<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; ">This is my second time through this section of the book (3rd for some parts) and I think it is both deliberately more elusive, fictionalized/mythologized, and non historical than any other section with the exception of the central asian sub-sands which feed us in a later chapter, or the time travel U. One word has lodged in my mind to connect several parts of ATD in particular and make more sense of Pynchon in general: that word is unearth. <FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Baskerville" size="6"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 24px;"></SPAN></FONT><DIV><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Baskerville" size="6"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 24px;">unearth</SPAN></FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Hiragino Mincho Pro" size="4"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;"> |ˌənˈərθ|</SPAN></FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Baskerville" size="4"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;"> |ˈənˌərθ| |ÊŒnˌəËθ|</SPAN></FONT><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Baskerville" size="4"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;">verb [ trans. ]</SPAN></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Baskerville" size="4"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;">find (something) in the ground by digging.</SPAN></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Lucida Grande" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;">• </SPAN></FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Baskerville" size="4"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;">discover (something hidden, lost, or kept secret) by investigation or searching : </SPAN></FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Baskerville" size="4"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;"><I>they have done all they can to unearth the truth.</I></SPAN></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">The miners are unearthing  silver and zinc and gold as dynamitic firepower becomes a kind of religion both for the anarchists and the mine-owners, vying for ownership of their lives and labors. The scientist Tesla is unearthing electromagnetic forces. The Traverses are unearthing the ghost of their father. The Vormance expedition are variously looking for the perfect iceland spar, a more perfect control of global energies, transportation routes, and are drawn magnetically resting place of an unearthly being hidden beneath the ice. Converging on the scene from beneath the surface of the planet come the chums of chance. Who have learned nothing from the book of Genesis but serve as both God and serpent in this story. <BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">The serpent faced creature. One thinks here of Superman, so much more likely in our actual history to be malign than benign, with his ice fortress and power crystals. I also thought of Oppenheimer's thoughts from the Baghavad Gita when viewing the first atomic explosion," now am I become death destroyer of worlds". </DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">We have unearthed the "radiance of a thousand suns" , and now seem on the verge of unearthing the earth.  </DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">One also thinks of King Kong found in a region the Chums have just come from, and the Karmic payback represented in Kongs attack on New York, the revenge of the god of the colonized native peoples. But it is northerners who are historically the most violent natives and this unearthing of their Fear/god is a storybook foreshadowing, set in a frozen white world of green ice and ribbons of colored light.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">I also see throughout ATD, particularly in the minds of the powerful a psycho-mythological unearthing of the ancient and seemingly hardwired story of a final battle between light and darkness , ( or good and evil, or just survival of the fittest) . A vision which seems to change little from Zoroaster to John's apocalypse to the wars to end wars, to the evil empire to the religion of Jihad to the war on terror) So often the modern justification for war revolves around the need to defend oneself from a clearly oppressive and aggressive state (the military industrial complex must thank God for the Nazis on a regular basis), but it is impossible to find this moral clarity with WW1, or today. The Karl Roves and Rush Limbaughs of the world treat people like moral children who cannot realize that the demonic other we fear is a part of ourselves, a potential we all share, the monster we dug up and carried home with us for the obvious rewards.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">The entire story of the Etienne-Louis Malus is fictionalized and distanced from the more historical world of the Traverses and the non chums parts of ATD. That distance is hard to bridge unless one takes these chums sections as ways of connecting the turn of the last century (and the ideas and myths at play then) with the turn of this century (and the result of choices made). Right now this makes the most sense for me  of the unavoidable comparison between the northern creature's attack and the attacks of 9-11. </DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Maybe we should stop the roller coaster unearthing and take up a little more earthing.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "> </DIV><DIV><DIV><DIV>On Mar 21, 2007, at 11:32 AM, <A href="mailto:robinlandseadel@comcast.net">robinlandseadel@comcast.net</A> wrote:</DIV><BR class="Apple-interchange-newline"><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">I was thinking, just the other day, about Love's Body:</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-converted-space">          </SPAN>"Norman O. Brown is variously considered the architect<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-converted-space">         </SPAN>of a new view of man, a modern-day shaman, and a<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-converted-space">         </SPAN>Pied Piper leading the youth of America astray. His<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-converted-space">         </SPAN>more ardent admirers, of whom I am one, judge him<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-converted-space">         </SPAN>one of the seminal thinkers who profoundly challenge<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-converted-space">         </SPAN>the dominant assumptions of the age. Although he is<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-converted-space">         </SPAN>a classicist by training who came late to the study of<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-converted-space">         </SPAN>Freud and later to mysticism, he has already created<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-converted-space">         </SPAN>a revolution in psychological theory."</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-converted-space">         </SPAN>--Sam Keen, Psychology Today</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><A href="http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/2502.html">http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/2502.html</A></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">I read the thing many years ago, and remember little in terms of content<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">(other than recalling it was pretty freeeeky stuff, man) but absorbing<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">instantly the notion of sculpting literary structure out of other peoples words.<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Of course, other writers use this mode, like Studs Terkel, but when I read<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">"Love's Body" the quarter dropped and the jukebox started to play.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-converted-space">         </SPAN>Mark Kohut:</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-converted-space">         </SPAN>Does anyone think it is Pynchon's way of indicating the<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-converted-space">         </SPAN>darkness in us, in human nature when it is mangled by<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-converted-space">         </SPAN>'the day's" narrownesses.....not allowed to be natural?</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-converted-space">         </SPAN>A kind of Return of the Repressed?.....We sorta know that<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-converted-space">         </SPAN>Brown's Life Against Death was important to TRP...</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-converted-space">         </SPAN>(see stuff on GR)......so, here the Death Wish shows itself,<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-converted-space">         </SPAN>buried in a remote location, in ATD?</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-converted-space">         </SPAN>David Casseres:</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-converted-space">         </SPAN>I can't help thinking of those many different versions<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-converted-space">         </SPAN>of "The Mummy's Curse," in which a group of scientists,<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-converted-space">         </SPAN>against the earnest advice of their guides, take an<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-converted-space">         </SPAN>artifact out of its concealment and ship it home for</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-converted-space">         </SPAN>their museum. And as soon as they get to New York,<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-converted-space">         </SPAN>it breaks out of its confinement and causes havoc.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-converted-space">         </SPAN>David Morris</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-converted-space">         </SPAN>I agree with your take here. One gets the sense that the<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-converted-space">         </SPAN>object was buried in a remote location for a reason. The<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-converted-space">         </SPAN>ultimate "Mummy's Curse" cautionary-ignored tale would<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-converted-space">         </SPAN>have to be that of Pandora's Box.</DIV> </BLOCKQUOTE></DIV><BR></DIV></DIV></BODY></HTML>