Ginger Spice in a Private Detective's Eyes

     After many years of not reading his work, I'm reading a William Gibson novel, Pattern Recognition, from 2003.  I have little to write about it now, since I'm only on page 37, a prime number; thus, part of a pattern continuing with 41.
     Gibson maintains on page 22 that "Homo sapiens is about pattern recognition...a gift and a trap."
     In the preceding paragraph, he writes, "Parkaboy says you should go to new footage as though you've seen no previous footage at all, thereby momentarily escaping the film or films that you've been assembling, consciously or unconsciously, since first exposure."
     This fresh eyes perspective seeks to override pattern recognition, that tendency of the mind to seize perceived phenomena and form individual units of image, thought, feeling, into structures with multivalent connectivity.  That's Vic Neptune's definition of pattern recognition, not Gibson's, but I assume the famous author would at least argue with me about my way of putting it.  Gibson's mind works as a sharply focused details-describing poet.  Surfaces figure prominently in his novels.  He bothers to describe the belt a minor character wears, mentioning the manufacturer by name.  Such hyper-attention fits with the novel's protagonist, Cayce Pollard, a "coolhunter," someone who predicts marketing trends.  Curiously, from the standpoint of Gibson's own work, the name Cayce (she's a woman in her thirties whose name is pronounced "Case") features in his celebrated first novel, Neuromancer, in which the young male protagonist, Case, is a cyberspace hacker.
     Gibson said in an interview that the detective novels and stories of Raymond Chandler influenced his own attention to detail, noting how Chandler's detective character Philip Marlowe sees everything when he walks into a room.  This characteristic is common to private detectives, cops, and film directors, as well as some writers.
     This noticing of things infuses Cayce in Pattern Recognition.  Since I'm stuck with this characteristic myself, I can attest that it is, indeed, "a gift and a trap."  I'm exceptionally adept at finding lost objects.  My driving ability is above average because I pay attention to driving itself and the environment I drive through--I don't talk on the phone or text while driving.
     I'm prone to obsessive-compulsive thoughts, too.  Last night, for instance, my mind wouldn't settle, darting about like a gnat.  The yield of such mental exertion amounts to the intellectual production of a gnat trying to figure out the nature of twilight.  Fortunately, I don't always experience this useless cerebral maundering.  However, the mechanism by which these rambles draw their power is the same brain operation linked to pattern recognition.
     The Nike symbol on a pair of shoes, like the twin sky-linking columns of the former World Trade Center, are part of patterns Western Civilization's peoples and those of other lands buying (and making) casual footwear are deeply familiar with, the Towers and their fall connected to worldwide strife still affecting everyone, fourteen years along history's thread to now--a bulked up string of patterns comprising war, capitalism, trade, and energy strategies.
     When Donald Trump bellows about "radical Islamic terrorism," this verbal pattern is immediately recognized by his followers, all of whom have a visceral reaction derived from what happened on September 11, 2001.  Al-Qaeda, the group perpetrating the 9/11 attacks, though largely scattered and killed, has inspired other, more vicious groups, like ISIS.  Pattern recognition doesn't just operate at the level of buying coffee at Starbuck's; it also functions where fear and irrationality is stirred up, sometimes agitated by people like Trump, John Ashcroft, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Ted Cruz, all of whom have used a non-violent form of terrorizing the minds of Americans into believing they're more in danger from "radical Islamic terrorists" than they are from a teenager driving a car while texting, or a drunk driving, or lead in a city's water supply.
     In psychosis, patterns become all-consuming.  Someone says, "I ate at Taco Bell," and the psychotic has just heard a bell rung in a film; bell becomes an important point to ponder, until it's covered over with another obsessive string of cognition.  Everything conforms, in the psychotic's mind, to a grand purpose, ever evolving to account for new information, which eventually can sometimes come in the form of the neutral-voiced responses of the cop driving the psychotic to the hospital.
     In more normal circumstances, pattern recognition serves capitalism: the brilliant red Coke banner, sometimes neon-lit in big cities, stimulates subliminally even as its bloody color and flamboyant lettering declare something almost religious; the name of a god prominent in the lives of everyone, since Coke has been around since 1892, before anyone alive now yet existed.  Coca Cola precedes cinema, and it contained cocaine.  Recognize the pattern: cocaine addiction, soft drink popular with the masses, competition with Pepsi, no more cocaine but sugar and caffeine addictions, corporate capitalism, Times Square remodeled into an advertiser's nest.  Buy.  Get used.  Get slowly killed by cancer unleashed by corporations profiting from misery and death.  Laboratory animals abused and killed in cancer treatment experiments.  Cigarettes.
     The Buddha, from what I understand, sought to stop the mind's flow through meditation.  Make the water still.  The idea mentioned above in Gibson's novel about looking at images, or footage, as if one has never seen images before, is very hard to do, but it's possible for anyone to just look at something without giving it an immediately seized upon meaning.  The opening shot of Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal, a gull shot by the camera from below, hanging motionless on a momentarily suspended air current, is, by itself, a striking image moving a viewer, perhaps, to a grunt of admiration for its beauty.  Then, since it's a motion picture, the patterns start: it's a rocky beach during the Middle Ages.  A knight and his squire prepare to make another day's ride, but the knight is interrupted by the appearance of a black-cloaked and -hooded man who says he's Death, and the knight's time is up.  The knight says he's seen images of Death (pattern recognition) playing chess and challenges him.  They begin a chess game that recurs intermittently throughout the film.  Thinking back to the film's opening shot, pattern-wise, we can see that Bergman has opened his movie with a bird, wings outspread, hanging in space, not because it's an interesting shot by itself, but because the Angel of Death is a major character in the film.
     The inevitable lead-up to death is, of course, something we can all recognize in its patterns.  I get sick, I worsen, I die.  I go to a nightclub, I get shot by a maniac, I die.  I drive, a goddamn fool not paying enough attention sideswipes me, I die.
     In politics, the pattern of demagogues and their slanders; in professional sports, the pattern of young men given too much money; in personal relations, the pattern of failed sustainment of connections with significant others; in bands, the pattern of breakups--Geri Halliwell was once a Spice Girl, and she's currently 43, the next prime number after 41.

                                                                            Vic Neptune