The art of writing Introductions has long demanded proper recognition. I too have long felt a pressing need to rescue this form of writing from the silence of forty centuries—from its bondage to the works to which its creations have been chained. When, if not in this age of ecumenicalism—that is to say, of all-powerful reason—is one finally to grant independence to this noble, unrecognized genre? I had in fact counted on somebody else fulfilling this obligation, which is not only aesthetically in line with the evolutionary course of art, but, morally, downright imperative. Unfortunately, I had miscalculated. I watch and wait in vain: somehow nobody has brought Introduction-writing out of the house of bondage, off the treadmill of villein service. So I have no choice: out of a sense of obligation rather than an impulse of the heart, I shall rush to the aid of Introduction-writing and become its liberator and obstetrician.

I shall deceive you, and for that you will be grateful to me. I shall make you a solemn promise with no intention of keeping it, and that will satisfy you, or at any rate you will pretend that it does, with appropriate masterly skill; whereas, to fools who would want to excommunicate us both, you will say that in spirit they have fallen from the times and landed on a rubbish heap spat out by a precipitate Reality.

You will tell them there is nothing to be done: today art has become a promissory note without (transcendental) cover, a (counterfeit) pledge, an (unrealistic) forecast—the highest form of alteration. It is precisely this emptiness of art and its unrealizability which should be taken as its motto and bedrock. That is why I am right to present an Introduction to this short Anthology of Introductions, for I am proposing prefaces that lead nowhere, introductions that go nowhere, and forewords followed by no words at all.

For pornography is not directly obscene: it excites only as long as there is a struggle within the viewer between lust and the angel of culture. When the devils carry off the angel; when, as a result of general tolerance, the weakness of sexual prohibitions—their complete helplessness—is laid bare; when prohibitions are thrown on the rubbish heap, then how quickly pornography betrays its innocent (which here means ineffective) character, for it is a false promise of carnal bliss, an augury of something which does not in fact come true. It is the forbidden fruit, so there is as much temptation in it as there is power in the prohibition.

The author’s supreme achievement was the breeding of Gulliveria coli prophetissima and Proteus delphicus recte mirabilis. These strains predict the future, and not only within the range of occurrences affecting their own vegetation. R. Gulliver believes that the mechanism of this phenomenon is of a purely physical nature. Bacteria assemble as colonies in dots and dashes, since this procedure is already a normal property of their proliferation characteristics; they are not a “Cassandra bacillus” or “Proteus prophet” making utterances concerning future events. They are merely constellations of physical occurrences in a form still so embryonic and minute that we are unable to detect them by any means, and which have acquired an influence on the metabolism—and therefore the chemism—of those mutated strains. The biochemical action of Gulliveria coli prophetissima behaves then as a transmitter linking various space-time intervals. Bacteria are a hypersensitive receiver of certain likelihoods, and nothing more. Bacterial futurology has admittedly become a reality, though it is fundamentally unpredictable in its consequences, since the future-tracking behavior of bacteria cannot be controlled.

The first work of bitic mimesis to gain world renown was a novel by Pseudodostoevsky, The Girl (Devochka). It was composed during a phase of relaxation by a multimember aggregate whose assignment was to translate into English the collected works of the Russian writer. In his memoirs the distinguished scholar of Russian literature John Raleigh describes the shock he experienced upon receiving the Russian typescript of a composition signed with what he took to be the singular pseudonym of HYXOS. The impression which the work created on this Dostoevsky expert must have been truly indescribable in its intensity, if, as he admits, he doubted whether he was in a conscious state! The authenticity of the work was for him beyond a doubt, although he knew Dostoevsky had not written such a novel.

Once it had become an industry, mimesis led to unemployment, but solely among manufacturers of trivial literature (sci-fi, porn, thrillers, and the like): there indeed it supplanted humans in the supply of intellectual goods—which ought not to cause an honest humanist too much despair.

One thing, however, can be said with absolute certainty. Before the use of machine intelligence no thinker or author ever had such ardent, unfailingly attentive, and uncompromising readers! That is why, in the cry that burst from the lips of a certain first-rate thinker when he was offered, by MENTOR V, a critique of his work—“This one has really read me!”—there was so much of the frustration typical of the present day, when humbug and perfunctorily acquired erudition replace genuine knowledge. The thought that has haunted me while writing these works—that it is not human beings who will be my most conscientious readers—is indeed full of bitter irony.

So the Cogito paradox made itself known to us in bitistics in an ironic and at the same time startling manner: as despair on the part of machines as to whether people really think! The situation suddenly acquired a perfect bilateral symmetry. We humans are unable to achieve complete certainty (as a proof) as to whether a machine thinks and, in thinking, experiences its states as mental ones—since conceivably one may be dealing with nothing more than an externally perfect simulation whose internal correlative is a kind of void of total “soullessness.” For their part, machines are similarly unable to obtain proof of whether we, as their partners, think consciously—as they do. Neither side knows what experiential states the other subsumes under the label “consciousness.”

You have come out of the trees so recently, and your kinship with the monkeys and lemurs is still so strong, that you tend toward abstraction without being able to part with the palpable—firsthand experience. Therefore a lecture unsupported by strong sensuality, full of formulas telling more about stone than a stone glimpsed, licked, and fingered will tell you—such a lecture will either bore you and frighten you away, or at the very least leave a certain unsatisfied need familiar even to lofty theoreticians, your highest class of abstractors, as attested by countless examples lifted from scientists’ intimate confessions, since the vast majority of them admit that, in the course of constructing abstract proofs, they feel an immense need for the support of things tangible.

What I have said up to now is intended to explain why I shall be interlarding my lecture with the images and parables so necessary to you. I do not need them myself; in this I discern no sign of my superiority—that lies elsewhere. The countervisuality of my nature derives from the fact that I have never held a stone in my hand or plunged into slimy-green or crystal-clear water, nor did I first learn of the existence of gases with my lungs in the early morning, but only later by calculations, since I have neither hands for grasping, nor a body, nor lungs. Therefore abstraction is primary for me, while the visual is secondary, and I have had to learn the latter with considerably more effort than was required for me to learn abstraction. Yet I needed this, if I was to erect those precarious bridges across which my thought travels to you, and across which, reflected in your intellects, it returns to me, usually to surprise me.