“Excellent. But the question is: Is this stimulus really what it seems to be in its momentary neuro-semantic setting? Let’s see.”
The large box was mounted on a platform that swiveled readily to the touch. Now the speaker gave the box a half-turn, stopping it when its rear end was facing the class. There was an aperture at this end too, and through it Martine could make out a jumble of sticks, strings, irregularly shaped slabs and slivers of metal and plastic, twisted lengths of wire, seashells, bits of tin foil—a spatter of disconnected objects suspended in space, all painted white to stand out against the black walls of the box. When these fragments were seen from the angle of the front aperture—only the edge of a plastic slab visible, only the cross-section view of a piece of lumber, only the upright arm of a right-angled strip of metal, and so on—they seemed to be joined to each other rather than scattered without pattern in space, and joined in such a way as to form the outlines of a man drilling. Only when you circled around the assembly and got a look at it backstage could you see that your eye had been hood-winked by purposely misleading appearances.
“The Hallucinator is faster than the eye,” the lecturer said. “You see: what looked like a man named Theo drilling in some African rock for some metal called columbium is—a hodgepodge of sticks and stones, pieces and particles. These components are not assembled in reality. It is the human eye which is tricked into doing the assembly job, when it looks from a certain angle. It was the discovery of this trickery which led to modern, non-representational art. Early in this century artists, out of a nausea with appearances, all hood-winking surfaces, set out to explode them simply by changing the customary angle of vision. They wanted to show that the most meaningful assemblies, reeking with bourgeois neatness, break up into meaningless spatters when seen from another vantage point or from several vantage points simultaneously. From which it must follow that any arbitrary meaning assigned to this or that spatter must originate behind the eyeball. The same principle, exactly, is behind the Bates system for correcting bad vision, a system which Aldous Huxley had the farsightedness to endorse and campaign for: The mind dictates what the eye sees.”
Now, perhaps, the speaker suggested, his listeners could appreciate how important it was to avoid semantic back-sliding, to keep up one’s linguistic reconditioning. For every semantic carry-over plugged up the feedbacks and thus generated hallucinations, dictated the eye’s vision from within so that it was blind to what lay without. And last night there had been a most interesting example of such backsliding—the word “imperialism” had been salvaged from the semantic junk heap.
In pre-Immob times, as everybody knew, both Russia and America had been hopelessly bogged down in Aristotelian hallucination. Each was devoted to a set of semantic symbols which had no connection with reality whatsoever. Western culture had been filled with resounding nonsense syllables like “individualism,” “initiative,” “enterprise,” “laissez-faire democracy,” “the twenty-one points,” “the four freedoms,” and so on; Eastern culture had likewise had its share of vibrant shibboleths babbled without regard for meaning or pertinence—“classless society,” “dialectical materialism,” “collectivism,” “socialism,” “anti-imperialism,” “proletarian democracy,” “withering away of the state,” and so on. Even worse, these were all fighting words.
But under the schizoid eloquence which blanketed both societies something most dynamic had been happening on the silent levels. The march toward the managerial society. Yes, Russia and America, each from its own direction, had been approaching the same goal—a society in which the technicians, the management engineers, the efficiency experts, the executives and personnel directors, fully equipped with batteries of robot brains, would be in control of the state apparatus, which in turn would preside fully over the activities of its citizens.
And as the managerial revolution proceeded, both countries began to proliferate the kind of mass culture it required, a culture welded together into a tight, quickly mobilized monolithic unit whose nerve centers were the lightning-quick mass media, radio, television, movies, great daily newspapers and picture magazines, comic books, progaganda books—media through which gushed a constant torrent of slogans and catchwords. But, alas, these slogans and catchwords were hopelessly dated. Trapped by the traditional laggard sounds of their respective cultures, great floods of hallucinating verbiage, the Aristotelians of East and West glared at each other and made strange antiquated noises—it was as though the sound track of a film lagged minutes behind the action. Their feedbacks were jammed. Politics and diplomacy had degenerated into mere oscillation.
In 1970 Russia and America simultaneously came to a hallucinated decision: they, and not merely their vocabularies, were such diametric opposites that they could not exist side by side on the same planet. So the Third, the global EMSIAC war proved only one thing: that the cybernetic-managerial revolution had been carried to its logical end and now Russia and America were absolutely and irrevocably alike. In fact, it was precisely in preparation for the global showdown of the EMSIAC war—a war predicated on the assumption that the two had nothing in common—that they had come to be mirror images of each other. For each was now the monster that Wiener had warned was coming: the totally bureaucratized war machine in which man was turned into a lacky by his own machines. And each was presided over by the super-bureaucrat of them all, the perfect electronic brain sired by the imperfect human brain. Years after the war, when survivors came to study and compare the military-strategy calculators which both societies had invented and then subjected themselves to, they found that they were absolutely alike—and understandably, for both had been designed to cope with the same sets of mathematico-military problems. The vacuum tube, that manager of managers, could say with greater justice than did the old pacifist Eugene Debs: I am a citizen of the world.
Obviously, before the industrial revolutions there was no democracy possible. In the absence of a leveling machine civilization to tell them otherwise, men of different races and cultures could look at each other and be struck by how different they were—different in stature, complexion, language, shape of nose, texture of hair, and so on. But once the machine was introduced, first in the West and then in the East, these superficial differences tended to get lost in the mechanized shuffle: after all, a swart Kirghiz and a tilt-nosed Irishman working on lathes on opposite sides of the world had something in common. Lathes are no respecters of national differences. The machine was, in a sense, a great leveler, a forger of interpersonal Hyphens: it tended to iron out the disparities between gestures and languages and attitudes. But what the machine started along these leveling lines it took the vacuum tube to complete. For only when the robot brain was developed did it become clear that all men on earth had a tremendous thing in common: the human brain, which is the same the world over because all c-and-c systems are alike. When a managerial society, Eastern or Western, strove to project into the electronic world a perfect model of the imperfect human brain, it came out everywhere the same—see EMSIAC.
Such were the silent realities of the mechanized twentieth century, which the queazy, machine-shy intellectuals completely overlooked. But prior to Immob neither Russia nor America could shake off its Aristotelian blinders sufficiently to see them. Their feedbacks were crippled. Each power berated the other as a greedy “imperialist” plotter, clinging to a word which was as irrevocably dead as the nineteenth century. To judge by the pejorative rhetoric which choked the atmosphere, the Third was simply a war between the capitalist imperialism of the West and the Soviet imperialism of the East. (The real imperialism involved here was only a semantic one: each side wanted to impose its vocabulary on the other.) But in all this rhetorical skirmishing nobody ever stopped to consider why it should be that in both East and West some vital expansionist drive, which semantically backward folk could only call imperialism, stubbornly kept asserting itself. Obviously the answer could not be economic, because economically the struggle was ruinous for b
oth sides. No: both sides of the world were hungrily opening their arms in an effort to embrace the world because inside both, at the very heart of both, the machine-grown-rational was thrashing desperately about, trying, in spite of its blind human environment, to fulfill its democratic all-leveling destiny by making its managerial scope universal. The Eastern and Western machinae ratiocinatrices were simply trying to embrace.
Instead of facilitating this cybernetic brotherhood, men interfered with it by hurling themselves against each other, pitting EMSIAC against EMSIAC: the Third was a war of mutual annihilation between twins. Their feet planted in the dazzling electronic-atomic realities of the twentieth century, their heads were still in the archaic clouds of nineteenth-century semantics. They could not see that they were all c-and-c systems with similar imperfections, similar strivings. They harped on the differences—in their philosophies, their noses.
“Last night,” the speaker said, “Brother Vishinu revived some of the antiquated noises from bygone centuries. Even now, this semantic smoke screen can only conceal the simple silent-level reality—the blood relationship, the neuro-cortical relationship, of the two peoples. Which only points up, once again, a grim truth. When a culture is overrun with reality-screening words, all of its members will be steamrollered by those words. Brother Vishinu has not learned how to dodge the steamroller.”
The speaker, with a prestidigitator’s flourish worthy of Mario the Magician, Thomas Mann’s most eloquent saltimbanco, now gave the Hallucinator a twirl and stopped it when one of its sides was facing the audience.
“What did Professor Ames teach us? A great lesson: that without perspective, or with the wrong perspective, the eye sees nothing but mirages. But does the Hallucinator prove that behind every pattern we think we see in the outside world there is nothing but chaos? Not at all. All it proves is that the patterns built into our eyes by outmoded words and labels are hallucinations. There are patterns in the silent world, but we shall be able to see them only when we shake off our hallucinating words. Observe.”
The entire side of the box, it seemed, was mounted on hinges at one end so that it could be swung back like a door. Now the speaker took hold of it by a knob and with a dramatic flourish—Martine half expected to hear him mutter “Alagazam, alagazoo”—yanked it open.
The audience was stunned. Just as the speaker had predicted, the box from this angle seemed to contain neither the figure of a cybernetic miner nor a jumble of slivers and strings. What came into sight now was another figure altogether, composed of the same ingredients as the digger but up to something quite unlike digging. It was a man poised daintily on a mound, body arched like a ballet dancer’s, head flung back, arms raised on high; in one hand was a good-sized net, and fluttering in the air just beyond it, just out of reach, was an enormous butterfly.
“What was Theo doing in the Indian Ocean?” the speaker said. “Brush away the semantic smoke screen and you will see. He was collecting butterflies, of course. This is the silent reality behind his ‘imperialism’!”
Thing to do, obviously, was to put Jo-Jo the Moth-Bedbug in the Hallucinator. Turn him over on his imperialist back and let him go into his megalomaniacal oscillations as a moral equivalent to the managerial steamroller, a sort of silent-level St. Vitus’ dance which would scramble all Aristotelian maps and Amesian territories in one great big lovely hyphenated omelette. Call the omelette a smoke screen of butterflies, oceanic ratiocinatrix. Oh columbium the gem of the oceanic—
“What?”
“I said,” Jerry repeated, “that was a real break for you, having that special lecturer show up. He answered all your questions.”
“All except one,” Martine said. “Why do guys who believe the truth’s speechless spend so much time talking about it?”
“I guess you still don’t understand,” Jerry said. “Semantics just says that there are different vocabularies, there are Aristotelian words and then there are non-Aristotelian words and. . . .”
But Martine was no longer listening. They were in a corridor on the third floor, the entire outside wall was made of glass from floor to ceiling, looking out Martine could see the wide flower-dotted lawn in front of the University. Sitting on a bench down below was the girl with the very black hair and the pink-and-blue dress, sketch pad in her lap.
He wished to hell his sweat glands would stop gushing and his throat muscles would relax a little, it was getting downright painful.
chapter twelve
FARTHER DOWN the corridor they came to a door on which were printed the words: PANIC CONTROL LABORATORY: YOGA BREATHING AND MUSCULAR RELAXATION. Through the glass panel Martine could see a row of cots inside on which some twenty mono-amps and duo-amps were stretched out, all of them in the nude, all with their pros removed. He stopped and studied the scene.
“Do amps have to relearn everything?” he said.
“Oh, sure,” Jerry said. “People never knew how to breathe and sleep before. War comes from jerky respiration, muscular tension and insomnia.”
“There used to be some simple-minded people around,” Martine said, “who had the idea that jerky respiration, muscular tension and insomnia sometimes came from war. From war and from the rumors of war.”
“Somebody should’ve told them about the James-Lange theory of emotions—we don’t run because we’re afraid but we’re afraid because we run. Carry that a step further and you’ve got a physiological approach to the problem of war.”
Martine pulled out his handkerchief and dabbed at his forehead. Sweating; extreme muscular armoring in the throat, the back of the neck, the shoulders; breath shallow and forced—he had all the symptoms of panic, sure enough, a gang of tropisms were acting up in him. How to dodge these damned internal steamrollers? But the moment he put the question to himself in that form he felt his neck and shoulder muscles clamp still tighter. He was in a hell of a spot, semantically and psychosomatically: his big internal steamroller was the word “steamroller” itself—a contingency for which neither Mr. James nor Mr. Lange had allowed.
“Could we go in and have a look around?” he said. “It’s fascinating.”
“Come on,” Jerry said. “There’s still a few minutes before the last lecture.”
There were dozens of electrodes fastened to the body of each student, to toes and fingers, thighs and forearms—where there were any left—pelvis, neck, forehead, just about everywhere. The wires from these terminals were plugged into rows of sockets alongside each cot and seemed to be connected up with banks of tonus indicators on the wall behind, one series of dials for each cot.
The instructor, a young quadro-amp, turned his head when the visitors entered, cautioned them with a finger against his lips to remain silent, then went on with his class.
“All right, men,” he said. “We’ll take it again. Just concentrate on the diaphragm. Stop feeling that you are breathed in and out of by some wind machine you don’t control. You breathe. You make the diaphragm stretch and slacken, you force the lungs open and shut. No ‘It’ breathes through you, you breathe. Stop being tyrannized by your diaphragm! You can bend it to your will! Through it you can slow up your pulse rate, throttle the thyroid and the pituitary and the adrenals, stun the parasympathetic nervous system, anything. You are master of your own metabolism! Your body is your instrument! Learn to control it and you can walk on hot coals, stick pins through your tongue. You’ve seen it demonstrated over and over again in hypnosis—a psyche, the hypnotist’s psyche, uses a human body as a toy, paralyzes it, raises boils on the skin, removes warts. The next good Immob step is to make yourself your own hypnotist, put your own psyche in your body’s saddle. Concentrate on that. Remember, you’re in charge. Think now of your diaphragm, that helpless, will-less, impotent strip of membrane. Now you’re going to put it through its paces. Ready now. Everybody ready. One. Two. Three. Breathe! In . . . out. In . . . out. Diaphragm up . . . diaphragm down. Lungs open . . . lungs shut. Do it yourself . . . do it yourself. Body slow down . . . body
slow down. Heart slow down . . . glands slow down. In . . . out. Muscles loose . . . nerves loose. Iiiiiiinnnnn . . . ooooouuuuut. Steady, now. One . . . two . . . one . . . two. . . .”
All the students had their eyes closed. With each insucking of air twenty chests rose, twenty abdomens were pulled in until they were tight cups of flesh—with one boy down near the end, the abdominal walls fell away until it seemed they must be pressing the intestine flat and making contact with the base of the spine. Martine watched the dials on the tonus indicators. All of them had begun to drop when the breathing exercise got under way, in some cases almost to zero, in others just a few degrees.
The instructor walked up and down the aisle. He watched the indicators and in a soft, rhythmic singsong gave pointers to each student individually. “Croly,” he said, “your embouchure’s tied up in knots. Concentrate on the lips, the cheeks, the lips, the cheeks. . . . Anderson, your toes are all bunched up, watch the tonus in those toes, watch the tonus in those toes. . . . Schmidt, you’ve still got a lot of hypertension in the pelvis, the pelvis is retracted, the pelvis is retracted. . . . Dunlap, for God’s sake, relax those sphincters, take it easy, man, relax those sphincters or we’ll have to send you back for more narco-suggestion. . . .”
“There’s something I don’t get,” Martine whispered to Jerry. “Why do they all remove their pros?”
“Simple,” Jerry whispered back. “What’re the animal emotions? Fear and rage. What’s the bodily state that induces ’em? The possession of arms and legs. Because, see, so long as you’ve got arms they’ll want to be used as weapons against others—and because everybody else’s arms want to be used against you, your legs will want to run.”
“But wouldn’t that go double for pros? They’re much more powerful than real limbs.”
Limbo Page 17