My take on TRP and difficulty...

[dennis grace]

Gershom Bazerman rhapsodizes:

>I attacked GR as a lad of 14, and 

<nostalgic GR reading snippage>

>there was obviously
>something that kept me coming back...
>	So, I slogged through all of GR in about a month, in stolen
>half-hours and hours here and there. The little time each day devoted to
>reading, as well as my half-awake state and my inexpirence all contributed
>to my total lack of comprehension of any plot at all. But, the guy got his
>hooks into my head anyway, or why would I have presisted? So, I stumbled
>onto the whole internet TRP community (disunity?) and spent my next month
>or so reading merely the selections from GR in Moulthroup's (sp?)
>Hyperbola. After that, I took on GR again and it all clicked...
>	I don't rilly know where I'm going except perhaps that it's
>possible to not understand any of TRP at all and still feel irresistibly
>drawn in. And it wasn't all the sex neither, in fact I still wince while
>approaching the Pudding scene...

<personal philosophic snippage>

Have you ever sat and studied a Rothko?  We have one at the Harry Ransom
Center here at UT Austin (actually, we have a couple, but just one big one).
At first glance it appears to be a thin horizontally oriented rectangle
sandwiched between (but not touching) two thicker kelly green rectangles all
on a midnight blue background.  While trying to tackle a rhetorically fuzzy
definition (what is art), I like to send my students to look at that set of
rectangles.  I always tell them to spend at least fifteen
minutes--preferably seated--studying the painting.  Invariably, only about a
fourth of the class can manage this task. Hey, after all, it's just a set of
badly drawn rectangles, right?  They have TV shows to watch, games to
attend, beer to drink, and then there's all that sex, y'know?

Oddly--though perhaps not converts to Rothko's vision--the students who
manage to sit studying the painting come to see that the rectangles aren't
quite so regular as they'd at first appeared, that the painting actually
contains more than the three basic colors they'd originally spotted.  In
fact, it's impossible to precisely determine the boundaries of any of the
rectangles.  Studying them causes some kinesthop effects--de-focussing,
floating, movement--and the harder my students concentrate, the more
pervasive the optical illusions become.  

Ultimately, the colors of the painting begin to wend their way into the
psyches of most of my students.  The blue wants to depress them, but the
power of that encasing green and the way its light seems to deny the night
behind it--well, it has a calming effect on some, an enlivening effect on
others.  One young lady asked me (as if I knew, sheesh), "It's about peace,
isn't it?" Some of them tell me they see the painting clearly in their
day-dreams, long after the retinal ghosts have faded.  Some see the painting
recur in their dreams.  Even for lovers of expressionism, fauvism, or
surrealism, a Rothko experience has a different flavor from any other sort
of viewing.  You don't see a Rothko in the same snapshot way you experience
VanGogh, Gris, Magritte, or Miro; you have to take in a Rothko over time and
allow it to work on your emotions in unexplained ways.  The experience is
like listening to the Eroica, savoring a delicate wild mushroom soup,
inhaling your favorite perfume from the nape of a lover's neck.

Is _Gravity's Rainbow_ another such experience?  No.  Of course not.  Nor
are the poems of Whitman and Ginsburg, or the best short fiction of Robert
Coover.  They all have linear qualities--diacritical qualities.  But they
all partake of that plate.  Think not?  Look again at the Kenosha Kid passage.

Thanks, Gershom.

Honos servio,

dgg
_______________
Dennis Grace
University of Texas at Austin
English Department
Assistant Instructor
Recovering Medievalist

"But to return to madness."  --Jonathan Swift's Grub-Street Hack, _A Tale of
a Tub_