The king of ancient Persia, Xerxes, ordered the sea to be whipped for drowning his horse.

It was not the sea that drowned the unfortunate animal, but the carcass of Xerxes himself. He would have climbed into a boat, onto a raft, or sailed on water-skins bubbles, and his horse would not have drowned!

As is usual with people, descendants of cannibals: They are always looking for the “guilty” from the outside, instead of honestly taking the blame for stupidity, malice and meanness on themselves.

Historical background.

Sketches on the theme of the idiotic novel “Solaris”, despite the fact that I love and honor the talent of Stanislav Lem and consider him my spiritual daddy and teacher.

But even such a great talent of the most original thinker DOES NOT GUARANTEE ANYONE from mistakes, stupidities and ridiculous misconceptions.

Because we are all just human beings, not machines that are hardware-preprogramed for nothing but genius.

Rather, the malicious stupidity and stupidity of self-worship…

Isn’t it?

So, the Thinking Ocean, the only giant inhabitant of the planet Solaris.

Does he know the feeling of pain?

I answer with confidence: Yes!

Why?

Because ANY living being (starting from unicellular amoebas and algae) MUST BE EXPERIENCING SOME KIND OF DANGER SIGNAL FOR THEIR EXISTENCE! If this were not the case, such a creature WOULD NOT KNOW what the danger is, what the damage to its body is, and therefore it would be unviable and its existence would end very quickly. Such a creature would be like a dead stone. Who “doesn’t care” whether it falls and breaks, whether it is flooded with red-hot lava, where it melts, whether it gets into a certain cavity with acid, which slowly corrodes it, etc.

That is, as an obligatory SENSATION, a danger SIGNAL, any living being should have a feeling of “pain” or some similar sensation of acute discomfort!

According to Lem, a certain thermonuclear rocket (needless to say, people’s technology will not be very reliable in the distant future!!!), which fell into the Ocean and burned dozens of square kilometers of his body, did not cause him the slightest reaction.

This is the Ocean that, according to Lem’s ridiculous idea, PENETRATED with ITS most subtly sensitive and focused CONSCIOUSNESS into the hidden depths of human consciousness and scanned all sorts of long-standing emotions, sensations and thoughts there!!!

This one micro-episode in the novel already shows that it was written with Lem’s complete thoughtlessness!

It is clear that the Ocean MUST have had an extraordinarily developed sensitivity and selectivity. So how could he NOT FEEL the terrible flame of a thermonuclear explosion?

Lem introduced this stupid episode with one purpose: To add a cheap MYSTERY to the Ocean’s behavior, although he is a doctor by profession, and who better than him to understand that there cannot be such a LIVING BEING!

This is not a tenant in a changing world!

But after all, when Lem answered questions about Solaris, he repeated one phrase with dull stubbornness:

THE UNKNOWN AWAITS US IN SPACE!

The motto is: IGNORAMUS ET IGNORABIMUS!

We don’t know and we WON’t find out!

And, if so, then “cosmic paths are inscrutable!”

Then what is all this self-satisfied delight in the illusory omnipotence of our anthropocentrically inflated intellect?

The incomprehensible exists just FOR US to challenge our minds: FIGURE IT OUT!

Stanislav Lem prudently avoids the slightest delving into the THOUGHTS and FEELINGS of the Ocean, into its paleontology and evolution.

How did it come about?

From what?

Wasn’t it “earlier” a certain MULTITUDE of beings who, in the process of a peculiar evolution characteristic ONLY of CERTAIN VERY SPECIFIC conditions in the Solaris planetary system, caused this gradual merger, since only THIS provided the best opportunities for qualitative and quantitative growth and, in general, existence?

After all, something similar happened once on Earth: Single-celled creatures began, perhaps by chance at the beginning, to unite into some kind of symbiotic colonies, which gradually merged into a syncytium or a single organism and acquired a COMMON GENETICS. But on Earth, according to the empirical law of LIFE, MANY such creatures began to develop at once! Because the colonies were different in the Archean Ocean, and the physico-chemical conditions in it were also very different.

The general trend line – the emergence of certain symbiotic conglomerates from individual unicellular cells – has been preserved everywhere (on Earth), and a variety of specific conditions have caused many DIFFERENT multicellular conglomerates!

But, nevertheless, how did the Oean of Solaris arise?

WHAT if we assume some kind of Earth-like evolution that facilitated the development of some unicellular progenitors of the Ocean and their unification into ONE giant multicellular entity? Since there is ONLY ONE, does it mean (by analogy) that we come to the conclusion that the physico-chemical conditions on the planet Solaris have been EXACTLY the SAME since the origin of life on it?

If we assume the opposite, then again: Why was the universal law of any life violated – the preference for quantity over quality? However, this question can also be asked in the case of some ideal and completely identical conditions on Solaris since ancient times. MANY IDENTICAL ORGANISMS could have arisen then! Self-sufficient! Why the hell would they merge into one mass?

Moreover, for the “nutrition”, for example, the synthesis of minerals of the planet into the body of the Ocean, the light energy of the star is needed. And it is clear that many MICRO-OceanS would have an incomparably larger contact SURFACE with the outside world than a single giant drop. And even one Ocean could absorb the radiant energy of a star much more if it had many mushroom-shaped tentacles, which, being located high above the surface of the Ocean, would be much larger in area than the surface of the planet flooded with it, and could, for the most part, always face the star with their surface, regardless of the rotation of the planet!

A hack of thoughtlessness!

About the pain.

Let’s say that the Ocean possessed a certain ability to total self-anesthesia. As soon as he felt that something was INVADING his body, he immediately turned off any sensory connection of this area with the rest of his body and “brain”, and therefore the rocket did not have the slightest effect on him. But she didn’t just fall, crushing and destroying decillions of his LIVING CELLS, but then exploded in a THERMONUCLEAR explosion. Even if the Ocean turned off any sensitivity in this area, he COULDN’T have predicted that this rocket would also explode thermonuclearly!

Then the following assumption: HE KNEW IN ADVANCE WHAT would happen, and therefore was able to “turn off” a huge area of his body …

That is, like some people, in rare seconds of their lives, the gates opened from Superconsciousness to Consciousness and he received information about the future from Temporal Waves?

Truly: “The Moment of VISION for which a lifetime is often too short.”

Evelyn Waugh, “The Loved One.”

m not even talking about the fact that a being capable of synthesizing copies of living people from something has such capabilities to prevent some primitive rocket from falling into it, as well as completely eliminate its explosion somewhere! Here, Lem’s ends don’t meet, and he himself, without noticing and getting entangled in his own fantasies, contradicts himself!

Such a mighty OCEAN of power and knowledge will never allow, possessing the forces of nature unknown to people, that something falls into it and then explodes thermonuclearly!

Now let’s imagine OURSELVES as this Ocean.

Let this explosion be for a desensitized part of our body, like a hair stye for us. IT DOESN’T HURT!

But surely THIS CAN HAPPEN AGAIN on the scale of an entire planet?

This scum, humans, can poison me with all its radiation, dumping a thousand of these thermonuclear missiles into me, as long as these two-legged plague bacilli have enough of them! Then, as the Ocean, I would immediately expel these creatures not only from the planet or from my star system, but also from this part of the galaxy in general. And it’s easier for me to do this by synthesizing in their brains the BASIC panic INSTINCT of fear of space travel in general! Let them sit on their lousy planet and drop thermonuclear charges on each other, thereby ridding the universe of such stupid and predatory parasites!

It was my feeble attempt to develop only one aspect of a silly novel: Falling into the Ocean and a thermonuclear rocket explosion.

And frolicking AFTER SUCH a thing in order to create some kind of neutrino twins, and even easily exposed with the help of a primitive microscope by the stupid human brains themselves, this is not an occupation for a Thinking Ocean, but only for a brainless oligophrenic!

And most importantly, what Lem could think about and WRITE with his characteristic originality: Does not the “Law of Life”, namely, create MANY INDEPENDENT organisms, instead of one, albeit knowledgeable, multi-talented and multi-powerful, a certain universal principle of EVIL! After all, the Ocean will not bite and devour ITSELF, because it is very painful and suicidally dangerous for him. And when there are many, many DIFFERENT creatures, all of whose senses ARE CLOSED TO EVERYONE IN THEIR OWN SHELL, then EATING, TORTURING AND KILLING OTHERS IS NOT PAINFUL AND NOT SCARY!

In «Solaris», he would have been able to collide these two tendencies: A multitude of self–contained beings, which means complete indifference to anyone OUTSIDE of HIMSELF, or the uniqueness of a being to whom his pain and life are dear and therefore he will not eat himself!

The ancient Greeks, however, came up with such a punishment for King Erisichton of Thessaly. He cut down a hundred-year-old oak tree in the grove where the beloved DRYADS of the goddess of fertility Demeter lived. For which he was punished with an insatiable hunger and, in the end, began to tear his own body!

(Medically speaking, he should have died from a ruptured stomach.)

And yet, it’s sad that Lem, having taken an interesting and sociable topic for thinking, turned it into a boring and meaningless novel.

Faciant meliora potentes.

27 II 2025