“Imagine a missile one hears approaching only after it explodes. The reversal! a piece of time neatly snipped out … a few feet of film run backwards … the blast of the rocket, fallen faster than sound—then growing out of it the roar of its own fall, catching up to what’s already death and burning … a ghost in the sky. …
Pavlov was fascinated with “ideas of the opposite.” Call it a cluster of cells, somewhere on the cortex of the brain. Helping to distinguish pleasure from pain, light from dark, dominance from submission … (…) He’s out there, and he can feel them coming, days in advance. But it’s a reflex. A reflex to something that’s in the air right now. Something we’re too coarsely put together to sense—but Slothrop can. ”
“But that makes it extrasensory.”
“Why not say ‘a sensory cue we just aren’t paying attention to.’ (…) “So, Slothrop. Conceivably. Out in the city, the ambience alone—suppose we considered the war itself as a laboratory? when the V-2 hits, you see, first the blast, then the sound of it’s falling the normal order of stimuli reversed that way … so he might turn a particular corner, enter a certain street, and for no clear reason feel suddenly … ” (…) (49)
“(…) this transmarginal leap, this surrender. Where ideas of the opposite have come together, and lost their oppositeness.” (50)