Hi, David Thomas -
Your name makes me think of a burger chain with a relevant motto. : )
Chain's name is another synchronicity ... wonder if they ever eat there, and
exchange a secret smile ...
We start in a wee little rainstorm with the narrator checking his
watch,....
I'm not trying to be pedant.
I know, and appreciate. The "start" to me isn’t sentence one or paragraph
one. It's a zone or area cohered by a value-energy. But your point stands:
if I'd been handed a secretly-rewritten ZAMM with rain in paragraph three, I
wouldn't have noticed - I'd have liked the artistic connection to the
novel's end. Someone recorded a Zen master's last minute: "He inked the
character 'dream' on the paper, and died." Camille Paglia in Berkeley said,
"Art is dreaming in public space." Imagine dreamy David Lynch as the
director of The Big Bob Pirsig Z+L Movie. Man!
It's just interesting how we each grab a screen capture images of "the
start", "key points", and "the end".
sq! The Bergsonian cinematograph. At some point the card-sharp's shuffled
cards blur together.
They may or may not be as they are "really" portrayed in the text.
Well said. We remember our narrations of remembered narratives - which are
often of narrated remembered narratives ... which are ... There's some
patterning. (Rather like how Plato set the Eidos of the Good up top. Surely
the Good patterned everything. But where's the Good get its Good? Do we not
run into a bootstrapping problem?) Think ZAMM tries to reconcile Aristotle
and Plato? Coleridge said that every man's born either Aristotelian or
Platonist. So the Z-narrator and Phaedrus had to be different men to bring
them together with a thunderclap!
and end with an opening out to the majestic view of the Bay, with the
well-ordered city of happiness...
Yeah my image for "the end" is rolling over the Golden Gate Bridge into
San Fran, but that's not mentioned.
I've lately come to really appreciate the tacit, the unsaid, in art.
Sometimes pianists will leave out some things the composer indicates. "It
pleases" me to imagine them playing at infinite pianissimo there.
The last town mentioned is Novato. But in San Rafael, they could have
taken the 540 into Richmond then Oakland and your "well order city of
happiness" would then be seriously difficult to visualize.
Here's my reasoning. Can't say if reasoning came first or the image provoked
the reasoning, but since I live in that area the route was familiar before I
redrove it a few years ago specifically to visualize the final bit of ZAMM.
The last route-words read: "We pass through Asti and Santa Rosa, and
Petaluma and Novato, on the freeway that grows wider and fuller now,
swelling with cars and trucks and busses full of people, and soon by the
road are houses and boats and the water of the Bay." Route 101, as we know,
is the freeway from the north through Novato, and since they stayed on "the
freeway" they wouldn’t have turned onto another one - namely, the 580 that
goes off to Oakland. Route 101 and Route 1 overlap after 1, coming east from
the sea, skirts Mt Tam and slips down to join 101 just after Strawberry and
just before Sausalito. The only place where the two-lane-each-way freeway
grows wider, fuller, with peopleful busses (most likely tourists coming up
from Sausalito) was the curved downward grades approaching the Golden Gate
Bridge after the Marin County tunnel - which gives the view of San
Francisco. I would note also the acceleration of general detail in ZAMM
after Novato: there's a quickening of things after the list (which covers a
lot of ground itself, in the rapidity of epiphanaic happiness: the houses
and boats and Bay waters proper are seen as one comes toward Sausalito. It's
like an accelerating camera pan at the triumphal end of a movie, showing
liberation from past circumstance.
MRB
http://www.fuguewriter.com
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