NP Solace

[Larry Carswell]

	Stewart Brand recommended 'Gravity's Rainbow' in one of the Whole Earth
Catalogs and I worked through it first in 1974 or 1975, then reread it along
with 'V' and "The Crying of Lot 49' every year or so for the next ten
years... never  really found anyone to share them with, but they were a
great solace. I ordered a new copy of GR online four weeks ago to replace a
worn and yellow 1974 Bantam edition, and found myself one 8:00 AM in tears
though due at work  rereading "the War's evensong"(pg. 130).  "-something to
raise the possibility of another night that could actually with love  and
cockcrows, light the path home, banish the Adversary, destroy the boundaries
between our lands, our bodies, our  stories, all false, about who we are:.."
	Then came this tragedy of urban terrorism, and so many people seeking
solace.
	For me Bob Marley, Kenneth Patchen, Tom Waits, Stanley Kunitz, Thomas
Pynchon suffice.

"...If there is such a thing as the City Sacramental, the city as outward
and visible sign of inward and spiritual illness or  health, then there may
have been, even here some continuity of sacrament through the terrible
surface of May. The  emptiness of Berlin this morning is an inverse mapping
of the white and geometric capital before the destruction--the  fallow and
long-strewn fields of rubble, the same weight of too much featureless
concrete... except that here everything  has been turned inside out."

"..among the queued, the drifting, the warily asleep,..."