The Best of Science Fiction 12

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'.