INTRODUCTION

 I have always perceived science fiction as a paradox for the following reason: science, by definition, cannot be fiction, and fiction, by definition, can never be science.  But out of this joyful paradox an entire literary style emerges: the style of a fantastic science that does not yet exist.  The music of the future.  The future of dreamed fact.

Now imagine for a moment that someone is able to prove that God's creation of the universe - with everything that goes along with it - is the result of a fantastic science, a science which is predicated on its own superfluousness, whereby it drops its product, mankind, into freedom.  The "light" of science fiction is now cast onto the history of Creation and the "Lost Paradise".

And now imagine for a moment that someone was to write this story down in poetic language: as an explanation in verse.  Of course it now becomes clear what I am trying to get at, for this is exactly what Ulea has done in her Treatise.  She has written a didactic poem, a veritable Paradise Lost, but from a point of view that distinctly belongs to "our" turn-of-the-century.  There is no more regret, however, for this lost Paradise.  The devil now also escapes discussion, for even Satan has become lost.  Now one only speaks of angels - and of the person who associates himself with them.  In this case, it is even more than a mere association.

Treatise is certainly not "dark poetry" in the style of Waste Land (T.S. Eliot) or Poema bez geroja (Anna Akhmatova).  One could certainly say that Ulea’s is a modern style of poetry.  The story she tells is one of the most famous there: Adam and Eve, the expulsion from Paradise, and everything that came as a result.  However, this old story is told from a new point of reference: a determined Universe, from which God maintains his distance, in order to give freedom to mankind.  Mankind then emerges from this indefinable reference point, and does not even need Paradise.  The constant presence of an angel - one of "God's robots", whose origin is not accounted for in the Bible - replaces the vision of a utopian paradise.  This is reason enough for the poet to jump in.

   I leave it to others to debate whether or not Ulea is a religious poet.  While God is constantly a topic of discussion, it does not seem to be a God to which one can pray.  God stands for the legitimacy of his creation, he is only there as the complete product of his creation, from which Adam emerges into freedom: not determined, but therefore taken over by his conscience.  The angels, some say, are what were "left over" from God after he gave mankind freewill: bodiless plumage-mutants of the intelligible.

I present Ulea to the "angelic" reader now.  Expect a type of wit that never becomes irony, and, in a crafty way, also remains serious.    

Horst-Jürgen Gerigk,

University of Heildelberg

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