In his real life, this rock critic, Lester Bangs, died of the flu and a Darvon overdose.
But since I get to write imaginative fantasies, I decided to give Lester a different and alternate life. So, instead of dying as he did, Lester Bangs almost dies under the wheels of a reckless New York taxi.
Shocked by this off-the-wall mishap, Lester buys an airline ticket
out of town, ends up in San Francisco, discovers the love of his life,
gets married, moves to Kansas, abandons his wild and reckless ways, and
dies much later, in his sixties, while shoveling snow.
In other words, through a random twitch of the wheel, a human life takes
a new course. The new road-map of Lester's life makes as much sense as
Lester's relatively senseless death--maybe more, when you think about
it.
This story of mine has been reprinted more, and in odder places, than
any of my other works. That may be because people admire stormy characters
like Lester Bangs.
I tend to think it’s because people really like metaphysics. They
enjoy tales of fate and predetermination and ego and self-determination
and moral responsibility and Imminent Will.
Folks just dig that stuff somehow. They want to feel vast, spooky powers
playing out within their own existences. They can’t help but sense
that the loose mishmash of events that forms their passing days has, well,
a good story behind it. Something dramatic and meaningful.
It’s both disquieting and liberating to realize that freedom doesn’t
require any free will. Even phenomena as dumb and blind as lightning,
wind and rain have what physicists like to call “sensitivity to
initial conditions.” Deterministic chaos. The Butterfly Effect.
This means some tiny fate-altering sneeze of a butterfly can lead to a
Category Five Caribbean-born storm pancaking the pylons and powerlines
in Pensacola, Florida. Due to random whimsy, really.
A hornet could do a hurricane just as well, or a housefly. We call this
notion “the butterfly effect” because a butterfly is so pretty.
Deterministic chaos is a glittering, graceful idea. As the Chinese say,
“the butterfly never hurries even when pursued.”
Through a kind of butterfly accident, I recently wrote an introduction to Jules Verne’s classic, Around the World in 80 Days, written in the 1880s.
Here we’ve got Phileas Fogg, this ultra-rational robot-man from Isaac Newton’s clockwork universe. Cool, predictable, imperturbable. Not the kind of guy to pay much heed to butterflies, it would seem.
And yet Phileas Fogg makes a senseless bet on a chance remark at a card game, then takes off like a bat out of hell. In a matter of hours Fogg is off to fight angry natives and rustle elephants.
There’s no question of Fogg ever backing off and returning to his previous rut. The book gets steadily more exciting as Fogg destroys every illusion of stability in human life.
The weirder he gets, the less likely he is to chicken out. It's like he's been given some tremendous source of storming energy that no rational act of will could ever have unleashed within his soul.
As Thoreau said, even the quietest of men is often topping-out on desperation. We never quite know what we can do till lightning strikes. Man, woman and child, we are all deeply contingent beings.
By nature, we are the heirs and heiresses of a genetic lottery...one female egg in the fertile, wriggling human soup of millions of possibilities. There is nothing so unlikely as the flesh we happen to inhabit, and we are all mysterious beings within our own minds.
One of the original cyberpunk authors, Bruce Sterling’s novels include Holy Fire, Distraction and Zeitgeist. He has contributed short stories and journalism to Time, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and many others. He has a regular column in Wired. He has also appeared on ABC's Nightline, BBC's The Late Show and MTV.