Porta Ludovica. He decides therefore to alter his route at a certain point on this new arc, turning toward the center. He starts along the circumference arc by Via T roya, Viale Cassala, Viale Liguria, Via Tibaldi, Viale Toscana, Via Isonzo (slight turn toward the center), Viale Umbria, Viale Piceno, Via dei Mille, and Viale Abruzzi. Arriving at Piazzale Loreto, he turns again toward the center (otherwise, he knows, he will end up in Monza) and follows Viale Brianza, Viale Lunigiana, Viale Marche, and Via Jenner, turns again toward the center, adjusting his route, along Via Caracciolo, Piazza Firenze, Viale Teodorico, and Piazzale Lotto. At this point, afraid of still not having reached the inner coils of the spiral, he turns again toward the center, along Via Migliara, Via Murillo, Via Ranzoni, Via Bezzi, and Via Misurata.
At which point he finds himself back in Piazza Napoli, having completed the circuit of Milan. Experiments show that after this the subject loses all capacity for telling direction. No matter how much he adjusts his course toward the center, reducing the apparent arc of the circumference, he will find himself at Porta Ticinese, Piazza Medaglia d’Oro, but never at Porta Ludovica. This leads to the supposition that Porta Ludovica does not exist for anyone in Milanese space who triangulates from Piazza Napoli. In fact, an attempt from any direction will inevitably be frustrated. All efforts at orientation must be made, if possible, independently of any preliminary notion of Milanese space.
Actually, it will be impossible for the subject to refrain from falling back on spontaneous Euclidean references such as «If I take three steps to the left, then three steps forward, then three steps to the right, I will consequently be three steps ahead on the straight line that originates at my point of departure.» As a rule, the subject, after a calculation of this sort, finds himself almost invariably in the Monforte district, which can be shown to be the geometric nexus of every possible destination. Milanese space stretches and contracts like a rubber band, and its contractions are influenced by the movements the subject makes in it, so that it is impossible for him to take them into account as he proceeds.
As all scientists know, Moa later attempted to demonstrate the Second Paradox of Porta Ludovica,
making the hypothesis that with Porta Ludovica as the point of departure it would be impossible to identify the Monforte district (thus proving an exception to the postulate of the Monforte district as the geometric nexus of all possible destinations). But it is not known if his research proved successful, because Moa disappeared and his body was never found. There is a legend current among the natives that his restless spirit has roamed these many years around Piazza Napoli; having arrived there, it has
never been able to leave. If this is what really happened, Moa has the distinction of having demon
strated the irreversibility of the Porta Ludovica paradox. A more alarming possibility, however, is that Moa’ s spirit haunts Piazza Napoli in a vain search for its body, which lies unburied in Piazza Tricolore, in the Monforte district.
Naturally philosophers found Moa’s topological hypothesis unsatisfactory, and they have since tried to put the spatial ambiguity of Milan on a specific existential footing.
Still, Moa’s topographical studies were the inspiration for the Mailandanalyse of Karl Opomat, aspecialist in the Admiralty Islands trained in this sort of research during the period when those territories admitted, for acculturation workshops, a number of German «colonials. «
The being-in-Milan condition Opomat writesis equivalent to a being-around-Porta-Ludovica in the fictive world of the satisfiable. The in-what being in-Milan comprises is, primarily, a system of reference; it is the that-which-to-what of the preliminary state, in allowing Portc;t Ludovica to approach. The in-what of self-referring comprehension was that which-to-what of allowing Porta Ludovica to ap proach in the way of being proper to satisfiability; it is the phenomenon of being-in-Milan.
But in the very Milanity of Milan in general (Mailandischkeit von Mailand uberhaupt), being-in-Milan must be clarified as Worry (Sorge), and worrying-about, aworrying-about Porta Ludovica according to the three ecstasies of temporality, though in such a way that being-around-Porta-Ludovica can only be a being around-Monforte.
Opomat’s tragic view was to be tempered in later studies (cf. the notion of Piazza Napoli as «disrevelation»), but even these are not completely free of negativism.
Closer to the temporal situation illuminated by Industry and Sexual Repression in a Po Valley Society Moa, on the other hand, is the penetrating phenom enology of another thinker, the late lamented Manoi Cholai, iri whose unpublished manuscripts we find a dazzling analysis of the state of bewilderment in one who is inserted into the «fluxation» of the spatial Milanese situation.
Its [Milan’s] present state of being is still in the originating source and diffusion (Urquellen and Verquellen), and in such a way that the diffusion is tantamount to a constant modification, which the actual present (Urprdsent), no-longer-originating present, transforms into a has-just-been, to which, however, a new originating present (Monforte district) is constantly added, which is both source and expansion, and to which a new mode is added of the now originating source, and so on. In Milan there is a phenomenon of reciprocal distancing (Auseinandersein ), which is also a succession (N acheinander ), in the sense of a distancing of the points in time.
In the movement from Porta Ludovica to Piazza Napoli both the now and the various has-beens (Gewesenheiten) are present at once, as well as the horizon of the maintaining (Behalten) and of the oncoming (des Zukommendes). Here we encounter, first of all, the medianness of intentional implication, with regard to retentive modification. From the source-point (Porta Ludovica) a later awareness of the just-has-been is diffused for the immediate has-been, which is enforced by a phase of awareness of the just-now or every just-now, and so we have a recursive of of of of. The retentive temporal flux is characterized in itself by a constant already-has-past, in which the already-past, in its individual stages, is characterized as the already-past of a passing and as an average or median passing, etc.
It is clear that the complexity of these analyses, impressive as they are, does not carry us very far beyond what Moa previously established, the fact that the mental backwardness of the Milanese native is due to the disorienting action of the ambiguity of the spatial situation on the nerve centers (directly influencing the inner ear, according to some representatives of traditional biological positivism, who tend, moreover, to speak not only of Eustachian tubes but also Fallopian, in the indigenous women who roam at night along the paths of the inner spirals of the city).
Nevertheless, we venture to refute both the philosophical explanation and the scientific-mathematical one, returning, instead, to a historical view which still incorporates the concrete anthropological research we have conducted (see Appendix, pp. 671 1346).
The primitive structure of the rites of passage and acts of worship, the colonial passivity, the static community, and the incapacity to evolve cannot be explained only by hairsplitting disquisitions on the spatial structure of the locality; they must be seen also in the light of profound , economic and social factors.
Now, in comparing the present situation of the peninsula with that described in the historical writ-Industry and Sexual Repression in a Po Valley Society ings of the natives which date back about a thousand years, we consider it appropriate to venture, at least as a historiographical hypothesis, the following explanation, believing that it is the most probable.
- Church and Industry
(A Proposed Historical-socioeconomic Interpretation)
The Italian peninsula is witnessing today what the natives would call a «struggle for turf.» The social and political scene is dominated by two equally strong powers, disputing the control of the peninsula’s, territories and its people: Industry and the Church. The Church, according to statements recorded in the field, is a secular and worldly power, intent on earthly rule, on acquiring more and more property, on controlling the sources of political authority; whereas Industry is a spiritual power, bent on winning souls, on propagating mysticism and askesis.
During our stay on the Italian peninsula we observed some typical manifestations of the Church: the «processions» or «precessions» (obviously connected with equinoctial rites), which are unabashed displays of pomp and military force-including platoons of guards, police lines, generals of the army, and colonels of the air force. On another occasion, in the so-called Paschal celebrations, we witnessed outright military parades, in which whole armored units came to offer the symbolic homage that the Church demands of the army. This secular display of armed, uniformed power is totally different from the spectacle offered by Industry.
Its faithful live in gloomy conventlike buildings, where mechanical devices contribute to making the habitat more and more stark and inhuman. Even when such coenobia are constructed according to the dictates of order and symmetry, they are marked by a kind of Cistercian severity, for the coenobites’ families live in small monastic cells in
