AtDTDA: 19 Flash Forward in Venice. 523/575

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

          Bibliomancy is the use of books in divination. The 
          method of employing sacred books (especially specific 
          words and verses) for 'magical medicine', for removing 
          negative entities, or for divination is universal in all 
          religions of the world. "What the Vedas were to the 
          Hindus, Homer to the Greeks, and Ovid and Virgil to 
          the Romans, the Old Testament was to the Jews, the 
          Old and New Testaments to the Christians, and the 
          Koran and Hafiz to the Mohammedans." (quoted 
          from Jewish Encyclopedia)

          Sometimes this term is used in the same way as 
          Stichomancy and Libromancy, which is a form of divination 
          that seeks to know the future by randomly selecting a 
          passage from a book, frequently a sacred text.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliomancy

So I've got this copy of Against the Day, all marked up with little multicolored 
post-it tabs, with glittering multi-colored  stick-on stars and shit, and how the 
hell do you expect to find anything if every page is marked? You sneeze on 
it with a snoot full of coffee, that's how and on page 575 to be exact:

          "It was not quite the Venice older folks remembered. The Campanile 
          had collapsed a few years before and had not yet been rebuilt, and 
          stories about its fall had multiplied. There reports of an encounter 
          in the sky, described by some as angelic. . . . "

>From the tattered casebook of the Chumps of Choice:

          Through a series of moment-flash descriptions, it becomes apparent 
          there was a sky battle between The Inconvenience and The Bol'shaia 
          Igra, seen by only the ubiquitous background figures (lasagnoni) in 
          scenes such as these. There is another presence, "some visitation" 
          during the battle, a "lethal impedance in the air". The battle rages, 
          the Campanile comes into range, then Padzhitnoff "saw the ancient 
          structure separate cleanly into four-brick groupings... rotating and 
          translating in all available modes". The Campanile is falling - in the 
          shape of a Tetris game!

http://tinyurl.com/2nrc4o

. . . .anyway, that's back around 256, noted in the build-up as:

          . . . .something that was to transcend both Chums and Tovarishchi, 
          nearly a material thing, a lethal impedance in the air, as if 
          something malevolent were making every exertion to take form 
          and be released upon the world in long, dry cracking percussions, 
          as if jarring the fabric of four-space itself.

. . . .and, yeah, I know Tetris can be noisy, but my real point is that here 
Dally is hooked up with time-traveller Hunter Penhallow:

          . . . .who had begun showing up every morning on her fondamenta 
          with an easel. . . . 

          ". . . .the light's good here"

          "But—"

          "All right." A minute or two of pencil work. "It wouldn't matter. Imagine 
          that inside this labyrinth you see is [sic.] another one, but on a 
          smaller scale, reserved only, say, for cats, dogs and mice—and 
          then, inside that, one for ants and flies, then microbes and the 
          whole invisible world—down and down the scale, for once the 
          labyrinthine principle is allowed, don't you see, why stop at any 
          scale in particular? It's self-repeating. Exactly the spot where we 
          are now is a microcosm of all Venice."

. . . .and back we go to 523:

          They paused at Venice in the fog in the middle of the night to 
          allow for some brief ghostly transaction. Dally woke, peered 
          out the porthole and saw a flotilla of black gondolas, each with 
          a single lantern, each bearing a single cloaked passenger, 
          who all stood solidly gazing ahead into  something only they 
          seemed to understand. This is Venice? she remembered 
          thinking, then went back to sleep.

. . . .and back again to 575:

          He spoke calmly, as if she would understand what all this meant, 
          and in fact, because Merle used to talk like this, she wasn't totally 
          puzzled and was even able to refrain from rolling her eyes, Inhaling 
          deeply on her cigarette stub, flicking it expressively into the rio, 
          "That go for Venetians, too?"

          Sure enough, it got her the once-over. . . .

. . . .and eventually [577]

          ". . . .I wish I could remember. Anything. Whatever the 
          time-reversal of 'remembering' is. . . ."

Why don't we ask Proust?

          The day on which I heard the distant, far-away sound of the 
          bell in the Combray garden was a land-mark in that enormous 
          dimension which I did not know I possessed. I was giddy at 
          seeing so many years below and in me as though I were 
          leagues high.

http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/p/proust/marcel/p96t/chapter3.html

http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/p/proust/marcel/p96t/index.html

http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/p/proust/marcel/