GRGR1: Discussion opener for section 1

[jm]

 "It has happened before but there is nothing to compare it to now"
>    Why nothing to compare it to if it has happened before? What is
>    *it*, anyway?

Jumping ahead to the seance episode (p.30) a "lady brushing by on the arm of
a dock worker" whispers, "More Ouspenskian nonsense."  This brief dropping
of a name is the only mention of Ouspensky in TRP's writing (as far as I'm
aware) and it is easy to pass over it without noticing.  (The "Ouspenskian
nonsense" in question is the medium's assertion that "No one can do.")
Recurrence was a subject that fascinated Ouspenski all his life.  The
subject forms the theme of Ouspenski's short novel "Strange Life of Ivan
Osokin" and gets its own chapter in his "A New Model of the Universe."  The
Ivan Osokin novel has a wrap-around structure, and pre-dated _Finegan's
Wake_, probably the most famous wrap-around novel of all, by about 30 years.
I certainly don't want to push the comparison any further, however. It's
been suggested here on this list that GR also has a similar wrap-around
structure.  The falling rocket lands at the novel's end.  The sound of its
falling follows--at the novel's beginning.  In COL49 Driblette says
something like "let me create a world."  "It," then, would have to be the
whole novel, the whole fictional world TRP has created.  
 
Another chapter in "A New Model of the Universe" was devoted to the tarot, a
subject that also finds a place in GR.  I think that by having a nameless,
faceless character call the seance material "Ouspenkian nonsense" TRP
distances himself from one of his sources that is not quite respectable even
while he somewhat slyly acknowledges the influence.  Oh yes, and it's
historically accurate that someone at a London seance in 1944 would have
known of Ouspenski because he lived in or near London until the war drove
him across the Atlantic to New England.  


>11) What does `your sound will be the sizzling night' actually mean?  

It sure sounds like actual dream material to me.  Another
suggestion--someone has recently mentioned one such suggestion--that TRP
uses dream material in his fiction may be found in "Nearer, My Couch, to
Thee:"  It is precisely in such episodes of mental traveling that writers
are known to do good work, sometimes even their best, solving formal
problems, getting advice from Beyond, having hpnogogic adventures that with
luck can be recovered later on.  Idle dreaming is often of the essence of
what we do.  We sell our dreams.  So real money actually proceeds from
Sloth...."  (New York Times Book Review, June 6, 1993)

                   -jm