Haunted by Iraq's Ghosts & Our WMD

[cathy ramirez]

Mason Melancholy & Madness

Mason suffers from every cause and symptom of
Melancholy Burton details, including: The Stars, Diet
(Meat), Envy, Malice, Anger, , Covetousness, Fear,
Love of Gaming, Over-much Study, Venus Omitted &c. 

He is haunted by his wife and now by Dixon. 


What the wretched overmuch desire, they easily
believe; still, still, still, that good father, that
good son, that good wife, that dear friend runs in
their minds; a single thought fills all their minds
all the year long, as Pliny complains to Romanus,
methinks I see Virginius, I hear Virvinius, I talk
with Virginius, &c.

Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Death Of
Friends, The First Partition, Sect.2, Memb.4, Subs.7

He haunts Wicks and Wicks haunts him as shades with a
grievance and a lesson. M&D page 8

At the darkest hour right before the dawn, all of
Philadelphia's Unchosen,  a parade of shades with a
grievance,  attend Wicks and LeSpark. Already, the
preterits of America have been passed over. Passed
over and run over and fucked over by the political
machines progress down the Line. But what the Line
divides and separates is only as important as what it
merges and blends and commercializes on technical and
political sacred/profane ground. Science and magic,
religion and psychoanalysis, virgin and dynamo. 

So what haunts this novel is what haunts all of
Pynchon's books. They are there in the dump in Elmira
New York, car bodies piled up like the corpses of
Auschwitz. They are there when men of science and
religion and business experiment on baby Tyrone and
when Slothrop the soldier is injected with Sodium
Amytol.  

Auschwitz continues to haunt, not the memory but the
accomplishments of man --- the space flights; the
rockets and missiles; the "labyrinthine basement under
the Snack Bar"; the pretty electronic plants, clean,
hygienic, and with flower beds; the poison gas which
is not really harmful to people; the secrecy in which
we all participate. This is the setting in which the
great human achievements of science, medicine,
technology take place.; the efforts to save and
ameliorate life are the sole promise in the disaster.
The willful play of with fantastic possibilities, the
ability to act with good conscience, cotra naturum, to
experiment with men and things, to convert illusion
into reality and fiction into truth, testify to the
extent to which Imagination has become an instrument
of progress. And it is one which, like others in the
established societies, is methodically abused. Setting
the pace and style of politics, the power of
imagination far exceeds Alice in Wonderland in the
manipulation of words, turning sense into nonsense and
nonsense into sense. 

The formally antagonistic realms merge on technical
and political grounds ---magic and science, life and
death, joy and misery. Beauty reveals its terror as
highly classified nuclear plants and laboratories
become "Industrial Parks"….

	Marcuse, One Dimensional Man  



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