GRGR 1,1: Pirate's Ascent/Desent

[jbor at bigpond.com]

Yes, there is something familiar. While Callisto's hothouse is a 
"closed system", and unrelentingly sterile, Pirate's rooftop garden is 
miraculously fecund. And in the maisonette there's a middle level, the 
"minstrels' gallery" (p. 5), from which Teddy Bloat tumbles. Those 
excluded middles are Bad Shit, as we well know.

I think what makes it so familiar are the very precise parallels 
between the structure of Pirate's maisonette, with its rooftop garden 
and "glass hothouse" (p. 5), and the conveyance and edifices conjured 
up in the dream, that "carriage [...] built on several levels" (p. 3) 
-- all the glass and the bed and trestles and windows and smells and 
mysteriously vital growth and fancy iron eaves. His "comrades in arms". 
And the presentiment of destruction, burnt wood, the feeling that 
something is about to collapse on top of him (both Bloat and, perhaps, 
augured by that air raid siren screaming across the sky and waking him, 
a rocket).

best

On 03/11/2005 jporter wrote:

> There is something familiar about the presence of an upper level
> climate controlled area sitting over a chaotic first floor, populated
> by a profane group determined to get as wasted as possible. Is this a
> reprise of that same form used by Pynchon in his short story, 
> "Entropy,"
> with some significant differences?
>
> This time, there is communication between the two levels. Pirate
> is our emissary. In preparation for his ascent to the rooftop
> garden, he first evacuates his unconscious- by dreaming- and
> then, his conscious mind- while voiding. He seems to be
> "purifying" himself, somehow, before ascending to the "sacred"
> garden.
>
> This garden, however, is an open system- the very opposite
> of the closed and sterile environment shared by Callisto and
> Aubade. It has-
>
> 	an impasto feet thick, of unbelievable black
> 	topsoil in which anything could grow.
>
> It's dawn, and Pirate is ascending to the garden to gather fruit
> for breakfast. While on the roof, in his purified state, his vision
> is captured by a recently launched V-2. He shares with us his
> classified knowledge about this "Most Secret German rocket
> bomb'", and his concern about "doing something". He is
> distracted, but using his commando skills he is able to re-empty
> his consciousness and re-focus on the task at hand: "Pick
> bananas." He has completed a transformation hinted at a few
> sentences earlier, allowing him to become oblivious to time:
>
> 	Pirate looks at his watch. Nothing registers.
>
> becoming, in effect, a barely historical creature, totally absorbed
> by the present.
>
> Task completed, he pauses momentarily on the roof gazing eastward.
> The contrail is gone. He sets up the reversal of blast and incoming
> scream of the rocket, which will be important later, and then, in a
> Newtonian moment, imagines the point of the missile in contact with
> his scalp. Blessed, thus, by gravity, he descends, ape-like, down the
> corkscrew ladder.
>
> A few observations:
>
> Entropy is the basis of evolution. It is the cause of variation
> in otherwise perfectly transmitted genetic messages, which
> are then  "selected" by the "context" of the environment. In the
> garden, in concert with the molecular basis of life, entropy causes
> the natural production of waste that will be transformed into
> fecundity, the conjuror's secret, as it were.
>
> [...]