GRGR (33) - The Glass Sphere

[jbor]

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>From: "David Morris" <fqmorris at hotmail.com>

> The place Blicero describes is very similar to Hades.  Hades might be called
> an "afterlife," but it is occupied only with the faint shadows of those that
> were alive.  This fits well w/ Pynchon's space-age version:  "Hardly solid,
> no more alive than memories, nothing to touch... only their remote images,
> black and white film images, grained" (723.15)
>
> There is a topographic confusion as to this sphere's locus.  It's "very high
> and far away."  But is it an object (viewed from the outside) relative to
> the earth, or is it _surrounding_ the earth (and viewed from the inside), or
> is it neither?  "Gravity rules all the way out to the cold shpere, _there is
> always the danger of falling_"  Who's in danger of falling?  Those venturing
> from earth out to the colony, or is it the colonists as they swing and dive
> through the space within?  If they were to fall, where would the land?
>
> Another obvious connection w/ this sphere is the light bulb, especially
> considering that the colonist are projected images, and that the sphere
> contains a vacuum.  I imagine a frosted bulb with blurry flickering B&W
> images inside that rarely come into focus on the surface of the bulb.  This
> vacuum tube might also figure for the first television sets.  TV
> afterlife...

Yes, I like this thought, and the final paragraph of the section is also
like a slow panoramic pan, too, a fade or wash, some fancy cinematic
dissipation to white screen/page/mind.

I'd also throw in Kubla Khan's "stately pleasure-dome" decreed for good
measure: "... sacred river ... sunless sea ... deep romantic chasm ...
savage place ... with ceaseless turmoil seething ... Ancestral voices
prophesying war ... The shadow of the dome of pleasure/ floated midway on
the waves ... caverns measureless to man ... I would build that dome in
air,/ That sunny dome! those caves of ice! ..." and so forth. Even if not
pertinent it's well worth the (re)visit:

http://www.yoga.com/raw/readings/coleridge.html

And while on the trail of those Romantic poets it's probably apt to
(re)consider Wordsworth's 'Ode on Intimations of Immortality from
Recollections of Early Childhood' especially in relation to the Pan and
"green uprising" passage and its precedents (and to Blicero's failing
eyesight I guess):

     [...]
     The things which I have seen now I can see no more.

     The rainbow comes and goes,
     And lovely is the rose;
     The moon doth with delight
     Look round her when the heavens are bare;
     [...]
     But yet I know, where'er I go
     That there hath passed away a glory from the earth.

     [...]
     Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting,
     The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
     Hath had elsewhere its setting
     And cometh from afar;
     [...]

     O joy! that in our embers
     Is something that doth live,
     That Nature yet remembers
     What was so fugitive!
     [...]

     Blank misgivings of a creature
     Moving about in worlds not realised
     [...]

     We, in thought, will join your throng,
     Ye that pipe and ye that play,
     Ye that through your hearts today
     Feel the gladness of the May!
     [...]
     We will grieve not, rather find
     Strength in what remains behind;
     In the primal sympathy
     Which having been must ever be;
     In the soothing thoughts that spring
     Out of human suffering;
     In the faith that looks through death
     In years that bring the philosophic mind.

     [and so forth]

http://www.bartleby.com/cgi-bin/texis/webinator/sitesearch/?query=%28colWord
swthW%29+immortality&db=db&cmd=context&id=38d46919356#hit1

While it's Rilke who gets the guernsey in the text -- and I don't for one
moment mean to suggest that any old Romantic poet is just as good as the
next one for the sake of illustration -- I find that Rilke in translation,
or any poetry in translation, is necessarily suspect. More the translator
than the translated imo, an impossible double distance for the reader to
traverse. And I'm not sure that Rilke retains quite the same mystique for
German-speaking readers as he does for English speakers nowadays anyway ...
but this is by the bye. Anyway, all this is to say that there is a rather
large dose of that Romantic Imagination thing going on in the text,
particularly this final section.

I see the dream of the "great glass sphere" as Blicero finally realising and
admitting those utopian dreams of earthly immortality (science, space
travel, a new world, film, art, procreation, that "one-way flow of European
time" et. al.) for what they are: illusions. Utopia is just and will only
ever be another sterile and inhuman "Deathkingdom". Redemption for him can
only come in Gottfried's love, the boy's voluntary self-sacrifice. (cf. God
and Jesus)

best