Sunday, May 8, 2011

Head shots and body blows

The pace picks up from this point, courtesy of Monsieur Poincare. That is deliberate. I want the reader to stay off-balance—thwacked about the head by a Zen monk with a stick. No time to think. You don’t want to think. You want to side-step that mechanism if enlightenment is to be your goal.

As a result, I expect readers to become disconcerted following on from
Everything you know is wrong. Anyone would, as they observe their world being dismantled. Then I advise that one should not trust one’s senses—this on top of an exhortation to rely only on the self and keep one’s distance from god, guru, systems of thinking and the notion of enlightenment. Well, what else can you expect?
 

It’s like boxing or billiards. In a rapid-fire sequence we bounce from one thing to the next. No time to catch our breath or regain our orientation. We’ve got reincarnation on the brain, Theo leaping out of the woodwork, and there’s a 24-hour rebirth thing going on. Isn’t this a doozy of a dilemma? Even Tom Cruise wouldn’t take this mission on in a hurry, I’ll bet.
 

My magnum opus leaps from Poincare’s nightmare to a worse one, and that mutates into a horrible hybrid of movies and TV shows: E.T., The Truman Show, 24, Twilight Zone, Mission Impossible and Groundhog Day. Brrr! But these stories aren’t just cultural references.  They are narratives, and it’s a narrative that we home in on for the remaining couple of dozen pages.

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