Spending time with Crying of Lot 49 this summer, I find, in Pynchon’s discussion of infinitesimals, still another idea maybe comparable to “epiphany” for thinking about the origin of a work of art (though it pertains to something more than to the work of art — pertains to Time and how we should stand with respect to it).
…”dt”, God help this old tattooed man, meant also a time differential, a vanishingly small instant in which change had to be confronted at last for what it really was, where it could no longer disguise itself as something innocuous like an average rate (pp.129)
The infinitessimal or dt is something very like Duchamp’s inframince, it occurs to me. Though where inframince concerns a very small, but ostensibly measurable, moment of time, (or perhaps it is immeasurable because no one would ever conceivably want to measure it: no one would ever measure the warmth of a recently left seat, and if they did, it wouldn’t be inframince), a dt is a moment so small it isn’t measurable, and an epiphany (though this a total projection upon Joyce**) is “a thing at the last moment of the world” (I’m quoting myself here — nothing to do with Joyce) which I guess is a little like a dt: a thing as it’s poised to vanish. Which is like Kierkegaard’s saying of the eternal that it exists in every change:
if there is, then, something eternal in a man, it must be able to exist and to be grasped within every change […] it must be said that there is something that shall always have its time, something that a man shall always do
The thinking here is extremely loose of course: yet find myself wrestling with there being some sort of correspondence to be teased out among these ideas: Kierkegaard’s “eternal”, Joyce’s “epiphany”, Schopenhauer’s “passive subject”, Duchamp’s “inframince”, haikus (the whole genre), and now Pynchon’s infinitesimals,… and we might as well throw Being & Time in as well. There’s something about these authors’ ideas of ordinariness that implies also a certain philosophy of Time, an ethic, perhaps, of how to approach it.
** Joyce seemed to want to say that epiphanies were pregnant moments in time, whereas I would like to say that all moments are pregnant in that way, if subjected to the proper chemical bath of interrogations (everything, I fancy, at the last moment of the world, would show itself to be pregnant with meaning). In any case it does at least seem clear that Joyce was speaking of moments of ordinary life, not moments of historical significance — not pregnant in that sense — when he thought of epiphany.
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 