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

[Paul Mackin]

There ya go.

			p.

On Sun, 27 Aug 2000, jbor wrote:

> 
>       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
> 
> 
> ----------
> >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.
>