It is not a linkage, but a local pull, by way of little frictions…. Look at it: It is the dance of time…

Is it possible that the following has never occurred: a reader who is completely unfamiliar with any fragment whatsoever of Shakespeare’s sonnet ‘sequence’, chances upon them, commencing at the beginning of the first sonnet, and, in all subsequent readings, continues, one after the other, until the end of sonnet 154, without any violation whatsoever of the ostensive order?

This query I found quickening whilst on the train in Geoff Ryman’s 253.

The act of boarding this train is, (similar, I suspect, to when one boards Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence, somewhere in particular), an inauguration fraught with immediacy (even potential serendipity); a shock, if not reduced to apparent randomness, an accident.

But reckoning Time, whose millioned accidents
Creep in ’twixt vows and change decrees of kings,
Tan sacred beauty, blunt the sharp’st intents,
Divert strong minds to th’course of al’tring things –
( Shakespeare, Sonnet 115)

For example: there is a fair chance that, (excepting the possible moments in the work which have been incorporated into the basic idiom), many readers first engage the ‘sequence’ at the beginning of the eighteenth sonnet (i.e. rather than the first), in primary or secondary education (‘Shall I compare thee…?’). This phenomenon, the possibility (probability?) of entering an ostensible ‘sequence’ at any moment (in particular), is exacerbated on the journey on Ryman’s train. Since the particular entities (personae) comprising 253 are hyperlinked, the question of contingency with regards to sequential logic is almost parodied; the blizzard of potential sequences drowns out any assertion that the ‘train’ be experienced strictly ‘sequentially’ (this term is by now suspect), that is, commencing with persona ‘1’ (driver Mr Tahsin Cilekbileckli) and ending with ‘253’ (Miss Anne Frank).

Is there hyperbole in the suggestion that an itinerary of the journey through either Shakespeare’s 154 or Ryman’s 253, may never have coincided with the purported sequence of numerical progression (ie. 1-154; 1-253), which is at least suggested, and thus suggestive of a progressive, teleology of narrative succession?

This is the chain of contingency… its links slide over one another, as though viscous. They touch because they are adjacent… It is not a linkage, but a local pull, by way of little frictions… simply a liquid movement, a viscosity, a propagation that wagers its age in each locality…. It is never a chain of necessity. Suddenly, it will bifurcate. It goes off on a tangent…
(Serres 71, emphasis added)

(Which ("tangent") will be retroactively reappraised as a link in a/the ‘sequence’). If this passage seems more directly related to 253 – (to be sure, Shakespeare is not hyperlinked, though themes and motifs abound) – then what follows in Serres is perhaps more conducive to an understanding of the 154 by Shakespeare:

…it is a bit of life’s secret, a series of sudden and risky leaps of thought that can invent, throw itself into the noise, support itself in redundancy, a long piece of melody, sometimes rhythmic, in tempo as it were, sometimes letting go, as by a free end, some proposition that is aperiodical but right.
(Serres 72)

The question would be whether these "sudden and risky leaps" refer to the poetic relationships within the ‘sequence’ itself, or to the situation in which we as readers of the 154 (or 253), must find ourselves, having ‘thrown ourselves into the noise’?

Jaya Savige