GRGR(1): Bananas

[Curt Gardner]

When I read the bit about the odor of Breakfast "taking over not so much 
through any brute pungency or volume as by the high intricacy to the 
weaving of its molecules" it reminded me of the story of Kekule's dream.  
I'm no chemist, so I don't understand it all too well, but my feeling had 
been that the benzene ring discovery was not such a 'good' thing.

When I checked the passage, it became somewhat clearer to me (page 
412/480).  "Kekule dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its 
mouth, the dreaming serpent which surrounds the World.  But the meanness, 
the cynicism with which the dream is to be used.  The Serpent that 
announces, 'The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally- 
returning,' is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to 
_violate_ the Cycle."

So this tells me the dreaming is good, the form and intricacy is good, 
but the system has perverted the goodness, for "No return, no salvation, 
no Cycle--that's not what They, nor Their brilliant employee Kekule, have 
taken the Serpent to mean."  Life perpetuates form over and over, but the 
system wants the one-time profit.

Curt Gardner
gardner at haas.berkeley.edu