In the spring semester of my program at NYU, I wrote and rewrote the story, “Redemption Shoes” and kept re-writing all the way back to Austin and for many years after I had abandoned writing for philosophy. It never unfolded any farther than the seven corners of Ft.Green--the blanket of snow that covered the streets below which had never before, as far as I know, been quiet--the girl with the magical shoes which she had procured on one of her many adventures through Greenwich Village, repeated herself perpetually, dreaming and being dreamed by the reclusive photographer, a century before, in Prague. The sky was always grey. She might notice, not a flock of birds, but a dim shadow of a flock of birds, just at the moment, repeated forever, that his shutter snapped in another fold of time’s cloth.
But maybe they changed just so slightly with each rendering? Perhaps if I had continued tirelessly to re-write them, with the passage of many, many years, they might have finally found their way to one another, resolved the minutiae of space-time mathematics through persistence, and finally resolved the cruel temporal dilemma that plagued both of them.
I have the impression that the world repeats…
“Chaos looks toward everything that repeats, reproduces, grows, decays, unfolds, flows, springs, vibrates, seethes..for the reader that is attuned to Chaos there will be an opening upon unexpected corridors allowing passage from one point to another in the labyrinth.”
--Antonio Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island
