Back From The Future Theme - Tony Gantner's novel "McCabe"

Now that he had effectively stood down on the race for Mayor---McCabe was overcome by a mind-bending, time-twisting sensation on the nature of causality and becoming that had afflicted him since his earliest unshackled memories---final causation and reverse causality—feedback from the future affecting the present---he couldn’t make an egg out of an omelette nor return a cappuccino to the coffee plant and the cow’s udder—but the laws of physics were dragging him, no matter how much he might protest and believe in “free will” toward his fate---something that both Aristotle, 333 BC and St. Thomas Aquinas,1270 AD had posed---reconfigured in his own lifetime at the fringes of modern physics-----between two apparently identical particles with different fates, the difference found only in the future---Zeno’s arrows of time flying backward and forward-—were not the men and women of Greek fable and myth pulled toward an inexorable fate no matter how much they ignored it---character was fate---it was a question of whether your character was cognizant that there was a fate---and intuitively lived with that self-recognition—Achilles had not ---nor Helen of Troy---but had Ulysses?

Since he had made up his mind about the campaign and done the clean deed as it were---cause and effect would ripple back in time unless there was some sort of indeterminate quantum Buddhist-curve ball---barring that---it would seem teleologically that McCabe’s purpose---assuring an outcome on the mayoral election---at least as to himself---would now work backwards---from the November election to the the present ---particularly since not prevailing was normally the easiest outcome to assure in terms of probabilities. His inchoate understanding of quantum future unfolding---subconsciously decoding future quantum pulses from an intelligent universe--- and as he aged, catching ever stronger glimpses of that obscure message---accorded with his vague sense that he was, with every atom and sub-atomic element in the cosmos---a product of intentional design from a designer living in the far future---creating itself and therefore perhaps partially evolved from us---in which the universe(s) had a set destiny---a cosmos with set final conditions in place---its fate therefore influencing the past---what had not yet happened combining with what has---to shape the present---rather than the normal time sense of past-to-future Big Bang as the beginning measure of sequential events moving toward higher progressively ordered arrangement. Why else would the cosmos appear so conducive to life---and it would explain how life arose---everything having its origin in the future. It was why he doubted Existentialism---believing instead that the weave of our lives was sown in the future---looked at front-to-back rather than back-to-front---and it was with this in mind that McCabe was alert to meaningful coincidence and synchronicity --- which when he witnessed it---or thought he had---confirmed his suspicions of the manner in which the universe moved and imprinted his own life. McCabe--Chap 19, Tony Gantner (based on communications with me)