MDDM Ch. 75 Another Space

[Dave Monroe]

"'In a larger sense, then, to journey anywhere, in
this Terra Concava, is ever to ascend.  With its
Corollary,-- Outside, here upon the Convexity,-- to go
anywhere is ever to descend.'" (M&D, Ch. 75, p. 740)

   "'Thy trip to Scotland will be closely watch'd,
Mason, from below....  "Once the solar parallax is
known," they told me, "once the necessary Degrees are
measur'd, and the size and weight and shape of the
Earth are calculated inescapably at last, all this
will vanish.  We will have to see another Space."  No
one explain'd what that meant, however...?'" (M&D, Ch.
75, p. 741)

"'"And wherever you may stand, given the convexity,
each of you is slightly pointed away from everybody
else, all the time, out into that Void that most of
you seldom notice.  Here in the Earth Concave,
everyone is pointed at everyone else,-- ev'rybody's
axes converge,-- forc'd at least thus to acknowledge
one another,-- and entirely different set of rules for
how to behave."'" (ibid.)
   
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2001), Ch. 6, "Symmes
Hole, or the South Pole Grotto," pp. 138-61 ...

"Everyone has an Antarctic."
--Thomas Pynchon

"... a long-standing human tendency to see inner
psychological contents--images of wholeness, and
ultimately of self--reflected back from the larger
physical contours of our planet.  This identification
is an ancient one in Western culture, and it continues
to flourish long past its allotted historical moment
in science as well as in literature and film of the
fantastic.
   "Representations of the planet Earth as a tops of
the human psyche derive from the premodern Neoplatonic
framework of hierarchies of the living cosmos in which
the heavens are mirrored, great to small, in the human
body and (especially once its roundness was
established) in the earth itself.  Microcosm and
macrocosm converge in the rotundum, the spherical
container--cosmos, globe, and human soul....  The
Republic presents the cosmos as eight hollow
concentric spheres set inside one another like 'nested
bowls' ....
   "Though the idea of a round Earth would be
abandoned for more than a millenium after ancient
times, medieval and Renaissance philosophers retained
to concept of concentric circles to describe the
relationship between our terrestrial regions and the
heavens.  Meanwhile the Platonic sphere endured in
Western consciousness in other forms.  It was St.
Augustine's famous dictum that the nature of God is a
circle whose center is everywhere and whose
circumference is nowhere.  In alchemy, the dual
transformation of matter and psyche occurred, not
coincidentally, within yet another perfect sphere--the
crucible or rotundum ...." (pp. 139-40)

"As the Copernican revolution and the new empirical
sciences converted cosmic forces to telluric ones, the
focus of attention shifted downward from the celestial
and ethereal spheres to the newly valorized elemental
sphere in the seventeenth century and Earth became the
important level in the geocosmic hierarchy.  Ontology
begat geology, not cosmology, as all the classical
attributes of the cosmic spheres--equator, tropics,
and poles--were transferred and laid like a grid onto
the Orbis Terrarum.  For seventeenth-century
alchemists ... the globe became yet another level of
correspondence in the hierarchy of Hermetic vessels.
   "Non-alchemists proved equally adept at pouring the
old wine into new glasses.  Just as the pole star was
thought by the ancient to mark a hole in the heavens,
the earthly poles were now believed to mark holes in
the planet.  In his Mundus Subterraneus (1664), the
Jesuit Athanasius Kircher ....  In 1692 the astronomer
Edmund Halley advanced the theory that the Earth is
composed of a series of inner concentric spheres
capable of sustaining life.  The most fascinating
document of the rapidly expiring Platonic natural
philosophy of this era, hwoever, is Thomas Burnet's
Telluris sacra theoria (1689), revised and expanded in
an English version, The Sacred Theory of the Earth
(1691-92)...." (pp. 140-1)

   "It is alchemy as impicit subtext, however, that
rules the metaphorical structure of The Sacred Theory.
 In the story of Burnet's planet ... we see
geological, cultural, and spiritual transmutations
nostalgically coincide....
   "Narratively as well as alchemically, Burnet's
geocosmic vision of planet Earth also functions as a
kind of microcosmic sacred theory of the psyche....
   "The intertwined apocalyptic destiny of self and
globe, as we will see, is a theme Burnet's literary
heirs in the twentieth century would often return
to...." (pp. 142-3)

   "Out of the same mixture of Christian and classical
sources drawn on by the old sciences, however, Western
religious tradition alread possessed a literary
tradition of mystical geography.  From Dante to John
Bunyan, the quest literature of Christianity had
always boasted authors who ... created their own
special kind of inner topography.  In the concrete
allegory of these narratives, outer and inner worlds
describe each other; the spiritual journey enacts
itself in the physical journey, and vice versa.... 
>From the Romanitic era on, the Neoplatonic tradition
would be carried on in a distinct group of literary
sea and adventure narratives that, while ostensibly
imitating the real feats of Western explorers ...
became vehicles for a new kind of soul quest
throughout the geocosm.
   "'O vast Rondure,' intoned our trusty
nineteenth-century Hermeticist Walt Whitman (also
known to identify himself as 'a Kosmos') ...." (pp.
143-4)

"Using the topographical allegorizing of the religious
narratives, the creators of these fictions would also
oblige ther readers to employ ... the analogic
principles of the old discarded science." (p. 144)

  "nowhere is this complicated heritage of the
Renaissance more strikingly apparent than in the
nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western fictional
narratives of journeys to the Poles ...." (p. 145)

"'Pole' began as an astronomical term (Greek polos,
axis or sky; Latin polus), first as the entire axis of
the celestial sphere, then as the two fixed points in
the celestial sphere around which the stars seemed to
revolve.  By the sixteenth century, pole signified the
two points at which the earth's axis met the celestial
sphere....
   "The term pole was also extended to each of the two
opposite points on the surface of a magnet ....  Thus
the Poles, in both their 'true' and 'magnetic'
manifestations, are orienting points.  In microcosmic
terms, this means they are the orienting loci of the
psyche, but by the same token they are also the least
known, the farthest from consciousness, the point
(inherent in the notion of polarity) where the
transcendent and celestial spheres have special access
to the human sphere...." (p. 145)

   "The tradition of the Antichthones and Antipodes as
a region of reversals contra naturam ....  Out of this
tradition comes the implicit identification of the
Poles with teh furthest unknown reaches of the
self/world and, for that very reason, with its
transcendent center as well.  For what is farthest
away and most hidden is, paradoxically, always what is
most important: the journey to the pole is a journey
to the center of the soul." (p. 146)

"C.G. Jung ... uncovered numerous references to the
Poles in the works of the 'chemical' philosophers ....
 Performing his own twentieth-century downloading of
grids--this time into the psychological realm, not the
geographical one--Jung interprets this passage as a
description of the psyche's irresistible jouurney or
impetus toward wholeness, that is, 'the Deus
absconditus (hidden God) who dwells as the North Pole
and reveals himself through magnetism.  His other
synonym is mercurius, whose heart is to be found at
the Pole, and who guides men on the perilous voyage
over the sea of the world..  The idea [is] that the
whole machinery of the world is driven by the infernal
life at the North Pole, that this si hell, and that
hell is a system of upper powers reflected in the
lower.'  Jung believed that the 'true nature of the
Pole' was 'a cross from which the four directions
radiate'; that the quest to reach the Pole was
symbolic of striving for 'wholeness as the goal to
which the "archaic appetite" points, the magnetic
north which gives the traveller his bearings on the
'sea of the world."'" (pp. 146-7)

Jung, Carl G.  Aion: Reseraches into the Phenomenology
of the Self.
   Trans. Gerhard Adler and R.F.C. Hull.  Princeton,
NJ: Princeton UP, 1959.
   pp. 134, 171.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 'The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner" (pp. 147-9)

http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/stc/Coleridge/poems/Rime_Ancient_Mariner.html

Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
(pp. 149-52)

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA98/silverman/poe/fulltext.html

"Captain Adam Seaborn," Symzonia: A Voayge of
Discovery (pp. 149-50)

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA98/silverman/poe/symzonia.html

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (p. 151)

Jules Verne, The Sphinx of the Ice-Fields (p. 152)

H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness (pp.
152-3)

Stanislaw Lem, Solaris (pp. 153-5)

Thomas Pynchon, V. (pp. 155-6)

"In the elaborate tapestry of V., the rulers of the
sublunary sphere are able to elude identification by
hiding in a polar grotto below the visible pattern of
the natural world.  Or conversely ... they may
represnt no more than the speaker's own paranoid
fantasies." (p. 156)

"Here we see the polar quest diverging into two
distinct types of journeys cum inner experience: going
to the Pole and falling into the mundus subterraneus
on one hand and, on the other, having the Poles invade
the Ekumene, the center of consciousness, in such a
way that the ego experiences wither demonic conversion
(daeth or psychosis) or a blissful mytical
experience." (pp. 156-7)

Anna Kavan, Ice  (pp. 157-8)

Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet (pp. 158-9)

   "In The Ice, his admirable study of the Antarctic,
Stephen J. Pyne claims that the era of the polar
Gothic ended at the close of the twentieth century:
'Once Antarctica and the ocean basins had been
generally explored, there were no unvisited
geogrpahies within which to set a lost civilization;
fantasy writing had to resurrect old problems, tour
other planets, or plunge into the depths of the human
soul.'  But even as we see this mechanism working ...
it seems likely that our mapped, explored,
satellite-circumnaviagted and much photographed Whole
Earth will continue to exert its macrocosmic
seductions on the human psyche." (p. 160)

Pyne, Stephen J.  The Ice: A Journey to Antarctica. 
    Seattle: U of Washington P, 1998.

http://www.public.asu.edu/~spyne/nsf-ice.html

"Yet humans never cease their efforts to bring about
the impossible union...." (p. 161)

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