Ratner's Star (Vintage Contemporaries) by DeLillo Don

Author:DeLillo, Don [DeLillo, Don]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780307817150
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-04-10T16:00:00+00:00

11

SEQUENCE

There were times when he felt the lure of a submoronic mode of being. During such periods his mind turned opaque, making it hard for him to perceive the simplest incentive. It would be easy, he believed, to spend a lifetime in this stateless zone. Content to be organic. Content to perform only monotonous tasks. Content to forsake coherent speech. The spirit that informed him would swiftly dwindle, replaced by the soul of a plant. In time he’d dispense with voluntary motion and the natural management of his body. Content to smell himself and dream of downy molds.

This feeling always occurred when he was on the verge of solving a drawn-out mathematical problem. It seemed to mean, nearing the end, that he preferred to abandon all the structural forms, the intersecting perspectives, the entire weightless system of exact relationships; discard it all in exchange for the scantest condition of existence.

The intuition of mathematical order occupied the deeper reaches of cognitive possibility, too old and indistinct for tracing, predating even the analytical scrapings of logic and language. Because his work’s natural tendency was to provide a model of his own mind, of himself as a distinct individual, he was puzzled by the lack of an adequate vocabulary for mathematical invention, by his inability to understand what made his mathematics happen. In retaliation, as it were, against the secrecy of his own constructions, he engineered a desire to subsist on minims of specific being. It was to this, the unknown self, that the basest nature was clearly preferable.

At the module he scribbled nonsense on a pad. This surprised him, this familiar indication that he verged on an answer, because it accompanied the solution of a problem that was anything but familiar, having (he was coming to see) none of the usual shadings and gradations. Sequence, form, unsuspected relationships were not really the issue here. But the process seemed the same as always. He could feel it happening, an emptying of both modes of consciousness, the asymmetric transmapping of fact and unorganized reality.

Beings that need no intervening substance to transmit their art, able to write with their fingers, laser-paint with eyes alone, creatures such would surely know this feeling, as of nature taking part in thought, the living brain that codes its own development.

He scribbled calmly, oblivious to everything but one emerging thought, feeling the idea unerase itself, most evident of notions, an idea with a history, scribbling, rule of ancient numeration. What breathless ease, to fall through oneself. Rudimentary being. Leaflikeness. A condition scaled down to noncomplex sensation. No, there was no way to name the process. Mathematical ideas exist between adjacent points on a line segment. He got up and walked around the room, unaware of sound and color and yet knowing, touching, seeing, hearing, breathing, sheer certainty, feeling it inside him, watching his own feet (what a funny word, hearing it, “feet,” for the first time) move him ever more surely around the room. Thus the simple answer surfaced, deprived at first of linguistic silvering.

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