Termite art, or Wallace's Wittgenstein. (David Foster Wallace)

If you do know that there is one hand, we'll grant you all the rest

It's a myth that truth is stranger than fiction. Actually they're about equally strange.

Reality Termites vs. the White Elephants

Might I not believe that once, without knowing it, perhaps in a state of unconsciousness, I was taken away from the earth - that other people even know this, but do not mention it to me?

The more you live with a pomo text, the less pomo it becomes. Think, for instance, of your first magic-carpet ride through William Gibson's Neuromancer back in 1984. Of the downright glee you experienced in the face of that white-hot language, roller-coaster narrative speed, spaghetti-convolution plot brain-burning dive into that resplendently amazing realm of virtual reality called cyberspace. Of the kick in the head you got realizing here was a writer dealing with subjects you just never saw dealt with in fiction before: computer hackers jacking into consoles with all the intensity of wall-banging sex, multinationals making ideas like national boundaries seem antique as bell-bottoms, affectless cyber-outlaws creeping along the undersides of environmentally and morally comatose cityscapes.

Only then you went back and read it again. Maybe you even found yourself writing an essay trying to explain just how jazzed up about it you got. Maybe you even tried to teach it. And the thing was (don't get me wrong here) it remained a great book. It still grabbed you by the the, still spoke to a whole generation of kids that didn't just read science fiction but actually lived it. But you know that language? Somehow it seemed more transparent the second time through, didn't it? You picked up the rhythms easier, intuitively learned Gibson's sleight of hand with those jump-cuts, how he introduced future-words (the Sprawl, a coffin) on one page and then slipped in the definition of them (the Boston-Atlanta metropolitan axis, a small tubular hotel room) a couple of pages down the line. And the narrative pace? It was still there, except now you knew where it was going. You had this sense of logical movement. Plus you'd been watching MTV and reading Kathy Acker and going to Cronenberg films an extra year, and so that pace didn't seem quite as fast as it once had. And what were you thinking of about the plot? It's just this simple love affair between these two artificial intelligences. No big deal. Throw in a heist which you've seen a million times on TV and you've got it. The virtual reality bit? Well, now there's The Lawnmower Man. You might as well go to McDonald's for all the innovation you'll find there. And computer hackers are just those people you read about in Mondo 2000 all the time. And who doesn't know that national boundaries are falling apart, that multinationals are taking over the power vacuum? You watch CNN, right? Not to mention you have this real bad feeling, looking at those techno-sleezoid characters again, that you've seen them all before somewhere. Which you have. Bret Easton Ellis, Jay McInerney, and the other Brat Packers have done the same affectless-amoral-urban-underbelly-dweller number more than I can: to think about even if they didn't set it in a near-future world. And was there really a time when environmental destruction seemed a provocatively new topic?

All I'm saying is that people like to make sense of things. It's in their nature. How long can any of us, after all, actually five in a state of total Pynchonesque anti-paranoia, Baudrillardian schizophrenia? We'd never get our essays written on time, our magazines published, our classes taught, our exams graded, our children raised. The more we experience a text, pomo or otherwise the more we discover patterns, shapes, connections, resonances, systems. These help us interpret it, make it our own.(3)