The Book Of Ian Watson, page 6
You may object that it is a hopeless task to presume we could unpick these various layers. You may also object that, once having unpicked them, we might find that even on the deepest level there was sheer incongruity. Particle physicists are nowadays coming to the reluctant conclusion that while there is a regular underlying mathematical structure to Nature, Nature does not however properly obey its own laws. In the words of Steven Weinberg of Harvard, “Increasingly, it is believed that the symmetries of nature are in fact exact, but they are symmetries of the underlying field equations, and are not obeyed by the solutions to these equations.” We live in a universe which only approximately corresponds to the formal structures and regulations that permit it to exist. The same may be true of the set of alien languages. They are related, yes—via the biogrammar, to an underlying set of necessary forms. But only approximately so. There will always remain a fundamental uncertainty and ambiguity—corresponding to the uncertainty with which the universe obeys its own laws! This may turn out to be the case. But that is no reason for not pursuing the idea of an alien linguistics.
To sum up, we must be prepared to entertain the idea of a self-creating, self-examining cosmos, in which life is somehow involved in the very processes which bring it into being in the first place; and that the nature of life’s involvement is, in the broadest sense, a linguistic one: its double role of message, and observer or messenger. Since language evolves, we must also entertain the idea that structural evolution of language is to some extent determined by the demands of this participatory role; and furthermore that language may tend evolutionarily to yield up more of its nature, so that it will one day be possible to represent in language that which is mirrored in language. Or, that this is already possible, elsewhere—in languages which we would therefore have great difficulty comprehending. But, then again, such “ideal languages”, which articulate Reality, might be quite impossible—in the same paradoxical way as the universe has to break its own rules, in order to exist. The ideal pattern only generates approximate realities. And this approximate feature is inherent in the nature of things. The idea of a universe pulling itself up by its own bootstraps, in the way I have outlined, is somewhat anathema. As Piaget puts it in his book Structuralism, “The subject cannot be the a priori underpinning of a finished posterior structure; rather, it is a centre of activity. And whether we substitute “society” or “mankind” or “life” or even “cosmos” for “subject”, the argument remains the same.” The cosmos cannot generate itself. And yet, strangely, it must do.
An English mathematician, G. Spencer Brown, has written a book called Laws of Form, in which he develops a logic to describe this situation: a logic for “operations taking their own results as a base.” His logic demands, to make this possible, a universe which is so constituted as to examine itself—which divides up into Observer and Observed. So, once again, we are faced with a participatory universe: and it is only a participatory universe that can generate itself. Nevertheless, as Spencer Brown says, we are faced in such a universe with the situation of a dog chasing its own tail. “In respect of its own information, the universe must expand to escape the telescopes through which we, who are it, are trying to capture it, which is us”.
Whatever the outcome of these speculations, it seems indisputable that we are witnessing nowadays a necessary convergence of what used to be regarded as the most diverse areas of knowledge: Physics, Cosmology, Biology, Mathematics, Logic, Linguistics. Each is needed now to throw light on the fundamental problems of the others. And this convergence—which demands some highly speculative “leaps into the Beyond”—is also something which the Science Fiction imagination can and should explore. The problems of this world here and now are urgent—the social, economic, ecological problems; and science fiction should deal with these. At the same time, I think it must find a way of dealing with these epistemological problems. For science fiction is a literature of the Beyond, as well as a literature of the impact of change on Man. It deals with the Beyond in an historical sense: the Future, that is rapidly becoming the Present. It must also deal with the Beyond of knowledge—without losing touch with a sense of the social base of Man, whose knowledge this is. For, just as we are here making our world and our society, so in another sense we are engaged in the making of the universe through that which is at the root of our social being: our language.
A linguistic fiction …
The False Braille Catalogue
So few real details seem to be available about Samuel Klossowski apart from the censored trial reports and the few anecdotes which the ‘demon librarian’ has chosen to make public that you might be forgiven for imagining Klossowski a figment of Borg’s own imagination were it not for the existence of those one hundred and seventy-seven volumes in Braille, which time alone would have stopped Borg from composing and still attending to his other duties.
We don’t often come across a case in reality of a tame crew of monkeys tapping away on typewriters to come up with some stochastic Shakespearian masterpiece; but Borg clearly had his own sedulous ape in Klossowski. Whether Klossowski comprehended the extent of his exploitation at Borg’s hands is another matter; yet it has a bearing on whether we view Klossowski as the De Sade of this age of conceptual art, or just a chess piece in some complex game of Borg’s which happened to involve Klossowski—albeit full-time for sixteen years—as scribe of his anger and frustration.
The volumes in question were typed on the prison library’s braille machine at the rate of about one per month, and bear the titles of various edifying or nostalgic 19th century classics, novels by Charles Kingsley, Bulwer-Lytton, Mrs. Gaskell. They do indeed contain statistically significant samples of these works. But what they also contain, blandly bonded sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase, is an invitation to sexual madness, an entreé into a hypnotic incantatory world of psychopathology.
What blind person, forewarned, would be rash enough to isolate himself or herself within this obsessive antiworld that subtly, devastatingly, corrupts all the comforting realities of fiction? I learnt Braille myself just to read these one hundred and seventy-seven books and almost wish I hadn’t. But then, I can see that things are not as he says. I can gaze out of the barred windows at the real world at the same time as I run my fingers over the embossed pages …
Klossowski thought every volume he typed would find its way to a vulnerable public through the Society for Blind Affairs. This wasn’t the case—on the contrary, Borg was systematically diverting the volumes for his own private use, to be revealed only at the grotesque vernissage of last July when he proudly announced Klossowski’s satanic achievement. Obviously Klossowski was convinced that nothing from outside the prison walls could threaten his literature programme, such being the hypnotic capacity of his books to usurp reality before the reader could defend himself, such their built-in coded traps and labyrinths.
How Borg rejoiced, in his librarian’s heart, when he first discovered the nature of Klossowski’s revenge against the world, his tactile rape of the blind! I remember how he described his ecstasy to me recently, still vivid after sixteen years, his airy puckish voice weaving a net of concepts to catch Klossowski in, fingers dancing as they juggled small faery balloons about his head, his seared displaced countenance looking like a humorous sandstone statue’s eroded by years of acidic rain showers. He described too how he deliberately made things harder for Klossowski by instituting a quota system, keeping his prisoner constantly near the fringe of breakdown where he could refine his genius in the white-hot fire, where ever greater atrocities might be born, as he found out progressively fiercer incantations, as he laid the foundations for a new system of magic.
You may be wondering how Borg came to read Braille in the first place so that he was able to check through that first intercepted text. Well, Borg read every kind of script. He was as proficient in Egyptian hieroglyphics as he was in Chinese characters. And what could he read during the frequent power cuts of those years? It had to be Braille.
Besides, he was fascinated by the idea of being able to read two books at once, one with the eyes, the other with his hands. The dialogue of Babel was ever on his mind and the subversive implications of this dialogue.
“Suppose it were possible,” he said to me a few months ago, “to develop a language which would seem to say one thing while really saying another: one whose sounds, or shapes, would contradict the semantics. Do you remember how Mallarmé complained that the sound values ‘jour’ and ‘nuit’ in French are the opposite of their meanings? So that we are plunged into darkness at midday, and the midnight is illuminated. What would the land be like where men spoke an anti-language that deliberately contradicted reality? What a fine project, don’t you think, to escape from Nature into this ideal world!”
To this end Borg devised a whole theory of clashing signs over the years, isolating contradictions of meaning wherever they cropped up in whatever language; quizzing Hungarian, Jewish, Bantu prisoners about the colours of sounds in their languages and other paradoxes, tormenting them to get at the truth beneath the words.
“Why should I not prepare myself,” he asked me, “to communicate with some interstellar being for whom all familiar terrestrial connotations may be inverted and reversed?” Certainly he kept a critical eye on the space adventure, over the years. Yet approaching it more in the spirit of a master forger who intends to let a wholly alien script be found carved in a rock on the moon where it will tantalise the human race to the end of time or drive it to despair long before then.
“I knew an amateur doctor many years ago who compiled a manual of imaginary diseases.” He paused to savour the situation. The sun was shining in through the barred windows upon the thousands of books that served as a wall within a wall, a wall of paper within that wall of stone. “With the aid of a forged diploma he proceeded to get a job in a hospital where he could diagnose his own imaginary diseases and operate for them—bringing them into being with acids and scalpel. At the end of each operation when he sewed the patient up again there was the disease he had predicted, reconstructed before the amazed eyes of the nurses and anaesthetist. And this inversion of the usual time flow disorganised these worthy professionals to such an extent that it was some months, and some deaths, later before they began to challenge him. You see, each witness of the improbable operation took it for granted that the abrupt inversion of cause and effect was affecting him or her alone—some passing malaise induced by the bright lights of the operating theatre working on a latent trauma associated with surgery that they were not anxious to admit. Doesn’t the imaginary strike you as much more probable than the real? It’s still waiting in the wings, you see.”
Denied the chance of planting forgeries in the Sea of Dreams or by the canals of Mars, Borg has, ironically enough, found his destiny as prison librarian and governor. By tradition the two posts are combined; he who can keep the books in order can perform the same service for criminals and misfits—for what are books but the miscreants of their time? Basically this governorship is a sinecure designed to let a man of letters get on with his own research, while the hard work of running the prison remains in the hands of a crew of bullies. Ironically, however, it was here that Borg was to meet the apotheosis of his theories, in the person of Klossowski. Dare one say that without Samuel Klossowski’s activities there would be scarcely any reason to mention Borg?
At the same time I must admit that without Borg Klossowski’s literature programme would have got nowhere and the world lost a magnificent if terrifying gesture, equivalent in our time perhaps of the Pharoahs’ attempts to create conceptual time machines out of stone. How long would it have been before some appalled blind reader stammered out the truth about his welfare reading matter to a furious policeman or a gloating reporter? There is a dialectical relationship between Borg and Klossowski: each man negates the other and confirms the other.
Yet it was the genius locked up in Klossowski’s mad head that actually realized Borg’s lifelong scheme of a contradictory meta-language: a galling thought for the prison director whose sinecure had perhaps been intended by the authorities to buy him time to develop this language of disruption and control for them (assuming that they knew about it or paid any attention to such subtleties—the truncheon and the thumbscrew are just as effective really). Was Borg’s protection necessary? Would the blind victims have realized what was happening to them in time, before their fingers began to traverse the rows of dots helplessly as though they were magnetized—latterday Brer Rabbits caught in a tarbaby of conceptual pornography? An addiction so suddenly sprung upon them in their world innocent of the iconography of commercial sex which determines the gaze and gestures of the sighted! The whole waterfall would have poured on their heads at once, the whole wet dream of the modern world vexed to nightmare by Klossowski and transposed from predominantly visual into tactile, aural, gustal terms. Klossowski was determined to forge a landscape of pornography meaningful to the reader blind from birth. The missing dimension of so many sentimental novels with their passion for scenery, faces, glances, extended use of the pathetic fallacy: this missing dimension amoureuse Klossowski provided devastatingly, devising his own vocabulary of signs against which no protection exists. (It is perhaps the fact that I am sighted that saves me from the worst of Brer Rabbit’s fate, though even I can sense how very sticky it is!)
“My detractors,” Borg told me confidently the other week, “argue that compared with the authentic texts of those classics that Klossowski perverted, his books only deserve the status of footnote to a future psychopathology of signs. Yet surely you’ll admit there are cases where the footnote deserves to be the text? And if sexuality is just a footnote to those books in the original—some critics suggest that precisely this constitutes their eroticism—in our friend Klossowski’s texts this footnote progressively usurps the main text, elbowing it aside with a bland ferocity that compels assent! As it has done historically, wouldn’t you say? All these memoirs and diaries of the Victorian sexual underworld! So that Klossowski writes the true history of those times, which did not then publicly exist for them. Truly the probable is more exact and demonstrative than the real! Don’t you sometimes ask yourself: who is inventing us? And, what’s more, if our destiny is to be invented, why all this fuss, this protest, this rebelliousness these days? It’s no more than a rebellion among midgets that a giant dreams about as he sleeps in the sunshine while the flies buzz about him …”
But let me turn now from the conceptual, and outline the part that Klossowski’s works played in Borg’s own personal erotic life; something which you will not have heard about before: the brief ill-fated liaison that occurred many years ago, between Borg and the blind cellist Anna Soleri (whose death coincided with the revelation by Borg to the public of the Braille works of Klossowski, which he hadn’t troubled to reveal on the occasion of Klossowski’s death in prison the year before).
Undercurrents such as this ‘invisible’ liaison and its aftermath form the real content of history, Borg himself has written on more than one occasion. What takes place in public is essentially a subterfuge. (Thus the finding of a book that once belonged to you and has your name in it to prove it, but which you threw away in another city years ago, left on the next seat by a woman you only half paid attention to … you run out of the train after her in vain at the next station, as though she will be waiting there for you.)
Borg refuses to say anything personal to me about Anna Soleri; confines himself to criticising her virtuosity as a cellist. When I press him he shrugs his shoulders and smiles, upper lip twisting into a rictus of pulled flesh as though one or two of the muscles have been permanently severed in some accident which has left no visible scar—until he smiles.
I have pursued my own investigations.
Borg met Anna Soleri in April 1952 when they were both staying at the Pickwick Arms Hotel on East 51st Street—a hotel with an elegant European atmosphere (where virtually the entire Israeli delegation to the General Assembly has nowadays taken up residence). Borg was attending a conference on the Meaning of Art in a Time of Turmoil, Anna Soleri was presenting her incomparable rendering of Kaganovich’s Sinfonia for Cello and Strings.
A psychoanalyst would surely have ascribed Anna’s legendary ‘purity’ to dubious motives—the etherialization of hysteria, no less. For the single night she spent with Borg disappeared from her own consciousness the very next day in an amnesia so total and so perfect—with no ragged edges or nagging suspicions surrounding it—that nobody could persuade her she hadn’t spent a perfectly tranquil eight hours asleep. Not only that, but she had somehow tuned out Borg’s voice selectively from the spectrum of sounds reaching her. No one could persuade Anna that a Borg existed or was standing in the same room as herself begging for a word of acknowledgment. Alas, his own project had betrayed him: by becoming so real to her the night before, he had become totally improbable; and was henceforth banished from her own universe.
This scene was described to me by two former members of the hotel staff, brother refugees from Eastern Europe whom I traced to a motel in Reno which they now operate.
The motel is actually in the adjoining township of Sparks along Interstate 80, a couple of blocks beyond the casino known as John Ascuaga’s Nugget.
