"Babel 17"

[fiefoe]

Samuel R. Delany wrote this in his twenties and it does read like a young person's book -- jaunty and full of fun ideas.

• He stopped, because he wasn’t sure what Cryptography had established, and because he needed another moment to haul himself down from the ledges of her high cheekbones, to retreat from the caves of her eyes.
• A code can be one type or the other, or a combination. But both have this in common: once you find the key, you just plug it in and out come logical sentences. A language, however, has its own internal logic, its own grammar, its own way of putting thoughts together with words that span various spectra of meaning. There is no key you can plug in to unlock the exact meaning. At best you can get a close approximation.”
• “I know the Outer Planets were hit a lot harder than the Inner.” <> “Then you don’t know. But, yes, they were.” She drew a breath as memory surprised her. “One drink isn’t enough to make me talk about it, though. When I came out of the hospital, there was a chance I may have had brain damage.”
• The door swung open and evening brushed blue fingers on his eyes. <> My god, he thought, as coolness struck his face, all that inside me and she doesn’t know! I didn’t communicate a thing! Somewhere in the depths the words, not a thing, you’re still safe. But stronger on the surface was the outrage at his own silence.
• I listen to other people, stumbling about with their half thoughts and half sentences and their clumsy feelings that they can’t express—and it hurts me. So I go home and burnish it and polish it and weld it to a rhythmic frame, make the dull colors gleam, mute the garish artificiality to pastels, so it doesn’t hurt anymore: that’s my poem. I know what they want to say, and I say it for them.”
• They’re not what other people have said before, put in an original way. And they’re not just violent contradictions of what other people have said, which amounts to the same thing.
• But language is thought. Thought is information given form. The form is language. The form of this language is…amazing.”
• “You can really judge a pilot by watching him wrestle?” the officer inquired of Rydra. <> She nodded. “In the ship, the pilot’s nervous system is connected directly with the controls. The whole hyperstasis transit consists of him literally wrestling the stasis shifts. You judge by his reflexes, his ability to control his artificial body.
• “There’re some jobs—” Calli’s voice was as heavy with alcohol as his shoulders with muscle—“some jobs on a transport ship you just can’t give to a live human being.” “I know, I know,” said the Customs Officer. “So you use dead ones.” “That’s right.” Calli nodded. “Like the Eye, Ear, and Nose. A live human scanning all that goes on in those hyperstasis frequencies would—well, die first and go crazy second.”
• She said: “He was part,” the words lean, calm, her eyes intent on not losing his, “of a triple, a close, precarious, emotional, and sexual relation with two other people. And one of them has just died.”
• Blackness beyond the windows was flung across with blue signal lights. Ships rose on white flares, blued through distance, and became bloody stars in the rusted sky.
• He had not spoken at all, still trying to regain her face, her words, her shape. But it stayed away, frustrating as the imperative comment that leaves your mind as speech begins, and the mouth is left empty, a lost referent to love.
• “Eh…Miss Twa?” Calli said. “You’re alive now. Will you love us?”
• Now, at this point, their indices may be a mite jarring. But, by the time they fight through learning to understand each other—and they will, because they need to—they’ll graph out congruent a foot down the logarithmic grid. Clever?
• What we’ve got to do is arrange the marbles around the wall of the room in a perfect sphere, and then sit back with the clock and keep tabs on the second hand.”... “I think you can push around any other circles so that they’re equidistant at all points and don’t touch. But all great circles have to have at least two points in common.” “Think about that for a minute and look at these marbles, all being pulled along great circles.”... “They’ll move toward each other and their paths’ll intersect.” Calli’s eyes widened. “That’s right, at exactly a quarter of the way around our orbit, they should have flattened out to a circular plane.” “Lying along the plane of our orbit,” ... “I figure we can do this once, then fire our rockets enough to blast us maybe seventy or eighty miles either up or down without hurting anything. From that we can get the length of our orbits, as well as our speed. That’ll be all the information we need to locate ourselves in relation to the nearest major gravitational influence.
• “And because all great circles intersect, in this language the word for great circle is always ŌX. It carries the information right in the word... ‘Great Circle’ carries some information with it, but not the right information to get us out of the jam we’re in. We have to go to another language in order to think about the problem clearly without going through all sorts of roundabout paths for the proper aspects of what we want to deal with.”
• “I didn’t realize—” He extended his hand as though he were meeting her all over again. “But, of course—” The surface of his manner shaled away, and had she never seen this transformation before she would have warmed to his warmth.
• (Shapeshifting weapon:) Ver Dorco smiled. “We’ve managed to polarize alloys of the heavier elements so that they exist only on certain perceptual matrices. Otherwise, they deflect. That means that, besides visually—and we can blank that out as well—it’s undetectable. No weight, no volume; all it has is inertia... An unexpected property of polarized matter is tensile-memory.”
• He picked a sealed glass phial from a wall rack. “Pure diphtheria toxin. Enough here to make the reservoir of a good-sized city fatal.”
• He showed me all about sentences and paragraphs—did you know the emotion unit in writing is the paragraph?—and how to separate what you can say from what you can imply, and when to do one or the other—”
• (The assasination scene:) With the console smashed, along the table the fruit platters were pushed aside by emerging peacocks, cooked, dressed, and reassembled with sugared heads, tail feathers swaying. None of the clearing mechanisms were operating. Tureens of caldo verde crowded the wine basins till both overturned, flooding the table. ... She darted away, came up against a length of table, and vaulted the steaming pit. The intricate, oriental dessert—sizzling bananas dipped first in honey then rolled to the plate over a ramp of crushed ice—was emerging as she sprang. The sparkling confections shot across the ramp and dropped to the floor, honey crystallized to glittering thorns. They rolled among the guests, cracked underfoot. People slipped and flailed and fell.
• “…Bond?” “A mythological reference. Forgive me. TW-55 flipped.”
• while the third was at once a placeholder for particles that should denote the room’s function when she discovered it, and a sort of grammatical tag by which she could refer to the whole experience with only the one symbol for as long as she needed. All four sounds took less time on her tongue and in her mind than the one clumsy diphthong in “room.” Babel-17; she had felt it before with other languages, the opening, the widening, the mind forced to sudden growth. But this, this was like the sudden focusing of a lens blurry for years.
• “We live dangerously,” Tarik went on. “Perhaps that is why we live well. We are civilized—when we have time.
• You tell me you have never heard of shadow-ships, yet you do know the feelings ‘that loop night to bind you’—that is the line, isn’t it?
• “You’re right. But what whole man is not of two minds on any matter of moment, eh, Captain Wong?”
• She looked for objection in herself, but it was blocked by a clot of tiny singing sounds on an area of her tongue smaller than a coin: Babel-17. They defined a concept of exactingly necessary expedient curiosity that became in any other language a clumsy string of polysyllables.
• From the speaker came Tarik’s voice: “Hear this: the strategy is Asylum. Asylum. Repeat a third time, Asylum. Inmates gather to face Caesar. Psychotics ready at the K-ward gate. Neurotics gather before the R-ward gate. Criminally insane prepare for discharge at the T-ward gate. All right, drop your strait jackets.”
• “Neurotics proceed with delusions of grandeur. Napoleon Bonaparte take the lead. Jesus Christ bring up the rear.” The ships on the right moved forward now in diamond formation. “Stimulate severe depression, noncommunicative, with repressed hostility.”
• “The life goal has become dispersed,” Tarik announced. “Do not become despondent.”
• As she put the microphone down, Tarik’s voice announced: “Advance for group therapy!”
• Babel-17. It was not only a language, she understood now, but a flexible matrix of analytical possibilities where the same “word” defined the stresses in a webbing of medical bandage, or a defensive grid of spaceships. What would it do with the tensions and yearnings in a human face? Perhaps the flicker of eyelids and fingers would become mathematics, without meaning.
• “That knife was meant for you, Tarik,” she panted. “Check the records of Jebel’s personafix. He was going to kill you and get the Butcher under hypnotic control, and take over Jebel.” <> “Oh,” Tarik said. “One of those.” He turned to the Butcher. “It was time for another one, wasn’t it? About once every six months. I’m again grateful to you, Captain Wong.”
• The Butcher’s egoless brutality, hammered linear by what she could not know, less than primitive, was for all its horror, still human. Though bloody-handed, he was safer than the precision of the world linguistically corrected. What could you say to a man who could not say “I”? What could he say to her? Tarik’s cruelties, kindnesses, existed at the articulate limits of civilization. But this red bestiality…fascinated her!
• In the beginning was the word. That’s how somebody tried to explain it once. Until something is named, it doesn’t exist. And it’s something the brain needs to have exist,
• “Do they have this word, I?’ “As a matter of fact they have three forms of it: I-below-a-temperature-of-six-degrees-centigrade, I-between-six-and-ninety-three-degrees-centigrade, and I-above-ninety-three.”
• “Look, every time you’ve said you in the last ten minutes, you should have said I. Every time you’ve said I, you meant you.”
• “And that’s why you can’t go around killing people. At least you better do a hell of a lot of thinking before you do. When you talk to Tarik, I and you still exist. With anyone you look at on the ship, or even through a view-screen, I and you are still there.”
• Poet in Greek means maker or builder.
• Still watching, she saw him commit robbery, murder, mayhem, because the semantic validity of mine and thine were ruined in a snarl of frayed synapses. Butcher, I heard it ringing in your muscles, that loneliness, that made you make Tarik hook up the Rimbaud just to have someone near you who could speak this analytical tongue, the same reason you tried to save the baby, she whispered.
• “Was that Baron Ver Dorco of the War Yards?” “Yeah,” said Calli. “Barbecued lamb, plum wine, the best-looking peacocks I’ve seen in two years. Never got to eat ’em.” He shook his head.
• You know, she was tripled with Muels Aranlyde, the guy who wrote Empire Star. But I guess you must, if you’re her doctor. Anyway, you start thinking that maybe those people who live in other worlds—like Calli says—where people write books or make weapons, are real. If you believe in them, you’re a little more ready to believe in yourself.
• The General raised his eyebrows. “I’m karate myself. Aikido is one martial art I’ve never really understood. And you have a black belt?”
• “Ordinarily this would create a snake pit situation in the brain. However, with a mind that doesn’t know the word ‘I,’ or hasn’t known it for long, fear tactics won’t work.”
• None of those computer languages have the word for ‘I’ either.
• It’s the most analytically exact language imaginable. But that’s because everything is flexible, and ideas come in huge numbers of congruent sets, governed by the same words. This just means that the number of paradoxes you can come up with is staggering. Rydra had filled the whole last half of the tape up with some of the more ingenious. If a mind limited to Babel-17 got caught up in them, it would burn itself out, or break down—”
• The lack of an ‘I’ precludes any self-critical process. In fact it cuts out any awareness of the symbolic process at all—which is the way we distinguish between reality and our expression of reality.”
• By manipulating his vocabulary properly you can just as easily make him a sailor, or an artist. Also, Babel-17 is such an exact analytical language, it almost assures you technical mastery of any situation you look at. And the lack of an ‘I’ blinds you to the fact that though it’s a highly useful way to look at things, it isn’t the only way.”
• “All right, woman, come here!” and she had whispered, with her hands achingly tight on the brass bar, “My name is Rydra!” An individual, a thing apart from its environment, and apart from the things in that environment; an individual was a type of thing for which symbols were inadequate, and so names were invented.

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• Delany’s description of a terrorist attack at an official dinner is one of the strangest fight scenes in sci-fi history, with more attention lavished on the food than fighting.
• whose own speech is bereft of the words “I” or “you.” At the novel’s moral center, they stroll amid the discorporate while the compassionate poet teaches the Butcher that these shifters, which express both personhood and relation, are the indispensable key to morality:
• Literature combines visionary precision in the transmission of sensations and ideas with a moral commitment to the inner lives of individuals, of “you” and “me.”
• In Delany’s imagination, “I” and “you” are interpenetrated and perfectly balanced, but most societies seem, outside of beautifully experimental science fictions, to elevate one over the other.
• the point of such a society is to sublimate literal violence into discourse and dispute, to use language as a field wherein extra-linguistic reality may be recognized, interpreted, and only then imaginatively transformed. If words are weapons, then all we have are weapons. The social becomes a scramble of all against all, a zero-sum contest to control reality, which language has the putatively absolute power to do. Far from bringing peace, the claim that language speaks us rather than the reverse promises only war.