SLSL: Concavity, convexity, balls

[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)

--- The Great Quail <quail at libyrinth.com> wrote:
> 
> I think he likes concavity *because* of its womb-
> like state, with him at the low-lands, resting at
> sea-level. I think overall, Flange *likes* wombs,
> because they are murky, snug, comforting, warm, and
> full of potential. He fears the filling up of
> concavity, and worse, he fears convexity because it
> will expose him, thrust him into action,
> responsibility, precarious balance.

Concavity, cave, grotto, womb, alembic, et al. ...

>From Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The
Nature of Religion (trans. Willard R. Trask, New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1959) ...

"In all cultures and in almost all epochs the cave has
been the symbol of creation, the place of emergence of
celestial bodies, of ethnic groups and individuals. It
is the great womb of earth and sky, a symbol of life,
but also of death. It is a sacred place that
constitutes a break in the homogeneity of space, an
opening that is a passage from one cosmic region to
another, from heaven to earth or, vice versa, from
earth to the underworld." (p. 37).

http://www.nebulus.org/academy/cave/creation.html

>From Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets 
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2001), Ch. 6, "Symmes
Hole, or the South Pole Grotto," pp. 138-61 ...

"... 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....
   "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)

"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.... 
   "'O vast Rondure,' intoned our trusty
nineteenth-century Hermeticist Walt Whitman (also
known to identify himself as 'a Kosmos') ...." (pp.
143-4)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0209&msg=70528&sort=date

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