The Book Of Ian Watson, page 4
Though Kim did not.
For Kim stared, scandalised, at the asphixiated lovers in their metal fairyland …
Kim joined the sluggish crowd that oozed like a coil of toothpaste towards the Roof Garden Route and around it, gaping in wonder at the dwarf trees and fish tanks inside their oxygen tents …
Suzuki who had returned from the parapet, after seeing many people faint in the crowd, and finally the fall of their flea God of the moment from the utility pole, distrusted these people—for what did they really care in their hearts about these wonderful fishes and trees? Oh to be sure they were taught the ceremonies of appreciation. Yet Suzuki was well aware of the real reason why they flocked in their hundreds and thousands up to the roof, under Saturn. It was the spectacle of so much free oxygen, so much sheer fresh air, lavished upon these pedigree fishes and trees (that fade and tarnish far more swiftly than the human machine will ever fade and tarnish) that was the real wonder of the roof …
Today of all days, on the eve of the Fish Festival (his very own), Suzuki felt almost painfully sensitive to the well-being of the fish … and, to a lesser degree, of the trees. Ah but the fish … bloated and knotted by mutation and selective breeding into wondrously mottled finned globes which rivalled, no surpassed the fantasies of the finest glass-blower. He cast a disapproving glance over the crowd, and observed Kim staring sullenly at a particularly beautiful dwarf maple flourishing in its transparent hood of fresh air …
An insistent insect-like buzzing caught Suzuki’s attention. The buzzing sound gradually asserted itself above the noise of traffic in the street, the hurdy-gurdy music of the roundabout, and the chant of adverts over the Store’s loudspeakers concealed in the bugler’s bugles. The noise drifted closer, on the grey air.
A curiously antique-looking biplane (that surely ought to have been in a science museum and not in the perilously opaque skyways of the City) was flying towards the Store, dodging between the tethers of the balloons.
The biplane circled the huge illuminated globe of Saturn which straddled the roof, its grey steel supports barely visible (creating a grand illusion) … and while it circled Saturn, the biplane pumped out a cloud of bright pink smoke.
This pink smoke settled slowly through the thick grey air towards the Roof Garden, while the crowd on the roof stamped their feet nervously and shoved their neighbours impolitely … for it had begun to look as though the real planet Saturn’s caul of methane gas was dripping down on to the roof—a sight and a supposition that stirred currents of agitation in the spectators …
Suzuki wasn’t concerned for his own sake. With the true Zen sensibility, it became—as it were—possible to breathe yet not to breathe … He was more concerned about the safety of the oxygen tents. His whole life was involved in them. Beauty could only exist on such a small scale in the modern world. The Culture of Poverty (when small things were valued because of the people’s poverty) had given way to a Culture of Affluence in which, once more, small things were admired by the discerning, since the big things were compatible with human life no longer. These oxygen tents with their fish and to a lesser degree their trees represented his aesthetics, his religion, his social situation. This kind of feudal loyalty made him an excellent watchman, for he would never steal a breath of air from his beloved fish and would make sure no one else did. The watchmen watched each other like hawks, and watched the crowd like dragons.
The pink mist had by now descended upon the Roof Garden, tinting the air a delicate shade of cherry-blossom …
Kim felt a subtle horror creep over him. The uneasy shuffling of the crowd in this pink polluted fairyland and their laboured panting for breath made them seem like a herd of man-sized lizards on some Saturnian moon. When the pink mist cleared, they would see him as he was, a Man, and … The reptile pack closed round him, grunting and pawing.
He thought …
The explorer seized the strange idol of the Lizard People and escaped through the throng of worshippers bearing it aloft. The Tree Of Life in its tent of poisonous oxygen (paradoxical image of their religion) was his talisman and their taboo. They shrank back fearfully …
Kim shoved people aside rudely, embraced the plastic container with the dwarf maple in it, and wrenched it free from the air pipe. It was heavy. Much heavier than he had thought. Yet the oxygen gushing from the pipe invigorated him. He succeeded in lifting the unwieldy box and swung round …
Quite soon the crowd was moving on its caterpillar course again wondering at the fish and trees, squeezed by people still inside the Store who had seen nothing of the pink mist and were only too anxious to view the beauties of the roof and begin the ceremony of appreciation.
Suzuki glimpsed himself briefly, vaingloriously, as a samurai of old, clutching on antique sword still wet with blood against a background of the rising sun, rising behind a snow-capped cone … although in reality it had only been a chemical spray that had frozen the vandal in his tracks blinding him, not a slash of steel … and some of this anguish of misplaced tradition must have passed over Suzuki’s normally impassive features, for another watchman, who was not his friend, took it upon himself to remark on it …
“We are only servants, after all, Suzuki-san. He was a man too.”
“Bah,” snorted Suzuki, his vision rent in half. “He was rubbish … to do that.”
Suzuki let his thoughts dwell upon the next day’s Fish Festival, to calm them …
Once more he would take to the City’s waterways in a painted lacquered barge for the voyage upstream from Tea-Water Station. He would wear protective clothing, of course, since the waterways were somewhat full of human waste and detergents, of mercury and cadmium and other chemicals. He would breathe air from a scuba-duba back-pack since no creature but hideous rats could breathe the air of the waterways (and these breaths he anticipated with due pleasure, though not in the spirit of self-indulgence). He and his partners of the Fish Ceremony would dip symbolic oars into the streams, sometimes deep in concrete culverts, sometimes in underground tunnels dimly lit by service lamps. The high point of the journey through the poisoned waterways of the City would undoubtedly be when they passed, for a whole half-mile, beneath the massive concrete arches of the overhead expressway all freshly painted a dazzling vermilion—as massive and noble a line of sacred gateways to a shrine as Suzuki could conceive …
LINGUISTIC
Other languages, other perceptions …?
Towards an Alien Linguistics
I have called my talk, “Towards an Alien Linguistics”. But do we wish to hear about aliens who are very similar to us, and relatively easy to understand? Hardly! Yet on the other hand, do we want to hear about amazing and strange aliens, who are almost incomprehensible? Here, one runs the risk of being simply bizarre; of concocting monsters of languages and societies, for the sake of monstrosity. In either case, we do not necessarily arrive at a general theory—at an alien linguistics, but only at a literature of imaginary languages. So I want to speak about the general idea of alien languages, rather than about particular invented examples. I want to outline a few ideas for a theory of language, embracing alien languages and inspired by thinking about them—what their nature might be; how we might possibly understand them.
And immediately a problem arises. For apparently this has nothing to do with Linguistics.
The American linguist Bloomfield said that “the only useful generalizations about language are inductive generalizations”. In other words, we should base our theories upon data from actual languages. We should discover, not invent. Otherwise, we might succeed in being amusing or provocative, but from a strictly linguistic viewpoint we should be talking nonsense.
Yet I feel that this is to restrict oneself unhelpfully—in rather the same way as Wittgenstein restricted philosophy, when he refused to take account of any solutions that the sciences might propose to problems of the nature of language and knowledge. In effect, Wittgenstein fenced off a certain area, and said, “This is Philosophy; the rest isn’t. The rest isn’t part of the Philosophical Game. Psychology and Biology cannot provide philosophical answers”. I would not wish to impose a similar restriction on Linguistics. I prefer the definition that Linguistics is not so much just about human languages, as about the place of human language in the universe. This retains a pragmatic, human base—while leaving the wider questions open.
The Alien is unknown. Alien Languages, obviously, are unknown. But how much do we know about human language, for that matter? The fact that we use it all the time does not mean that we know all about it. We only know about human languages in their present state. We have no real knowledge where our languages came from, or how. Nor do we have the least idea where they are going to, or why. So even human languages, in the distant past and the far future, are quiet alien to us.
It is hard to imagine that evolution on this planet is going to stop with present-day Man—unless we destroy the planet, that is. Language, too, is plainly an evolutionary phenomenon. It has been very different in the past. It has only grown to its present state through a series of radical changes in form. The growth of a rich system of transformation rules—those rules which relate the prolific structures of surface speech to a more limited number of abstract deep structures—must be one example. Without transformations, grammar would have to be extremely complex in order to express the amount of information that we normally handle today. Transformations enable us to manipulate a rich variety of concepts economically. But Speech did not spring from our foreheads—like Athene, goddess of wisdom, from the head of Zeus—fully armed with transformations. The linguist McNeill, writing about “The Creation of Language”, points out that primitive speech must therefore have taken many years to learn. Yet nowadays we possess what Chomsky has described as an innate plan for acquiring language: an inborn scheme which assures that we will master speech in a remarkably short time. This is part of our genetic code, now. But it could not have been so in quite the same way for primitive man—or the stages in early life when he was receptive to language, when he was primed to learn, would have passed away before he had time to learn enough. So language – change and genetic – change must go hand in hand. It is hard to imagine that genetic change will cease. It is equally hard to imagine that language will cease to evolve and undergo radical changes. Its form, and even the genetic plan for acquiring it, must alter.
Assuming, then, that evolution carries on into the far future, building on the base of present-day Man, then we even contain the Alien within ourselves, in a very real sense: Future Man, with a language as different from ours in quality and concept, as ours today is from the speech of those first primitive men inhabiting the borderland between Nature and Culture. But we do not think very much about the dynamics of language over an evolutionary time-span—and to what state of mind they may be leading. So I think it is valuable to talk in terms of an Alien Linguistics, for it forces us, not only to think about Aliens, but to think about this Future Man, whom we do not yet know either. Science fiction, with its population of aliens from other star-systems, and also its aliens in human guise—its mutants, telepaths, etc.—establishes a vocabulary of metaphorical beings, ranging from the downright crude to the relatively sophisticated, for questioning the unknown universe and the unknown future.
Note, by the way, that in mentioning the grammar of primitive man, I made some perfectly acceptable linguistic statements. But the fact is, we do not know whether they are true. We have no proof that primitive speech was this—or that. Simple and telegraphic—or ponderous and complicated. All languages today show approximately the same degree of complexity and sophistication. There are no primitive languages today. Languages spoken by so-called “primitive peoples” in South America or New Guinea are, in reality, just as sophisticated as European languages—or as Chinese, or Arabic, or Eskimo. Historical records go back too short a time to show any drift towards more primitive structures. I was merely being deductive in talking about primitive speech. But it is obviously useful and desirable to know the origins of what we are talking about. Not is it meaningless to speculate about those origins. So we should not pay too much attention to Bloomfield’s rule.
Alien Linguistics, then, is an idea about the relationship between language and the universe. But is it a universal idea? Are there any universal ideas? Must we conclude, after Lem’s Solaris, that we cannot actually understand the alien should we encounter it; that wherever we may go we will only experience human experiences? Is the alien, by definition, unknowable; and is it therefore a waste of breath even to mention the idea of Alien Linguistics?
Let us explore this problem of universal ideas a little further, and ask ourselves what the relationship is between Language and Reality—and whether Language does represent Reality in any meaningful sense. The American Benjamin Whorf, in contrasting European languages with American Indian languages, came to the conclusion that different languages condition radically different worldviews; different realities. Whorf’s studies of Hopi, Nootka, Shawnee, and the American Indian view of the universe read at times like models for an alien linguistics; and indeed a good example of Whorf-based aliens occurs in Delany’s Babel-17 with its description of the culture of Çiribia, entirely based on heat and temperature changes. Delany’s moral is that “compatibility factors for communication are incredibly low”. This is Whorf writ large on the galaxy.
However, since Whorf’s time, Chomsky has shown that there is in all human beings an innate plan for acquiring any human language—and therefore that all human languages must be formally related on some deep structural level. Also, Charles Osgood, applying his technique for measuring meaning (known as the “Semantic Differential”) to speakers of languages as remote from each other as English, Navajo, and Japanese, has demonstrated the existence of what he calls a “common market in meaning”, based on the biological systems of emotional and purposive behaviour which all humans share.
Whether aliens will necessarily develop systems sufficiently similar for us to comprehend them, is a point to which I will return later. Meanwhile, so far as Man is concerned, the Whorf argument has to be abandoned.
Apart from this linguistic objection to the existence of universal in language, there is an important philosophical or logical objection to the idea that the underlying structure of languages and human thought may be related to the underlying structure of the universe. This objection has been voiced by several philosophers since Wittgenstein, but in essence the objection springs from various remarks Wittgenstein made in his Tractatus. In Wittgenstein’s view, there is a fundamental logical reason why we cannot disinter Reality archeologically from behind the language that represents it. Wittgenstein wrote: “The picture cannot represent its form of representation; it shows it forth” (2.172); “No proposition can make a statement about itself, because a propositional sign cannot be contained in itself” (3.332); “That which mirrors itself in language, language cannot represent. That which expresses itself in language, we cannot express by language” (4.121). Thus, if the structure of reality is indeed mirrored in language, this in fact prevents language from articulating the structure of reality. In which case, to quote the logician Quine, “we do better simply to say the sentence and so speak not about language but about the world”. One can either speak about language, or about the world; but not about both at once, using language. The purpose of language is language; there is no underlying significance. Thus it would be pointless to hunt for some universal significance which underlies, and links, the set of possible alien languages. It would be inarticulable; opaque; ungraspable.
Systems, whether it be the mathematical system or the linguistic system, apparently cannot be properly self-descriptive; cannot know themselves, authenticate themselves. They can only manifest behaviour. Wittgenstein tells us this as regards language. The Austrian logician Kurt Gödel told us this forcibly in 1931 for mathematics when he published a remarkable proof that the truth of arithmetic cannot be proved within arithmetic. The ethnologist Gregory Bateson, applying concepts from cybernetics to the problem of the nature of consciousness and the unconscious, tells us that “if, as we must believe, the total mind is an integrated network … and if the content of consciousness is only a sampling of different parts and localities of this network; then, inevitably, the conscious view of the network as a whole is a monstrous denial of the integration of that whole”. We are conscious only at the expense of being largely unconscious. Consciousness is a boundary cutting through the complete circuits of total mind. Above, visible for inspection, are the arcs of circuits. Of these we are “conscious”. Below, invisible, is the rest of the Mind, closed off from our inspection. Consciousness thus only exists by virtue of Unconsciousness; the total system cannot be conscious. Perhaps we might even make a comparison between the Conscious and Unconscious Mind on the one hand, and Chomsky’s Surface Structures of Speech, and Deep Structures, on the other hand. Deep Structures underlie all our surface manifestations of Language. But introspection will never recover them. We cannot consciously think by means of them. And even the level of Deep Structures is some way removed from the level of Thought itself. Between the world and our expression of it are thus a series of interfaces, apparently impenetrable to consciousness. Our language is an activity; not a proof of anything.
Thus we would seem to be cut off from consciousness of Reality by virtue of the language which alone enables us to organise our thoughts and think about Reality. This may seem paradoxical. But really it is not so surprising. For Culture could only emerge from Nature by an act of cutting off—by alienation. This was the only way that consciousness and speech could dawn—in the act of negation. As Octavio Paz puts it in his book on Lévi-Strauss: “It was the first ‘No’ which set man against nature”.
