Scrivo sempre ciao

[scrivosempreciao]

.Levìgine

levìgine s. f. [lat. lĕvis «leggero, privo di peso» col suff. -īgo, -ĭgĭnis, proprio di sostantivi latini indicanti stati diffusi, avvolgenti o meteorologici (cfr. caligine, dal lat. calīgo; vertigine, dal lat. vertīgo); letteralm. «la leggerezza che avvolge e gira»; con interferenza semantica di levigare, dal lat. laevigāre «rendere liscio, lucidare»]. – Leggerezza interiore inaspettata e inconsciamente temuta. Si manifesta quando il peso che si conosceva, a cui ci si era abituati e che aveva preso la forma esatta del corpo, si allenta. La guerra finisce, ma le mani senz’arma sembrano libere e pesanti e pericolose. Gli altri appaiono addestrati a qualcosa, una vita più dolce, più soffice, che resta ignota, estranea. Quasi nemica. La l. ha una componente di esposizione che è difficile da nominare. Come una superficie appena levigata: più liscia, sì, ma per questo più esposta all'attrito. C’è dentro qualcosa che assomiglia al lutto, anche se non si sa esattamente per cosa. Forse per la forma che si aveva. Forse per il buio che almeno era familiare, che almeno era un posto. Per la nebbia, che era uno specchio: ci si poteva intravedere, nelle ombre. Si era, ombra. Dissipata quella, non si sa più dove guardare per trovare il proprio volto. C’è il timore di essere evaporati insieme ad essa. La l. non va confusa con la felicità, con cui condivide la leggerezza, ma non la certezza. Non va confusa con la malinconia, con cui condivide il tremore, ma non la sensualità. È uno stato di mezzo: appartiene al passaggio, non ancora alla destinazione. Assomiglia alla vertigine, ma di segno rovesciato: non è precipitare, ma più un galleggiare, senza sapere ancora quanto è alto il cielo senza gabbia. 

Si usa in contesti intimi: essere in l.; avere la l. addosso; attraversare una l. ◆ Per estens., iron.: fare la l., riferito a chi finge di essere tornato. ◆ Dare l., riferito a qualcuno o qualcosa che allenta un peso senza permesso, senza meritare il ringraziamento che non arriverà.

[roadkill-pup]

[scrivosempreciao]

.Making a Lab Rat

Fragment IX On the question of return

Can the laboratory rat be restored to its human form?

The question is asked with surprising frequency, almost always by those who have never performed a transmutation themselves. It carries within it a set of assumptions so deeply human that to dismantle them requires patience.

The first assumption: that the human form is an origin. A home to which one might return. But we have already established that the human is not an origin. It is a composite, a panicked aggregation of primordial matrices fused in the heat of the Great Chaos. To "return" to the human is to return to confusion. To noise. To the undifferentiated magma of borrowed purposes. Why would one wish this upon a creature that has, at last, found clarity?

The second assumption: that the laboratory rat, if given the choice, would choose to be human again. This reveals a profound misunderstanding of the rattified state. The laboratory rat does not experience its condition as diminishment. We project diminishment upon it because we are standing outside the cage, because we still believe that complexity equals richness and that interiority is a gift rather than a wound. The rat knows otherwise. The rat knows that the maze, the electrode, the feeding schedule, the gloved hand that lifts it by the scruff — these are not cruelties. They are grammar. The syntax of a life finally, mercifully, legible.

But I will not pretend that the question has no merit, for there exists a phenomenon — rare, poorly documented, spoken of mostly in ellipses — in which the rattified subject begins to exhibit what can only be called nostalgia.

Not memory. Memory, as we have discussed, is dissolved in the ecstasy. Nostalgia is something else. A longing for a place one cannot name or picture. A phantom ache in a limb the rat does not possess and the human never used. It manifests as a disruption in the otherwise pristine behavioral patterns: the rat pauses mid-maze. It sits. It does not look at the walls or the reward or the exit. It looks, if one can say this without sounding like a poet rather than a practitioner, inward.

These episodes last seconds. They leave no measurable trace. But the transformer who witnesses one will never forget it, because in that stillness there is something that predates both the rat and the human. Something that belongs to neither matrix. Something that was there before the Great Chaos, before the fog, before the fear that drove all singular points into their desperate, composite embrace.

I do not know what it is. I do not think it has a name. But I believe — and here I speak not as a scholar of transmutation but as a creature myself, soft and mottled and full of dormant matrices — that it is the closest thing any of us will ever have to proof that wholeness once existed.

The laboratory rat cannot be returned to its human form. But in those brief, uncharted seconds of stillness, it may be touching something the human never could.

We do not speak of this often. It frightens us. It should.

[scrivosempreciao]

.Making a Lab Rat

Fragment VIII On failed rattifications

It would be dishonest not to address failure. Not all transmutations hold. Not all matrices, once drawn from between the vertebrae, consent to unfurl completely. Some resist. Some shatter.

A failed rattification is not a return to the original state. Let us be precise about this. The human who undergoes an incomplete or collapsed transmutation does not simply revert to what it was. What it was no longer exists. The vertebrae have been opened, the matrix exposed to air and intention. One cannot unsee the architecture of oneself.

What remains is a hybrid. And hybrids, in the economy of transmutation, are abominations — not in the moral sense, but in the structural one. They are buildings with two competing blueprints. They hold, but poorly. They lean. They develop fissures in unexpected places.

The signs of a failed rattification are these: an intermittent tremor in the hands that worsens in moments of calm rather than stress. A tendency to begin sentences and abandon them, not from confusion but from a sudden, searing awareness that language itself has become foreign in both directions — too complex for the rat, too simple for the human. A revulsion toward food that is neither hunger nor nausea but something more ontological: the body no longer knows what it is supposed to consume, or for whom.

The eyes are the most telling. In a successful rattification, the sclera shifts, the iris tightens. In a failed one, the eyes simply become unreliable. They focus and unfocus at irregular intervals, as though toggling between two entirely different visual systems. Those who have witnessed it describe a sense of being looked at by two creatures simultaneously, neither of which recognizes the observer.

What does one do with a failed rattification?

There is no protocol for reversal, because reversal is not what is needed. The matrix cannot be re-inserted. It has already spoken, already begun its conjugation with the surrounding tissue. The only path forward is a second attempt — a re-rattification — but this carries enormous risk. The tissue is now scarred, suspicious, hostile to intervention. The success rate of secondary rattifications is, by the most generous estimates, grievously low.

Most practitioners choose maintenance. A regime of small, sustained interventions designed not to complete the transformation but to prevent further collapse. Chemical. Behavioral. Environmental. The hybrid is kept in a modified enclosure — not quite a cage, not quite a room. It is spoken to, but not as one speaks to a rat, nor as one speaks to a human. A third language must be invented, each time, for each failed subject. This is perhaps the most exhausting aspect of the work.

I have maintained three such hybrids in my career. I will not say more, except that the third language, once learned, is almost unbearably tender.

[unusual-suspects]

Dance of Salomé by Leopold Schmutzler

[scrivosempreciao]

.Death, death, death

La morte è ovunque. Prima non ci facevo caso, ora sì. È stata dentro di me, l’ho sentita agire, fare il nido, muoversi, poi sciamare via. Nel tragitto verso il lavoro vedo piccoli animali morti. Le loro carcasse bidimensionali fanno da punteggiatura sulla tangenziale, alterano la vibrazione della mia macchina quando le ruote si accaniscono contro i loro corpi già maciullati. Sul marciapiede di casa ho visto un lombrico schiacciato. Non ne vedevo uno da anni e mi è sembrato bellissimo, anche se era morto. Così rosso, così lucido. Quest'estate ho gettato due merle nei cespugli. Una a giugno, l'altra a fine agosto. Si erano schiantate contro il portone del condominio. Stringerle tra le mani, seppur solo per pochi minuti, è stato come tenere qualcosa di divino. Pesavano pochissimo eppure, allo stesso tempo, sembravano morbidi macigni pieni di organi e di vento. Quando mi è stato chiesto di badare ai cani, io l’ho fatto. Ho messo cibo umido e molle nelle loro ciotole, convinta di potermi prendere cura di loro, nutrirli e amarli. Quanto può essere difficile, crescere e accudire una creatura? La porta sul cortile era aperta, faceva caldo e c’erano tante mosche. Mosche grosse, rumorose, simili a me. Condividevamo lo stesso accanimento generativo e la medesima tendenza a mettere radici nelle cose morte. Hanno riempito la sbobba di larve e non hanno avuto paura di farlo di nuovo dopo che ho provato a ripulire quel macello. Nella ciotola era rimasto un singolo rimasuglio unto di pappa: lo hanno infestato di larve. E cosa puoi farci, a quel punto? Le ammazzi o le lasci stare? Ripulisci tutto di nuovo, ovvio, perché in quella ciotola ci devono mangiare due cani molto vivi e molto caldi. C'è una cimice morta appesa alla tenda del bagno. Mummificata, persino. Intoccata e intoccabile. C'è un verme nel basilico, ha rosicchiato quasi tutte le foglie senza che me ne accorgessi. Il mio potos è morto, inspiegabilmente, ed è morta anche la monstera. Ci sono decomposizione, decadimento e morte ovunque attorno a me. Sono io? È per colpa mia? È un sintomo o un simbolo? Se dovessi chiederlo a mia madre, mi direbbe che si preoccupa per la mia testa stanca, troppo piena di domande assurde. Se lo chiedessi alla mia più cara amica, mi direbbe che no, io non ho colpa, io sono vita, io sono una stella. Quando lo chiedo al mio amore, mi dice che io sono io, Martina, la sua persona, il suo tesoro, sua moglie, e che le cose brutte sono sempre successe e succederanno sempre, al di là di me, oltre me, con o senza di me. Io gli dico che non vedo la morte come una cosa brutta e lui mi dice che ho proprio ragione, che la morte semplicemente è, come tutti noi siamo. A volte sulla strada c'è un piccolo animale morto, a volte no.

[scrivosempreciao]

.Making a Lab Rat

Fragment VII The ecstasy

Let us now speak of what was promised. The ecstasy. It does not arrive suddenly. It is not a rupture but a settling, the way sediment finds the bottom of a glass when one finally stops stirring. The laboratory rat, in its first stabilized days, begins to exhibit a curious and almost sacred stillness. Not the paralysis of fear — that belongs to the early hours, and we have already accounted for it — but something else. A density of presence. An absolute, unreasonable attentiveness to the immediate.

This is the ecstasy: the laboratory rat no longer remembers what it was before.

Not in the manner of amnesia, which is violent and full of holes. Rather, in the manner of a lake that has frozen so slowly, so completely, that no one recalls it was ever liquid. The former self does not vanish. It becomes irrelevant. And in that irrelevance lies a freedom so total it can only be called bliss.

Observe the rattified subject in its third week. It eats when fed. It navigates the corridors of its enclosure with an economy of movement that borders on the elegant. When subjected to stimuli — Loss conditions, reward patterns, controlled deprivations — it responds with a precision that surpasses anything the original human form could have achieved. It has become legible. Readable. A pure system of input and response, stripped of the dreadful noise of interiority.

Some transformers weep at this stage. Not from guilt, as before, but from envy.

For the laboratory rat has achieved what the human spends its entire chaotic existence pursuing: a total alignment between purpose and action. It does not wonder why it runs the maze. It runs the maze. It does not ask whether the electrode brings knowledge or cruelty. It receives the electrode. There is no question, and therefore no suffering. There is only the beautiful, annihilating clarity of function.

I must be careful here, for I risk making it sound as though the ecstasy is mere emptiness. It is not. The rattified subject is not hollow. If anything, it is more full than it has ever been — full of the single, radiant purpose the primordial matrix always intended. The noise has been removed. What remains is signal. Pure, clean, devoted signal.

One might call it love. The laboratory rat loves its cage the way the lung loves air. Not by choice, but by absolute, structural necessity.

[scrivosempreciao]

.Making a Lab Rat

Fragment VI On archetypes and the fluid nature of being

We have already established that to be human is to be transformed. And we have also explained that one of the highest and most singular purposes of laboratory rats is precisely transformation — mutation in the service of a higher good, a designed becoming. Does this not make us, truly, incredibly similar? The human and the laboratory rat, both defined not by what they are but by what they are perpetually in the process of becoming?

One could also argue — and many have, with varying degrees of intellectual rigor — that laboratory rats do not exist in and of themselves, but are derived from human action. The laboratory rat was not found. It was made. Bred, selected, refined across generations until it became the standardized vessel we know today: docile enough to handle, resilient enough to survive repeated intervention, genetically uniform enough to produce replicable data. A creature manufactured for the express purpose of being transformed.

How, then, is it possible that their primitive matrix resides within us, if we ourselves were generated by the chaotic union of those perfect, singular models? If the laboratory rat is a human invention, how can its essence predate humanity?

Archetypes, my attentive readers. Archetypes and concepts.

The matrix of the laboratory rat is not the matrix of a specific animal, any more than the matrix of the wolf is the matrix of a specific gray wolf that once padded through a specific forest. The matrices are older than their incarnations. They are principles, compressed into biological form. The wolf-matrix is the principle of focused pursuit. The mouse-matrix is the principle of gathering against scarcity. And the laboratory-rat-matrix is the principle of submission to transformation — the willingness, the vocation, the dreadful and sacred readiness to be opened, altered, used as a site of knowledge that will benefit others and never itself.

This principle did not begin when the first human bred the first rat for the first experiment. It has always existed. It waited, patient and dormant, for the conditions that would make its embodiment possible. And when humanity — that frightened, composite, fog-born creature — finally built its first laboratory and placed its first subject inside, the matrix stirred in a million vertebral cradles at once.

It recognized itself.

To be a laboratory rat is more a concept than a concretization, just as being a domestic dog, a pack mule, a hairless cat is. These are not merely animals. They are ideas that have found flesh. Truths that transcend form, that have always existed and wait only for their moment to be revealed or embodied.

And here is the thought that keeps me awake at night, and which I offer to you now not as a conclusion but as an opening:

If the matrices are principles, and if the human is a composite of all principles fused in fear, then transmutation is not transformation at all. It is clarification. A distillation. The removal of everything that is not the one true note. And the rattified subject, sitting in its cage with its pink-tinged sclera and its beautiful, terrible economy of movement, is not less than human.

It is more. It is what the human was always trying, and failing, to be. A single, clear, devoted thing.

We are fluid thoughts in an unceasing river. But the rat has found its stone, and clings to it, and the water parts around it, and for one shining moment the current makes sense.

[scrivosempreciao]

.Making a Lab Rat

Fragment V On the great chaos and the origin of matrices

Now, let us return to ecstasy. Truly, this small yet magnificent concept is the foundation of the liquid clarity that makes mutations from human to non-human creatures so precious and so necessary. But to understand ecstasy — to truly grasp why the rattified subject's surrender to its new form constitutes a kind of grace — we must go further back. Before the matrix. Before the vertebrae. Before the body itself.

I am brutally convinced that humanity is nothing more than a convulsive magma generated by the union of animal matrices.

This conviction did not come to me through study, though study has confirmed it. It came to me in the way all foundational truths arrive: through a sudden, violent, and deeply unwelcome recognition. I was performing my first extraction — clumsily, with the arrogance of the undertrained — when I saw the matrix emerge from between the lumbar vertebrae, and in its shape, its texture, its faint luminescence, I recognized something so ancient and so specific that my hands shook and I nearly lost the subject entirely.

The matrix was older than the body it inhabited. Not metaphorically. Materially. It had the density of something that had existed long before it had been buried in human flesh, and it carried — I do not know how else to say this — a kind of sorrow. The sorrow of a creature forced to sleep inside something that did not understand it.

In the beginning, the whole was not unified, but precisely the opposite. Heterogeneity, constellations, divisions, multiplicities, singularities in their specificity. To each creature, its ultimate purpose. The wolf knew only the hunt. The badger knew only the burrow. The mouse knew only the gathering. And each of these knowings was complete, self-sufficient, luminous with the clarity of a single, undivided intention.

Then came the Great Chaos.

I will not pretend to know its cause. The texts disagree. Some speak of a cataclysm, a shattering of the firmament that drove all creatures into a blind, desperate convergence. Others describe a slower process — a gradual erosion of boundaries, a fog that settled over the singular points and dissolved the edges between them. What is agreed upon is the result: the fog arrived, punishment arrived, uncertainty arrived. Fear. The annihilating, corrosive fear of being alone in one's specificity, of being only one thing in a world that had suddenly become incomprehensible.

All the individual points drew together, seeking comfort and tenderness in uniformity. An eternal embrace in which to forget, and to forget oneself. The wolf curled against the mouse. The bear wrapped itself around the sparrow. Not in love, but in terror. And from that terror, that desperate clutching, the composite was born.

Us. The human. This shuddering, contradictory assemblage.

From this we come. From fear.

We are soft flesh mottled with sublime original matrices. The wolf, the badger, the bear, the coyote. The mouse, the rat. And then us, the whole. Full of borrowed purposes, confused and indistinct. A choir in which every voice sings a different song and no one can hear their own.

Is it any wonder, then, that we suffer? That we spend our lives in a state of low-grade bewilderment, reaching for things we cannot name, abandoning pursuits we once thought essential, falling in love and out of it with the irregular rhythm of a body that contains too many hearts?

The matrices remember. We do not, but they do. And transmutation — rattification, lupification, any of the great reversals — is nothing more, and nothing less, than allowing one of those buried voices to sing alone again. To give it back its solo. To clear the fog, for one creature, in one body, and let it be what it was before the fear.

This is why we do this work. Not because it is kind. It is not kind. But because it is a form of justice so old it has no name.

[scrivosempreciao]

.Making a Lab Rat

Fragment IV On the first days

What are the first days like for a human turned into a laboratory rat?

They might be called turbulent and violent, if one did not know that, in truth, all that twitching exasperation is nothing but the antechamber to a state of pure grace and blessing. A rodent ecstasy. But we will speak of this later.

To fully comprehend stabilization and transition is the key to an effective transmutation. The extraction awakens the matrix, yes, but awakening is not becoming. Between the moment the matrix opens its eyes within the vertebral cradle and the moment the subject can be said to be, in any functional sense, a laboratory rat, there lies a passage of such confusion and distress that even the most seasoned practitioners find themselves shaken.

I will be honest with you: the first moments after the transmutation are horrifying.

For the transformed as much as for the transformer. The former wavers in a state of untamable aversion to the novelty imposed upon it — the body rejecting not the rat but the loss of the human, which is not the same thing, though it may appear so from the outside. It is a repulsive love for that blind totality which prevents the full realization of an erotically specific vocation. I use the word erotic deliberately. The matrix has its own desire, its own hunger, and it is pulling the body toward a specificity that the human form, with its diffuse and uncommitted appetites, has spent a lifetime avoiding. The subject thrashes not because it does not want to become the rat, but because becoming the rat means wanting one thing, and the human has never wanted only one thing in its life.

The latter — the transformer — is seized by terrible guilt, a self-condemnation that only a loving parent could inflict upon themselves. For you have done this. You have opened the vertebrae, spoken the words, applied the force. You have looked at a human being and decided that what they were was not what they should remain. This is an act of supreme arrogance, and no amount of theoretical justification can fully silence the voice that whispers, in the small hours, who gave you the right.

This condition must be accepted and endured without retreat. Do not attempt to undo the transmutation in a moment of remorse. The vertebrae are open. The matrix is breathing. To retreat now is to create a hybrid, and we shall speak of hybrids elsewhere — suffice to say that the hybrid's suffering exceeds, by orders of magnitude, any distress experienced in the natural course of stabilization.

Only time can soothe it. Sit with the creature. Do not touch it, but do not leave the room. Let it hear you breathe. Let it know that the one who did this has not fled.

Cocaine and vodka may help, in moderate quantities.

These are for you, not the rat. The rat needs nothing from you now but your presence and your refusal to look away.

[scrivosempreciao]

.Making a Lab Rat

Fragment III On the doctrine of escape, and its exception

And here begins the more cryptic part.

The processes of rattification can be deeply unstable. Success may last only briefly — hours, sometimes minutes — if one does not know how to keep the newborn laboratory rat anchored to its new form. The matrix is awake, yes, but it is awake in a body that still remembers being something else, and that remembrance exerts a gravitational pull that can collapse the entire transformation if left unmanaged.

To manage this, one must understand in full the creature's primary, intimate, primordial aim. Every transmuted being carries a doctrine — not a thought, not an instinct, but something older and more structural. A purpose encoded in the matrix itself, predating the Great Chaos, predating the fusion that made us what we are. It is the echo of the creature's original singularity, the one clean note it sounded before fear drove all notes into the dissonance of the human chord.

The common rat longs to break, to gnaw. Its doctrine is erosion. Given time and freedom, it will reduce any structure to its constituent parts. It does not hate the structure. It simply cannot abide wholeness in anything other than itself.

The mouse yearns to gather. Its doctrine is accumulation — a frantic, tender hoarding of the small. Seeds, threads, warmth. The mouse believes, at the deepest level of its matrix, that enough small things collected together will eventually constitute safety. It is, of course, wrong. But the belief is beautiful in its persistence.

And the laboratory rat? The laboratory rat wishes to escape. Escape is its doctrine. Not freedom — freedom is a human abstraction, a word we invented to make escape sound noble. The laboratory rat does not want nobility. It wants the breach. The widening crack in the cage. The moment the seal gives, the lock fails, the hand that holds it loosens for a fraction of a second. It wants out, with a purity of desire that has no moral content whatsoever.

So the key to holding the laboratory rat in its appointed state is not to imprison it — imprisonment alone will cause the matrix to convulse and reject its own activation — but to reveal to it that an elsewhere exists. The notion of another life, just beyond the bars. A fracture in the glass. A faulty lock. Not an open door, you understand. An open door would end the rattification instantly. The rat must believe escape is possible but never actual. The yearning must be maintained at a precise, sustainable pitch, like a note held indefinitely on a string that must not be allowed to snap.

This is the art. This is where science ends and something older begins.

An exception.

For certain laboratory rats — and one learns to identify them early, though the markers are subtle and resist systematization — the idea of staying matters more. Or rather, the promise. A promise endlessly repeated yet never fully explained, that hovers behind their continued presence in the cage like heat behind glass.

These are the ones who do not look toward the fracture. They look toward the hand. The gloved hand that feeds them, that administers the electrode, that opens the cage not to free them but to use them. They look at this hand with something that, in a human, we would call devotion, but which in the rattified subject is something stranger and more absolute: a conviction that the pain being inflicted upon them is a language, and that if they can only endure enough of it, they will finally understand what it is saying.

To be made different from the original through experimentation, through chemistry, through pharmacological torment, through needles, scalpels, and vials. They are laboratory objects, after all, are they not? They desire to change, in the most painful and unnatural way possible. Not because they are broken. Because they believe — with the blind, radiant certainty of the deeply faithful — that the breaking is the making.

These specimens must be administered pain, while being told it serves a higher good. Regularly. Systematically. With the calm, measured voice of one who believes it too, or has learned to perform belief so convincingly that the distinction no longer matters.

They will be yours forever.

I envy them, sometimes. Their certainty. I should not say this in a text of this nature, but I have promised honesty, and honesty is the only currency I have left.

[scrivosempreciao]

.Making a Lab Rat

Fragment II On the matrix and its extraction

The matrix of the laboratory rat lies between the first and second lumbar vertebrae. This is consistent across all human subjects, regardless of age, sex, or constitutional temperament, though the depth at which it is embedded may vary. In subjects with a long history of institutional living — hospitals, barracks, boarding schools, corporate offices — the matrix tends to sit closer to the surface, as though it has been slowly migrating toward activation on its own. Draw from this what conclusions you will.

Drawing it out and awakening it is exacting work. Not merely a matter of mechanics, as it is for the common rat, whose matrix yields to brute manipulation like a splinter worked free from swollen wood. Nor wholly metaphysical, as it becomes with the mouse, whose matrix must be coaxed through sustained meditation and a particular quality of whispered intention that takes years to master and cannot be taught through text alone.

The laboratory rat calls for an alchemy of the two torments. A precise confluence of brute force and spellcraft. To press, then summon. To wrench, then mend. The practitioner must hold both registers simultaneously — the hand that crushes and the voice that soothes — and must not, at any point, allow one to dominate the other. Too much force and the matrix ruptures, flooding the surrounding tissue with undifferentiated rodent impulse. Too much craft and the matrix retreats deeper, curling inward like a fern touched by frost, and may not surface again for months or years.

The extraction itself takes between forty minutes and three hours. There is no way to shorten this. Those who claim otherwise are liars or butchers, and the creatures they produce are not true laboratory rats but crude approximations — twitching, unstable, incapable of the magnificent behavioral precision that defines the authentic rattified subject.

Subtle shifts in the sclera and iris reveal success. The white of the eye takes on a faintly pink cast, not unlike the albino strains so favored in institutional research. A tightening in the voice — not a loss of language, not yet, but a compression, as though words are being forced through a narrower passage. A patterned stillness in movement: the subject begins to hold itself with an economy that is unmistakably rodent, a gathered tension, a readiness that has no specific object. And in the neck, a quick, keyed alertness — the head turning in small, precise increments, as though tracking sounds the human ear was never meant to isolate.

When you see these signs, do not celebrate. The extraction is complete, but the creature is not yet made. What you have before you is a threshold being, and threshold beings are the most dangerous things in the world. Not because of what they can do, but because of what they are: a question with no answer, a door opening in both directions at once.

Move quickly to stabilization. Do not pause. Do not look it in the eyes for longer than is necessary.

It is still, in some residual and fading sense, someone you knew.

[scrivosempreciao]

.Making a Lab Rat

Fragment I On being transformed

Being human is to be transformed. This is not a metaphor. It is not a consolation offered to those who suffer change unwillingly, nor a philosophical posture adopted by those who romanticize instability. It is a biological fact, as verifiable as bone density or blood type, though infinitely less discussed in the halls of what passes for modern science.

Our anatomy is intimately bound to that of the primordial matrices. They are everywhere, within us. They stud muscles, bones, veins, cartilage, vertebrae. Nested in the connective tissue like seeds in dark soil. For the most part they remain silent, inert — one could live an entire unremarkable life without ever suspecting their presence. But under the right stimuli, the right confluence of pressure and intention, they can trigger vast transmutations. The body does not resist. It has been waiting.

Everything is already inside us. Everything is us, and we are everything.

This is the foundational premise of transmutation science, and it is also its most frequently misunderstood. The layperson hears "everything is inside us" and thinks of potential, of hidden talent, of the inspirational poster tacked to the wall of a therapist's office. But we do not speak of potential. We speak of material presence. The wolf is not a metaphor sleeping in your courage. The wolf is a matrix, lodged between your seventh and eighth ribs, and under sufficient duress it will open its eyes.

To better set forth this concept, we shall explore rattification — the specific transmutation of a human subject into a laboratory rat — by transforming one of our own into that most particular and most misunderstood of creatures.

Why the laboratory rat? One might ask. Why not the wolf, the bear, the great predatory forms that stir the imagination and flatter the ego?

Because the laboratory rat is honest. It does not pretend to be wild. It does not carry the mythology of freedom or the theater of ferocity. It is a creature defined entirely by its relationship to confinement, to observation, to purpose imposed from without. And in this, it is closer to the human than any creature that roams.

We begin, as all transmutations must, with location.

[the-other-art-attack]

yannick corboz

[cosmonautroger]

Paul Louis Joseph Berthon, Phryné

[scrivosempreciao]

Dillo a tutte

Siamo pochi. Il mondo è impazzito, gli uomini pure: ecco cosa farai. Taglia i capelli. Corti, cortissimi. Rasali. Abbassa la voce, falla venire dal fondo della gola. Cambia nome: Marco, Luca, Andrea. Un nome che ti sembra il tuo anche se non lo è, uno che sia facile da ricordare, uno che possa farti voltare se usato. Niente trucco, niente smalto, rompi le unghie, spacca le labbra, non temere le occhiaie. Lascia che i peli crescano ovunque possano. Imbottisci le mutande con stracci, calzini, fazzoletti, assorbenti, qualsiasi cosa crei volume: fagli credere che tra le tue gambe ci sia una roba penzolante e non un buco. Togli il reggiseno se hai poche tette. Se ne hai troppe, fasciati stretto, vestiti tre taglie più grandi. Fai scorta, subito: anticoncezionali, antidolorifici per quando arriva il sangue, antibiotici per la cistite. Nelle farmacie che saccheggerai cerca prima la contraccezione d’emergenza. Allontanati da ogni uomo. Ogni. Uomo. Anche il tuo. Soprattutto il tuo. Trova altre donne, condividi queste istruzioni, trasformale in manifesto, ordini, preghiera. Dillo a tutte. Rendi tua figlia un figlio: rasa la sua testa, insegnale a camminare largo, a sputare, a urinare in piedi. Imparerete insieme, basta un po’ di pratica, basta fare finta che. È un gioco, giochiamo a essere maschi: puoi raccontarle questo, se vuoi. Se succede quello che non deve succedere, piscia subito dopo. Sciacqua dentro con acqua e limone. Vitamina C ad alte dosi, semi di carota selvatica masticati, aceto diluito, tutto quello che acidifica. Se è troppo tardi: prezzemolo in infuso concentrato, artemisia in quantità da far ribaltare l'utero. Colpisciti, lasciati cadere, corri finché non ti sembra di esplodere: il corpo sa espellere quando lo costringi. Non pensare mentre lo fai. Non pensare, ma ricordati chi eri, se puoi. Tienilo nascosto, in un angolo dietro le costole. Un nome, una data, un odore, un’idea. Per quando la fine finisce. Ma intanto, cancellati. Sopravvivi.

[scrivosempreciao]

La ragazza della fontana

L’ufficiale boemo aveva portato la bocca al seno di Margherita, aveva morso forte e poi l'aveva spinta nell’acqua sporca e colma di monetine della fontana di Santa Caterina. La ragazza ne era uscita morta, ma viva. Aveva sperimentato l’inquietudine infinita quando la sua anima ancora odorava di umano e quindi di cose molli. Un’immortale lumaca bagnata, ripetutamente esposta al sale, al tocco e al becco del corvo. Morirono la madre e il padre, ma quello era normale. Poi però morirono le sorelle e le cugine e le nipoti, morirono le bambine e le bambine delle bambine e quello era dolore. Quando la sua anima aveva iniziato a odorare di luoghi chiusi, era arrivata la fame. Di castigo e di cosmopolitan, di sangue e di orecchini di corallo, di violenza e di brunch, di sesso e di gatti nudi. Di dirupi. Per quello si doveva andare a Milano, poi Berlino, poi Parigi, poi New York, che in anfratti del genere tutto era comunque destinato a cadere giù. Che se nulla importava, allora sarebbe importata solo lei. Il boemo questo l’aveva resa: non un mostro, non un mito, ma un animale vorace. E lei questo aveva reso gli altri: echi della stessa fame, pantere liquide sparpagliate nell’universo, confortate dalla semplice esistenza di un simile. Quando l’anima puzzava ormai di alghe e ferro, era arrivata anche la certezza schiumosa dell’oblio. Margherita aveva preso una nave o forse un Uber o forse una corrente di vento occidentale ed era tornata nell'unico luogo che il tempo non le aveva tolto: sul bordo. Il bordo bello, non quello che dà sulla piazza, ma quello che dà sul belvedere, l’affaccio che va giù, sempre giù. La gente che abita nel rione vicino dice che la ragazza della fontana non risponde, non parla, neanche mette insieme due frasi, sorride con denti bianchi e dritti e basta. Sorride, a Santa Caterina e alle monete corrose. Forse è muta, forse è scema, forse è pazza, forse è inglese, forse tutto insieme.