“Acido ergo sum.”
In the ninety-ninth chapter of a novel that ends in the fifty-sixth, Cortázar rewrites Descartes best known conclusion. Thought, the quintessential human function, the necessary condition for and confirmation of our existence, has been exposed as a product of electrochemical gradients and synaptic potentials within a densely interconnected neural circuit. With the cogito situated somewhere among electromagnetic fields and chemical phenomena, “not so different as we used to think from things like an aurora borealis or a picture taken with infrared rays” (Cortázar 470), a thinking being is a fundamentally material one. But is it necessarily a finite one?
The kernel self is sealed within the skull. There it thumbs through words and images in bounded awareness. But what is the sum of this inner experience if not a desire to go beyond this very boundedness, to satisfy some nostalgic longing for a bygone continuity? Might we say, metonymically, that what we desire is in fact a trepanation?
The eye perceives a hole, something missing. But by the ambiguity of an absence, precisely where there is nothing, may something come to be. There, between the external world and the small tract of brain, exposed yet intact, there is a fusion of separate entities as the self overflows and exceeds itself — there is a revelation of continuity, of eternity.
The craniotome. Perhaps it is a sterilized surgical tool. Perhaps an electrical drill, a corkscrew. Perhaps it is anything that we put to our own head to repudiate our wholeness, to dissolve the isolating
separateness of being.
— Hopscotch, Julio Cortázar
In the ninety-ninth chapter of a novel that ends in the fifty-sixth, Cortázar rewrites Descartes best known conclusion. Thought, the quintessential human function, the necessary condition for and confirmation of our existence, has been exposed as a product of electrochemical gradients and synaptic potentials within a densely interconnected neural circuit. With the cogito situated somewhere among electromagnetic fields and chemical phenomena, “not so different as we used to think from things like an aurora borealis or a picture taken with infrared rays” (Cortázar 470), a thinking being is a fundamentally material one. But is it necessarily a finite one?
The kernel self is sealed within the skull. There it thumbs through words and images in bounded awareness. But what is the sum of this inner experience if not a desire to go beyond this very boundedness, to satisfy some nostalgic longing for a bygone continuity? Might we say, metonymically, that what we desire is in fact a trepanation?
The eye perceives a hole, something missing. But by the ambiguity of an absence, precisely where there is nothing, may something come to be. There, between the external world and the small tract of brain, exposed yet intact, there is a fusion of separate entities as the self overflows and exceeds itself — there is a revelation of continuity, of eternity.
The craniotome. Perhaps it is a sterilized surgical tool. Perhaps an electrical drill, a corkscrew. Perhaps it is anything that we put to our own head to repudiate our wholeness, to dissolve the isolating
separateness of being.
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