M&D, the Internet&W.A.S.T.E

[David Casseres]

[I wrote]
>Can't remember the details but wasn't it a bunch of overexcited academics
>that got in all that trouble by running around Athens knocking the dicks off
>those herms.  Watch out for those Grove guys, all you ithyphallic
>antiprophets of dysentropy!)

[Vaska sez]
>Nah, no bunch of academics those: the mutilation of the Hermae, done in the
>course of a single night, was/is thought to have been the work of an
>oligarchic or aristocartic consipracy [symposia].  Check out I.F. Stone's
>"the Trial of Socrates," pp.140-42.

Indeed, I was supposed to know that, and remembered it as I was falling 
asleep last night.  Not academics but conservatives, bleah, much worse.

>As for Hermes, I always thought that his association with both commerce and
>communication [as well as travel and lying] had to do with how inextricable
>those two activities were for the people of the ancient Mediterranean.  If
>you were in Athens, say, and you wanted to send some mail to a friend in
>Smyrna, you had to wait for one of those trading ships, right?  And the idea
>of travel, of crossing over, of moving things around in space was not that
>far from the idea of "crossing over" from the land of the living to the
>shores of the dead -- hence that other function of Hermes.  Seems logical.

Seems so to me too, but it worries me that as far as I know Hermes, 
belonging to the seafaring Greeks, was associated with all the things you 
mention but not with boats.  I was going to say that his counterpart 
Anubis was associated with boats even thought the Egyptians didn't go to 
sea much, and then I remembered that of course the Egyptians were 
river-folk, and their funerals ofetn involved literal river travel, and 
*crossing* a river is a big-time symbol for dying.  So the Greeks gave 
that job to Charon and put the river underground, having no really 
impressive rivers in their own land.

This gets a bit far afield from Gravity's Rainbow, but it shows the 
shiftiness of these symbolic systems, which of course were not intended 
to be systems, after all.  And this in turn may shed a little light on 
why it can be difficult to elucidate all the nooks and crannies and dark 
corners and spider-holes in Pynchon's writing; thus my unconvincing 
attempt to tie in Slothrop with Hermes.  But however they might or might 
not be knotted together, all of those symbols and ideas are present in 
the Anubis episode, and inevitably they resonate louder and louder until 
Slothrop has to be yanked out of the nexus by that smuggler woman (hey, 
who's got the mythological referent for her, eh?) and propelled into the 
Zone.




Cheers,
David