Sandpapering the conscious mind with William Gibson

[s~Z]

Sandpapering the conscious mind with William Gibson
Interview By Peter Darling

full text of interview: http://www.scifi.com/sfw/issue146/interview.html

In other interviews, you've talked about the nature of the book industry. Do
pressures from the industry affect what you write or how you write it?

Gibson: No, I almost wish they could. I just don't have enough conscious
control over what I do. I mean, I'd like to be able to make sound commercial
decisions, but really the part of me that's talking to you right now has
almost
nothing to do with the actual generation of one of these texts. They're
products of the unconscious, to the extent that they work at all. To the
extent
that they don't work--that's the part that I'm consciously responsible for!
[Laughs.]
Gibson: Well, E.M. Forster once said that if a novelist was in control of
plot
and character, he really wasn't doing his job. And I took that very much to
heart. So for me the hardest part about writing is getting to the place
where I
completely give up and surrender, and admit that I can't do it. And that's
when
it starts to happen, and all I can do is watch it.

These pathways sort of open up on their own.

Gibson: Yeah, well I think that what happens is that in the course of
writing
on a very regular basis, the membrane between conscious and unconscious gets
sandpapered down paper-thin, so there can be, like, ruptures. And then this
stuff emerges that the conscious mind could never make up. For me, the
trouble
with too much genre SF is that it's so obviously the product of the
conscious
mind. I'm just not very interested in that.

So is it coming from collected personal experience, or is it coming from
some
sort of larger collective unconscious?

Gibson: I think it's just my unconscious, which probably isn't...it's unique
but it probably isn't all that different from someone else's. I don't
necessarily think that all unconscious minds are of a piece,
literally--although there is a certain metaphorical truth to that, and you
can
sometimes navigate in life as though that were the case.

In this latest book you write a lot about the idea of obsession. A lot of
your
characters have these little obsessive tendencies, or they're completely
obsessed by one thing--I'm thinking of Laney. Do you think the creative
impulse
itself is a form of obsession?

Gibson: I think there are definitely pathological aspects to it. Otherwise
what
would make someone sit in a basement and type for the majority of their
waking
hours? It's a very weird thing to do. It doesn't feed you or offer sexual
gratification. [Laughs] It doesn't do any of those things. It's a cultural
activity, in the sense of Brian Eno's definition of culture, which is all
those
things that we do which we don't really have to.

In your writing I sense this acute appreciation of these underlying patterns
within complex systems, these huge unseen structures which are really
driving
events on the surface. It's kind of a Zen idea. What got you thinking about
that--the larger patterns underneath?

Gibson: I think it's my very, very superficial and imperfect take on chaos
theory and fractal geometry. What I know about that is as much as you could
learn walking around in this bookstore and looking at the covers of books
about
it. That's really all there is to it. I sort of have a hunch that that's
what
the structure of reality is. There really isn't any more to it than that,
except that it's very much mine. I'm just sort of writing from experience,
and
I've worked out a couple of science fictional metaphors to back it up. But
it's
not like I'm presenting it as a scientific theory or even a
pseudo-scientific
theory. It's just a sort of metaphor for how I experience reality. I think
these books are all, for me, just metaphors of how I experience reality.
Laney's probably a more conscious metaphor in that what he does with the
nodal
points is sort of like what I see myself really doing in that part of my
work
that some people regard as predictive. There are several places in these
books
where Laney says: "Look, I can't predict the future. But I am sensitive to
some
areas from which change is emerging." I think that's pretty much the best we
can do these days, because change is both exponential and in some weird,
either
new or newly revealed way, out of control. You know, who's running the show?
Well, nobody. That's why conspiracy theories are so popular. Conspiracy
theories are big because they're comforting. Any conspiracy is infinitely
less
multiplex than the real deal, which is sort of multiplex to the point of
being
unknowable.

About this sort of "Zen" slant, this holistic view of reality that you're
bringing across ... this phrase that I really love from All Tomorrow's
Parties,
"Dirty is God." Is that a metaphor for this idea?

Gibson: I lifted it from somewhere, and offhand I can't remember where. It's
probably a song title. It's either a song title or the name of a band. I'm
aware when I write these books--that people will--it's sort of the nature of
the mammalian mind to interpret this information as though it made sense.
That's part of the pleasure of the text, when people read one of these
books.
But that doesn't mean that on my side of the fence it's going to make that
kind
of sense. I take perverse pleasure in plugging bits like that in, and giving
maybe a passing thought to what someone will imagine it might mean. But it's
really sort of surrealist-slash-naturalist texture. It's puzzling in the way
the world is puzzling.

In one part of All Tomorrow's Parties you suggest that alternative cultures
are
becoming co-opted before they can even be considered alternative. In a few
years, do you think there are going to be any Bohemias left for the
underground
to escape to?

Gibson: I'm not sure there is one now, in the traditional sense. It's like
straight people have become the endangered species. It's like at the end of
the
century, everybody's hip. That's kind of a new ball game. I'm very
interested
in that.

Do you think that technological advancement is the next stage of human
evolution? Or is that putting it too simply?

Gibson: I suspect that looking back from the future, that where we're living
now, we're living in the very, very late pre-post-human epoch. I kind of
take
it for granted that our great-grandchildren will regard us as a sort of
precursor species. That they won't think of us as human and if we could see
them, we probably wouldn't think of them as human either. Or, we just
wouldn't
understand, any more than my great-great-grandfather could understand what
I'm
about and what this world is about.

Do you think there's a limit to this acceleration and fragmentation of
culture,
this sort of exponential acceleration?

Gibson: I don't know. One possibility is that idea of the technological
singularity, which I gleefully borrowed from Vernor Vinge via Stewart Brand.
That's not really a limit. That's a point beyond which everything becomes
unknowable, and which we just wouldn't be able to process. There's just no
way
of saying whether there's limits there or not. In terms of what we could
understand, that would be a kind of absolute limit, like the lip of a black
hole. Once human history goes over that, who knows? In any case, that's the
point at which science fiction is over. [Laughs.]