WvB and Richard Farina

[Jeffrey L. Meikle]

Basil writes:

>>  he's saying that "nothing is completely forgotten, EVEN
>> IF it's no longer among the living."
>
>There is a famous Jorge Borges poem that starts: "One thing does not
>exist: oblivion"...
>
>Could this actually be a reference to Richard Farina then?

Think back to when Slothrop finds his long-lost harmonica:  "There are
harpmen and dulcimer players in all the rivers, wherever water moves.  Like
that Rilke prophesied,
                And though Earthliness forget you,
                To the stilled Earth say:  I flow.
                To the rushing water speak:  I am.
        It is still possible, even this far out of it, to find and make
audible the spirits of lost harpmen....  Slothrop, just suckin' on his
harp, is closer to being a spiritual medium than he's been yet..."

Since Farina played the dulcimer, this passage evokes his memory (his
spirit?) and recalls the WvB quote:  "Nature does not know extinction; all
it knows is transformation." The quote also suggests the spirituality of
Whitman's "Leaves of Grass."  Nothing is ever lost in nature (1st law of
thermodynamics); it's just transformed.  How literally we're meant to take
the second sentence of WvB's quote depends on our own talents for
mediumship:  can we ourselves make the piston of Maxwell's demon
move--against the scientific odds of the third law of thermodynamics?
It's also worth recalling, I think, though perhaps in bad taste, that
Farina was killed when a motorcycle on which he was a *passenger*, *not*
the driver, lost control and sailed off the road.  The parallel to
Gottfried as passive passenger on a machine--the rocket--over which he has
no control is personal and implicit, but I think it's there.

Jeff Meikle