Agrippa: a brief introduction

A sub-page of Ray Girvan's website, The Apothecary's Drawer.

A minor spoiler warning:
You can either go to Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) now, or read my comments first.

Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) is a poem by author William Gibson, best known for his SF novels, beginning with the 1984 Neuromancer, that more or less defined the 'cyberpunk' genre of many more books and movies. Gibson is, however, very much a literary writer, and in 1992 he published Agrippa in an interesting format: a highly expensive limited edition of an Apple Mac computer disk that erased itself as you read it (so you only got one chance to read the poem) packaged with etchings by artist Dennis Ashbaugh in light-destructible ink, all in a binding that constantly oxidized, changed colour, and flaked away. It was designed to be ephemeral.

What subsequently happened was that readers soon found ways around this. It was, after all, simple to hand-copy or voice-record as the poem unwound. Agrippa can be found on many websites now, and Gibson has indicated in more than one interview that this was his aim all along: "... I kinda love this monument to my father ... I sort of tricked, or teased them into cracking it and they made it into a monument" (from Go Crude, an interview by Dale L Sproule).

Although the word "Agrippa" has various historical resonances that are probably intentional (e.g. Herod Agrippa, and Agrippa von Nettesheim) in Gibson's poem its literal meaning is the brand name of an old photographic album containing images of the author's father (who died when Gibson was young), grandfather and their contemporaries. The poem is autobiographical, descriptions of the images of these long-dead people leading on to Gibson's own recollections of the long-lost atmosphere of a small American town and his eventual departure to Canada to avoid the Vietnam draft.

One of the central themes in Agrippa is what Gibson calls "the mechanism". The camera - its shutter closing and forever "dividing that from this" - is the metaphor for the moments in life when we see permanent and irrevocable separation of past from future: the moment of realising our mortality, or the moment of leaving home town or country (knowing you can never return either physically or in mindset). This links thematically with the original packaging, which (theoretically) made reading the poem an unrecoverable experience. Agrippa seems to me to be about memory, nostalgia, loss, mortality, and moments of passage; an intensely poignant poem that I think should be far better known outside Gibson's fanbase.

Now read Agrippa (A Book of the Dead).