Don DeLillo is now 74 years old and unlikely to write more large-scale novels like Underworld or Libra. We should be thankful for smaller mercies,however, especially when ,as with Point Omega, they come packed with a lifetime of wisdom.
The novella is just 145 pages long so can be read easily in one sitting; whether it can be understood completely in this space of time is unlikely. It is a fable of sorts, but a very open-ended one and I can only offer some random thoughts here.
The story opens and closes with Chapters named Anonymity which are impressions of 24 Hour Psycho – a video work by Scottish artist Douglas Gordon in which Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece is projected so slowly that it would take 24 hours to watch from start to finish.
I remember seeing this at the Hayward Gallery, London in, I think, 2002. I stayed watching it for about twenty minutes . It is not designed to be watched for that much longer; there are no seats in the room where it is shown to discourage people getting too comfortable (“the standing man participates”, notes DeLillo) .
I wish my visit had coincided with the shower scene , still, I remember it being quite a hypnotic, and faintly disorientating, experience.
The character in DeLillo’s book gets obsessed with the work and visits regularly. The fascination is about how it seems to make time an irrelevance; a “radically altered plane of time” in which “the less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw”.
These themes of time and altered reality feature in the main body of the story. (they obviously also consumed Douglas Gordon as he went on to co-direct a 90 minute documentary that focuses entirely on Zinedine Zidane during a Spanish league match).
DeLillo opens the novel proper with the great lines: “The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever. The true life takes place when we’re alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamingly self-aware, the submicroscopic moments”.
This is Richard Elster thinking, a 73-year-old retired war adviser who lives for two months of every year in a California retreat cut off from the regular world. He likes to be away from the cities and the feeling of : “Time falling away. ………. Time becoming slowly older. Enormously old.”. He believes that we create our own realities; words are not important.
The title comes from a complicated Omega Point theory of perception in the universe which was conceived by French Jesuit Father Teilhand (Pierre Teilhard de Chardin). Thankfully, this is only briefly touched upon in the story and DeLillo seems to be drawn mainly to the notion by which “the mind transcends all direction inward”.
This half hallucinatory (“hypnagogic”) state is what 24 Hour Psycho produces in the viewer and it is one Estler in his advanced years is happy to embrace: “Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to organic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field”.
While I don’t personally find this a very comforting philosophy, DeLillo’s slim volume did make me reflect on how ageing changes our concept of time completely. Put simply, using time well now (at the age of 52) seems of paramount importance in a way that it didn’t when I was younger.
We apparently view reality at 24 frames a second and the idea of slowing this down is often hugely appealing.
The daily prompt form WordPress for those of us who recklessly signed up to make a blog post every day suggests:
