LSD in the Wind

[Terrance]

> >
> > Avallone, Michael.  Beneath the Planet of the Apes.
> >     New York: Bantam, 1970.  pp. 1-3
> >
> > ... "based upon characters created by Pierre Boulle."  Well, there was
> > something in the wind ca. the turn of the decade, at any rate.  And note
> > the echo of Thomas stearns Eliot's "The Waste-land" there as well.  By
> > the way, I've been reliably informed that, alchemically, April is,
> > indeed, "the cruelest month" ....

Whitehead's becoming of Nature in process never complete,
Nadeau, Robert L., Studies in the Novel 11, No.4 (1979), p.
461. But tell me why, if P is sympathetic to the Gnostic
view of Earth, why is that those that have left her, the
Gnostics that have broken through to the other side, without
shattering and returning to earth, live in a world neither
fertile nor erotic, neither chaotic nor asymmetrical,
neither continuous nor mysterious, neither in constant
process nor beyond control. 

In P's fictions there are worlds below, one can go beneath
the planet, and like Slothrop's harp resurface. 

There is in P, I think, still, something more than truth,
mathematical truth for example, that pre Newtonian
Aristotelian ether, that fertile ground where mindlessly
pleasurable fictions fill the V-oid, the vacuum. Fictions 
that make sense of, of maybe even Monistic Materialism's
painful truths, fulfilling the most basic human needs, 
fiction, not a myth, not a heroic myth, but fiction. I
think, G. Grass has this view of fiction, but I could be
just dust.