bill gray and Pynchon cont..

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

Emerson's famous new england transcendental  "I become a
transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents
of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or
parcel of God....The health of the eye seems to demand a
horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far
enough," becomes in Delillo's Mao II master Moon's never
tired Karen's "the single floating eye of the CROWD (my
caps), inseparable from her own apparatus of vision but
sharper sighted, able to perceive more deeply." Delillo
turns Emerson inward, Karen admonishes an old man in a bar,
"don't be so subjective sir," she recites the van truth of
the cult like a doll with a pull string. Her father zooms
in, his logic, his documenting, the shots, the click of the
camera, the spectators in the stadium "trying to neutralize
the event, drain it of eerieness and power." The mechanical
routine, the brides and grooms, now "turned to sculptured
objects," SEE how happy they look? "Clickety-click. The
thought makes the couples a little giddy. They feel that
space is contagious. They're here but also there, already in
the albums and slide projectors, filling picture frames with
their microscopic bodies, the minikin selves they are trying
to become." One little Moony wont grow at all, seems to
shrink, and the future belongs to crowds, crowds fixed as
images, images with "missing parts" missing souls. In De
Anima (on the soul) Aristotle treats the senses five, he
describes the process, the sense receives "the form
of sensible objects without the matter, just as the wax
receives the impression of the signet-ring without the iron
or the gold." But, since there are different species for
each of the five external senses that Aristotle
recognized--sight, hearing, touch,
taste, and smell--"species" does not mean "image." The
images lift the souls from the stadium, floating
transcendental eye-balls searching for Melville's silent
god, have surrendered free will to a new Calvinism, a new
predestination, a new "Lord of the Second Advent," a
"whiteness against the patches and shadow," the same
"uncertainty and chaos" that Delillo attributes to "The
powerful moment of death, the surrounding blurs, patches and
shadows" of the JFK assassination home movie.        |  
                                          

No broken estate here, as Karen's father zooms in
"documenting" his daughters wedding, musing, "When the Old
God leaves the world, what happens to all the unexpended
faith?" 

TBC

Terrance