A Perfect Vacuum

by Stanisław Lem

  Here the judge cuts off his oration. Odysseus is sentenced to two months in prison for the destruction of the car and another two months for contempt of court. He can also expect a civil action on the part of Hutchinson, whose concha he has injured. However, Odysseus succeeds in handing his brochure to the reporters present. In this way he attains his end: the press will write about him.

  The ideas contained in Homer M. Odysseus’s brochure, The Quest for the Fleece of the Spirit, are simple enough. Humanity owes its progress to geniuses. Above all, its progress of thought, because collectively one might hit upon a way of hewing flint, but one cannot through joint effort invent the zero. He who conceived it was the first genius in history. “Could the zero—is it likely—have been thought up by four individuals together, each contributing a quarter?” asks Homer Odysseus with his characteristic sarcasm. Humanity is not wont to deal kindly with its geniuses. “Es ist schlecht Geschäft, einer Genius zu sein!” declares Odysseus in dreadful German. Geniuses have a rough time of it. Some more than others, because geniuses are not all equal. Odysseus postulates the following classification of them. First come your run-of-the-mill and middling geniuses, that is, of the third order, whose minds are unable to go much beyond the horizon of their times. These, relatively speaking, are threatened the least; they are often recognized and even come into money and fame. The genuises of the second order are already too difficult for their contemporaries and therefore fare worse. In antiquity they were mainly stoned, in the Middle Ages burned at the stake; later, in keeping with the temporary amelioration of customs, they were allowed to die a natural death by starvation, and sometimes even were maintained at the community’s expense in madhouses. A few were given poison by the local authorities, and many went into exile. Meanwhile, the powers that be, both secular and ecclesiastical, competed for first prize in “geniocide,” as Odysseus calls the manifold activity of exterminating genuises. Nonetheless, recognition awaits the geniuses of the second order, in the form of a triumph beyond the grave. By way of compensation, libraries and public squares are named after them, fountains and monuments are raised to them, and historians shed decorous tears over such lapses of the past. In addition, avers Odysseus, there exist, for there must exist, geniuses of the highest category. The intermediate types are discovered either by the succeeding generation or by some later one; the geniuses of the first order are never known—not by anyone, not in life, not after death. For they are creators of truths so unprecedented, purveyors of proposals so revolutionary, that not a soul is capable of making head or tail of them. Therefore, permanent obscurity constitutes the normal lot of the Geniuses of the Highest Class. But even their colleagues of weaker intellect are discovered usually as a result of pure accident. For example, on scrawled-over sheets of paper that fishwives use at the market to wrap the herring, you will make out theorems of some sort, or poems, and as soon as these see print, there is a moment of general enthusiasm, then everything goes on as before. Such a state of affairs should not be allowed to continue. At stake, surely, are irretrievable losses to civilization. One must create a Society for the Preservation of Geniuses of the First Order and from it appoint an Exploration Committee that will take up the task of systematic searches. Homer M. Odysseus has already drafted all the statutes of the Society, and also a plan for the Quest for the Fleece of the Spirit. He distributes these documents to numerous scientific societies and philanthropic institutions, calling for funding.

  When these efforts produce no result, he publishes a brochure at his own expense and sends the first copy, with a dedication, to Professor Evelyn G. Hutchinson of the Science Council of the Rockefeller Foundation. By not deigning to respond to this, Professor Hutchinson became culpable before humanity. He showed obtuseness; that is, he showed himself unfit to occupy the position entrusted to him. For this he had to be punished, which is what Odysseus did.

  While still serving his sentence, Odysseus receives the first contributions. He opens an account in the name of the Quest for the Fleece of the Spirit, and when he leaves the prison, a tidy sum of money, to the tune of $26,528.00, permits him to commence organizational activity. Odysseus recruits volunteers by placing ads in the classifieds; at the first meeting of the enthusiast-amateurs he delivers a speech and hands out a new brochure, this one containing exploration instructions. After all, they must know where, how, and what exactly it is they are supposed to seek. The quest will have an altruistic character, for—Odysseus makes no bones about it—there is little money and enormous labor ahead.

  Spiritus flat, ubi vult; therefore, geniuses even of the highest order may be born among the small tribes that constitute the exotic outskirts of the world. Genius does not present itself to humanity directly and personally, going out on the street and seizing passers-by by the toga or buttonhole. Genius operates via appropriate experts who are supposed to recognize it, revere it, and expand upon its thought, as if setting their countryman swinging, the clapper of a bell that peals out to humanity the beginning of a new age. As usual, what should take place does not. The specialists in general believe they know all there is to know; they are willing to teach others, but themselves are unwilling to learn from anyone. Only when there are an awful lot of them does one find, as is usual in crowds, two, perhaps three persons of sense. Consequently, in a small land genius receives the response that a beggar gets from talking to a wall, whereas in larger lands the chance of a genius’s being heard is greater. Hence the questers set sail for the lesser peoples and the towns of the out-of-the-way provinces of the globe. There, who knows, they may even succeed in finding yet-unrecognized second-order geniuses. The case of Bosković of Yugoslavia is characteristic: he met with false recognition, for what he wrote and thought centuries ago was noticed when similar things began to be thought and written in the present. Such pseudo-discoveries are not what Odysseus has in mind.

  The search ought to include all the libraries of the world, with their collections of rare editions, incunabula, and manuscripts, but primarily their basements and cellars, into which are stuffed all sorts of paper ballast. However, one should not count too much on success there. On the map that Odysseus has hung up in his study, red circles indicate, as the first priority, psychiatric sanatoria. Also among excavated sewer systems and cesspools of outdated lunatic asylums Odysseus places high hopes. One must likewise dig up the garbage dumps near old prisons, comb the trash cans as well as other rubbish receptacles, ferret through stores of wastepaper; it would also be well to examine carefully dunghills and sumps, mainly their fossils, since it is precisely there that one finds everything humanity has held in contempt and swept beyond the perimeter of existence. And so Odysseus’s intrepid heroes must sally forth for the Fleece of the Spirit full of self-denial, with pitchfork, pickax, crowbar, dark lantern, and rope ladder, having also on hand geologists’ hammers, gas masks, strainers, and magnifying glasses. The search for treasures considerably more precious than gold or diamonds is to take place in petrified excrement, in crumbled, cluttered wells, in the former dungeons of every inquisition, in ruined castles; meanwhile, the coordinator of these world-wide operations, Homer M. Odysseus, will remain at his headquarters. One must take as a signpost, as the trembling needle of a compass, every sort of echo of gossip and rumor about completely unique cretins and screwballs, about maniacal, persistent cranks, stubborn dimwits and idiots, because humanity, conferring such names upon genius, is only reacting within the limits of its own natural capacities.

  Odysseus, having caused several additional scandals, owing to which he accumulates five new convictions and an additional $16,741.00, betakes himself, after doing two years, southward. He makes for Majorca, where he will have his headquarters, because the climate there is good and his health has been seriously impaired by his sojourns in various jails. He freely admits that he is not averse to combining the public interest with his private interest. Besides, if according to his theory one can expect the appearance of first-order geniuses anywhere, then why sh
ould not there be any in Majorca?

  The life of Odysseus’s heroes is rich in extraordinary adventures, which take up a good portion of the novel. Odysseus sustains more than one bitter disappointment, such as when he learns that three of his favorite explorers, working in the Mediterranean region, are agents of the CIA, which organization has been making use of the Quest for the Fleece of the Spirit for its own ends. Or, again, when another seeker, who brings to Majorca an inestimably valuable document from the seventeenth century—a work by the mameluke Kardyoch on the parageometric structure of Being—turns out to be a forger. He himself is the author of this work; unable to publish it anywhere, he wormed his way into the ranks of the expedition in order to avail himself of Odysseus’s funds and thereby give publicity to his concept. The enraged Odysseus flings the manuscript into the fire, kicks out the forger, and only afterward, when he has calmed down, does he begin to wonder: might he not have destroyed, with his own hands, the work of a first-class genius?! Ridden with remorse, he calls the author back by advertising in the newspapers—alas, in vain. Another explorer, one Hans Zokker, without Odysseus’s knowledge auctions off extremely valuable documents which he found among the old libraries of Montenegro, and, absconding to Chile with the cash, there commits himself to fortune. But even so, many extraordinary works do find their way into Odysseus’s hands, many rarities, manuscripts generally regarded as lost, or else entirely unknown to the body of world learning. From the historical archives in Madrid, for example, come the first eighteen parchment leaves of a manuscript that, written in the middle of the sixteenth century, foretells—relying on a system of “trisexual arithmetic”—the dates of birth of eighty famous men of science. The dates contained in that document in fact agree with the dates of birth of such persons as Isaac Newton, Harvey, Darwin, Wallace, and are accurate to the month! Chemical analysis and the appraisals of experts confirm the authenticity of this work, but what of that, when the entire mathematical apparatus which the anonymous author made use of has perished? It is known only that his point of departure was the acceptance of a premise totally at odds with common sense, that of the “three sexes” of the human race. Odysseus finds some solace in the fact that the sale of this manuscript by bid in New York significantly replenishes his expeditionary budget.

  After seven years of labor, the archives of the headquarters on Majorca are full of the most remarkable writings. There is, among them, the bulging tome of a certain Miral Essos of Boeotia, who outdid Leonardo da Vinci in inventiveness; he left behind a plan for the creation of a system of logic based on the spinal columns of frogs; long before Leibniz, he arrived at the concept of monads and of harmony pre-established; he applied trivalent logic to certain physical phenomena; and he maintained that living creatures begot those similar to themselves because in their seminal fluid were messages written in microscopic letters, and from the combination of such “messages” resulted the aspect of the mature individual; all this in the fifteenth century. And there is a formal-logical proof of the impossibility of a theodicy based on rational argument, because the underlying premise of any theodicy must be a logical contradiction. The author of this work, Bauber the Catalonian, was burned alive at the stake after the preliminary severing of his extremities, the pulling out of his tongue, and the filling of his bowels, by a funnel, with molten lead. “A powerful counterargument, albeit on a different plane, for the nonlogical,” observed the young doctor of philosophy who discovered the manuscript. The study of Sophus Brissengnade, who, proceeding from the axioms of “two-zero arithmetic,” demonstrated the possibility of a noncontradictory construction of a theory of plurality that is purely transfinite, did receive the approbation of the scientific world; but then Brissengnade’s work coincided with much of current mathematics.

  And so Odysseus sees that recognition goes, as it has always gone, only to the forerunners, to those whose ideas later are discovered anew by others, to—in other words—the geniuses of the second order. But where, then, are the traces of the labor of the first? Despair never enters Odysseus’s heart—only the fear that an early death (for already he is on the threshold of old age) will prevent his continuing his search. At last comes the affair of the Florentine manuscript. This roll of parchment from the middle of the eighteenth century, found in a section of the big library in Florence, at first appears to be—filled as it is with cryptic marks—the worthless work of some alchemist-copyist. But certain expressions remind the discoverer, a young mathematics student, of series of functions that in those times no one could possibly have known. The work, when submitted to the experts, yields conflicting opinions. No one understands it in its entirety; some see it as gibberish with rare moments of logical lucidity, others as the product of a diseased mind; the two most eminent mathematicians, to whom Odysseus sends photocopies of the manuscript, also cannot agree in their views. Only one of them, after going to a great deal of trouble, manages to decipher about a third of the scribbles, piecing out the gaps with his own conjectures, and he writes to Odysseus that, yes, it does in fact deal with a concept that is—on the face of it—exceptional, but also useless. “Because you would have to toss out three-quarters of existing mathematics and set it on its feet again in order to be able to accept the idea. This is simply a proposition of a mathematics other than the one we have built up. As to whether it is better—that I cannot tell you. Possibly it is, but to find this out, a hundred of our best people would have to dedicate their lives; they would have to become for this anonymous Florentine what Bolyai, Riemann, Lobachevsky were for Euclid.”

  At this point the letter falls from the hands of Homer Odysseus, who with a cry of “Eureka!” begins to run about the room, which looks out, with its glass windows, upon the blue of the bay. In that moment Odysseus realizes that it is not that humanity has lost forever its geniuses of the first order—the geniuses, rather, have lost sight of humanity, for they have moved away from it. It is not that these geniuses simply do not exist: rather, with each passing year they do not exist to a greater and greater degree. The works of unrecognized geniuses of the second category can always be saved. All one need do is dust them off and hand them over to presses or universities. But the works of the first order nothing can preserve, because these stand apart—outside the current of history.

  Collective human effort carves out a trench in historical time. A genius is one whose effort is exerted at the very limit of that trench, at its verge, who proposes to his or to the next generation a particular change of course, a different curve of the bed, the angling of the slopes, the deepening of the bottom. But the genius of the first order does not participate thus in the labors of the spirit. He does not stand in the first ranks; nor has he gone a step ahead of the rest; he is simply somewhere else—in thought. If he postulates a different form of mathematics or a different methodology, whether for philosophy or the natural sciences, it will be from a standpoint in no way similar to those existing—no, without a scintilla of similarity! If he is not noticed and given a hearing by the first, by the second generation, it is altogether impossible for him to be noticed thereafter. For, in the meantime, the river of human endeavor and thought has been digging its trench, has gone its way, and therefore between its movement and the solitary invention of the genius the gap widens with each century. Those proposals—unappreciated, ignored—truly could have changed the trend of things in the arts, Odysseus of Ithaca in the sciences, in the whole history of the world, but because it did not happen thus, humanity let slip by much more than a particular curious individual with his particular intellectual equipment. It let slip by, at the same time, a particular other history of its own, and for this there is now no remedy. Geniuses of the first order are roads not taken, roads now completely desolate and overgrown; they are those prizes in the lottery of incredible luck which the player did not show up to claim, the purses he did not collect—until their capital evaporated and turned to nothing, the nothing of opportunities missed. The lesser geniuses do not part with the
common stream but stay within its current, altering the law of its movement without ever stepping outside the margin of the community—or without stepping outside it totally, all the way. For this they are revered. The others, because they are so great, remain invisible forever.

  Odysseus, profoundly moved by this revelation, immediately sits down and writes a new brochure, whose gist—given above—is no less plain than the idea of the Quest. That Quest, after thirteen years and eight days, has reached its end. It was not a labor made in vain, since the modest inhabitant of Ithaca (Massachusetts), venturing down into the depths of the past with his team of votaries, has found that the single living genius of the first order is Homer M. Odysseus: for the greatest greatness of history can be recognized only by a greatness that is equal to it.

  I recommend Kuno Mlatje’s book to those who think that if man were not invested with sex there could be no literature or art. As to whether or not the author is kidding, each reader will have to answer that question for himself.

  Toi

  Raymond Seurat

  (Editions Denoël, Paris)

  The novel is pulling back into the author; that is, from the position of the fiction of the only reality it retreats to the position of the origin of that fiction. This, at least, is what has been taking place in the vanguard of European prose. Fiction has grown odious to the writers; it sickens them; they have lost faith in its necessity and therefore have become atheists of their own omnipotence. No longer do the writers believe that when they say, “Let there be light,” genuine radiance dazzles the reader. (The fact that they speak thus, that they can speak thus, is definitely no fiction. )