duffbert reviewed count zero, a william gibson book, and, well, i just had to read it, being a gibson fan myself.

i love gibson's stuff. unlike duffy, i've never had trouble following his story lines. but his comment: "the story-lines don't match up with the quality of the imagery", that is interesting. it is something i've worried about as i've been writing my own novel. i'm a poet at heart, but what i want to do is weave stories together.

truly great poetry is often steeped in image. i'm thinking of pablo neruda as i type this. there is a way in which a poet can write that surfaces images up from a part of the mind (which is probably located in the right hemisphere of the brain), and those images can communicate subtle truths that flower in infinite variety.

this is way to talk about metaphor, but for me there is a very real substance underneath that term.

if a poet can learn to see images and then write them out with strong fidelity, without interfering with them too much, the result can be astounding. a possibility exists in which the images can project truth straight out of the form of the image, dependent on the context the image surfaces within.

so what you end up with is an image that is quite literally a truth projector. or you could say that truth is projected through the image. that same truth could be projected through other images as well, and the contradictory poles of every truth could be projected through images that seem to be in opposition to one another.

people who think strongly in this way are not necessarily people who are thinking sequentially. an image is a pool you sort of float around in. it is not something that moves through time. time stops inside the image. there is no time inside these kinds of images, the kind that project truth. i want to say, time and space unfolds through image, even though it seems that images are a function of space and time. it's a particular way of thinking and conceiving.

story telling is more about time. people doing things to and with each other in a linear progression. the king's brother kills the king's children and serves them to the king at dinner. or whatever. those are events that happen in time, one after another. those events can, of themselves, be very powerful. i mean, that sentence i just wrote, that comes i think out of some old Greek play, that is a powerful sentence isn't it? your mind probably filled the images in for you, right? but that sentence is not image centric per se. people who think in images, who write in image heavy chunks, are not always great at making the bare bones of the plot shine through.

in gibson's case, according to duffy, the images are so dense that it is hard to see what is going on. man, i find that fascinating.

i think this style is appropriate to what gibson does, because he is talking about a near future (let's face it, it is already upon us), in which information is very dense. it is hard to see what is going on in the world around us because so much is going on, and we have access to all sorts of event driven data. gibson seems to be about the task of presenting characters who are learning to surf that stream of data and survive, and if they can, even find meaning. it is very much like he is writing about atavistic hunters who are faced with a bewildering jungle. there are so many sounds, so many things to see. how do you find your prey, how do you get home safely? how do you survive the encounter with that thing you are hunting? how do you survive brushes with other predators? now take that old struggle, which is almost unknown to us in the modern world, and immerse a normal, modern person into a jungle of data, where everything is morphing all the time, even things that are not supposed to morph, and watch what happens. that is gibson, at least to me. though it's been a while since i read him.

[as an aside: it strikes me that duffbert is himself a william gibson character. my god, how many books has this man read? how much information has his single mind parsed? i understand that he lives next to a library. i think he's become a library by now.]

this constant morphing of images can be seen in Ovid's Metamorphoses. i sent a chapter of the novel i'm working on to a man i'm proud to call a friend of mine, a guy named Eric Larsen. i'd never read Ovid, but after he read the chapter i sent him, he recommended i read Metamorphoses. so i did. or i should say, i am, i'm about in the middle of it now. every story ends with someone turning into a bird, or into a snake. every encounter a mortal has with a god ends with the mortal transforming into something, usually an animal. there are some things like that going on in my own writing, not exactly like that, but the basic thought process is there. it is a process that is image centric for sure.

so i've been struggling with how to put the story together in a way that is compelling from the standpoint of a story teller. i've got to keep my eye on the ball of that linear progression, at least within any particular chapter i'm writing. it is too easy for me to bask in that pool of images and forget to tell a story.

i'll be curious to see if people end up reacting to my stuff the way they react to gibson's. will they get lost in the images? i don't know. i feel a little like that character in Lady in the Water who only works out one side of his body all the time. as it happens, i've been doing this programming thing the past ten years or so, and i've given the left side of my brain quite a workout. it's as though i had no structure to start with, and forcing myself to think logically all these years has had an impact on me. so i'm hopeful that i will be able to include enough logical, linear structure in what i am doing that what i write will make sense, and be compelling for readers. but the place i'm most at home at is the world of image.