"Across the interface"

[David Morris]

Wow!  Such a Thread!

The Interface is everywhere in GR.  It is MANY things.  Is it even 
_possible_ to unite their instances?

It is (but not excluding):
1.  The cortex.
2.  The veil between worlds.
3.  The Zero.
4.  The Great Radiance.
5.  That which Separates...

O-or...  But...

Even as it is introduced, the concept of separation is subverted.  And the 
blurring of separation is associated with the Occult, Zen, another reality 
where there is no clear line of demarcation, no "this" V "that."  There 
instead is a continu-Ohmmmm...

But I think the progress of Time is important is this no-borders reality.  
There is a "Flow."  This is not "Anti-Paranoia," where no-THING is 
distinguished, which thus precludes association.  That Anti-P is related to 
the preconscious state, without Identity, which begins with separation of 
Self from the chaos of experience.

"Flow" implies Direction, and maybe Time.  Travel may be Reversible, but it 
is channelled, following pre-set Grooves. I think "Flow" V "Separation" 
speaks on many levels...

Abstractions all use the knife of separation.  Re-integration is the next 
challenge.


>From: rj
>
>I think that Pynchon has accessed this term deliberately and
>reflexively, and he uses it in a range of guises in *GR*: Walter
>Rathenau, through a spirit medium, comments that the "interface between
>coal and steel is coal tar" (166); Slothrop and Geli Tripping's
>"Brockengespenstphanomen" is confined to "dawn's slender interface"
>(331); and the Herero Pavel, sniffing "Leunagasolin", hears "the voices
>of the Fungus Pygmies who breed in the tanks at the interface between
>fuel and water-bottom":
>
>Not much fun for them down here at the Interface, competing with the
>bacteria who cruise by in their country of light, these cellular
>aristocracy, approaching the wall of hydrocarbons each for his share of
>God's abundance -- leaving their wastes, a green murmur, a divergently
>unstable gabbling, a slime that grows with the days thicker, mor
>epoisonous. It is a depressing bthing indeed to be a pygmy clustered
>together with thousands of others, hundreds of thousands, and have to
>live on the other side of all this. You say other side? What do you
>mean? What other side? You mean in the gasoline? (Clustered Pygmies,
>playfully and to some well-known swing riff): No-no, no no! -- You mean
>in the water, then? (C.P.:) No-no, no no! ... We mean, explain the
>Pygmies ... on the other side of the whole thing, the whole
>bacteria-hydrocarbon-waste cycle. We can see the Interface from here.
>It's a long rainbow, mostly indigo, if that's any help, indigo and Kelly
>green ... (523-4)
>
>I suspect that there is a sociological fable buried in this
>hallucination.
>
>Elsewhere there are the "souls across the interface" between life and
>death (147), "floundering in the swamp between the worlds" (217). Kevin
>Spectro envisaged the brain's cortex "as an interface organ, mediating
>between ... Inside and Outside ... but *part of them both*" (141); and
>it is Slothrop's cortex which, for Spectro and Pointy, is the
>"interface" which will provide the "answer" to his apparent prescience
>of the V-2 blasts (144).
>
>I think that the notion of "interface" -- as a type of
>scientifically-observable magical realm or state -- also serves as a
>metaphorical demonstration of the process of information transmission
>from author to reader. The text is an "interface" between the author's
>experience of the "real" world and the reader's own, one across which
>Pynchon reaches with his social and cultural critiques.
>
>best
>
>
>Doug Millison wrote:
> >
> > Can't we credit TRP with introducing "interface" into literary 
>discourse?[snip]

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