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

[David Casseres]

Very good!  Another instance of Mason & Dixon illuminating Gravity's Rainbow.

On 11/25/05, jporter <jp3214 at earthlink.net> wrote:
>         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."
>
>