Antonio Moresco
Anne greeott
the locusts
Sometimes in literature or life you come across a few ordinary sentences, reflections, or images so deep and human they give an immediate feeling of finding something that’s been thought over and grappled with for a long time, something that gets straight to the heart of the matter and tells it the way it really is—no middleman, no frills. It can happen on the street or at the bakery, or even sitting on the steps of a church drinking a beer and reading Shakespeare, or maybe Melville or Cervantes.
The image I’d like to start with for this little reflection on “modernity” comes from Dante’s Divine Comedy at the end of the sixth canto of Purgatory, where Dante compares his city to a woman lying in bed who tricks herself into thinking she’ll find relief from suffering by constantly turning from one side to the other:
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And if you look clearly at what you were you will see yourself as that sick woman never still on her bed of down, turning over and over to find some way not to suffer.
(trans. W.S. Merwin)
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This is Dante’s hopeless conclusion in response to the agonizing political strife in the Florence of his day, whose continual wars immersed him in the abuses of power and reciprocal expulsions of the black and white Guelfs and the Ghibellines.
Leopardi uses this image as well in a different way in The Moral Essays, where he says:
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Each one of us who comes into this world is like a man who lies on a hard and uncomfortable bed, where, finding himself uneasy, he begins to turn from one side to the other, changing his position every few minutes; and he keeps doing this all night long, always hoping to doze off a little, and sometimes even believing to be about to fall asleep—until the morning comes and, without having rested at all, he gets up.
(trans. Giovanni Cecchetti)
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What does all this have to do with what we call “modernity”? I’d say it has a lot to do with it. And even more so now, at a point when we seem to be at the apex and implosion of all the typical illusions of modernity which by now have been overruled by the failure of illusions in “late modernity.” And it really hasn’t come from no one pointing out the direction things have been headed. Some people, a lot of people, have been pointing it out for a long time. But nobody’s paid attention. We didn’t want to; maybe we couldn’t. The whole lot of political, artistic, scientific, and spiritual utopias and illusions generated by so-called “modernity” seems to be at the end of the line: all of them died in the late modern dead end of ideology camouflaged in terminal anti-ideology, in the general information of the imploded reticular universe, and in the labyrinth, with its false stillness generated by reversing the false movement of modernity. Behind blatant demagoguery, this apparent stillness disguises the reality of all spaces closing down more and more, a tragedy in human, political, and geopolitical terms, and even for the very survival of the species. Like the ideology of every other power structure that’s come before, the currently dominant one loves to describe its own supremacy as the final, unconquerable picture and to elaborate upon its own ideologies (the end of history, economic horizontality, interexchangeability, the surface as the only possible dimension, and other descriptions of life and the world which—introjected—effectively control the vast masses of humans raised in this era) in order to exorcise the fact that, like every other one that’s come before, this one too in its turn will get ground up in the mill of life and time until the sick person rolls over to the other side of his uncomfortable bed until it’s all taken over by other forms and structures of supremacy in the usual terrible, drawn-out uproar by which every other empire has collapsed, all of it overdramatized today by the vast number of human individuals populating the planet and by the devastatingly destructive power they currently wield.
It’s been that way from the start. Endless political and military upheavals. Athens and Sparta became allies against the Persians and then, Xerxes defeated, they started wars again amongst themselves until they destroyed each other and paved the way first for Thebes and then for the Macedonian Empire. In the century that just ended, the United States and the Soviet Union became allies against Nazi-Fascism and then, once that was defeated, they started wars with each other all over again. And on and on a thousand times over the years. All the movement or illusion of movement that seemed to characterize “modernity” now appears to be detonated or deactivated within the false movement of the economic, financial, military, technological, and advertising practices in use. And all the while, those claiming to be the antagonists seem more often than not to be imprisoned within the same old logic and the same old framework, a puppet game run by a minority which increasingly fuels the same tyranny it claims to want to fight against. The illusion of “progress” has capsized in an all-engrossing, widespread labyrinthine interexchangeability, in a stagnant puddle teeming with oodles of miniscule larvae and the insane, inert movement of all their abrasive trajectories. The illusion of “democracy,” with all its initial emphasis on the opening of possibility in every field, is bogging down in a new type of totalitarian economic, technological, media, and military grip, capsizing in its planetary control of devastating throngs of men who must only and can only consume and multiply the financial wealth of others, who move like clouds of locusts over what remains of the living human fabric on this small, inhabited planet. The possessors or accumulators of enormous wealth and the elite who vastly increase their wealth in the circular and self-referential economic, technological, and military game can literally buy—via the advertising mechanism of media conditioning and its possession and control—the governmental structures of entire countries without even the feeble political negotiations familiar in the past. The possession of energetic and now also genetic and reproductive resources makes this game, played out under the frightening blindness of the species, ever more limited and creates a situation in which our relationship with the only planet available is approaching the point of no return. This composite machine of planetary dominance, by means of its own internal workings, is driving our mutual rapport and the fate of our species toward collapse on this small, wayward planet spinning through the silence and the cosmic darkness. Almost every day we read newspaper articles by experts debating the recent alarms going off over the state of our planet. What’s amazing is that the nature of their contention is not whether this alarming scene is realistic or not, but whether it will take fifty years or a hundred for the collapse to happen. When confronted with this news and these odds, with these consequences for our species, something enormous should occur in the minds of individuals, in the minds of the people and of those governing. Instead, everything seems to go on as if it were nothing: those holding power are careful not to discuss the power structure of which they are the expression, and in an increasingly typical general inurement to the spine-chilling ruin of the species, the great teeming masses do not recover from their narcosis.
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I don’t want to give too dark a picture, though, of our situation or our future, as though the game were already over or the derailed train could only run itself over the cliff. Something unexpected or unforeseeable can always occur, as long as we don’t close our eyes to the way things really are. Here and there human groups and embryos of awareness are being born who seem conscious of the situation and of the world’s life expectancy, and who seem to understand that we can no longer play the same game within the usual old framework of specular, antagonistic upheaval, that we need to invent something completely different to try to get beyond this pivotal impasse, and that this will be the task of the future.
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So, let’s try to imagine that the person endlessly turning from side to side who we started with is not always awake, but manages to fall asleep from time to time and that in these brief naps he even manages to have a few dreams. Come on, let him dream a little! What could he dream? Not one of those dreams where all the people are good and live in harmony with nature and with other people and themselves, and on and on. Because these days even dreams have had it up to here with dreaming. So, let’s see. What could he dream? Well, let’s have him dream about living somewhere under the crust of the earth because the whole surface of the planet has been destroyed by vast waves of steel locusts produced by genetic combinations that got totally out of control and that go around devouring everything and darkening the sky. Everything is cold, and from under the ground toxic miasmas gush out generated by sewers and physiological odors produced by the human masses who have managed to escape the surface and huddle in the hollow areas that open up under the level of the horizon: cellars, anti-aircraft shelters, subways, and other spaces dug out with fingernails and teeth to escape the clouds of locusts seeking to infiltrate even underground through the gratings and ductwork.
“So how can all those people live under there if everything up above has been devoured or destroyed?” someone might wonder. “How do they provide food or electricity to keep the underground structures they live in going?”
“I don’t have the foggiest idea! The dream doesn’t explain that. That’s just how it is.”
Every now and then the sounds of the devastation happening above the horizon come in from outside, amplified by the underground caverns. In one single, terrifying roar you can hear the metallic rasping of countless living organisms and objects shattering under the synchronized assault of chewing. First, the tender things swelling on the rim of earth: tree fruits, plant forms, human crops, animals of the flesh moving through city streets, birds covered in feathers. The locusts attack mid-flight and devour the eggs inside the bodies moving through space, clamped in the gleaming capsules of thousands and thousands of metallic bodies that keep chewing them up mid-flight, then moving on to the next. The black piles of night foliage, the fibrous pulp of trees. They drill all the way through the bark into the most concentric, hidden zones. They devour the men and women who stayed outside, along the sidewalks, or locked inside houses or buildings. At unbelievably high volume you can hear the sounds of their heads exploding. The brain buckets of the owners and rulers of the world split open under the onslaught of countless steel mandibles jabbing into the soft blobs of their long-deactivated cerebral matter. They assault the sick stretched out in their beds, still hooked up to IVs in hospitals, in the morgues they pick the frozen cadavers clean in an instant. They hurl themselves against the clouds, devour them, chew them, tear them apart. They start to attack the houses, the buildings. They charge into the containers of garbage, of glass, jab their steel teeth into the wet rubbish, shatter the bottles. They besiege the support structures of houses made of mud, concrete, metal, glass, the parabolic TV antennas on the rooftops, the space centers. They start attacking the outsides of skyscrapers, which stay standing a little while with their chewed-up edges in silhouette. They rush inside, into the marrow: elevators, offices, electrical wiring that crackles and sends out sparks, into the frightening clash of countless metallic heads hitting, ramming together from all directions against the framework of the last skyscrapers still upright in that blinding glare off the droves of shells moving forward like tortoises in space. They attack the cars left behind in the streets and the asphalt on the streets, they eat away at suspension bridges and the big steel cables holding them up in the air. Even from far away, you can hear them crashing into the rivers, into the seas brimming with the wrecks of chewed-up ships that float half-submerged. They chew up everything left above sea level in the big coastal cities and dive under the surface of the water to chew at the foundations, they raise big fish swollen with garbage and excrement out of the water and chew on their dismembered forms in flight. They flush out the putrefying carnage in cemeteries, shrieking electric and ramming headlong into the flabby matter decomposing just under the film of earth. They rise up again in flight with their mouths still wet, their antennae dripping with effluent, filthy. The big cities collapse, the seas and oceans roil with the thrashing of myriad tortured and dismembered bodies. The whole sky is filled with the screeching and screaming of winged bodies flying for a little while longer, half-chewed.
What’s our dreamer up to in the meantime? He’s making his way through the subway burrows after hiding out down there with the torrents of terrorized folk who locked themselves inside the bowels of the earth to get away from the scourge. He can’t tell how long he’s been there. He knows nothing, remembers nothing. Not even his name. He has no father, no mother. They must have gotten devoured too, up on the surface. His teeth are half gone, he can’t remember why. Maybe because before he managed to escape by slipping into the nearest subway tunnel, a locust or two broke through his front teeth, shooting down like lightning from on high like some projectile trying to get inside the softness of his body. Maybe it’s from that point on that he can’t remember anything. He moves around in the burrows, sleeps on the ground, eats wherever and whatever he can from the food handouts which still occur here and there, while up above those steel heads rumble and work to crush those armored tubes and penetrate the warm intestines of the subway filled with living flesh. Sometimes, winding through the crowded rivers of people moving along the benches and through the tubes, he comes across a woman with one half-chewed ear. When he sees her, he breaks into a run. She runs faster too when she sees him. They cross paths and run across the blanket of rubbish piled all through the tubes, sidestepping the smelly places where heaps of human excrement foul the air. For a while, they keep running like that without knowing where to go or why, and end up infinitely far away before they realize how fast they’re going. They turn around back the way they came. Their paths cross again in a totally different, far-away place. They go up and down over and over just for the thrill of crossing on two parallel escalators while one goes up and the other goes down, and moving toward each other while standing still with their eyes wide open to the air, the light. He flashes her a toothless smile. She opens her eyes wide and blushes because she’s an orphan too and no one ever taught her to smile. They don’t see each other for days and days because after every time they meet their running takes them so far away they lose their sense of direction, while high above their faces the countless metal teeth rumble and shred the last strips of asphalt to get to the human layers tucked just under the crust, smashing the sewer drains and plunging headfirst into the juicy black waters pouring out from underground.
Our dreamer and his friend glimpse each other whizzing past on different escalators since the moving steps accelerate their whirling steps.
“What happened to your teeth?” she manages to blurt out.
“I don’t know. And what about you, what happened to your ear?” he manages to ask, sputtering air through his broken front teeth.
“I don’t know,” she answers.
They don’t see each other for days and days because this little exchange of sentences sped their heart rates up so much that their bodies raced at a breakneck pace through even the furthest untraveled tunnels.
“What is your name?” he sputters out the next time, running down another escalator.
“I don’t know,” she answers. “Nobody gave me a name.”
“And what is your name?” she asks him the next time.
“I don’t know. I don’t have a name either,” he sputters.
Sometimes during all this an even louder racket happens from thousands of metallic teeth drilling through layers of earth to uproot the electrical cables underground, chewing off the rubber casings and causing short-circuits that plunge entire zones of the subway into darkness and make enormous, frightening, sudden flashes blaze even that far down. In their abnormal demographic explosion, the locusts are starting to battle over the last edible scraps on the planet. And when they can’t find anything else in their path, they turn on each other. In some places far from the subway, the reinforced crawlspaces are almost collapsing from the impact of droves of metal projectiles crashing straight down from above to break the vaults and smash all the way through and consume one last meal.
“What happened to you?” he sputters at her the next time with a lump in his throat because her legs are all streaked with blood that’s obviously gushing out of some hidden place in her body under what’s left of her skirt, while he happens to be a few steps below her going up the same escalator for the first time, one of the last ones still working.
“I don’t know,” she answers.
“Did the locusts get in there too?” he sputters again. “Did one get inside your body?”
“I don’t know,” she answers again. “I don’t understand.”
She turns to face him and he keeps looking up at her with a lump in his throat while the escalator keeps on going up, and from outside they hear the clanging get louder and louder and they can’t figure out if the locusts have broken in and already started burrowing toward them or if it’s just the rumble of so many bodies hitting and chewing on each other. They can’t figure out what’s happening or what’s going to happen: if the locusts have already broken in, if they’ll end up burrowing all the way in, or if they won’t be able to because they’ll devour each other first.
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“What kind of a dream is that?” someone might ask at this point. “That’s not a dream, it’s a nightmare!”
“No, you’re wrong! Can’t you see what’s happening? It is a dream! It is a dream!”
Antonio Moresco was born in 1947 in Mantova, Italy and published his first novel Clandestinità at the age of fourty-five. He has since published many novels and has become one of Italy’s most important contemporary writers. His novel Distant Light was published in English (Archipelago, 2016). He is best known for his trilogy Giochi dell’eternità, a three-volume work written over a period of thirty-five years.
Anne Greeott has published work in Bitter Oleander, Italian Poetry Review, Poetry Northwest, Gravida, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. She has received Fulbright grants to Italy and Peru, as well as a Travel Fellowship from ALTA.