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Chapter Six Flow Change alone is unchanging. —Heraclitus YOU CAN NEVER STEP in the same river twice, said Heraclitus, and he was wrong. If I step today into the Missouri or Nile or Neva, then come back a day or a year later, I can easily step into the same river: not the same molecules of water but the same pattern and place of flow. The river is the pattern, and of course Heraclitus knew that. His aphorism really says that a river’s mode of being is different from a stone’s; a pattern ’s from a thing’s. Heraclitus went even further: the whole order of the universe can be seen as fire, now slowing, now quickening. This fire is not quite an archetypal element (as water was for Thales or air was for Anaximenes) but a way of being, a dynamic pattern that governs everything—even stones. Bely seems to have agreed. The Neva is an important presence in Petersburg, and it is not the only salient pattern of flow. Even Apollon Apollonovich , addicted as he is to icy graphs, is able to reconcile himself to certain sorts of current. “The aged Senator,” we learn, “communicated with the crowd that flowed in front of him by means of wires (telegraph and telephone ). The shadowy stream seemed to him like the calmly current news of the world” (13). Streams of electrons enable his communication with streams of people, who remind him of streams of news items. Everything flows. This appears to be not only Apollon Apollonovich’s opinion (and that of Heraclitus) but Bely’s as well. In his early essay “The Forms of Art,” Bely announces that “any attentive contemplation of the images of reality brings us to the conviction that they do not remain unchanged. Movement is the basic feature of reality. It governs images. They are conditioned by movement.”1 Both “reality” and “images” move, and attentive observers notice the motion. Yet as both Bely and Heraclitus understood, regular motion can itself be a kind of stasis. This is easy to see in Petersburg, where the circulation of leaves and documents, the flow of the Neva, and the daily routine of the Ableukhovs 80 all have their own sort of stability. It is motion in stasis, the stability of a pattern . In a curious way, then, a pattern of flow is a sort of interchange between motion and stasis and thus between a time-sensitive universe and one in which (as on many graphs) the only important coordinates are spatial. Everything in Petersburg flows, and everything forms patterns. Circulars circulate, blood circulates, disease spreads, the quadrille flows, the public moves (for the most part) predictably. To perceive these phenomena as patterns of flow means shifting our attention away from the changing location of a particular element to the unchanging course it follows. This, for example, is the shape of Eternal Return, a seductive proposition to Bely and his friends. He began work on Petersburg under the premonition that 1912 would be a fateful year for Russia, as 1812 had been. Patterns guide events, and they operate equally in time and in space. In a highly influential essay published in 1945, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” Joseph Frank argues that modernist literary aesthetics strives for spatial (that is, simultaneous) rather than temporal organization. Such writers as Joyce, Proust, Eliot, Pound, and Barnes, he argues, “ideally intend the reader to apprehend their work spatially, in a moment of time, rather than as a sequence.”2 Thus “Joyce composed his novel [Ulysses] of a vast number of references and cross references that relate to each other independently of the time sequence of the narrative. These references must be connected by the reader and viewed as a whole before the book fits together into any meaningful pattern.”3 As a result, the reader is forced to read Ulysses in exactly the same manner as he reads modern poetry, that is, by continually fitting fragments together and keeping allusions in mind until, by reflexive reference, he can link them to their complements. Joyce desired in this way to build up in the reader’s mind a sense of Dublin as a totality.4 This arrangement alters the reader’s experience of time as well. “This, it should be realized, is the equivalent of saying that Joyce cannot be read—he can only be reread. A knowledge of the whole is essential to an understanding of any part; but...

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