Atdtda29: Presents succeed, 821

[Paul Nightingale]

{821.14-17] If there is an inevitability to arrival by water, he reflected,
as we watch the possibilities on shore being progressively narrowed at last
to the destined quay or slip, there is no doubt a mirror-symmetry about
departure, a denial of inevitability, an opening out from the point of
embarkation ...


The shot/reverse shot moment that returns the narrative to Cyprian's parting
from Yashmeen on 815. Cf. Yashmeen's departure by rail from Vienna:


[811.1-3] Leaving the Sudbahn, she gazed backward at iron convergences and
receding signal-lamps. Outward and visible metaphor, she thought for the
complete ensemble of "free choices" that define the course of a human life.


Hence ...


Presents succeed, encroaching upon one another. Nevertheless, however strong
the incoherence or possible opposition between successive presents, we have
the impression that each of them plays out 'the same life' at different
levels. This is what we call destiny. Destiny never consists in step-by-step
deterministic relations between presents which succeed one another according
to the order of a represented time. Rather, it implies between successive
presents non-localisable connections, actions at a distance, systems of
replay, resonance and echoes, objective chances, signs, signals and roles
which transcend spatial locations and temporal successions. We say of
successive presents which express a destiny that they always play out the
same thing, the same story, but at different levels: here more or less
relaxed, there more or less contracted. This is why destiny accords so badly
with determinism but so well with freedom: freedom lies in choosing the
levels.


From: Difference and Repetition, 83.


Meanwhile, from Bergson ...


For consciousness corresponds exactly to the living being's power of choice;
it is co-extensive with the fringe of possible action that surrounds the
real action: consciousness is synonymous with invention and with freedom.
Now, in the animal, invention is never anything but a variation on the theme
of routine. Shut up in the habits of the species, it succeeds, no doubt, in
enlarging them by its individual initiative; but it escapes automatism only
for an instant, for just the time to create a new automatism. The gates of
its prison close as soon as they are opened; by pulling at its chain it
succeeds only in stretching it. With man, consciousness breaks the chain. In
man, and in man alone, it sets itself free. The whole history of life until
man has been that of the effort of consciousness to raise matter, and of the
more or less complete overwhelming of consciousness by the matter which has
fallen back on it. The enterprise was paradoxical, if, indeed, we may speak
here otherwise than by metaphor of enterprise and of effort. It was to
create with matter, which is necessity itself, an instrument of freedom, to
make a machine which should triumph over mechanism, and to use the
determinism of nature to pass through the meshes of the net which this very
determinism had spread. But, everywhere except in man, consciousness has let
itself be caught in the net whose meshes it tried to pass through: it has
remained the captive of the mechanisms it has set up. Automatism, which it
tries to draw in the direction of freedom, winds about it and drags it down.
It has not the power to escape, because the energy it has provided for acts
is almost all employed in maintaining the infinitely subtle and essentially
unstable equilibrium into which it has brought matter. But man not only
maintains his machine, he succeeds in using it as he pleases.


From: Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, Henry Holt, 1913, 263-264.