The Best of Science Fiction 12

UDI KAL- The clothes of the woman one loves

UDI UKAL- The body of the woman one loves

UES WE TEL DA- Love between a male and female politician

UGI SLO GU- The love that needs a little coaxing

UMI RIN TOSIT- The sensations a woman experiences when she does not know how she feels about a man

UMY RIN RU- The new dimensions that take on illusory existence when the body of the loved woman is first revealed

UNIMGAG BU- Love of oneself that passes understanding; a machine's dream

UNK TAK- An out-of-date guide book; the skin shed by the snake that predicts rain

UPANG PLA- Consciousness that one's agonised actions undertaken for love would look rather funny to one's friends

UPANG PLA- Consciousness that while one's agonised actions undertaken for love are on the whole rather funny to oneself, they might even look heroic to one's friends; a play with a cast of three or less

U RIRHI- Two lovers drunk together

US ANA NUTO- A novel all about love, written by a computer

US AN I NUT- Dying for love

USAN I ZUN BI- Living for love; a tropical hurricane arriving from over the sea, generally at dawn

UZ- Two very large people marrying after the prime of life

UZ TO KARDIN- The realisation in childhood that one is the issue of two very large people who married after the prime of life

WE FAAK- A park or a college closed for seemingly good reasons; a city where one wishes one could live

YA GAG- Too much education; a digestive upset during travel

YA GAG LEE- Apologies offered by a hostess for a bad meal

YA GA TUZ- Bad meat; (Obs.) dirty fingernails

YAG ORN- A president

YATUZ PATI- (Obs.) The ceremony of eating one's maternal grandfather

YATUZ SHAK SHAK NAPANG HOLI NUN- Lying with one's maternal grandmother; when hens devour their young

YE FLIG TOT- A group of men smiling and congratulating each other

YE FLU GAN- Philosophical thoughts that don't amount to much; graffiti in a place of worship

YON TORN- A paper tiger; two children with one toy

YON U SAN- The hesitation a boy experiences before first kissing his first girl

YOR KIN BE- A house; a circumlocution; a waterproof hat; the smile of a slightly imperfect wife

YUP PA- A book in which everything is understandable except the author's purpose in writing it

YUPPA GA- Stomach ache masquerading as eye-strain; a book in which nothing is understandable except the author's purpose in writing it

YUTH MOD- The assumed bonhomie of visitors and strangers

ZO ZO CIN- A woman in another field

More words: syntax, symbol, and space-time. Syntax is a way of arranging symbols in space-time. When you invent new symbols, you must invent a syntax for them, or specify the known syntax in which they are designed to be used. When you move into a different continuum, your old syntax is likely to be totally useless, even if your usual symbols have retained their meaning. Changing your syntax can emphasise or modify the connotative significance of a symbol by displaying it in a new perspective.

The most common use of the word syntax refers to the use of words in sentences. A word is a word is a word, whether it be spoken in a cave, sung by a bard at a crowded fireside, flashed on a screen for subliminal perception, printed in graceful Gothic type on a page of elegant sentences, orated in a speech, intoned in a chant, shouted from a mountain-top (to the sound of one hand clapping), or broken up in typographic effects as part of a picture. But though the word remains the same, its impact, value, in-context meaning, colour, shape, sound, may vary enormously with the syntax.

Syntax trouble is symptomatic of our society — of any society in transition. Our intellects operate through the manipulation of codified symbols for abstractions; mathematics provides syntaxes for such symbols; so does myth; so does language.

It is tempting to abandon detachment and intellection entirely at a time when we are discovering, with astonished joy, the uses of involvement, immersion, sensual and transcendent experience. But we are no more suited to the role of exultant flowers than of emotionless computers: we are human beings, equipped for both sensual and sensible experience and behavior. Mathematicians began to create new syntaxes for their new concepts a hundred years ago; scientists today have frames of reference in which to manipulate the multiplex symbols of space-time. In sociology, theology, psychology, we are just starting to seek the new matrixes. If it seems the tines are out of joint, it is rather that our syntaxes — in mythology, in language — are out of joint with the times.

Meantime, we find ourselves falling back on words, away from sentences: simply nouns and verbs, or, subtly-complexly, the noun-verbs — the ones the old syntax called participles or gerundives, and the make-do ones pressed into crisis service: package, protest, love, broadcast, star, surround, contact, fix, talk ...

Double your meaning, double your fun.

The following selection consists of three excerpts from Part II of the novel Journal from Ellipsia (Little Brown, 1965). It starts with the beginning of the actual 'journal'.

On, on, on and on, on; and on, and on, on. The paradox about distance is that quite as much philosophy adheres to a short piece of it as to a long. A being capable of setting theoretical limits to its universe has already been caught in the act of extending it. The merest cherub in the streets here, provided he has a thumbnail — and he usually has ten — does this every day. He may grow up to be one of their fuzzicists, able to conceive that space is curved, but essentially — that is, elliptically — he does nothing about it. He lives on, in his rare, rectilinear world of north-south gardens, east-west religions, up-and-down monuments and explosions, plus a blindly variable sort of shifting about which he claims to have perfected through his centuries, thinks very highly of, and, is rather pretty in its way and even its name: free wall — a kind of generalised travel-bureaudom of 'across'. It follows that most of his troubles are those of a partially yet imperfectly curved being who is still trying to keep to the straight-and-narrow — and most of his fantasies also. His highest aspiration is, quite naturally, 'to get a-Round'; his newest, to get Out.

And he will too, though in his current researches he may have reached only so far as the Omega particle. In the phenomenology of all peoples, the mind slowly becomes curved.

At least that is what Ours are matriculated to, and I had seen nothing to contradict this, during my all-to-brief sojourn in Bucks. Ah, what a mentor was there, was mine, though except for one, I never saw — as she taught me to say — Her!

As I taxied once again along the upper solitudes, trying not to arrive instantaneously at destination — which is of course Our main problem here — I thought of Her with considerable leaning. Leaning is to Us what yearning is to You — but that story will emerge later. The hardest thing to learn here — and still not mastered — is how to get about pornographically.