Pynchon, Rilke & Things Angelic [was Re: MDMD(4) - Giant rob'd]

[Vaska]

John Atchison suggests:
>Could they not be the same beings.... called to bear witness, not to
>intervene. Sent to observe and to report [SNIP]  
Vaska:
>> these sinister
>> "Giant rob'd Beings" do remind me of the Rilkean angels in _GR_: Rilke's
>> angels were also pitiless and destructive.  

I believe they are -- although I'm not sure how "blind and remorseless"
beings can truly bear witness to anything.  They seem to me more like some
apocalyptic "riders of the storm," though I still have no idea how to read
that _M&D_ passage, and what these allusions may really be doing right there
where they appear in the novel. 

I just took another look at what Rilke does in the _Duino Elegies_, and
here's what I've found: at the very beginning of the first one, he fuses
beauty with terror, and both with those angelic orders of whom "Each single
angel is terrible" yet "serenely disdains to destroy us."  Right at the end
of the _Elegies_, however, in the City of Pain section, in a highly charged
apocalyptic moment, Rilke writes:  

        How an Angel would tread beyond trace their market of comfort
        with the church alongside, bought ready for use....

I suspect that in Pynchon's eyes, this particular Rilkean Angel may be a
"blind and remorseless" being indeed: in _GR_, where Pynchon pays his homage
to Rilke in an aside about his "mean poem about der Leid-Stadt," Pynchon
then also goes on to write [close to the end of the novel] a little prose
elegy of his own, a lament for all the cities of the world, and a plea that
each City of Pain, however debased and routinized the life of its people may
have become, be saved. 

>From bombs as well as Angels, I take it.  But why Pynchon has woven all of
this into the St. Helena section and that particular passage of _M&D_, I
can't tell. Yet.  

Vaska, who keeps on hoping