grgr (34): "the tower" (747)

[Dave Monroe]

Consider the fololowing, from Norman O. Brown, Life against Death: The
Psychoanalytical Meaning of History  (Ed. Christopher Lasch.  Hanover, NH:
Wesleyan UP, 1985 [1959]):

Luther describes the circumstances under which he received the illumination
which became te fundamenmtal axiom of the Protestant Reformation--the doctrine
of the justification by fait--in the following words:

These words "just" and "justice of God" were a thunderbolt in my conscience....
but once when I was in the tower I was meditating on those words, "the just
lives by faith," "justice of God," I soon had the thought whether we ought to
live justified by faith, and God's justice ought to be the salvation of every
beliuever, and soon my soul was revived.  Therefore it is God's justice which
justifies and saves us.  And these words became a sweeter message for me.  This
knowledge the Holy Spirit gave me on the privy.

... It was in the tower of the Wittenberg monastery, where the privy was
located.  Grisar explains, "in olden times it was very usual to establish the
adjunct on the city walls and its towers, the sewage having egress outside the
town boundaries."

Luther's candor has been too much for the Lutherans.  Recognizing the crucial
importance of the "experience in the tower," the Thurmleibnis, as it is called
in Lutheran hagiography, Lutheran scholars have either monkeyed with the texts
in an attempt to separate the tower from the privy, or else interpreted the
tower not as a geographical location but as an allegory of spiritual captivity.
It was left to the Jesuit Father Grisar to recover the facts ....  (202)

... there is much to be deconstructed here, esp. in re: that Tower/privy binary,
the privy a supplement (in the Derridean sense), indeed, excluded 9and yet
constituive of), waste(d), preterite ... and also note that "thunderbolt," cf.
GR V663-5, that "Polish undertaker in a rowboat, out in the storm tonight to see
if he can get struck by lightning" ... much about such flashes of (Holy)
inSpiration in GR, Pynchon, no?



> > On Thu, 24 Aug 2000, Mark Wright AIA wrote:
> >
> > > That's what I'm after, as many meanings as people want to throw out for
> > > consideration.