UopFururologicalCongressExtract
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From The Futurological Congress (from the memoirs of Ijon Tichy) by Stanislaw Lem. trans. Michael Kandel, Continuum Publishing Corporation, 1974. pp. 107-112.
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3 X 20039. Three in the morning. Dead tired as I write this, and sick at heart. The Professor arrived a little late, so I waited fro him in the restaurant. He showed up on foot. I recognized him instantly, though he's a whole lot younger now than he was in the last century and no longer wears glasses or carries an umbrella. He seemed moved at the sight of me.
"On foot?" I asked. "What did your car balk?" (Sometimes they do.)
"No," he said, "I prefer to travel per pedes apostolorum..."
But he gave an odd little smile when he said this. The waiters finally rolled away, and I began to ask him what he was doing - but couldn't help dropping a word
- r two about my doubts concerning reality.
"There you go again, Tichy, with your hallucinations!" he said with a sigh. "I could just as well suspect you of being part of my dream. You were frozen? So was I. You were unfrozen? I also. Except that they unaged me in addition - you know, rejuvenex, desenscenine - not necessary for you, but without a couple of good, stiff shots I couldn't be a futurologian today!"
"A futurologist?"
"That word means something different now. A futurologist makes profutes, prognises, prophecies, while I deal exclusively with theory. This is a completely new field, unknown in our day. You might call it divination through linguistic derivation. Morphological forecasting! Projective etymology!"
"Never heard of it. How does it work?"
To tell the truth, I had asked more out of politeness than curiosity, but he didn't seem to notice. Meanwhile the waiters brought our soup and, with it, a bottle of Chablis, vintage 1997. A good year.
"Linguistic futurology investigates the future through the transformational possibilities of the language," Trottelreiner explained.
"I don't understand."
"A man can control only what he comprehends, and comprehend only what he is able to put into words. The inexpressible therefore is unknowable. By examining future stages in the evolution of language we come to learn what discoveries, changes and social revolutions the language will be capable, some day, of reflecting."
"Amazing. How exactly is this done?"
"Our research is conducted with the aid of the very largest computers, for man by himself could never keep track of all the variations. By variations of course I mean the syntamgatic-paradigmatic permutations of the language, but quantized..."
"Professor, please!"
"Forgive me. The Chablis is excellent, by the way. A few examples ought to make the matter clear. Give me a word, any word."
"Myself? H'm. Myself. All right. I'm not a computer, you understand, so this will have to be simple. Very well then - myself. My, self, mine, mind. Mynd. Thy mind - thynd. Like ego, theego, And we makes wego. Do you see?"
"I don't see a thing."
"But it's perfectly obvious! We're speaking, first , of the possibility of merging of the mynd with the thynd, in other words the fusion of two psychic entities. Secondly, the wego. Most interesting. A collective consciousness. Produced perhaps by the multiple dissociation of the personality, a mygraine. Another word, please."
"Foot."
"Good. Onefoot, twofoot. Threefotter, fourfooted. Footing, footingly, footling. Footage, befootery, Footment. And footloose gets you footless, unfooted, defeeted. Ah, defeetism. Feetish, feetus ... feetback? Infoot and outfoot! I think we're getting somewhere. Feetality, twofootalitariansim."
"But these words have no meaning!"
"At the moment, no, but they will. Or rather, they may eventually acquire meaning, provided footeries and defeetism catch on. The word 'robot' meant nothing in the fifteenth century, and yet if they had had futurolinguistics then, they could have easily envisioned automata."
"So what is defeetism?"
"In this particular case I can tell you precisely, but only because it isn't a prognosis but something that already exists. Defeetism is a very recent concept, a new approach to human autoevolution."
"You mean, creating men without feet?"
"Yes. Inasmuch as walking has become a vestigal activity and we're running out
- f space besides."
"But that's insane!"
"I quite agree. And yet such shining lights as Profesor Hatzelklatzer and Foeshbeene are defeetists. You were'nt aware of that, were you, when you gave me that word?"
"No. And the other derivations, what do they mean?"
"That is as yet unknown. If defeetism wins out over twofootalitarianism, such things as footments, infoots and underfeet will come into being. This is no prophecy, mind you, but a simple stock-taking of the possibilities in their purest form. Let's have another word."
"Interferent."
"Good. Inter and fero, fero, ferre, tuli, laturm. It comes from the Latin, so we must seek a continuation in Latin. Flos, floris. Interflorentrix. But of course. This is a virgin who has a child by an interferent, for it took her maidenhead."
"Where do you get the maidenhead?"
"Flos, floris - flower. She was deflowered, you see. Though they'll probably say: physigentitress, or physitress for short. Or simply reviewer wife. Or that she interloped. I assure you, we have a most fertile field at our desposal here. PV-dultery. Coitus interferentus. High-infidelity reception/conception, heterodyne insemination. A whole new world of social patterns opens up, a whole new morality!"
"I see that you are an enthusiast of this new science. Would you care to try another word? Trash."
"Why not? It doesn't matter that you're a skeptic. Not in the least. What was it again, trash? Very well ... trash, trashcan, ashcan, trashman. Trashmass, trashmic, catatrashmic. Trashmass, trashmosh. In a large enough scale, trashmos. And-of course - macrotrashm! Tichy, you come up with the best words! Really, just think of it, macrotrashm!"
"I'm afraid I don't follow. It's nonsense to me."
"First of all, we don't say follow now but swallow'. You don't swallow. (Your speech, I've noticed, is full of anachronisms. This is not good. But we'll talk of that later.) Secondly, macrotrashm is nonsense so far, yet we can already guess its sense-to-be, its future significance. The word observe, implies nothing less than a new psychozoic theory! Implies that the stars are of artificial origin!"
"Now where do you get that?"
"From the word itself. Macrotrasm indicates, or rather suggests, this image: in the course of many eons the Universe filled up with trash, the wastes of various civilizaitons. The wastes got in the way, of course, hampering astronomers and cosmoauts, and so enormous incinerators were built, all at extremely high terperatures, observe, to burn the trash, and with sufficient mass to pull it in from space themselves. Gradually space clears up and behold, there are your stars, those selfsame furnaces, and the dark nebulae-this is the trash that remains to be removed."
"You can't be serious! The Universe nothing but one big trash disposal? You don't really think that's possible? Professor!"
"It isn't a matter of what I think or don't think, Tichy. We have simply used futurological linguistics to create a new cosmogony, another theory for future generations to consider. They may or may not take it seriously, but the fact remains that it is possible to articulate such a hypothesis! Note that if morphological extrapolation had existed in the fifties of the last century, they could have forseen, even then, the benignimizers - remember them? - by projective derivation from 'benign' and 'traquilizer.' Language, my boy, is a gold mine of possibilities, though those possibilities are not limitless. Remember that the word 'utopia' literally means nowhere, a never-never land, an unattainable ideal, and you will better understand the pessimism of many of our futurologicians!"
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