"Stanislaw Lem - Ijon Tichy 05 - Peace on Earth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lem Stanislaw)

you want to know what happened to me, you'll have to read this whole story, word by word, even when
it doesn't make sense. The sense will come, though probably not completely because you can get to the
bottom of it only by callotomy, just as you can't know what it's like to be an otter, say, or a turtle without
being turned into an otter or a turtle, and then you can't communicate it because animals don't talk or
write. Normal people, of which I was one most of my life, don't understand how a split-brain person can
be himself and look like himself and speak about himself in the first person singular and walk normally
and talk coherently while his right hemisphere doesn't know what his left hemisphere is doing (except for
mushroom barley soup in my case). Some say that callotomy must have existed in Biblical times because
it is written that the left hand needn't know what the right hand is doing, but I always thought that was a
figure of speech.
One character followed me for two months trying to wring the truth out of me. He would visit me
at the most uncivil hours to ask me how many of me there really were. The medical textbooks I gave him
didn't help him any more than they had helped me. I loaned him the books only to get rid of him. How
did I meet him? I had gone to buy shoes without laces, the kind with Velcro on the top, because if my left
side didn't want to go for a walk, it was impossible to tie my shoes. As soon as I'd tie a shoe, my left
hand would untie it. So I went to buy a pair of running shoes with Velcro fasteners, not that I'm one of
those jogging types, I just wanted to teach the right hemisphere of my brain a lesson because at that time
I couldn't communicate with it at all and I was furious and covered with bruises. I muttered something to
the salesman to excuse my erratic behavior which wasn't actually mine. Then, as he knelt before me with
the shoehorn, I grabbed his nose with my left hand. My left hand, that is, grabbed his nose, and I tried to
explain this to him, the difference, figuring that even if he thought I was deranged (how could a shoe
salesman know anything about callotomy?) he would still sell me the shoes. No reason for a madman to
go barefoot. Unfortunately the salesman was a philosophy student working part-time in the shoe store
and he was fascinated.
"Mr. Tichy!" he now yelled in my apartment. "According to logic, you're either singular or you're
plural! If your right hand is pulling up your pants and the left hand interferes, it means that behind each
stands a separate half of the brain that thinks its own thoughts and refuses to cooperate with the other.
Because hands and feet don't go around fighting each other on their own!"
That's when I gave him the Gazzanigi. The best research done on the split brain and the results of
that operation are in Professor Gazzanigi's book, The Bisected Brain, published in 1970 by Appleton
Century Crofts, Educational Division, at the Meredith Corporation, and may my brain never grow
together again if I'm inventing Michael Gazzanigi or his father to whom he dedicated his monograph and
whose name is Dante Achilles Gazzanigi, also a doctor (M.D.). If you don't believe me, go to the nearest
medical bookstore and ask for a copy.
The man who hounded me asking over and over what it's like living as two learned nothing from
me. All he accomplished was to drive both my hemispheres to unanimous fury because I grabbed him
with both hands by the neck and threw him out the door. This brief armistice of my dissociated being
sometimes occurs, but I don't know why.
The young philosopher then telephoned me in the middle of the night, hoping that half-asleep I
would spill my incredible secret. He asked me, ignoring the colorful language I was hurling at him, to
place the receiver first to the left ear then to the right. He said it wasn't his questions that were idiotic but
the state I was in, which defied all anthropological and existential concepts of man as a rational being
conscious of his own rationality. He'd probably just finished his finals, that philosophy student, because he
threw Hegel at me and Descartes (I think therefore I am, not we think therefore we are), and Husserl and
Heidegger, to prove that my condition was impossible because it contradicted the greatest minds who for
thousands of years, beginning with the Greeks, studied the conscious ego, and here comes someone with
a severed commissure of the brain, as fit as a fiddle except his right hand doesn't know what his left hand
is doing, likewise with the legs, and while some experts say that he has consciousness on the left side only
and that the right is a soulless computer, others believe he has two consciousnesses but the right one can't
speak because the Broca's area is in the left frontal lobe, but a third group proposes two partially