Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories - Italo Calvino [115]
It was in this spirit that I lifted my arm that morning, gripped the remote control and pointed it towards the corbeille of white camellias, towards Volumnia's mother's bonnet with its little blue bunches of grapes, the pearl on the father's plastron cravat, the priest's stole, the bride's silver-embroidered veil… This gesture, just when the whole congregation was expecting my ‘yes’, was misunderstood: most of all by Volumnia who saw it as a rejection, an irreparable offence. But all I meant to say was that there, on that other channel, mine and Volumnia's story was unfolding far away from the jubilant sounds of the organ and the flashlights of the photographers, yet had many things about it that made it more consonant with my truth and hers…
Perhaps on that channel beyond all channels we didn't break up. Volumnia goes on loving me there, while here, in the world I live in I haven't been able to get her to understand my motives: she doesn't want to see me any more. I never recovered from that violent break; it was then I began the life described in the papers as that of a maniac of no fixed abode, wandering through the city armed with his incongruous gadget… And yet my reasoning was clear as never before: I had realized that I must begin to work from the top down: if things were going wrong on all channels, there must be a last channel unlike the others where the leaders, perhaps not so different from these here, but with some small variation in character, in mentality, in matters of conscience, were able to stop the cracks that open in the foundations, the reciprocal distrust, the degeneration of human relationships …
But the police had had their eye on me for some time. When I shoved my way through the people crowding round to see the Heads of State getting out of their cars for the summit, then sneaked into the building through the French windows amidst a swarm of security men, I didn't even manage to lift my arm and point the remote control before they were all on top of me dragging me away, despite my protests that I didn't intend to stop the ceremony, only wanted to see what they were showing on the other channel, for curiosity's sake, just for a few seconds.
Implosion
‘Over the last few years, quasars, Seyfert galaxies, B.L. Lacertae objects, or, more generally, active galactic nuclei have been attracting the attention of astronomers because of the huge quantities of energy these bodies emit, at velocities of up to 10,000 kilometres per second. There are good reasons for supposing that the central driving force of the galaxy is a black hole of enormous mass (L’Astronomia, no. 36). ‘Active galactic nuclei may be fragments left unexploded by the Big Bang and engaged in a process exactly opposite to that which takes place in black holes, a process, that is, of explosive expansion involving the liberation of enormous quantities of energy (white holes’). They could be explained as the exit extremities of a connecting link between two points in space-time (Einstein-Rosen's bridges), expelling material devoured by a black hole situated at the entrance extremity. According to this theory, a Seyfert galaxy a hundred million light years away may now be expelling gas sucked in by another part of the universe ten billion years ago. And it is even possible that a quasar ten billion light years away may have assumed the form we see today by taking in material that reaches it from some point in the future, travelling through a black hole which, as far as we are concerned, formed only today’ {Paolo Maffeir, Monsters of the Sky, pp. 210-15).
To explode or to implode - said Qfwfq - that is the question: whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to expand one's energies in space without restraint, or to crush them into a dense inner concentration and, by ingesting, cherish them. To steal away, to vanish; no more; to hold within oneself every