The Third Flash, or, What's the P.O.V.?

[jporter]

(For Dave Monroe: I'm currently reading Ben Franklin's Autobiography in
tandem with H.W. Brands, *The First American, The Life and Times of Benjamin
Franklin* in an effort to obtain some parallax on "The American Prometheus."
Your friend might consider such a technique, with Franklin, or some other
interesting character... Just a thought.)

Speaking of another autobiographical Franklin, i.e., Walter, forced into
suicide attempting to flee fascist France for neutral Spain in 1940, with an
important document for our times...

JM Coetzee and John Leonard do a nice fandango in this biweekly millenium
ending/starting edition of the NYRB- Coetzee covering the Havard editions of
Walter Benjamin's: Selected Writings I &II, and, _The Arcades Project_,
while Leonard is magnificent with what can only be called a worshipful
review, not just of Richard Power¹s latest: _Plowing the Dark_ but also,
peon¹s of praise for all of Power's other works, as well as, placing him
high(est) in the pantheon of our best, including Pynchon. One of Leonard's
sentences ties the two pieces together:

"Boy, is he smart. See him in Boston in the early Eighties, a
 freelance programmer with a Dutch girlfriend, who just
 happens to be reading Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in
 the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" when he wanders one
 Saturday morning into a Museum of Fine Arts retrospective
 on German photography, and sees a picture called "Young
 Westerwald Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, 1914."

Concerning Benjamin, here are some selections from Coetzee:

"What was in the briefcase, and where it disappeared to, we
 can only guess. Benjamin's friend Gershom Scholem
 suggested that it was the last revi-sion of the unfinished
 Passagen-Werk, known in English as the Arcades Project.
 ("To great writers," wrote Benjamin, "finished works weigh
 lighter than those fragments on which they work throughout
 their lives.") By his heroic if futile effort to save his
 manuscript from the fires of fascism and bear it to what he
 thinks of as the safety of Spain and, further on, the United
 States, Benjamin becomes an icon of the scholar for our
 times." 

And:

"The key concept that Benjamin invents (though his diary hints
 it was in fact the brainchild of the bookseller and publisher
 Adrienne Monnier) to describe what happens to the work of
 art in the age of its technological reproducibility (principally
 the age of the camera‹Benjamin has little to say about
 printing) is loss of aura. Until roughly the middle of the
 nineteenth century, he says, an intersubjective relationship of
 a kind survived between an artwork and its viewer: the viewer
 looked and the artwork, so to speak, looked back. "To
 perceive the aura of a phenomenon [means] to invest it with
 the capacity to look at us in turn." There is thus something
 magical about aura, derived from ancient links, now waning,
 between art and religious ritual."

By now it may become clear that the package which Slothrop has braved the
shocking revelations within the bowels of the Anubis to retreive for der
Springer, may indeed contain the very manuscript Benjamin was attempting to
carry across the Franco-Spanish border, whence he was rebuffed ³because his
papers were not in order...² As noted: no one has seen THAT manuscript
since. And while the revisionists claim it was merely the original version
of ³The Arcades Project²  as recently published from another copy, I think
not. Whatever. It's a safe bet, though, that if there is anyone who can
produce said item, and you¹d like to take a peek, it would be der Springer.
You can find him in the zone, waiting to deal...

This topic is relevant here, I would opine, because of the depiction,
allegorical- as needs be- of the murder, not just of Benjamin, but of ³Aura²
itself, in "the corridor scene" of the current V. segment. Yes, we are all
by now familiar with Pynchonian Corridor Metaphysics. You will not have
heard it here first. There was, of course, the allegorical representation of
western epistemology as a corridor in the upper echelons of The Cafe Hermann
Goring, where the fashion conscious cladistic demon/thief of evolution gave
us the finger, followed by the ascent/descent of our hero- the naked
american, Tyrone... just another parabolic tale.

Let¹s briefly review the current corridor conundrum. The corridor in play is
to audience starboard of the actual Ezbekiyeh Garden theater space (not
quite eden). Call it, if you will, a para-theater of the mind, to the
actor's non-dominant side. Without dredging the neuro-anatomic details,
there is, presumably, Lepsius... But taking some liberties- substituting a
for e, and dropping an i, Lepsius becomes Lapsus-  a bit of a red shift, I
know, but this exegesis is for the *accelerated class* and we can assume
that Lepsius is the dopplered version of Lapsus (It is LATE, after all, and
the available light has stretched to *O*range. Besides, that would make a
nice play on (almost) all the vowels of our western alphabet: a, e, i, u and
O... alpha to Oboy... Don't ask about Y.  This particular take being all
about the shift from aural to written language, AS WELL AS, another example
of the interminable competition- some would say, mutual co-dependence- of
the semites with their syllabic efforts, AND, those upstart goyem pagans
with their written vowels. Who should we blame for inventing phonetic
writing? cf., M&D for another example of this semitic/goyem inter-play, but
there, allegorizing the embryogenesis of "american" consciousness: Gersh and
Washington.)

Now, as you may recall, there are two versions of lapsus: calami and
linguae. Which came first I'll leave to JD and the eggheads. Either way, as
Ralph Wavyone, Jr., can well attest, he who would be Porpentine- although
dead already- is still in deep shit. Do not be cajoled, however, by the
arrogant whimsy of *The Don's Son.* Something HAS been irretrievably lost in
the transition FROM the sacred (I would say analog) experience of the
proto-group, just before lateral dominance set in,  i.e., before *the
hemlines came down,* TO the profane secularization of *being* engendered by
the reduction (I would say digitization) of experience into the encoded
sounds of culture. Call it a loss of the Aural and a gain of the aural- some
self-defining, self-derivative, self-NAMING, and otherwise, relentlessly
diminishing process- the road to hell, in other words... And, all that even
BEFORE the written version of the code came into being.

Meanwhile, back in the hallway, that Henry Jamesian-like shadow character at
the end of the corridor, right hand (controlled by port-side hemisphere)
flashing brighter than the Orange sunshine, three times, is now taking up
office space in the dominant hemisphere of your head.... he helps you read
this, is all. Recapping our collective heritage, then- one flash for the
spoken word, one more for the written.... but, well, besides mechanical mass
reproduction and desacralization, what¹s that third flash about?  Maybe this
will help-

Inspite of all Esther's fears and dimissals of ESP, and having her mind read
like a character in a novel, "she is anyway." So maybe the time has come
(again) to get off Esther's crosstown van and try some other mode, like the
M.M.T., with another driver... maybe even someone like Jimi.


Is it in my ears and in my eyes? You bet, but not in words.

Cloudpressed but warm,

jody

p.s.:  Maybe it was only 2.7182 flashes. Either way, don't blame me, I
didn't shoot no deputy.