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

[jbor]

      A dozen nationalities, dressed as Argentine estancieros, crowd
   around the soup-kitchen commissary. El Nato is sitting on the saddle
   of his horse, Gaucho style, looking off into the German pampas.
   Felipe is kneeling out in the sun, making his noontime devotionals
   to the living presence of a certain rock back in the wasteland of La
   Rioja, on the eastern slopes of the Andes. According to an Argentine
   legend from the last century, Maria Antonia Correa followed her lover
   into that arid land, carrying their newborn child. Herders found her a
   week later, dead. But the infant had survived, by nursing from her
   corpse. Rocks near the site of the miracle have since been the object of
   yearly pilgrimages. But Felipe's particular rock embodies also an
   intellectual system, for he believes (as do M.F. Beal and others) in
   a form of mineral consciousness not too much different from that of
   plants and animals, except for the time scale. Rock's time scale is a lot
   more stretched out. "We're talking frames per century," Felipe like
   everybody else here lately has been using a bit of movie language,
   "per millennium!" Colossal. But Felipe has come to see, as those who
   are not Sentient Rocksters seldom do, that history as it's been
   laid on the world is only a fraction, an outward-and-visible fraction.
   That we must also look to the untold, to the silence around us, to the
   passage of the next rock we notice -- to its aeons of history under the
   long and female persistence of water and air (who'll be there, once or
   twice per century, to trip the shutter?), down to the lowland, where your
   paths, human and mineral, are most likely to cross. . . .  (612-3)

M(ary) F. Beal is an American novelist. Pynchon wrote a advertising blurb
for her novel *Amazon One* in 1975, as he had for her husband, David
Shetzline, in 1968 for his novel *DeFord*. Shetzline also cops a mention in
*GR*. (389)

http://pynchonfiles.com/pynchonprint.htm
http://pynchonfiles.com/amazon.htm
http://pynchonfiles.com/deford.htm


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>From: Paul Mackin <pmackin at clark.net>
>To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: Re: grgr (34): "the tower" (747)(rocks)
>Date: Sun, Aug 27, 2000, 7:57 AM
>

> So isn't it the stones' souls that are being referred to. And if stones
> have souls they are the most immortal of all souls. Stones are the
> closest thing to eternal we have.  Same goes for mountainsides--faces
> being the mirror of the soul--even with all those German youth out
> dissipating their blues on them.
>
> Pretty rosy scenario I'd opine.