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She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien’s theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.
She’s a design-free zone, a one-woman school of anti whose very austerity periodically threatens to spawn its own cult.
Homo sapiens is about pattern recognition, he says. Both a gift and a trap.
Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which ‘now’ was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents’ have insufficient ‘now’ to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile.”
Far more creativity, today, goes into the marketing of products than into the products themselves, athletic shoes or feature films.
It’s as though the creative process is no longer contained within an individual skull, if indeed it ever was. Everything, today, is to some extent the reflection of something else.”
Apophenia, Win had declared it, after due consideration and in his careful way: the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things.
Paranoia, he said, was fundamentally egocentric, and every conspiracy theory served in some way to aggrandize the believer.
It will be like watching one of her own dreams on television. Some vast and deeply personal insult to any ordinary notion of interiority. An experience outside of culture.
“It’s more the way it is now than it’s ever been,” Cayce replies, a line of Dwight David Eisenhower’s that she sometimes resorts to when she has nothing whatever to offer.
Just now she wishes lives could be replaced as easily, but knows that that isn’t right. However odd things seem, mustn’t it be to exactly that extent of oddness that a life is one’s own, and no one else’s?
Does she feel liminal, now, or simply directionless?
And while comforting yourself with the symmetry of it all, he’d believed, you stood all too real a chance of missing the genuine threat, which was invariably less symmetrical, less perfect.
Now we say that everything Lenin taught us of communism was false, and everything he taught us of capitalism, true.”
Only the wound, speaking wordlessly in the dark.
Whole universes of blood and imagination, built over lifetimes in rooms like these, never to be seen. To die with their creators, and be swept out. Now Nora, what she does, it joins the sea.”
Perhaps it’s a meal in that country without borders that Bigend strives to hail from, a meal in a world where there are no mirrors to find yourself on the other side of, all experience having been reduced, by the spectral hand of marketing, to price-point variations on the same thing.
