Eusapia
In one of the imaginary cities catalogued by Italo Calvino, the inhabitants have built an exact copy of their city underground where the embalmed corpses of the recently dead (carried there and posed in attitudes reflecting their former occupations) sit at tables, ride bicycles, play trumpets. The job of ferrying the dead underground and arranging them, Calvino tells us, is entrusted to a hooded confraternity. These men say that each time they go underground, they find something changed; from one year to the next, they say, the Eusapia of the dead becomes unrecognizable. Marveling at this phenomenon, the living have taking to imitating the dead and so Eusapia has become a copy of its underground copy. The story concludes with a final flourish: Calvino claims that there are some who say that this has not just now begun to happen—it was the dead who built the upper Usapia.
At first, one suspects that Calvino is fabricating a paradox. But consider: All the dead of Eusapia are set up in tableau vivant and imitated by living inhabitants—including, importantly, the members of the hooded confraternity. It may be going too far to say that the dead, literally, build the upper Eusapia but the reader who ignores Calvino’s invitation to dwell on the paradox may miss the dizzying regress. For what happens when a member of the confraternity dies? He is also carried underground and posed in an attitude reflecting his former occupation—that of arranging the dead. The scene implied is that of a corpse posed in the act of posing a corpse. And this the living members of the confraternity imitate until they die in their turn and are posed in the act of imitating it—so that we must then postulate a corpse posed in the act of posing a corpse in imitation of a corpse posed in the act of posing a corpse. With each passing generation, the relay of imitation telescopes and the original act recedes farther and farther into the growing multitude of corpses. The riddle to be solved was how the dead built the upper Eusapia. One wants to object that the living imitate the dead who are arranged by the confraternity and therefore the confraternity controls everything. But that is imprecise because all the arrangements of the confraternity are dictated by the dead. If we suppose that this has always been the case, we are faced with a indissoluble dilemma of causality in view of which it is no more or less absurd to say that the dead built the upper Eusapia than it is to say that the chicken came before the egg. |