No Maps for These Territories Page #5

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he was okay.

What about the rest of us?

Whats going to save the rest of us?

Acceptance.

Acceptance of the impermanence of being,

and acceptance of the the imperfect nature

of being.

Or possibly the perfect nature of being, depending on how one

how one looks at it.

Acceptance that this is not a rehearsal for the

that this is it.This is the deal. This is your life.

Basically, I dont know. You know, all the fridge magnets

of the New Age have a certain

a kernel of truth in them, I think.

What about religion?

I remember

consciously

consciously rejecting it

at some point when I was twelve,

or thirteen, or fourteen years old,

insofar as I decided that that was not

whatever

whatever might be going on,

it wasnt going on for me

in The Church.

That wasnt where it

wasnt where it was happening.

And thats kind of continued as a constant

for me,

that I dont feel like its happening in The Church.

Although, I think it canwhatever

It is, that it can happen there,

perhaps, you know, in spite of all odds.

I think of religions as

I think of religions as franchise operations.

Sort of like chicken, chicken franchises.

Andbut that doesnt mean

that theres no chicken, right?

Its difficult to

its difficult to articulate.

Actually, by the time you get it reduced to something,

by the time you get it reduced to something that that you can

you can talk about, you dont really

you dont really have anything.

I mean, language is such an extraordinary thing,

but at the same time, its just like

giant monkeys standing up and

making noises that sound like GOD.

Like, what does thatwhat does that convey?

Whats happiness to you?

Hmmm. Happiness is, I think

happiness is being in the moment,

and not beingnot living in anticipation,

and not living in recollection,

but being inin the moment.

Which is,

you knowsounds very simple, but the actual practice

of it can become incredibly complicated.

And I dont think anyone really achieves it

achieves it with any constancy.

When I first started trying to write,

I remember going to a

going to a professor of mine

and saying,

How do people do this?

How do people ever do this?

I dont understand

how do fiction writers do this?

And he looked at me.

He looked at me a while and then he said,

They have rich inner lives, I think.

It was extremely painful.

It was extremely strange andand painful.

And, I, in retrospect,

I dont really understand why I persisted.

I took it very seriously, and went away and started thinking about

what sort of rich inner life one would have to have.

I felt that I had no native

no native talent for it.

It came so it came so hard to me,

and yet I wanted, you know, I desperately wanted to be a writer,

and to be able to be a writer of fiction.

But why did you want to be a writer?

I dont know.

I really dont know. It was just,

you know, it was there.

I had beenI had been a reader all my life, you know?

And if

if you could make a living being a reader,

like, being a really good reader,

Id be, like, you know, really comfortably off

from being a reader,

and I wouldnt have had to become a writer

something like that.

Like many people who had been lifetime readers,

I had aspired to

to be a writer. But I dont know why.

What I found I had to do,

to start to write fiction, was to rediscover

the mechanism of daydreaming-as-play,

that I had had as a child.

And there arent too many activities

that resemble writing fiction.

I think a childs daydreams, or

someones masturbation fantasies, might be

might be the closest, you know,

in terms of using actual parts of the

parts of the brain.

Those are similarsimilar models.

I think the process ofof, uh, fantasies of anxiety,

probably, are a similarsimilar thing.

Imagining yourself having a very hard time,

and getting into a great detail in order to make it more

convincing and increase your anxiety.

That probably uses a uses some similar

takes up some similar territory in the brain.

I initially started

started by trying to write little units

units of fiction.

And I remember, you know, labouring for months

on end on an opening sentence,

and being very frustrated with it, and finally getting something:

this very long and over-elaborated

sentence, which went nowhere.

It was something like

something like

Seated each afternoon in the darkened screening room,

Halliday came to recognise the targetted

numerals of the Academy leader as

sigils preceding the dream state of film.

And I actually worked on that so long,

that I could still remember it,

remember it twenty-some years later.

And it went nowhere at all.

I mean, that was simply it.

It was like one of those Ballardian paragraph-stories.

nd it was very consciously Ballardian.

It was like a little, little pastiche of J.G. Ballard.

But it went nowhere, and I remember wondering about that.

Like, how did one introduce movement?

And I just kept kept going

kept going back to, you know,

kept going back to the

that activity, and trying different things.

Until, finally, it started, it started to move a little bit.

What I did with movementbecause

I became so frustrated with my inability to physically move the

characters through the imaginary narrative space,

that I actually developed an early form,

in my fiction, a sort of early form of imaginary

VR technology.

That served to, you know that sort of covered my ass,

in terms of not being able to move the characters,

cos they could simply change channels.

And it was some sort of recorded-memory technology.

And all they had to do was switch tapes,

and theyd be in a different

theyd be in a different place.

And I was spared the embarrassment of demonstrating

that I didnt know how to get them up and down stairs,

in and out of vehicles at that point.

So, in a way, that sort of invention began

began out of necessity and inexperience.

But it opened up an interesting territory.

Id gotten to a point

Id gotten to a point in my early fiction and, you know, were really talking, like, two or three

two or three attempted short stories and Id gotten

Id gotten to a point where I needed a buzzword.

I needed to replace the rocketship and the holodeck

with something else that would be a a signifier of technological change,

and that would provide me withwith a narrative engine,

and a territory in which the narrative could take place.

And I didnt realizeI dont think I realized that

quite what a tall order that was. And in the way that

people sometimes do, I solved the problem in a very offhand

in a very offhand way.

All I really knew about the word cyberspace

when I coined it was that it wasit seemed like an effective buzzword.

It was evocative and essentially meaningless.

It was very suggestive ofit was suggestive, of something,

but it had, like, no, you know...

no real semantic meaning, even for me, as I saw it emerge on the page.

But its not just the word, its the idea of a virtual reality inside a computer network.

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