The American Book of the Dead
Originally posted by Snow Fire Watches@Jul 26 2004, 09:48 PM
Maybe I got it wrong, but from the blog what I understood was Eugene wrote a fiction book which turned out to be non-fiction. Now he realizes he is channelling . . . interesting . . .
He is kinda spamming the boards though.
From the edge or maybe a little beyond . . .
SFW
I've written perhaps a dozen books, one of them a poem over a thousand pages long. Only two or three are in a form fit for revision, to say nothing of publication. One is being published, and the poem is just about finished. I also have
started to write many, many stories, some of them no longer than a few pages. Perhaps Eugene has discovered what I have: in the course of the creation of a piece of writing, you often have no idea what it is, how long it's going to be, or whether it's based mostly on fiction. Even stories supposed to be completely fiction are filled with converted autobiography.
But when he says he is from 2020, and makes this unequivocal, and invites communication about it (or is it just that he is inviting
customers?), he has either decided that the story is creating him, or that he is able to create reality by an act of the imagination. I think that this is the bind Boris found himself in, on the old Board. If the story is creating him, then the
story is able to create reality--fiction making nonfiction.
So the question is, are we to play host to this theory of timetravel-- that is, are we willing to entertain the idea that one can travel through time by an act of the imagination? As a corollary, are we willing to entertain the idea that things happen in reality which derive from no known physical or worldly source?
In a universe of parallel universes or timelines, it is plausible that Eugene has become a creature of his own story; Vonnegut used to play around with this idea, and had to go to the extent of killing off one of his own recurring characters, a science fiction writer named Kilgore Trout. Trout, by the way, has a science fiction novel you can buy at the bookstore; he is also a character invented by Vonnegut, and appears in his novels (e.g.,
Slaughterhouse Five;
Breakfast of Champions).
The mind itself has parallel universes, fictional experiences recorded as memories, fantasies which scarcely remain submerged, and interpretations of events entirely contradictory to what others recall. You would need the interaction of others to complete any number of inchoate narratives or suspicions or histories. This is why Titor needed to go online.
