last re:quest

[Mittelwerk at aol.com]

to david casseres:  thanks for the reply

in the post-mythic world there is no such thing as home.  odysseus' homeland
disappears at that same moment he becomes a historical (proto-bourgeois)
'self;'  that is, a consistent ego who now has a concept of home.  the price
paid for odyssesus' being able to identify himself is his loss of immediate
identification with everything else, including his 'personality'--symbolized
in his interlude with the purely functional, murderous (proto-rocket)
Cyclops; to save his life (self-preservation is the real myth of western
enlightenment, according to adorno and horkheimer) he is forced to sacrifice
the identity of his name with his nature:  he becomes 'no one,' an abstract
formal ego no different than the Kantian version.  There will never again be
a 'home' for Odysseus, or any of us--only a perpetual homelessness which
refers to one in the negative.  The spatial violence of myth is turned inward
and becomes temporal--becomes memory.  who cares how bored odysseus is?  what
about the poor denatured cyclops, sitting on his lonely island, impotent and
confused . . . vanishing, finally.

in the arthurian cycle, the grail is already reflecting contradictions within
the nature of barter.  hence the profusion of auratic objects, properties
that magically sing for their unique owners, like Nike ads.  these objects
are perceived as eluding the grasp of barter--they already have the
significance of art-objects, their value lies in being priceless or without
conceivable use (the 'hoard').  in mallory's late entry in the cycle, death
and disillusionment cause even the arthurian knights to falter, as the bodies
and sacrifices pile up yet do not equal the 'price' demanded of the magical
object; the object remains mythic, no matter how much blood the questors
attempt to fill it with . . . 

in pynchon's post-alienation world of GR, everybody is a function, a
variable, who cannot fully grasp their role in the equation--in the same way
that modern mathematics long ago lost even the slightest pretense of
grounding its effort in an object outside of itself, in short, an 'object.'
 numbers themselves were given up (they referred to magnitude, and hence to
an image of actual geometric entities--a superstition, to the scientific
mind) in favor of the modern abstract formal equation which is one of pure
relationship severed from content.  before the final fall of the curtain
(show's over), everyone is searching for a way back into mythology.  in GR,
as in V, the ruptures in civilization appear at the moments of intense
violence and regression; as with the fascists themselves, the dream is to
return to the mythic zero-point of history, an erotic Nietzchean leap which
bridges the irrevocable past with the receeding future.  needless to say,
slothrop's dick wants more than he does:  it has a nose for the sacred, the
way out through the center of the circle. . . 

on another note, i'm suprised i haven't seen it mentioned (amid all the talk
of pomo quest) that the obvious dead father on whose grave GR was written,
had to be melville . . .