Ký sinh trùng
Thấy được Oscar, rồi được cộng đồng “net” khen quá cỡ thợ mộc, Gấu bèn
thử coi, đến khúc, bà người làm bị “lũ người quỉ ám” chơi đòn bửn, mất
sở hụi, đành lắc đầu, không coi tiếp, tiếc thời giờ!
“Cái này”, Bắc Kít, Tẫu Kít, rành lắm, “cái gì gì” ‘vô độc bất trượng phu’:
Không độc không phải là... trượng phu.
Ở mức nhẹ, nó được gọi là láu cá, lưu manh. Đểu cáng…
Ở mức cao hơn, là điều Updike, nói về những xã hội măng non đắng nghét
không làm sao trưởng thành được trong tiểu thuyết của Mặc Ngôn. (*)
Cái, Gấu thù nhất, ở trong…. Gấu!
(*)
Rushdie gọi, “thế giới thứ ba”, tức những nước XHCN - những xã hội chỉ có “1 nửa”.
Tình cờ làm sao, Gấu đang loay hoay với 1 số báo “Granta” thật xưa,
đánh dấu 21 năm đầu của nó, trong có bài của Primo Levi, viết về tình
trạng “không trọng lượng” của phi hành gia, và nó làm ông nhớ đến 1 xen ở
“Hỏa Ngục” của Dante:
From this persistent dream of
weightlessness, my mind returns to a well-known rendition of the Geryon
episode in the seventeenth canto of the “Inferno”. The 'wild beast',
reconstructed by Dante from classical sources and also from
word-of-mouth accounts of the medieval bestiaries, is imaginary and at
the same time splendidly real. It eludes the burden of weight. (1).
Nếu thế, “ký sinh trùng” còn có cái nick ”wild beast”. “Con thú hoang dã”, như Primo Levi.
Hay, “Cô Vy”, như đang được gọi?
(1)
Primo Levi
WEIGHTLESS
What I would like to experience most of all would be to find myself
freed, even if only for a moment, from the weight of my body. I wouldn't
want to overdo it-just to hang suspended for a reasonable period-and
yet I feel intensely envious of those weightless astronauts whom we are
permitted to see all too rarely on our TV screens. They seem as much at
ease as fish in water: they move elegantly around their cockpit-these
days quite spacious-propelling themselves forward by pushing gently off
invisible walls, and sailing smoothly through the air to berth securely
at their work place. At other times we have seen them conversing, as if
it were the most natural thing-c-one of them 'the right way up', the
other 'upside down' (but of course in orbit there is neither up nor
down). Or we have seen them take turns to play childish games: one
flicks a toffee with his thumbnail, and it flies slowly and in a
perfectly straight line into the open mouth of his colleague. We have
seen an astronaut squirt water from a plastic container into the air:
the water does not fall or disperse but settles in a roundish mass which
then, subject only to the weak forces of surface tension, lazily
assumes the form of a sphere. What do they do with it then? It can't be
easy to dispose of without damaging the delicate structures upholding
its surface.
I wonder what it would take to make a documentary that
would link together these visions, transmitted by some miracle from the
satellites that flash past above our heads and above our atmosphere. A
film like that, drawn from American and Soviet sources, and with an
intelligent commentary, would teach everybody so much. It would
certainly be more successful than the nonsense that is put out today,
more successful too than porno movies.
I have also often wondered
about the experiments, or more particularly the simulation courses which
aspiring astronauts have to undergo and which journalists write about
as if they were nothing out of the ordinary. What sense is there in
them? And how is weightlessness simulated? The only technique imaginable
would be to close the candidates in a vehicle in free fall: a plane or
an elevator such as Einstein postulated for the experiment designed to
illustrate the concept of special relativity. But a plane even in a
vertical fall, is braked by the resistance of the air, and a lift (or
rather, a fall) has additional frictional forces acting on the cable. In
both cases, weightlessness (or “abaria” to the die-hard classicists)
would not be complete. And even in the best case- the quite terrifying
scenario of a plane dropping like a stone from a height of five or ten
or twenty miles, perhaps with an additional thrust from the engines in
the final stages-the whole thing would last no more than a few tens of
seconds: not enough time for any training or for measuring physiological
data. And then there would be the question of stopping...
And yet
almost all of us have experienced a 'simulation' of this decidedly
non-terrestrial sensation. We have felt it in a childhood dream. In the
most typical version, the dreamer becomes aware with joyous amazement
that flying is as easy as walking or swimming. How could you have been
so stupid as not to have thought of it before? You just scull with the
palms of your hands and-hey presto-you take off from the floor, moving
effortlessly; you turn around, avoiding the obstacles; you pass
skillfully through doors and windows, and escape into the open air: not
with the frenetic whirring of a sparrow's wings, not with the voracious,
stridulant haste of a swallow, but with the silent majesty of the
eagles and the clouds. Where does this presentiment of what is now a
concrete reality come from? Perhaps it is a memory common to the
species, inherited from our proto-bird-like aquatic reptiles. Or maybe
this dream is a prelude to a future, as yet unclear, in which the
umbilical cord which calls us back to mother earth will be superfluous
and transparent: the advent of a new mode of locomotion, more noble even
than our own complicated, unsteady, two-legged style with its internal
inefficiencies and its need of external friction between the feet and
the ground.
From this persistent dream of weightlessness, my mind
returns to a well-known rendition of the Geryon episode in the
seventeenth canto of the “Inferno”. The 'wild beast', reconstructed by
Dante from classical sources and also from word-of-mouth accounts of the
medieval bestiaries, is imaginary and at the same time splendidly real.
It eludes the burden of weight. Waiting for its two strange passengers,
only one of whom is subject to the laws of gravity, the wild beast
rests on the bank with its forelegs, but its deadly tail floats 'in the
void' like the stern-end of a Zeppelin moored to its pylon. At first,
Dante was frightened by the creature, but then that magical descent to
Malebolge captured the attention of the poet-scientist, paradoxically
absorbed in the naturalistic study of his fictional beast whose
monstrous and symbolic form he describes with precision. The brief
description of the journey on the back of the beast is singularly
accurate, down to the details as confirmed by the pilots of modern
hang-gliders: the silent, gliding flight, where the passenger's
perception of speed is not informed by the rhythm or the noise of the
wings but only by the sensation of the air which is 'on their face and
from below'. Perhaps Dante, too, was reproducing here unconsciously the
universal dream of weightless flight, to which psychoanalysts attribute
problematical and immodest significance.
The ease with which man
adapts to weightlessness is a fascinating mystery. Considering that for
many people travel by sea or even by car can cause bouts of nausea, one
can't help feeling perplexed. During month-long spells in space the
astronauts complained only of passing discomforts, and doctors who
examined them afterwards discovered a light de-calcification of the
bones and a transitory atrophy of the heart muscles: the same effects,
in other words, produced by a period of confinement to bed. Yet nothing
in our long history of evolution could have prepared us for a condition
as unnatural as non-gravity.
Thus we have vast and unforeseen
margins of safety: the visionary idea of humanity migrating from star to
star on vessels with huge sails driven by stellar light might have
limits, but not that of weightlessness: our poor body, so vulnerable to
swords, to guns and to viruses, is space-proof.
“Translated from the Italian by Piers Spence”
“Primo Levi died on April 11, after a fall at his home in Turin. His
death was reported by Italian newspapers as ‘apparent suicide'.”
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