Virtual objects belong essentially to the past...the virtual object is not a former present, since the quality of of the present and the modality of its passing here affect exclusively the series of hte real as this constituted by active synthesis. However, the pure past as it was defined above does qualify the virtual object; that is, the past the past as contemporaneous with its own present, as pre-existing the passing present and as that which causes the present to pass. Virtual objects are shreds of pure past" Giles Deleuze in Repetition and Difference, 101.
Last night, lying in bed between sleep and dream, drunk on Chilean white wine, and the a heady sultry summer night, I remembered something which I could not quite lay my mind on. Stories, half-formed, from books vaguley remembered. Stories of time lines running beside each other where other lives were lived. I thought about how somewhere there is another Ginger and H who married but have no children. And also a Ginger and H who did not make it. And another who never meet...and on and on...repeat a little.
And my thoughts did not end there because it is more complicated than just simply pararrell lives. There is not just the possibility of parareel lives but of mulitple lives that enfringe and touch upon each other. Those framgents of a pure past in which Ginger and H did not make enrich the lives of the Ginger and H who did make it. They exisit, fragmented, to haunt the lives that live out other possibilities.
8 comments:
I love this idea of the virtual, and the way in which it can (and it does) affect our present lives. All of those things that never happened and yet, are here, prsent, happening now making our life more intense, more beautiful, MORE.
We are also all the things we are not, all the time.
I'm going to sound like an old clueless idiot here, but isn't the imagination the traditional name for the virtual? What we imagine (= hope, wish, dream, lament, etc etc to the length and breadth of the dictionary) is not without affect, is it?
I'll also sound like an old idiot and rephrase Horacio's first comment thus (because this "thus" is very true for me): All of those things that never happened never happened, making our life more intense, more beautiful, MORE. Making it EVERYTHING, to the point of pure ecstatic sorrow.
Or if not ecstatic sorrow, sorrowful ecstasy.
I don't think imagination is the right word for the virtual. At least not for Deleuze. For one thing, imagination denotes something that happens in the mind be it singular or collective. For Deleuze, the virtual is not the mind although it does include the mind. The virtual is a thing like nature...it is almost objective. When he talks about the virtual, Deleuze sounds like a mystic.
Well, Blake and say Henry Corbin capitalize imagination and consider it objective. I'm not sure I do. Not to argue w/Deleuze - he'd mop the floor w/me - but one reality is more than I can handle, it's weird enough that what is happening is actually happening. My head begins to spin when I think that "what is not" has the same sort of reality, except in the "presence of absence" sort of sense. Anyway, I'm off to San Francisco for a few days. Peace and love to you and Horacio.
Love to you too John, and the whole virtual thing is pretty wacked. It's something I'm not entirely grasping yet.
Have fun!
Peace and love to you too John, enjoy Sanfran and thanks for the fruitful discussions and comments.
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