I might be misremembering and/or blending themes from too many movies but it seems like the whole “limited life” thing crops up pretty often in movies with androids. Sometimes as a safety measure and sometimes as a limitation. The “I want more life” line from Blade Runner is an all-time classic; on the level of “My god, it’s full of stars.” Roy, fearing his own mortality seeks out his maker in an attempt to prolong his life. Has anyone read 2001: A Space Odyssey and/or 2010: The Year We Make Contact? It’s complicated but the plot also revolves around the AIs (HAL and SAL) and their knowledge of their own mortality. I’ve always been fascinated by the line at which sentience and self-awareness create the fear of death.

P.S. I saw Blade Runner: The Final Cut this weekend at the Music Box and it was excellent.

The stories in general, and the vignettes in between them, reminded me of the various ways we’ve seen people advance in the internet in books. It’s like ‘jacking in’, or like creating an avatar in Snow Crash’s Metaverse. You can be anyone you want. You can look any way you want, be any gender, anyone in the entire world.

I enjoyed the dialogue throughout the stories. It was very minimal explanation; it was pure dialogue. In a way, it almost resembled an instant messenger conversation, which again brings us into the cyberworld. I enjoyed that. YAY.

To begin with her identity is based on how she was raised, in disguise as a boy. While she knows that she is not a boy, neither is she fully a female because she was not raised as one. Instead she “became a spy,” raised “in disguise, to see if I could bring any wealth to the household.” (p. 11) Her identity is based on her role as a spy. Her gender has very little part in her identity, much as a cyborg has no gender.

Secondly, her body is augmented, rather crudely, when her mother crafts the garment (or holder, perhaps?) for the tulip bulbs she’ll be concealing. The bulbs are sewn together and then hung on a leather strap that ties around the main character’s hips. A tulip is then added to this garment to be “The bit in the middle.” (p12) It is only later that this augmentation seems to take root (pun intended) when it functions as the real deal would. During a crucial encounter with the princess her “disguise come[s] to life. The tulip began to stand.” (p 25) When the audience tells the storyteller that it “was a terrible thing to do to a flower”, the storyteller comes back with “you said you wanted to be transformed.” (p 29)

What is real? The Powerbook encourages the reader to look past objectivity when searching for the answer to the ubiquitous question. Winterson persuades readers to be attentive to the transcendent fibers of their reality, to imagination, and to open possibility. Take this exchange between the Turkish Captain and Ali for example:
“…You will live in this world as though it is real, until it is no longer real, and then you will know, as I do, that all your adventures and all your possessions, and all your losses, and what you have loved—this gold, this bread, the green glass sea—were things you dreamed as surely as you dreamed of buffalo and watercress.’
‘Am I always sleeping?’
‘Neither sleeping nor waking. Only the body sleeps and wakes. The mind moves through itself.’
The use of dialogue reveals much in these stories, and places somewhat lofty concepts into the context of human experience. The statement, ‘The mind moves through itself,’ draws attention to that ‘nonspace’ of the mind, the plane of reality on which human consciousness operates—a place physical bodies can not go. Storytelling has its origins in imagination. In The Powerbook, imagination is significant because it is immaterial yet still real, and it contains a certain potential, even if what people can imagine is physically impossible.
In regards to the potentiality of all things, The Powerbook relates to our ‘best’ (or should I say ‘most accurate as-far-as-we-know’) understanding of reality—quantum physics, which tells us that we can only know the probability or the likeliness of something to happen. It further tells us that nothing happens unless it has been observed, which brings about a fundamental problem.
This explanation of Schrodinger’s cat is helpful (scroll down to the, ahem, Schrodinger’s Cat heading). Winterson mentions quantum physics within the text: “In quantum reality there are millions of possible worlds, unactualised, potential, perhaps bearing in on us…(63).” She goes on, “I can’t take my body through space and time, but I can send my mind, and use the stories, written and unwritten, to tumble me out in a place not yet existing—my future (63).” So Winterson offers her own solution to that fundamental problem—our imaginations are where those unfulfilled potentials lie (lay? I don’t know). All the infinite possibilities, events that happen and never happen, are all encompassed in narrative, and further, in imagination. Winterson sees that the inifinite nature of potential is unfolding, right here, right now, just not in physical reality.
Don’t tell the physicists this, but we may never know the nature of our reality, especially in this lifetime. Even so, there are things we know are beautiful, things we know are universal, like love. Stories help us to somewhat exonerate our curious existence, and Winterson quite clearly sees the beauty in that.

Some other mentions of the future and reality:
- Turkish Captain: “There will be a future. We believe in our unreality too much to give it up (Winterson 21.)”
- From ‘New Document’: “The Talmudic layering of story on story, map on map, multiplies possibilities but also warns me of the weight of accumulation. I live in one world—material, seeming-solid—and the weight of that is quite enough. The other worlds I can reach need to keep their lightness and their speed of light. What I carry back from those worlds to my world is another chance (Winterson 64.”
- ‘New Document’ again: “Nothing is solid. Nothing is fixed. These are images that time changes and that change time…(Winterson 52).”
There are so many more examples—it seemed like every time I turned the page there was some philosophical morsel to be found somewhere.
Take this little loaded statement for example, “The heart. Carbon-based primitive in a silicon world (Winterson 46).” Or this one, “I am my own master but not always master of myself (55).” Or this one, “This is a virtual world. This is a world inventing itself (73).” Or perhaps this one, “’What happened to the omniscient author?’ ‘Gone interactive (31).’ I mean, it borders on absurd how loaded this text is. Chock-full of content.

Other themes, in brief:

- Memory and reflection are heavy hitters in this story. The way in which the past affects people, in which people’s histories shape their existence is mentioned throughout. There is an existential feel to the story, like Winterson’s assertion in the beginning of the text, “I can change the story. I am the story (5).” Memories are always strong within the characters—this happens across all the stories in The Powerbook. Open Hard Drive: “…I am always there, in that room with her, or if not I, the imprint of myself—my fossil-love and you discover it (25).” New Document: “That’s how I remember her, laughing at me, on a wooden bridge in Paris (49).” Search: “I fell in love with her then, and I have never been able to stop loving her, or to stop my body leaping at the sight of her (86).”
- The tension between two viewpoints in New Document was amazing. This section of dialogue really says it all:

“’You are an absolutist then.’
‘What’s one of those?’
‘All or nothing.’
‘What else is there?’
‘The middle ground. Ever been there?’

Everyone can relate to the perspectives embodied here: the hard-line, the upright, the decision-maker, and (in contrast to) the contemplative, the spontaneous, the subjective. Even explaining it this way I feel like it is a bit reductionist but all in all, life is complicated. These are ubiquitous forces that exist in our life—this is why politics are so terrible and decisions are hard to make sometimes. It’s as Winterson herself put it, “The trouble is that in imagination anything can be perfect. Downloaded into real life, it [is] messy. She was messy. I was messy (55).” Although we never reach perfection, to strive toward it, to struggle for it is what is important—Winterson mentions this twice in the story, “Only the impossible is worth the effort (65, 90).”

This tension culminates in a passage on page 55, where Winterson uses a totally different scene (a man exercising Dalmatians nearby) along with the colors black, white, and red to represent the different forces of inner and outer turmoil in the character. Yes, there are black and white (right and wrong), but red, which represents passion/emotion, steps in and muddles what was once thought a clear choice between the two.

Annnnnnnd this is long, so I’m going to stop there.

–Mindy

A note for Sean:
Blade Runner is actually an adaptation of the Phillip K. Dick story called Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It’s a good read, I recommend to everyone that you give it a try. It ties in with this class very well.

In the end it seems to be a struggle between freedom and control. And once you start to give up control, you end up with a crazy story when all you really wanted to do was disconnect.