GR and M&D related: telluric forces

[Lycidas at worldnet.att.net]

 For most of the characters in GR, these powerful earth
forces are menacing forces and they will do whatever it
takes to conquer them so they may expand the rules of
consciousness or enlarge the glade cut in the woods and
repress the fear of the powerful forces of earth where "the
forest could be penetrated no further." Defiant, Faustian
man Steering between Scylla and Charybds under Yaw
control(GR.239), ignorant of the Hottentot dialect
(Mondaugen's story):  "Gomera was the last piece of land
Columbus touched before America. Did he here them too, that
last night? Did they have a message for him? A warning?
Could he understand the prescient goatherds in the dark, up
in the Canarian holly and the faya, gone dead green in the
last sunset of Europe?" (GR.453) "America was a gift from
the invisible powers, a way of returning." (GR.722)
Returning to the miraculous "soil's stringing of rings and
chains in nets only God can tell the meshes of" (GR.5-6). 


    

Doug Millison wrote:
> 
> I thought of  telluric forces, which Pynchon mentions several times in M&D,
> and some important GR elements, as I read this passage in a New York Times
> article, "Maybe We Are Alone in the Universe, After All " by William J.
> Broad, published yesterday,
> http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/020800sci-space-life.html.
> The article discusses a recent book, _Rare Earth_, by Dr. Peter D. Ward of
> the University of Washington, "a paleontologist who specializes in mass
> extinctions" and Dr. Donald C. Brownlee of the University of Washington, "a
> noted astronomer, member of the National Academy of  Sciences and chief
> scientist of NASA's $166 million Stardust mission to capture
> interplanetary and interstellar dust."
> 
> I haven't taken the notion any deeper, but the idea that these powerful
> earth forces may contribute to life's evolution on earth seems to me to
> bear thinking about in the context of M&D's telluric forces. From a
> different point of view (looking at organics rather than the heavy metals
> which center in the argument Ward and Brownlee make, according to Broad)
> this represents an interesting notion when read in the context of the way
> Pynchon treats the earth's interior in GR, the strata of petroleum.
> 
> Broad writes, "According to the book, the slow movement and recycling of
> planetary crust into a planet's hot interior are key ingredients for the
> evolution of complex life. Plate tectonics, the authors say, promotes
> biodiversity by producing mountain chains and other kinds of environmental
> complexity, lessens the odds of extinctions, helps keep planetary
> temperatures even through the recycling of carbon and makes dry land on
> which advanced civilizations can flourish."
> 
> Gravity plays a big role, too:
> 
> "The analysis of starlight from the fringes [of the galaxy] shows they are
> relatively poor in elements like iron, magnesium and silicon, partly
> because of less recycling of stellar materials over the eons and partly
> because of the rarity in such regions of supernovas, the stellar blasts
> that help make heavy elements in enormously hot explosions.  These
> elements, Dr. Brownlee said, and even heavier ones that are radioactive and
> also made in supernovas, appear to be prerequisites to the formation of
> terrestrial-type planets that have sufficient gravity to retain seas and
> atmospheres and that have plate tectonics, which is powered largely by the
> heat of radioactive decay. "
> 
> d  o  u  g    m  i  l  l  i  s  o  n
> http://www.millison.com
> http://www.online-journalist.com