"The Evacuation still proceeds..." GR Part 1 Section 1
David Meury
dmeury at yahoo.com
Mon Oct 24 23:21:13 CDT 2005
Later, after the evacuation, "In the Zone" --
specifically, in the bowels of the Mittelwerke,
Pynchon echoes the opening dream sequence) --
". . . it was always easy, in open and lonely places,
to be visited by Panic wilderness fear, but these are
the urban fantods here, that come to get you when you
are lost or isolate inside the way time is passing,
when there is no more History, no time-traveling
capsule to find your way back to, only the lateness
and the absence that fill a great railway shed after
the capital has been evacuated, and the goat-god's
city cousins wait for you at the edges of the light,
playing the tunes thay always played, but more audible
now, because everything else has gone away or fallen
silent
. . . barn-swallow souls, fashioned of brown twilight,
rise toward the white ceilings . . . they are unique
to the Zone, they answer to the new Uncertainty.
Ghosts used to be either likenesses of the dead or
wraiths of the living. But here in the Zone
categories have been blurred badly. The status of the
name you miss, love, and search for now has grown
ambiguous and remote, but this is even more than the
bureaucracy of mass absence--some still live, some
have died, but many, many have forgotten which they
are."
* * *
"But the living are wrong to make distinctions that
are
too absolute. Angels (they say) often can't tell
whether they move among the living or the dead. The
eternal torrent hurls all ages through both realms
forever and drowns out their voices in both." --
Rilke, Duino Elegies, The First Elegy
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