GRGR(16): The Aqyn's song

[Doug Millison]

Jeremy asked "what the Kirghiz light is, (b) how T. heard about it, (c) why
he wants to see it?"

The Kirghiz Light is what some folks nowadays call a "primary religious
experience"--  a direct experience of God's presence, as described in the
mystical traditions of all the world's religions. The lyric makes the
connection explicit in the third stanza where the "God" that otherwise
"might be a gold ikon" here "comes as the Kirghiz Light."  This experience
is described in the paradoxical terms common in the literature of
mysticism: "Its voice is deafness . . . It's light is blindness."  Like the
God of the Old Testament, "Its face cannot be borne."  Like the Christian
rebirth, "a man cannot be the same, after seeing the Kirghiz Light", and in
an explicit allusion to Jesus' teaching, "this light must change us to
children... Now I sense all Earth like a baby." For those who are "ready"
(as Tchitcherine was not, p.359), this is a sacred place of rebirth and
transformation.

It's hard not to think of Kubrick's 1968 movie, _2001 A Space Odyssey_  as
I read Pynchon's landscape description, "at the tall black rock in the
desert".

I'm sure it will be debated, but in this episode Pynchon seems to
unequivocably affirm the possibility and power of such mystical experience
-- transcendence is possible here in a way that it's impossible in
Blicero's quasi-religious travesty.  The Aqyn's Song's lyric, like the song
that Geli sings for Slothrop, is one of the very few in the novel that is
not a parody of a popular song. The Aqyn is not a figure of fun or irony.
And T does feel the power of the Light, even if he doesn't benefit from Its
illumination.

Don't know why T is after this experience -- although seeking after this
type of mystical experience after his drug experimentation makes this metal
man resemble  many a 60's hippie -- but he certainly seems on a mission
with his "Let's ride, comrade."  And, like many a 60's hippie, years later
"he will hardly be able to remember It"  because, I think, "his heart was
never ready."


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