VLVL II: Techno-Transcendence in Kafka & Pynchon

[Glenn Scheper]

> kafka, in a rare moment of authorial intrusion, invites us to
> 'look beyond the harrow' to where the true significance of the
> machine, as it inscribes the law on the body of its victim, lies.

I recognize the harrow spoken of in In The Penal Colony. It may
be another metaphor of AF, although I do not yet appreciate
how a single penis should be represented as a multitude of blades,
unless perhaps serially. The harrow is a type that I can identify
in two other places sporting a profusion of blades: The first
is a personal memory from my childhood: I would often lay awake
long at night, in anger for having been put to bed. I would take
solace in my usual fantasy for such times: that an immense heavy
block hung above me, its bottom face perhaps two feet square,
and on that face were mounted many, say, two hundred very long
knives. And it was poised to fall. I cannot remember that it ever
moved, but it was always ready to drop onto me, to kill me, and
my solace was in the thought, "Then they'll be sorry!"

 > Existentialists: Franz Kafka
 > http://userzweb.lightspeed.net/~tameri/kafka.html
 > In The Penal Colony (In Der Strafkolonie, 1914)

 > In grand Kafka style, the machine malfunctions, disintegrating
 > as it tortures the colony's governor. Instead of gently carving
 > the "Be Just" phrase into the man's back, the machine plunges
 > needles deep into his flesh.

 > Instead of writing, the harrow was only jabbing, and the bed,
 > not turning the body over, simply raising it up, quivering, against
 > the needles.

 > The traveler knows instantly that the governor is being killed
 > by his own machine. All that is left to do is wait for the machine
 > to discard the body into a grave.

 > ...and now the last thing went wrong as well: the body failed
 > to come loose from the long needles but hung suspended above the
 > pit without falling.

This is of course the self-referential machine, hence it is also
distintegrating with its victim, and death confused with rebirth.

The other case I recognize of an harrow form, and perhaps the
final epochal referent of all the cases of this archetype, is
to be found in the two million pound Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant
Reactor Vessel Head called "Elena", pictured here:

 > JPEG Preview with caption for UK_CH_513.JPG
 >
http://insp.pnl.gov:2080/cgi-bin/photo/photo_page?called_by=node&tif_filenam
e=UK_CH_513.TIF&filename=UK_CH/UK_CH_JPG/UK_CH_513.JPG

The 1600 nuclear fuel rods mounted in groups descending vertically
from that immense reactor lid satisfy both those images, as well
as the prophetic image given in 1 Enoch 14:12, of swords (cherubim)
of fire, as I have described in another web site page:
Biblical Prophecies correlated with Modern Objects.


Since writing those, I read of a Prostate cancer treatment machine
that as I recall, implants a fixture of many apertures around the
organ, and later, radioactive seeds are inserted and withdrawn by
the machine for a treatment.
 
Yours truly,
Glenn Scheper
http://home.earthlink.net/~glenn_scheper/
glenn_scheper + at + earthlink.net
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