GRGR(7) Discussion Opener

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>     p. 97  
>     
>     6.)  "Want the Change," Rilke said, "O be inspired by the Flame!"
>     
>     [...]Is it to be transfigured into the realm of Lord Dominus 
>     Blicero, a realm where human life is reduced to the naked workings of 
>     power transactions?  That can't be what Rilke meant
>  [...] but what else could it mean to Blicero? 

Norton read that line a little differently.  Her translation of #12 of
the second set of Orphus Sonnets is so filled with language
appropriate to GRGR(7)DO and its explication of GR that it is
presented here in defiance of the copyright laws...

Will transformation.  O be enraptured with flame, 
wherein a thing eludes you that is boastful with changes;  
that projecting spirit, which masters the earthly, 
loves in the swing of the figure nothing so much as the point of
inflection.

What shuts itself into remaining already _is_ starkness;  
does it think itself safe in the shelter of inconspicuous gray? 
Beware, from afar a hardest comes warning the hard.  
Woe-, an absent hammer lifts!  

Who pours himself forth as a spring, him Cognizance knows;  
and she leads him enchanted through the realm of serene creation, 
that often ends with beginning and with ending begins.  

Every happy space they wander wondering through 
is child or grandchild of parting.  And the transformed Daphne, since
feeling 
laurel-like, wants you to change yourself into wind.


....Norton said she had some problems with Line 9, which should be
something like "Understanding apprehends him."  The last line, most
accessible (the nymph Daphne was metamorphosed into a laurel bush),
enjoins the lover to change to the form most appropriate to the
beloved.  Conversely, if you think you are a hammer, you want everyone
to be nails.
>     
>     
>     p.98
>     
>     8.)  "Und nicht einmal sein Schritt klingt aus dem tonlosen Los..."  
>     "And not once does his step ring from the soundless Destiny..."  [all 
>     ellipses TRP]
>     
>     The twinning of the Rilke line -- translation as doppelganger?     
>     
TRP seems always to provide the English, because the meaning obviously
is important;  but often the German is not given, perhaps because it's
intended only for flavor.

>     p. 99
>   
>     Nice fat dualism here: the symmetry of creation and destruction.  Why 
>     does Blicero's Christian upbringing make this hard to see?  It works 
>     out quite nicely further on (pp. 110-111) in the scene where the 
>     Dodo's extinction is recast in terms of Christian salvation.
>
Christ died but did not become Death;  for those who chose it, pace
the manichees, salvation was available, but was not the guaranteed
outcome of a passively-observed Campaign to Stamp Out Death.  Blicero,
who smells a lot like Kurtz, seems to like to think of himself as an
accident that happened to himself.     
>     
>     p. 104
>     
>     14.)  "And she is gone.  Crossed over the English lines at the salient 
>     where the great airborne adventure lies bogged down for the winter[...]"
>     
>     What is the adventure referred to here?     
Richard Romeo feels    '...only some 19th century romantic would call
bloody battle and death, an "adventure".'     But from the
Elizabethans to the Georgians the word was more sober, and Blicero may
be thinking more of Frobisher or Cook than of Richard Burton I.
    
>     15.)  "Or else this is her warning that--"
>      
>     ... warning or being warned?  What does "this" refer to?
>     
possibly-:  Katje, unable to continue, has asked the Resistance to
kill her rather than to use her in the Blicero menage.  They refuse,
and then she does not receive scheduled communications.  Fearing she
has lost their trust, unwilling to throw in with the Germans, she
runs.  Or, possibly, not.  

     
>     ... The word *crotchet* is etymologically...
>    So when Pirate sez:  "It's my crotchet" it makes perfect 
>     sense also to hear "It's my V."
>     
The word is used in music, too, both to denote the quarter note and
also, obsoletely, to describe a doubletime reprise, a quirky baroque
'effect.'  In the event, then, it's more self-expressive
individualism.
     
 
>    ...vastly different reasons than Von Goll might have given or even 
>     from his peculiar vantage foreseen.' "
>     
>     Other comments about this passage?  How 'bout that Prettyplace?
>     
...perhaps it's possible to hear TRP casting himself as von Goll here
and so warning us, as he seems to have done elsewhere, that he will
not take responsibility for what the book does for us and to us, with
us.  Like the sonneteer pouring himself forth, he is willing to let
reason follow the creative act rather than attempt to lead it.

Does Prettyplace translate to Bonaparte?

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Save the planet;  then get the other 
eight and have a whole set.
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