owl saw me

Museum of Vancouver

attention

"The blackbird could not find food in the eternal night and he desired light, and the earth lit up."

Time travel

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n17/fredric-jameson/in-hyperspace

But where did the genre come from? My own hypothesis is a very general one: namely, that the late 19th-century invention of SF correlates to Walter Scott’s invention of the modern historical novel in Waverley (1814), marking the emergence of a second – industrial – stage of historical consciousness after that first dawning sense of the historicity of society so rudely awakened by the French Revolution. David Wittenberg does much better than this, but his remarkable hypothesis is only one of the conceptual breakthroughs in this stimulating contribution to literary theory. I will dwell mainly on the three that interest me the most: the relationship of SF to modernism in the arts; the historical periodisation of the genre; and the dramatic challenge to narratology as a field, with implications for the theory of ideology as well as for the analysis of narrative structure itself (of which the time-travel story, with all its ineradicable paradoxes, suddenly becomes the fundamental paradigm). Nor is philosophy itself untouched by the fallout from these dramatic revisions: after all, the phenomenological ego is a temporal matter, and time itself one of its fundamental paradoxes, which neither Husserl nor Heidegger ever laid to rest.

shape of night

The Phenomenon of the Future

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
Gibson / Neuromancer

Over the world as it ends in decrepitude is a pale sky that may perhaps dissipate with the clouds - streaks of used sunsets that bleed into the dormant waters of a river, submerged beneath rays and drops. The trees are bored, and beneath their whitened foliage [whitened by the dust of time, not by the dust of roads], rises the tent of the Revealer of Things Past…
Mallarme / Divagations / 11

The sky is thin as paper here.
Burroughs / Cities of the Red Night


The narrow staircase pushes me into the attic where the wall paper is loose. There are no images because the room is itself an image.
The yellow-orange cloth wrapping the skylight seems to hold a fallen sun; a softly illuminating sun of about one meter diameter, flat like a coin. I sweat and dream, washed up on a cold beach at midday.

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.

Pynchon / Gravity's RAINBOW


‘The sea had receded and the ground was grey and brownish like the sky. Abstraction grey. Calmly, intensely, hopelessly, the ultimate abstraction took hold of me.’ It seems to me that the ‘abstraction grey’, which recalls Hegel’s ‘grey on grey’ of theory, is the place to begin not so much thinking the ‘future’ as thinking the present.

noys/ beradi 

"When philosophy paints its grey on grey, then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey on grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk." Philosophy of Right ( (1821), translated by T. M. Knox, (1952)) p. 13 

1

The sky had lifted at least thirty feet.

I sat there, not moving. The shock must have cracked the

pavement, my right hand fumbled in the rubble. As I breathed,

the silence stilled the explosion of stars whose sparks still

crackled in my head. The white lines in the pavement showed

dimly in the darkness: my hand left the ground, felt up my left

arm, up to my shoulder, back down my ribs to my hips: noth-

ing, I was intact, I could go on.

I stood up. Falling flat on my face, sprawled out like a cross, I

remembered that I had forgotten to check over my legs as well.

ASTRAGAL /sarrazin