Stanislaw Lem - Hospital of the Transfiguration

“What does my leg have to do with it?” Stefan could see that he wasn’t holding up his end; Sekułowski was batting the conversation around like a ball with a racket.

“Everything. Your leg is obviously close, because you can experience it in two ways, with your eyes closed as a ‘conscious feeling of possessing a leg,’ and when you look at it or touch it—in other words, as an object. Unfortunately, no other human being is ever more than an object.”

“That’s absurd. Surely you don’t mean to say that you’ve never had a friend, that you’ve never loved?”

“Now we’re getting somewhere!” Sekułowski exclaimed, “Let’s assume that I have. But what does that have to do with closeness? No one can be closer to me than I am to myself, and sometimes I am a stranger to myself.”

He lowered his eyelids heavily, as if resigning from the world. This conversation was like wandering in a labyrinth. Stefan decided to persevere and do his best. It might be fun.

“But your literature is no bargain. One takes hold of words too one-sidedly and glosses over details…”

“Go on,” the poet encouraged him.

“A literary work is a matter of conventions, and talent is the ability to break them. I’m not saying it has to be realism. Any literary style can be good, provided the author respects the internal logic of the work. If you have your hero walk through a wall once, you have to let him do it again…”

“Excuse me, but what is the purpose of literature, as you see it?” Sekułowski asked softly, as if he were falling asleep.

But Stefan had not finished; the interruption confused him and he lost his train of thought.

“Literature teaches…”

“Oh really?” The poet sighed. “And what does Beethoven teach?”

“What does Einstein teach?”

Stefan’s impatience now bordered on irritation. Sekułowski definitely had an overblown reputation. Why go easy on him?

The poet smiled quietly, very satisfied. “Nothing, naturally,” he said. “He’s playing, friend. Except that some people don’t know it. Turn on a light every time you give a dog a piece of kielbasa, and after a while the dog will salivate at the sight of the light. Show a man enough ink scrawled on paper, and after a while he’ll say it is a model for the universe. It’s neurology, obedience school, that’s all.”

“What’s the kielbasa in that example?” Stefan asked quickly, feeling like a fencer scoring a touch. But Sekułowski was not slow with his riposte.

“Einstein, or some other worthy authority, is the kielbasa. Isn’t mathematics a form of intellectual tag? And logic, chess played by the strictest rules. It’s like that child’s game with string, where two players twist it around their fingers in artful combinations, adding more and more twists until they come back to the starting point. Have you ever seen Peano and Russell’s proof that two plus two is four? It takes up an entire dense page of algebraic symbols. Everybody is playing, and so am I. Have you seen my play The Flower Garden ? I call it a chemical drama. The flowers are bacteria, and the garden is the human body in which they multiply. A fierce battle between tuberculosis bacilli and the leukocytes is going on. Alter seizing the armor of the lipoids, which is a sort of magic cap of invisibility, the bacteria unite under the leadership of the Supermicrobe, defeat the leukocytes, and then, just as a blissful and blessed future is unfolding before them, the garden sinks under them. In other words, the human being dies and the poor little plants have to die along with it.”

Stefan did not know the play.

“Forgive me for talking about myself,” the poet said. “But each of us, after all, is a kind of blueprint for the world. The trouble is that the plan is not always well executed. An awful lot of bungling goes into the making of human beings. And the world,” he said, looking down through the window as if he saw something amusing, “is just a collection of the most fantastic oddities, whose existence no one can explain. The easiest thing, of course, is to make believe you don’t see anything, that whatever is, simply is. I do it myself all the time. But it isn’t enough. I cannot remember the exact figure—my memory is failing these days—but I once read the odds of one living cell arising out of the multitude of atoms. It was something like one in a trillion. And that those cells should come together in however many billions you need to make up the body of a living human being! Every one of us is a lottery ticket that hit the jackpot: a few dozen years of life, what fun! In a world of superheated gases, nebulae spiraling to whiteness, and the cosmic absolute zero, suddenly a protein pops up, some greasy jelly that immediately tends to decompose into a puff of bacteria and decay. A hundred thousand subterfuges sustain this weird field of energy, which divides matter into order and chaos. A node of space crawls across an empty landscape. And why? Haven’t you ever wondered why there are clouds and trees, golden-brown autumn and gray winter, why the scenery changes through the seasons, why the beauty of it all strikes us like a hammer-blow? Why does it happen that way? By rights we should all be black interstellar dust, shreds of the Magellanic Cloud. The normal state of things is the roaring of the stars, showers of meteors, vacuum, darkness, and death.”

He leaned back on his pillow exhausted and said in a deep, low voice:

Only the dead know the tunes

The live world dances to.

“What does literature mean to you, then?” Stefan dared to ask after a long pause.

“For the reader it is an attempt to escape. For the creator, an attempt at redemption.”

“You’re a mystic…” Stefan was not doing well in this conversation: he couldn’t play his best cards, because Sekułowski would snort and drop down from infinity.

“A mystic? Who told you that? Here in Poland you publish four poems and they pin a little card on you with a label that sticks beyond your death: ‘subtle lyricist,’ ‘stylist,’ ‘vitalist.’ Critics—or critins, as I sometimes call them—are the physicians of literature: they make wrong diagnoses just like you, and in just the same way they know how things ought to be but they can’t do anything. So they’ve mysticized me now, have they? Well, one more weirdness to add to the million others: though possessing brains, they can think with their intestines.”

“This conversation is slightly one-sided,” Stefan said, deciding to rally his forces for a frontal attack to conquer Sekułowski. He had completely forgotten about medicine. “Instead of a dialogue you’re having a double monologue with yourself. I do know your work. Somewhere you propose the existence of a consciousness different from the ‘Consciousness of Being.’ You describe the nonexistent worlds of Riemann. But as you say yourself, the world that surrounds us is interesting enough. Why do you write so little about it?”

“The world that surrounds us? Oh, so you think I dream up worlds? But you have no doubt about the identity of the world that surrounds—for example, the one you’re sitting at the center of, on that white chair?”

Stefan thought and said, “For the most part, no.”

Sekułowski heard only the “no,” which was all he needed.

“I see a different world. Recently Doctor Krzeczotek let me look into a microscope. As he later told me, in it he saw pink buffering epithelia, among which appeared, in a palisade configuration, dark diphtherial corynebacteria of the characteristic spadiceous configuration. Do I have it right?”

Staszek nodded.

“I saw an archipelago of brown islands and coral atolls in a sky-blue sea with pink icebergs drifting on a trembling, stream.”