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.
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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."
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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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