She said, What is history?
And he said: History is an angel
Being blown backwards into the future
He said: History is a pile of debris,
And the angel wants to go back and fix things,
To repair the things that have been broken.
But there is a storm blowing from paradise
And the storm keeps blowing the angel
Backwards into the future
And this storm, this storm, this storm
Is called
Progress.
--Laurie Anderson, "The Dream Before (for Walter Benjamin)"
We've been talking about insanity lately. It seems strangely
appropriate on an anniversary to ponder how you
know what you know. Gally is a deviant character: part of the reason
that we follow her is because she
breaks the norms of her society. Lately, however, she's gone further.
She carries on conversations with
manifestations of her own mind: the aptly-named Payne. She reacts to
the presence of this manifestation,
this meme, despite the fact that nobody else around her perceives his
presence.
Perhaps this goes back as far as Gally herself. In Rusty Angel, Chapter
2, Gally experiences a momentary
disjunction from reality: questioned about why she does what she does,
she feels confident that she has
been asked that before. But she is surprisingly quick to move on.
Like a lot of people with psychological problems, it's a bout of
depression that brings on Gally's
schizophrenia. Without Hugo, spurned by Ido and humiliated by Takie,
Gally collapses into the Motorball pit
hallucinating about Mars. In her very next fight, up against Jashugan,
Gally is so far absorbed by her mental
constructs that she begins talking with the image of her sensei.
For the next few years of her life, Gally is on stronger grounds, able
to work out her feelings through
hunting, teaching and music. But during the ten years of the Tuned
project, Gally's sense of self is eroded.
With--literally--a voice in her head goading her on, she knows nothing
except repression and catharsis.
Even with her time in Alhambra with Figure, and with whatever community
she had there, Gally must have
been put under extreme pressure in the time that followed. The arrival,
and sudden departure, of Lou
Collins, combined with the insanity of the Granite Inn and the
Ouroboros Program, must have made her
"victory" against Nova rather hollow. I need hardly go into the events
that have transpired since the bomb
attack. The only datum I want to mention is that Gally clearly hasn't
forgotten Hugo and his desperate goal.
She's gone much further than he ever dreamed.
And, by the by, Seraphim is nine years old.
http://www.reimeika.ca/snydder/
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