Rosenbaum

[hankhank at ccwf.cc.utexas.edu]

Tim Ware: your hyper page is a real gem. Radiating.


I just visited it yesterday, and printed out that 
Rosenbaum Article; been too busy to read all of it.

When back home reading it, I felt it ringing a bell. 
And all by sudden I realized what it was: CARMINA 
BURANA, one of my youth favorites, and about which 
I remember later having arguments with some young 
and choleric music students in Helsinki, who tried 
to convert me into realizing how incredibly bad 
composer Orff is. But if it's trash, its wonderful
trash, methinks. Hey, music connoisseurs of the list: 
what do ordinary music academics *nowadays* think of
_CB_? (Now that I think of it, I haven't tried Van 
Dyke Parks' _Song Cycle_ for a long time, either; I
went for it at those same juvenile days, too; wonder
what that one would feel like now. Probably as great
as ever. But because it's "rock", not "serious", it
has never been something that young serious music 
critics would feel the eager need bashing of, or?)

But just after "Tempus et iocundum" with those lines 
which _GR_ cites from "the Bavarian tunesmith" (Viking
237): O! O! O!/totus floreo/iam amore virginali/totus
ardeo. (Oh, oh, oh/I bloom entirely/now virginal love
(or, love for a maiden)/burns me entirely) comes 
"Blanziflor et Helena". 

Rosenbaum speculates on Pynchon's coming contemplations
on Venus and Sun and the momentary link between Eros
and Illumination. Mentions "radiant aureoles", etc.

"Blanziflor et Helena", this poem from the 13th century,
brings jubilantly together radiating Virgin Mary, Venus, 
and those two medieval romance heroines, Blanchefleur 
and Helena; Eros (rose of the world) and Illumination 
(light of the world) are brought together. Which, of
course, can be experienced only in a passing moment,
like the meeting of Venus and Sun in 1761; the finale
that follows tells about changing and cruel Fortuna,
and is a cyclic repetition of the opening piece.

But those "mindless pleasures" Carmina Burana is about 
are from the time that precedes Joe's GRGR question re
"American heresy" of "effectivity"; the latter is a part
of Puritanism and Protestantism, which certainly are 
heretic to ineffective Catholicism, where one's earthy 
belongings do not make a mark of predestination. I don't 
want to romantize cruel medievality, but as Norbert Elias 
showed already in the 30s, in medieval times bodily every-
day was something external to sophisticated traditions
and religious requirements, which were internalized only 
in the slow civilizing process that followed, and nowhere
more than in the Puritan North.

In a way Pynchon started in _V._ from the Enlightenment: 
how its clockwork universe was internalized in the bodily
in the centuries to come. (Have you ever felt that there's 
some affinity between Fellini's _Casanova_ and _V._'s 
gloomy universe, as if they were, oddly, mirrors to each
other?) But it may also be good to remember that Newton
already felt the uneasy, haunting presence of some "Lady", 
that might disturb his well-wrought mechanistic universe.
So, V. may not only be the agent of violent mechanization, 
but also something that shatters this rationalistic *man*-
machine view of the 18th century encyclopedists.  

And now we will presumably witness TRP returning to the
eighteenth century.
  
Heikki