Pan

[Bonnie Kaplan]

Pan and Blicero
Infidelity is a feminist practice of undermining the "Law-of-the-Father" or 
"Name-of-the-Father"


Panic, especially at night when the citadel darkens and the heroic ego 
sleeps, is a
direst participation mystique in nature, a fundamental, even ontological 
experience
of the world as alive and in dread. Objects become subjects; they move with 
life
while one is oneself paralyzed with fear. When existence is experienced 
through
instinctual levels of fear, aggression, hunger, or sexuality, images take on 
compelling
life of their own. The imaginal is never more vivid than when we are 
connected
with it instinctually. The world alive is of course animism; that this 
living world is
divine and imaged by different gods with attributes and characteristics is 
polytheistic
pantheism. That fear, dread, horror are natural is wisdom. In Whitehead's 
term
"nature alive" means Pan, and panic flings open a door into this reality.

Pan and the Nightmare by Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher and James Hillman (1972; 
reprint Spring Publications, Dallas, 1988)

"Pan was the son of Penelope by all her suitors in the absence of Ulysses."



Graves, Robert The White Goddess, A Historical Grammar Of Poetic Myth, FSG, 
NY, 1948

Stereotypes, Cowards, and Dominance


As the characters begin to separate from Blicero's camp (Enzian, Pokler), 
they also drift away from his view concerning sexual symbolism. In this book 
filled with prejudicial stereotyping on the basis of sex,
race, and religion, stereotyping is the antithesis of love because love 
individuates for the purpose equality,
whereas stereotyping generalizes for the purpose of domination. Both  
Blicero and Pointsman remain enamored of their views toward what they regard 
as the separate provinces of male and female
Katje learns from those who use her that the rocket ascending, programmed in 
a ritual of love…at Brenschluss it is done, the Rocket's purely feminine 
counterpart, the zero point at the center of its target, has submitted. The 
female role is perceived as being submissive or subservient to some 
masculine force.
Any notion of  "love" (Blicero "love") in such a context is not love at all, 
but an expression of  "morbid
dependency." Enzian, schooled by Blicero, makes a discovery that love, among 
these men, once past the simple feel and orgazming of it, had to do with 
masculine technologies, with contracts, with winning and losing. Demanded, 
in his own case, that he enter the service of the Rocket. ..Beyond simple 
steel erection,
was an entire system away from the feminine darkness, held against the 
entropies of lovable but
scatterbrained Mother Nature. That was the first thing he was obliged by 
Weissman to learn, his first step toward citizenship in the Zone. He was led 
to believe that by understanding the Rocket, he would come to
understand truly his manhood. Acquiring a dominant position in the hierarchy 
is the proofof masculinity. Enzian's views concerning the Rocket and 
technology are tempered somewhat by his personal assessment
of Blicero and his later pondering of the role the Hereros may really be 
playing in the Zone. Pointsman's view of power and the bureaucracy is also 
arranged according to sexist notions from which he never deviates: It all 
comes down as it must, to the desires of individual men. Oh, and the women 
too of course, bless their empty little heads. But survival depends on 
having strong enough desires-on knowing
the System better than the other chap, and how to use it. It's work, that's 
all it is, and there's no room for any
extrahuman anxieties-they only weaken, effeminize the will: a man either 
indulges them, or fights to win, und so weiter. Here, we can see that  
Blicero and Pointsman are allied. They both also lust after Children.  t
PokIer is captivated by Alpdrucken and female sexual submission, as is 
Marvy. PokIer, however,  undergoes a change of view through the loss of his 
wife and, more importantly, through his relationship with "Ilse " and a 
growing awareness that finally culminates in his understanding that Blicero,
has been saving and using him. Yet this does not make PokIer immune to 
Zeitgeist influences. Pokler experiences a nazistic vision, in his deeper 
excursions into the Mare Nocturnum. He found delight not unlike a razor 
sweeping his skin and nerves, scalp to soles, in ritual submission to the 
Master of this night space and of himself, the male embodiment of a 
technologique that embraced power not for its social uses but for just those 
chances of surrender, personal and dark surrender, to the Void, to delicious 
and
screaming collapse. ...

Pokler envisions himself as associated with elements of technology 
characterized as masculine and superior which provide an opportunity for the 
submission to the romance of extinction.

Gravity and Rainbow Come



Just as Brenda serves as a spokesperson for the twentieth century in her 
poem in V,  Nora Dodson-Truck sums up the view of nature and technology that 
the sexist view maintains. It is reminiscent of Victoria Wren's view of 
herself as embodying a female force: In recent weeks, in true messianic 
style,
it has clear to her that her real identity is, literally, the Force of 
Gravity. I am That against which the Rocket must struggle, to which the 
prehistoric wastes submit and are transmuted to the very substance of 
History….Her wheeling freaks, her seers, teleporters, astral travelers and 
tragic human interfaces all know of her visitation, but none see any way for 
her to turn. Nora's seeing herself in this light puts into sharp contrast 
the exaggeration of stereotypes by both sexes. Oppositions drive this novel. 
The complex notions of salvation, destiny, and culturally derived or imposed 
sex role identifications, the distinction of Elect and Preterite, the 
definition of neuroses as the ultraparadoxical, and the sexual stereotyping. 
The characters  within the book find it difficult to thread their way 
through the complexities, the very complexities the War needs to maintain 
itself.

"I begin to feel those bits of color floating up into me-deep in me. That 
streak of green from the june-bug light, the purple from the berries 
trickling along my thighs, Mama's lemonade yellow runs sweet in me. Then I 
feel like I'm laughing between my legs, and the laughing gets all mixed up 
with the colors, and I'm afraid I'll come, and afraid I won't. But I know I 
will. And I do. And it be rainbow all inside."
			(Toni Morrison)


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