GRGR (33) - The Glass Sphere

[Dave Monroe]

Thanks!  Coleridge's "stately pleasure-dome" is no doubt in the archaeology of
that "great glass sphere," as is that televised broadcast of Armstrong's "one
small step for man, one giant leap for mankind" ("it is important they both be
men," "they are all men," sure enough ...).  And had not considered, much less
reconsidered, Wordsworth's "Ode on Intimations of Immortality," but Romanticism
should indeed prove significant in re: those "ecological" passages as well.  Am
still getting 'round to that, though ... and not so sure that that new
"Deathkingdom" on the moon isn't perhaps more properly an illusory dystopia, but
... but recall the "Countdown" @ V753/B878, "The countdown as we know it,
10-9-8-u.s.w., was invented by Fritz Lang in 1929 for the Ufa film Die Frau in
Mond" (hm, note the gender here ...).  Do take a look at Peter Fisher, Fantasy and
Politics: Visions of the Future in Weimar Germany, maybe J.P. Telotte, A Distant
Technology: Science Fiction Film and the Machine Age, and, esp., the, I don't
know, phenomenology of the astronaut (as exemplar of that isolated, perhaps
gnostic to Enlightenment to romanticist to ... subjectivity) in Robert D.
Romanyshyn's Technology as Symptom and Dream.   But I'm not so sure just how
"redeeming" Gottfried's launching, perhaps death, perhaps the death of the
audience at the Orpheus Theater, perhaps the death of humanity (for starters), is
here ...

jbor wrote:

> 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"
>
> 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)
>
> 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)