Moss Creature, Mossmoon

[Dave Monroe]

Dale Carter, in "Appendix 2: From Minotaur to Mossmoon" to his The Final
Frontier: The Rise and Fall of the American Rocket State (London and New York:
Verso, 1988, pp. 275-6), has an interesting and, here, relevant discussion of
Clive Mossmoon, starting with his name, which "takes us from the erstwhile
classic imperial figure of ... the effective founder of the British Empire in
India, to the prospective and exemplary lunar landscape at its incipient
totalitarian edge.  In the center ... lies the Moss."  "The Moss Creature
emerges from the equinoctal, pitching canyons of the Titans ... via the
mountains of the 'animal north' ... that Blicero's minotaur had retreated into
three months before.  It embodies the spirit of Pan ... and is the next term in
an aural series--Minotaur: Monitor: Moss Creature: Mossmoon--extending below
history's surface to connect the Oven and Rocket State cycles; a 'leaky,
wounded' creature ...linking the death cries of the Moinotaur in Pointsman's
deepest dreams with the birth cries of the rising self ('a a petty indulgent
animal') in Clive Mossmoon's 'mired darkness.'" "As it emerges ... [it] becomes
'the peak that we are allowed to see, the break up through the surface, out of
the other silent world, violently,' which fixes itself historically within Clive
Mossmoon ... (GR  98, 142, 486, 523, 616, 699, 720, 726)."

"The appearance of the Moss Creature en route to its historical embodiment via
the simultaneous and hardly coincidental destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
announces to the Schwarzkommando the first appearance of the new order ... n
'awful branching ... a new Zone in any case, now, ehetyher Christian fires or
refrains.'  When Enzian knocks Christian's barrell aside he ensures that
military options are restrained by civilian caution.... the post-war structure
of power is starting to manifet itself ... (GR 524)."

"Not coincidnetally, at the same time in London (early August 1945), Clive
Mossmoon 'feels himself rising, as from a bog ... delivered onto the sober shore
of the Operation, where all is firm underfoot ....'  ...  He has absorbed the
Moss or Bog Creature and in the process has completed the formation of his
Rocket State character.  This character is presented symbolically as a piece of
graffiti (appropriately scratched on a toilet or bog wall) by Tyrone Slothrop
shortly before his dissolution (GR 624).  the sign represnts, in one sense, the
imperial order absorbed into the totalitarian, and in another the unstable
tensions between private and public dimensions of power characteristic of the
post-war order.  An inner circle is held between a central point ... and an
outer ring, between personal Fuhrer-dom and passive extinction.  The point at
which the inner circle reaches the outer, and hence vanishes, equates to the
delta-t at which the descending rocket (which the sign also represents) reaches
the top of one's head ... (GR 7, 206, 425, 616, 624)"

jbor wrote:

> It seems to me that the/a point being made is that the "green uprising"
> proceeds regardless of man, and that that is a good thing. It recalls the
> "Moss Creature" stirring back on 523-524 for Leunagasolin-sniffing Pavel &
> co. And it is a motif repeated in the "seized bearings, rotted socks and
> skivvies fragrant now with fungus and mud" -- the biological processes of
> life, rust, decomposition, unicellular algaes etc -- these things are still
> able to reclaim whatever mechanical destruction has been wrought by man.