GRGR(29) - The Grid, The Comb

[Dave Monroe]

... text, from the Latin texere, "to weave," also perhaps related to the Greek
tekton ("builder, carpenter"), techne ("art, craft, skill"), cf. that Remedios
Varo painting in The Crying of Lot 49, very good ... but also Lucretius's
clinamen (De Rerum Naturae), that swerving of particles otherwise on parallel
paths, that introduction of difference necessary to the creation--or, more
technically (...), accretion--of matter,  appropriated by Harold Bloom in his
The Anxiety of Influence as the necessary swerving of the "strong" poet from his
[sic] predecessors ... or, for that matter, that swerving of lines necessary to
writing, to the differences necessarily inscribed in writing (one requires at
least two different characters to convey "information," no?) ... and, perhaps
(just free-associating now), the importance of The Grid in modernism, in
modernist art, at any rate, see Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the
Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths ...

David Morris wrote:

> ----------
> (655.20)  The colonel is left alone in Happyville.  The steel city waits
> him, the even cloud light raising a white steak down each great building,
> all of them set up as a modulation on the perfect grid of the streets, each
> tower cut off at a different height - and where is the Comb that will move
> through _this_ and restore the old perfect Cartesian harmony.
> ----------
> (643.18)  Hair is yet another kind of modulated frequency.  Assume a state
> of grace in which all hairs were once distributed perfectly even, a time of
> innocence when they fell perfectly straight over the colonel's head.
> ----------
>
> The Grid is a digitally ordering device, one that brings us right back to
> the beginning of GR, the Map of London.  When all of the points on a grid
> are of equal value, when all the hairs are exactly perfectly straight and
> the same length, such uniformity is ironically called here a "state of
> grace."  This reminds me of the Talking Heads lyric: "Heaven is a place
> where Nothing ever happens."
>
> This section of GR is FULL of modulations.  These modulations, patterns in
> the air to which Eddie Pensiero is so finely attuned, nearly invisible
> pulsations in the light from Bulb Byron, provide contrasts in the points of
> the grid, "content" which embody "meaning," whether that meaning is inherent
> in the frequencies or contributed by the readers own imagination, or both.
>
> ----------
> (27.21) "While the great Loom of God works in darkness above,/And our trials
> here below are but threads of his Love."
> ----------
>
> Lay a Grid over GR.  Now take the threads, color code them,  and connect the
> dots.  Use thicker and thinner lines to indicate importance, over and under
> too.  Does a picture emerge from this Grid?  Are you sure it's not just your
> hallucination?
>
> If you were to take a comb to these woven lines and untangle them all, you
> would not "get to the bottom" of things, you would destroy the message.
> What we have is a psychedelic oriental rug whose knots are more intricate
> the closer you look.
>
> Consider the role of the Fates: one spins the thread, one measure the
> lengths, and one cuts.  They create the medium for the web of reality, but
> who does the weaving?  Are they not be agents in the employ of the Great
> Paranoid weaving sense (or nonsense) into this wildly scattered cosmos he's
> stumbled upon?
>
> David Morris
>
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