S///R///W/B Mythless Patterns

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

This list is sofa king mean. Why identify an apparent weak
spot in Doug M's argument and than proceed to assault his
person? Why? Well, I think it's because the argument is a
good one and rather than provide a competing argument, list
members simply pretend Doug is,  as one list member with a
little too much cyber chutzpah for anyone's good and perhaps
a little too much 
Irish Punch, had the impudence to say, "a human kick me
sign" and kick away and run like
cowardly 8th grade brats. 

The novel is, as all TRP's novels are, loaded
with religion, much of it christian, and those that don't
know, don't know. Ironic, I think, because it is not Doug or
Christianity that is to blame for so much of the horror that
TRP portrays, but it is the denial of myth. Joseph Campbell
said, "we are losing our myths", TRP shows 

(he doesn't tell us much in GR, rj is right on here, not on
the perspective where is argument as s~z noted is twisted
out of sense.
He went after those corrupt objective/subjective
Perspectives and struck out. The self-consciousness as a
part of Postmodern fiction was strike two, but the other
stuff is excellent reference, again see Brian McHale's
PostmodrnIST Fiction for a difficult but worth the effort
introduction, POSTMODERNIST, IST.)

us what can happen when myth's are lost and the
beaucacrat/scientist/mystic (Weissmann & Co./Pointsman &
Co.) with their machines, theories, formulas, books, love of
the Word, arrogance, charisma, etc., take over by
corrupting, co-opting, and otherwise replacing our myths.
Our myths are so very deep, rooted in our Mother, in our
Souls, in  our dreams, they are so sexual, so brutal, so
beautiful, so human. 

For a list member to say that Doug M's ideas have been the
cause of much of the destruction of history is not only
absurd, it's stupid, and asinine. Moreover it demonstrate
complete ignorance of the subject in and out of fiction.
It's not religion. We don't see what Kurtz does. We see what
Blicero does. Why? Blicero's uses of ritual
to act as a "preserving routine " against war involves the
Hansel and Gretel story. Roger and Jessica take children to
see a pantomime of Hansel and Gretel. The rocket crashes
near the theater, the parabola connecting these two
relationships to the pattern of a fairy tale on
both sides of the rocket's trajectory. Blicero's perverse
rituals do not preserve anyone from war. Saying he doesn't
hurt anyone is beside the point. His violent sex is a part
of the War, not a preservation against it. The fairy
tale as usually told stresses the preservation of the
children form the hostile intent of the witch. 
In GR, the stress is placed on the death romance of
submitting to the oven, the Nazi monument to murder. The
Nazi monument to murder! Under the "present dispensation"
the freedom of life is thwarted by ritual conditioning to
death:  
"...mothers and fathers are conditioned
into deliberately dying in certain
preferred ways: giving themselves
cancer and heart attacks...going
off to fight in the war--leaving their
children alone in the forest. 

This is the one way trip of no return, the rule of war
asserting that "people are meant for work and government,
for austerity", as Roger, who certainly read his Weber,
claims. The submission of individuals to the demands of war
creates a
situation in which the cycle of life is broken and, Atropos,
"she who cannot be turned governs the aspect of action." 

Eddie Pensiero (what about these stereotypes Dave M. gonna
see more in V. yous guys), possessed by the rule of Atropos,
does not simply give haircuts, but performs them with the
attention to detail that Slothrop exhibits in his generating
Black-words and his later fascination with trees. Of course
Slothrop's fascination with trees does not bring him to an
understanding of the role of the Tree of Creation as
archetype and legitimizing pattern for action. Though aware
of the individual integrity of each tree, Slothrop is too
far gone to be able to associate this realization with the
rest of his experience and re-integrate himself. The
wondering scholar gypsies Doug M has mentioned a few times,
and yes, I think Doug M's insistence that TRP did work at
Boeing, did write an essay in which he mentions Bartleby the
Scrivener, is certainly worth considering. It's not my
thing, I don't give a rats ass about TRP the person, but I
think it is certainly a valid approach. 

Myth and the relation of myth to deity are important in the
book for two reasons. First, it is the concurrent use and
denial of the viability of myth that is one cause of the
violence in the book,
and in history. Second, the sense of deity in the book is
more "absentee " than the war
that carries that epithet: Patterns would appear to be the
only
expression of order. The denial of myth is the concomitant
of the stress placed on abstraction and mechanical
explanations for human existence and actions. The
dissociation of thinking and feeling that may be associated
with this bias can lead to war which forces Man into the
mythic style of life in
its most destructive form. This view of the effect of the
denial of the power of myth is related to the cultural
denial of Death that is a central theme we have discussed at
length--Brown etc.. 

The appearance of the Anubis, which is named for "the
dog-headed death-bringer of Egypt, that Flying Dutchman,
that United or League of Nations against
entropy, where a child must be murdered, a ritual murder, a
political murder that has, as the narrator explains later,
referencing Caesar, JFK, Malcolm X, replaced human
sacrifice.
The social world of the ship includes  Morituri. Here is
your stoic. He is not a voyeur, he is a re-worked Mondaugen,
he stoically observes the sadistic orgy of the other
passengers, an "organized anarchy, " where pleasure "becomes
life's only business"--pleasure, however, that is
indistinguishable from rape, murder, unbridled
aggression. Pretty savage, I'd say. Slothrop is able to
leave the ship of death, but he has lost her. Here is a mock
Orpheus, he has simply lost her, she is not in the
underworld. His second appearance on the boat forces him to
see what has happened. He didn't look back. Oh the Irony is
black. But not to worry boys, shortly after leaving the
boat, Slothrop will mostly forget  this tragedy. Nothing is
connected, ant-paranoia. This sounds like a moral position
to me, and not simply a moralist's reading of the novel. Of
course the relativist's argument is a moral reading too: one
so dead and jelloey you don't have to put a fork in it you
can eat it with a spoon. A moralist's Perspective that won't
express any kind of value-judgment  (a) to avoid giving
offense, except to list members for their apparent crimes
against humanity when
their arguments are sound and make sense, and (b) because
values are thought
to be a 19th cent. non-existent  fantasy anyway, so that all
attitudes are equally acceptable within their own local
context (a view that has problems when it comes up against
political genocide, but, but but but, of course moral
relativist
always have buts, when it comes to (insert their favorite
orphans, widows and ladies in distress). Yes, Relativistic 
Knights have morals and values and two handed engines at the
golden door ready to condemn and smite us all, destroy us
all, once and
once only.

Anyway, it is this ability to forget that constitutes the
tragedy of Slothrop. The one way trip, or the false return,
are the usual possibilities under the "present
dispensation", which can be
associated with patterns and their effect on the lives of
the characters. Springer, in his rollicking way, refers to
the patterns when Anton Webern's tragic death is brought
up; Slothrop remarks,  

 "It was a mistake. He was innocent."
"Ha.Of course he was.	But mistakes
are part of it too--everything fits.
One sees how it fits, ja? learns patterns,
adjusts to rhythms, one day you are no
longer an actor, but free now, over on
the other side of the camera. No dramatic 
call to the front office--just waking
up one day and knowing that Queen, Bishop,
and King are only splendid cripples, and
pawns, even those that reach the final
row, are condemned to creep in two dimensions, 
and no tower will ever rise or descend--no: 
flight has been given only to the Springer!"

Only to the Springer! Only? The Springer reminds me of 
Humpty Dumpty at times. I have noted here in the margin,
that 
Spriger seems to be in the habit of ending these eccentric
proclamation with ONLY I. 
He claims he is the only one that knows, as in the ultimate
"those that know", and whatsmore he is the only one who
understands it All. Why does he, like H. Adams, Stencil,
others, refer to himself in the third person? This seems to
corrupt his credibility. At least, as Paul says, that's how
we see it through Slothop's eyes. 
He seems to be performing the role of the fool, who can
pithily comment on the narrative action in the book and in
so doing Springer does point to the way that even seemingly
random events are part of an overall determined structure of
causality.


Turning back to the Rocket blasphemies now. The Zone-Hereros
are mystically oriented, believing that There may be no
gods, but there is a pattern: names by themselves may have
no magic, but the act of naming, the physical utterance,
obeys the pattern.
Nordhausen means dwellings in the north. They associate the
north with the rocket.
Zone-Hereros are aware that the act f naming is significant.
Names can create
patterns of association and meaning. Thus, Enzian is able
through name and association of Bleicherode and Blicker to
provide Weissman (white man) with his SS code
name, Blicero, associated with the death and the whiteness
of the cathedrals of death-dealing Europe (boy this is night
mare Henry Adams), the color
of the hostile rooms of Slothrop's conditioning, and most
particularly with Gottfried's experience as he approaches
death:

Brenschluss, when was Brenschluss
it can't be this soon. ..but the
burnt out tail opening is swinging
across the sun and through the blonde
hair of the victim here's a Brocken
specter, someone's, something's shadow
projected from out here in the bright
sun and darkening sky into the region
of gold, of whitening, of growing
still as underwater as Gravity dips
away briefly. ..what is this death
but a whitening, a carrying of white-
ness to ultrawhite, what is it but
bleaches, detergents, oxidizers, abra-
sives--Streckefuss he's been today to
the boy's tormented muscles, but more
appropriately he is Blicker, Bleicherode,
Bleacher, Blicero, extending, rarefying
the Caucasian pallor to an abolition of
pigment...


In this passage Gottfried brings together whiteness, death,
and the chemistry of control that has figured prominently in
the novel. 
The Hereros also have a rocket and a rocket mandala which is
a technological reference for the launch steps as well as
the essential symbolic components of Herero culture and
cosmogony, as Andreas tells Slothrop:

Andreas set [the mandala] on the ground,
turns it till the K points northwest. Klar, touching each
letter, Entluftung,
these are the female letters. North letters. In our villages
the women lived
in huts on the northern half of the circle, the men on the
south. The village
itself was a mandala. Klar is fertilization and birth,
Entluftung is the breath,
the soul. ZUndung and Vorstufe are the male signs, the
activities, fire and prep-
aration or building. And in the center, here, Hauptstufe. It
is the pen where
we keep the sacred cattle. The souls of the ancestors. All
the same here. Birth,
soul, fire, building. Male and female, together...Opposites
together.

The opposites are controlled by their mythic association
within the mandala which is the containment of polarities
and represents that paradox  which is able to contain
these opposites.  The preserving effect of the harmony of
opposites is one that Slothrop senses immediately in the
mandala which he hands back to Andreas,
hoping that it will permit trouble to pass over:
"mba-kayere...a spell against Marvy tonight, against
Tchitcherine. A mezuzah. A situation of possible threat is
turned into a rare moment of his feeling that there can be
the kind preterition that preserves life. 

"How you so stupid." 

	---V.S. Naipaul, Miguel Street