GRGR (33) - Pan's Place

[David Morris]

Now me.

Katje thought he (Pan) was a lousy lover (but why?), Geli, though, has yet 
to be taken by him.  She sits alone in the woods waiting to be abducted.  
Remember the little girl's “Come take me" from Vineland?

Pan’s Place is violent-green: “too violently pitched alive in constant flow 
ever to be seen by men directly.” (720.20)   Remember  Moses couldn’t look 
at _God’s_ face?  He had to resort to a short glimpse at God's "back side."  
Pan’s Place is Earth fully frontally nude, before the apple, unsullied by 
the advent of human consciousness, “that poor cripple, that doomed deformed 
thing.”

Consciousness is here depicted as a curse on the land, much like the curse 
that took over Creation when the first humans partook of the Tree of the 
Knowledge of Good and Evil.  If they’d just stayed stooooopid we’d all be 
dumb and happy today.  Human Consciousness ushers in Death as a response to 
uncontrollable Life!  Consciousness is the Counterforce to Life,  “but [it 
is]  only _nearly_ as strong  [as Life].” (720.28)  Life will win (with or 
without humans).

When we last brushed by Pan’s Place it was in contrast  to Katje’s forced 
confrontation with a special Blackness,  not Pan’s but “_her own_“ (661),   
not pastoral, but of the city, and European.  This “Anti-Pan” darkness 
(Zombie-Quipoth) is the emptiness which Enzian believes Blicero has 
transcended.

Stop and gather these threads:

1. Pan’s Place is Violent Life.
2. Human Consciousness is it’s Death-Counterforce.
3. Blicero has transcended #2, above.

Look at Enzian’s description of Blicero’s transcendnece:

(660.37) “ ‘If he is alive’ he may have changed by now past our recognition. 
  We could have driven under him in the sky today and never seen.  Whatever 
happened at the end, he has transcended.”

This description of Blicero’s  new state is very similar to Slothrop’s 
transcended state as we know it:  invisible, or hard for us still of this 
realm to perceive.   As Katje puts it, “I don’t know anymore who Slothrop 
really was.  There’s a failure of the light_. I can’t see_.  It’s all going 
away from me.”  (659.24)

So….  Recapping the above:  Pan’s darkness is opposed to 
Consciousness/Analysis, and this latter’s Quipoth has been “transcended” by 
Blicero (according to Enzian)....

I feel like I’m on the wrong track here.  Blicero would seem to have thus 
returned to Pan’s Place.  But look closer:  Blicero’s “transcendence” is put 
in quotation marks in he text.  It might be false….

As Geli awaits Pan in the woods her Identity and Time sh-sh-shifts over to 
Gottfreid just before the launch.  “What if he wakes and finds you’ve gone?” 
(722.20)    The witch  becomes Hansel.  Contrast is again emphasized.

Gottfreid recites to himself lessons in fear, in survival, learned from 
childhood, important to remember now that (s)he’s “sneak[ed] away from camp 
to have a moment alone with what you felt stirring across the land.”

Blicero now begins to speak, as remembered by Gottfreid:  “America was_ the 
edge of the World.  […]  Europe had found the site for its Kingdom of 
Death.”  (722.20)  And, on Earth, Europe of the locus Death’s infection 
which has spread and nearly consumed it’s host, thus  Death’s  New Cycle in 
space…

Is there return from consciousness back to the Violent Green Garden?

Child, do you want to go?

Is that where Slothrop’s gone?

David Morris

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