Pg157-168, A Perfect Vacuum, Stanisław Lem (translated by Michael Kandel, 1979)

Joachim Fersengeld

(Editions de Minuit, Paris)

Joachim Fersengeld, a German, wrote his Pericalypse in Dutch (he hardly knows the language, which he himself admits in the Introduction) and published it in France, a country notorious for its dreadful proofreading. The writer of these words also does not, strictly speaking, know Dutch, but going by the title of the book, the English Introduction, and a few understandable expressions here and there in the text, he has concluded that he can pass muster as a reviewer after all.

Joachim Fersengeld does not wish to be an intellectual in an age when anyone can be one. Nor has he any desire to pass for a man of letters. Creative work of value is possible when there is resistance, either of the medium or of the people at whom the work is aimed; but since, after the collapse of the prohibitions of religion and the censor, one can say everything, or anything whatever, and since, with the disappearance of those attentive listeners who hung on every word, one can howl anything at anyone, literature and all its humanistic affinity is a corpse, whose advancing decay is stubbornly concealed by the next of kin. Therefore, one should seek out new terrains for creativity, those in which can be found a resistance that will lend an element of menace and risk - and therewith importance and responsibility - to the situation.

Such a field, such an activity, can today be only prophecy. Because he is without hope - that is, because he knows in advance that he will be neither heard out nor recognized nor accepted - the prophet ought to reconcile himself a priori to a position of muteness. And he who, being a German, addresses Frenchmen in Dutch with English introductions is as mute as he who keeps silent. Thus Fersengeld acts in accordance with his own assumptions. Our mighty civilization, he says, strives for the production of commodities as impermanent as possible in packaging as permanent as possible. The impermanent product must soon be replaced by a new one, and this is good for the economy; the permanence of the packaging, on the other hand, makes its disposal difficult, and this promotes the further development of technology and organization. Thus the consumer copes with each consecutive article of junk on an individual basis, whereas for the removal of the packagings special antipollution programs are required, sanitary engineering, the coordination of efforts, planning, purification and decontamination plants, and so on. Formerly, one could depend on it that the accumulation of garbage would be kept at a reasonable level by the forces of nature, such as the rains, the winds, rivers, and earthquakes. But at the present time what once washed and flushed away the garbage has itself become the excrement of civilization: the rivers poison us, the atmosphere burns our lungs and eyes, the winds strew industrial ashes on our heads, and as for plastic containers, since they are elastic, even earthquakes cannot deal with them. Thus the normal scenery today is civilizational droppings, and the natural reserves are a momentary exception to the rule. Against this landscape of packagings that have been sloughed off by their products, crowds bustle about, absorbed in the business of opening and consuming, and also in that last natural product, sex. Yet sex, too, has been given a multitude of packagings, for this and nothing else is what clothes are, displays, roses, lipsticks, and sundry other advertising wrappings. Thus civilization is worthy of admiration only in its separate fragments, much as the precision of the heart is worthy of admiration, the liver, the kidneys, or the lungs of an organism, since the rapid work of those organs makes good sense, though there is no sense whatever in the activity of the body that comprises these perfect parts - if it is the body of a lunatic.

The same process, declares the prophet, is taking place in the area of spiritual goods as well, since the monstrous machine of civilization, its screws having worked loose, has turned into a mechanical milker of the Muses. Thus it fills the libraries to bursting, inundates the bookstores and magazine stands, numbs the television screens, piling itself high with a superabundance of which the numerical magnitude alone is a deathblow. If finding forty grains of sand in the Sahara meant saving the world, they would not be found, any more than would the forty messianic books that have already long since been written but were lost beneath strata of trash. And these books have unquestionably been written; the statistics of intellectual labor guarantees it, as is explained - in Dutch - mathematically - by Joachim Fersengeld, which this reviewer must repeat on faith, conversant with neither the Dutch language nor the mathematical. And so, ere we can steep our souls in those revelations, we bury them in garbage, for there is four billion times more of the latter. But then, they are buried already. Already has come to pass what the prophecy proclaimed, only it went unnoticed in the general haste. The prophecy, then, is a retrophecy, and for this reason is entitled Pericalypse, and not Apocalypse. Its progress (retrogress) we detect by Signs: by languidity, insipidity, and insensitivity, and in addition by acceleration, inflation, and masturbation. Intellectual masturbation is the contenting of oneself with the promise in place of the delivery. first we were onanized thoroughly by advertising (that degenerate form of revelation which is the measure of the Commercial Idea, as opposed to the Personal), and then self-abuse took over as a method for the rest of the arts. And this, because to believe in the saving power of Merchandise yields greater results than to believe in the efficacy of the Lord God.

The moderate growth of talent, its innately slow maturation, its careful weeding out, its natural selection in the purview of solicitous and discerning tastes - these are phenomena of a bygone age that died heirless. The last stimulus that still works is a mighty howl; but when more and more people howl, employing more and more powerful amplifiers, one’s eardrums will burst before the soul learns anything. The names of the geniuses of old, more and more vainly invoked, already are an empty sound; and so it is mene mene tekel upharsin, unless what Joachim Fersengeld recommends is done. There should be set up a Save the Human Race Foundation, as a sixteen-billion reserve on a gold standard, yielding an interest of four percent per annum. Out of this fund moneys should be dispensed to all creators - to inventors, scholars, engineers, painters, writers, poets, playwrights, philosophers, and designers - in the following way. He who writes nothing, designs nothing, paints nothing, neither patents nor proposes, is paid a stipend, for life, to the tune of thirty-six thousand dollars a year. He who does any of the aforementioned receives correspondingly less.

Pericalypse contains a full set of tabulations of what is to be deducted for each form of creativity. For one invention or two published books a year, you receive not a cent; by three titles, what you create comes out of your own pocket. With this, only a true altruist, only an ascetic of the spirit, who loves his neighbor but not himself one bit, will create anything, and the production of mercenary rubbish will cease. Joachim Fersengeld speaks from personal experience, for it was at his own expense - at a loss! - that he published his Pericalypse. He knows, then, that total unprofitability does not at all mean the total elimination of creativity.

Egoism manifests itself as a hunger for mammon combined with a hunger for glory: in order to scotch the latter as well, the Salvation Program introduces the complete anonymity of the creators. To forestall the submission of stipend applications from untalented persons, the Foundation will, through the appropriate organs, examine the qualifications of the candidates. The actual merit of the idea with which a candidate comes forward is of no consequence. The only important thing is whether the project possesses commercial value, that is, whether it can be sold. If so, the stipend is awarded immediately. For underground creative activity, there is set up a system of penalties and repressive measures within the framework of legal prosecution by the apparatus of the Safety Control; also introduced is a new form of police, namely, the Anvil (Anticreative Vigilance League). According to the penal code, whosoever clandestinely writes, disseminates, harbors, or even if only in silence publicly communicates any fruit of creative endeavor, with the purpose of deriving from said action either gain or glory, shall be punished by confinement, forced labor, and, in the case of recidivism, by imprisonment in a dark cell with a hard bed, and a caning on each anniversary of the offense. For the smuggling into the bosom of society of such ideas, whose tragic effect on life is comparable to the bane of the automobile, the scourge of cinematography, the curse of television, etc., the law provides capital punishment as the maximum and includes the pillory and a life sentence of the compulsory use of one’s own invention. Punishable also are attempted crimes, and premeditation carries with it badges of shame, in the form of the stamping of the forehead with indelible letters arranged to spell out “Enemy of Man.” However, graphomania, which does not look for gain, is called a Disorder of the Mind and is not punishable, though persons so afflicted are removed from society, as constituting a threat to the peace, and placed in special institutions, where they are humanely supplied with great quantities of ink and paper.

Obviously world culture will not at all suffer from such state regulation, but will only then begin to flourish. Humanity will return to the magnificent works of its own history; for the number of sculptures, paintings, plays, novels, gadgets, and machines is great enough already to meet the needs of many centuries. Nor will anyone be forbidden to make so-called epochal discoveries, on the condition that he keep them to himself.

Having in this way set the situation to rights - that is, having saved humanity - Joachim Fersengeld proceeds to the final problem: what is to be done with that monstrous glut which has already come about? As a man of uncommon civil fortitude, Fersengeld says that what has so far been created in the twentieth century, though it may contain great pearls of wisdom, is worth nothing when tallied up in its entirety, because you will not find those pearls in the ocean of garbage. Therefore he calls for the destruction of everything in one lump, all that has arisen in the form of films, illustrated magazines, postage stamps, musical scores, books, scientific articles, newspapers, for this act will be a true cleaning out of the Augean stables - with a full balancing of the historical credits and debits in the human ledger. (Among other things, the destruction will claim the facts about atomic energy, which will eliminate the current threat to the world.) Joachim Fersengeld points out that he is perfectly aware of the infamy of burning books, or even whole libraries. But the autos-da-fé enacted in history - such as in the Third Reich - were infamous because they were reactionary. It all depends on the grounds on which one does the burning. He proposes, then, a life-saving auto-da-fé, progressive, redemptive; and because Joachim Fersengeld is a prophet consistent to the end, in his closing word he bids the reader first tear up and set fire to this very prophecy!