A reality stranger than fiction

[Guy Ian Scott Pursey]

"Perhaps history this century [...] is rippled with gathers in its
fabric such that if we are situated [...] at the bottom of a fold, it's
impossible to determine warp, woof or pattern anywhere else. By virtue,
however, of existing in one gather it is assumed there are others,
compartmented off into sinuous cycles each of which come to assume
greater importance than the weave itself and destroy any continuity.
[...] Perhaps if we lived on a crest, things would be different. We
could at least see." (V., pp.155-156)

 

I remember when I first read it - blew me away.

 

Guy

 

________________________________

From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On
Behalf Of Mark Kohut
Sent: 10 September 2007 23:13
To: Dave Monroe
Cc: pynchon -l
Subject: Re: A reality stranger than fiction

 

TRP has something---in V.? GR?---about the "folds" of history very like,
no?

Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote: 

A reality stranger than fiction
Angela Bennie
September 7, 2007

WILLIAM GIBSON HAS a nodal theory of history. It is a little like the
astronomers' string theory but with knots in it.

There are certain points in history, Gibson says, where the world
switches course, "where all the balls in the game move and settle in
new positions". These nodal points are rare, he says, and quite random
and they might not even be recognisable as significant when they
occur.

Their causes and effects can even seem quite mysterious afterwards.
But whatever the circumstances of the event, the only thing that is
really clear to him is that, having reached the node, or the blip in
the historical course of human affairs, the world is set on an
irreversibly different course.

September 11, 2001, he says, was one of those events. "In some ways
September 11 was the true beginning of the 21st century," Gibson says.
He's speaking from Chicago late in the afternoon, one of his pit stops
in a gruelling tour across the United States to promote his new book,
Spook Country.

"And at this point it is still perhaps only our narrative. But the way
we have responded to it is changing things for other people in the
world, too. So it is now becoming part of their narratives and their
narratives will have different versions of the cause and its effects
of the event.

"So it is like this seismic shock, one whose waves are still moving up
the time line. At its epicentre is 9/11."

What he doesn't say is that this seismic shock changed the course of
his writing, too....

http://www.smh.com.au/news/books/a-reality-stranger-than-fiction/2007/09
/06/1188783376158.html

 

  

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