Novelspace is a parallel universe, fascinating for many reasons, one is of being so easily accessible in addition to being so rich of surprises. So, I have been exploring parallel spaces in the form of Plutonian explorers, diligent waitresses, goats with golden feet, Byzantine-American warriors, and way more. Some of these universes are fascinating, some just bizarre, and some weird in the ugly sense of the term.
This note is about a recent novel by the Italian author Stefano Ceccarelli, titled "The Cosmic Twins" (in Italian, "I Gemelli del Cosmo"). First of all, let me say that this is deep stuff of the fascinating kind. It was Jorge Luis Borges who said that all individual books are just pages of a great book that humankind is writing. I would add that not all the books written nowadays deserve to be added to that great book, but some certainly do and this is one of them.
Let me start from the beginning and, since if we are discussing a single, gigantic book, we may as well take a look at the initial pages in order to understand what's written somewhere near the end. So, we might start with the Epics of Gilgamesh, possibly the first novel ever written. How does the story of Gilgamesh relate to the story written by Ceccarelli? All good stories are about searching for something -- it was a science fiction writer, Samuel Delany, who wrote that he couldn't think of writing anything but a new version of the search for the Holy Grail. So, that's the point to start with.
But what is exactly the Holy Grail? What are novel characters searching for? And why when they finally find it, the novel ends, or maybe they discover it is a disappointment? Maybe there is something deep here. All this searching is not about something in particular but rather has to do with the way the universe functions. The universe is not a uniform blob: it was created from the beginning by separating the light from the darkness and God herself saw that it was a good thing to do so. If you think about that, light wouldn't be what it is if there didn't exist darkness. Maybe light actively searches for darkness and maybe darkness is eagerly waiting for light to merge with it and become light, too, while maybe light itself lounges to become darkness after having spent itself to spread around. It is the eternal principle of the Yin and the Yang, always turning around each other, always seeking for each other, and never completely merging with each other.
So, what does Gilgamesh search for in his saga? Eternal life, we read. But that's not the real reason. The reason why Gilgamesh travels, fights, struggles, suffers, and keeps going is something that not even Gilgamesh himself understands. Perhaps we can find it in some detail of the saga. Gilgamesh has a friend in the story, Enkidu, but they are both Yang characters. They are both searching for a counterpart, Yin characters and we can find them in the two women of the story. They are not as well known as the two main male characters, but they have their names spelled out in clear: Shamhat, the holy prostitute and Siduri, the alewife. They are supposed to be minor characters but, make no mistake, they are among the very first female characters whose name we know in the history of literature -- that is, female characters who are not goddesses. Actually, these two ladies partake something of the higher sphere of things, but everything in the universe does.
So, perhaps we can read the Gilgamesh saga as a search of the main male character, Gilgamesh himself, for his female counterpart. He just has a glimpse of her when he meets Siduri at a tavern, then he moves on in his unsuccessful research, without even suspecting that what he had been looking for had been so close to him for a while. The same is true for Enkidu, who briefly meets Shamhat in the forest, is seduced by her, but then never meets her again. But so is the mythical search in all his literary manifestations. The object of the search is never fully grasped and, if it is, it is destroyed in the process.
Let's go now to Ceccarelli's Cosmic Twins. The story is about a couple of twin planets, one is our Earth, the other ts twin, called "Serra" that in Italian differs from the term for Earth ("Terra") for just one character. Actually, calling them "twins" is a misnomer. They are different and, for a quirk of creation, Serra doesn't have in its crust mineable amounts of the element we call "gold." But that's not the real point. Terra and Serra are two different planets, with Serra being definitely female as opposed to the more aggressive, male, Terra. Among the several characteristics of Serra, one is that of having had a female Messiah, Yesua Krista, the Yin counterpart of the Yang Terran Messiah, Jesus Christ. A male planet and a female planet, two halves looking for each other, with Krista not dying on the cross on the gentler Serra, while the availability of gold has corrupted men's hearts on Terra.
So, the novel goes on by describing how the inhabitants of Serra engage in a search for Terra. Eventually, a couple of Serrans, Yosh and Laylah, manage to travel to Terra by exploiting a strange space vortex. They arrive there to find a dead planet, destroyed by global warming and pollution. And eventually, they go back home empty-handed, just like Gilgamesh did, unable to complete his search.
That's the story: one problem is that the end of the novel is disappointing with the narration slowing down as it goes on, like an old clockwork toy. But never mind that: like all good novels, this one has defects, it is unavoidable. But, like all good novels, it is a metaphor that you can't really understand in rational terms. You have to feel it. And if you do, this is deep stuff. Extremely deep. It tells us how we are desperately looking for something that we cannot describe, but we know that it is there. It is our Yin counterpart that we lack to become a truly harmonious civilization. The Serrans fail in finding it. Gilgamesh failed in finding it. Maybe we will fail too, but who knows? Perhaps the path is the destination.
