GR 'Streets'

[Terrance]

Otto wrote:
> 
> Ascendent Virgo at the time of the blast is correct.
> My astrological software tells me at 17'' 41' in Virgo.
> The Sun is at 13:08 in Leo, thus nearly midway through the sign.
> 06.08.1945, 8:15 JST
> Hiroshima (J)
> 34'24 N 132'27 E
> 

I knew Otto would come in with that soon or later. 

I think the discussion was a good one, better than most recently. I
suspect that Robert is not as familiar with Nobokov's lectures as S~Z
and myself or that he hasn't understood the term "fairy tale" as we have
applied it from those lectures and that may be the source of some of the
confusion here at the discussions "bitter end." 

Anyway, I think Paul noted that 'Streets' is Elegiac. 

In this episode Pynchon has Milton on his desk. One of Milton's most
famous poems is Lycidas. 

The subject of Milton's elegy is a dead poet, a young man. He is
identified with a god who personifies both the sun that falls into the
western ocean at night and the vegetable life that dies in Autumn.
Lycidas is also Adonis & Tammuz whose "annual wound," as Milton calls it
elsewhere, was the  subject of a ritual lament in Mediterranean
religion, and has been incorporated in the pastoral elegy since
Theocritus, as in the tile of the Romantic poet Shelly's Adonis. As a
poet, Lycidas's archetype is Orpheus,  who also died young, in much the
same way as Adonis, and was flung into the water. As priest, his
archetype is Peter (mentioned in the streets section), who would have
drowned (the dead poet drowned in the Irish sea) in the "Galilean Lake" 
if Christ had not did not save his Rock from sinking. Each aspect of
Lycidas poses the question of premature death as it related to the life
of Man, of poetry, of the Church. All of these aspects are invested in
the Life & Death of Christ, the young god who dies but is eternally
alive, the one Man who  Returns as to save his Bride as 
Slothrop/Orpheus failed to, the WORD that is all poetry, the head and
body of the Church, the good shepherd whose pastoral world sees no
winter, the Sun of righteousness that never sets, whose power can raise
Lycidas, like Peter, out of the waves, as it redeems souls from the
lower world, which Orpheus failed to do. Christ does not enter the poem
as a character, but he pervades every line of it. 

All that SHIT you once believed, S~Z, is quite beautiful and elaborate
and complex and it pervades every single line of Pynchon's fiction. As
Paul has said repeatedly, belief and knowledge are no the same thing.
Perhaps GR is also about secularized belief in the magic that others
once believed in and some still do. 



In some fairy tales magic plays an important part. Jack trades his cow
for some magic beans....

And sometimes fairy tales include  rituals--an imitation of nature that
involves magic--the beans are tossed out a window into the moonlight and
produce a giant stalk reaching up into the sky where a giant has
imprisoned and goose that produces gold and a harp that sings. 

Magic seems to begin as something of a voluntary effort to recapture a
lost rapport with the natural cycle. Unfortunately, for the folk in GR,
these efforts are now profaned. This sense of a deliberate recapturing
of soething no longer possessed is a distinctive mark of human ritual.
Ritual constructs a calendar and endeavors to imitate the precise and
sensitive accuracy of the movements of the the heavenly bodies and the
response of vegetation to them. A farmer must harvest his crop at a
certain time of the year. He has to do it. And because it must be done,
harvesting itself is not really a ritual. It is the expression of a
desire or will to unify, synchronize human energy and effort with that
nature that produces the harvest poem, song, sacrifice, and the customs
associated with ritual. 

The impetus of the magical element in ritual is toward a
scatter-brained-mother-nature that no longer contains human society in
her circle of life and death, but  is contained by that society, and
must be made to rain or shine at the pleasure of Man. 

Erit in omnibus omnia Deus