GRGR - Knotting Into

David Morris fqmorris at hotmail.com
Fri Nov 9 16:36:41 CST 2001


A tangle of hair, a tissue of lies.  The web of social action.  The 
coplexities of intellectual systems: a web of deceit, a woof wove called 
Science.  _Hyphen, hymen, hymn, hypnos_.  The net or nexus.  Networks of 
affiliation:  the filial relation is not natural but artificial, threaded 
(filum).  The bnding ties or obligations.  The close-knit groups.  The 
seamless garmet of the church or state.  [...] In the ascent of the soul, 
the doffing of garmets, the sliping of knots, the loosing of bonds, 
disaffiliation:  "the sum of these knots is called 'psyche'" - the complexes 
or complications.

"Loves Body" p.74, Norman O. Brown, U of CA Press, 1966

And a post of mine from the last GRGR(29):
http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0006&msg=131&sort=author
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(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.
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(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.

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(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?


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