GRGR 1:5- "...laminar and gently singing"

[jporter]

	On a wall, in an ornate fixture of darkening bronze,
	a gas jet burns, laminar and gently singing- adjusted
	to what scientists of the last century called a "sensitive
	flame": invisible at the base, as it issues from its orifice,
	fading upward into smooth blue light that hovers
	several inches above, a glimmering small cone that
	can respond to the most delicate changes in the room's
	air pressure.

I'd like to contrast, somehow, this flame with "lord" Byron- the per-
petually lambent bulb-  awaiting us later in the text. For now, however,

cf:

	As the day darkens, and the first Flames appear,
	sometimes reflected as well in Panes of Glass, the
	sounds of the Stables and the Alleys grow louder,
	and chimney-smoke perambulates into the Christ-
	mastide air. The Room puts on its Evening-Cloak
	of shifting amber Light, and sinuous Folds of Shadow.
	Mason and Dixon become aware of a jostling Murmur
	of Expectancy.

	All at once, out of the Murk, a dozen mirror'd Lanthorns
	have lept together, as into their Glare now strolls a
	somewhat dishevel'd Norfolk Terrier, with a raffish
	Gleam in it eye,- [p. 18]

What strikes me of parallel significance in these two Pynchonian
passages, is first, the primacy of the context: The Room. It is the 
room's
air pressure that the sensitive flame responds to in the first passage,
and, The Room which puts on "its Evening-Cloak," in the second. The
very space has come as much alive as the characters which populate
it. The narrator has spread "agency" around- delocalized it, and
allowed its diffusion into the setting. This is psychotomimetic. And,
sure enough, the scenes which follow in both novels represent
an extrusion of animacy into the narrative space. That is to say, the
room, or space- from the narrative perspective- has taken on animacy,
in the grammatical sense.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animacy

This is a highly significant transition, and suggests that there is a 
rent
in the fabric of the narrative reality, through which may issue 
alternative
ways of knowing. This de-localization of animacy does not come without
a price, however, and as the narrative space becomes more animate,
the characters will become less so, at least in terms of their power to
control events. But then, the concept of control is the primary concern
of this section.

jody

"The saint whose water can light lamps, the clairvoyant whose
lapse in recall is the breath of God, the true paranoid for whom
all is organized in spheres joyful or threatening about the central
pulse of himself...

	Most skate tangent to the holy circle, some stay, some
	are off again to other rooms...

"...the dreamer whose puns probe ancient fetid shafts and tunnels
of truth all act in the same special relevance to the word, or whatever
it is the word is there, buffering, to protect us from."