased from the earth, but those who had not chosen to live there like shades and that hate had buried under the law. The vanished Empedocles all of a sudden found himself with those damned by Hate. He had naively thought himself the only one to choose the night; nothing could be more common, banal, or ordinary. The hero lives in the street and the public square, whereas the hero of the stage amounts to a mask.
Immersed in the turba, the skin of his face was falling off. He was hearing a new language that the full light of day had abducted. Voices of imploring women, cries and murmurs being drowned by the confusion, brawls, altercations, pitched battles, a fearsome army whose breastplates and sabers were clashing against each other, breakings of lances, crashings of shields, whistlings of javelins, stompings of horses whose hooves were breaking bones, vociferations of anger, disparate terms of abuse, warriors mortally wounded and who were bellowing out their agony, above all, the moans, groans, and lamentations of the wounded. The mountain was giving birth to the sobs of men, was streaming with venom, harshness, loathing, horror, rancor, and resentment; but the background tonality remained suffering. And victor and vanquished were nothing but victims; the women’s voices were crying it out. Hate cuts up and reproduces itself, total and identical, on each side of the division, like a worm. Despite the putting to death of one piece by another piece, Hate multiplies itself faster than it kills; the contagion increases by its own ravages. The crowd was amassing the plague victims of history. The global flood of that plague we call history.
Empedocles understood that he was going to die. In his tears were vibrating the reflections of those who were killing each other. He was seeing double. He was going to die from them, by them, and for them. Be totally consumed by Love and Hate. He had known how to beat the plague, the one that turns the throat black and spit the color of saffron, the one whose principles were hiding away in the river mouths and backwaters; he had been able to make the waters flow, to dredge the silty bottoms, to burn the sanies and rot on pyres, to scatter the fetid and putrid miasmas in the light wind to the south, to the sea, to drain the upstream swamps and cure the Selinuntans, but he didn’t know how to fight against this insane plague that dictates fighting. Inadequate medicine, impotent physics.
Worst of all, his knowledge, tied to that state of things, had seen and predicted it. Love, Hate—global forces—regulate the parts and the elements, the chain of things and their unleashing; bodily energies lead to murder, lynching, tortures, to caresses, warm coitus, and ecstatic fusion; Love and Hate are also of science. At a hundred paces from the smoky hearth, the world is reversed. What I had thought up to this dawn to be my knowledge, the luminous space of faithful intuition, is placing me, manifestly, in front of things as they are. I see the elements and the contrary energies that shape them. But I only see and understand them for having been formed from these same parts and shaped by the same forces. The world, in me, is doubled and perceives itself across me. It’s transformed by passing into my body. My science, inevitably, is formed, composed, built from Love and Hate. It grasps the state of things but is subjected to it. Why should it be an exception to the law it decrees? Thus it understands things by obeying them. It says Love, Hate, draws and evaluates forces, but it says reasons, forms and beings with Love and with Hate. We have been living for a long time already, ever since a black morning we have all forgotten, in the exclusive grip of Hate. It alone causes rocks to crumble, reduces mountains to dust, brings the sands to the delta, scatters the sandstorms, wears down the ocean swell, cools down the pyres; it alone impels to chaos; the atomic pulverulence in glacial disorder achieves its reign and its end. It dictates its law to the rocks, to the dead. It divides cities, takes the ax to the tree roots, puts the swords in the hands of the warriors and implacably seeks the holocaust. Its regime and target is the battlefield in the evening, in the steaming scraps and wounded limbs. We’re living in pestilential history. So my science as well, its history and cold light have forgotten Love. The crowd here is given over, body and soul, to Hate. And me, scientist, I am of it and in it, saturated to the teeth with pestilent miasmas. I carry the disease of Selinunte in my words. My physics carries Hate and my science destruction. Knowing is suspecting, and then cutting into pieces. His head tilted, his eyes like lakes of tears, he interrogated the hazardous wind to know who was holding the ax and the raison for the dichotomy.
So Love took him who took the volume of the world and suddenly enveloped the cut up crowd, his scattered body, the mountain of shadow and his new knowledge. An insane Love, fulgurant, broad. In a white silence in which the clamors vanished, an interminable piece of history came to an end. The new science was gently dawning on the eastern horizon, behind Greece and behind Iran, behind the entire known world, still blind, not very visible, unimaginably hot. The furnace sparkled there and not at the crater. He understood his former errors. Going down quickly, as fast as possible, running to the new place, taking everything up again and abandoning the final fold of this mountain, leaving the crest and the summit where the bad fire was awaiting him. Immobile, stopped, suspended in his new hesitation, he was going to go back down.
The crowd was climbing up the slope. It resounded with battles to the death to finally decide who, in the singular or plural, would be the very first to reach the height. It made use of elbows, terms of abuse and sabers. Everyone was trampling underfoot the most bodies possible, in the suffocation, amid the crushing, to arrive at the top as fast as they could. An incomprehensible power was driving the mass to suffer the steepness of the slope and the cruelty of the fighting in order to run precipitately towards the abyss. Everyone appeared terrorized at the idea of going down, toward the meadows of the bottom and the olive trees of the shore. Visibly death was attracting them. They were killing in order to run to it. They would have loathed living happily. By the invisible seashore, yonder, in the early dawn, the peasants were already driving their oxen; their daughters were washing themselves over the stones of the fountains. The mountain, its folds and walls, its slopes and obstacles, prevented them from seeing what was calmly being done in the plains. They were climbing, reversing the gradient of the volcano; their cataracting river was collapsing towards the heights. Overtaking others and taking summits, destruction that’s necessary for the life of intoxication.
The smoke, all of a sudden, invaded space. The ground, burning, was trembling. A few paces away, a yellow wall was glowing, studded with orange. Downwind from the crowd, Empedocles now heard the imprecations and cries of the mixed clusters that fell from the top of a short cliff into the purple and viscous swamp. Their predecessors, upwind, couldn’t perceive anything. Fascinated by the discord and slaughter, blinded by the volutes of sulfur, deafened by the direction of the wind, the direction of history established within Hate’s banks, supported by, clinging to the final gradient, drawn, impelled, shoved, they no longer knew anything about what they were doing. They were feeding the cataract of clusters into the violet lake without stop. Which closed heavily over the despicable agitation.
Among the scattered rocks, enormous around the summit, the flow of the crowd’s course was being divided, the way a river’s waters are divided into several beds when long islands are met with. The standing obstacles were multiplying the forks, from which a labyrinth of bifurcations like one sees in a delta was being woven. The adversaries lost one another, their disputes settled by the walls, and found again, at the end of a defile, haggard enemies whose faces had changed. Just as it was about to be over, at the end of the combat, they had forgotten just who the hated was and the reason for the battle. Their eyes were becoming all white from it. The fire had destroyed the firebrands that had given birth to it. The short overlapping of intersecting valleys was making the teeming mass and confusion more compact. The tumult sounded a fearsome echo along the black choked-off couloirs in which the wind was twisting. Ten paces from the sides of the burnt lake, on the charred scree, between the walls of flame, a lethal cold was striking the mass down. Furious and contorted living beings were falling into the molten sheet, mixed with corpses all stiffened by the freeze, with faces turned blue and a statue’s limbs. The dead, frozen, were flaming like torches. The fire was decomposing this pile of rocks, suddenly struck, immobilized by the cold. Empedocles hadn’t seen that the fall of the men was distributed around the crater. He had thought he was seeing the cataract straight on whereas the smoke hid the entire circumference from him. The complicated network of the flow had surrounded the cone’s crest. At the very moment he finally decided to descend, turned around, with his back to the fire and tightening his tunic over his chest to stifle the icy wind, he found himself facing the torrent.
A thick front of bodies, of corpses tied up with shapeless things, of blood, dust, and crushed objects was rolling toward him with the speed of a thunderstorm. No one, nothing could stop that. He immediately sought to free himself. He turned around, ran toward the crater and skirted a leaning rock. The crowd passed with a thunderous noise. He went back down, ran once again into a path along which the torrent was advancing. Made a U-turn, passed on the left, climbed up some boulders, descended, was seized again by panic, climbed again, used cunning with the volcano, approached the edge, moved away from it, rolled downhill, still the crowd. The mass with ten million heads was covering the mountain with its numerous tissue, besieging the corners and paths, swarming over the folds. Empedocles was looking for the rift, the opening in this network. He ran, calm and serene, knew that he had lost, and dreamed of a love that would open a path for him.
The sun rose. He saw full-on the fearsome proliferation. Moved forward once again. Empedocles was seized by the cataract. A woman was smiling at him, solemn, quite close to his face, while he was falling, for a long time.
The next day, covered with ashes, a large part of Catania was wiped out by the eruption in the early hours of the day. In the silence of the streets, a few sobs, rare moans.
A few decades later, somewhere on the massif of Etna, erudite archeologists discovered strange objects in the ashes, strange objects that their science assured them the volcano had spewed forth on the dawn following Empedocles’s disappearance. All trace of him had been lost on the evening of the feast given by the inhabitants of Selinunte thanking him for his civil engineering works, works whose plans and execution had rid the island of the plague epidemic. Where was he hiding, living or dead?
Those objects strongly resembled a pair of sandals, and certain witnesses deserving of belief as well as twenty Agrigentines who claimed to be on familiar terms with the scientist affirmed that Empedocles used to wear them. That’s a formal proof, they said, that he threw himself into the crater. The story or legend began there.
Others denied that it was a question of shoes: here are two feet broken at the malleoli; here are relics of the body of that man whose legs were broken by accident at the time of his fall into the furnace.
A third school, whose realism excluded all religion and respect, openly mocked the two others by recognizing those objects as two little volcanic bombs, ordinary things that the combined chance of fire, pressure, throwing, sudden cooling and impacts had sculpted into the shape of a foot, left or right, or of sandals or sabots. Why not a sort of pedestal? In short, completely natural simple stones.
Fragments of a body, scattered limbs, artificial, manufactured objects, or inert masses—no one ever knew how to decide.
That hesitation engenders a series: what comes out of the shadowy mouth or the furnace, out of the earth after a life throws or buries itself there, what resurrects from the tomb resembles a piece of the body, an artifact, a thing.
What is a statue? An inert object, a mass of marble or pozzolana, clay, bronze, common or rare earth. A shaped, carved, hammered, sanded, polished, modeled thing. A body resembling, so you can’t tell them apart, a living being, mobile, aerial, soft, caressing, in love, moving. The series of our hesitations.
At the origin of physics, one the first physicists disappeared. His legend hurls him living into the volcano, which lastly returned that thing.
Nearly twenty-five centuries after Empedocles, on the same island of Sicily where Archimedes, the prince of ancient mathematicians, died at the hands of a Roman legionary during the capture of the city of Syracuse, a city he had defended by means of fearsome war machines that came from his knowledge, on the same island, as I was saying, where Hate and Love transmuted into abstract theories and technologies, our contemporary Majorana, a scientist of genius of scarcely thirty years of age, admired by Heisenberg and Fermi, the author of profound works on particles, also chose to disappear when his physics or ours suddenly learned how to unleash by itself lethal eruptions. All trace of the young man vanished around Palermo, a little before the last world war: he had foreseen the atomic bomb. In him as in his elders, life and knowledge mixed fairly.
Agrigentum, Selinunte, Catania, Syracuse, Palermo, we’ve toured around the island or the world; Empedocles, Archimedes, Majorana, the cycle of time, of history, of the sciences is completed here; from now on we inhabit a kind of isolated Sicily closed under the black light of numerous Etnas, which depend and don’t depend on us.
At the edge of a map, a legend shows us how to read it. That is this book’s legend which tries, first, to answer the question that was posed just now: what is a statue? But the legend, besides and above all, requires that you accompany a living being in its ordinary and tragic voyage to the vicinity of death. Empedocles approached it, lost his way and burned there. There’s no true philosophy without descending into the underworld. Then, from the abruptly opened rift, things come out. Physics, one might say, begins: the subject has disappeared, the object comes to pass, raw, and then worked. The scientist’s deadly passion reveals the birth of the objects of knowledge.
An anthropology of the sciences exists. It accompanies them, silent, unheard of. It constitutes their legend: how they must be read. An anthropology lived by Empedocles, at the origin; hinted at by the life and works of Archimedes; and Majorana, our neighbor—invisible and vanished—lastly, meditated on it.