Stanislaw Lem - His Masters Voice

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His Master's Voice

by Stanislaw Lem

Translation of the Polish Glos pana done by Michael Kandel

a.b.e-book v3.0

Note from the Scanner:

The "Back Cover" information for this book is quite misleading. This is

only "science fiction" in the most literal sense of the phrase -- it is

fiction about science. The single fantastical element is only theorized -- a

Sender of the message in question. The book is cerebral in nature, which makes

me question why exactly it is referred to as a "thriller" on the back cover. .

. though there is a tension in the book, like in most good literature, I would

not choose to describe it as a "thriller". The most thrilling thing about this

book is that there exists an author who is willing to explore topics as

diverse as psychology, morality, linguistics, physics, mathematics, ethics,

and philosophy in one book. This is a more thoughtful, realistic, and

rewarding book than others in the same vein such as Sagan's Contact.

Back Cover:

A pulsating stream of neutrino radiation from a source with the power of

a sun has been detected on earth and a team of scientists assembled to study

and decode the mysterious message. As the scientists wrangle among themselves,

clashing and conspiring while jockeying for favor and position, Lem produces

witty and inventive satire of "men of science" and their thinking. In the race

to discover whether the message is a technological gift or the formula for the

ultimate weapon, the author grapples with the issue of scientific

responsibility in a compelling sci-fi thriller.

"This is not a book, as it might seem, about science and scientists, the

military, or politics, though they are all here. It is a book about the whole

human race and what it's like to be part of the twentieth century." --

Washington Post

"By the last chapters one is racing like a romance novel addict." -- Peter S.

Beagle, New York Times Book Review

"If he isn't considered for a Nobel Prize by the end of the century, it will

be because someone told the judges that he writes science fiction." --

Philadelphia Inquirer

may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or

by any means, electronic or mechanical, including

photocopy, recording, or any information storage

and retrieval system, without permission in

writing from the publisher.

Requests for permission to make copies of any

part of the work should be mailed to:

Permissions, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers,

757 Third Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10017

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Lem, Stanistaw.

His master's voice.

Translation of: Glos pana.

"A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book."

I. Title.

PC7158.L39G613 1984 891.8'537 83-18467

ISBN 0-15-640300-5

Printed in the United States of America

First Harvest/HBJ edition 1984

B C D E

Editor's Note

The manuscript was found among the papers of the late Professor Peter E.

Hogarth. That great mind, alas, was unable to put it into final form, though

he had labored long over it. The illness that claimed him made the book's

completion impossible. Because the deceased was reluctant to speak of the work

-- a work unusual for him, and undertaken more out of a sense of duty than by

choice -- and reluctant, even, to speak of it to those near him, in whose

number I am honored to have been included -- certain obscurities and points of

contention arose during the preliminary efforts to prepare the manuscript for

publication. I must state, to be truthful, that in the circle of those who

were made acquainted with the text there were voices raised in opposition to

its publication: they claimed that such was not the intention of the deceased.

There is to be found, however, no written testimony of his to this effect; one

can only conclude that such opinions are without foundation. It was obvious,

on the other hand, that the thing was unfinished, for it had no title, and one

particular fragment existed only in a rough draft, which fragment was to have

served -- and here lies one of the principal doubts -- as either a preface or

an afterword to the book.

As friend and colleague of the deceased, and mentioned by him in his

will, I have decided, finally, to make of this fragment, necessary for an

understanding of the whole, the preface. The title, His Master's Voice, was

suggested to me by the publisher, John Keller, whom I wish to take this

opportunity to thank for the great care he has given to the publication of

this last work of Professor Hogarth. I should also like to express here my

gratitude to Mrs. Rosamond Schelling, who so painstakingly assisted in the

initial editing and in the final proofreading.

Professor Thomas V. Warren

Mathematics Department

Washington University, D.C.

June 1966

Preface

Though I may shock many readers with the words that follow, it is my

duty, I am convinced, to speak them. I never before wrote a book like this;

and, since it is not the custom for mathematicians to introduce their works

with statements of a personal nature, I could have spared myself the trouble.

It was as a result of circumstances beyond my control that I became

involved in the events that I wish to relate here. The reasons I preface the

account with a kind of confession should become evident later on. In speaking

of myself, I must choose some frame of reference; let this be the recent

biography of me penned by Professor Harold Yowitt. Yowitt calls me a mind of

the highest caliber, in that the problems that I attacked were always, among

those currently available, the most difficult. He shows that my name was to be

found wherever the heritage of science was in the process of being torn down

and the edifice of new concepts raised -- for example, in the mathematical

revolution, in the field of physico-ethics, or in the Master's Voice Project.

When I came, in my reading, to the place where the subject was

destruction, I expected, after the mention of my iconoclastic inclinations,

further, bolder inferences, and thought that at last I had found a biographer

-- which did not overjoy me, because it is one thing to strip oneself, and

another, entirely, to be stripped. But Yowitt, as if frightened by his own

acumen, then returned -- inconsequently -- to the accepted version of me as

the persistent, modest genius, and even trotted out a few of the old-standby

anecdotes about me.

So I could set this book on the shelf with my other biographies, calmly,

little dreaming, at the time, that I would soon be entering the lists with my

flattering portraitist. I noted, also, that not much space remained on the

shelf, and recalled what I had once said to Yvor Baloyne, that I would die

when the shelf was filled. He took it as a joke, and I did not insist, though

I had expressed a genuine conviction, no less genuine for being absurd. And

therefore -- to return to Yowitt -- once again I had succeeded, or, if you

like, failed, in that at the age of sixty-two I had twenty-eight volumes

devoted to my person and yet remained completely unknown. But am I being fair?

Professor Yowitt wrote about me in accordance with rules not of his

making. Not all public figures may be treated the same. Great artists, yes,

may be drawn in their pettiness, and some biographers even seem to think that

the soul of the artist is perforce a scurvy thing. For the great scientists,

however, the old stereotype is still mandatory. Artists we view as spirits

chained to the flesh; literary critics are free to discuss the homosexuality

of an Oscar Wilde, but it is hard to imagine any historian of science dealing

analogously with the creators of physics. We must have them incorruptible,

ideal, and the events of history are no more than local changes in the

circumstances of their lives. A politician may be a villain without ceasing to

be a great politician, whereas a villainous genius -- that is a contradiction

in terms. Villainy cancels genius. So demand the rules of today.

True, a group of psychoanalysts from Michigan did attempt to challenge

this state of affairs, but they fell into the sin of oversimplification. The

physicist's evident propensity to theorize, these scholars derived from sexual

repression. Psychoanalytic doctrine reveals the pig in man, a pig saddled with

a conscience; the disastrous result is that the pig is uncomfortable beneath

that pious rider, and the rider fares no better in the situation, since his

endeavor is not only to tame the pig but also to render it invisible. The

notion that we have within us an ancient Beast that carries upon its back a

modern Reason -- is a pastiche of primitive mythologies.

Psychoanalysis provides truth in an infantile, that is, a schoolboy

fashion: we learn from it, roughly and hurriedly, things that scandalize us

and thereby command our attention. It sometimes happens, and such is the case

here, that a simplification touching upon the truth, but cheaply, is of no

more value than a lie. Once again we are shown the demon and the angel, the

beast and the god locked in Manichean embrace, and once again man has been

pronounced, by himself, not culpable, as he is but the field of combat for

forces that have entered him, distended him, and hold sway inside his skin.

Thus psychoanalysis is, primarily, sophomoric. Shockers are to explain man to

us, and the whole drama of existence is played out between piggishness and the

sublimation into which civilized effort can transform it.

So I really ought to be thankful to Professor Yowitt, for maintaining my

likeness in the classical style and not borrowing the methods of the Michigan

psychologists. Not that I intend to speak better of myself than they would

speak; but there is, surely, a difference between a caricature and a portrait.

Which is not to say that I believe a man who is the subject of

biographies possesses any greater knowledge of himself than his biographers

do. Their position is more convenient, for uncertainties may be attributed to

a lack of data, which allows the supposition that the one described, were he

but alive and willing, could supply the needed information. The one described,

however, possesses nothing more than hypotheses on the subject of himself,

hypotheses that may be of interest as the products of his mind but that do not

necessarily serve as those missing pieces.

With sufficient imagination a man could write a whole series of versions

of his life; it would form a union of sets in which the facts would be the

only elements in common. People, even intelligent people, who are young, and

therefore inexperienced and naïve, see only cynicism in such a possibility.

They are mistaken, because the problem is not moral but cognitive. The number

of metaphysical beliefs is no greater or less than the number of different

beliefs a man may entertain on the subject of himself -- sequentially, at

various periods of his life, and occasionally even at the same time.

Therefore, I cannot claim to offer anything other than the notions of

myself that I have formed over the space of roughly forty years, and their

only singularity, it seems to me, is that they are not flattering. Nor is this

uncomplimentariness limited to "the pulling off of the mask," which is the

only trick available to the psychoanalyst. To say, for example, of a genius

that morally he was a bastard may not necessarily hit him in the place of his

private shame. A mind that "reached the ceiling of the age," as Yowitt puts

it, will not be bothered by that type of diagnosis. The shame of a genius may

be his intellectual futility, the knowledge of how uncertain is all that he

has accomplished. And genius is, above all, constant doubting. Not one of the

greats, however, bent beneath the pressure of society, has pulled down the

monuments raised to him in his life, calling himself thereby into question.

As one whose genius has been duly certified by several dozen learned

biographers, I think I may say a word or two on the topic of intellectual

summits; which is simply that clarity of thought is a shining point in a vast

expanse of unrelieved darkness. Genius is not so much a light as it is a

constant awareness of the surrounding gloom, and its typical cowardice is to

bathe in its own glow and avoid, as much as possible, looking out beyond its

boundary. No matter how much genuine strength it may contain, there is also,

inevitably, a considerable part that is only the pretense of that strength.

The fundamental traits of my character I consider to be cowardice,

malice, and pride. As it turned out, this triumvirate had at its disposal a

certain talent, which concealed it and ostensibly transformed it, and

intelligence assisted in this -- intelligence is one of life's most effective

instruments for masking inborn traits, once it decides that such a course is

desirable. For forty-odd years I have been an obliging, modest individual,

devoid of any sign of professional arrogance, because for a very long time and

most persistently I schooled myself in precisely this behavior. But as far

back into childhood as I can recall, I sought out evil, though of course I was

unaware of it.

My evil was isotropic, unbiased, and totally disinterested. In places of

veneration, such as churches, or in the company of particularly worthy

persons, I liked to think forbidden thoughts. That the content of these

thoughts was ludicrously puerile does not matter in the least. I was simply

conducting experiments on a scale practically accessible to me. I do not

remember when I began these experiments. I remember only the deep sense of

injury, the anger, and the disappointment that came upon me some years later,

when it turned out that a head filled with wickedness would never, not in any

place nor in any company, be struck by lightning; that breaking free of and

not participating in the Proper brought with it no -- absolutely no --

punishment.

If it is at all possible to speak thus of a child of less than ten, I

wanted that lightning or some other form of dire retribution; I summoned it,

challenged it, and grew to despise the world, the place of my existence,

because it had demonstrated the futility of all action and thought, evil

included. Thus I never tormented animals, or hurt even the grass underfoot; on

the other hand, I lashed out at stones, the sand, I abused furniture,

subjected water to torture, and mentally smashed the stars to pieces, to

punish them for their indifference to me, and as I did so my fury became more

and more helpless, for my understanding increased, of how ridiculous were the

things I did.

Somewhat later on, with self-knowledge, I came to the realization that

my condition was a kind of keen unhappiness that was utterly useless to me,

because it could serve no purpose. I said before that my rancor was unbiased:

I bestowed it first upon myself. The shape of my arms, of my legs, the

features of my face, seen in the mirror, galled me in a way in which usually

only the features of others cause us anger or impatience. When I grew a bit

older, I saw that it was impossible to live like this; I determined, through a

progression of decisions, exactly what I ought to be, and from then on strove

-- true, with variable results -- to adhere to that established plan.

An autobiography that begins by listing cowardice, malice, and pride as

the foundations of one's psyche entails, from the deterministic point of view,

a logical error. If one says that everything in us is predetermined, then

predetermined also must have been my resistance to my inner meanness, and the

difference between me and other, better people is then reduced to nothing but

a variation in the localized source of the behavior. What those better people

did voluntarily, at little cost, for they but followed their own natural

inclination, I practiced in opposition to mine -- hence, as it were,

artificially. Yet since it was I who dictated conduct to myself, I was, in the

overall balance -- in this formulation -- nevertheless predestined to be as

good as gold. Like Demosthenes with the pebbles in his stammering mouth, I put

iron deep in my soul, to straighten it.

But it is precisely in this equalizing that determinism reveals its

absurdity. A phonograph record of angelic singing is not an iota better

morally than one that reproduces, when played, a scream of murder. According

to determinism, he who desired and was able to be better was no more or less

fated beforehand than he who desired but was unable, or than he who did not

even attempt to desire. This is a false image, for the sound of battle played

on a record is not an actual battle. Knowing what it cost me, I can say that

my struggle to be good was no semblance. Determinism simply deals with

something altogether different; the forces that operate according to the

calculus of physics have nothing whatever to do with the matter -- just as a

crime is not made innocent by its translation into the language of amplitudes

of atomic probabilities.

About one thing Yowitt is definitely right: I always sought difficulty.

Opportunities for me to give free rein to my natural malice I usually forwent,

as too easy. It may sound strange, or even nonsensical, but I did not suppress

my inclination to evil with my eyes fixed on the Good as a higher value;

rather, I suppressed it for the precise reason that I felt so powerfully its

presence in me. What counted for me was the calculus of resistance, which had

nothing in common with the arithmetic of morality. Therefore I really cannot

say what would have become of me had the principal trait of my nature been the

inclination to do only good. As usual, reasoning that attempts to picture

ourselves in a form other than what is given breaks the rules of logic and

must quickly founder.

Once only did I not eschew evil; that memory is connected with the

protracted and horrible death of my mother. I loved her, yet at the same time

I followed with an unusually keen and avid attention the process of her

destruction in the illness. I was nine then. She, the personification of

tranquillity, of strength, of a composure almost sovereign, lay in a lingering

agony, an agony prolonged by the doctors. I, at her side in the darkened

bedroom filled with the stink of medicine, still kept a grip on myself; but

when I left her, as soon as I had shut the door behind me and found myself

alone, I stuck out my tongue joyfully in the direction of her bed, and, that

being insufficient, ran to my room and breathlessly jumped up and down in

front of the mirror, fists clenched, making faces and giggling with delight.

With delight? I understood perfectly that my mother was dying; since that

morning I had fallen into despair, and the despair was as real as my stifled

giggling. I remember how the giggling frightened me, yet at the same time it

took me beyond everything I had known, and in that transgression there was a

dazzling revelation.

That night, lying alone, I tried to comprehend what had taken place;

unable to do this, I worked up a befitting pity for myself and my mother, and

tears flowed until I fell asleep. I considered these tears to be an expiation;

but then, later, the whole thing repeated itself, when I overheard the doctors

conveying worse and worse news to my father. I dared not go up to my room;

deliberately I sought the company of others. Thus the first person I ever

shrank from was myself.

After my mother's death I gave myself up to a child's despair that was

untroubled by any qualms. The fascination ended with her last breath. With her

died my anxiety. This incident is so confusing that I can only offer a

hypothesis. I had witnessed the fall of the Absolute -- it had been shown to

be an illusion -- and witnessed a shameful, obscene struggle, because in it

Perfection had come apart like the most miserable rag. This was the trampling

of life's Order, and although people above me supplied the repertoire of that

Order with special evasions even for so dismal an occasion, these additions

failed to fit what had happened. One cannot, with dignity, with grace, howl in

pain -- any more than one can in ecstasy. In the messiness of loss I sensed a

truth. Perhaps I saw, in that which disrupted, the stronger side, and so sided

with that side, because it had the upper hand.

My hidden laughter had no connection with the actual suffering of my

mother. I only feared that suffering; it was the unavoidable concomitant of

the expiring that I could understand, and I would have delivered her from the

pain had I been able. I desired neither her suffering nor her death. At a real

murderer I would have thrown myself with tears and pleas, like any child, but

since there was none, I could only absorb the cruel treachery of the blow. Her

body, bloated, turned into a monstrous, mocking caricature of itself, and it

writhed in that mockery. I had only one choice: either to be destroyed with

her or to jeer at her. As a coward, then, I chose the laughter of betrayal.

I cannot say whether it really was this way. The first paroxysm of

giggling seized me at the sight of the destruction; perhaps the experience

would have skipped me had my mother met her end in a fashion more aesthetic,

like quietly falling asleep, a form that is much favored by people. It was not

like that, however, and, forced to believe my own eyes, I proved defenseless.

In earlier times a chorus of hired mourners, brought in quickly, would have

drowned out the groans of my mother. But the decline of tradition has reduced

magical measures to the level of hairdressing, because the undertaker -- and I

overheard this -- suggested to my father the various facial expressions into

which her frozen grimace could be reworked. My father left the room then, and

for a brief moment I felt a tremor of solidarity, because I understood him.

Later I thought of that mortal agony many times.

The idea of my laughter as a betrayal seems incomplete. Betrayal is the

result of conscious decision, but what causes us to be drawn to destruction?

What black hope, in destruction, beckons man? Its utter inutility rules out

any rational explanation. This hunger has been suppressed in vain by numerous

civilizations. It is as irrevocably a part of us as two-leggedness. To him who

seeks a reason but cannot abide any hypothesis of a design, whether in the

form of Providence or of the Diabolical, there remains only the rationalist's

substitute for demonology -- statistics. Thus it is from a darkened room

filled with the smell of corruption that the trail leads to my mathematical

anthropogenesis. With the formulae of stochastics I strove to undo the evil

spell. But this, too, is only conjecture, therefore a self-defensive reflex of

the mind.

I know that what I am writing here could be, with slight shifts in

emphasis, turned to my favor -- and that some future biographer will try to do

this. He will show that with intellect I conquered my character, achieved a

great victory, but defamed myself out of a desire to do penance. Such labor

follows in the steps of Freud, who has become the Ptolemy of psychology, for

now, with him, anyone can explain human phenomena, raising epicycles upon

epicycles: that construction speaks to us, because it is aesthetic. He

converted the pastoral model into one that was grotesque, unaware that he

remained a prisoner of aesthetics. It was as if the purpose had been to

replace the opera, in anthropology, with tragicomedy.

Let my posthumous biographer not trouble himself. I require no apologia;

all my effort was born of curiosity, untouched by any feeling of guilt. I

wanted to understand -- only to understand, nothing more. For the

disinterestedness of evil is the only support, in man, for the theological

argument; theology answers the question where does a quality come from that

has its origin neither in nature nor in culture. A mind immersed totally in

the human experience, and therefore anthropocentric, might finally agree with

the image of Creation as a somewhat sick joke.

It is an attractive idea, that of a Creator who merely amused Himself,

but here we enter into a vicious circle: we imagine Him sadistic not because

He made us that way, but because we are ourselves that way. Meanwhile the

utter insignificance and smallness of man vis-à-vis the Universe, of which

science informs us, makes the Manichean myth a concept so primitive as to be

trivial. I will put it in another way: if a creation were to take place --

which personally I cannot conceive -- then the level of knowledge that it

would require would be of such an order that there would be no place in it for

silly jokes. Because -- and this really is the whole credo of my faith --

nothing like the wisdom of evil is possible. My reason tells me that a creator

cannot be a petty scoundrel, a conjurer who toys ironically with what he has

brought into being. What we hold to be the result of a malign intervention

could only make sense as an ordinary miscalculation, as an error, but now we

find ourselves in the realm of nonexistent theologies -- that is, theologies

of fallible gods. But the domain of their constructional practices is nothing

other than the field of my lifework, i.e, statistics.

Every child unwittingly makes the discoveries from which have sprung the

worlds of Gibbs and Boltzmann, because to a child reality appears as a

multitude of possibilities, where each can be taken separately and developed

so easily that it seems almost spontaneous. A child is surrounded by a great

many virtual worlds; completely alien to him is the cosmos of Pascal, a rigid

corpse with even, clocklike movements. The ossified order of maturity later

destroys that primal richness. If this picture of childhood seems onesided,

for example, in that the child owes his inner freedom to ignorance and not

choice -- well, but every picture is one-sided. With the demise of imagination

I inherited its residue, a kind of permanent disagreement with reality, more

like an anger, though, than a rejection. My laughter had already been a

denial, and a more effective kind, perhaps, than suicide. I acknowledge it, at

the age of sixty-two; and the mathematics was only a later consequence of this

attitude. Mathematics was my second desertion.

I speak metaphorically -- but hear me out. I had betrayed my dying

mother, betrayed all people, opting, with the laughter, for a thing of power

greater than theirs, however hideous it was, because I saw no other way out.

Later I would learn that this enemy of ours -- which was everything, which had

built its nest in us as well -- I could also betray, at least to a certain

extent, because mathematics is independent of the world.

Time showed me that I had been doubly mistaken. Genuinely to opt for

death, against life, and for mathematics, against the world, is not possible.

The only true option is one's own annihilation. Whatever we do, we do in life;

and, as experience has demonstrated, neither is mathematics the perfect

retreat, because its habitation is language. That informational plant has its

roots in the world and in us. This comparison has always been with me, even

before I was able to put it into the language of a proof.

In mathematics I searched for what I had valued in childhood, the

multiplicity of worlds, which broke contact with the imposed world, but so

gently that it was as if the latter had been stripped of its force -- a force

that lay within us as well, yet was hidden enough for us to forget its

presence. Later, like every mathematician, I learned to my surprise how

unpredictable and incredibly adaptable is that activity, which at first

resembles a game. One enters into it proudly; without apologies and

unequivocally one shuts out the world; with arbitrary propositions that rival,

in their uncontestableness, Creation, one performs a definitive closure; this

is to separate us from the vortex in which we are forced to live.

And lo, that denial, that most radical break, leads us precisely to the

heart of things, and the flight turns out to have been an attainment, the

desertion -- an appreciation, and the break -- a reconciliation. We make the

discovery, then, that our escape was apparent only, since we have returned to

the very thing we sought to flee. The enemy metamorphoses into an ally; we are

purified; the world gives us to understand, silently, that only by means of it

may we conquer it. Thus our fear is tamed and turns to joy, in that special

refuge whose deepest interiors intersect the surface of the only world.

Mathematics never reveals man to the degree, never expresses him in the

way, that any other field of human endeavor does: the extent of the negation

of man's corporeal self that mathematics achieves cannot be compared with

anything. Whoever is interested in this subject I refer to my articles. Here I

will say only that the world injected its patterns into human language at the

very inception of that language; mathematics sleeps in every utterance, and

can only be discovered, never invented.

What constitutes its crown may not be cut free from its roots, because

it arose not in the course of the three hundred or eight hundred years of

civilized history, but through the millennia of linguistic evolution: at the

loci of man's encounter with his environment, from the time of tribes and

rivers. Language is wiser than the mind of any one of us, just as the body is

wiser than the discernment of any of its units as it moves, self-aware and

many-faceted, through the current of the life process. The inheritance of both

evolutions, of living matter and of the matter of informational speech, has

not yet been exhausted, but already we dream of stepping beyond the boundaries

of both. These words of mine may make poor philosophizing, but that cannot be

said of my proofs of the linguistic genesis of mathematical concepts, of the

fact, in other words, that those concepts arose neither from the enumerability

of things nor from the cleverness of reason.

The factors that contributed to my becoming a mathematician are complex,

no doubt, but one major factor was talent, without which I could have

accomplished in my profession no more than could a hunchback in a championship

track-and-field competition. I do not know whether the factors that had to do

with my character, rather than with my talent, played a role in the account I

intend to give -- but I should not rule out the possibility, for the

importance of the affair itself is such that neither natural modesty nor pride

ought to be considered.

As a rule, chroniclers become extremely honest when they feel that what

they have to say about themselves is of monumental importance. I, on the

contrary, with the premise of honesty arrive at the complete immaterialness of

my person; that is, I am forced into an insufferable garrulity simply because

I lack the ability to tell where the statistical caprice of personality

composition leaves off and the rule of the behavior of the species begins.

In various fields one can acquire knowledge that is real, or the kind

only that provides spiritual comfort, and the two need not agree. The

differentiation of these two types of knowledge in anthropology borders on the

impossible. If we know nothing so well as ourselves, it is surely for this

reason: that we constantly renew our demand for nonexistent knowledge, i.e.,

information as to what created man, while ruling out in advance, without

realizing it, the possibility of the union of pure accident with the most

profound necessity.

I once wrote a program for an experiment of one of my friends. The idea

was to simulate, in a computer, families of neutral beings; they would be

homeostats, cognizant of their "environment" but possessing, initially, no

"emotional" or "ethical" qualities. These beings multiplied -- only in the

machine, of course, therefore in a way that a layman would call

"arithmetically" -- and after a few dozen "generations" there continually

appeared, over and over again, in each of the "specimens," a characteristic

that made no sense at all to us, a sort of equivalent of "aggression." After

many painstaking but fruitless checking calculations, my friend, at his wit's

end -- really grasping at straws -- began examining the most trivial

circumstances of the experiment; and then it turned out that a certain relay

had reacted to the changes of humidity in the air, and thus those changes had

become the hidden producer of the deviation.

I cannot help thinking of that experiment as I write, for is it not

possible that social evolution lifted us from the Animal Kingdom in an

exponential curve -- when we were fundamentally unprepared for the ascent? The

socialization reaction began when the human atoms had barely given evidence of

their first cohesiveness. Those atoms were a material strictly biological, a

material made and prepared to satisfy typically biological criteria, but that

sudden movement, that upward shove, seized us and carried us off into the

space of civilization. How could such a start not have bound onto that

biological material accidental convergences, much as a probe that, lowered to

the ocean floor, scoops up from it, along with the desired object, debris and

chance pieces of junk? I recall the damp relay in the sophisticated computer.

And the process that engendered us -- why, pray, must it have been in every

respect perfect? Yet neither we nor our philosophers dare consider the idea

that the finality and singularity of the existence of our species do not at

all imply a perfection under whose aegis the species originated -- just as

such perfection is not present at the cradle of any individual.

It is a curious thing that the marks of our imperfection, which identify

the species, have never been, not by any faith, recognized for what they

simply are, that is, the results of uncertain processes; on the contrary,

practically all religions agree in the conviction that man's imperfection is

the result of a demiurgic clash between two antagonistic perfections, each of

which has damaged the other. The Light collided with the Dark, and man arose:

thus runs their formula. My conception sounds ill-natured only if it is wrong

-- but we do not know that it is wrong. The friend whom I mentioned

caricatured it; he said that according to Hogarth humanity is a hunchback who,

in ignorance of the fact that it is possible not to be hunchbacked, for

thousands of years has sought an indication of a Higher Necessity in his hump,

because he will accept any theory but the one that says that his deformity is

purely accidental, that no one bestowed it upon him as part of a master plan,

that it serves absolutely no purpose, for the thing was determined by the

twists and turns of anthropogenesis.

But I intended to speak about myself, not about the species. I do not

know where it came from or what caused it, but even now, after all these

years, I find within myself that malice, as vigorous as ever, because the

energies of our most primitive impulses never age. Do I shock? Over many

decades now, I have acted like a rectification column, producing a distillate

composed of the pile of my articles as well as of the articles occasioned by

them -- hagiography. If you say that you are not interested in the inner

workings of the apparatus which I unnecessarily bring out into the light, note

that I, in the purity of the nourishment I have vouchsafed you, see the

indelible signs of all my secrets.

Mathematics for me was no Arcadia; it was, rather, a court of last

resort, a church that I entered, unbelieving, because it offered sanctuary. My

principal metamathematical work has been called destructive, and not without

reason. It was no accident that I called into question, irreversibly, the

foundations of mathematical deduction and the concept of the analytic in

logic. I turned the tools of statistics against these basic notions -- until

at last they crumbled. I could not be a devil underground and an angel in the

light of day. I created, yes, but on ruins, and Yowitt is right: I took away

more truths than I ever gave.

For this negative balance the epoch was held to account, not I; because

I had followed in the steps of Russell and Gödel -- after the former had

discovered the cracks in the foundation of the Crystal Palace, and after the

latter had shaken it. It was said that I had acted in the spirit of the time.

Well, of course. But an emerald triangle does not cease to be an emerald

triangle when it becomes a human eye in an arranged mosaic.

More than once I have wondered what would have become of me had I been

born within any one of the four thousand cultures we call primitive, which

preceded ours in that gulf of eighty thousand years that our lack of

imagination contracts to the foreground, the foyer, of history proper. In some

of them I would no doubt have languished; but in others, who knows, I might

have found greater personal fulfillment, as one visited, as one creating new

rites, new magic, thanks to the talent I brought into the world, that of

combining elements. Perhaps, in the absence of a restraining curb, which in

our culture is the relativism of every conceptual entity, I could have

consecrated, with no trouble, orgies of havoc and debauchery, because in those

ancient societies they practiced the custom of a temporary, periodic

suspension of daily law, by dissolving their culture (it was the bedrock, the

Constant, the Absolute of their lives, and yet, remarkably, they knew that

even the Absolute required holes!) in order to give vent to the festering mass

of excesses that could not be fitted into any codified system, and of which

only a portion found expression in war masks and family masquerades, under the

bit and bridle of morality.

They were sensible, rational, those severings of societal bonds and

rules, the group madness, the pandemonium liberated, heightened by the

narcotics of rhythm and poison. It was the opening of a safety valve, out of

which poured the factor of destruction; through this particular invention

barbarity was adapted to man. But the principle of a crime from which one

could retire, of a reversible madness, of gaps rhythmically repeated in the

social fabric, has been done away with, and now all those forces must go in

harness, work treadmills, play roles that are too tight for them and always

ill-suited. So they corrode everything quotidian; they hide in every place;

for nowhere is it permitted them to emerge from anonymity. Each of us is, from

childhood, fastened to some publicly allowed piece of himself, the part that

was selected and schooled, and that has gained the consensus omnium; and now

he cultivates that fragment, polishes it, perfects it, breathes on it alone,

that it may develop as well as possible; and each of us, being a part,

pretends to be a whole-like a stump that claims it is a limb.

As far back as I can remember, no ethics ever took root in my

sensitivity. Cold-bloodedly I built myself an artificial ethics. But I needed

to find a reason to do this, because setting up rules in a desert is like

taking Communion without faith. I am not saying that I planned out my life in

as theoretical a manner as I present it here. Nor did I attach axioms to my

behavior retroactively. I proceeded always in the same way, at first unawares;

the motivations I later guessed.

Had I considered myself a person who was basically good, I would have

been quite unable to understand evil. I would have believed that people

perpetrated it always with premeditation -- that is, that they did what they

had resolved to do -- because I would have found no other source of vileness

within my personal experience. But I had better knowledge; I was aware of my

own inclinations, as well as of my blamelessness for them -- blamelessness

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Stanislaw Lem - His Masters Voice

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