grgr(5)Turkey Dodoes

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

GR sends us to other books. The opening dream episode sent
me to Mumford's history of the second industrial revolution,
the Slothrop down the bowl sent me to Malcolm X and The
Decline of the West. Episode 14 sent me to Conrad. Doug's
quotes from the Dickens conference opens to Dickens Doubles,
Dostoevsky Doubles, and Conrad's Secret Sharer, and  this
episode is double, double, double and also  has Heart of
Darkness all over it. In any event, this is my favorite
episode in the first hundred odd pages and I think a lot has
been covered, though a lot has not. So we move on. It is my
contention that GR is first of all, a story of America, as
all of Pynchon's stories are, and so I thought I'd mention
the turkey.
Ben Franklin's choice for our national bird, the wild turkey
(Meleagris Gallopavo) has not always had an easy time
finding a place in its homeland. Native to only North
America, the wild turkey became popular game for early
colonists, who found easy targets with the abundance of
animals and birds in the New World. As the colonists began
to stake territory and set up farms, villages and eventually
cities, they destroyed the turkey's crucial food and nesting
sites in forests and waterways. Eventually, the industrial
revolution polluted many of the country's rivers, further
reducing endangered flocks. Turkey populations  declined
because of wide-scale logging, illegal poaching and hunting,
poor habitats and even the devastation of the Civil War and
Great Depression, when food quality was sparse and the
turkey was considered an easy catch and good eating.

"That was it right there. No language meant no chance of
co-opting them to what their round and flaxen invaders were
calling Salvation." GR.Penguin.110

"The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon
the shackled form of a conquered
monster, but there -- there you could look at a thing
monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the
men were -- No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that
was the worst of it -- this
suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly
to one. They howled and leaped, and
spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just
the thought of their humanity -- like
yours -- the thought of your remote kinship with this wild
and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it
was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit
to yourself that there was in you
just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible
frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there
being a meaning in it which you -- you so remote from the
night of first ages -- could
comprehend. And why not? The mind of man is capable of
anything -- because everything is in it,
all the past as well as all the future. What was there after
all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion,
valour, rage -- who can tell? -- but truth -- truth stripped
of its cloak of time. Let the fool gape
and shudder -- the man knows, and can look on without a
wink. But he must at least be as much of
a man as these on the shore. He must meet that truth with
his own true stuff -- with his own inborn
strength. Principles won't do. Acquisitions, clothes, pretty
rags -- rags that would fly off at the
first good shake. No; you want a deliberate belief. An
appeal to me in this fiendish row -- is
there? Very well; I hear; I admit, but I have a voice, too,
and for good or evil mine is the speech
that cannot be silenced.

                        --Conrad HOD