Imaginary Magnitude

by Stanisław Lem

  Anything? Even death? Why has its antimajesty not shocked us, or should those blood-scoured pages of enlarged illustrations of forensic medicine not at least have given us cause for reflection by their sheer horror?

  Yet they could not, for they were too forced! The intention was childish: to frighten the grown-ups— which is why it could not be taken seriously! So instead of a memento mori we were given carefully disheveled corpses; the too importunately revealed secret of the grave manifested itself as a slimy cesspool. That kind of death failed to convince, because it was too ostentatious! The poor artists, finding nature no longer sufficient, set about escalating Grand Guignol, duping themselves.

  But after such loss of face, when death "flopped," what in fact did Strzybisz do to rehabilitate it? What in fact were his Necrobes? After all, they are not art: Strzybisz does not paint and appears never in his life to have held a brush. Nor are they graphics, for he does not draw, nor does he engrave in any material, nor is he a sculptor. No, he is a photographer—a particular kind, to be sure, for instead of light, he employs X-rays.

  Using his eyes, extended by the snouts of his X-ray equipment, this anatomist goes straight through bodies. But the black-and-white films that we know from doctors' consulting rooms would doubtless leave us indifferent. Which is why he has animated his nudes. Which is also why his skeletons move about at such a buoyant, determined pace, with their raglan shrouds and phantom briefcases. Rather mischievous and bizarre they are, to be sure, nothing more, but he was merely trying these snapshots on for size, he is still experimenting, he didn't know for sure. The uproar began only when he dared to do something terrible (though "terrible" things were no longer supposed to exist): he X-rayed us clean through, and thereby revealed sex.

  This collection of Strzybisz's work opens with his Pornograms, which are truly comic, though in a rather cruel way. What Strzybisz has captured within the leaden diaphragm of his lenses is the most obtrusive, licentious, audacious form of sex: group sex. It has been said that he wanted to deride pornomania, that he gave an accurate reading of it (one reduced to its bare bones), and that he has succeeded since these bones, clinging to one another in a puzzling geometrical arrangement, suddenly—and eerily—leap into the eye of the beholder like a modern dance of death with gamboling, spawning skeletons. It has also been said that he was trying to abuse and deride sex itself—and has succeeded.

  Is that correct? Undoubtedly, though in the Necrobes it is possible to discern something more. Caricatures? Not only that, for despite everything the Pornograms contain a kind of hidden dignity. Perhaps this is because Strzybisz "tells the truth"—and only the truth, which, when not subjected to "artistic deformation," is today considered vulgarity—though in point of fact he is purely a witness, for his gaze is piercing but not distorting. There is no defense against this evidence, no way of dismissing it as a fabrication, as a convention, a trick, or a banal little game, for he is right. A caricature? A prank? But when all is said and done, these skeletons are, in their abstract delineation, almost aesthetic. For Strzybisz has acted with consummate skill: he has not so much laid bare—torn the bones from their bodily shell—as freed them, honestly searching for their proper meaning with no further reference to us. Searching for their proper geometry, he has made them sovereign.

  The skeletons have, one is tempted to say, a life of their own. He has endowed them with freedom through the vaporization of their bodies—that is to say, through death—though bodies play an important, albeit not immediately perceptible, role in the Necrobes. It is difficult here to go into the details of X-ray technique, but a few words of explanation are essential. Had Strzybisz used hard X-rays, the bones alone would have been visible in his photographs, like sharply outlined strips or rods, segmented as if by cuts—the murkiness of articular interstices. They would have been too neat, too skeletonized, an osteological abstraction. But he never works that way; indeed, X-rayed by means of soft rays, human bodies appear in his photographs as allusions, as intimations, milky whiffs of faint light, and through this he achieves his particular effect. Appearance and reality change places. The medieval, Holbeinesque dance of death which persistently lurks impassive within us— the very same adhesion of death and life, untouched by the hurly-burly of glittering civilization—this Strzybisz achieves unwittingly, as if by accident. For we can recognize that same lively pace, that jovial vigor and frivolous passion which Holbein—and only Holbein—gave to his skeletons. Or rather, the piecework of denotations which this contemporary artist undertakes is broader, since he has adopted the most modern technique for the oldest problem of the species: death's appearance in the midst of life. And it is precisely the X-rayed mechanics of a propagating genus which the bodies assist, as pale specters.

  Fine, you may say, maybe that's the philosophy behind it, but when all is said and done, he has deliberately gone the "whole hog"—he has worked copulating couples into his corpses, he has taken up a fashionable theme, effectively and for effect. Isn't that cheap? Isn't there a shrewdness in his Pornograms? Or simply a fraud? There is no lack of such judgments. I prefer not to wheel out against him the artillery of heavy rhetoric. Instead, I would ask you to have a look at the twenty-second Pornogram, entitled "The Triple Leaf."

  This scene is indecent in a particular way. If one were to compare it with an ordinary photograph of the same people—a product of commercial photography—the innocence of such pornography as compared to the X-ray photograph would immediately become obvious.

  For pornography is not directly obscene: it excites only as long as there is a struggle within the viewer between lust and the angel of culture. When the devils carry off the angel; when, as a result of general tolerance, the weakness of sexual prohibitions—their complete helplessness—is laid bare; when prohibitions are thrown on the rubbish heap, then how quickly pornography betrays its innocent (which here means ineffective) character, for it is a false promise of carnal bliss, an augury of something which does not in fact come true. It is the forbidden fruit, so there is as much temptation in it as there is power in the prohibition.

  And so? Our eyes, growing indifferent through repetition, catch a glimpse of nudes wriggling around and exhausting themselves as they carry out their assignments in the studio—and how poor the spectacle then seems. A feeling not so much of embarrassment as of offended human solidarity awakens in the beholder, for these nudes muck about with one another so importunately that they resemble children bent on doing something monstrous to shock adults, but who really cannot, being in no position to—and their imagination, now merely enraged by their own impotence, leads not toward Sin and the Fall, but simply to idiotically pathetic ugliness. That is why, in the persistent activities of those big, naked animals, there lurks a shallow infantilism; it is neither hell nor heaven, but a lukewarm sphere: tedium and the futility of poorly compensated effort.

  But Strzybisz's work is predatory, for it is as horrific and comic as those trips of the damned into the abyss in old Dutch and Italian paintings. Since, however, we can distance ourselves from these sinners somersaulting into the Last Judgment, since we have canceled the next world, what can we oppose to the X-ray picture? In these clinches, in which their bodies are an impassable obstacle to them, the skeletons are tragically comic. Mere bones? When we see people in an awkward, desperate embrace, it would be merely pitiable, were it not for the ghastly comic element. Where does it come from? From us—for we recognize the truth. The justification of these clinches evaporates along with their corporality, and that is why their embraces are so sterile and abstract, and at the same time so terribly matter-of-fact, icy, and pale, so hopeless.

  And in addition their holiness, or the mockery of it, or the allusion to it, which is not fixed, not heightened by artificial manipulation, but visible, for here a halo surrounds every head—their hair becomes a pale, round aureole and candle, as in holy pictures.

  I know, moreover, how difficult it is to disentangle and begin defining impulses from which
the totality of feelings arises in the spectator. For some, this is literally Holbein redivivus, since in reality there is something peculiar about this reversion—by electromagnetic radiation—to the skeletons, as if to a Middle Ages preserved within us. Others are shocked by bodies resembling powerless spirits attending out of necessity the difficult practices of a sex rendered unseen. Someone else has written that the skeletons are like instruments removed from their cases for the performance of an esoteric initiation, which is why people have spoken of the "mathematics" or "geometry" of this kind of sex.

  That may well be; though hardly speculative in origin is the sadness into which Strzybisz's art sinks. The symbolism, arising over the centuries and bequeathed by the centuries (though secretly vegetating, since we disowned it), did not, as we see, succumb to destruction. We have transformed this symbolism into signalization (skulls and crossbones on high-tension poles and on bottles of poison in drug stores) and into classroom visual aids, in the form of skeletons held together by gleaming wires in lecture halls. So we have condemned it to an exodus, we have exiled it from life, but we have not rid ourselves of it entirely. Unable to separate a skeleton's most substantial corporality, equal to the eloquence of an antler or a soldier's stripes, from that which represents in it the silence of fate and thus a symbol, our intellect falls into that particular frustration from which it finally escapes through salutary laughter. Yet we comprehend that this is a somewhat forced gaiety, and that we are shielding ourselves behind it in order not to succumb too much to Strzybisz.

  Erotica as a desperate futility of intention, and sex as an exercise in projection geometry—these are the two opposite extremes of the Pornograms. Nor do I agree with those who maintain that Strzybisz's art begins and ends with the Pornograms. If I had to say which of the nudes I value the most, I would say without hesitation the "Pregnant Woman" (p. 128). A mother to be with her child enclosed in her womb, this skeleton within a skeleton is fairly cruel and in no way untrue. In this big, stalwart body, its pelvic bone branching like white wings (an X-ray picture hits upon the purpose of sex more forcibly than the typical nude), against a background of these wings already parted for childbirth, there is the little skeleton of the nestling child—hazy, being still incomplete, its little head down. How false these words sound, and how pure and proud a whole the light-and-shade effects of the X-ray create! A pregnant woman in her prime and in her death, and the still unborn foetus which has already begun to die by virtue of having been conceived. There is a kind of tranquillity of challenge and a determined affirmation in this act of observation.

  What will it be like a year from now? The Necrobes will have sunk into oblivion, their place taken by new techniques and fashions. (Poor Strzybisz, how many imitators has he already acquired, in the wake of his success!) Isn't this the case? Undoubtedly, nor can it be helped. But even though this rapid inconstancy strangles us, dooming us to a series of ceaseless resignations and separations, today Strzybisz has favored us lavishly. He has not fallen into the depths of the matter, he has not penetrated into the exotica of detecting the purposeless perfections of Nature, into those investigations by which science has contaminated art, but he has brought us to the borders of our bodies, in no way distorted, exaggerated, or changed—our real bodies!—and by doing this he has erected bridges from the present into the past, reviving that dignity which art has lost. It is not his fault that this resurrection lasts only a few minutes.

  ERUNTICS

  Reginald Gulliver

  George Allen & Unwin Limited 40 Museum Street, London

  Introduction

  The future historian will doubtless find two mutually pervading explosions to be the most appropriate model for our society. Avalanches of intellectual products mechanically dumped on the market come in contact with consumers by coincidences just as fortuitous as those that control the collisions of gas molecules: no longer can anyone encompass the multitude of these products in their entirety. And since nowhere is it easier to lose oneself than in a multitude, the entrepreneurs of culture, precisely because they publish everything that authors give them, exist in the blissful but mistaken conviction that now nothing valuable is being wasted. Individual books are deemed worthy of attention by the decision of competent experts who eliminate from their field of vision everything outside their own speciality. This process of elimination is the defensive reflex of every expert: were he less ruthless, he would drown in a flood of paper. But as a result, a statelessness equal to civil death threatens everything which, by virtue of being completely new, defies the bases of classification. The book which I am introducing lies precisely in no man's land. It may be the result of lunacy, but in that case we are talking about a madness with precise methods; it may be the product of pseudological perfidy, but then it would not be perfidious enough, for it would be unsalable. Both reason and haste would have one pass over such an oddity in silence, but notwithstanding all the tedi-ousness of discourse, a spirit of extraordinary heresy shines through it and stops one in one's tracks. Bibliographies have listed this title under science fiction, but this area has by now become a dumping ground for all sorts of half-baked oddities relegated from more serious spheres. Were Plato to publish The Republic today, or Darwin On the Origin of Species, both books might bear the label "fantasy," whereupon they would be read by everybody and appreciated by nobody; sinking into sensational verbiage, they would play no part in the development of ideas.

  This book deals with bacteria, though no bacteriologist will take it seriously. It pursues a linguistics that would make any language specialist's hair stand on end. It arrives at a futurology contradicting that practiced by futurology's professional exponents. Which is precisely why, as an outcast of all the scientific disciplines, it must drop to the level of science fiction and act the part, though it cannot count on readers, since it offers nothing that might satisfy a thirst for adventure.

  I am not in a position to give a proper judgment on Erun-tics, yet I feel that there is no competent preface writer for it. I am usurping this position uneasily: who can ever know how much truth lurks behind such deep audacity? At a glance, the book looks like a scientific handbook, though it is a pack of absurdities. It makes no pretense to literary fantasy, for it is not an artistic composition. If it depicts the truth, this truth belies virtually the whole of contemporary knowledge. If it lies, it does so in monstrous proportions.

  As the author explains, eruntics (Die Eruntizit'atslehre, eruntica, eruntique—the name comes from the Latin erunt, "they will be," the third person plural of the future tense of esse) was not intended to be a form of prognostics or futurology. It is impossible to learn eruntics, since nobody knows the principles by which it functions. It cannot be used to forecast anything one might desire. It is not "esoteric knowledge," like astrology or dianetics, nor is it natural scientific orthodoxy. We are dealing with something condemned to be an "outcast from all worlds."

  R. Gulliver introduces himself in the first chapter as a philosopher-dilettante and amateur bacteriologist who one day eighteen years ago decided to teach bacteria English. His impulse was of an accidental nature. On the crucial day he removed from his thermostat some petri dishes, those shallow glass containers in which bacteria in vitro are grown on agar gelatine. Until then he had, as he says, merely dabbled in bacteriology, for he pursued it as a kind of hobby, with no pretensions or hopes of any discoveries. He admits that he simply liked observing the growth of microorganisms on their bed of agar: he marveled at the "cleverness" of the invisible "plantlets," forming colonies the size of a pinhead on the filmy surface. To study the effectiveness of antibacterial agents, he introduced large quantities of these agents onto the agar with a pipette or a dipper; where they were effective, the agar remained free of bacterial coating. As laboratory technicians sometimes do, R. Gulliver dipped a wad of cotton in an antibiotic and wrote "yes" with it on the smooth surface of the agar. By the following day this invisible inscription had become visible, for the bacteria, multiplyi
ng intensively, had covered the whole of the agar with the tubercles of the colony, except for the mark left by the cotton which he had used as a kind of pen. It was then, he says, that it first occurred to him that this process might be "reversed."

  The inscription was visible because it was free of bacteria. But were the microbes to arrange themselves into letters, they would be writing and thus expressing themselves in language. The idea was tempting but at the same time, he admits, totally nonsensical. After all, it was he who had written the word "yes" on the agar, whereas the bacteria had merely "developed" the inscription, being unable to multiply iv within it. But thereafter the idea gave him no rest. On the eighth day he set to work.

  Bacteria are one hundred percent unreasoning and thus surely unreasonable. However, by virtue of the position they occupy in Nature, they are superb chemists. Pathogenic organisms learned how to overcome the bodily barriers and protective constitutional forces of animals hundreds of millions of years ago. This is understandable if one considers that they did nothing else for ages and ages, so they had time enough to push the aggressive albeit blind means of their chemisms into the protective wall of the proteins by which large organisms are shielded. Likewise, when man appeared in history they attacked him and, during the ten to twenty thousand years civilization has existed, inflicted diseases on him resulting in notorious plagues and at various times the death of entire populations.