GRGR(13) Notes (Pt 1)

[Mark Wright AIA]

Howdy

(minor spoiler, I suppose...)

Interesting that in this allusive little episode of dragons teeth and
cows P presents the Puritan experience a bit differently than he
usually does elsewhere.  Typically he presents his forebears as fixated
upon the "Word" and as viewing nature as an empty field waiting to be
logged off, mined, fenced, planted etc.  In this passage however they
hear God "clammoring" in the rustle of leaves and the meaningless
lowing of cows.   (Not, in this instance, the active purposeful divine
*bull* but the passive shambling *cow*.)

Can a single entity *clammor*?  I've always associated a *clammor* with
a crowd.  I suppose a Trinity could Clammor, or a host of angels? The
Greeks might easily have been able to think of their pantheon as an
unruly crowd, and heard them clammoring.

Vincent Scully, in his *marvelous* book "The Earth, The Temple, And The
Gods" demonstrates that the Greeks perceived their landscape as
suffused by the gods.  He analyzes dozens of temple sites and their
associated landforms, and shows how the various major gods were
manifest in fairly consistent ways in different places.  I hearby
recommend this book to the group.

GR concludes, of course, with a bitter singalong (follow the bouncing
ball)in the last theater (of war?) in which God has given up, the stone
faces of the gods bear witness from every mountainside, and the souls
of the dead are imprisoned in every stone.

Would these imprisoned souls clammor?

Mark



--- David Morris <fqmorris at hotmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Cows, Bulls and abduction fill Greek Mythology.  Zeus is often a
> bull, 
> overcoming, abducting his momentary choice.  It was a prized animal,
> and the 
> prettiest were sometimes cause for the gods getting some lesser
> sacrifice, 
> of course only leading to Monstrous effects.
> 
> Roberto Calasso's _The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony_ (Knopf, 1993)
> is a 
> wild ramble through Classical Mythology, and deals with
> identification of 
> Hero and Monster, Abductor and Abductee.  There is an implied eternal
> 
> flipping of the two-sided coin.
> 
> Watch that the cows don't wander, but the bulls might steal your
> wife.
> 
> DM
> 
> >From: Mark Wright AIA
> >
> >Howdy
> >
> >The Dragon's Teeth at 281.11 suggests the story of Cadmus and
> Apollo's
> >cow in the grove (see, alas, my poor offering below).  Through this
> cow
> >P links the Puritan apprehension of the sacred with that of the
> pagan
> >Greeks "...his own WASPS in buckled black, who heard God Clamoring
> to
> >them in every turn of a leaf or cow loose among apple orchards in
> >autumn...." (281.34).
> >
> >Mark
> >
> >
> 
> ______________________________________________________
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> 


=====

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