VV(18): Grace

[Dave Monroe]

"A remarkable innovation would be the use of automata, to play Su Feng's 
handmaidens.  'A German engineer is building them,' said Itague.  'they're 
lovely creatures: one will even unfastened your robe.  Another will play a 
zither--although the music itself comes from the pit.  But they move so 
gracefully!  Not like machines at all." (V., Ch. 14, Sec. i, p. 396)

"The tango still played: or perhaps a different one [...].  A new dance, and 
popular.  The head and body had to be kept erect, the steps had to be 
precise, sweeping, graceful.  It wasn't like the waltz.[...]  But here no 
words, no deviating: simply the wide spiral, turning about the dancing 
floor, gradually narrowing, tighter, until there was no motion except for 
the steps, which led nowhere. A dance for automata."    (V., Ch. 14, Sec. i, 
p. 400)


>From Heinrich von Kleist's "Uber das Marionettentheater," "On the Marionette 
Theater" (1810), written in dialogue form ...

And the advantage such a puppet would have over a living dancer?

The advantage? First a negative gain, my excellent friend, specifically 
this: that such a figure would never be affected. For affectation appears, 
as you know, when the soul (vis motrix) locates itself at any point other 
than the center of gravity of the movement. Because the puppeteer absolutely 
controls the wire or string, he controls and has power over no other point 
than this one: therefore all the other limbs are what they should be dead, 
pure pendulums following the simple law of gravity, an outstanding quality 
that we look for in vain in most dancers.

Take for example the dancer P., he continued. When she dances Daphne and is 
pursued by Apollo, she looks back at him--her soul is located in the 
vertebrae of the small of her back; she bends as if she were about to break 
in half, like a naiad from the school of Bernini. And look at the young 
dancer F. When he dances Paris and stands among the three goddesses and 
hands the apple to Venus, his soul is located precisely in his elbow, and it 
is a frightful thing to behold.

Such mistakes, he mused, cutting himself short, are inevitable because we 
have eaten of the tree of knowledge. And Paradise is bolted, with the cherub 
behind us; we must journey around the world and determine if perhaps at the 
end somewhere there is an opening to be discovered again.

I laughed. Indeed, I thought, the spirit cannot err where it does not exist. 
Yet I noticed that he had still other things on his mind and invited him to 
continue.

In addition, he went on, these puppets possess the virtue of being immune to 
gravity's force. They know nothing of the inertia of matter, that quality 
which above all is diametrically opposed to the dance, because the force 
that lifts them into the air is greater than the one that binds them to the 
earth. What wouldn't our good G. give to be sixty pounds lighter, or to use 
a force of this weight to assist her with her entrechats and pirouettes? 
Like elves, the puppets need only to touch upon the ground, and the soaring 
of their limbs is newly animated through this momentary hesitation; we 
dancers need the ground  to rest upon and recover from the exertion of the 
dance; a moment that  is certainly no kind of dance in itself and with which 
nothing further  can be done except to at least make it seem to not exist.

I replied that although he handled his paradoxes with skill, he would never 
convince me that in a mechanical figure there could be more grace than in 
the structure of the human body.

He replied that it would be almost impossible for a man to attain even an 
approximation of a mechanical being. In such a realm only a God could 
measure up to this matter, and this is the point where both ends of the 
circular world would join one another.

I grew even more amazed and simply did not know how to reply to such strange 
statements.

It would seem, he continued while taking a pinch of snuff, that I had not 
read very carefully the third chapter of the first Book of
Moses; and whoever was not acquainted with that first period of human 
civilization could not reasonably discuss the matters at
hand and, even less so, the ultimate questions.

I told him that I understood only too well how consciousness creates 
disorder in the natural harmony of men ...

http://www.cc.emory.edu/ENGLISH/DRAMA/HistDrama2/KleistMarion.html

Also in ...

Kleist, Heinrich von.  "On the Marionette Theater."
   Trans. Roman Paska.  Fragments for a History of the Human
   Body, Part One.  Ed. Michel Feher et al.  NY: Zone, 1989.
   415-20.

And see thereupon ...

De Man, Paul.  "Aesthetic Formalization: Kleist's Uber
   das Marionettentheater."  The Rhetoric of Romanticism.
   New York: Columbia UP, 1984.  262-90.

Tiffany, Daniel.  "The Lyric Automaton."  Toy Medium:
   Materialism and Modern Lyric.  Berkeley: U of Cal P,
   2000.  63-94.

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0011&msg=215&keywords=de%20man%20paul%20kleist

And keep in mind that Kleist also wrote, albeit, perhaps (?) 
tongue-in-cheek, that ...

"... in order ... that business communications be accelerated and multiplied 
at least within the boundaries of the civilized world, we propose a 
projectile or cannonball express: an institution that, with suitably 
situated artillery stations placed within firing range of each other, would 
discharge, from mortars or howitzers, hollow shells, which have been stuffed 
full not of powder, but letters and packages, and which could very easily be 
observed in flight, and wherever they might fall, short of some morass, be 
retrieved ..."

Kleist, Heinrich von, "Useful Inventions: Project for a
    Cannonball Postal System," An Abyss Deep Enough: Letters
    of Heinrich von Kleist, with a Selection of Essays and
    Anecdotes.  Ed. and trans. Philip B. Miller.  New York:
    Dutton, 1982.  245-6.

Cf. the "incoming mail," incoming via V-2, at the outset of Gravity's 
Rainbow ...

And if yr in the vicinity (Windy Second City of Big Shoulders, on the Third 
Coast), check out the festivities ...

http://www.ci.chi.il.us/SpecialEvents/Puppetropolis.html

I do and do and do for you kids ...

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