Oscillations, Fat Men, etc.

[LARSSON at vax1.mankato.msus.edu]

Bonnie Surfus writes:
"'. . . The red curtains, heavy velvet, swing to and fro,
unsynchronized, after his passage.  The oscillation soon damps out
because of the weight.  they hang still.  Ten minutes pass.  "
continue reading and see what you make of the following on that page.

w/ regard to oscillation, vectors and eigenvalues, could there be any
relevance to this:  ""Two men turn the corner by the allegorical statue
of Tragedy.  Their feet crush unicorns and peacocks that repeat
diamond-fashion the entire length of the carpet.  . . ."
I'm thinking of the "matrix" you mentioned and the sugg. that these
issues are all simple physics--crushed underfoot here?  Or handled
disrespectfully?  The unicorns and peacocks, evoking myth and mystery--no
more, as our knowledge of such adavances the bomb?

One more thing, as you read, consider the nickname for the bomb--"fat
boy" ( I don't know if it was one word.)"

Actually, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were Fat Man and Little Boy
(though I forget which was which--and which one was plutonium and which
uranium).

Bonnie's interpretation of the passage is evocative, but I think it's 
useful to remember the counsel offered by our new poster (whose name I
unforgiveably erased from my computer's memory and my own)--that P often
tempts us with the apple of Meaning and then snatches it back, so that
we are--like Tantalos--eternally hungry.  I think that dual operation is
especially in force in the cited passage, which in its style so deliberately
evokes Robbe-Grillet, who so deliberately frustrates linear meaning with
his spare sight-centered form.  (And consider that R-G, like P, has a 
background in engineering.)  Some of the following, from R-G's FOR A NEW 
NOVEL, might be of relevance (or might not--which do you want it to be?):

"The construction of our books is . . . disconcerting only if one insists
on looking in them for the trace of elements which have actually diappeared in
the ast twenty, thiry, or forty years from all living novels, or have at
least singularly disintegrated: characters, chronology, sociological studies,
etc. . . . "

"The significations of the world around us are no more than partial, 
provisional, even contradictory, and always contested.  How could the work
of art claim to illustrate a signification known in advance whatever it 
might be?  The modern novel . . . is an exploration, an an exploration
which itself creates its own significations, as it proceeds.  Does reality
have a meaning?  [One might say that this is the central question of V.  --dl]
The contemporary artist cannot answer this question: he knows nothing about it.
All he can say is that this reality will perhaps have a meaning after he
has existed, that is, once the work is brought to its conclusion."

[or, writing of Kafka]: "Nothing is more fantastic, ultimately, than precision.
Perhaps Kafka's staircases lead *elsewhere*, but they are *there*, and we
look at them, step by step, following the etail of the banisters and the
risers.  Perhaps his gray walls hide something, but it is on them that
the memory lingers, on their craced whitewash, their crevices.  Even what the
hero is searching for vanishes before the obstinacy of this pursuit, his
trajectories, his movements; they alone are made apparent, they alone are 
made real. . . . "

--Don Larsson, Mankato State U., MN