MDDM Ch. 76 Purposefully Constructed

Thu Sep 12 11:36:32 CDT 2002

   "'Yet appropriately enough, what compels me out
iunder the Elements once again now, is yet another
damn'd Species of Giant Mound,-- and after hoping I'd
seen my last in America.  Woe, it seems I've acquir'd
a Specialty,-- and the Elevated, the Chosen, go on
assigning me to these exercises in large-scale
Geometry.  This Mountain I'm about to seek must be
regular as a Prism, as if purposefully constructed in
days of old by Forces more powerful than
ours...powerful enough to suggest that God (whatever
that may be) has not altogether quit our own desperate
Day.'" (M&D, Ch. 76, p. 747)

   "'D'ye think I wasn't looking, all that long
arse-breaking American time?  Mounds, Caverns, things
that went across the Sky?-- had you seen one of those,
'twould have made y' think twice....  Even giant
Vegetables,-- if it had to be,-- seeking Salvation in
the Oversiz'd, how pitiable,--'" (ibid.)

Cf. ...

   "'Here we went off upon the most prodigious such
Line yet attempted,-- in America, where undertakings
of its scale are possible,-- astronomically precise,--
carefully set prisms of Oolite,-- the Master-valve of
rose Quartz, at the eastern Terminus.  Any Argument
from Design, here, must include a yearning for Flight
....'" (M&D, Ch. 44, p. 440)

And then ...

"Mason glowers, shaking his head.  'I've ascended,
descended, even condescended, and the List's not
ended,-- but haven't yet trans-cended a blessed thing,
thankee.'" (M&D, Ch. 76, pp. 745-6)

Again, Fanfare for the Common P-Lister.  Anyway ...

"the Elevated, the Chosen," i.e., The Elect ...

"exercises in large-scale Geometry"

http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/gr/public/cs_home.html

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/dp76st.html

http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/strings-attached.html

http://www.maths.soton.ac.uk/applied/research/CoStringsPapers.phtml

"regular as a Prism"

http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/Prism.html

http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/java/scienceopticsu/newton/

http://www.explorescience.com/activities/Activity_page.cfm?ActivityID=51

http://phyun5.ucr.edu/~wudka/Physics7/Notes_www/node58.html

"purposefully constructed"

http://www.origins.org/menus/design.html

http://skepdic.com/intelligentdesign.html

http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-55/iss-6/p48a.html

Dawkins, Richard.  The Blind Watchmaker: Why the
   Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without
   Design.  New York: W.W. Norton, 1986.

Pennock, Robert T.  Tower of Babel: The Evidence
   against the New Creationism.  Cambridge, MA:
   MIT Press, 1999.

Pennock, Robert T., ed.  Intelligent Design
   Creationism and Its Critics: Philosophical,
   Theological, and Scientific Perspectives.
   Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.

"seeking Salvation in the Oversiz'd"

Joseph Addison, The Spectator No. 412 (1712) ...

"By greatness I do not only mean the bulk of any
single object but the largeness of a whole view
considered as one entire piece. Such are the prospects
of an open champaign country, a vast uncultivated
desert, of huge heaps of mountains, high rocks and
precipices, or a wide expanse of waters, where we are
not struck with the novelty or beauty of the sight but
with that rude kind of magnificence which appears in
many of these stupendous works of nature. Our
imagination loves to be filled with an object, or to
grasp at anything that is too big for its capacity. We
are flung into a pleasing astonishment at such
unbounded views, and feel a delightful stillness and
amazement in the soul at the apprehension of them."

http://65.107.211.206/sublime/addison.html

http://sallie.rutgers.edu/~triggs/SPECTATOR/specv02/index.djvu?djvuopts&page=p0716.djvu

Edmund Burke, Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of
our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) ...

"Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of
pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any
sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible
objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror,
is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive
of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of
feeling."

http://www.bartleby.com/24/2/107.html

"The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature
... is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of
the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with
some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so
entirely filled with its object, that it cannot
entertain any other."

http://65.107.211.206/sublime/burke.html

Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Taste (1759) ... 

"Objects are sublime, which possess quantity, or
amplitude. and simplicity, in conjunction.... When a
large object is presented, the mind expands itself to
the extent of that object, and is filled with one
grand sensation, which totally possessing it, composes
it into a solemn sedateness and strikes it with deep
silent wonder and admiration: it finds such a
difficulty in spreading itself to the dimensions of
its object, as enlivens and invigorates its frame: and
having overcome the opposition which this occasions,
it sometimes imagines itself present in every part of
the scene which it contemplates; and from the sense of
this immensity, feels a noble pride, and entertains a
lofty conception of its own capacity."

http://65.107.211.206/sublime/size.html

http://65.107.211.206/sublime/dwarfs.html

http://65.107.211.206/sublime/theories.html

http://65.107.211.206/sublime/sublimeov.html

Bibliography ...

http://www.courses.rochester.edu/duro/AH267/

And definitely download ...

http://www.cercles.com/n1/bois.pdf

"has not altogether quit"

http://icg.harvard.edu/~laa72/glossary/deus_absconditus/

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0209&msg=70603&sort=date

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