Theatre/Theater

[Lycidas at worldnet.att.net]

The Second Falling

The age-old questions and the fruit of that repressed tree
whose mortal denial brought division into the world and all
our woe with loss of eden....

The age-old questions can be found in Joyce or Mann or
Milton and so on. Milton could be read from Bacon and
Descartes through the Romantic's lens and what Pynchon notes
is "500 hundred years of metaphysics" and science which in
GR has has produced a profound historical pathology that is
indistinguishable from a psychopathology or an ominous
doubling mechanism deep in the very scheme of things.

It is great irony that as Pointsman attempts to come to
terms with this historical pathology, to maintain control,
he directs his efforts at the American Tyrone Slothrop
(GR.144).  

 In a limited sense, Pynchon identifies this pathology as
the cultural setting of pre-war Germany. It is the 
"primitive German, God's poorest and most panicked creature"
(GR.465) or "the poor harassed German soul" (GR.426) whose
mind "for at last two centuries--since Leibniz" (GR.407) has
been strangely connected to "the rapid flashing of
successive stills to counterfeit movement....extended past
images to human lives" (GR.407). This "German sickness" is
tied to an old Pynchon concern, the influence of "texts"
(books, film, architecture, etc.) on the young mind.   


Except maybe for Brainy Smurf, it's hard to imagine anybody
these days wanting to be called a literary intellectual,
though it doesn't sound so bad if you broaden the labeling
to, say, "people who read and think." Being called a Luddite
is another matter. It brings up questions such as, Is there
something about reading and thinking that would cause or
predispose a person to turn Luddite? Is It O.K. to be a
Luddite? And come to think of it, what is a Luddite, anyway?



The same theme runs through "The Secret Integration." Tom
Swift, parental conspiracy, racist film and TV. 

In GR, Kurt Mondaugen, "One of these German mystics who grew
up reading Hesse, Stafan George, and Richard Wilhelm, is
"ready to accept Hitler on the basis of Demian-metaphysics
(GR.403) and Pokler was an extension of the Rocket, long
before it was ever built" (GR.402). The sickness is also
Christian and infects and is in turn infected by the "German
mania for subdividing" (GR.448) which also infects and is
infected by a cultural linguistics
(Christian/sexual-homosexual, fetishistic language) obsessed
with "name giving (note the dble irony of naming and the act
of naming--Enzian and Raketmensch), dividing the Creation
finer and finer, analyzing, setting namer more hopelessly
apart from named (GR.391, GR.366, GR.320-322). The German
sickness is a Modern sickness, a pathology that Pynchon
satirizes as an epidemic of the West, but directs at an
American audience sitting in an American Theatre, an
American reader and thinker, that Pynchon admonishes by
depicting the the German male at puberty who rebels against
what he considers a "detestable Burgerlinchkeit" (GR.162)
and who, in the wake of his "Wandervogel idiocy" (GR.162),
reads Hesse and company to become ready to accept Hitler on
the foundations of "Damian-metaphysics, a "Schwarmerei" that
soon degenerates into various forms of fanaticism for
technological specialization (GR.239) and fixed control
which is rationalized by those "folks in power" (GR.238). 

In a broader sense, these woes are caused by the human
mind--the subjectivity, the inwardly trapped mind that has 
separated what was once whole or unified so that human
experiences have become antagonistic.     


Creation sees itself with both eyes
Open. Only our eyes are turned inwards,
Walls of circumvallation,
Against our own free beginning.
What it is like outside, we only know from glimpsing
The faces of animals. As soon as a child is born
We turn and force him so that he sees
All forms inside-out, not the real, that real
That shapes the animal's face--free from death.
Only we see it; free creation has its decline behind it
And before it, only God. And when it goes, it goes
Into eternity, as the fountains go.
We have never, not even for a day,
Looked into the world, into which the flowers
Eternally open. The world always is,
Not our narcissistic nothingness,
But the pure, the open, that one breathes in and out,
Always knowing and desiring. In stillness, children
Lose themselves in this pure air and tremble.
Or someone dies and yet remains.
Near to death one sees death no longer and
Perhaps stares out with huge animal eyes.
Lovers, were not the others, that pretended
To see, standing near you and amazed
When by mistake they peered out from
Behind themselves? . . . But we cannot get
Beyond our little selves and our small world returns.
Creation turns eternally and we see in its turning
The reflection of freedom
That is dark in us; or there, an animal,
Mute, looks out, peaceful through and through.
This is fate: to be opposed
And nothing more
and always opposed.
Were our kind of knowing in the beast,
The knowing that turns us into our other ways,
And his knowing in us,
We would know the turning.
For the beast's being is for her eternal
And ungrasped and without a glance towards her own
condition,
Altogether pure, like the passing of the world through her
eyes.
And where we see the future, she sees the all
And herself within it, healed forever.

Yet in the warm and waking beast
Trouble and sorrow are inner burdens.
She also bears what often this self of ours
Will overcome--the remembering,
As if it once was that which we strive
To approach, sadly, and the joining
Intolerably tender. Here all is distant
And there all close as breath. After our first home
We find the second cold and drafty.
O holiness, O tiny creation,
Remaining always in the womb that bears her.
O lucky gnats, still jumping into death
Even as they marry. The womb is all.
And see the edgy safety of the bird
Who breath and distance knows from birth,
As if he were the soul of an Etruscan,
Back from death, who has found a room
Lidded o'er with reclining figures.
And how dismayed he is--forced to fly
And torn from out the womb. Frightening
Himself, he flickers through the air, like a crack
Through a china cup. So is the trail of the bat
Through the porcelain of the evening.
And we, the audience, always, everywhere
Turning from all-in-all and never looking out.
It overflows from us. We bring it order.
But our things fall apart.
We sweep up our own debris and fall apart ourselves.

So who was it that turned us inwards, so that we,
And all we make, assume the posture
Of imminent departure? He stands upon the final rise,
>From which he sees our spreading lowlands.
He turns and stops and waits.
And here we live and take our leave. (DE VIII)


But with us, where we finally decide on one thing,
The other choice is always felt. We wear strife
Like a second skin. The lovers cannot always walk,
Arm in arm, along the borders
Of the world they have promised to find and to settle.
For a momentary sign, a reason for
Opposition will be prepared--laboriously;
We notice it because it is so meaningful
To us. We do not know the contour
Of feeling, only what facts it causes. (DE IV 9-18) 

A god can do it. But will you tell me how
a man can enter through the lyre's strings?
Our mind is split. And at the shadowed crossing
of heart-roads, there is no temple for Apollo. (SO I, III,
1-4) (GR.625-626)