GRGR(19) - Temporal Bandwidth

[Henry Musikar]

The rock is physically heavy, but it's "time scale is a lot more stretched 
out. `We're talking frames per century.'" Slothrop is no physical 
lightweight, either, btw.

>From: David Morris <fqmorris at yahoo.com>
>Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 11:35:03 -0600
>
>I finally found it: extremely large temporal bandwidth
>- the consciousness of stone.
>
>``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 objects 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....'' Pynchon (1973, p.
>612-613).
>
>
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